San Francisco’s Offense: A Glass Half Full and Empty

The San Francisco Giants’ offense should be better than we have seen thus far. On the other hand, the Giants’ offense should be a lot worse than we’ve seen thus far. But then again, maybe the Giants’ offense is about what we expected it to be. Below is an attempt to determine how much water is currently in the San Francisco Giants’ glass.

The Optimist’s View

The Giants have been unlucky and they are bound to turn things around. Since the beginning of the season, the Giants’ offense has been one of the best in the league, but has failed to score runs. The defending World Series champions carry a solid .268/.332/.398 line after 39 games. Their .319 wOBA ranks eighth in Major League Baseball and their wRC+ of 105 is sixth. Removing pitcher statistics makes their numbers even better, as the wRC+ of 113 is fourth in all of baseball and just one point away from second place (if also a mile behind the 134 wRC+ of the Dodgers). Despite their solid hitting numbers, the Giants have scored just 3.8 runs per game, ahead of only the Chicago White Sox, Los Angeles Angels, and the woeful Philadelphia Phillies, who have scored just 3.2 runs per game this season.

There is a disconnect between the Giants’ hitting performance and their runs scored. Here’s a graph depicting MLB teams’ runs scored versus wOBA so far this season, with the Giants denoted as the orange dot.

The Giants are a slight outlier, but they are not the furthest team away from the line. The Blue Jays on the positive side and the Rockies on the negative side both look to have bigger gaps between their hitting line and runs scored. Perhaps BaseRuns might reveal the difference a better than wOBA? On the FanGraphs Standings page, one of the options is BaseRuns. For those unfamiliar with the metric, this is what Dave Cameron had to say when it began showing up on the site last year.

It’s significantly more complex than a linear weights model like wOBA, but that complexity leads to estimates that fit each team’s own run environment; if a team has a very good offense, the extra value will be captured in BaseRuns when it is not in wOBA. If you’re particularly interested in how BaseRuns works, this is a good primer. If you don’t care about the how and just want to know that it does work, however, research supports the idea that BaseRuns is probably the most accurate run estimator in the public domain.

The Giants’ current record of 21-18 matches up with BaseRuns’ expectations so far this year. Overall, they haven’t been particularly lucky or unlucky but on offense, specifically, they’ve been the unluckiest team in the majors. The following graph looks at runs scored per game and subtracts the number of runs scored per game expected by BaseRuns. A positive number indicates that the team has scored more runs than expected and a negative number shows teams that have scored fewer runs than expected.

If you needed any more reason to be skeptical of the Minnesota Twins’ start, there it is. As for the Giants, they are scoring roughly half a run less per game than their underlying performance has indicated. The Giants’ wOBA in low-leverage situations (.328) is higher than in high-leverage situations (.312), although their performance with the bases empty (.329) is roughly the same as with runners on base (.332). Matching the results in runs with the hitting production thus far as well as Hunter Pence’s return both provide reasons to be optimistic about the Giants prospects moving forward.

The Pessimist’s View

The Giants have been lucky. Almost every individual player has outperformed expectations so far this season. When that performance returns to normal levels, San Francisco’s offense will perform worse than it has up to this point. Below are the ten players with at least 80 plate appearances on the Giants, their productions this season, and their expected production the rest of the season from the FanGraphs Depth Charts.

	wOBA	ROS wOBA	Difference
Brandon Belt	.383	.347	.036
Brandon Crawford	.378	.304	.074
Gregor Blanco	.351	.304	.047
Buster Posey	.347	.364	-.017
Joe Panik	.344	.295	.049
Angel Pagan	.332	.313	.019
Nori Aoki	.332	.317	.015
Matt Duffy	.319	.286	.033
Justin Maxwell	.309	.286	.023
Casey McGehee	.240	.296	-.056
AVERAGE	0.334	0.311	0.022

In Buster Posey and Brandon Belt, the Giants have merely two players expected to produce solidly above-average offensive numbers over the rest of the season. The addition of a healthy Hunter Pence and his .331 projected wOBA should help somewhat, but the Giants have gotten solid production from the combined efforts of Justin Maxwell and Gregor Blanco. Only McGehee and Posey have been playing below their expected level for the rest of the season with Panik, Belt, and Crawford playing well above expectations.

Casey McGehee, both slow-footed and grounder prone, has come to the plate 21 times with a runner on first and less than two outs and grounded into a double play 12 times. Even if his production improves from his .196/.248/.284 line, he should still be a below-average player. Brandon Crawford is “on pace” for an unlikely 25 home runs and Belt is benefiting from a .418 BABIP that is third in the majors behind only Dee Gordon and Kris Bryant. Once the performances regress to expected levels, the Giants offense will get worse.

The Realist’s View

The Giants’ mix of luck, both good and bad, has them just about where they were expected before the season started. The realistic viewpoint is rarely as fun as wide-eyed optimism or feel-like-breaking-things pessimism. The Giants have been roughly a .500 team up to this point, and the projections peg them as a roughly .500 team going forward. The Giants are expected to score more runs than they have so far, but moving up to roughly four runs per game still places them among the bottom of the league in terms of offense. Finishing a game over .500 the rest of the way puts them at 83-79, and in the FanGraphs projections, the Giants are just one game out of the wild card along with the San Diego Padres and Pittsburgh Pirates.

At the moment, there looks to be a five-way battle brewing for the two wild-card spots, with the New York Mets and Chicago Cubs in contention with aforementioned Pirates, Giants, and Padres. While the division races don’t contain much intrigue presently, the race for the two wild-card spots should make for an interesting summer in the National League. One solid addition or continued good play from an unexpected source could push any team fighting for a spot right into the playoffs. To the degree that it’s possible to overlook a club that just won the World Series, the Giants have been overlooked this season. They failed to make any interesting moves in the offseason, one of their best players has been injured, and they have moved along at a .500 pace. The Giants’ middling record and lack of newness does not make for a great early-season story, but they have the pieces once again to be much more interesting as the season moves along.