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).
St. Louis was out of the playoffs a few weeks ago, and a couple of weeks of great ball, and they are right in the playoff picture. The 31 year old McCutchen was traded today to the Yankees for one known prospect, (Avelino) and another unknown prospect at this time. I was hoping for a better return. We gave up Wheeler and then some for Beltran in a similar deal.
ReplyDeleteYeah, great play will do that. St Louis was at .500 at that time as well. I was hoping that the Giants could do the same in August, and with a good offense (and defense, it was poor in August), we would have, the pitching was great in August.
DeleteThere is a huge difference between Beltran and McCutchen. Beltran was still a .900 OPS hitter when the Giants traded for him. McCutchen, at best, is a .800 OPS hitter.
As I went into in my PQS post, I like Avelino and De Paulo. Avelino showed good peripherals lower in the minors, so he has some skills to work with. His power breakout in 2018 was nice and hopefully something they can build on going forward, along with his command of the strike zone.
De Paulo is still young and can throw in the upper 90's, having a plus fastball that you can't teach. I think he has tools the Giants can work with, both are nice prospects you can dream on, which I find fair in trade for McCutchen, a nice but not good player anymore, he has regressed a lot from his peak years.
McCutcheon actually had significant bad BABIP luck this year, and the average velocity off his bat was higher than in previous years. Not sure how much that is from playing in the Western division, or playing in a new division, or just plain bad luck, but the drop off is not as bad as it seemed. If you take away his initial couple of weeks of the season his numbers are certainly not as bad as they look overall. I hope Avelino is possible the other half of a double play combination with Alen Hanson. Not sure how much injuries played their toll, but the second half of the season had serious dropoffs, for Belt, Crawford, Hundley, and Panik seemed to have dropped off after the first few weeks. I wonder if we had placed Bochy like St.Louis placed Matheny, if we would have had a motivational stimulus which would have yielded a half a dozen to a dozen more wins.
DeleteYes, he had a lot of BABIP bad luck, particularly in the second half. Part of me wonders if the hitting coaches were working with him to improve some aspects of his mechanics, as I believe that when a player is in learning mode, he's going to be just off a bit, resulting in poorer BABIP than one would expect.
DeleteHe actually improved greatly in two aspects in the second half with us, walks and turning some of his doubles into homers, but his very poor BABIP moderated his results: .243 vs. .320 in the first "half". Had he gotten the same BABIP, that would have added 77 to his BA/OBP, about 150 to his SLG, which would push his batting line closer to .298/.451/.555/1.006. So even a minor improvement to his BABIP, based on what he was hitting, should result in a return to his prior MVP goodness.
I expect the Giants to end up signing McCutchen to a slightly above market deal, which should infuriate a lot of people. I think he liked it here, and his poor showing with the Yankees, unfortunately for him, as well as okay but not good results for the Giants, should lessen the interest in signing him quickly, so the Giants probably could work on Harper first, then Cutch.
I also wonder if, even if the Giants somehow signed Harper (now freed of CBT worries, they could throw the bank at him, with, say, 3 year opt-out like Stanton had, with the expectation that he'll leave in 3 years), they could also sign Cutch to man LF for us as well.
Either way, he's still a quality hitter, something that is missing from our current lineup with all the injuries.
As reported extensively through the press, both Belt and Crawford have been dealing with knee injuries, Belt's so bad that surgery is expected after the season. He claims it's not affecting his hitting, though.
DeleteLastly, and thanks for the comment nomisnala, I don't think a change from Bochy would have changed anything.
DeleteThe Cards picked up a lot of pieces, and there was talk about Matheny underperforming with them even before he was fired.
While Bochy has been dealing with injuries across their Top 3 starters, inconsistent closers, and injuries to Posey, Belt, Crawford, Longoria, Sandoval, Duggar, Williamson (who looked poised for breakout) and Panik's poor performance. Only Cutch played all season, and was affected by something that held his stats back, then traded Take away all the Cards good hitters, and I'll bet they wouldn't do that well either.
The complaints about Bochy only gained exponential traction once this losing streak happened. They were there, but the bubbling of ire didn't really happen until this streak. The streak, as my Offense post noted, is a result of nobody in the lineup hitting at the major league minimum level of .700 OPS.
Changing Bochy would not have changed what is happening right now, whoever manages this current Giants team will not have anyone who is capable of hitting at a major league minimum level right now. You can't build a viable MLB offense, especially with these young prospects who are all not proven MLB hitters, you will have ups and downs (see Hanson for perfect example of that).
Yeah, I get that the vets aren't hitting, but either are the young. Some argue that it's because the young aren't playing full-time, that they can't get into a rhythm. Well, why isn't that true for the vets too? Maybe Pence would hit better if he was playing full-time? He was earlier when after returning from DL, after rehabbing as a regular in the minors, to July 25, he hit .282/.338/.423/.760 in spite of playing irregularly, before he started fading, and perhaps that was because he wasn't playing regularly. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
It's like getting mad at someone who is hobbling due to injury that they aren't running at full speed like everyone else. Or yelling at a child that he/she can't do the things that adults can do, in the case of the young players.
It shows a total lack of empathy and understanding to bitch and moan passionately about this offense. I get that its bad, and I hate losing but some things in life are just is, and there's nothing that one can do about it, either us or them.
