The San Francisco Giants woke up this morning with a hold on the third Wild Card in the National League and about a 37% chance of making the postseason, according to FanGraphs, thanks to a 34-35 record. They’re one of 9 teams in the NL (15 overall in the sport) with a negative run differential, which means they should be more like 32-37. They have been more lucky than good through the first two and a half months of the season.
The analytics revolution managed to define what makes a player and a team “good,” and that, ultimately, “good” requires a combination of breaking federal human trafficking laws (probably) and spending at least to a team’s financial break even point in order to maintain it with no guarantee of actual success — particularly in the postseason. And so the Billy Beane adage of “My s**t doesn’t work in the playoffs” has become the underlying principle for nearly every front office across the league: it’s better to be lucky than good.
I would argue that the 2010 and 2012 San Francisco Giants were good teams that had luck help them along in their quests to win the World Series in those seasons. Meanwhile, you could argue that the 2014 World Championship is largely the result of luck. And, of course, the fact that the Giants were able to gather players in the down years of 2005-2008 who wound up having successful developments and became tremendous major leaguers was its own sort of luck, too.
So, luck is absolutely 100% a part of the game of Baseball, a part of every team’s season, whether they make it to the playoffs or not. Because there are now three Wild Cards in each league, the amount of luck required to alter the fortunes of any one team is considerably less than ever before. Would the Padres have collapsed and the Giants pushed themselves so hard into that final weekend if they knew they were in with 86 wins?
If you’re a team that must always settle for second division free agent talent (sorry, Jung Hoo Lee), then you’re a team that must also gameplan with an expectation that at least two teams ahead of you will stumble at some point during the season and that you’ll get hot at that exact moment and jump ahead of them in the race. That’s a fine expectation, but hoping for somebody to trip and fall — while likely — is probably less of a plan than just running well and staying upright.
Still, theory is tested by reality, and if we’re being honest, all internal and preseason projections do is say, “In theory, team x has y chance” or “In theory, this player should be this good.” In theory, the Giants put together a very strong contender for (explicitly) the Wild Card division. As luck would have it, they’re contending, though perhaps not very strongly. If a competitor falls, the Giants will need to strengthen some areas. Of course, because all success in Baseball is ultimately the result of luck, maybe not!
So, here are some areas where the team’s luck either needs to continue or improve.
Continue: Pitcher workloads
One thing to keep in mind, as upsetting as it may be, is that they’ve already been pretty lucky in this regard. Logan Webb leads the staff with 92.1 innings pitched, but that’s where we all expected him to be. Kyle Harrison checks in at 77.1 and Jordan Hicks at 71.2. After that, it gets kinda scary.
Keaton Winn and Blake Snell have combined 70.1 innings and a 7.83 ERA. It’s not exactly starters innings, but then there’s Mason Black, Spencer Howard, and Daulton Jefferies with 32.1 innings of 7.29 ERA ball. There’s a lot of “it’s not what you want” wrapped up in “What did you expect?” in these results, and back in January when we looked at how the team might cover the innings workload — pre-Snell, pre-Stripling trade, pre-injury news for Tristan Beck — a situation like this seemed plausible while feeling probable.
Here’s my projection for the innings breakdown:
STARTERS
Logan Webb - 200 IP
Kyle Harrison - 120 IP
Tristan Beck - 120 IP
Keaton Winn - 110 IP
Jordan Hicks - 100 IP
Ross Stripling - 100 IP
Alex Cobb - 90 IP
Robbie Ray - 50 IP= 890 IP
Seems clear now that Harrison and Hicks will be asked to go to ~140 innings. It’s doubtful Beck will pitch this season, or simply very much at all. If Snell had been a part of this exercise, then I would’ve reduced Beck’s innings and given some to Snell and then zeroed out Stripling’s contributions. Now let’s figure it looks something like this:
Logan Webb - 200 IP
Kyle Harrison - 140 IP
Jordan Hicks - 140 IP
Blake Snell - 100 IP
Keaton Winn - 80 IP
Robbie Ray - 50 IP
Spencer Howard - 50 IP
Alex Cobb - 30 IP
= 790 IP
In other words, the Giants have gotten very lucky with how the taxation on their pitching staff has worked out. They have the sixth-worst team ERA and are 20th in value (4.9 fWAR), but they could be worse especially later in the season, when their top heavy rotation runs out of gas. Maybe they can get lucky and some other guy after Webb, Harrison, and Hicks can step up or a waiver claim blossoms.
