2020 ZiPS Projections: San Francisco Giants

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the San Francisco Giants.

Batters

The Giants’ lineup won’t be mistaken for a great (or even good) one, but it’s not really all that bad. Sure, many of the contributors are on the wrong side of 30 — even last year’s surprise contributor Mike Yastrzemski will turn 30 before the end of the season — but that’s balanced by the fact that the majority underperformed expectations in 2019. That shouldn’t be taken as good news, as players who underperform see their expectations drop, but it’s still a silver lining — the offense probably wasn’t as inept as it appeared last year.

Also of value is the fact that the team’s position players are generally average-or-better defensively. Among them is Buster Posey, who still is a plus despite his offensive decline. ZiPS isn’t projecting a return to prime form with the wood for the backstop, but Posey is one of the better defensive catchers of this generation, and there’s still some value to be had there. I’m both curious and dreading to see how the writers consider and value Posey’s defense when he becomes Hall-eligible; I’m fairly certain I’ll check his box, but it’s hard to say how the other 400 or so votes will go.

ZiPS projects Yastrzemski to come back to earth a bit with the bat, though not to such a degree that it ought to negatively affect his continued employment. Yastrzemski may have established a level of play he can maintain, but with a minor league record featuring a sub-.800 OPS, he’s going to have to do it again before we can state that with any confidence. Some of the drop in offense is balanced by better defensive projections; in the probability-based metric I use for minor leaguers, zDEF regularly had Yastrzemski as one of the best minor league corner outfielders. I don’t think it’s without justification that the Orioles and now the Giants have let him appear occasionally in center.

The Giants have the potential to be middle-of-the-pack at most positions. The larger problem is that there’s just not a lot of upside in this group, outside of maybe Mauricio Dubón.

I’d like to say that with Yastrzemski and Peter Maris in the organization, the Giants have a new strategy of acquiring the grandsons of baseball legends, but sadly, Peter isn’t actually a relative of Roger.

Pitchers

If the pitching matched the quality of the offense, the team might have a realistic-if-difficult path to a .500 season in 2020. I like Kevin Gausman quite a bit, but the fact that he projects as San Francisco’s most valuable pitcher is rather inauspicious. I still think Gausman needs a consistent breaking pitch to reach his potential as a starter, but even without one, he’s better than the 5.72 ERA hurler he was in 2019.

I’d like to be more optimistic than ZiPS is concerning Johnny Cueto, but given that Cueto hasn’t been fully healthy since 2016, I think I have to keep my expectations in check at this point. “Luckily” for the Giants, it’s unlikely Cueto’s presence will hinder a playoff push if he struggles.

The less said about the bullpen the better. When all the 2020 projections are in, the Giants will likely have one of the worst team bullpen forecasts. It’s probably not all that surprising given that the team has traded away almost an entire above-average bullpen in the last year or so — even the deepest team doesn’t go 20-deep on quality relief pitching. One bright spot is soft-tossing Sam Selman, who rode his nasty slider to the Pacific Coast League All-Star Game. This was a tough year to survive in the PCL with Triple-A getting the major league rabbit ball, but Selman didn’t seem to notice. In fact, he was able to make significant progress on his command issues. His command backslid in the majors, but I think he’s made real improvement here, and I’d like to see him get a bullpen spot. With Tony Watson likely closing, the Giants are shallow on lefties and given the choice, I’d rather see what Selman can do than Jerry Blevins.

The good news is that even if the pitching isn’t all that good, it’s actually quite deep. ZiPS only projects a single starter with an ERA+ above 100, but even after crossing out the pitchers who are unsigned minor league free agents, you still have a dozen or so starting pitchers projected to have an ERA+ of 85 to 100. Looking at Luis Madero or Conner Menez may help the team more long-term than seeing if Tyson Ross can sow some Derek Holland oats.

Prospects

ZiPS doesn’t think Joey Bart has reached the point at which he can push Posey out of a starting gig, but the system is confident in his power, and is likely underselling Bart’s defensive abilities. While Bart doing what Keston Hiura did in Milwaukee — crushing the high minors and forcing the issue — would be nice, he missed significant time in 2019 and fractured his right thumb during Fall League, and I think a consolidation season is in order. Seventeen ZiPS teams in, and Joey Bart ranks sixth among catchers in projected career WAR remaining, behind the two young Dodgers catchers (Will Smith and Keibert Ruiz), Adley Rutschman, Yasmani Grandal, and Gary Sánchez. J.T. Realmuto will certainly move Bart down another place, but there aren’t enough other candidates left to push him out of the top 10 entirely.

ZiPS is less sure about Heliot Ramos. Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel have been talking about Ramos more as a right fielder, and ZiPS also has concerns about him sticking defensively in center. His speed scores have dropped, and zDEF had Ramos at nine runs worse than the average minor league center fielder. Minor league defensive numbers aren’t strong enough to rely on entirely, but it’s unfortunate that they seem to match the scouting in this case. In a corner, Ramos gets less exciting, and the need to work on his plate discipline becomes more urgent.

The computer sees Logan Webb and Sean Hjelle both becoming third of fourth starter options very quickly, though without very high ceilings. There aren’t any slam-dunk prospects in the organization outside of Bart, but there are certainly more minor leaguers of general interest than there were two or three years ago.

One pedantic note for 2020: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth charts playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned, players who will miss 2020 due to injury, and players who were released in 2019. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in June to form a ska-cowpunk Luxembourgian bubblegum pop-death metal band, he’s still listed here intentionally.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR — which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article.