The math isn’t mathing.
Who knows what’s going to happen with the front office after this season. The team seems on the precipice of a September collapse similar to last year’s, which caused the San Francisco Giants to move on from Gabe Kapler. Does Farhan Zaidi deserve the same fate?
It’s been six years. That’s a big enough sample to get a sense of somebody’s management style and priorities and compare that against a record. Farhan Zaidi is a Billy Beane acolyte first and foremost, and Billy Beane’s famous line that resonates throughout time is “My s*** doesn’t work in the playoffs.” Zaidi hasn’t made a similar statement, but it’s clear that his program doesn’t work in the regular season, a distinct difference from the Beane system. Why is that? Why have the Giants been so mid?
Farhan Zaidi was hired to be a “next gen” GM who had a model that guaranteed a floor of 75 wins and was committed to making one smart baseball move after another to get the team to where they wanted to go (the playoffs). Major League Baseball made it even easier for them by expanding the playoff field and they’ve only gotten worse. Why? Let’s look at data.
Since 2019, the Giants have the 12th-best record in MLB (445-413). They’re 14th in pitching fWAR and 18th in batting fWAR. If you’re anti-WAR, then they’re 11th in runs allowed (3,742) and 21st in runs scored (3,804). And, obviously, the outlier that is 2021 is helping out a lot.
If we look at this as a statistician might, let’s knock out the two most extreme results: 2019 (77-85) and 2021 (107-55). Obviously, 2024 could be worse than 2019, record-wise, but for now let’s just use their 72-78 record — this team isn’t affected by a Bochy farewell tour or shaking off the vestiges of a bygone championship era. This year is firmly Zaidi’s squad. Anyway, that gives us a running tally of 261-273 and .489 winning percentage, which certainly feels right. 2021 was, perhaps, a COVID-induced fever dream.
The simplest explanation for these results is that the Giants don’t have good players. But that isn’t the drive of a Billy Beane/Moneyball acolyte. It’s about finding useful players who can make good players in the aggregate. It’s about exploiting an undervalued resource. And in simple competitive terms, it’s about playing to your strengths.
Pitching seems like the easiest thing to coach up because of technology and Oracle Park’s effects on batted balls — and yet, they’re just the 14th-best team, pitching-wise! That includes 2021. If you just look at the three seasons since 2021 (2022-now), they’re 11th. Their 4.01 team ERA is 16th.
The Giants won three titles last decade thanks to pitching, defense, and timely hitting. Looking at the list of teams their pitching value runs alongside suggests that they should’ve been a playoff team in one of the past three seasons, but because their lineup has been so so bad their pitching has needed to be much much better. It simply hasn’t measured up.
Has the team’s tendency to favor sinker-slider guys limited their pitching breakouts? How many four-seamer, curveball, changeup types have they tried to retrain or have otherwise ignored in order to find players who fit a model that says “sinker-slider is best”? Remember, Hayden Birdsong wound up having the year they projected for Mason Black and that’s probably because the data said sinker-sweeper Black was statistically likelier to have more success than four-seam/curveball Birdsong.
Roger Munter and Kerry Crowley did an episode of their joint podcast recently where they got into why they think the team has basically spun its wheels for the past few seasons and Roger suggested the thinking had become stale. Zaidi’s focus on strikeout-to-walk ratio has probably limited the offensive upside of the team even if it has theoretically raised the floor.
He cites Marco Luciano’s “draw a walk first” approach at the plate that has helped him in the minors (both performance-wise and staying within the good graces of the front office) but hurt him in the majors. I see that as one example where a data truth that resonated a lot back in 2014 (or whenever Zaidi pitched himself as a behavioral economist who belonged in a front office) but could be less useful now in the face of more data.
We can observe Heliot Ramos and Tyler Fitzgerald as guys the team seemed reluctant to utilize who were only able to force the issue when the Giants ran out of supposedly better options. Bryce Eldridge’s rise could be the sign of a change in front office thinking or the simple luck that comes with better draft position year after year.
As kind of Matt Chapman as it was for him to say “I think this organization has the beginning of a championship-type ballclub” at the press conference that announced his six-year, $151 million extension, we all can understand how that’s just something you say when you’re in a good mood. The reality is that the Giants are on course to lose more games this season than in any of the prior three seasons, with an outside shot at tying or exceeding the most losses in a season during Farhan Zaidi’s stewardship (85 in 2019).
And last night, Andrew Baggarly (The Athletic sub required) filed a report that colored the team’s negotiations with Chapman in such a way that it sure does sound like Farhan Zaidi’s seat is glowing hot. In Ken Rosenthal’s piece from a couple of weeks ago about the bland state of baseball competition (The Athletic sub required), he noted,
Owners should be scrambling to find the next Anthopoulos, the next Dave Dombrowski, the next A.J. Preller. No one would accuse any of those executives of being afraid. But each also works for committed ownerships.
A major component of those three dudes’ success is the talent in their minor league systems. The Giants do not have a robust talent pipeline nor an international presence that would make other teams interested in acquiring that raw talent. It’s the thing that so much of the Moneyball discussion has ignored. Even in the movie, they ignore the pitching staff completely. The “we have a great development pipeline” seems to be a given, even though the A’s and Dodgers have always enjoyed a distinct advantage over the Giants in this area.
The Giants have not, with very few exceptions, had much luck drafting and developing with the best of them. Good draft position, good scouting, time, and luck seem like the only factors that can flip this condition from a negative to a positive. Is that something Zaidi understood completely when he interviewed or learned after he took over?
Whenever the Giants get a seemingly good player in their development ranks, they tend to want to hold on to him. Plus, as we’ve seen before, whenever the Giants inquire about another team’s good player, they want the Giants’ best player (the Nationals wanted Logan Webb for Juan Soto) which would be a net negative because the Giants would be without one of their few good players and a bunch of potentially good players.
So, we’re left with the question, “Maybe the strategy will work next season?” Logan Webb, Heliot Ramos, Matt Chapman, Patrick Bailey’s defense, Robbie Ray, Hayden Birdsong, Jordan Hicks, Landen Roupp, Mason Black, whatever’s left of Ryan Walker’s shoulder, Jung Hoo Lee, Tyler Fitzgerald, Grant McCray?, Mike Yastrzemski?, Wilmer Flores/LaMonte Wade Jr.? — this is, theoretically, a wins above replacement base of 35.5, which puts the Giants in the 83/84-win area, about where they project to be every offseason.
This is the dance we’ve been doing for most of the past six seasons, though, and it hasn’t come together except that one time when a trio of players he didn’t acquire played so well that it made his model look like the envy of professional sports. Now, we’re hoping that Heliot Ramos’s “breakout” (119 wRC+; 2.0 fWAR) is replicated multiple times next season by other prospects. The process hasn’t worked to this point so why stick with it?
The math says Farhan Zaidi’s stuff should work in the regular season. If the math says a bridge should stand or a rocket should launch or a bomb should go off and none of that happens — repeatedly — is that a problem with the workers who followed the blueprints or the entity that funded the project or the people who did the math? The Giants haven’t been good for a few years now and on that point it doesn’t matter what the numbers say.