Will the Giants’ lineup improve? Who’s to say.
On Monday, I looked at where the San Francisco Giants stand five years (and 5+ seasons) into the Farhan Zaidi era. I urged finding the humor in it because what else can we do but laugh? There are certainly reasons to criticize the front office (there usually are), but we’re only a week into May and, well, look — there’s historical and present day evidence that all of us should be able to find within ourselves a little more patience for the Giants to get good.
This morning for The Athletic (subscription required), Eno Sarris looked at STUFF+ numbers and put together a list of teams and players that had faced the best pitching this far into the season. The Giants don’t appear on the list until the stuff is combined with location (PITCHING+) and then it becomes clear that the Giants have faced above average pitching with above average location and their results are, appropriately, below average. This has particularly hurt Matt Chapman in the early going, as he’s faced this tough pitching and seen the largest decline in his OPS versus preseason projections.
Sarris makes the key point that good hitting is supposed to do well against good pitching anyway, but only 3 out of the top 15 hitters by PITCHING+ (that is, the top 15 sorted in order of most PITCHING+ quality faced) have positive current OPSes versus preseason projections and only one player is basically even with their projection.
Of course, comparing 34-36 games of a sample against an entire season projection is tricky, but it all goes to prove Sarris’s point that it’s still early and despite the challenges teams and individual hitters have faced, the probabilities are that it will even out over the course of the season. Teams and players will face easier pitching over the long haul. It’s just bad luck that it’s bunched up here in the near-term to produce some poor results.
That’s reasonable, of course, because you’d like to believe that Matt Chapman’s .204/.257/.338 start is unsustainably poor on top of being outright surprising because he’s only 31 years old. Last year, Wilmer Flores was hitting .233/.281/.419 through May (42 games; 139 PA) and then went .308/.387/.551 the rest of the season (84 games; 315 PA).
It’s just hard to shutdown those reasonable fears in the back of your mind, though. Is Matt Chapman the new Evan Longoria? Well, Longoria was a year older than Chapman when he landed on the Giants and he still managed to approach league average (91 OPS+). That wouldn’t be a terrible outcome. Are Wilmer Flores’s and Jorge Soler’s best days behind them? Possibly. But it really is too early to tell.
Yesterday, Farhan Zaidi told the Chronicle (subscription required), “The start overall has been hugely disappointing, because we obviously invested a lot in the team. We’ve had a lot of changes that we expected to show up in our record, in on-field performance […] and it hasn’t happened. We haven’t hit our stride.” He focused in on Austin Slater but also mentioned that plenty of players in the lineup have had bad months in their careers and managed to emerge from them to be productive.
Who knows if that will happen again. It’s a legitimate fear to have, but fear doesn’t need to overwhelm us. I still think we’re okay sitting in the cheap seats and Statler and Waldorfing these chumps who thought they could contend for the third Wild Card. It’s easier said than done aiming for mid. Plenty of other crappy teams are trying to do the same. The Giants haven’t managed to win the mid-off in Zaidi tenure. This year could be different, but until that starts to feel like a possibility, why not have fun at their expense?
Those clamoring for Heliot Ramos & co. really have to consider that Bob Melvin is not a flesh puppet. He has some agency here. He and the front office want to focus on track records and young players — who have already struggled in brief callups — don’t make things easy. Veteran managers and coaches don’t want to deal with adjustment periods, they want to deal with guys with track records getting back on track, and if you think those are the same things that’s a mistake. Veteran hitters have a book on opposing pitchers, a routine they bring into the clubhouse — they’re a reduction of uncertainty. Waiting for a guy to get hot has a better track record than waiting for a guy to figure things out.
If there’s anything getting old has taught me it’s that we are all in a struggle to reduce the uncertainties in our lives. Figuring out how we’re going to eat, where we’ll sleep, and who we can trust are fundamental to a thriving existence. Gabe Kapler was willing to push for younger guys with unproven track records when the anxiety about his situation grew and the team’s options outside the organization were limited. Zaidi and Melvin have committed to this group of position players for the foreseeable future. They’re pointing to track records and calculations to say “things should get better,” and numbers are smarter than feelings, but at the end of the day, all we can do is hope they’re right.