Your 2015 Giants: Perhaps the Giants Do Have an Offensive Type: Strikeout Avoidance

Baseball America published a study on team with the lowest strikeout rates by their hitters, and found that five teams - Cardinals, Giants, Royals, Rangers, Tigers - had the lowest strikeout rates over the 2010-2014 period and won 9 of the 10 league championships over that period.

ogc thoughts

First study I've seen to find correlation between offense and winning.  However, as I commented on there (and someone else), study size is probably an issue, it might be holding now, but not so much over history, perhaps.  Also, as I noted, both BP's (Baseball Prospectus) and FG's (Fangraph) studies, which studied a long period of time, found that offense has no correlation with winning.  Still, don't mean that there could not be some correlations over periods of time, just not over history.

The Giants over this period has definitely focused on hitters who minimize strikeouts. Sandoval, Posey, Blanco, Stewart, Arias, Panik (he also walks a lot while striking out less) and even Belt and Crawford, when they are on (I studied their strikeout rates over 10, 20, 30 game intervals a couple of years ago), could get their strikeout rate down, resulting in contact rates above 85%. And players they traded for or signed as free agents, like Freddie Sanchez, Angel Pagan, and Marco Scutaro, in particular, and now Aoki and McGehee. Only Pence, Morse, and Belt were the free swingers in this lineup for the last few years, I think, piling up the strikeouts at times, and even Pence wasn't that bad.  And of course, Burrell before that (Huff was actually a good hitter in terms of strikeout rate in 2010 and before, and so he would be included in the list of good contact hitters) and Torres, for his improvements over before, wasn't that great at avoiding strikeouts.

One thing I found interesting that that while OBP was much better than batting average in terms of correlation with winning on the offensive side, as sabermetrics has basically denigrated the value of batting average to the extent that most newbie sabers treat BA with disdain, on the defensive side, batting average had almost as high a correlation as OBP, and both were considered strong correlations.  Then again, on the defensive side, all the metrics were strong in the 2010-2014 period except for HR/PA.

Lack of Homeruns Does Not Mean a Team is Weak or Can't Win

Thus, the media's strong preoccupation with the long ball - be honest, how many articles have you seen regarding the Giants lack of HR hitting as a key weakness on this team, and heck, for many prior Giants teams during this golden era - is misplaced.  Hitting a lot of homers has a weak correlation with winning.  And this is something both the BP and FG studies noted as well, that there was no connection between the number of homers hit by a team and how well they did in the playoffs.   Girls may dig the long ball, but the trophies don't necessarily end up with the guys hitting them.

The Very Strong correlation, for both offense and defense, at least in this new defensive era, is with winning and SO/BB.  It is very significant offensively (-0.72 vs. next highest correlation of 0.58 for OBP) and still pretty significant defensively (0.73 vs. -0.67 for OBP and 0.61 for SO%).

The Giants have appeared to be focusing on getting such pitchers and hitters.  Bumgarner had a wonderful SO/BB ratio in high school and continued it into pros.  Strickland, Law, and Okert exhibit such great ratios as well.  Cain and Lincecum once had very high ratios, dropping in recent years, but there are indications they should revert to prior performances in 2015.  Both Hudson and Peavy have had good ratios as well.  Among the hitters, Posey, Susac, Belt, Crawford, Scutaro, and Panik have shown this skill in the majors, and Adrianza showed it in the minors in a couple of seasons.