Your 2024 Giants: Where the Roster Stands Today

I posted this comment, and given all the work I put into it, I'm posting it here.  I, of course, added some more content (I tinker constantly) and added headings.  Also, the Giants signed Jordan Hicks in the meantime, so I added some thoughts on that, but didn't add to existing projections to give more buffer for the projection I'm making.

I analyzed where I think the Giants are improved in 2024 vs. 2023, and how many wins that should translate into, and whether they can make the playoffs.

Hey Zaidi! My Baseball Business Plan: Pitchers Produce more WAR than Position Players

Happy Thanksgiving!  What people don't really realize about WAR is how much is contributed by the good to great pitchers vs. the position players on a per game basis.

Baseball Prospectus Secret Sauce: Their Rationale for Ending It Was Incorrect

[NOTE: wrote most of this up before, just getting around to posting now]

Baseball Prospectus did a study for their great book, "Baseball Between the Numbers", of how teams historically, during the divisional baseball era, got deep into the playoffs, answering the question Billy Beane had, of why his sh!t didn't work in the playoffs.

They found, on an overall basis, that offensive stats was random and all over the place, meaning that it is defensively how teams got deep into the playoffs, that is, pitching and fielding.  They narrowed down the variables to three key metrics:  K/9 for the pitching staff, WRXL for their closer, and their Fielding Defense metric, FRAA.  The only offensive metric that seemed tied to going deep was stolen base attempts, which they attributed to the link of team speed to stolen base attempts.

For a few years, BP published analysis based on their "secret sauce".  But after a number of failures, they decided to end the analysis, making the assumption that the playoffs had changed in some way to make it fail as a strategy.

Your 2019 Giants: Zaidi, Year One (and thoughts on Year Two)

After Zaidi's first year as Giants President of Baseball Operations, I thought I would post my thoughts on him so far, and what I see for the upcoming season.

Your 2017 Giants: Post-Mortem and 2018 Thoughts

The Giants had the second worse record in franchise history, going 64-98.  I've seen many in the media, including some talking heads who I don't have a lot of respect for, excoriate the Giants for not planning on pursuing power, necessarily, when the annual post-season press conference was held.  The Giants senior management emphasized improving outfield defense, looking for an upgrade at 3B, and perhaps bullpen help.

FYI, all stats from the great Baseball Reference resource.

My Current Baseball and Giants Blog Links

Intro:  this post has some of the links I used to have on the side of my blog content.

Ugh, Blogger just did something to lose all my links.  But it didn't remove the widgets that shows posts, so I'm going to post the links in this post, and widget this post.  While this is slower to get to, I don't really think that many of you are using my links anyway to get to places, I assume most of you are savvy enough to have them bookmarked somewhere so that you can get to what you want when you want.  In addition, I can't remember every link I had, so I'm going with the ones I can remember, for the most part.  But let me know if you prefer links on the side and I'll think about complying.

This was last updated May 3, 2018.

2016 Giants: April PQS

This post has the Giants Pure Quality Start scores for the month of April 2016, PQS as defined in Ron Shandler's Baseball Forecaster annual book and they published the details here (unfortunately, they removed the article; this link gets you at least to the PQS definition, read down to middle for details). I wrote on this first in 2006 (wow, 11th year of this!  10th anniversary!) and have compiled their stats on a regular basis, so I'm continuing it this season for continuity and historical comparison (there is the "PQS" label that you can click to see the old posts on this). Regular readers can skip to the next section.

This is the Quality Start with a sabermetric DIPS twist, and it gets really easy to calculate once you get used to it. I don't think it's the end all or be all, but then nothing really is that. It is, as I like to say, another piece of the puzzle. A dominating start is scored a 4 or 5 and a disaster start is scored a 0 or 1. DOM% is the percentage of starts that are dominating, DIS% is the percentage of starts that are disasters (any start under 5.0 IP is automatically a 0, or disaster).

Your 2016 Giants: They're Down, They're Really Down

(oops, had wrote this on 4/21, intending for it to publish late that night, but for some reason still had it open and unpublished until now).

The Giants just lost their fifth straight game, and 8 of the last 9 games, sinking to 7-10.  Giants fans are moaning everywhere.

Your 2016 Giants: Cueto Fatigue

Continuing my series of posts on Cueto.  As I have been finding out, Cueto have splits, both by home vs. road, and first half vs. second half.  And those splits hold even when taking the two splits into account, both home and road gets worse in the second half.  The mysteries are two-fold:  why is he so much better in Cincinnati and why is he that much worse in the second half?

I don't think we can ever answer the former (my best guess is that there is something in the background of the stadium that works well with his deceptive pitching motion; there was an analysis long ago of why San Jose Municipal Stadium has a much higher strikeout rate and Giants hitters (including Bowker), noted that there were mountains in the background in CF that hid the ball in some visual haze plus also the sun would set in CF in the second half of the season and the hitter would be looking into the sun, so there was no hitter's eye, making it harder for the hitters to see the ball) but let's take a look at his monthly stats and see what's there.

