Hello! As you are reading this, I am…out of the country. I am writing these words on Sunday afternoon without knowing what the roster actually looks like today, on Thursday, which is Opening Day. Happy Opening Day! I won’t be watching baseball.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t do a season preview! Here at It Would Be Nice If The Giants Weren’t Bad, we don’t let a little thing like pre-writing before the Giants have even played a game outside of Arizona this year stop us from acting confident. I have, therefore, made one entirely vibes-based prediction for every player either on the roster or likely to be on the roster within the next couple of months. To be clear, none of this is based on any kind of scouting or statistical evaluation. This is all based on How Things Go For The Giants.
Also, I will be off next week, and then back the week after, because if there’s one way to build an audience, it’s by not writing anything when fan excitement is at its peak at the beginning of a new season. I am nailing this!
On to the predictions!
Patrick Bailey’s batting line will be very similar to last year’s .233/.285/.359. No one will care, because his defense will be great and he won’t flag quite so badly heading into September.
Tom Murphy will be inexplicably bad. A segment of fans will pine for Joey Bart, who will also be very bad, wherever he ends up.
LaMonte Wade Jr will have a disappointing start to the year, will lose playing time, and won’t ever fully regain it.
Wilmer Flores will be right back to his career norms this year, with a couple clutch moments thrown in.
Thairo Estrada will have a nice first half. It will be a little worse than his first half last year, but still good enough that Giants fans start cherry picking stats to claim that he should go to the All-Star Game, which absolutely will not happen.
Nick Ahmed will win the starting job at the end of Spring Training, will have lost it by May 1, and will be off the roster by July 1.
Marco Luciano — oh man, the vibes are all over the place here. This is a real tough one. I’m getting…rookie inconsistency that gels into a solid last month or two of the season, giving us hope for Luciano’s future.
Tyler Fitzgerald will make the Opening Day roster, won’t get enough playing time to get into a groove, and will be optioned and called up at least three times over the course of the year.
Matt Chapman will be a nice addition to the team. He won’t be a superstar, but he will be just good enough that he opts out at the end of the year.
Michael Conforto will be fine. There will be several points during the year when we hear that he's turning it around and fully healthy and will reclaim his All-Star Mets form, but then he'll slump, lose all those statistical gains, and overall his year will be perfectly okay.
Austin Slater will have multiple seemingly unrelated injuries over the course of the year. At least one of them will be out of his control — someone steps on his foot, or he gets hit by a pitch with disastrous results or something — but the label of injury prone will still start to echo through everyone’s mind.
Luis Matos will have very nice numbers in the majors with sporadic playing time, but will be demoted because his Statcast numbers indicate that he's playing above his head.
Jung Hoo Lee is a beautiful soul and therefore he will never make an out.
Mike Yastrzemski will be a perfectly useful player, and a good presence, and you won’t want to admit it, but if the team is competing, his spot will be the one they look to upgrade at the trade deadline.
Jorge Soler will hit 22 homers with a fairly low batting average, but people will like that he adds pop to the lineup and he’ll be popular in the clubhouse. His fWAR will be 1.3.
Logan Webb will be good, and I’m sorry that I don’t have more details for you, but you basically know exactly how Webb will be good, so I’d be wasting your time by expanding on it.
Blake Snell will very clearly be pitching only for his next contract, but hey, if it works, why complain? And it mostly will work: he’ll still give up plenty of walks and he won’t ever pitch into the 8th, but his strikeout rate will be the best of his career.
Jordan Hicks will have good starts and bad starts, more bad than good although there will be a couple of real gems in there, but certainly nothing strong enough to keep him in the rotation when Robbie Ray comes back.
Kyle Harrison will walk way too many guys in the early part of the season, but after the All-Star Break, he’ll get it together and still walk too many guys, but not quite as many.
Keaton Winn will be a perfectly fine back-of-the-rotation guy, but when he gets moved from the bullpen after someone comes back from injury, it’ll feel both unfair and like the team isn’t doing its best for his development.
Alex Cobb will come back strong in April, but strain something by the end of May and miss some time with that. He’ll come back from it, but all season long it’ll feel like he’s one Old Man Getting Out Of Bed Wrong from going on the IL again.
Robbie Ray will come back in August, and be pretty good. He will makes us wonder both “What if we had this guy in the rotation all year?” and also “What could he do if he was fully healthy?”
Camilo Doval will blow a couple saves. Otherwise, he will be excellent. We will still worry about him, remembering that time he blew a couple saves.
Tyler Rogers is due for a BABIP-fueled mediocre year, right? He feels due for that. Just dinked and dunked to death over the first couple months, which kills his overall stats.
Taylor Rogers will be really good, other than one catastrophically bad outing in which he’s not only terrible, but Bob Melvin leaves him in way too long. This one outing will tank both his ERA and any trust that fans have in him.
Ryan Walker will weirdly fall flat on his face and someone will break down his mechanics and show what he’s doing differently. Then he’ll change back to his old mechanics and be worse. Then the Giants will call up some new funky reliever who will be great. If you’re wondering who that reliever will be, ask Roger.
Luke Jackson will be excellent, except for when the Giants try to use him as an opener, which won’t work for reasons no one will understand. The Giants will still try it six or seven times before giving up.
Juan Sanchez will have early success against lefties but not righties, condemning him to as much of a LOOGY role as possible given the 3-batter minimum.
Mason Black will show flashes of his talent, but won't put it together in the big leagues without another stint in the minors.
Landon Roupp will be dominant.
Daulton Jeffries will not see his spring success translate to the majors.
To anyone who doesn’t like the injury predictions, well, neither do I. I would like to be very wrong about all of them. And to anyone who doesn’t like the predictions about guys being bad, I am not saying that they will be bad or that their true skill level is being bad. I’m saying they feel like the kind of players who end up being bad. Does this mean anything? Well, I guess we’ll find out this year!
And if I missed any players I should have previewed, well, sorry. You can tell me all about it in April.
Weirdly, I agree with almost all of these predictions. Enjoy your trip!
I agree with some but not most of your assessments. I think Chapman puts it together and maintains his Gold Glove form.
I think LWJ will be fine. He's consistent and SMART and wears pitchers down
Yaz will remind everyone why they like him so much with a hot start, a flukey May then HotBoi Summer his way into some ASG talk.