SF Giants season in review: An autopsy of the frustrating offense
For those of you not familiar with WAR (Wins Above Replacement), it's a handy way of estimating a baseball player's value based on how many more (or fewer!) games their team won because of them. It's by no means a complete evaluation, but in bulk, can tell us how well or poorly certain players or groups of players fared. The hitting component, oWAR (Offensive WAR), tells us just how good they swing the bat. We can use this metric to, say, compare how well the SF Giants produced at the plate this year versus last:
SF Giants 2021 oWAR* - 31.0
SF Giants 2022 oWAR - 15.7
Hmm... From this, we can estimate that nearly 60% of the Giants drop off in the standings between this year and last comes from an offense produced barely half as much WAR at the plate. To put that in perspective, it's as if the Giants borrowed Juan Soto, Shohei Ohtani, and Whit Merrifield for 2021 and gave them up before this season.
SF Giants catcher looks into the dugout. (2021)
Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sport
Obviously, the Giants didn't lose three MLB superstars in the past offseason. Still it's an alarming reminder of how far the Giants suddenly need to go to sustain the level of offensive excellence that propelled them to 107 wins last year. But it might, in fact, be even more alarming to consider that such a dramatic dip came largely at the hands of the same players, whose frustrations at the plate were visible over and over again. To dig in further would only intensify the painful calculus of a team mired in mediocrity, and the last thing that any of us want as the page turns and the calendar shifts to autumn is a gory dissection of one step forward and 27 steps back.
For curiosity's sake, though, let's at least consider the projections. As a whole, the Giants' offense in 2021 was projected to put up 21.3 WAR, per Steamer Projections. The projected players exceeded that total by nearly 10 WAR, racking up 30.1 oWAR. I expected the rest of that year's call-ups and trade acquisitions to account for much more of that total, but between "roster-churn" players and the last pitchers to ever be forced to swing a bat, even adding Kris Bryant to the mix didn't even add up to a single extra win. The sliver of a silver lining there is that it makes the Giants' 2022 totals slightly less frustrating by comparison. Let's take a look:
Projected 2022 Giants oWAR: 20.2
Final 2022 Giants oWAR: 15.7
2022 Giants oWAR from Opening Day roster: 13.0
2022 Giants oWAR from all others: 2.7
Yeesh. Between both year's Opening Day hitters, the Giants dropped 17 whole games in the standings. Now, let's bring it all together. Of the players with at least 100 at-bats for the Giants in the past two years, here's a nifty little compilation of stats:
| Season | WAR | At-Bats | Average Age <br> |
|---|---|---|---|
2021 | 32.0 | 5,774 | 30.5 |
2022 | 17.6 | 5,667 | 30.4 |
Strangely enough, in a season which the Giants lost approximately three superstars' worth of offensive production, they technically got younger, contrary to just about everyone's expectations. How does that make sense? Well, most of the teams' average age drop comes from a 25-year-old Joey Bart replacing a 34-year-old Buster Posey, who didn't provide an All-Star campaign for the Giants like he did in 2021. From there, it's a series of vanishing acts from familiar faces that would make Penn & Teller gasp in awe. You saw everything from 'O Captain, My Captain!' Brandon Belt's balky knee to LaMonte Wade going from "Late Night" to just "Late," and you don't need more metrics to accept this season was a dud.
So, there you have it. The 2022 Giants fell into a tar pit of their own making, and despite clawing their way back to a .500 record that looks respectable in a vacuum, are old and bad with a middling farm system and have no hope whatsoever going forward.
Yes. That's all there is to say on the matter. Don't look at the 1200 words below this. Not quite sure what they're doing there. Maybe they're looking for tickets to the Giants' annual Hawai'i getaway event in December. Surely we've said everything there is to say on this irksome topic, right?
Well, not quite. Because, having spent several hundred hours watching the Giants this year, there are a couple of things that kept bothering me. Things I couldn't stop wondering about because the existential hell of a .500 team is that by definition, they're a couple of small breaks away from being noticeably better than that. Maybe a stronger June keeps the team afloat going into the All-Star break, and - motivated at the deadline - they make some moves that actually get them back into contention.
So, first things first. For an offense with as much potential as this one had (see: 2021's record-breaking offense), this year just felt sluggish. Boring. For a large part of the year, it felt as though they never gathered an early lead that put the opposing team away. Unfortunately, in my research, I haven't been lucky enough to find the button on MLB.com that tells me "your team scored first __this__ many times!" So, we'll have to get creative in this regard.
A stat that we do have, courtesy of the fine folks at Team Rankings, is a list of "Yes Run First Inning %" (YRFI%) - basically, how often did your team score a run in the first inning? Even in a 162-game season, teams can perform noticeably better or worse in certain innings, perhaps due to a bad closer or struggling starting pitcher. But given that the first inning offers the most uniform matchups in a game and the tendency to gain a lead when you score in the first inning, it's probably the next best stat we can look at to figure out just how often the Giants did or did not get off to fast starts.