Your 2016 Giants: Cueto Home and Road, First Half and Second Half, Splits

I had discussed Cueto's stats regarding first and second half previously.  When he had his first start for us in Milwaukee, much was made about his much better results at home vs. on the road.  So I thought I would look into that as well.

Giants RAA Per Statcorner: 2009 to 2015

Statcorner is an online resource that I've been aware of for a while now, but don't always have time to peruse.  Something drew me to it recently, and I discovered their Team RAA report.  It allows you to look at their RAA stats by the various components of baseball performance that could be measured:  batting, fielding-gb, fielding-fb, SP, RP, and Total.  And one can do this by year as well.  I thought I would look at the stats from 2009 to 2015.

Your 2016 Giants: Duffman Considered

As I noted in another post, I'll be doing more posts where I don't feel I have the final answer, but found something interesting to ponder, which I do a lot of time, but then just tuck away.

Today, Baggarly wrote about Matt Duffy, from a nice interview he did with him, noting that some might question whether Duffy can repeat his 2015 season.  So I went into his splits and dug around and see what I could noodle either way.

Your 2016 Giants: Cueto First Half Magic

A beat reporter noted that Cueto has had great first halves and poorer second halves.  So I commenced analyzing that and seeing why, and perhaps what could be done.

Your 2016 Giants: When Projections Go Wrong: Pence

I thought I would look into Hunter Pence's projections because they were off so much when I looked at them.

How Samardzija Was This Signing?

The Giants signed Samardzija (pending physical on Tuesday, which is expected to be fine) and so how good a deal is it?  There were some negatives that led me to not want to sign him, but now that I've seen more information, I'm actually pretty excited about it.  Plus, it gives us more Shark marketability, with Gregor Blanco (White Shark) and Samardzija (Shark).

Your 2015 Giants: A Peek at PQS Data

As you may or may not remember, I've been actively keeping track of PQS data the last two seasons, and this season I expanded it to include the actual pitching line for each starter, so that I could build pivot tables and see what the numbers say.

Your 2015 Giants: After 15 Turns of the Rotation

My report on the Giants starting pitching based on PQS data.

Your 2014 Giants: Playoff PQS Analysis

I was just looking at the Giants stats when I realized that I had not done the Giants 2014 Playoffs PQS analysis.  So here it is.

Bochy Getting Some Love in the Media

As I've been commenting in my blog, there has been a number of articles extolling the greatness that is Bruce Bochy.  Of course, I approve.

There was a great article by Jonah Keri about how Bochy is one of the best managers in baseball history on Grantland and I wanted to share it.  But if you know me by now, I'm never too happy about baseball generalists writing about the Giants because they always get something wrong that I don't agree with.  However, for the most part, Keri wrote a pretty clean article and very complimentary about Bochy, which I have been since late in the 2010 season when he started changing his tactics and strategies, sitting down low performing veteran starters in place of other players, culminating with the shocking move to leave Zito off the playoff roster, including the World Series roster.

ogc thoughts

Closer Leverage

Keri makes the great point about the bullpen.  This section was very good overall.  I think he's a saber, so I'm surprised he does not note that one of the things sabers want managers to do is use your best pitchers when it counts, not just as a monkey assigned to get the last three outs, whether it's a tight one-run lead or a safe four-run lead.   But he did say it:  "It’s about using your best players in the biggest spots. "

I'll end by quoting Keri:

Bochy is intellectually flexible enough to recognize important moments as they come and adjust his moves accordingly. In the playoffs especially, that’s a really big deal.

Bochy and the Vets

This section has the information I've been looking for, for a while now, as I had read it somewhere, started quoting it, but then couldn't find it when someone asked.  Chris Jaffe took raw team analysis data and grouped it into managerial and examined various aspects of a manager, for his book.  What he found was that under Bochy, veteran hitters out-hit expectations, based on prior and next season stats, adding 270 runs over a 12 year period (basically his years managing the Padres).   That's roughly 2-3 wins per year, just from that, and doesn't include what Huff and Burrell did in 2010, Pagan after he joined us, Scutaro in 2012, or even Morse this season.

So that means Bochy takes average teams and just from working with veteran hitters, make them 83-84 win teams.  And I think this applies to the next section as well.

#FreeBelt Was A Concept That Got Bochy Wrong

I am so tired of this meme that mean Bruce Bochy don't understand young players.  And I'm surprised that Keri didn't make the connection that he did not trust the young players in San Diego but trusted the young players in San Francisco (maybe it's the quality of talent coming to the majors?).

Bochy wasn't loyal to Huff, costing Belt playing time.  Any Giants fan of that time should remember that the Giants CHOSE to place Belt on the roster, to see how he handles things, pushing Huff to Left Field (which ultimately drove him crazy, but that's another story).  If that is considered being loyal, then I don't see it.  If the vet is favored, wouldn't Belt have been moved to LF, like how the A's moved Mark McGwire to 3B because they liked that other guy better at 1B?

In fact, the Giants liked Belt so much that they kept him on the MLB roster even though he had a lot to learn, culminating in his famous learning of how to properly hold the bat in order to release his power, TWO years later, because Belt was hesitant to follow all of Meulen's recommendations.  Only once he embraced ALL of the changes did he start hitting like the player everyone thought he was.  But Bochy and the Giants get blamed for that delay in development when it was Belt who was fighting all the changes, like a wild stallion (giraffe?).

