Eric's Giants Blog

Dog Days

Not really a good time to have a Giants blog, is it? I give full credit to Grant over at http://www.mccoveychronicles.com/. He manages to find stuff to write about them each day, and makes me laugh more often than not.

[not talking about LaTroy Hawkins]

The last time I wrote, I was trying to find something to be positive about, and I found it in Todd Linden's AAA performance. Well, Linden didn't disappoint. He crushed the ball for another month and got himself called up, hopefully for good. He's been up for 25 ABs now, and other than a dramatic 3-run homer (which was ultimately wasted), he hasn't done much yet. I'm not worried yet, though - I think if he's overmatched, we'll know after 150 ABs or so. But I think he's got enough skill to stick.

[not talking about LaTroy Hawkins]

The Giants are a bad team. This is pretty clear at this point. Would they better if Bonds was playing? Yep. Would they be better if Benitez was playing? You bet. Would they be better if Jason Schmidt was pitching like an ace? Absolutely. In fact, if all three of these guys (arguably the three best players on the team, really) were playing at a high level, the Giants might even be competitive this year. And while I'm the last person to support the way the current team has been constructed, it's important to remember this if you want to come by your conclusions honestly.

The Giants are currently 29-39 going into today's game. They've scored 309 runs (more than only ... Colorado? ... in the division) and have allowed 367 runs (again, more than any other team in the division other than Colorado - in fact, more than any other team in the National League other than Colorado). So how much difference would Bonds, Good Schmidt and Benitez have made?

There are ways to do this scientifically, but I'm neither patient enough to do it with rigor nor particularly interested in scientifically showing how close they'd be if nothing had gone wrong. The qualitative way to look at it is to look at it this way:

Pedro Feliz has been playing left field. His line this year is .318 / .439 (notice, btw, that Feliz gets talked about so much more when he starts out hot rather than when he turns back into himself).

When Feliz doesn't play left field he plays third base. Most of the playing time there has gone to Edgardo Alfonzo (.370 / .403). Feliz also sometimes plays first base, which is currently manned by Lance Niekro (.331 / .577) or JT Snow (.361 / .354).

Now there is no question whatsoever that Bonds is MUCH better than any of these guys. But the point I'm trying to make is that the Giants have gotten an OPS of between .773 (Alfonzo) and .908 (Niekro) from the guys who are likely taking Bonds' ABs. Not all-star performances, certainly, but neither have they replaced Bonds with automatic outs. Even Michael Tucker (.347 / .395) hasn't been a complete offensive zero.

The Giants would have scored more runs with Bonds playing, but the offense wouldn't have gone from bad to genuinely good even if he was playing.

Schmidt probably would have made a bigger difference. The version of Schmidt we currently have (5.40 / 1.60) is well below league average. The version we were expecting (say, last year's 3.20 / 1.08) is an ace. Very unscientifically, I think Good Schmidt is worth 3 or 4 wins more than Evil Schmidt at this point in the season.

As for Benitez - the whole bullpen has been a disaster, and honestly, Tyler Walker has converted most of the saves since Benitez went out. My views on closers are well-established, but of course we'd be better off with him than without him.

None of this is quantative or scientific, but I think the Giants are maybe 6 or 7 games if all the guys were playing and were healthy. That would put them at something like 35-33, three games back of San Diego.

It also bears mentioning that if the Giants were 3 back in this scenario, it would look like a complete miracle. Jason Ellison, Lance Niekro and Mike Matheny have all played FAR better than projected (as has Moises Alou), so at that point literally everything would be going right for the Giants, and they'd be only a couple of games back. It's not really relevant, since when you build an old, injury-prone team you expect things to go wrong, but it's a somewhat interesting thought experiment.

More later in the week on what the team can do going forward.

[not talking about LaTroy Hawkins]

posted by Eric @ 12:01 PM