Your 2022 Giants: Top Defensive Teams Can Win with sub-par offense, and cheaper

Seeing complaints about the Giants offense and how they should have went out and signed a big bat hitter. 

And while I wanted them to sign Seiya Suzuki, especially at the contract that the Cubs signed him to, for whatever reasons (per Baggarly, there were other non-baseball factors), I at least can understand why he chose to do what he did. So I decided to revisit the scenario of going with strong defense: strong pitching paired with strong fielding, and show the magic of having great pitching and fielding.

ogc's big picture

As I showed in my business plan series of posts, a team can win by being a Top 3 level team in RA (runs allowed), that is, with strong defense.  But how did that translate using 2021 stats, now that the baseball environment is much different from 10-15 years ago?

Here are the leaders in RA in the NL in 2021:

1. Dodgers: 3.46 RA
2. Giants: 3.67 RA
3. Brewers: 3.85 RA
4. Braves: 4.07 RA
5. Mets:  4.12 RA

I thought I would show what happens when you fall out of the Top 3, by including the Top 5.  The margin for making this work is very slim, as we'll see.

I calculated the RS necessary to win 90 games, which is the minimum, generally, just to get into the playoffs somewhere. The below shows the RS each team needed to win 90 games in 2021, and how that offense would have ranked in 2021, given all the NL teams (I did not remove their actual RA from the ranking, though, I view all of it as the sample of possibilities of offense in the NL):

1. Dodgers: 3.91 RS (14th in 2021)
2. Giants: 4.15 RS (13th)
3. Brewers: 4.36 RS (10-11th)
4. Braves: 4.60 RS (5th)
5. Mets:  4.66 RS (5th)

As you can see, if you were in the Top 3, you would win 90 games easily by having an average offensive team (4.46 RA), but not if you were below the Top 3.  The Brewers just made it, keeping there RA low enough that they only needed a below NL average RS to win 90 games.

Then I calculated RS necessary to win 97 games (.600 winning percentage), which is around where you need to be to compete well for divisional title (this time, along with where they needed to be, I included their actual RS rank):

1. Dodgers: 4.32 RS (12th in 2021; actually was 1st with 5.12)
2. Giants: 4.58 RS (6th; was actually 2nd with 4.96)
3. Brewers: 4.80 RS (5th; was actually 6th with 4.56)
4. Braves: 5.08 RS (2nd; was actually 3rd with 4.91)
5. Mets:  5.14 RS (1st; was actually 13th with 3.93)

Again, this showed how important it is to have a Top 3 defensive team. It's very hard to win a division without a top pitching staff, along with good fielding, for an overall elite RA.  Even the Braves and Mets had to have a Top 2 offensive teams in order to legitimately compete for a division title.   The average NL teams' RS is 4.46 RS, for your reference. 

That is probably why the Mets went so hard for offensive in their free-agent signings. But if I were them, I would have worked equally on their pitching, they only had to jump from 3.93 RS to 4.36 RS if they moved from 5th to 3rd in RA (4.12 to 3.85 RA), instead of trying to jump from 3.93 RS to 5.14 RS.  That's a 0.30 drop in RA tied with a jump of 0.43 increase in RS, for a total of 0.73 improvement, vs. a 1.21 RS improvement by solely concentrating on offense.

This also illustrates the leveraged power in improving a team's RA. As my study showed, each drop in 0.1 RA then required less RS overall to win the same percentage of games: for each drop in RA by 0.1, the RS necessary to maintain the same winning percentage drops by 0.11. There is improvement in your winning percentage as you reduce your RA, because you then need less RS to be a winning team. For instance, from the table in the link above, dropping RA from 5.00 to 4.00 (1.00 run decrease),  the RS necessary to maintain a 90 game winning percentage falls from 5.59 RS to 4.47 RS (1.12 runs decrease).

This is why I talk incessantly about the Giants focus on starting pitching and relief. If you focus on being the best in this area, you can navigate the ups and downs of an average offense and still win a lot of games, and be competitive for the division title most seasons (unfortunately, the Dodgers are #1 in both offense and defense, so wild card is the alternative, unless the Giants can rack up the wins beyond Pythagorean again).

2022 Giants

So for the 2022 Giants, while it would have been nice to get another big bat into the lineup from free agency, Zaidi focused on building up the rotation again, with many key signings, in particular, Carlos Rodon but Alex Cobb was a key signing too, with the goal of being a top team in RA again. As nice as it was to add Kris Bryant to the lineup (but at what a cost, I loved Alexander Canario!), the team is roughly the same as last season, though obviously missing Posey's big bat.

However, there are some mitigating factors. Posey only played 113 games, so barely 70% of the games.  In addition, while hitting a great .304/.390/.499/.889 with 18 home runs, he was only responsible (due to playing only 70% of the games) for 3.5 bWAR.  

There are ways of covering that loss. One obvious one would be Joey Bart producing to make up for that loss. So far, not so good, though. And we have no way of knowing exactly how much he can produce. But projection systems estimates range from 0.7 to 1.1 WAR, so Bart can probably cover about a 20-30% of that loss.

Another is if Belt can be healthy for more games. He was only in 97 games last season, but he produced 2.7 bWAR. If he can stay healthy for 145 starts, which he's done 4 of 9 seasons (and 137 in another), and produce at the same rate, that's an additional 1.4 bWAR or 40%.  Of course, he needs to stay healthy, as well as continue to produce. Plus, unfortunately, the other Brandon (Crawford) is not producing at the same rate as last season, so that is a mitigating factor.

In addition, Zaidi is know for finding diamonds in the rough who produce. As my series has shown, he has added new players who produce at least 1 bWAR in each season GMed by Zaidi.  Yaz kept this streak alive in SF (it ended the first season LA was without him) and additions like Alex Dickerson and Darin Ruf helped too. This season, it looks like Thairo Estrada will be the one to keep the streak going, he's already at 0.4 bWAR (roughly 4.0 bWAR seasonal rate), although Ruf is struggling (two steps forward, one step back)

Free agents have helped too. Flores last season and continues to do so, even more, this season. And Joc Pederson has been a great addition, as well. Both are also at 0.4 bWAR or roughly 4.0 bWAR seasonal rate. 

So, we don't know where it's coming from, but the ragtag team the Giants had last season somehow produced franchise team record of 241 home runs and still came in 2nd in RS, in spite of no hitter other than Crawford producing over 3.5 bWAR, so perhaps Zaidi can do it again.  Because while 107 wins is not expected, their Pythagorean Wins was 103 last season, basically keeping the same team except for Posey (3.5 bWAR) and Gausman (5.1 bWAR), that still leaves the team at 94 wins, which is still pretty good, as a starting point.  So one could make the argument that the Giants, as is, would still be a 90-95 win team without adding another big bat.

Economically Efficiency by Focusing on Starting Pitchinig

I haven't talked about this before, but. I think that this team strategy of focus on defense can be economically efficient (i.e. you spent less per win).  Per Matt Swartz's research for FanGraph, starting pitchers are paid less:

So if you focus your scarce payroll budget on procuring SP, which is cheaper than the average player ($7.3M/WAR vs. $8.1M/WAR overall and $13.6M/WAR for RP), not only will you get more efficient at winning (in terms of winning percentage vs. overall change in runs scored and allowed) but you get more efficient cost-wise as well.