Your 2018 Giants: This Day in Giants History

On this day in Giants history, the Giants were 6 games behind the division leading Padres, and they had the most amazing finish to catch up with the Padres and win the division on the final day of the 2010 season.

Today, the Giants are 6 games behind the division leader, but this time they are the Rockies and D-bancks, and the Dodgers are only a game behind them, giving them three obstacles to get around, which is much much harder to do, as they need all three teams ahead of them to start scuffling while the Giants need to dazzle and show some magic.  Can they do it?

ogc thoughts

It was a tall mountain to climb back in 2010, but the red thong spoke and the starting rotation dazzled, from Cain to Zito, with a Lincecum exclamation point, running off a string of of 23 straight games giving up 4 runs or less, with 18 straight games giving up 3 runs or less, and a stretch of 13 games where they gave up 2 runs or less, except for one game in the middle.  It was a magical time.

What are the odds of that today?  Of course, Pythagorean does not look good at all, the Giants are above where they have played.  The problem with this analysis is that this captures all that the team has been during the season, but not where they are today.  There is no Cueto, but there is also no Samardzija's 6.25 ERA, and finally they have a good OBP leading off.

Rotation Is In a Good Spot

Even by the current ERA, Suarez appears to be over his dead arm adjustment period, and his current 4.42 ERA (but appears to be hot and cold), and Stratton has finally found his happy spot for mechanics, with a big assist from Vogie in the minors, when Stratton was totally lost, which he had been since he left for his paternity leave to be at his child's birth.  He's also not his 4.99 ERA anymore.

So where are they?  First of all, Dereck has a 2.30 ERA, Bum has 2.68 ERA, and Holland has 3.65 ERA.  Those are good and better, and presumably they can continue being that good.  And Holland has been great in recent months, he has delivered a 2.73 ERA since the start of June, which is similar to the ERA he delivered in prior seasons before his arm strength gave out.  2.56 ERA in the 7 starts since he returned to the rotation. The top of the rotation appears to be in good hands.

Suarez has had an up and down season, some period of adjustment early on, then really good in the middle (2.28 over 8 starts) that got his ERA down to 3.75.  After a bad 4 start period (7.89 ERA), he has been up and down but 3.48 ERA over last four starts.  So the hope is that he can continue to basically be as good as Holland has been overall.  But one should expect some up and down in the 4th starter.

In Stratton's case, while he's been bad overall, the Giants were still 12-9 in his starts, which startles a lot of people. That's because he has been on a roller coaster all season, and baseball is all about points in time, it is not a smooth curve the way people presents stats as.  He started the season with a great 5 starts, 2.32 ERA.  Then six bad starts at 8.00 ERA.  Then 5 great starts at 2.48.  Then 3 really bad starts with double digit ERA. And two great starts so far in his return.

What some forget is that a few bad starts can kill the seasonal ERA.  That is why my PQS studies have shown me that, for ERA purposes, it is actually much better to have a very low DIS% than it is to have a good DOM% (unless your DOM% is so elite that, by definition of everything adding up to 100%, there is little left over for DIS% or DEC%).   So Stratton has actually been pretty good:  10 starts with 6 IP or more (out of 21 starts); 15 starts with 3 runs given up or less.  So the rotation appears to be running pretty well overall, at the moment.

Still, overall, the Giants pitching and fielding has been keeping the opposition down, in their last 16 games, the team has a 2.67 ERA. So the rotation is looking good right now, like it did in June, when the team went 20-10.   But, obviously, with so few games left, each bad start is magnified, if they somehow get back into the division race, they can't afford many (any?) bad starts.

But the Rotation Has Questions Marks (Typical for a Young and/or Unproven Rotation)

And dangers could lurk around the corner.  Bumgarner appears to be Mad Bum once more, so probably no worries there barring mountain bikes and line drives up the middle.  D-Rod, however, has never really pitched this deep into the season before.  His career high came last season when he went 143.1 IP, though he did pitch another 9.1 IP in the Puerto Rico Winter League.  He's at 136.1 IP, but the two week break from starting at the start of July (which included a 3.0 IP relief stint in the middle), could have refreshed his arm enough.

Holland is also in uncharted waters as well for IP, as he has not done this since he originally had surgery back in 2013.  He would pitch 2+ ERA great, but once he hit the limits of his arm, he suddenly had a very high ERA.  But in 2016, he got DLed in the middle of the season, and then came back and threw 3 games at 2.00 ERA, before his arm tired again.

This season, however, the Giants gave him some rest mid-season, with only one start after his July 1st start and before his July 24th start, with four relief stints in between.  He had a total of only 13.1 IP (ASB was in there too, which helped), when he would have normally had to do 3 starts (around 15-18 IP) plus the Giants probably didn't allow him to do his normal throwing between starts, so that his relief stints were just what he normally would throw in between starts anyway.  And he has been fine overall since June started.

Suarez is in similar waters as the other two, with a high of 155.2 IP in 2017, and he's already at 149.2 IP.  And as noted above, he had a rough period not that long ago, and has been wobbly in his recent starts as well.  He hit a rough patch (which coincided with his promotion from AA to AAA, so that could be extenuating circumstances) in June-early July, 6 starts, 4.98 ERA, after 2.96 ERA previously.  He then had a streak of 8 starts, 1.97 ERA, before getting smoked in his last start.   Luckily, as the fourth starter, not much more should be expected out of him.

