The Giants changed their pitching philosophy to accommodate their new pitching plan. Now that the plan is out the window, will that philosophy help them at all?
The San Francisco Giants woke up this morning with a team ERA of 4.53, 6th-worst in MLB and 4th-worst in the NL. They got here in part because Alex Cobb’s miraculous May return didn’t materialize and Blake Snell is caught in perpetual Spring Training. On top of that, Keaton Winn’s ongoing elbow discomfort and Kyle Harrison’s workload have taken their toll. The other part of the problem is how the Giants approached the problem at all. Did the team do enough to prepare for the worst?
In his recap for yesterday’s 5-3 loss, Steven delved into the stolen base problem the team has experienced all season long. Surrendering free bases consistently — in the Giants’ case, at least 1 base per game — is a great way to engineer a high team ERA. The other way is to simply give up a bunch of hard contact, which the Giants are doing better (and by better, I mean worst) than anybody, as I noted in today’s series preview.
So, the Giants give up a lot of baserunners and they let those baserunners take an extra base whenever they want. That’s in addition to a rotation that currently features just Logan Webb and Jordan Hicks. Webb is having a good to great season with a 3.16 ERA and 2.75 FIP, and yet I can’t help but stare at the 106 hits he’s allowed along with his 1.23 WHIP. He and Hicks (1.28) are in the bottom 30 of qualified MLB pitchers. Meanwhile, Webb is in the top 15 of walk rate (5.3%) while Jordan Hicks is in the bottom 10 (9.3%). In short, not all hits are created equal, but how this all comes about isn’t as simple as “the defense is bad.”
As of today, the Giants’ defense measure as -1.1 Defensive Runs Above Average, which is not good, of course, but it’s not a calamity, and it’s not entirely clear that an infield with Matt Chapman and Thairo Estrada in it should be so incredibly negative. Before TV transitioned to this streaming era (which was setoff by the advent of DVRs), it used to be that audiences generally watched 1 in 4 episodes of a show — even if they were self-described obsessives. I think there’s some truth in that to this day with baseball teams. If you’re a fan who doesn’t watch every game and largely checks out the Wild Card standings, things don’t look so bad.
But things are bad. The Giants are experiencing genuine woes. They have just two reliable pitchers in the rotation, and one of them is fading. They are down Blake Snell, Kyle Harrison, Keaton Winn, Alex Cobb, and Robbie Ray, and if you want to be really mean about it, Tristan Beck, too. Injuries are a part of every season, though, and it’s reasonable that these specific guys have gone done. Winn had prior elbow troubles, Cobb and Ray were coming back from surgery. It’s Beck’s clot and Snell’s Forever Spring that have been surprises.
Then again, had the Giants not banked a roster with guys already injured, maybe Beck & Snell’s situations wouldn’t have been such a shock to the pitching plan. Why have they been hurt so much? You’d think 5+ years of development and scouting plus a ballpark perfect for taking advantage — if not exacerbating — a low run-scoring environment like 2024 MLB would be an opportunity for a team that needs to pitch and out-think opponents in lieu of superior talent. Instead, we’re scrambling to make excuses for why they pretty much stink.
In previous years, we’ve seen the team find a diamond in the rough — a Vogelsong of Ice & Fire, mayhaps? — or deploy their pitchers in such a way that the results defy explanation. The bullpen games that the season ticketholders successfully lobbied away were successful, and now that they’re back on an emergency basis, they’re basically not, because the infrastructure for them has been destroyed.
That infrastructure starts with the pitching coaches. In what was likely a cost-saving move (the Major League Staff has shrunk from 19 to 15), the team did not hire anyone to replace Brian Bannister as the Director of Pitching. They got rid of some video/tech coaches and, of course, they went from Andrew Bailey to Bryan Price.
Being critical of the Price hire from day one, I’ve been as prepared to eat crow as I have been to point out that maybe this hire was not the best move. The Giants’ best advantage, especially given Oracle Park, is their pitching. One of the qualities that has transcended all eras is their ability to spit-shine and data-drive discarded arms. There was nothing in Price or Melvin’s recent oeuvre that suggested they’d follow suit.
Indeed, all of Bryan Price’s accomplishments as a pitching coach were before the Statcast era. Data drives a player’s development in the offseason, informs how that player is coached in Spring Training and in-season… Price’s philosophy is data-second. Data is the key to the modern game, though. What pitch to throw and when? How to throw that pitch better and the same every time? Zones to attack hitters in based on their swing type and given the game situations… these are all variables that can be analyzed and projected by computer and used as a tool for human coaches to aid their players.
