It’s time for another statistical roundup for your 2023 Giants. I can hear some grumbling in the back, so let me link back to the last statistical roundup, in which I pointed out that the Giants were lucky in the first half with their success with runners in scoring position, and how that didn’t have to continue. Boy, howdy, did it not continue. Sometimes you can learn as much from what isn’t yet happening than from what is happening.
So let’s look at what’s been happening in the month since the All-Star Game. Because, yes, the Giants have been lousy with runners in scoring position, but their problems might go deeper than that. This might be something they have to address at the trade d…
Ah, nuts.
To the stats!
RISP since All-Star break: .210 (24th out of 30 teams)
Surprised? Six teams have been worse than the Giants at hitting with runners in scoring position since the break: Pirates, Marlins, A’s, Yankees, Angels and Reds. Three of those teams are contending. This is how baseball works; sometimes you’re up with RISP, and sometimes you’re down. Baseball is a little imp that’s forever hanging from your nose hair, and every so often it gives a hard yoink, just to hear the sounds you’ll make.
However, it’s one thing to have a team that’s unlucky, but it’s another to have a team that’s not very good at making its own luck. And the Giants are pretty awful at making their own luck.
Exit velocity with RISP since All-Star break: 84.2 MPH (30th out of 30 teams)
Doinks and dribblers: The story of the 2023 Giants.
That’s a little unfair, perhaps, because the Giants have seven players with 10 homers or more; only six teams have more. They have a strong distribution of players who can poke one out at any given time. The Giants are currently tied for the top wild-card spot, even after an embarrassing weekend against the A’s, in large part because of their quantity of quality.
At the same time, the Giants are a team that isn’t especially good at hitting the ball hard … which is kinda the point of the sport. Here are the ranks for Giants hitters in average exit velocity among hitters with 150 balls in play or more.
J.D. Davis — 91.6 mph (39th out of 279)
Joc Pederson — 91.5 (43rd)
Mike Yastrzemski — 90.7 (71st)
Patrick Bailey — 89.4 (116th)
Brandon Crawford — 89.4 (116th)
Michael Conforto — 89.1 (144th)
LaMonte Wade Jr. — 88.3 (185th)
Casey Schmitt — 87.0 (224th)
Wilmer Flores — 86.0 (262nd)
Thairo Estrada — 86.0 (262nd)
Luis Matos missed this cutoff, but he’s at 87.6, which would rank 216th here.
So what you have with the 2023 Giants is a team with:
• No elite exit-velocity hitters
• Two hitters in the top quintile
• One hitter in the second quintile
• Three hitters in the third quintile
• One hitter in the fourth quintile
• Three hitters in the bottom quintile
Exit velocity isn’t everything when it comes to hitting — just ask Luis Arraez, who has the 205th-best exit velocity in baseball and is hitting .375 — but it’s certainly a useful metric to explain a team like the Giants. They have a lot of batters who can help a lineup, but collectively they’re not very good at hitting the ball hard. It’s why the Giants can have one of the best ground ball/fly ball ratios in baseball (8th out of 30) without one of the highest home run rates (17th out of 30).
So the Giants don’t hit the ball as hard as other teams. Big whoop. They’re still in the top half of baseball when it comes to the lowest percentage of swings on pitches out of the strike zone, so they’re not overly aggressive.
That only goes so far, though. And it leads us to the most damning stats of this exercise.
Average exit velocity on pitches in the middle of the strike zone in the second half: 90.7 MPH (27th out of 30)
Batting average on pitches in the middle of the strike zone in the second half: .250 (30th out of 30)
Slugging percentage on pitches in the middle of the strike zone in the second half: .407 (30th out of 30)
We’re talking right down the middle, according to Baseball Savant. These are the pitches in the heart of the plate, and the Giants haven’t been hitting them in the second half. If you limit the search to these pitches with runners in scoring position, the Giants are dead last in exit velocity in the second half. Not ideal.