And think of this another way:  if Bochy understands veteran hitters enough that they improve greatly under his guidance, perhaps he is a pretty good judge of what a good hitter is, and how to fix him, and that applies whether the player is old or young.  So if a lot of the Padres top prospects fizzled under him, perhaps that was more a function of the GM not delivering a lot of talent to him.  Remember, those were the brainiacs who drafted Matt Bush with the #1 pick overall, apparently because the Twins picking Mauer worked out so well, plus I think he agreed to a lower bonus (if I recall correctly).  Because that's not my experience with Bochy at the helm of the Giants.

There are many instances of this, beyond just Belt.  When Freddy Lewis was doing well, Bochy chose to keep Roberts on the bench and keep Lewis starting, even though Roberts was now healthy.  He often kept Schierholtz in the lineup even though he was super cold, until he could wait no longer (it was go time, last two months).  And of course, a lot of young guys have come up and almost immediately took starting/important jobs:  Cain, Lowry, Lincecum, Sandoval, Romo, Posey, Bumgarner, Belt (if not for his DL injuries, he probably would not have seen much more time in the minors after he was brought up).

For more recent examples, how about Panik, Susac, Duffy, and Strickland?  In particular, Bochy has put both Susac and Duffy into extreme pressure situations during the playoffs, when he could have gone to Arias instead.  Instead, he has hardly been used, Duffy has been used a lot more than he has.  And Strickland has been used in key situations as well, and he has had his ups and See You Laters! (four homers)  A guy unfriendly with young players would not have done that.

He has run the Giants mostly as a meritocracy, and if you falter, he don't make it about the player being stupid, old, or lousy, he keeps their confidence up (just see any interview where he talks about a struggling player) by saying that he believes in the guy but that the player is just out of it, for whatever reason, and he needs to get production by using other guys, with the promise to return to the player once he and the coaches fix his problems.

Beating Pythagorean

The next section covered his numbers as manager, covering how his teams did or didn't beat Pythagorean expectations.  So given the veteran hitters adding value which would show up in Pythagorean (83-84 wins), there is something extra that managers adds on top of that which Pythogorean does not measure.

Now the rubric here is that the average manager would just regress to the mean of 0 for his career.  But this table shows that over the 20 years of managing Bochy has done, he is currently at 26 extra wins for his career.   That works out to 1.3 extra wins average for his managing career.  That puts us now up to 85 wins, assuming he starts with an average team, just from his managerial influence, an 81-81 team is on average an 85-77 team.

Coincidentally enough, my study on one-run wins found that he adds 4 wins per season on average in terms of beating the rule of manager regress to mean of .500 in one-run games, which is the same number of extra wins.  Of course, if the team is a near playoff caliber team (mid-80's), adding 4 wins would put the team into the playoffs, either as wild card or divisional winner.  And Natch, a good playoff team becomes a great one, at least during the season.

Gathering all the datapoints, just from eyeballing the data, one can see that there is some correlation involved between his bullpen value add, his Pythagorean out performance, and his one-run record out performance, but there are clearly years where they are polar opposites, so clearly not the best correlation.

Overall

Obviously a very complimentary article about Bochy, and makes a pretty good case for Bochy being one of the best managers around and ever.

Your 2014 GIants: Dissecting 1-8 PQS Style

Wow, mea culpa for even looking at how good the Dodgers would have to play to catch the Giants.  This game can be such a humbler. I wondered how badly the starters did in PQS in the streak so far.

ogc thoughts

Would you believe that in those 9 games, the Giants starters had 5 DOM (56% DOM which is pretty good) and only 1 DIS (11% DIS which is very good).  If a starter did that over a full season, he should have a very good season, very low ERA.

Bumgarner lost two DOM starts (teams normally win around 70-80% of them), Lincecum and Vogie each lost one DOM start, with Hudson the only one winning a DOM start.  Of course, he was the one with the disaster start, first one in 13 starts for the rotation:  again, any pitcher doing that over a season is usually having a very good season.

And they only have 2 DIS starts over their last 39 starts, again, great numbers.  Meanwhile, they had 23 DOM starts for roughly 60% DOM, which is good.  So the starters have been very good for a very long stretch, and nothing in the last 9 games signal that anything is changing for them, other than that the team has been losing games that they should have been winning going 1-4 in DOM starts is a pretty big aberration (though I just noticed that they only had 1 DOM start in the last four starts).  As long as they don't stress and change something they should be fine.

And the reports from the beats are that they are treating this as an aberration.  As one of the players noted, the Giants could have as easily been 3-0 as 0-3 in the Rockies series, and 2-2 and not 1-3 in the Nats series.  And the beats also noted that the clubhouse was pretty laid back, not stressing at all.   Well, with the lead that they had, and they still have a pretty good lead, they should not feel any extra stress.

So I'm trying not to worry.  The logical side says that things are still fine, as long as the Giants starters are going strong, we will be fine.  The emotional side of me, of course, is spiraling along with other Giants fans.

Go Giants!