The ’19 Giants—a Team in Transition, by Fred Krumbein

The San Francisco Giants, on the last day of June 2019, finished playing their 27th series of the season. It was a four-game series in which the Giants hosted the Arizona Diamondbacks, and it straddled the halfway mark of the season. They split the series. The Giants then left to begin a series the following day in San Diego against the Padres. That next day, they did something they hadn’t done all season long.

The Giants’d begun the season losing four series in a row—winning four games and losing nine. After that losing streak, they went on an 11-series splitting streak, with a record of 16 wins and 16 losses. So they were still five games under .500. Next they lost their 16th, 17th, and 18th series; in this third streak, they won two games and lost eight. They remained 11 games under .500 after their fourth streak: going 14 and 14 in nine series.

Thus in their first 83 games, the Giants had played in two losing streaks, with a total of 23 games, and in two splitting streaks, which’d added up to 60 games. Through the first half of the season, in 20 of the 27 series, they had managed to maintain precise mediocrity.

On the first day of July, they began playing in their first winning streak of the season. They won the next seven series in a row—18 games won and five lost. This brought the Giants up to a couple games over .500 going into the first series that went into August.

In the 13 games of the Giants’s first stretch of the season, they scored fewer than three runs per game and gave up more than three and a half. This was a runs ratio (runs scored per runs allowed) of just over .800. (Giving up more than 3.6 runs per game is not necessarily good, but it is good enough to be competitive—as we shall see.)

The Giants upped their runs production to better than four and a quarter per game in the second streak, albeit they were surrendering nearly five and a third per game. In fact, their runs ratio was nearly identical to that in the losing streak, and yet they were now competitive enough to gain a split throughout the 32 games. During the next three series, they scored not even two and three quarters runs a game. And they gave up more than seven a game! This was a runs ratio of well under .400.

But when looking at their runs production, there is quite a distinction between the first four series in the stretch and the latter three—nearly a tale of two streaks within a streak (may we call them “substreaks”).

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In the 13 games comprising the earlier substreak, the Giants scored more than eight runs a game and gave up just over four. So their runs ratio was almost double! In the 10 games making up the latter substreak, they gave up slightly shy of four runs a game (about the same). They themselves scored fewer than three and a quarter runs a game though. The Giants scored barely 82% as many runs as their opponents, even though they won all three series!

First we note that they didn’t have another winning streak this season. As July closed, they began a three-series losing stretch with a runs ratio beneath 60%. They then had their first blip of the season—winning a single series. This preceded a splitting streak of four series. Another three-series losing streak followed. They then had their second single-series blip—in which they won while only scoring two thirds the number of runs as their adversary. And half a dozen series in a splitting stretch completed their season.

Evan Longoria joined the team in 2018 and Austin Slater in 2017; Joe Panik had been on the team since their World-Series-winning 2014 season; Brandon Crawford and Brandon Belt started in 2011 and so had also played when they won the World Series in 2012; Buster Posey joined in 2009 and thus was there all three times that they won it, including the 2010 World Series as well, and so was Pablo Sandoval, who came on board in 2008 and then returned in 2017, having left after the 2014 season.

These other six batters joined after Opening Day this season: Kevin Pillar on April 2nd; Tyler Austin, April 8th; Stephen Vogt, May 1st; Donovan Solano, May 7th; Mike Yastrzemski, May 25th; and Alex Dickerson on June 21st.

We here take a look at a sampling of the TBAR/PAs (total bases advanced or relinquished per plate appearance) of the Giants and of some of the individual batters: from the 5th streak (their surge, which we examine as the two substreaks), through their 6th streak (a losing one), the 1st blip (a winning series), their 7th streak (a splitting one), and up to the 8th streak (another losing one). This includes 18 series (the 28th to the 45th) of 57 games (the 84th through the 140th), covering about a third of the season. [

Through this stretch, the Giants had 31 wins and 26 losses, with 2,221 plate appearances, in which they advanced runners 1,140 bases; they thereby had an overall record of .513 bases advanced per plate appearance.

Brandon Belt had 233 plate appearances during this period; Kevin Pillar had 193; Mike Yastrzemski, 175; Brandon Crawford, 154; Austin Slater, 133; Donovan Solano, 120; Evan Longoria, 106; Stephen Vogt, 105; and Alex Dickerson had 86. We record the TBAR/PA for each of the six stretches in which the player had at least the number of plate appearances equivalent to the number of games in that particular stretch. (Due to injuries, Longoria did not play in the second substreak of the Giants surge, nor did Dickerson have the requisite plate appearances in the 1st blip or the 7th streak.)

When the Giants scored 8.077 runs a game (105/13) in the former substreak of their July surge, they were getting 41.077 plate appearances per game (534/13) and were moving the line 32.308 bases a game (420/13). It was taking them just 5.086 plate appearances to score each run (534/105); that was .197 runs scored for every plate appearance (105/534)!

In the latter substreak of the surge, when scoring only 3.200 runs per game (32/10), they still got 41.200 plate appearances a game (412/10) but advanced runners only 13.500 bases per game (135/10). Even though they were surging on, it was taking 12.875 plate appearances to score every run (412/32), only .077 runs scored on a plate appearance (32/412).

