Zaidi M.O.: Zaidi and Starting Pitching

I've been promulgating my theory that starting pitching can help lead the Giants to their next dynasty.  Following is my comment on The Athletic, plus my usual additions.

ogc big picture thoughts

I would agree that the Giants starting rotation is not playoff proven, that's going to happen with 3 young pitchers like D-Rod, Suarez, and Stratton, and two returning pitchers coming back from injury plagued season, like Shark and Pomeranz.

But we don't need them all to be great, we just need one of Pomeranz, Holland, Shark, and the three young guys, to be the co-ace to pair with Bumgarner, then the others to fill three average to good starters in the rest of the rotation. Not 100% likely, yes, but I would not bet against it either, as all of them had extended period of dominance in recent seasons, 10 to 20 consecutive starts of great pitching. And with the bullpen (and addition of Duggar to swing the OF back to good defense; his Outs Above Average per Statcast had his run rate being Top 10 in the MLB, had he done that over a full season, perhaps Top 5 on the high side), that's the formula for the Giants Dynasty, pitching and fielding defense.

And 2018 had issues that don't necessarily repeat in 2019.  Where Suarez struggled early because he was new, then struggled late, because he's never pitched a full MLB season before. Where Stratton didn't know his proper mechanics, but with tips from Vogie, now do. Where Shark and Pomeranz were not available, but if healthy, as they appear to be now, could return to their recent 2016-2017 goodness. Where Bumgarner was pitching handicapped by a weak hand grip, affecting both his pitching and his hitting. Where looking at Holland's and D-Rod's pitch quality, both, while outperforming, still was good for the most part, and thus should be able to be good enough again in 2019. Again, don't need D-Rod to repeat a great season, just need him to have an average or better season. And with so many choices to pick from (including Blach and Anderson), the Giants should not be forced to use guys in questionable health, like they did in July when they used Cueto and Shark, which cost another couple of wins or more.

Pair that with an okay enough offense and they can win games and be competitive. Let's put it this way: they averaged 3.92 runs scored per game to the end of August (not good at all), and yet they were still 68-68 at the time, with the starting pitching we have now (and handicapped by Bochy's poor leadoff choices most of the season, cost 3-5 wins).  And that's with the problems I noted above going on, which should not all repeat in 2019. Meaning that the team could advance from where they were in 2018 (.500-ish) with similar offense, but improving defense (starting pitching, bullpen, fielding defense)

Why 2019 Is Not Necessarily Bad

Thus, I think .500 is very doable, and with some good performances (particularly Duggar simply being startable at leadoff, not necessarily good, to fix Bochy's poor leadoff selection, plus his elite defense in CF), playoffs competitiveness is not out of the question.  They were .500 until the Giants basically tanked September, which they never did before, they would play for pride, it seems, as they could have been tanking in all the odd years when they didn't make the playoffs.  And I would not be surprised if they make the playoffs, though I know it's not likely.

But we'll see. My logic is this, with all the SP having had extended (10-20 start runs) periods of dominance in recent seasons, we don't need one SP to be a co-ace all season with Bumgarner, we just need one or another to kick in a dominant start, at various times during the season, to win regularly.  That's similar to the 2014 season, where the other starters other than Bumgarner, would randomly have a good start, and collectively do well, even if one does not co-ace all season long in tandem with Bumgarner.

And obviously, the more the better. So maybe D-Rod repeats, maybe he just can get guys out so easily. His pitches were of high quality in the majors in 2018, better than 66% of all other pitchers, good still, though not as great as his ERA (use QOPA, https://api.qopbaseball.com/, Components for 2018 for each pitcher name).  Maybe Suarez takes a step forward, now that he knows better what gets out MLB hitters, he starts off the season well. Suarez's pitch quality was elite, he was at the 95th percentile.  Maybe Stratton can keep it going for more than 5-10 starts at a time, now that he knows the mechanics he needs to use to be successful (and when he's successful, he has a mid-2 ERA). And Stratton's pitch quality was at 71th percentile.  Maybe Shark and Pom are healthy, and back to 2016-17 form. Maybe Anderson is ready to take step forward in majors. That's 5 or more major maybes involved, but each has some odds of happening.

Zaidi is as Zaidi Does:  SP by Committee

I know that's a lot of maybes, but that's the formula that Zaidi was using in LA while he was GM, starting pitching by committee.  He had a boatload of maybe starting pitchers filling up their rotation every year, and every year I would doubt they can craft a good season out of it, and every year, they proved me wrong (showing how evil they are :). So let's say the odds of each is very low, only 20%, but with 6 of them, that adds up to 120% expectation of one good season coming from them, with some probability of multiple good outcomes.

Let's ratchet that down and say each only has equal 1/6th (0.1667) odds of being good (I know, not all have same odds; it's an exercise to get an idea of the bounds). Binomial probability says 33% odds of none of them performing, but 40% of one of them doing well, and 26% of multiple doing well, or 67% odds of getting at least one (that's when playoff hopes rise greatly). Even dropping it to 10% odds for each SP, there's still 47% odds of getting at least one, when you got the six, roughly half the time you can expect to get a co-ace.

