There in the Giants clubhouse, behind the stars you’ve heard everything about, are two rare players. They’ve made a circuit that very few players have made before. After surviving the gauntlet, they took some time to pass on what they learned with their travels East.

New Giants’ third baseman Casey McGehee was pretty sure his Major League Baseball career was over when he packed his bags for Sendai in Japan. “Going over there, that was one of the toughest parts, I knew the chances of coming back weren’t great,” the player said before FanFest last week.

But both McGehee and Ryan Vogelsong made it back, and to the same team no less. Of the 167 foreigners that have played in Nippon Professional Baseball since 1998, Brian Cartwright found that only 11 position players have managed more than 100 plate appearances back in America, and only Julio Franco and McGehee managed as much as 300 in one season. Only nine pitchers pitched for more than one season after returning from Japan.

Or: nobody has come back from Japan since 1998 and become a full-time starter like McGehee, and only Eric Stults, Colby Lewis, and Ryan Vogelsong have returned and managed more than 100 innings twice in the big leagues.

Though the game itself isn’t very different there — they bunt a little more, swing a little more, and play for one run more often — it could be that the trip over has that sense of finality to it that you hear from McGehee. You don’t usually come back and become an important part of a good team.

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“Tom Seaver, he had the whole package. Power, deception, command, everything,” said Giants pitching coach Dave Righetti last week before FanFest. We’d been talking about tipping pitches, and deception, but any time you hear about an icon in the same sentence as Yusmeiro Petit, you put down your recording device and start looking at some moving images.

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Innovation doesn’t always come on the field. Innovation can invade any part of the sport, really. And innovation doesn’t always mean you are first in your field, even if that sounds wrong. If you define innovation as the introduction of something new, the Giants are constantly innovating upon their own processes.

“You always have to assess your best practices,” admitted Giants Vice President Bobby Evans this week. That includes everything from the training room to the rest room, apparently. Over the last three years, the Giants have spent time improving their facilities so that the fans and players had the best experiences possible. You might not see it easily on the field, and it’s hard to quantify how much these things help — but these changes are probably meaningful.

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“I was always pitching to a smaller strike zone,” Ryan Vogelsong said of his time in Nippon Professional Baseball. “That’s just the way it is, it’s the unwritten rule of baseball there, the foreigner’s strike zone is going to be smaller.”

Vogelsong is not alone — other returnees from Japan report unfair treatment from umpires there. A first look at the numbers seems to hint at the possibility that the strike zone is called differently for Japanese and foreign players. But closer inspection reveals that this could also come from a clash of cultures — baseball cultures.

Last Friday, Giants Ryan Vogelsong and Casey McGehee — while highly appreciative of their time in Japan and the things they learned while playing there — both independently referenced preferential treatment for homegrown stars in Nippon Professional Baseball.

From the other side of the plate, McGehee said that “you end up striking out looking a lot because there were a lot of times that if the catcher caught it, you were sitting down.” Using the Japanese word for foreigner, McGehee said the matchup was important: “Your best case scenario was when you had a gaijin pitching and a gaijin hitting.”

Jason Coskrey covers baseball for the Japan Times and has heard foreign players say this sort of thing before. He reached out to Jeremy Powell, who was with the Expos for two years and pitched in both NPB’s Central and Pacific Leagues from 2001-2008. While Powell felt that umpires were “focused on simply doing their best to do a good job,” it was a bit different when it came to big calls — “in crucial counts that really had an impact on how the inning may end up there were times that the call would favor the native player — it came with the territory (literally), it’s part of the game and I had to move on, albeit it was never easy.”

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The Giants were left at the altar by a couple of high profile free agents this offseason and did their best to improve the roster in different ways. Listen to Brian Sabean talk before the FanFest this weekend, and what they ended up doing was look at ways to “deepen the roster.”

One of those ways was to invite their many starting pitchers back into the fold. Behind new horse Madison Bumgarner and returning horse Matt Cain, the Giants will slide in some combination of Tim Hudson, Jake Peavy, Ryan Vogelsong, Tim Lincecum, and Yusmeiro Petit.

That collection of names may not lead the Giants into the next decade, but the veterans are mostly capable of league-average (or so) work. That’s impressive depth, actually. Given that there’s a 65% likelihood that two starters are on the disabled list at the same time on the average team — and this team may be more likely than most to have starters get injured, given their collective age — it’s good that the Giants score well on our depth charts in different ‘depth’ metrics.

Below, see how the Giants rank when it comes to innings expected from their sixth and seventh starters, projected Wins Above Replacement from those slots, and WAR per 200 innings pitched from their sixth and seventh starters. Generally, the Giants look like a top-five team when it comes to starting rotation depth.

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As the new baseball year starts, we celebrate at FanGraphs by compiling an annual of sorts; we call it FanGraphs+. An equal mix of fantasy analysis and real world breakdowns, our articles in this annual take advantage some of our best resources here at FanGraphs in order to scout baseball players, research topics, and, in general, think about baseball as best we can.

For the non-fantasy player, our 1200 player capsules can serve as gentle prods in the direction of the most interesting aspects of a player’s production. Or for a tickle on a rainy spring day. You don’t have to be interested in fantasy baseball to wonder how the clustering of a pitcher’s release point is correlated to their command peripherals, or how changing a team’s on base percentage affects the individual hitters in the lineup. Just be a baseball geek and you’ll love Dan Farnsworth’s breakdowns of a few key hitters and their mechanics at the plate — remember, this is the man that spotted the changes J.D. Martinez made that launched the Tiger into stardom.

But if you are a fantasy player, there’s gobs here for you at FanGraphs+. We hope you enjoy! It’ll only cost you $5.99 to receive access to the following:

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We can say some things about how Mike Fiers went astray in 2013, and how changes to his pitching mix, pitches, and spot on the rubber contributed to his return to relevance in 2014. Those things show up just by looking at the different stats and heat maps we have at our disposal. The harder thing to figure out (if it’s at all possible) is *why* these changes worked.

First, the how.

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There are all sorts of prescriptions for a good changeup. We talk about things like ‘velocity gap’ and ’tilt’ and ‘fade’ when we talk about how good a changeup will be. But what about the curveball? Can we spot a good one coming?

We can use our Arsenal Score work to identify good curveballs in general, just as we used to find bad changeups a couple weeks ago. Basically, by weighting grounders and whiffs on a pitch, we can assign it a score based on those easy-to-identify and important outcomes.

According to this metric, here are the best curves thrown at least 100 times last year.

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