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.
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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.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
The Engineer’s View
The glass is twice as large as it needs to be
The Accountant’s View
Just kidding, nobody cares what the accountant thinks.
Emil Cioran’s View
There is no good luck or bad luck. Only pain.
should read, how many mL of water is being debited to this glass?
The Alcoholic’s View
*hic* The glass is half the size it needs to be.
The Hawk Harrelson view:
The only stat that matters is ‘The Will TO WIN™”.
Great article. I like the Giants chances, for an odd year. The players “bound to regress” are less of a sure thing than the sequencing luck improving, IMO. Crawford & Belt have always shown flashes of talent with the bat, but they’ve been inconsistent. Maybe this is the year they put it together. They are both at prime ages for breakout seasons (27 and 28)…maybe not super likely, but it could happen.
With Dodger pitchers dropping like flies, the division might even be within reach.
And Kershaw apparently rendered ordinary, thus far, this season, though he went through a similar early rough patch last season too before dominating again.
And I would like to see a similar analysis done for LADies like was done for the Giants here. Grandal, A-Gon, Kendrick, Van Slyke, Pederson, Ethier, and Guerrero are all way above their OPS projections, and thus probably over their wOBA projections, if a similar table to above was done for them. Might even be a much greater difference than the Giants .022.
Unfortunately I think Kershaw is just fine. Take a look at his FIP, BABIP allowed, and HR/9 rate compared to his career numbers, there is a pretty decent amount of evidence.
Totally agree on the Dodgers offense, would love to see some analysis on that. It’s scary how good they have been so far even without Puig, I really hope they are due for some regression…
Funny thing is on that chart above the Dodgers are only 4 spots away from the Giants, meaning they are producing runs at a level lower than their performance would indicate (if I’m understanding that correctly).
Nice article and analysis, really enjoyed it.
I thought it would be interesting to just look at the expected starting 8 and see what the difference would be, using Maxwell as wOBA and Pence as ROS wOBA, and the difference falls from .022 to .012, halving that difference.
And other fans might not be aware, but Giants fans have been waiting for Belt and Crawford to break out, both has shown that, when healthy, they can hit for much better performance than they had in career so far.
For instance, Belt’s projection is reduced by his poor hitting last season in trying to recover from two concussions and does not seem to account for youth and possible growth. In 2012-13, he had a .356 wOBA combined, with a .365 wOBA in 2013 after a .339 wOBA in 2012. Assuming some growth/improvement, since he’s still young (age 27 season), somewhere in the .370-.380 wOBA range would result, not far from his current .383 wOBA.
In Crawford’s case, he starts seasons at a much higher rate before falling off. In 2013, he kept his batting line around .800 OPS to mid-June 2013, which is a .349 wOBA, before injuries took him down. In 2014, again around .800 OPS to late June, had a .344 wOBA, before something took him down again. If mid-.340 wOBA is Crawford’s true talent level, and he is able to keep this up for the full season instead of dipping mid-season, that would cut his difference in half.
Between those two reductions in differences, if they show growth in their performance in relationship to prior production, and which are not out of line with production that they had done before over an extended period, that would pretty much erase the average difference, putting it closer to .000 than .012.
Then there is Panik, who has very little MLB experience so far, and thus we don’t have a strong take on his talent level yet. His 2014 wOBA is .317, which would halve the difference if that is his talent level. If you treat his initial struggles (about a month) as a transition period, over the last two months, he had a .352 wOBA to close out the season, which is not far from the .344 wOBA he has achieved so far this season, and thus one could speculate that he should be in the .340-.350 wOBA range. And if this is his true talent level, then he’s just doing what he was doing last season, and there should be little difference.
And those are the three largest differences out of the starting 8. So, if there is development progression for these three young players (Belt 27, Crawford 28, Panik 24), and I don’t view it as a huge leap for any of them individually to happen, as they had produced at higher levels for extended periods before, then the overall production for the team might well end up closer to the optimistic side of your article. Of course, that is a lot of expectations for all three to progress, so perhaps something in the middle is more reasonable to expect. But even that would result in an additional drop of the difference from .012 towards .000.
And you make reaching 4 runs scored to be bad. First, average in NL is 4.14 RS, .310 wOBA overall. That is the average wOBA you had for the Giants ROS, so they should be around average RS (and don’t take into account any possibility of development for the three players above). But they have an above average ability to prevent runs, 3.72 RA so far this season.
Together, using PythagPat, that works out to 67-56 in the remaining 123 games in the season, which works out to an 88 win season. And should either Peavy or Cain can return to projected goodness, that replaces Vogelsong’s production, which should add 1+ wins, which would push it to 89 wins.
Now, Lincecum wouldn’t be expected to continue to do so well, but that is balanced with expected improvement over what Peavy and Vogelsong has done so far in the season, whether by Vogelsong, who seems to have found a way to perform well again, or Peavy/Cain, whoever returns first from DL, and so push it back to 88 wins.
Still, either way, that should be competitive enough for one of the wild card slots.
I agree with OGC above re projections. 2 other things:
-Why would you use pre-season projections now that there have been 150 PA’s? At least a hybrid projection/reality model would be called for. I’m talking BABIP and other is-it-real-or-is-he-lucky stats. Projections should always be used modestly IMO. Of the three that Fangraphs uses, only one calls for an increase in wOBA for Crawford, for example, despite the fact that he’s tacked on around 10-15 points every year since becoming an everyday player. And he’s 28.
-There’s no mention of parks played in, and none of the stats used are park-adjusted. This seems glaringly obvious. I’d expect Anthony Castrovince to gloss it over, but not this website. AT&T, PetCo, Chavez Ravine, a cold and wet Coors (it’s a big field when the weather’s moist), and then they go to warm Cincinnati and score 33 runs in 4 games. Not as surprising as it ought to be, espcially given the stats in the “optimists view”
The projections are rest of the season projections, not preseason projections. Crawford’s has gone up 10 points since the preseason.
I’m not entirely sure I understand the criticism about parks. BaseRuns is a run estimator based on hitting outcomes so adding in a park component would not be helpful. If playing in hitters’ parks early on has affected the Giants, it has not been reflected in their wOBA and likely had little effect. Their wRC+ which was mentioned also reflects the same.
point taken re projections. now I know what ROS means. Egg on face.
sorry, got tripped up in my wording last sentence. Meant to say not as surprising as it’s *being made out* to be
What’s the old ‘modeler’s saw’ about predicting horse races…assume a spherical horse.