The San Francisco Giants currently sit comfortably in a playoff spot in the National League. They are but 3.5 games behind the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NL West race. Only two teams in the NL have more wins than the Giants’ 62.

And yet, the Giants are probably not a great team. They project to land square in the middle of a Wild Card dogfight. They are either the worst good team in baseball or the best bad team in baseball. Sometimes they look the part, other nights their lineup betrays the mediocrity lurking within.

In my mind, these key traits of the the Giants are reflected in two of their best-known players, Tim Lincecum and Pablo Sandoval. Brilliant at times but perplexing at others. While Lincecum is quickly becoming a beloved enigma, Sandoval is a little tougher to figure. He’s not what he once was or what he might have been, but he remains a vital contributor to the Giants’ success.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

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Madison Kyle Bumgarner plays pitcher for the San Francisco Giants. At 52-43, the Giants have the sixth-best record in baseball. Madison the pitcher has +0.8 WAR as a hitter. That means a pitcher has been the seventh-most valuable hitter on a playoff-caliber team. Most major league pitchers make very poor major league hitters. This hasn’t applied to pretty much any of the San Francisco Giants starters, but especially to Madison Kyle Bumgarner.

Bumgarner’s slash line through the first half of the 2014 season is .275/.302/.550. That gives him matching wRC+ and OPS+ totals of 140. Thanks to the great Dan Szymborski, I can tell you that his ZiPS end-of-season-projection includes a 107 OPS+. That is to say, even if he goes back to hitting like a pitcher in the second half, it is more likely than not that Madison Bumgarner will finish the season with above-league average hitting numbers. There are many actual major league hitters that won’t finish the season with above-league average hitting numbers.

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Because of  interleague play, many of this season’s All-Stars have already seen who’s on the other side. But there’s a unique opportunity to see the best of the other league on one field in Minnesota. So I asked some All-Stars if they were looking forward to a particular matchup today.

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Brandon Belt was once thought of primarily a pitcher, so the Giants’ first baseman knows a little bit about change. He’s been accused of walking too much, striking out too much, and now perhaps swinging too much. But he’s still found his way to just outside the top ten at a position with a high offensive bar.

The process hasn’t been easy, but past changes to his game, combined with his current mindset, can both give us hope that he’s got what it takes to continue improving, while also dishing us a dollop of despair — hitting seems hopelessly hard, a continual game of adjustments, even on the game level.

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On Wednesday, for the second time in a year, Tim Lincecum threw a no-hitter. For the second time in a year, it was against the San Diego Padres. As Rob Neyer wrote yesterday, one pitcher throwing two no-hitters against the same team in a year is a pretty unlikely outcome, especially considering the fact that Tim Lincecum stopped being TIM LINCECUM a few years ago. If you were going to list off pitchers who would throw multiple no-hitters, you probably wouldn’t go with the guy with the seventh-worst ERA among qualified starters since the start of the 2012 season.

But there’s something a little bit unique about the recent vintage of Tim Lincecum. Something that makes these no-hitters maybe a little bit more understandable.

Below, I’ve charted Lincecum’s seasonal batting average allowed based on whether or not the bases are empty or if there were runners on. The blue line represents the situations in which Linecum would be able to pitch from the wind-up, while the Red line represents — not perfectly, but well enough — situations where Lincecum would have to work from the stretch.

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Two decades ago, Tim Hudson was finishing up his first season at Chattahoochee Valley Community College. He was a short righty with a sinker, a slurve and small hands. More than 3,000 innings later, that sinker’s still going — but the rest of Hudson’s arsenal’s evolved. And maybe the story of that change can tell us a little bit about sinkerballers, in general.

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The Rays may be in a new position when it comes to this year’s trade deadline. Since their playoff odds have dropped more than any other team’s since the beginning of the season and are now close to 5%, it’s at least hard to see them as buyers. Then again, they haven’t made a ton of in-season acquisitions in their more competitive past, and their team is built for 2015 as much as it was built for this year — it’s likely that their transition from buyers to sellers may come without many big moves.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

NOTE: In no way are the three players presented in this article meant to represent the three singular top performers of last month in the minor leagues. They are merely players who had clearly dominant Mays about whom I have especially relevant and novel information to add.

Summary
An excellent all-around catching prospect.

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The San Francisco Giants entered play Thursday with the best record in baseball at 38-21, a game ahead of their cross-bay rivals in Oakland and a full 3.5 games better than any other National League team. Given their recent history of World Series success, maybe this doesn’t stand out to you. If you know the team and have been following along, however, this seems more than a little surprising, because the Giants certainly don’t seem like the best team in baseball.

That’s not to disparage them – they’re a good team, to be sure, and their Pythagorean win-loss record of 36-23 doesn’t indicate that they’ve been benefitted too much from run distribution.

But that’s just based on run differential, and there’s certainly a lot of variance and good fortune that can go into how teams produce runs. For the Giants, well, being the clutchiest bunch of clutches who ever clutched is certainly helping.
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