I guess one can get an emotional release from complaining, so I can agree with that type of complaints, but after a while, it gets really boring and even a bit shrill.
Are you a fan or a fair weather fan? I assume you are a fan. Is everything in life fair? Does bad things happen and it's nobody's fault? That's what's happening now, sometimes life sucks, and all you can do is be supportive and move on and look forward.
Many people want to blame Bochy. I've made some concrete complaints regarding lineup construction, and usage of Cueto and Samardzija, particularly Shark.
DeleteMost of the complaints about Bochy is about not starting the young players, which is not a valid argument, no matter how many times you complain about it. The young aren't hitting, and even more important, they are not really ready to face MLB pitching full-time, again, pushing a child not prepared for adult activities to perform. You could kill their confidence.
These fans are showing little understanding for the handling of young players, or the need for a meritocracy environment in MLB teams. You need to start people because they deserve to start, not because you don't believe in the vets, because at some point, the young will be vets and they will remember when you threw the vets under the bus to play the young, even though they didn't deserve it. And really, they will remember as long as that manager is around, and that would put additional pressure on players that would not exist had you toed the line and just start players on a merits basis.
Many people want to blame Sabean. Most do not understand the competitive cycle that all teams operate in. The Giants are in the end of their last cycle (rapid declines in Cain, Lincecum,Sandoval, and Posey didn't help) and are readying for their next competitive cycle.
DeletePeople think that trading any valuable vets is the best strategy. They look at the examples of success in Cubs and Astros, and think that's the way, ignoring all the teams like the Orioles, Pirates, Rays, A's, Nationals who took that route and had varying success (and only one World Series appearance among them over decades of team-seasons).
This ignores a very important fact, which I've repeatedly noted in my posts: young does note equal a good player. You trade away established good players who could still be productive, for lottery tickets.
That shows how Beane, if any GM, should be questioned. Sabean only traded away two prospect who did very well, Liriano and Foulke. Beane traded away Ethier for Bradley, and Ethier outperformed Bradley THAT FIRST SEASON. Cargo, Ross, Russell, he shows that he don't really understand a prospect's true value. He's really more throwing jello to the wall and seeing what happens.
And studies have shown that teams, when trading, know for the most part, who are the ones to keep and who are the ones to trade. So by that finding, you are trading a known proven player, for prospects who the other team don't think will amount to much.
The nuance that these people are missing is that the strategy is not "trade away every good player for young prospects", it should be "trade away all the good players you think will decline soon, or has declined, and get your lottery ticket, or hopefully better, because your scouts saw something good in the prospects we got."
Hence why the Braves, in preparing for their next competitive cycle, kept Freeman around, for example. Now he's a vet who is helping lead these young players, just like how the Giants signed Morris and Randy Johnson to help lead and teach Cain and Lincecum and Sanchez. They also signed Markakis to a big contract that had analysts scratching their head, and now he's helping this team compete, because you need veteran fill in pieces across the team, no team can build youth in all areas in the starting lineup and rotation.
This nuance is key to understanding who and when to trade. Trade away the guys who won't be part of the next competitive era, keep the ones who are still productive, because you still need to field the other positions not filled with youth.
Sabean was also put behind a budget limit, else he could have tried to sign a much better hitter than Longoria or McCutchen to the lineup. Perhaps Cain, whom the Brewers signed. And a rebuild, while he can suggest, he would need ownership approval for that.
And Baer grew up with the Giants under threat of being moved multiple times, and a core finding from those struggles is that Giants fans do not support rebuilding teams. And that was true 2005-2008, attendance fell, if not for Bonds as an attraction, it would have fell a lot more, for sure. So I believe that the Giants ownership believe that a rebuild is anathema to the fan base, no matter how loudly some of them complain.
DeleteLook at the A's. Winning team this season, very exciting, but are they selling out? Not even close. And their long 2007-2011 losing (5 years) and 2015-2017 (3 years) for 8 losing years in the prior 11 seasons, has killed interest so much that they have 89 wins, headed for a 99 win season, which is darn good, and yet even in their last homestand, which is where one would help there is more heightened attendance, but the average worked out to only 1.8M, which is okay for them, but not great, compared to their history. Their peak was 2.9M in 1990, then 2.2M in the next good era of winning, then 2.0M in the last era of winning. In the face of that I get why the Giants are steady in their strategy to reset and not rebuild.
And who can argue with their success with that? That's been the strategy since Sabean took over as GM in 1996, and he rebuilt the Giants to a winning team with his bold Matt Williams trade, then rebuilt the Giants for the 2009-2016 competitive period, with great selections in the draft with Lincecum, Bumgarner, Posey, Belt, Crawford.
And about the contracts, the Giants tried to mitigate the risks of that. They just swung and missed. If one can forgive Shaw for swinging and missing, believing that's part of the process, why can't one forgive Sabean? They tried to trade Shark last season but he vetoed it. And if the baseball wasn't changed last season, Cueto would have pitched great again and opted out. Those are huge pieces of the owed contracts.
The only conclusion I can come to is that Sabean Naysayers never changed, they laid low when they couldn't complain, but come out of the woodwork when things get bad.
FYI, I had started a post on Sabean, and I'll probably repeat a lot of this comment there, as I don't think everyone gets these new comments unless they commented there already.