The Giants are the best. The Giants are the worst. These are not subjective descriptions; they’re objective FACTS, backed up by cold, hard data. The Giants are the best team in baseball and the worst team in baseball, depending on what you’re talking about. They’re also the weirdest, but we’ll get to that.
This is a search for the statistics where the Giants are leading either the majors or the National League (stats good through Monday’s games). It’s also a search for the stats where they’re either 30th out of 30 MLB teams in a category, or they’re 15th out of 15 NL teams. We’re still in that delightful time of year when samples are sketchy and unreliable on the player level, but on the team level, they’re not not meaningful. Giants hitters have taken 636 plate appearances this year. Their pitchers have thrown 146 innings. That’s not too far from a full season from an individual player, and you’re used to drawing conclusions from those.
So draw conclusions as you see fit, or just enjoy the early season statistical nuggets. Here’s where the Giants are the best or the worst:
The average runner in a stolen-base situation wanders 4.4 feet off first base, which is the longest lead in the NL and second only to the Mariners in all of baseball. It’s nearly a full two extra feet compared to the teams at the bottom of the category. Logan Webb is allowing the longest leads of all Giants’ pitchers (and has allowed the 10th-longest leads in baseball), but it’s likely that a single stolen base has disproportionately affected those numbers. Here’s the lead that Freddie Freeman got against him before stealing a base:
There was no throw on that stolen base, as you might imagine. It was a lead so big, it might be messing with the team-wide numbers to some degree.
The larger problem on a team-wide level, however, might be that the left-handed pitchers are allowing longer leads than the average southpaw. Here’s where different Giants lefties rank in all 0f baseball when it comes to leads in stolen-base situations:
3. Blake Snell
9. Erik Miller
11. Taylor Rogers
12. Kyle Harrison
That’s out of 95 left-handers who threw enough pitches to appear in the search, so it’s a fairly wide pool. This is a big reason why the Giants are near the top of stolen base attempts per opportunity, even though they have a catcher with one of the quickest pop times in baseball. I’m not sure if there’s anything to do about this without disrupting a pitcher’s overall rhythm, but it’s certainly something to watch.
Although, it’s worth noting that the Giants actually have an above-average caught-stealing rate, and teams aren’t exactly running wild on them. A lot of that has to do with Patrick Bailey, but at least some of it has to do with …
The Giants’ pitching staff is the quickest to home plate, both with runners on base and the bases empty
Well, there you go. Webb might have allowed that hilarious lead to Freeman, but that was only one of two stolen bases he’s allowed all season. You’d think that teams would be taking advantage of the long leads to stay out of the double play, but Webb’s secret weapon is that he gets the ball and goes, which has to disrupt a runner’s timing.
Something to keep in mind is that Camilo Doval has thrown only four innings this season, so he hasn’t had a chance to sandbag these numbers yet. He’s so slow to the plate that infielders are calling timeout to avoid pitch-clock violations, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen. In general, though, the Giants have a much quicker tempo than the average team.
Man, if I knew there was a whole stat devoted to this, I could have saved a few hours. There is a stat for this, though, and it’s called meatball-swing percentage. It’s what you think it is — right down the middle. I won’t belabor the point, as I wrote an in-depth article on the phenomenon just a few days ago, but it’s nice to have confirmation from an official source.
Since that article, too, there has been a development.
Of all the small-sample stats, this is one of the noisiest. The difference between the highest meatball-swing percentages and lowest last season was about 7 percentage points; it’s currently about 16 points. So the teams that have been extra aggressive on them will start to regress to the mean, taking more pitches they wish they had back, and teams like the Giants will likely progress to the mean.
The Giants are also first in the National League in called strikes overall. Seems bad, but the highest percentage in baseball belongs to the Yankees, who are off to a great start. There are a lot of ways to skin a baseball.
They’re also second in baseball when it comes to solid contact rate, behind only those rascally Dodgers. Now, while I’m not going to tell you that the Giants are hitting the snot out of the ball and that they’ve just been unlucky — they have a perfectly reasonable batting average on balls in play, and there are a whole lot of other factors that go into their disappointing run production — but it’s certainly a good thing that they’re making more solid contact than last year, right?