The Giants are an organization that lives and dies with doing damage on mistake pitches, even if it means taking strikes on the pitches they can’t hit as hard. It’s a great philosophy, but the Giants aren’t executing it well, at least in the second half.
In the first half, it was a different story. The Giants’ exit velocity on pitches down the middle was still toward the bottom of the league, but the slugging percentage (and expected slugging percentage) were both in the top half of baseball. Their damage on pitches on the fringes of the strike zone was low, but that’s almost by design. Giants hitters don’t want those pitches. They want the center-cut pitches. It’s the entire organizational blueprint, and when they get those pitches, they’d better hit them. In the first half, they did. In the second half, they’re not. That’s the entire difference.
You can be glass-half-empty here, but I’m inclined to go the other direction. It would be much more discouraging if the Giants had been a low-exit-velocity team that hadn’t done damage on pitches down the middle all season. As is, the answer is something like, “You see what you were doing back there? Do it again.”
It’s hard to offer a theory as to why the Giants aren’t doing damage on pitches down the middle. Could be fatigue/injury, could be sample size, could be the quality of the pitches they’re seeing down the middle, could be that other teams have gotten better at preparing for Giants hitters, et cetera, et cetera. The whys aren’t important unless there’s one of them that suggests that the Giants are unlikely to reclaim their first-half success. I’m not seeing one of those.
I’m open to suggestions, but it seems unlikely that this is a systemic problem with the entire Giants lineup. The likelier answer is that the team is in a funk, and they’ll get better.
You’d better hope so, at least. Because if not …
ERA+: 111 (4th out of 30)
FIP: 3.89 (4th out of 30)
BB/9: 2.6 (1st out of 30)
SO/W: (3rd out of 30)
… you’re watching the 2009 Giants. Maybe the 2011 Giants. You know the feeling of watching those teams, and it’s one of extreme frustration. All the pitching a team could ever hope for, with all the hitting of the 1968 Senators. It’s the kind of team that makes you want to take a bite out of your phone with every wasted opportunity, every stranded runner.
However, those teams were below-average offensively for different reasons. This Giants team had an average to above-average offense just a month ago. You can convince yourself that the first-half production was a fluke, and that this is the true ceiling of the lineup. I’m not sure why you’d do that to yourself, though. It seems likelier that the Giants will regress to the mean when it comes to hitting balls down the middle, and in this case, the regression will be welcome.
This would also explain why the Giants have been struggling against the under-.500 teams lately. Those teams often have a losing record because they’re stuffed with pitchers who make mistakes. But a team needs to take advantage of those mistakes, and the Giants aren’t doing it right now.
Marco Luciano’s eventual return might help with the exit velocity issues, but the likelier cure for what’s ailing the Giants right now is to do the same kind of damage on mistake pitches that they were doing in the first half. If it sounds simple, well, that’s because it kind of is. If the Giants hit the balls they’re supposed to hit — and were hitting just a month ago — they’ll be fine.
Easier written than done, of course. Still, you’ll take this evaluation over some of the other possibilities, which could have included observations like, “all of these hitters stink.” That’s probably not what’s going on here. The Giants don’t have to be an excellent offensive team to win, considering how good their pitching has been. They just need to get back to average, and there’s a clear path for them to do so. They just have to hit the pitches that are thrown down the middle of the plate. It’s all the Giants are currently missing.
If you want my suggestion for how to fix this team, then, I think that manager Gabe Kapler should yell things like, “Hey, if you see a pitch down the middle of the plate, give ‘er a good whack,” to batters at the plate. Then the batter would nod, take his advice and do exactly that. It’s a plan so crazy, that it just might work.
If it happens without the managerial exhortations, it wouldn’t be as funny, but it would still fix what’s ailing this team. The Giants just need to give ‘er a good whack when the pitches are in the hit-me zone. They’ll probably start doing it any day now.
Aaaaany day now. No time like the present.
(Top photo of Thairo Estrada: Stan Szeto / USA Today)