With just 2.778 (25/9) runs a game in the 6th streak (the losing stretch), they got 33.778 (331/9) plate appearances per game and moved the line 11.111 (100/9) bases a game. It was taking them 13.240 (331/25) plate appearances to score a run, .076 (25/331) runs scored per plate appearance.

Winning the 38th series with 5.750 (23/4) runs scored per game, the Giants got 36.500 (146/4) plate appearances per game, while pushing runners ahead 23.000 (92/4) bases a game. They took 6.348 (146/23) plate appearances to score each run; that’s .158 (23/146) runs for every plate appearance.

In the splitting stretch (the 7th streak), they got 6.000 (66/11) runs a game, on 39.182 (431/11) plate appearances per game, as they were advancing runners 24.091 (265/11) bases a game. This equated to 6.530 (431/66) plate appearances to score a run, and that was .153 (66/431) runs scored per plate appearance.

And in the next losing stretch (the 8th streak), they scored 3.200 (32/10) runs per game (the same as in their latter winning substreak), with 36.700 (367/10) plate appearances per game, while moving the line 12.800 (128/10) bases a game. This meant 11.469 (367/32) plate appearances to score a run, which is .087 (32/367) runs scored per plate appearance.

In four of these stretches, .250 runs were scored for each base advanced; that is, it took runners being advanced 4.000 bases for each run being scored: 420/105 in the first surgent substreak, 100/25 in the 6th streak, 92/23 in the winning blip, and 128/32 in the 8th streak.

This is certainly no surprise, since by definition, every base advanced should, and usually does, account for one of the four that leads to a run. The exceptions of course occur when the home team scores its winning run after the eighth inning (a “walk-off”) and there are runners SOB, “still on base” (not LOB, “left on base”), behind the winning runner. In two of the stretches, this happened. In the 7th streak, .249 runs were scored for each base advanced (66/265). They needed to move the runners up an average of 4.015 bases for each of the 66 runs they scored—one more base advanced than the 264 that would be typical. And before that, in the second surgent substreak, .237 runs were scored for every base advanced (32/135). They had to move the line 4.219 bases on average to get those 32 runs—seven more bases advanced than the 128 that’d usually be required. It is, as the old saying goes, left as an exercise for the reader to see which runners (and at the end of which games) were SOB.

In the news conference just after the end of the season to discuss the state of the team, Farhan Zaidi, the Giants president of baseball operations, was asked about the biggest tasks facing the team going forward. His immediate pointed response was focused on one thing: figuring out a way to generate more offense in this ballpark. The Giants had finished the season with a winning record on the road but a far lower losing record at home.

A couple days later, their president and CEO, Larry Baer, in his message to the fans, reminded them “that designs are underway to move the bullpens to the outfield.” And Zaidi had stated in the news conference that changes to the ballpark will affect the offense. A third of the way into the season, the Giants were 11 games under .500. Despite the surge, they still ended up eight games under; they found themselves 16 under on the final day last season, and the year before that, they finished 34 games below .500.

Ten seasons ago, the Giants made it into the postseason and continued to do so every other year four times in a row. In 2010, they won their first World Series since having moved to San Francisco more than half a century earlier. They won it again in ’12 and also in ’14. And in 2016, they were eliminated in the postseason by a team of destiny, the first Chicago Cubs team to go on to win the World Series in 108 years.

Before this season began, the Giants had relieved their general manager of his duties and had hired Zaidi in his current role. Upon that happening, Bruce Bochy, their field manager for more than a dozen years (who therefore had been there when those championships were won), announced that this was going to be his last season. One of the key reasons that he gave was that Zaidi would then be able to build his own new management staff.

Zaidi announced this month that the new general manager had been hired: Scott Harris, who has been with the Cubs for several years (including when they won the World Series three years ago). There was certainly confidence expressed by Harris, at his introduction, about the Giants being able to contend really fast. He was quoted as saying, “That’s certainly the goal for us. We’re going to try to compete as much as possible on and off the field to put us in a position to transform like we did in Chicago.” A couple days later, Gabe Kapler, formerly the manager with the Phillies, was introduced as the new Giants field manager.

20/20 is a common term in the fields of ophthalmology and optometry used in the measure of visual acuity. It is technically defined to refer to vision that is precisely mediocre, that is the average: exactly half are better, and half are worse. As we look toward the 2020 baseball season, we recognize that if the Giants achieve mediocrity, a .500 record, that will be an improvement over the last three years. Of course the entire organization will be trying to do better than that.

Much has been made in this century of the idea that baseball is now in an era of greater emphasis on analytics, that is to say, of stat geeks. Baseball fans have been hearing of, and going forward, will continue to hear of, many statistics being studied and cited and argued over, old ones and ones that are more recently being paid attention to. In the morning of the day that Kapler was introduced, Zaidi, who is reputed to rely strongly on it, said of himself in comparison to how much more keenly Kapler focuses on analytics, “I don’t even talk about xFIP.” Stats’ve gone hand in hand with the game (maybe more than almost any other) since its earliest days.