Offense is Hygiene, Defense is Core Competencies

I posted the below in response to a complaint about the Giants SS solutions since the Aurilia era.

Click on title of post to see the full post
(why does Blogger provide a jump break function but then does not let the reader know that they need to click something to see the full post, I wonder how many people thought I forgot to write my post. I'm almost at the point of stopping using this "feature")
That is the problem when you outsource for capabilities that your team has deemed to not be core competencies, you are at the mercy of the marketplace in terms of what you can reasonably pick up. It is not like you can pick up a young SS who is good without giving up something of value, and the Giants have, for the most part for years, not given up any prospect they consider of value. And time will tell on Wheeler.

People like to beat like a dead horse, to steal another overused cliche, that they have no offense, but the reality is that current saber research finds that teams gain competitive advantage in the playoffs by having great pitching, fielding, and closer. Offense provides zero competitive advantage. Both BP and THT came to the same conclusion, from different methodologies, that offense does not matter but pitching and fielding does, in doing deep into the playoffs.

Meanwhile, current management theory says that an organization should focus their finite resources on core competencies while outsourcing for the other skills (which Geoffrey Moore has termed "hygiene", competencies that you need to have to function, but not necessary for competitive advantage). Putting the two together, it means in best practice, teams should ideally focus on pitching and fielding with their finite player development resources, while outsourcing what they cannot fulfill internally, which is mostly offense.

The Giants and Sabean have done that. They have put together, mostly internally, the best rotation and closer combo in the majors, while outsourcing much of their offense and filling gaps, via free agency and judicious trades where they gave up on players they did not view as keepers. They have also tried to mix great defensive players with adequate defensive players on the field. Then finally an offense just good enough to win with the pitching and fielding.

As I’ve shown on my blog, in a business plan, when you have the best defense (pitching and fielding, but mostly pitching) in the majors, you can still win 90 games with a very sub-par offense. That is the beauty of the Giants strategy, when you have the best pitching around, you can mix and match spare offensive parts from all over to scratch out wins with just enough offense.

That they also look to have a good offense to go with the good pitching over the next 2-3 years, with Sandoval, Posey, and Belt in the middle of the lineup and hopefully Brown and Panik 1-2, they can afford to have Schierholtz in RF and Crawford at SS, plus someone in LF batting 6-7, is just the cherry on top. And maybe it’ll be Susac catching and Posey taking LF, should Susac sign and develop quickly.

Addendum

Thought I would update my table on RA and RS, considering how defenses have improved so much and/or offense have decreased so much (mainly the latter, I believe, due to the MLB stopping using a juiced ball and not because of PEDs) since then:



The Giants had a 3.60 RA in 2010, which the 12th placed team could have won 90 games with.  The Giants were slightly below average, at 4.30 RS/game, 9th in the league.  As one can see, you could have one of the worse offenses in the league (12th in 2010) and still win 90 games with the Giants defense (pitching and fielding).

Huff Enough Already

We have all been waiting in vain for Aubrey Huff to return to his 2010 form.  Various ideas abound, including this great analysis that showed that the difference between 2010 Huff and 2011 Huff is that he's swinging at more pitches low in the zone, where he typically does nothing with, while still mashing the pitches high in the zone.

My theory is that when he's under pressure to be "the man" in the offense, he doesn't do that well, whereas when there are other big producers, he relaxes and let the pitches come to his upper zone, and mashes them.  Like this season, once Posey was put out and with Sandoval out first then Franchez next, Huff needed to step up and the pressure got to him, and he swung at too many pitches down, apparently, expanding his zone by chasing more pitches, apparently in desperation to become the man.  I looked at his offensive support over the years, and found that when he did well, he usually had other guys hitting really well too, whereas when there was no plus hitter in the lineup, he struggled to be average himself.

Could he be finally breaking out?  Now that he has two offensive studs in Sandoval and Beltran to take the offensive heat?  Who knows, but you have to start somewhere before you can break out, he now has two months, as he put it, to make us forget about the first four months.