The YRFI% list spans from the league leader, Houston, who scored in 35.8% of their first innings, all the way down to Miami, who scored in only 17.9% of their first innings. It's hard not to notice that the top of the leaderboard is filled with playoff teams like the Yankees, Dodgers, and Mets, while the bottom is infested with rebuilding squads like Cincinnati, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. That's... probably not the preamble you wanted before I tell you the Giants came in 24th, scoring in 24.1% of their first innings.
But consider that the Giants ended the year 11th in runs per game, only three spots under Houston and two spots above a postseason entrant in San Diego. There's an argument that if the Giants had been able to sequence their runs a little better, they could have sported a much less dull offense. Perhaps some earlier leads could have supported their excellent starting rotation a bit better, easing the transition to the bullpen that caused them so much trouble this year, though that's a conversation for another time.
SF Giants infielders David Villar and J.D. Davis celebrate a homer. (2022)
Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports
YRFI% is a pretty specific number to draw an argument from, though. I should at least try to back up my statement with a small set of games from this season, which should give us an idea of how that actually played out, without having to hunt and peck through each game to find out who scored first. So, I rolled a random number generator 16 times and sifted through a random selection of ~10% of the Giants' season.
Here's what I found from games 24, 32, 43, 55, 62, 68, 69, 72, 83, 88, 99, 137, 145, 151, 158, and 159: in this random sample, the Giants scored first 10/16 times (62.5%). Not bad! They also scored in the first inning 4 times, or 25% - right on target with their season total. They won six of those 16, here, for a win percentage of .375, well below their actual record.
Perhaps, then, the argument isn't so much that the Giants kept giving up leads and digging holes for themselves; maybe the issue was that when they *did* score early, it wasn't enough to hold up, and so in order to win as much as they did, they had to do it from behind far more often than was sustainable.
And it turns out that in 10 of those 16 games, they indeed only scratched out a single run the first time they put a number on a board. Scoring first counts, but it counts a hell of a lot more when you use it to build a lead. How often, out of those 10 games, did they use that early score to build a multi-run lead? Three. And of those, twice the Giants only got their lead up to 2 before it was erased.
The idea that the Giants failed to score early and often dovetails into thet second thing that bugged me; how many innings per game *didn't* the Giants score? You could also frame this as "average number of innings between scoring innings," which would be a bit closer to what I'm asking, but it's also kind of clunky, and a bad offense would spend most of the game not scoring, anyways. Assuming the Giants aren't a weirdo outlier when it comes to racking up big innings - based on what we've seen, they seem proficient at racking up "small innings," if anything - here's what that same 16-game sample shows:
2022 SF Giants scoring innings/game: 2.4
...I'm not going to get into the average runs per inning there, but I don't think that averaging closer to two innings with runs in them is going to beat the Dodgers consistently.
Okay, one last thing. Humor me here, because this is something that was often commented on during the season. Perhaps the biggest reason that the Giants struggled to produce consistently this year was their bases-loaded production. As you may know, the Giants actually led the league with 159 at-bats with the bases loaded. Thing is, they were *really good* at getting runners on and forcing pitchers to bend. But what the Giants lacked is something to break through in those situations.
2022 SF Giants with bases loaded/RISP: .264/.315/.440
Maybe this is best way to look at it, after all. The Giants, in the most critical situations of the year, became Austin Slater, because those are basically the numbers he put up this year. And Austin Slater isn't a bad player! He's the kind of guy who fills a valuable role on a contending team. But that role isn't an everyday one, and of the players more valuable than he was in the batter's box in 2022, none were on the roster in 2021. Not one, be it Joc Pederson, J.D. Davis, or even David Villar. The veterans who did remain took huge steps back, and the ones who tried to fill their place ultimately fought a losing battle.
From all of this, I've realized that the 2022 Giants have done what a team that went .500 does best; they've obfuscated the path towards contending in 2023 and beyond. Maybe the veterans bounce back, and the team gets maddeningly older and better once again. Maybe wholesale changes are made, and the team gets younger and worse once again. The compass is spinning, and every free agent, every half-baked trade idea, and every prospect who might someday not become nothing is pulling it in a thousand different directions at once.
I've delved into the numbers, and discovered that this team is impossible to decipher because there's nothing holding the SF Giants down in any direction. Not yet, anyway. They could lose another 20 games, or they could shoot right back into triple-digit wins, and neither would be particularly shocking. It's one thing to commit yourself to performing an autopsy. It's another to realize you don't know whether or not your subject is actually dead.
*All oWAR numbers are from FanGraphs
SF Giants season in review Part 2: Starting Pitching
