I’m not going to defend Armando Benitez’s performance in last night’s loss to the Mets. He lost his poise after a questionable balk call allowed Jose Reyes to advance from first to second with no outs in the twelfth inning. Reyes, later at third, conned Benitez into another balk that allowed Reyes to tie the game, and then Benitez gave up Carlos Delgado’s second homer of the night. End of game.
Closers aren’t supposed to lose their poise the way Benitez did last night, but let’s face it, his mistake was not the first balk. It was going 3-0 on Reyes and then walking him. Once Reyes was walked, we knew he would get to second, probably by stealing the base against a pitcher who takes too long to get the ball from the mound to the catcher.
I think, though, that the fans’ lamenting Benitez’s shortcomings or the inadequacy of the bullpen is misdirected. Most of the time, in fact, the Giants’ bullpen has done its job. The team is 20-4 in games in which it leads after seven innings. What sticks in our memories are the failures, and some do stand out. But it is important when making judgments about ballplayers and teams that we look past what our eyes see, which we are likely to remember vividly, and look at what actually happens on the field. Sometimes what happens on the field is revealed in the numbers.
Despite its imperfections, the Giants’ glaring weakness is not their bullpen. The weakness is on the other side of the ball. They have scored 219 runs so far this season, good for 22nd in the majors. (Detroit leads in this category with 289 runs.) Lowly Colorado has scored only one fewer run than have the Giants.
Why so few runs? Well, the Giants aren’t hitting. But why aren’t they hitting? The big reason is that opposing pitchers are just not having to waste a lot of time getting them out. The Giants as a team see 3.67 pitches per plate appearance, which looks to be 27th in the league. Only the Angels, the Dodgers, and the Mariners rank lower. Take Barry Bonds and his extreme patience out of the mix, and the Giants fall somewhere between the Angels and Dodgers on that list.
Why are pitches per plate-appearance so important? Bonds’s secret is that he only swings at balls he can drive. (He sees 4.02 pitches per plate appearance.) He does not waste time on balls out of the strike zone. He is perfectly happy to have a pitcher expend energy on thowing balls that aren’t worthy of his swing. His discipline in this regard is remarkable. Call him the anti-Pedro Feliz. (Feliz sees 3.4 pitches per plate appearance, which while not Randall Simon bad, should be something that would keep him from being an everyday player on a major-league team.)
Look at the teams that lead the majors in pitches per plate appearance. Cleveland (3.98), Oakland (3.97), Boston (3.93), the Yankees (3.86), Philadelphia (3.83). Cleveland and Boston are of course two of the best-hitting teams in the majors, and the Yankees and Phillies are not far behind them. Oakland’s patience tells me that their hitters will turn it around over the course of the season; we should expect them to score runs at a greater clip from here on out.
Patience at the plate, and ability to judge what is and is not a pitch that can be hit hard, is the key to scoring runs. This sort of patience was actively discouraged under the Baker and Alou regimes, where “aggresiveness” at the plate was prized. (Dusty Baker, while at Chicago, said he didn’t like guys who took walks since all they did was “clog up the basepaths.”) I’m still willing to give Bochy a pass since he comes from an organization that at least takes such information as pitches per plate appearance into account when making personnel and lineup decisions, and since he came over with little input into what his roster would be this season. But so far, the numbers are not encouraging.
