Playoff PQS: Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks Path to World Series

After Merrill Kelly's great start and reading about his long and winding road from the U.S. to Korea and back to the U.S., I thought I would investigate the two teams battling it out for the World Series championship and see how their starting pitching's PQS results have contributed to their reaching the World Series.

As I've shown in prior posts about the playoffs, having pitchers who threw DOM PQS starts was a significant success factor in winning games and moving to the next series.  Since all that analysis was done with the original PQS, I'm going to continue to use that methodology here.  If I can ever figure out how to automate pulling all the playoff starts and automate the calculations of PQS, I will investigate creating my own PQS, and building research on that.

Your 2024 Giants: Alex Cobb Surgery

It was recently announced that Cobb will get hip surgery to fix the problem he had all season. The Giants have a buy-out option with Cobb for the 2024 season, they can buy him out for $2M or sign him to a $10M deal.  Normally this would be obvious, given his performances the past two years, to sign him, but it is complicated by the fact that he likely will need six months to recover, which should take him out to at least the start of May, if not longer.

Your 2023 Giants: Ohtani, the White Whale

As with any superstar free agent, Ohtani is likely to not sign with the Giants. But I don't think it would be out of the realm either. Here are some of my thoughts on what it would take to sign him.

Also, as many of my posts goes, this went long: it is also a discussion of the positives that I see with the Giants roster and future. While the past couple of years have been disappointing, the Giants appear to me to be on the cusp of breaking out and being a serious contender for the intermediate term, if they can acquire at least one key component (a good cleanup hitter) and ideally two (another ace starter).

Lastly, I started this post thinking I needed to finish by the end of the World Series, as that was when I expected the Giants to announce their next manager. Because Bob Melvin was named manager, I finished it up and published it now, adding a note where I left the content unchanged and noting the hiring.

Your 2023 Giants: It's Deja Vu All Over Again with Ann Killion

I generally love reading Ann Killion, but sometimes, she is way off.  I once responded in my blog when she questioned the future plans of the Giants under Sabean.  Here she goes again, this time in the Chronicle, questioning Zaidi.  

Your 2023 Giants: To Zaidi or Not Series - Five Years!!!

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?

This is the first in a series examining each complaint.