The Giants’ Role Players Shine
Anybody in baseball could have had these guys. Gregor Blanco, Yusmeiro Petit, Javier Lopez. Sure, the Giants spent a little to get them, but that little has meant a lot to them in return. All three came up huge in Wednesday’s Game Four victory. And the tweaks those players made to get where they are today weren’t big tweaks. The Giants just saw the talent underneath some iffy results.
As Lopez put it after the game Wednesday, “Petit’s kinda been flying under the radar for the nation to see, but we all know what he can do here.” Petit threw three innings of one-hit ball in the Giants’ Game Four victory.
Ask Petit if he’s doing anything differently, and he shrugs. No new pitches. No big changes. Maybe he’s throwing the ball down more, and in the zone more. Except if you look at his heat maps, there’s not much of a difference from before (left) and recently (right). And his zone percentage the last two years is well below his zone numbers from earlier in his career.
His pitching mix has changed, but only a little bit. A couple ticks on the gun, and a few more curves than changeups, and now his curveball is the top starter’s curveball by whiff rate. But if you look at what he was doing in 2008 compared to now, you can see the groundwork was there for what he is now. He had three excellent secondary pitches:
| Pitch | 2008 usage | 2008 Velo | 2008 swSTR | 2014 Usage | 2014 Velo | 2014 swSTR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fastball | 54% | 87.6 | 5.4% | 49% | 89.4 | 7.1% |
| Curve | 14% | 74.6 | 16.1% | 23% | 82.2 | 29.2% |
| Change | 11% | 78.9 | 14.4% | 9% | 82.2 | 13.6% |
| Slider | 22% | 81.7 | 17.0% | 18% | 84.8 | 10.2% |
As Lopez said, “What makes Petit great is that he has a four-pitch mix and he’s able to repeat his delivery better than anybody right now and he’s got that deception, he kind of jumps at the plate.” His fastball has that eleven-inch rise that can lead to good popup rates, and his career 4.8% pop-up rate is well above the league average of 3.7%, so even his weakness can be used as a strength.
Javier Lopez knows that the Giants’ bullpen doesn’t stack up to other bullpens in one way, but he’ll take his teammates. “We’re not going to light up radar guns, but we match up really effectively,” he said after the win.
Lopez may be the most costly of the role players on the Giants, as the team once had to trade John Bowker (the man that made Brandon Moss expendable to the Phillies) and Joe Martinez to the Pirates for him, and then signed him to a three-year $13 million contract.
But before that year with the Pirates, Lopez was having an unspectacular career. Known for his work against lefties because of his arm slot, he couldn’t keep his walk rate down enough to be effective. He was walking nearly a batter every two innings against lefties back then.
How did he better the command? By focusing. “I felt like it got to the point where I needed to execute down in the zone,” said Lopez Wednesday night. “I had to realize that being a painter is not in my repertoire, but being able to work down in the zone is something that I can and do pretty effectively.” You can see it in his pitch heat maps (early career on the left, late on the right) — Lopez really began to focus more on the outside corner:
You could also see that tweak in effect last night with Matt Adams at the plate in a tight spot. Lopez fell behind 3-0, but rallied to get the slugger out. “It didn’t work out initially but I tried to stay aggressive down in the zone, I got that strike call on the 3-0 pitch, he took a hack at 3-1 and then I knew I just had to keep the ball down and I would have a decent chance to get a ground ball, and I was fortunate to get one.” Watch Lopez continue to focus on down and away, even as the at-bat threatened to get away from him.
Gregor Blanco was almost out of baseball, and now he’s a super hero. When Pablo Sandoval came to the park with superhero t-shirts, he ended up with Bumblebee the Transformer while other players got Superman, Batman and the like. Not a bad match for a man whose underrated skillset mostly relies on baserunning, patience, and defense.
The change that made Blanco into the super role player he is today was health. In 2010, he finally got surgery on a wrist that had been bothering him for a while, and that allowed him to find himself, “the player I wanted to be,” as he put it to me in 2013. The Giants saw him in the winter leagues, saw that he was healthy, and immediately offered him a minor league contract.
That health has allowed him to be more aggressive. Listen to him talk about coaxing a fourth-inning walk out Randy Choate in Game Four: “I was just trying to get in his head, because yesterday I but the ball it made all the things happen. So I was just trying to make him feel like I was going to bunt it again, and I think the crowd was on him, and I was just trying to make him feel uncomfortable.”
Watch Blanco’s swing rate increase over his career, and you see a player coming into his own:
Javier Lopez appreciates Gregor Blanco’s willingness to put the ball in play: “We’re hitting the ground and pound and putting the pressure on the defense.” Lopez loves the rest of his bullpen. And Yusmeiro Petit, who also loves himself. These three important cogs didn’t cost the Giants much, and they’re giving back in spades.
