10 things that went right, wrong for Giants in first half
The early-season struggles finally hit a breaking point Sunday, when the Giants designated Hunter Pence for assignment. Pence was hitting .096. Pablo Sandoval hasn't been much better, with a .567 OPS and just two extra-base hits. Per FanGraphs, Pence and Sandoval had combined for negative .9 WAR when they were broken up.
The Brandons have gotten going over the last week or so, although Crawford is still hitting just .235 with a .358 slugging percentage. Jeff Samardzija isn't your traditional Forever Giant, but he's been around five years, and this last one has been rough in every way.
So much for a sophomore slump. Mike Yastrzemski has been one of the best players in the National League. Yastrzemski leads the majors in WAR and has a .429 OBP and .645 slugging percentage at the halfway point of the season. He has seven homers, 10 doubles, three triples, 23 RBI, 23 walks and 28 runs through 30 games, and he has been a good defender in center field. Plus, he made an incredible catch against the archway in right field Saturday night.
Yastrzemski has turned into a legit MVP candidate, and Giants coaches and teammates say his stats are matched by his leadership. That's a great sign for a team that could still have Yastrzemski at the top of the order when the best prospects fully arrive.
Joey Bart is here and looks like a star, and the Giants have a ton of talent on the way in Heliot Ramos, Marco Luciano, Hunter Bishop, Alexander Canario and others. But they haven't really seen any of their older prospects take the leap other than Austin Slater, who has been in the big leagues a while now.
Jaylin Davis started the year on the opening day roster but was sent down after going 2-for-12 with six strikeouts, and it doesn't sound like a return is imminent. Joe McCarthy had a brutal start and was DFA'd. Mauricio Dubon has been OK. He can handle center field and remains a plus defender at second, but he has a .634 OPS and has had trouble with pitch selection. Second-year relievers Tyler Rogers and Shaun Anderson have had some real rough moments.
Nobody has really stepped up yet as this year's Yastrzemski, which was one of the goals of this season.
The poor guy has been extremely unlucky, with an elbow strain limiting him over the last couple of weeks and a groin strain putting him on the IL this weekend. But when Slater has been in the batter's box, he's been as dangerous as any Giant.
Slater actually leads the team in OPS and he hit the IL with a slash line of .347/.458/.653. He has four homers and became the first Giant to homer twice in a game off Clayton Kershaw. Slater also is one of the league leaders with six stolen bases.
This is Slater's fourth big league season, but he's still just 27 and has finally made an adjustment to get the ball in the air more, improving his launch angle from 3.4 to 11.4 year over year. If he can keep that up, he could be a big part of the future.
The bullpen, full of inexperienced arms, ranks 26th in the majors with a 5.68 ERA and has given up a league-high 25 homers. The home runs have been an issue all season, but the low point came over a four-game stretch, when Trevor Gott blew leads of five, three, and one, and Wandy Peralta and Dereck Rodriguez combined for an ugly frame against the A's.
The Giants at the moment don't have a set closer, although Tony Watson has been really good and Rogers has overcome a slow start. This is a season of experimentation with the rest of the group, and none of the younger pitchers have really reached out and grabbed 2021 jobs yet.
Farhan Zaidi and Scott Harris have a pretty good batting average going this season on their veteran additions. Wilmer Flores, signed to a cheap two-year deal, has seven homers. Kevin Gausman has 42 strikeouts in 31 innings. Drew Smyly was the best pitcher in the rotation before getting hurt. Tyler Anderson and Trevor Cahill have been good additions to the rotation, and they were instrumental in a sweep of the Diamondbacks. This seems a good spot to mention Donnie Barrels, who is hitting .363.
The Giants could have gone all-in on youth, but they felt some of these veterans -- none of whom came with a serious commitment -- could help them compete. They were right.
You can't place all the blame for the pitching blowups on the manager because a lot of this is just a lack of talent and some bad luck. But the most visible decisions a manager makes are with the lineup at the start of the day and pitching changes near the end of it, and while Gabe Kapler's platoon-heavy lineups have been strong, there are some pitching moves he would certainly want back.
Two sequences stand out. Sticking with Johnny Cueto on a Saturday night in Los Angeles and then pulling Kevin Gausman -- who was throwing better and had a lower pitch count -- the next day was a double-whammy. It was a little unorthodox for Kapler to use Gott with a five-run lead, but the real issue was sending him back out there last Monday after Gott had already blown two huge leads over the weekend. He coughed up another win and hasn't pitched since. It'll take a while for a lot of the fan base to get over that one.
Kapler brought in a staff -- with Donnie Ecker, Justin Viele and Dustin Lind as the hitting coaches -- that preaches strike zone awareness and hunting pitches that you can do damage on. The early results are really encouraging, with the Giants averaging 4.96 runs per game, a huge improvement from their 4.19 last year. They've been particularly good at home, averaging 6.3 runs per game in a park that's definitely livelier this year.
Giants who are leading off an inning have a .948 OPS, the highest mark in the majors by nearly 100 points. The team already has 20 homers in two-strike counts. As bad as the pitching mistakes have looked for Kapler, he deserves a lot of credit for putting together a lineup that's been a threat just about every night.
This has actually been fixed to an extent, but because of all those early mistakes, the Giants still lead the majors with 25 errors. Beyond that, though, they've just been sloppy. Whether it's the four catcher interference calls, the missed cutoff men, or the botched rundowns, there have been plenty of moments this year that you wouldn't expect from a team that spends so much time doing high-intensity drills.
Gott made his share of mistakes during that three-loss stretch, but he was also burned by Wilmer Flores failing to touch first and Pence misreading a routine liner to right. Even in Sunday's win there was a routine error at short and a bad read in center that put extra runners on.
The Giants have lost a few pieces to minor injuries, but that's not what we're talking about. This is a season being played in a pandemic, and while everything else listed here is important from a baseball perspective, all that really matters this year is staying healthy. The Giants haven't had anyone test positive for COVID-19 since July 6, getting through summer camp and 30 games -- including road trips to Los Angeles (three times), Houston and Denver.
A lot of credit for this goes to the staffers behind the scenes who are keeping the facility clean and monitoring players and testing. But give a lot of credit to the players and coaches, too. They bought in from the beginning, and when the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals were shut down, the Giants tightened up already strict protocols. At every level, they've done a great job of handling the COVID-19 aspect of the 2020 season.
