The Giants fanbase, from the view of The Athletic's comment pages for the Giants, are in an uproar about Farhan Zaidi's stewardship of the Good Championship Giants. The Zaidi Haters complaints include but are not limited to:
- Five years is enough to rebuild a farm system and the team
- 2023 season was a disaster
- The farm system has not made any progress
- They are not as good as Texas, LAD, Atlanta, etc.
- Zaidi is in love with platoons and openers
- Zaidi can't sign the best free agents; there's no stars
- What's the plan?
ogc thoughts
Okay, I'm going to tackle the complaint about 2023 season being a disaster. True, it ended disastrously, but I consider the season a success.
If I Told You Before 2023 Season began...
- That after a .500 2022 season
- That we lost Rodon in free agent, who was worth around 5 wins to that .500 team (pushing us from 81-81 to 76-86 caliber team)
- That all the free agents we signed to make up that lost production would not produce much of anything, due to injury and/or poor performance
- That the team then started out to a 17-23 record at one quarter of the season (which works out to a 69-93 season) with poor vet performances also from retained vets as well as the free agents
- That we had to call up our top prospects, after a poor 2022 prospect season knocked our ranking in the majors down significantly
- That most of our prospects did not perform all that well, except for one, who did well until fading at the end of the season, and another, who didn't pitch a lot of games or innings
- That our rotation was Webb, Cobb, and then the dreaded 3 letters (TBD), meaning openers, for most of the season after that 17-23 start
- That our lineup was basically almost all platooned players
- That our manager got fired with 3 games left in the season because the team collapsed so badly in the last two months of the season
I would bet most Giants fans would have predicted a horrendous 100+ loss season. We ended up at 79-83, basically where we would have been with the loss of Rodon, and would have been at .500+ if not for the collapse. I consider it a success that the team didn't sink to impossible depths of losses given all of the above factoids about how the season went bad.
Saber Tricks Worked!
Many fans complain about them, but part of that was platooning, part of that was openers. Each allowed a talent lacking team to perform better than the individual pieces, by utilizing them in optimal ways.
Platooning has been done forever, so I won't discuss much about that. Hall of Famer Earl Weaver utilized platooning regularly, as that is a good way to make up for not having a hitter who can adequately hit both lefties and righties, relatively equally. Of course, few teams, if ever, basically platooned the whole lineup, and that's because three veterans who were expected to play every day - Crawford, Haniger, and Conforto - all had poor seasons.
The Opener I honestly didn't understand it until this season. But then I realized that it has more to do with giving the Featured/Bulk Pitcher the opportunity to pitch at least one more inning. It's about changing the hitters he faces when he gets to the third time through the lineup.
By having the opener, ideally someone good enough to be a setup reliever (i.e. a good pitcher), take on the top 4-6 hitters in the lineup, and then the next pitcher starts his appearance facing the bottom of the order. Normally, as a starter, he would face the lineup twice (18 batters), then face the top of the lineup again, that is, the best hitters again. Instead, in the third time around the lineup, the Bulk pitcher faces the bottom of the order again, which he presumably can handle better, and thus the team gets another handful of hitters out of the way that this pitcher faces, hopefully at least an extra inning.
This strategy stretches his usage from 18 batters to 22-24 batters. And if he's going good that day, and the manager isn't just a robot manager, pulling predesignated levers, they can stretch him further and let him face the best hitters again. That's what I feel Bochy excelled in, knowing when to get another hitter or two out of the way, or determining that the current pitcher don't have it, and go with someone else. Many a time, Bochy would bring in the closer in the 8th to get out of a key situation, and not just wait for the 9th, like many robo-managers do.
Giant Leap for Pitchers
One reason the team did not tank was because of their pitching staff. Even though the Giants lost Rodon's elite contributions from 2022, as well as suffered from poor performances from Desclafini, Manaea, and Stripling, the Giants pitching staff jumped from 4th to 2nd in xFIP and from 8th to 3rd in SIERA, per Fangraphs. They did not have many pitchers who had xFIP greater than the average ERA of 4.33 in the majors.
The Giants were very successful in handling their pitchers, and especially with manipulating the pitching rotation to accommodate individual pitchers' needs (Webb wanting to stick to starting every 5 games; Cobb needing to push his starts off a day because of his hip issues that eventually led to the surgery). And that should be what Ohtani is looking for, and it could be a selling point with Yamamoto, who might want to start his MLB career starting like he did in NPB, every six games, before stretching out at some point to take a regular turn every five games.
Giant's Ohtani Advantage
Basically Ohtani wants the ability to control when he starts and if he needs an extra day, he's going to take it. That's what he has been doing with the Angels, and that's a major reason, in my opinion, that the Angels have been losing all these seasons even with probably the two best players of this era, Mike Trout and Ohtani. Because this requires the Angels to have a starter or bulk reliever available to pitch that game, should Ohtani decides that he needs another day.
Most teams have a hard enough time finding four good starters to rely on (take any season, parse by SP with enough IP to qualify for Cy Young - 1 IP per games in season - see how many qualifies; there is never enough for four - at least the times I've tried - starters per MLB team, and in 2023, only 44 pitchers qualified, and I had to get down to 120 IP to pull up 102 pitchers, or 3.4 per team), let alone five (most teams churn through 5-10 starters for that 5th spot, even the Giants during the Dynasty era) and now you need to account for Ohtani taking a day off, so you either do a bullpen game that tires out your whole bullpen, or you throw your next starter up a day early (less rest is usually not good for performance), or you carry a 6th starter (remember, not every team has a qualified 4th starter, let alone 6th).
But the Giants dealt with a similar problem this season, with two regular starters and three openers, at one point. But they had mostly a regular rotation up until about the third month of the season. Looking at the undulations of the rotation, Webb was the only consistent starter going every five games or so, Cobb was moved back sometimes because the hip problem disclosed near the end of the season probably flared up (which basically is what Ohtani should want from his next team), so the Giants usage of Cobb illustrates how they handled him, and how they might handle Ohtani or Yamamoto. At minimum, it's an option that Yamamoto can chose if he decides he needs to take his turn like he did in Japan, no pressure.
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