Stratton is in a different case, but perhaps even murkier.  He has a career high of 161.2 IP, and he's currently at 139.1 IP.  As we know, he ended 2017 with a great 2.42 ERA in 9 MLB starts and started 2018 with 5 great starts at 2.32 ERA.  Then he would fade in and out, as I noted above, before getting sent down to the minors where Vogie played Yoda to Stratton's Luke, and taught him the successful ways of his mechanics, as he noticed that they were similar throwers (unlike when Jonathan Sanchez changed his mechanics to match Johan Santana, a hero of his, when he is much taller than Johan and should have way different mechanics).

This could be what he needed to be good consistently, but we don't know that for sure, it will be start to start.  But given that Stratton just threw his best start of the season, and especially set a high for a start with 8.0 IP and 117 pitches, that is very encouraging both that he's not tiring out and that he's able to keep his mechanics consistent.

Overall, the rotation looks in good shape to have an incredible run like it did in late 2010.  But there are clouds that could be discouraging, and we can only wait and see.

NL West Malaise

Helping keeping the pot boiling in the NL West, the top four teams have been mediocre over the past month or so.  Both the Dodgers and Giants are 15-15.  D-backs are 16-14.  And the Rockies have risen to the division lead tie by way of a 17-13 run.

It also helps that the Giants had a lot of games left to play with all of them.  The Giants really need to win today against the D-backs to hope to make a run at it, and get to 5 games back of D-backs. 

And it's D-Rod Day!  And he's up against Zack Godley, who leads their team with 13 wins but has a 4.59 ERA.  Like Stratton, he has been both very bad and very good:  had 16 starts with 3 runs give up or less, but lots of runs given up in the other starts.  Good news for Giants fans is 11 runs given up in his last 2 starts and 10 IP, and has a 6.10 ERA in two starts against the Giants in SF, both of them this season.  Also, he had a great BABIP last season and poor this season, so it appears that he had a regression to the mean in 2018, and likely be some where in the middle between the performances of the two seasons.  So it looks good for the Giants before the start of the game. 

Then the Giants need to take care of the NL West games, at minimum.  They  got 6 games against the Rockies, 6 games against the Padres, and 3 season ending games against the Dodgers.  At minimum, the Giants are playing spoiler with the Dodgers at the end of the season, unless the Dodgers implode and/or the Giants zoom.  Lucky the Dodgers picked up Machado and Dozier, otherwise they would be closer to us than the lead.  That said, the Giants basically is looking at the need to sweep the final series against the Dodgers, if they are within striking distance.

And the Giants must win at least 4 of 6 against the Rockies, as that would get them to 4 games behind the Rockies (ideally win at least 5 to get them to 2 games back), and should catch a game or two on the D-backs as well, if they can do this.  Thus they will need help to catch up with the teams ahead of them in the NL West.  It is not an impossible task, but it certainly is an improbable task.  So the task is very daunting, and hence why I understand why others have given up.

History

I also remember other chases that led to exciting endings.  The 2010 chase was very memorable given its results.  People forgot that the Padres shouldn't even been leading, their pitchers were pitching way above their back of their baseball card, and they fell back to earth in the second half.  And if that umpire didn't steal away a win from us, by calling Ishikawa out because he had no view of the slide/contact, so he called Ishi out because the catcher "looked" like he tagged Ishi out, the Giants would have won the division before the Padres series.

I still see a lot of people say that the 2010 team was not all that good.  But once the team jelled, with the additions of Posey to the starting lineup, and Bumgarner to the starting rotation, from July 5 to the rest of the season, the Giants had a 3.18 ERA (3.40 runs allowed average) and 4.43 runs scored average, for a 51-30 record, which is a 102 win season, and close to the Pythagorean of 100 wins.  Nothing against Molina and Wellemeyer, but both were huge upgrades, and the 2010 team was a great team at the point that they were in the playoffs, which all the complainers seem to forget.

Another chase that is burned into my memory is the Boston Braves of 1914.  No, I was not around back then (though that would be amazing as I would be historically old right now! :), but I read about their great comeback.  They were a pretty bad team, only 26-40 as of July 4th, but from there to the end of the season, they went 68-19.  Obviously, they started their tear much earlier in the year, and was on afterburners for the rest of the season, which the Giants can only dream of, right now.

Then there is the other side of this, as well, when the Phillies blew a 6.5 game led (on August 28, 1964).  Though, I guess to keep up the line of thought above, the Cards on that day was 8.0 games behind the Phillies on August 28, and there there three teams ahead of them, Reds and Giants as well.  To be fair, they were fairly close to the Reds and Giants, so it did not take much of a wobble on those two teams parts to fall short, but the Cards finished 24-11, and took the lead for good on the final day of the season.

All unlikely and improbable to happen to the 2018 Giants, but they did go 20-10 in June-ish, so it is not impossible, and in June, they had these five starters going well.  Furthermore, overall, as noted before, the Giants pitching and fielding has been keeping the opposition down, in their last 16 games, the team has a 2.67 ERA.  However, they also only have a 9-7 record during that period.  The offense has just sucked too much, for too long.  But if the pitching can keep up this pace for the rest of the season, it could be an exciting end of the season.

And maybe it is not to be.  After a great start, Mac Williamson fell into a horrible ball rolling into the side of the stands, suffering a concussion that continues to ail him (though in a brave blog post by his girlfriend, it was noted that he's finally feeling improving and feeling better).  Just now, Steven Duggar was placed on the 10-day DL list and Gregor Blanco was called up (40-man implication, probably Posey to 60-day list).