There’s more to this, too. The Giants are making less weak contact than last year, and they’re hitting more line drives in general. After finishing 22nd overall in average exit velocity last season, they’re now eighth in baseball, which is also one of the biggest increases. They’re making more contact on pitches in the strike zone than they were last year, which seems like a positive.
This isn’t to say that you should expect an offensive renaissance soon, but you’d rather have numbers like this than the other way around.
You ever see a stat that catches you totally off guard? You’re minding your own business, doing some research, and suddenly you see a number that can’t possibly be right. So you dig into it a little more, and it turns out that it’s absolutely correct. Your mind is blown.
This is not one of those times.
The Giants have only the eighth-worst batting average with runners in scoring position this season — spare a prayer for the Twins, who are absolutely putting their fans through something they don’t deserve — but the FanGraphs stat includes the situation of any given plate appearance. Making an out with a runner on second in a 9-1 game stings a lot less than doing it in a 3-2 game in the bottom of the ninth inning. This metric takes into account how much a given at-bat added or subtracted from the team’s win probability in that game. The Astros, Red Sox and White Sox have been worse than the Giants, but there isn’t a National League team that can compare.
If it makes you feel better*, the individual worst performance in the NL according to this metric belongs to Shohei Ohtani. Ha, take that, Dodgers.
* It does not make you feel better.
You can find a detailed explanation of what “shading” is here. It’s about the starting position of the infielders before the pitch is thrown. It’s something that’s much less extreme than shifting, but it’s still a pre-pitch response to where the ball is expected to go.
Some teams shade a lot. Against left-handed batters, Twins infielders shade 83 percent of the time. Out of 286 plate appearances with a left-hander up, they’ve shaded them in 238 of them. That’s a little extreme, but when you get to the league average, you’ll find numbers like the Yankees, who have faced 239 left-handed hitters and shaded against them 132 times. This is standard baseball stuff.
The Giants have faced a left-handed hitter 231 times. They’ve shaded against them twice. Twice. They’re 30 shades behind the 29th-lowest team and a full 11.4 percentage points. They don’t even show up in this search for infield shading against lefties. It’s a lot more common for teams to avoid shading against right-handed hitters, and the Giants are no exception, but they’re not doing it against lefties by a wild margin. There’s going against the conventional wisdom, and then there’s whatever this is.
Now they’re doing strategic positioning, which is different from shading. That’s where you’ll see a shortstop almost right over second base against a left-hander, or when the infield is brought in. But it’s either all (standing over second) or nothing for the infielders, especially against left-handers.
How is it affecting the Giants? No idea. They’re leading the world in pitches thrown to a left-hander while their infielders are in a standard position, and they also have the second-highest batting average allowed on balls in play in those situations. But there’s a lot of noise there — because they do it so often, that means they’re going to have more line drives hit in those situations, which will futz with the overall BABIP numbers. The Twins have been in a standard infield position when two line drives were hit against them this season, and one of them was a hit.
The Giants have allowed 42 line drives in standard position, and they’ve allowed 28 hits. So their overall BABIP in a standard infield position is affected, but my guess is that there wasn’t much that could have been done with any of them. Line drives are usually hits, shading or no shading. They’re line drives. So we don’t really know how many hits the Giants are saving/allowing because they play in a standard infield position so often. It doesn’t seem to be working on grounders, either, but … you guessed it: That’s in a small sample size.
Doesn’t mean it’s not fascinating, though! It’s definitely a deliberate decision from someone. So nerd out with me the next time a left-hander is up. Is Nick Ahmed right at the edge of second base? Is Thairo Estrada exactly where he’d set up against a right-handed batter? Let’s find out together.
The Giants are the best, the Giants are the worst. They contain multitudes, and there’s a lot of season left to see where these numbers go. It’s like my pappy always told me. If you ain’t first, you’re last.
(Top photo of Logan Webb : Nathan Ray Seebeck / USA Today)
