The 2024 Giants have played 110 games as of this writing. After an active offseason raised your expectations, how have they lived up to them?
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Oh.
I see. Well, that’s understandable.
So let me ask a different question. What was a realistic expectation for them after 110 games, considering their offseason? Where did you expect them to be?
Your answer might vary, but I’d be envious of the Padres right now. They’re 59-51 and 4 1/2 games behind the Dodgers. They’re in position for the second wild card, but they’re just a game away from being out of the postseason picture entirely. Their future is filled with beautiful dreams and horrible nightmares. They could still screw this all up, and you half-expect them to. But they care. Their fans care, and they’re not that disgruntled. That’s right where the Giants should have been.
The Padres (59-51) are currently five games ahead of the Giants (54-56). Let’s look where those five missing wins might have gone. This is a search for the difference between the Padres (solid, contending, currently exciting) and the Giants (bad, a failure, a team that keeps you up at night).
We’ll use Baseball-Reference’s WAR, which is imperfect but useful. We’ll also use preseason projections from FanGraphs, which are imperfect but useful. I can name that sad song featuring a sad trombone in three players. Once we get there, we can look for lessons to learn.
Lessons won’t be found. The real lesson is that baseball is a horrible goblin sport until it isn’t. But pretend with me for a minute.
3. Wilmer Flores (-0.3 WAR, projected for 1.3 WAR through Game 110)
A very important note: This article is not an excuse to dump on individual players. My goal isn’t to direct a torches-and-pitchfork crowd toward any of these three players. It’s just a reminder that baseball happens, for better and for worse. Often worse.
Flores was the Giants’ best hitter last season, with a 137 OPS+, .863 OPS and 23 home runs. For perspective, that OPS+ ranked 16th in baseball among hitters with 400 plate appearances or more. He was closer to Mookie Betts than Manny Machado.
It was, of course, an outlier season for an 11-year veteran, so the point isn’t that the Giants would have been closer to the postseason if Flores had simply repeated that season. That’s where ZiPS comes in, because the cold, unfeeling computers know better than to assume the 32-year-old coming off a career season is likely to do it again. But they look at his entire career, and they fold the career year into the previous seven seasons, in which Flores was an above-average hitter in every one. He had an OPS+ between 101 and 124 in each of those seven seasons. His defense and base-running took away a lot of that value, so the computers factored that in, too.
It’s been a rough season for Flores, one year after his career-best. (Kirby Lee / USA Today)
They projected Flores to be worth 2.0 WAR this season. Reasonable. Instead, he’s dealt with leg pain all season, and it eventually put him on the IL. Before that, he was horribly unproductive. That -0.3 WAR probably understates his contributions because his clutch stats are worse. What little damage he’s done has often come when the Giants were up by four or more runs.
Which brings us to the lesson. Maybe we should bold the words, so you know they’re important.
The Lesson
C’mon. What were the Giants supposed to do with Flores after that career year? Trade him? Cut him? No, they were going to hope he added value again. There’s no lesson. All of it just stinks for everyone involved.
So far in this exercise, the Giants are 1.6 wins down. We have 3.4 missing wins to find.
2. Thairo Estrada (-0.5 WAR, 1.3 projected WAR through Game 110)
For three years, Estrada was a solid player for the Giants.
2021 (age 25): 118 OPS+, 0.7 WAR
2022 (age 26): 105 OPS+, 1.8 WAR
2023 (age 27): 102 OPS+, 2.3 WAR
A league-average hitter who plays strong defense up the middle is a player teams want. Look at the middle infielders who were traded at the deadline, like Paul DeJong, Amed Rosario and Isiah Kiner-Falefa. DeJong is traditionally a strong fielder but an iffy hitter. Rosario is typically an OK hitter but iffy fielder. Kiner-Falefa is more known for his defense, but he’s having his best offensive season, which looks a lot like Estrada’s career numbers.
This year, Estrada has been awful at the plate. His plate discipline has regressed horribly, to the point where it hasn’t even been an advantage for him when he does get ahead in the count. His defense has been outstanding again, but it can’t come close to his negative value as a hitter.
