Where’s the Patience?

Bengie Molina has bashed three homers in a three-game span, powering the Giants to a pair of wins.  He’s got seven of the team’s NL-low 16 dingers, but through 104 plate appearances, still hasn’t drawn a walk, and yes, the Giants are last in that category as well as scoring.  Sadly, Molina’s .308 OBP is just the fourth-lowest among the team’s eight regulars, and it’s two points above the team’s rate.

 

Lackluster Two Weeks In

Tim Lincecum whiffs 13 snakes in eight shutout innings, and while the bullpen blows that sterling performance, it does allay some concerns about the reigning NL Cy Young winner after two lackluster starts to open the season.  Meanwhile, lackluster would be an improvement for the Giants’ offense, where Fred Lewis and Aaron Rowand are the only regulars with OBPs above .300 and SLGs above .340.  Like their Bay Area neighbors, they’re last in their league in EqA.

 

Swingin’ Free

Well, the Giants’ “offense” has whiffed 27 times while walking just once against Clayton Kershaw and Chad Billingsley en route to a 71/16 K/BB ratio thus far.

 

Overachievers, Yes; “Excellent,” No

Bruce Jenkins was at it again in the Chron today, writing about Billy Beane’s guts and “desperation” as he works to build a team to compete against the Los Angeles Angels, “baseball’s model of excellence, surpassing the Red Sox and leaving the Yankees in a little pile of dust.” I don’t know what criteria Jenkins uses to judge excellence, but he certainly doesn’t look at the numbers.

With a .622 winning percentage through Monday, the Angels are on a pace for 100 wins, the traditional mark for excellence in teams. They lead the American League West by 22 games with six games to go.

But the Angels, despite having baseball’s best record, aren’t nearly as good a team as they appear to be, because as strong as the Angels’ record is, it reflects too generously on a team that has had a great deal of luck.

 

Lean Times by the Bay

I tuned into the Giants game on April 7 and April 12 and each time was confronted with a scene that, I believe, provides a foretelling of the San Francisco season in microcosm. There was Matt Cain, struggling away in the fifth inning of a 0-0 game. (In the game on April 12, Matt actually had a no-hitter through five innings.) Better get used to those goose eggs, Matt–a year of non-support from your teammates is your lot.

Through 19 games, the Giants have scored 61 runs, least in the National League. When a team’s cleanup hitter is Bengie Molina, a 33-year-old catcher with a career .410 slugging average, isn’t it hard imagining them scoring even 500 times this season? That’s much too extreme, of course. It’s been ages (36 years, actually) since a team scored way down in the low threes–or under–per game. In 1972, one National and four American League teams were under 500 runs. (You see why the designated hitter came about?) Without starving to that extent, the Giants do seem like a good bet to break into this list of modern era clubs that have scored the fewest runs:

Lowest runs per game since 1996
3.54: 2003 Dodgers (574 runs scored)
3.57: 2002 Tigers (575)
3.65: 2003 Tigers (591)
3.80: 2004 Diamondbacks (615)
3.83: 1998 Devil Rays (620)
3.87: 2002 Brewers (627)
3.92-3.99: Eight teams (634 to 650)

San Francisco right now is scoring runs at a rate of 3.21 per game, which puts them at the top (bottom?) of this list. If AT&T Park were no longer almost neutral and suddenly started playing like the pitcher’s haven it was during its PacBell infancy, then we could almost guarantee a Giants appearance on this list. While I loathe extracting too much from a season’s first three weeks, the Giants so far are certainly fulfilling everyone’s fears of a season of offensive deprivation. Scoring zero runs (they’ve done it twice), one run (three times), or two runs (four times) is bound to be the rule and not the exception.

 

Money Poorly Spent

The Chronicle headlined Gwen Knapp’s column this morning “For those who think Zito is a bust, here’s the evidence.” Yes, Zito’s performance in yesterday’s opener was bad, but it was only disappointing to those who ignored evidence readily available on the day Zito was signed in December 2006. At the time, Brian Sabean evidently thought the twenty-eight-year-old Zito was coming into his prime, but Zito had actually been on a downward trend since 2004. In his first four major-league seasons from 2000-2003, Zito was 61-29, with a 3.12 ERA in 119 starts, and boasted nine-inning rates of 7.2 hits, 10.9 baserunners, 7.2 strikeouts, and 3.4 walks. Over the subsequent three seasons, Zito went 41-34 with a 4.05 ERA in 103 starts and his nine-inning rates were 8.3 hits, 12.5 baserunners, 6.6 strikeouts, and 3.7 walks. The Giants are paying a number-three starter $80 million over seven years. Do you think Johan Santana’s agent used those numbers as a starting point in his negotiations with the Mets as the New Yorkers attempted to sign the best starter in baseball?

Similarly, the Giants are never going to get their money’s worth from the Aaron Rowland contract (five years at $60 million). On the plus side, the signing gives the pitching staff the double break of replacing Dave Roberts in center with Rowand, and Bonds in left with Roberts. Since the only real point to playing the 2008 season will be to let Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum do their things, building a better defense isn’t such a terrible bit of off-season work. But I expect the Giants to be almost as rudely disappointed by Rowand’s hitting outside of Philadelphia as they are with Zito’s pitching away from Oakland. In only two full seasons of play has Rowand been an above-average hitter, and his numbers in the vastness of AT&T Park will not look so good as his numbers in that bandbox in Philadelphia. Given the abandon with which Rowand plays center, the chances that he lasts the full five years while playing every day seem pretty slight to me. What I don’t get is Rowand’s decision, since it involves paying California taxes and leaving playoff-picture relevance for the balance of his career, but as he’s already 30, we can at least acknowledge that he did choose a lovely place to play out that career.

 

Focusing on Benitez Misses the Point

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. 

 

How to Tell Your Team’s Lineup Is Not Solid

Oh my God! Pedro Feliz (.254/.286/.455) is hitting third in the Giants’ order today (Saturday) in Oakland!!! Doesn’t that say it all about our “solid” lineup?