So far, so good.  He has hit .308/.364/.462/.825 with 3 HR in 78 AB, 8 BB vs. 10 K (87% contact rate) since the All-Star Break, so he has been good overall for a while.  But in particular, since June 23, or roughly when Beltran was rumored to be traded for, he has hit .365/.426/.538/.965 with 2 HR in 52 AB, 7 BB vs. 5 K (90% contact rate, BB/K > 1.0), in 17 games, 15 starts, or roughly 2.5 weeks.

And from the moment the Giants traded for Beltran on July 27th, Huff has hit .341/.388/.545/.933 with 2 HR in 44 AB, 4 BB vs. 4 K (91% contact rate, BB/K = 1.0), in 14 games, 12 starts, roughly 2 weeks.

And per his statement of having a great 2 months to forget his prior 4 months:  in August so far, he has hit .367/.424/.600/1.024, with 2 HR in 30 AB, 3 BB vs. 3 K (90% contact rate, BB/K = 1.0) in 9 starts.  So far, so forgetting.

I would love for him to continue to do that, as would any Giants fan, but he has been so poor all season, up and down, that one has to take this streak with a boulder of salt.

The good news is that he has not really had a good stretch of plus plus hitting at this level at all this season until now.  He has been the "bad" Huff, as this recent Fangraph post noticed, most of this season, until this recent stretch of great hitting that started on July 23rd, rarely venturing, even for a two week period, into a very good offensive level, he was basically in the roughly 800 OPS or lower range that he has been during his career when things are not going well for him.   Those numbers above, since July 23rd, are heads and shoulders above offensively, which he has not shown at all this season, besides that one 3 homer game and 4 homers in two games.

In any case, this type of hitting is why I have preferred to go with Huff over Belt.  It is unrealistic to expect Belt to hit like this.  Particularly giving how badly he has been striking out in the minors and majors.  However, Huff not only has hit like this before but has done so a number of times in his career, including twice in the past three seasons.  People looked at this the wrong way, it is not that Belt couldn't hit any worse than Huff has been, but rather that Huff could hit much better than Belt could hope to, if he could just figure it out.

The quote in the San Jose Mercury suggests that he has:  "Just laying off bad pitches, getting myself in hitter's counts, and giving myself a chance.  In the struggles I've had, especially when we're not scoring any runs at all and our pitchers are going out there every night giving everything you got, you're going up there and just trying to do too much."  The first, laying off bad pitches, leads to the second, which leads to the third, as then the pitcher has to throw the ball up in the zone, where he hits the ball well, in order to avoid walking him. 

I find his quote to be funny ironic, in reverse, for Rowand.  His first couple of seasons with the Giants, he actually hit very well for around four months, I mean well enough to justify his salary, but his poor hitting in the last two months or so of those seasons made the fans forget about his offensive goodness during those first four months.

He hasn't done that much the last two seasons, unfortunately, and he acknowledged as much in a recent interview he had to do to clarify his statements in another interview which were interpreted as a knock against the Giants and their fans.  He basically said that he has sucked, and he understands why the fans have not supported him.  He wishes it has been different, but it is what it is.

Stewart Continues to Do Well

I've been a big supporter of Chris Stewart since he came up.  I love his stats in the minors, he knows how to avoid strikeouts, he just hadn't done much in the majors with his bat up to now.  And I've worried about losing him should the Giants do trade for a starting catcher, because he could blossom as a hitter at some point.

He has continued to do well.  He had his first major league homer yesterday.  Since June 26, after he got a stretch of games as the starting catcher (Whiteside must have been hurting badly, Stewart started 6 games in a row and 7 of 8 and 10 of 13), he has found a good stroke going:  in 25 games, 18 starts, he has hit .258/.333/.371/.704 with 1 HR in 62 AB, 7 BB vs. 4 K's (94% contact rate, BB/K > 1.0).  And since the ASB, he has hit .306/.342/.471/.759 with 1 HR in 36 AB, 2 BB vs. 3 K's (92% contact rate).