Back in November, Andrew Baggarly interviewed him for The Athletic (sub req) and I think it’s telling:
The industry has gotten comfortable deciding that the less exposure for starters in the middle and later innings, the better. The stats tell you that the third and fourth time through the lineup, (hitting) numbers go up significantly. Those stats don’t lie. […] But the game is still nine innings. Whatever outs the starter leaves on the table will be absorbed by the bullpen. And with limitations on the number of pitchers you can have, unless you constantly rotate guys back and forth from the minor leagues, which I don’t think is terribly healthy either, you’re going to overuse your bullpen in the first half of the season. So for me to see a major-league team be consistently good over the long term, you need to have depth in the rotation and have pitchers beyond your No. 1 or 2 that are capable of throwing more than five innings, that are hungry and that are allowed to continue into the sixth, seventh, eighth innings when they’re on and pitching well.
This sounds like a bullpen-avoidant strategy and presumes that a pitching staff will have 4-5 healthy starters at all times, belying the objective reality of the modern game. Too, the Giants’ bullpen has thrown 315 innings, the 2nd-most in MLB, behind the Brewers’ 318.2. The Brewers bullpen ERA is 3.30 and their team is in the driver’s seat for a playoff spot. That’s the difference between a team that plans to bullpen versus a team that does not.
There’s little difference beyond aesthetic when it comes to “guy who can throw 110-120 pitches every 5th day versus guy who can throw 35-40 pitches 2-3 times a week” if those pitches/innings are good. At the end of the day, it’s about putting a team in the best position to win, right? And in the interest of spreading the love, one wonders how the season might be going if Bob Melvin, too, had a different approach to the pitching plan:
“It’s been a lot,” Melvin said of the bullpen’s workload. “We have some guys with extreme workloads at this point. (Ryan) Walker, (Erik) Miller and Tyler (Rogers’) workloads are extreme. We’ve got to find a way, even in games that we’re ahead, to take a little bit off their plate. Hjelle is a guy that can do it, but unfortunately, he had to pitch two innings, as well.
This isn’t all on Price & Melvin, though — there’s executive decision-making involved, too. Fans wanted fewer bullpen games, management obliged, all those arms got hurt, and now you’ve got two guys who don’t believe in bullpen games running bullpen games. It’s a recipe for, well, what we’ve seen. On top of that, there is no Kyle Harrison-type prospect waiting in the wings (because Bobby Evans ruined the player development pipeline forever and/or player development isn’t linear), meaning that bullpenning is the only option remaining for the next few weeks. Who knows? Maybe former Guardians prospect Raymond Burgos (called up for this series, it looks like) can cover some innings. Coaches sometimes help players get out of slumps by tweaking the mindset. Maybe BoMel and BryPri shouldn’t see this as an impediment to work around but a challenge to embrace.
This four-game series against the Cubs will basically close out the Giants’ first half of the 2024 season. We’re now firmly beyond the “it’s still early” crutch, but are the Giants doomed? The third Wild Card is an abomination from a “maintain the competitive integrity of the sport” perspective, but at this point, we’re not rooting for the Giants to be competitive and certainly not good. We’re just hoping they get lucky. Has a Giants pitching staff ever been as bad as this one and still wound up with a winning record — which might be all that’s needed to clinch Wild Card 3?
Here’s the Giants’ runs allowed, ERA, and first half record in the Oracle Park era:
Obviously, these first half records can be a mirage. The Giants have looked good through their first 81 games plenty of times this century and failed to land the plane (2006, 2015, 2018, 2022, 2023). They’ve never been in bad shape from a W-L standpoint and rallied to make things incredibly interesting at the end. Or rather, they’ve yet to; though, lest any of the truly fanatical out there believe that they could just as easily be last year’s Diamondbacks team, that team never got worse than two games below .500, and at one point they were 16 games over.
And, obviously, just looking at this list, the ERA situation definitely fluctuates with the era. In the early part of the century, they had bad pitching but a lineup with Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent. And you see through the championship era (2009-2016) that they had an astounding 3.67 ERA team ERA. In the 8 seasons since, it’s 4.28, which is only a little bit worse than it was in the 2000-2008 seasons (4.23) — but, it also encompasses a goofy juiced ball segment post-COVID and a hefty decline in offense across the board this season.
Bryan Price and Bob Melvin might be the right guys to handle the staff that was planned, but it doesn’t look like they’ve been able to provide anything special in the margins, those coin toss pitching decisions that a game can turn on or create a future opportunity with. That could simply be an extension of the team’s bad luck with their pitching program this season or a meaningful difference between the current coaching staff and the previous one.
There’s still half a season to sort all this out, and even if we ignore the existence of Blake Snell, Alex Cobb, and Robbie Ray, that still leaves the rest of Kyle Harrison and Jordan Hicks’ season, Keaton Winn’s elbow, Spencer Howard, Mason Black, and maybe a surprise or two as projects the staff can service. At this point, that’s what it’s going to take.