Eric's Giants Blog

There but for the grace of Darren Oliver...

The Giants won 9-8 yesterday in the bottom of the 11th inning. They took 3 out of 4 from the Marlins, who entered the season with a league-best ERA and some hot hitters. So why don't I feel better about this?

Well, they took 3 out of 4 by scoring 30 runs and allowing 23. They got a quality start from just two starting pitchers in the series (Schmidt and Williams, of course). They played really terrible defense during the series. For a team whose most glaring weakness is its lineup, the team essentially slugged their way to a good series, scoring 7.5 runs per game against a very good pitching staff. It's hard to believe that anyone believes a series that was determined by such an outcome is meaningfully predictive.

What I thought this series demonstrated perfectly was the old adage that "every team wins 60 and every team loses 60", which obviously isn't literally true, but which has a large measure of accuracy - the vast majority of teams fall within that middle portion of the bell curve between 60-102 and 102-60. No one (well, not me at any rate) has claimed that the Giants are going to lose 100 games. The most negative claims I've seen have them finishing a few games under .500, which means sure, they're going to have some series like this one. Baseball, on the level of an individual game, can be pretty fluky. Infield singles that get caught in the grass, double play balls that spin strangely off the shortstop's glove, routine fly balls that a converted second baseman playing right field can't handle - we saw all of these, and for the first time this season a lot broke the Giants' way. And that's great, even though these games weren't very fun to watch.

But they're still playing really bad baseball. Three of the five spots in the rotation are still providing way too many 4.1 IP 5 ER starts. The defense is nothing like it was last year, so while some nice regression to the mean by some of the hitters who were doing nothing in April (AJ, Mohr, Tucker, Snow) is nice, and will provide some offense, nothing has really changed. This isn't a team that's going to score 8 runs in too many games. And Barry's walks continue to pile up (on pace for 274 as of today) because no one can protect him.

A few things about yesterday's game:

Where was Barry? With the bases loaded and two outs in the bottom of the 7th inning, Felipe Alou used Deivi Cruz to pinch-hit for the pitcher. With Barry Bonds on the bench. I heard rumors that Bonds wasn't suited up (he came in later as a pinch-walker and scored the winning run, of course), and if that's the case Felipe can't be taken to task too strongly (there were better options available, including Tucker, but choosing Cruz over Tucker can be safely placed within the purview of managerial discretion - choosing Cruz over Bonds cannot).

Felix Rodriguez appears to be back. He's not employing a breaking pitch the way it was reported he might, but he's using the inside part of the plate this year, which I don't remember ever seeing him do with any regularity. His 2.63 ERA / 0.88 WHIP to date are very encouraging, although his K rate continues to fall from a very high 10.47 in 2000 to a worrisome 4.61 this year. Still, he's clearly the best reliever on the team right now.

Et tu, Wayne Franklin? At what point do we believe that Sabean really is a genius when it comes to bullpens, and that Wayne Franklin, like a soft-throwing lefty Eric Gagne, was never meant to be a starter and is now in his proper role as a lefty out of the bullpen. Franklin has allowed struck out 11 in 11 innings pitched and given up just one homer. He's holding lefties to a .566 OPS in the early going. (Note to Sabean: I just gave you the sales pitch. Go call Hunsicker and keep this in your back pocket in case he doesn't want to take Christianson and his salary)

Big game for Yorvit Torrealba. A lot of people (myself included) believed that the smart move would have been to replace Santiago with the younger and cheaper (25 years old, $334k) Torrealba. Yorvit is never going to be Jorge Posada or Pudge Rodriguez, but in 363 career major-league ABs he has put up a line of .270 / .335 / .405, which makes him solidly above-average for a catcher, and if you take into account his youth and home ballpark it's not impossible to see him develop into a Ramon Hernandez type in a year or two. Of course, this type of reasoning is based on a view that Yorvit Torrealba represents an opportunity to get replacement-level (or better) performance from a young, inexpensive player, and we all know how Brian Sabean feels about such players. So instead, he went out and traded three young pitchers (including Twins closer Joe Nathan and lefty fireballer Francisco Liriano - Florida State League player of the week last week, and who is striking out more than a better per inning for Fort Myers) for AJ Pierzynski, then promptly went to arbitration with him and lost. Pierzynski now makes more than ten times what Torrealba does. The early results?

Pierzynski: 76 AB, .263 / .291 / .303 ($3.5M)
Torrealba: 23 AB, .261 / .414 / .478 ($334k)

It is generally accepted by people who know more about this than I do that Torrealba is a better defensive catcher than Pierzynski.

Burnout worries. Giants bullpen threw 6 2/3 innings again. I'm assuming this worries people with a lot more ability to act on their concern than me.

Neifi led off again. I can't really say anything else about that.

posted by Eric @ 7:47 AM