2022 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 a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the San Francisco Giants.

Batters

I feel a bit of disquietude when projecting the 2022 Giants. Following up on your biggest team projection miss in nearly 20 years of making said projections doesn’t feel great. Even worse is when your current projection is far closer to the previous year’s very wrong forecast than it is to the previous season’s actual win total. It’s a challenge to convince people that I didn’t write a model for sour grapes and reassure them that I’m an egalitarian who hates every team equally, no matter which one you root for!

In this case, I generally agree with ZiPS that the most significant regressions toward the mean will come on the offense. Let’s start with catcher. At least with the bat, Buster Posey matched some of his best seasons with his stunning 2021 campaign, this despite sitting out the entire 2020 season. With a 35-year-old catcher, it was already likely that some of those wins were going to melt off San Francisco’s total, but Posey’s retirement makes the position even more uncertain. Joey Bart is an outstanding prospect, but even just replacing Posey’s 2022 projection is going to be a tall order. ZiPS does like Bart’s bat a little better than Steamer does, but I don’t think he’s going to make fans forget their retired franchise player particularly quickly.

Then there’s Brandon Crawford. His glove isn’t what it was at its peak, but he managed his best offensive season at age 34. Still, the decline rate for mid-30s shortstops is quite steep. The Giants also got some great performances out of former stars like Evan Longoria and wrung a lot out of role players like Darin Ruf, but the story of San Francisco’s offense was a lot of aging players hitting exceptionally well, not a young phenom like Ronald Acuña Jr. or Fernando Tatis Jr. carrying the load. In fact, the Giants got more WAR out of 30-and-over position players than any team in baseball:

Only four other teams got even 10 wins out of their 30-and-over position players in 2021. Not all of those players will decline, but as a group, it’s a pretty good bet they will, especially when they were already performing above expectations. The simple truth is that projections do better in the long run than over the relatively small sample of a season. For example, when looking at how players who qualified for a batting title in 2015 were projected for 2016-21, the average error was four points of batting average, 14 points of on-base percentage, and 26 points of slugging percentage, smaller gaps than the projections for 2016 only. And in this case, historically, the prior year’s preseason projection has been slightly more predictive of the following year’s record than the preceding year’s actual win-loss record. One of the cruelest things about working with projections is that the things you’re projecting are basically small sample sizes, so you never know if you were right or lucky or wrong or unlucky — you can only guess.

What hurts the Giants is that they simply don’t have a lot of room to try to counteract some of their possible offensive declines by making additions. They’re not going to bench players coming off great seasons, especially after having won 107 games, so catcher may be the only position with serious turnover. And there, they’re probably not going to block one of their top prospects, and even if they were more willing to do so than I think, there are no free-agent catchers who are likely to be upgrades on Bart. The best bet is that no matter how clever they are with their player usage — Earl Weaver’s shade must have been smiling about Gabe Kapler’s role juggling — the Giants are likely to drop back to being a middle-of-the-pack offense in 2022.

Pitchers

The Giants’ pitching is what surprised me the least. Now, I’d be lying if I said I predicted the level of success they achieved in 2021, but I was interested in how competent their quick rebuild had been, and I didn’t turn out to be too horribly wrong there. Losing Kevin Gausman is a blow to the team and while the front four looks very good if you assume health for the Alexs (Wood and Cobb), neither’s injury record over the last four or five years suggests we ought to be particularly bullish. That means the Giants may have to test their depth, and even with ZiPS seeing Sean Hjelle and Sammy Long as having legitimate value as major leaguers (the system isn’t as high on Tyler Beede), it feels like the wheels could quickly come off the bus with some bad injury luck. Hopefully, when the lockout concludes and transactions resume, the Giants add another starter.

Like the rotation, the bullpen could use another arm or two. The Giants have a lot in common with yesterday’s ZiPS team, the Mariners, in that they have a respectable bullpen that is long on options but short on dominating arms for the highest-leverage innings. Given his up-and-down history, ZiPS isn’t sure Jake McGee will repeat his 2021 and the system will likely need another year to be totally convinced that Camilo Doval isn’t going to wake up one day and find that the walks he abandoned in the minors have shown up on his doorstep.

So how good are the Giants with this roster? Right now, knife to my back, I’d say they’re slated for about 85 wins. But I can understand why that might feel a bit rage-inducing for fans of a team that just won 107 games. What I don’t understand is why you’re going to such extremes to get a concrete projection. I’ll have one in just a couple of months! Sheesh.

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 2022 due to injury, and players who were released in 2021. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a big band orchestra that only plays nu-metal versions of baroque cantatas, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.36, similar to the post-June substance-enforcement environment.

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 that 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 assuming that the designated hitter will continue in force in 2022.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article, or get angry at Dan on Twitter.