Here's another view of the probabilities. Game Score has shown an ability to show a pitcher being good. SABR research found that Gsc of 50 (which I'll call a good start) or more resulted in wins at least 56% of the time, which works out to 91 win seasons. Stratton, in spite of his poor ERA, had 19 good starts out of 36 in 2017-18. Pomeranz was Bum good 2016-17, with 46 out of 62, but even with bad 2018, still was 48 out of 73. Shark was 38 out of 64 in 2016-17, but only 3 out of 10 in injury filled 2018, bad like Pomeranz. Holland had 20 out of 30 in 2018, but even in 2016-17, he had 23 out of 46, he just couldn't avoid the really bad starts those seasons. Suarez was 15 out of 29, while D-Rod was even better, 14 out of 19.

So the odds of getting a good start out of these six was greater than 50% in the past 3 seasons, combined, so I think the odds favor them collectively doing well, assuming the Giants do a better job of identifying when someone is scuffling and quickly moving to get them onto the DL (or minors) and bringing up a guy who is doing it. And if they collectively do well, the Giants collectively do well, is my logic.

Rebuild Not Coming, It Came

All in all, I understand that it's not a sure thing that the starting pitching can be good enough to win with in 2019, but it's not as dire as everyone makes it out to be, with talks of rebuilds taking anywhere from 2 to 5 and more seasons.  I get that the team record wasn't great for two and a half years, but that's the problem, people are focused too much on the seasonal record, and not on the components.

As I detailed above, even if there are low odds of pitchers doing great and co-acing with Bumgarner, one, all have had good starts more often than bad in recent years, and two, when you mix it all up and see the binomial probabilities, the odds favor that someone is going to be doing well, regularly.  Zaidi did this type of SP mash-ups of injury prone pitchers, and was able to mix and match them for winning seasons.   With Bumgarner, Stratton, D-Rod, Suarez all under 30, the rebuild came but few seems to have noticed.

Defensive Rebuild

Sabean teams were usually known for their defense, but it has not been as good under Evans.  Zaidi is returning to that principal, noting the need for good defense to support good pitching that thrives in a pitcher's park like Oracle/ATT/PBP Park.  He even said specifically that he needed to improve the corner OF defense.

And he has, so far.  If you go through the 2018 team, most of the poor defensive players have been flushed out of the system, and good defensive players, even if no-names, were added.  For example, I noted Duggar's Outs Above Average (4 BTW, good for 39th in the majors although he only played a fourth of the season), but Andreoli, the guy we recently DFAed but retained in AAA, he had 3 OAA in even less games.  Guys like them will help improve the 2019 Giants team defense.

And poor defensive players were let go.  Hundley was really poor defensively, and was let go (A's signed him; Giants just signed Vogt, who was injured most of 2018, isn't that good defensively either at C, but is LHH and can play multiple positions, plus signed minor league contract).   Tomlinson by one measure was bad, and he was let go too. The outfield was where he really cleaned house:  all together, Blanco, Pence, Gorkys, AJax, and Cutch were collective -11 Rtot and -11 Rdrs per baseball-reference.com.  And Cutch was actually okay in RF, 0 Rtot, +2 Rdrs, it was Blanco who brought down LF, AJax that made Span look good in CF, and Pence who was bad in RF.  In total, -11 Rtot and -25 Rdrs were removed from the players no longer with the Giants. 

Offensive Rebuild

So far, no real offensive rebuild.  They have met with Bryce Harper, but I've been down that road too many times to get my hopes up.  I'll believe it when it happens. 

The rebuild is based on injury recoveries.  Posey sounds healthy and he feels good.  He won't return to MVP status, but 2016 status would be great.  Belt and Crawford were hampered by knee injuries.  With Zaidi around, maybe they get more restorative rest and stay healthy.  Belt swore off fiddling with his mechanics for 2018, and he hit great until his appendectomy.  Crawford hit well until he hurt his knee.  And both had to play because there were no alternatives, which won't be true under Zaidi.  Duggar has a history of injuries, can he stay healthy and boost both our leadoff issues and our CF defense issues?  And Mac was ready for his spotlight until the hill took him down, maybe he can do it again?  They all were good when healthy and not injured, but can they avoid injuries in 2019?

Playoff Competitiveness Is the Question

But as I noted above, the defense (pitching and fielding) was good enough in 2018, even with the poor offense, to stay at .500 into September, before the team tanked the month.   So given just the expected improvements in defense noted above, the Giant should be able to stay at .500 in 2019.  The question is can they get into playoff range?

Lots of maybes here too, so we'll see.   If all the injured hitters hit well in 2019, that's a great lineup.  If they have issues again, not so much.  But even with all the problems of 2018's offense, the pitching was good enough to keep them at .500, and if Bochy did not botch the leadoff position, they would have actually been battling for the division title when September rolled around.  And the pitching should arguably be better in 2019, with the possibilities of Pomeranz and Samardzija, with the maturation and development of D-Rod, Suarez, and Stratton, with a fully healthy Bumgarner's hard grip returning.  And the bullpen was pretty good in 2018, and only lost Strickland, while adding a lot of interesting relievers like Bergen, Barrett, and Venditte.