And it feels great. As Petit said after the game “I’ll do whatever the manager wants, I’ll do whatever they need. I feel comfortable here because the Giants gave me the chance. This is the best part of my life, right now, because I’m working relaxed, comfortable.”
All it took was a few small tweaks and an opportunity.
With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
* Game Four
Man you had me really confused there for a second.
I thought this article was from the future.
Could this please be a title of a NotGraphs post?
Great article about some unsung heroes in yesterday’s game!
You forgot to add another one, Santiago Casilla, the Giants literally got him for nothing, as the A’s just released him, and he’s been excellent since then for us. The A’s probably wishes that they had him this playoff-season.
Yusmeiro has to start a game (if all goes well tonight, I suggest Game 2 and 6 of the WS). He is the second best pitcher the Giants have. There is no trusting Hudson and Vogey, and even Peavy is on a slippery slope.
I agree with your premise – actually, BOTH your premises – but not your hypothesis.
In 2013, Petit as an occasional starter came within one pitch of a perfect game. In 2014, he broke the all-time MLB record for consecutive scoreless innings pitched, rendered the more impressive by them all deriving from relief appearances. Add those to his recent work in the play-offs, as winning pitcher in that 18 inning epic with the Nationals, & again in the 4th game of the NLCS with the Cardinals, it’s hard to argue against him being any worse than 2nd best among the current SF pitcher.
But his particular set of skills in long relief put him into a certain position with THIS iternation of Giants pitching: a big time ace with no other reasonably comparable starter; missing their 2 top starters of 2007-12 (to a broken wing & a screwed-up delivery mechanism, respectively): and 3 of its remaining options in that homely stereotype: Grizzled Veteran Battler.*
The GVB is an important icon & meme to mass and national commercial purveyors of sporting contests, particularly for the presenters and pundits contracted to imagination-starved Fox Sports.* After all, even our 40th POTUS played such an iconic character in one of his most successful Hollywood productions, as Grover Cleveland “Pete” Alexander in The Winning Team (1952).
Reagan portrayed Pete as now popularly best-remembered (if at all) – IOW, as he portrayed all his film roles that weren’t comic or criminal: a decent, self-effacing, square-shooting, grizzled old hurler forced by circumstances beyond his ambition or control to battle overwhelming odds — in this case, the hydra of alcoholism, epilepsy and the 1926 NY Yanks of Ruth & Gehrig. IOW, same guy that led our troops up Porkchop Hill.
Problem is, while Coach/FederalAgent-Marshall-Sheriff/Sergeant Rock never fails, & if he dies – as he often does – it’s near the end of the flick when victory, hanging in the balance, is realized or in sight, these 3 GVBs on the Giants’ staff often get dinged early & knocked out of the battlefield. And this is particularly poignant on a team managed by a major fan of the collectivity of Coach/FederalAgent-Marshall-Sheriff/Sergeant Rock genre flicks.
Petit is Bochy’s ace in hole, sent in when one of those GVBs has taken a fatal hit while the day’s outcome yet unknown and even it’s shape largely certain. I’m not saying Bochy categorically won’t start Petit against KC, I’m saying it makes less sense for him to do that given the nature and condition of his nominally 2, 3 and 4 starters.
* See Coach/FederalAgent-Marshall-Sheriff/Sergeant Rock in sports, cowboy & war flicks, or the last at least in the early exhilaration of a lovely fresh foreign war enterprise.
** Most particularly of all, Harold Reynolds & Jack Buck.
Wow, that was hard to follow, but I’m glad I did: I got it, I agree.
I was thinking the same as the commenter, but I came to the same conclusion that you did, having Petit as an ace in the hole is much more valuable because he can do it at any time. So you give your GVB some rope, and if they pitch well, as they did in the Nats series, you don’t need to take them out, but if they falter, as Vogie did in NLCS, then you can insert Petit.
Meanwhile, if you don’t need to use him, great, just because you didn’t use him does not mean that you did not get value out of him, because he would have been a saving grace to any game where the starter loses it.
More importantly, he’s used to doing this, so he can do this in multiple games (though probably not consecutive, though he did offer to pitch after the 18 inning game).
Getting meaningful contributions from castoffs has been a big ingredient in the Giants’ success the past few years. How do you overcome albatross contracts like Zito’s and Rowand’s? Picking up a Vogelsong or an Andres Torres off the scrap heap to give you the production those players were supposed to for free is a real good start.
I don’t know what part of the credit goes to scouting, player development, or just plain luck but it’s been impressive.
There have been many castoffs (or misfits, as they were called in 2010) who contributed significantly that we got for no upfront costs, i.e., other teams could have had them also for free (or a minor league contract offer): Torres, Uribe, Casilla (DFA by A’s one day, set up god for Giants the next), Huff, Burrell, Ross, Vogelsong, Blanco, Arias, Petit, Ishikawa (our own castoff), Strickland. I probably forgot someone, but those are the main ones that came to mind.
Not quite enough Ishikawa in this one.
Amen to that, brother!