Why are the Giants so bad against lefties?

The Giants are a perfectly adequate offensive team against right-handers. In 1,299 plate appearances against righties (not counting yesterday), the Giants are hitting .243/.323/.394, a respectable but unspectacular wRC+ of 102, which ranks 17th out of the 30 teams in the league. Could they be better? Sure, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad, and anyway, a bunch of teams are worse. Besides, you’re a smart cookie and you read the title of today’s newsletter, so you know: we’re here to talk about the Giants’ struggles against lefties.

And they are struggling. Against lefties, the Giants are hitting .220/.286/.365, good for a wRC+ of just 83. An 83 wRC+, for comparison’s sake, is what Gorkys Hernandez had in his last season with the Giants. So: not great! And where are the Giants in the team rankings against lefties? A measly 18th!

Wait, 18th? As in only one worse than 17th, their rank against righties? Well, that’s…huh. Guess I should have done some more research before I came up with that title.

The whole league is struggling against southpaws, so at least the Giants aren’t alone there. Compared to a leaguewide line of .246/.318/.402 against right-handers, baseball as a whole is hitting just .238/.309/.375 against lefties. That’s certainly still better than what the Giants are doing, but it’s not as wildly out of line with their results as we might have guessed.

But all that context certainly doesn’t mean that the Giants are doing a good job against left-handers, because they unequivocally are not. When you look at the individual splits, what you see is a reasonably even mix of players performing well and doing badly. But then you look a little closer and realize, well, Villar’s gone so no reason to include him, and Sam Huff has barely played, so his good numbers don’t count, and Mike Yastrzemski is losing most of the starts against lefties to Luis Matos, which hasn’t gone great this year, but it’s how the roster was constructed, and suddenly what you have is this: four hitters who have been doing well, Wilmer Flores who has been mediocre, and everyone else has been awful.

It’s hard to build a lineup like that. The Giants have Tyler Fitzgerald, Matt Chapman, Jung Hoo Lee, and Heliot Ramos who have been good against lefties, but that still leaves half the lineup not measuring up. Matos and Casey Schmitt are on the roster to be right-handed bats against left-handed pitchers, and it has not worked. Willy Adames has been much worse against lefties than righties, and Patrick Bailey basically hasn’t hit anyone at all.

Those are four dead spots in the lineup, which makes it real hard to string a rally together, especially considering that Adames is usually in the middle of the order, an automatic out between a couple of the effective hitters, and that opposing teams can just pitch around Lee and Chapman to get to the guys who haven’t been getting it done. So strategically, even with hitters in the lineup who are threats, the pitcher has a clear path to pitching around them whenever he gets into trouble, avoiding a big inning.

But what’s actually going on? Why are all those hitters so bad? Even if you don’t really believe in Schmitt or Matos, it’s hard to believe that their true talents are wRC+ values of 57 and 0, respectively. The answer is probably just bad luck. Both Schmitt and Matos are drastically underperforming their expected numbers, with Schmitt in particular grading out pretty well in a small sample size. When you’ve had such a small number of plate appearances, funny stuff will happen and it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

Please do keep in mind, though, that these metrics were also pretty impressed by Schmitt even as he was steeply declining in 2023, so they are no more foolproof than any other stat.

As for Matos, well, he hasn’t been performing well. But he hasn’t been anywhere near this bad. Someone who has the talent to make the major league level is just not likely to have an .037 BABIP long term against guys who throw with the other hand, or a .135 BABIP overall. He might well need more seasoning in the minors, but when you’re hitting .150 on the season and your expected batting average is .225, that’s still bad luck.

Also, it’s not great that Patrick Bailey has turned into Jeff Mathis. Don’t love that.

So the things that have gone wrong for the Giants against lefties so far have been largely attributable to bad luck (and also having to start Christian Koss over Fitzgerald for a while due to injury, which brought the Giants down to just three good hitters in their lefty lineup). That means they’re likely to turn around, but not necessarily that the Giants will turn into a bunch of lefty mashers like the Yankees. Jung Hoo Lee is already cooling off. There’s a good chance Fitzgerald will too. Gains in one area can be offset by losses in another. That’s baseball.

At least the plan the Giants came into the season with wasn’t that bad. You can see how it could have worked. You can see why, even two months into a season when it isn’t working, there’s a chance it will turn around. And you can see the reason for hope. But the Giants need to turn that hope into action, and runs, specifically, or else the playbook to beat them will get very clear, very quickly.