The Lesson
Again, c’mon. There have always been red flags when it comes to the idea that Estrada was ever going to be a major offensive contributor. His exit velocities were below average. He had a willingness to chase, and he combined that with an unfortunate ability to make weak contact on bad pitches instead of just swinging through them. But it’s not difficult to find a role for a second baseman coming off a league-average offensive season and Gold Glove-worthy defensive season. You let him do it again.
Going forward, I have zero idea what to make of Estrada. He’s one of the most confusing players of the last decade, if not longer. It’s probably how Diamondbacks fans thought of Nick Ahmed back in the day, or how Yankees fans think about Kiner-Falefa now. It’s just a big ol’ “well … huh” from everyone who looks into it.
The Giants are 3.4 wins down from where they wanted to be right now, and we have 1.6 missing wins to find.
1. Blake Snell (-0.1 WAR, 1.9 projected WAR through Game 110)
Snell won the Cy Young last year. It’s important to note that ZiPS doesn’t care. It looked at his walk rate and stranded-runners rate and said, yeah, nice try. Not buying it.
That’s not the same thing as projecting him to be bad, though, because he was definitely supposed to be good and helpful to any team that had signed him. And the biggest difference between preseason expectations and the current Giants situation has been that Snell was bad before he was hurt. Now that he’s healthy, he’s been incredible. I personally think the Giants should keep him around if they get the chance.
There’s no undoing those outings and the time Snell spent on the IL, though.
The Lesson
The Giants shouldn’t spend money on free agents?
The Giants shouldn’t chase after pitchers who won an award for being “the literal best pitcher” the season before?
The Giants definitely shouldn’t give a Cy Young winner a short-term deal that negates most of the typical risks of a free-agent pitcher coming off an amazing season.
C’monnnnnnnnnn.
There actually might be a lesson here, but we’ll never know for sure. If it was a small financial difference between a deal in February (which gives Snell a full spring) and a deal in March (when he eventually signed), then saving a million or four wasn’t worth it. There’s driving a bargain, and then there’s pragmatism. On the other hand, the Giants were negotiating with Scott Boras, so let’s file that complaint in the “unresolved” bin.
Mostly, though, c’mon.
We’re over the five-win threshold now, with about a half-win to spare. An important part of this exercise is to be limited and realistic. There’s no point to complaining about LaMonte Wade Jr. being hurt because he’s missed time in the past. There’s no point to complaining about Alex Cobb not being ready on time because that happens with mid-30s pitchers coming off surgery. Can’t perseverate on Jung Hoo Lee being out for the season because we didn’t really know what he was going to do in the majors, even if the early returns were encouraging in a lot of ways. If you were hoping that Michael Conforto had a chance to be his former All-Star self, that’s on you. Any of those examples could have worked out much, much better for the Giants, but you can’t feign surprise over any of it.
Three players, who were previously and consistently productive, haven’t met expectations. That’s the difference. Even with the reasonable, boring expectations that were baked into the preseason projections, all of them have been much worse and actively harmful to the Giants’ postseason chances.
The real lesson is that the Giants should be absolutely buried by now. Taking blows like that should be disqualifying, but the Giants are still kinda sorta in a hunt for a lot of reasons. Heliot Ramos became an All-Star. Tyler Fitzgerald was helpful until he was nuclear, and now he’s probably helpful again. Sean Hjelle turned into a reliable reliever. Hayden Birdsong came up and filled a huge void. Kyle Harrison went forward, not backward. Matt Chapman was the player the Giants thought they were getting, if not even better.
My biggest complaint about how the 2024 Giants were built was how the shortstop situation was handled. Didn’t make sense at the time, doesn’t make sense now, but it might make sense going forward.
Everything else, the difference between a trade deadline that’s buy buy buy instead of general confusion, can be explained in three easy steps. I’m not sure if there’s a lesson to learn about the Giants’ direction going forward, or if there’s a lesson to learn about the optimism of the offseason. The real lesson is that baseball is a horrible goblin sport until it isn’t.
Sorry for not warning you about spoilers at the top.
(Top photo of Estrada: Dilip Vishwanat / Getty Images)