Improve: Health
You could say this about every team, every season, but if they have any chance of improving their odds of managing the pitcher workloads successfully, then Robbie Ray will need to have a successful rehab, Alex Cobb will need to fully realize his, and while I’d like to write-off Blake Snell’s season, it’s probably important to keep him on the list — just in case. There’s also LaMonte Wade Jr.’s recovery, but also Ethan Small’s and Austin Warren’s. At least in terms of the latter, the right-handed reliever just began a rehab assignment on Wednesday in San Jose.
The Giants are designed so that every player on the 26-man roster contributes, which means it’s an All Hands on Deck situation at all times. Get better hands, get better results.
Continue: Heliot Ramos & Brett Wisely
It’s wildly unlikely that Ramos will sustain an .850+ OPS through the summer and as intriguing as Wisely’s .377 career OBP in MiLB is, he’s drawn just two walks this season and has relied on a lot of hits — but crucially, he and the Ramos provide the Giants with some critical on base & defensive skills.
To really drive home the point about OBP, here are the Giants with a .330 or better: LaMonte Wade Jr. (.470), Ramos (.385), Patrick Bailey (.352), Austin Slater (.349), Wisely & Tyler Fitzgerald (.333). With all the bells & whistles of Statcast and things like wRC+ or OPS+, it’s easy to lose sight of OBP. Avoiding outs + creating outs (throug defense) makes a player valuable, and while it’s reasonable to question Ramos’s OBP long-term, walks in and of themselves are a good sign that a hitter has some sort of pitch recognition & strike zone judgment.
Improve: Jorge Soler & Blake Snell
One or both will need to show up if the Giants’ luck is to continue into the postseason. With these two having forgettable seasons along with Tom Murphy and Jung Hoo Lee having lost seasons, this is now two offseasons where only one of the big ticket free agent signings provides lots of value. Last year it was Sean Manaea and this year it’s Jordan Hicks. Because it’s unwise to rely on free agency to build a roster, it’s hard to say the Giants have had any sort of bad luck in this area, but if one or both of these guys could go on a hot streak, that’d certainly be a nice stroke of luck for them and us.
Improve: The competition falters
“It’s the Padres, of course they’ll blow it,” is a very easy thing to say and a comfortable belief system, but even if I agreed, they’re still in the hunt and 1.5 games up on WC3 Giants at this point in the season; and the Giants still have 6 games remaining against them. They also have 6 left against Arizona and 7 remaining against the Dodgers. The Padres have gone 15-11 over the last 30 days and have a +26 run differential. The Diamondbacks have a -3 run differential and have gone 14-14 over the last 30 days. The Giants have been unlucky when it comes to a pillar in their strategy.
Outside the division, the Cardinals have gone 17-10 over the past month, though they have a -38 RD on the year. The Reds are +15 and 16-12. The Cubs, Pirates, and Nationals are all within 2 games of the group, too, and if you want to get really funny, the Mets sit 3 games back at 30-37. Still plenty of time for any of these teams to get really hot, and it’s not about the Giants trying to run down a single team. There are two spots on the lifeboat (if you consider Atlanta’s spot as WC1 to be invincible for the rest of the season) and a lot of capable teams scrambling for those spots. It’d be nice if some teams on this list actually started doing worse rather than leave it up to us to imagine they will.
