Your 2019 Giants: After Three Innings the Giants are 21-33

The big picture is that my views of this season blew up in the third inning.  My thoughts...

ogc big picture thoughts

I don't know how I did it before, but getting the stats for players in 18 game increments is not easy, I would have to do each individually.  So I'm pulling the 28 days stats (covered 20-23 games typically) and pulling out names to point out based on that.

After hanging in there in the first two innings, especially after adding two functional major leaguers in Pillar and Austin (basically .500 after adding both), the team cratered to 5-13 in the third inning of the season, from May 9th to 29th.

Pitching Sucked Badly

With a 5.63 ERA for the third inning, it's pretty clear what was really wrong during the third inning.  And we know that it was basically the starters who failed the Giants during that time.

I totally did not see this happening.  I knew that there was some areas of variance, but I thought having Bumgarner, Pomeranz, Samardzija, Holland, D-Rod, Suarez, and Anderson would give us enough coverage for bad pitching.  They totally blew up my prediction of .500 for the season, which was looking good once the roster was properly rostered with MLB talent, and not experiments.

But relievers were also bad too, particularly Derek Holland, who, after complaining openly about what the direction of the team is, didn't pitch well and ended up being moved into the bullpen as long relief where he continued to not do well.

I think most teams would have DFAed him for that, but given that he was the biggest free agent signing by Zaidi, it appears that factored into the decision.  I mean, the season is not looking good at all, and frankly, Blach has been a very good long reliever, and probably would have been better than Holland in that role:  Holland has a 6.75 ERA since he was moved to the bullpen, Blach had a 3.19 ERA as a reliever in 2018 after he was moved out of the rotation, though he did get beat up by LA in his one call-up this season.  But with every prospect on the edge with the way Zaidi has been yo-yo-ing players up and down from the majors to minors or DL or DFA, that's not all too surprising either.

Moronta, Gott, and Bergen also did not do well either in relief.

And it was day and night between April and May for the entire pitching staff:  April, the pitching staff had a 3.81 ERA, but in May they had a 5.85 ERA.

Hitting Sucked Still

Not that the offense was all that good either, both pitching and hitting failed:  only 3.5 runs scored average during the third inning.  Standouts (have to use month of May stats) included Sandoval, Yazstrzemski, Panik, Longoria, Vogt.  Belt and Crawford were okay.  But Posey, Duggar, Pillar, and Williamson all did not hit all that well during May.  Pillar and Mac were especially bad, both under .600 OPS, Mac in particular.

If Mike Y (I agree, for now, with some who say that we should not call him Yaz, but if he keeps on hitting well, well, all bets are off) can continue to hit (he was pretty bad his first 5 games, .222/.300/.278/.578; but hit really well against the Orioles at "home"), that would help the offense given how poorly Pillar, especially, has hit (probably should be platooning with Austin by this point, he has been that bad:  vs. LHP, Mike Y, Duggar, Pillar; vs. RHP, Austin, Duggar, Mike Y.; and as bad as Duggar has been hitting, maybe some vs. LHP he should sit, with Austin in LF and Mike Y in CF, since he reportedly can play all OF positions).

I had been counting on Duggar to be doing well enough to make leadoff a no-brainer for Bochy, but he has also failed my expectations (I did a pretty bad job of it for this season, pretty much none of my expectations are being met at all, so far; maybe I should stop blogging while I'm ahead).  The good news is that Bochy went away from Duggar after roughly a month of struggles (after the team's first 25 games) and he's been mostly stinking up the bottom of the order.

Next Inning

Hard to say how far the team will fall, they were 5-11 in the third inning (5-13 overall) after Holland's bombshell hit.  They had been 13-15 since the 10-day experiment with Joe and Reed ended with Austin's acquisition.  It was punctuated with a 7 game losing streak, which did the vast majority of the damage to the inning.

All of that damage was in that period.  From May 29th to today, they have a 3.56 ERA, so the pitching has started to settle down some.  But it's only 5 games:  Bum, Beede, Anderson, Samardzija all had good starts, Pomeranz did not; had Pomeranz had even an average start, they would have been 4-1 instead of 3-2 during that period.  Lets see how the rest of June works out, especially since this good period coincided with the Giants playing two of the few teams worse than them, the Marlins and the Orioles.

But the hitting needs to pick up too.  Posey has been disappointing but perhaps that's related to his concussion, which he had another of during the month, and took a week off.  Summer months is also when the Giants hitting seem to pick up some.

Also, last season, the team was very unsettled, trying to find itself, which it did once Bumgarner returned to the rotation, and from June to August, the team was a good team.  Perhaps they can do that again, but it will take the young pitchers in the rotation starting to show the good skills they showed last season but not much of this season.  We'll see.