Your 2019 Giants: After One Inning the Giants are 8-10

Since my focus this year is on the big picture, I'm bringing back something I thought was good for understanding how long a baseball season is:  treating the season as 9 innings.  I first wrote about this concept when I was writing as Biased Giants Fanatic for Fanhome about 15 years ago, and I think it's good for seeing the big picture.

ogc big picture thoughts

I love the fact that the MLB season is 162 games, which is divisible by 9, into 18 game segments, or inning segments (and that's divisible by 2, which works out to half innings, if you want).  I think that's a good way to view the baseball season and better modulate your feelings regarding what's happening.  We have now reached 18 games played, so now the Giants are 8-10 at the end of the first inning.

I know that when your team is losing, it feels like the end of the world.  But as long as your team isn't double digit games behind, especially in the first half of the season, it's not the end of the world.  Here are some thoughts to help with that.

Dusty's Great Rule of Thumb

Dusty Baker had a great way to break down the task of winning the division into achievable smaller goals, and to judge how much time you have left to do it:  the goal is to gain one game in the standing per week.  And that goal not only feels achievable, it is achievable, with some push.

In April, even at the end of the month, there is still roughly 20-21 more weeks of baseball. So unless you are 20 games back, your team has plenty of time to make up whatever deficit they have in the win column.  So barring a Grand Canyon of a deficit, there's plenty of time for adjustments and re-dos.

Re-Do Example

This would probably be better if I can give the exact year and team, but I don't have time to research it, so I'll just present the example.  One season, the team started off really bad.  Don't remember if it was just bad performances plus injuries (I am thinking this happened at least a decade ago) or what, but I recall that by sometime in May, they changed most of their pitching rotation.  And darn if they didn't start winning.

Okay, not so great an example, I should dig that up one day....

NL West Do-Si-Do

Again, no time to research, but I've observed this for over a dozen years now in the NL West:  one team would rush out of the chute, winning a lot of games, looking like they are going to win the NL West division, but then at some point in the first half (April, May, June), they fall back and/or another team rises, and then suddenly it's a battle again for the NL West.  And sometimes that early leader is surpassed by the team that suddenly rises.  So, even if your team starts off cold, it does not mean that they can't rise and catch up.

And we saw that in 2010.  By May, the Giants were 2-3 games back of the Padres, who zoomed into the division lead behind pitching that was acting like aces that their history said that they were not.  And as the season balanced out their early good luck with later bad luck, their team fell back to the pack, and the Giants surged, as well, late, and took the division title on the last day (and if Cuzzi didn't like the theatrics of the Mets catcher, and called Ishikawa out when he scored the winning run, in May, there would have been no suspense in that final series, the Giants would have won the pennant already, entering into that series).

Offense Catch Up

The Giants lineup has been hampered greatly.  True, not a great lineup even at it's best, they have also been hurt by hitters getting BABIPed badly.  StatCast provides each batters wOBA and xwOBA, and 5 of our 8 regular lineup hitters are below expected wOBA, four of them by 15% or more:  Pillar (15%), Posey (17%), Longoria (19%) and Panik (30%).   And not that long ago, all four were over 30% under, so the luck can change in a hurry.  Overall, the team has a wOBA of .258 and a xwOBA of .278, or an 8% improvement.  Adding 8% to their run total would push the Pythagorean from 8 wins to 9 wins, the team should be 9-9 right now if not for bad offensive luck.

Of course, luck goes both ways, sometimes, and the pitching has had good luck as well, basically offsetting the bad luck of the hitters (probably it's the park and the marine environment).  So 8-10 seems to be well earned so far, based solely on performance.

Big Picture Overall

The big picture is that the Giants have a lot of baseball left to go.  It's only the first inning of the season.  The pitching has been great, the hitting has not.

But the team was hampered by the try out given Connor Joe and Michael Reed, early in the season.  Since acquiring Tyler Austin, and using either him or Parra in there instead, the team has gone 5-3.  Let's see how the offense gels as the team absorbs in four new starters in Parra, Pillar, Austin, and Duggar, and observe how they get settled into their new environment and make their adjustments.

They've also had some good luck with their starting pitching.  Their FIP and xFIP are worse than what's expected, so is their xwOBA per StatCast.  Still, what they are doing isn't something that they haven't done before, so that's something to observe too.  And, overall, while they are over performing, the overall pitching staff's FIP of 3.46 is still great (good for 4th in majors, 3rd in xFIP of 3.85).  And with 2.8 fWAR, the pitching staff is 6th in the majors, plus 3rd in K/BB with 3.53 and 5th in K%-BB% with 17.2% (due to 3rd in BB%).  Overall, the pitching staff is doing great, just about where we want it to be to win with pitching.

Where the Giants shine super bright is defense.  Per Fangraphs, 1st in Def with 9.3 (2nd has 7.1, 5th 4.8, 10th 2.6, 15th 1.0).  Best UZR/150 with 15.1 (Padres 2nd with 14.8 though, 5th 11.2, 10th 4.8).  Leader by far in DRS:  Giants has 31 DRS, D-backs has 16 for 2nd, Padres 11 for 3rd (3-way tie), Cards 10 for 6th, Rays 8 for 10th place, Angels and Cubs with 6 each for 15th place tie.  DRS is Defensive Runs Saved, and if that translate over, that's 3 out of 8 wins just due to our fielding defense!  The defense has been spectacular!

And here's an interesting stat:  we got some speed now!  Duggar's sprint speed of 28.2 ft/sec is 61th in the majors, 83.5 percentile.  Pillar is not far behind with 27.9, good for 86th and 78.8 percentile.  Even Austin is not bad, he's at 26.8, 50.1 percentile, and that's pretty fast for 1B-men.  But roughly in the middle for LF (around where Mac Williamson was; poor Mac, slow start, concussions seem to take more than a year to recover fully from). 

In any case, the Giants are 8-10, very near to .500, only 2.5 games behind the leaders, SD and LA.  SD led with a hot streak, getting 3 games up, and now LA has already caught up. And talk about lucky, they should be 8-11 right now, half a game behind the Giants Pythag 8-10, instead of 11-8.  They have had some really great luck so far.

Let's see how the offense and pitching settles down in the second inning.  And even then, it's still very early in the long game that is the baseball season.  People like to pigeon hole a team based on what happens in a season, but each season is a swirling mess of different elements that ebbs and flows, and you need to pay attention to all those elements, or you will miss out on what's happening, under your noses.

For example, I still see people bringing up the second half of 2016, but much of that team is not on this current team, so there is no 1:1 equivalencies there.  You need to see each team in its own right/light.  And as I've been saying all off-season, there is a lot to like in the pitching, and now with Parra, Pillar, and PDuggar in the outfield, even more to like in the fielding.  It won't take much offense to win with this group, but unfortunately, it's been underperforming even that low bar (only 3.22 RA per game so far, should be leading the division with that; if they averaged simply 4.00 RS, they would be 11-8 right now, per Pythagorean).  Let's see if they can improve in the next inning.