Aaron Rowand |
Ryan Garko |
| Aubrey Huff | Jose Castillo |
| Miguel Tejada | Dave Roberts |
| Freddy Sanchez | Ryan Klesko |
| Carlos Beltran | Mark Sweeney |
| Mark DeRosa | Steve Finley |
| Benji Molina | Moises Alou |
| Edgar Renteria | Omar Vizquel |
| Juan Uribe | Jose Viscaiano |
| Jose Guillen | Eliezer Alfonso |
| Rich Aurilia | Mike Matheny |
| Randy Winn | Barry Bonds |
The average baseball career is 6 years; a generation if you will. 2011 marks the end of the generation from 2006 to 2011. Those 24 players were all signed as free agents or traded for by the Giants to be starters, and each of them was paid $ Millions to do so. Other than Bonds, can you find a player there who was not over-the-hill and/or beat-up when the Giants signed/re-signed them?
Just to point out the obvious, these are Giants rankings in On Base Percentage, Slugging, OPS and Runs scored during those years followed by their pitching rankings below.
2006 - 28/22/25 - Runs Scored - 24th
2007 - 27/30/30 - Runs Scored - 29th
2008 - 24/28/28 - Runs Scored - 29th
2009 - 30/28/30 - Runs Scored - 26th
2010 - 19/13/17 - Runs Scored - 17th
2011 - 29/27/28 - Runs Scored - 29th
During this same period, Giants pitching rankings in ERA, Runs Allowed and OPS against.
2006 - 9/15/10
2007 - 9/6/10
2008 - 17/17/17
2009 - 2/1/2
2010 - 1/2/2
2011 - 2/2/1
The disconnect between hitting and pitching is dumbfounding. This disparity makes it impossible to believe that the same people responsible for building this pitching staff are the same people responsible for consistently assembling one of the worst hitting teams in the Major Leagues, year in and year out.
Whether it's as a pitcher who has his pockets picked every time he goes to the mound, or a position player who is on welfare while picking the pitchers' pockets, it is no fun managing/coaching a team like this. Remember, this is a pitching staff that has had the carcass of Barry Zito and his $126 Million contract run out to the mound every fifth day for the past four years to overcome while posting those numbers. That doesn't make it any easier to swallow if you're one of the guys doing all the lifting.
This is not a healthy situation for the long term. This is Marilyn Monroe's face on Roseanne Barr's body.
If the Giants were not matching up well against the Phils then there might be concern. But though they lost, the Giants still forced the Phils other number one guy to throw a shutout.
From the Phils perspective, I have to believe that my guy needs to throw a shut-out against the Giants to have a chance to win. When you factor in the Zito exception, this is a pretty accurate assessment of Giants pitchers dominating Phillies hitters.
That is a lot of weight for Phils pitchers. Most of the entire careers of Lincecum, Cain, Bumgarner and Sanchez have been pitched under those difficult circumstances. Not the Phils, though. The Phillies score about 25 percent more runs than the Giants. This year the Phils are at 4.4 vs the Giants 3.5 runs per game. And that is not insignificant. While this may seem like a big disadvantage during the season, and it is, the post-season really comes down to pitching under a lot of pressure when you know your hitters are in for a rough time. For Giants pitchers, this is an everyday thing, game-in, game-out, season-in, season-out. Last year, the Braves, Phils, and Rangers' pitchers were not up to the task. Though the scoring was close, the Giants were never really challenged except for the third inning of game 5 against the Phils.
The Phils position players have the big reputations, but they have built those reputations against the "Not-Giants". Except for Victorino, they have been pretty much helpless at worst, and sporadic at best against the Giants.
Its easy to fall into the trap of putting too much emphasis on the standings when evaluating a team's relative strength. We forget that by its very nature, baseball really is specific batters against specific pitchers, (yet one more reason for accurate strike-zone calls) and the Giants continue to match up well against Philadelphia.
I was reminded of that basic element of baseball, when reading Joe Posnanski's piece contrasting the careers of Matt Stairs and Randy Moss on the occasion of their mutual retirements.
Stairs owned David Cone and Roy Halladay , but couldn't hit Rick Helling. Matt Stairs, at age 40, came off the bench for these same Phils in Game 4 of the NLCS against the Dodgers' Jonathan Broxton in the 8th inning with a man on, score at 5-5. He promptly launched one into the cheap seats. Its not that Stairs was great or even having a great year. He was at exactly league average in OPS+ for the season. He just happened to hit a ball he picked up well out of Broxton's release point. It was no more complicated than that.
Drysdale owned Mays. McCovey owned Drysdale. Individual matchups. As a fan, I tend to overlook them, because I simply do not follow the game from that standpoint anymore. But matchups, and I do not mean the brain-dead absolutist approach to L vs R, are as integral to the game as the strikezone. Stats are certainly one element of evaluating matchups. But just as important if not more so, is observation and determining how well a hitter is picking up the pitcher's pitches and how deep in the zone he can let a pitch go before committing.
That takes a lot of eyeballing over a lot of years and some guys never do acquire that skill. Bochy has been pretty adept at this. Dusty Baker, Joe Girardi, Kirk Gibson and others seem to be very good at this. As a matter of speculation, I believe this to be a big element in the D-Backs success. Gibson's ability to determine favorable matchups based upon his years of experience measuring up pitchers. I have no empirical evidence to support that, but it is certainly a plausible explanation, at least in part, for the D-Backs current run.
As Giants fans, one can only hope that I am dead wrong and that the D-backs are smoke, mirrors, and paper-clips.
One of my favorite writers over at Giants watch, Steve Harmon was recapping the ambush of Matt Cain by the homeplate umpires' wandering, kaleidoscopic strike zone. Two innings of bad strike calls that could very well be the difference between a 1 game lead and a 3 game lead over Arizona. And I got to thinking about the strike zone and some of the lore that surrounds it. This posted as a comment but was a little long to be a comment so its reposted with some editing here
Umpire strike zones have a disproportionate and inappropriate impact on game outcomes. You cited several questionable calls in just two innings that probably dictated the final results.
Much of baseball lore emanates from the bottom of the cliche bin, and the following makes me want to break large pieces of furniture.
"Pitchers and hitters don't care what the strike zone is as long as it is consistent".
No! No! Helllllllll NOOOOOOOOO!
I believe the mindless repetition of this concept is something so harmful to the real integrity of the game as to be a canard of the highest order. Baseball is predicated upon a strike zone. Without a strikezone, baseball does not exist. So it seems to me that the best strike zone is the most accurate one, not a wrong one that is declared acceptable because somebody subjectively deems it to be "consistent".
What the game needs and is entitled to is a strike zone as it is written in the rulebook without impeding the flow of the game such as the use of instant replay. The means to do this electronically and visually have been in place and available to TV viewers for years.
The process is simple. Add an electronic voice to the process and run it into the homeplate umpires' ear bud. Run it through an ipod if need be for goodness sakes. This simple process removes the single biggest flaw in sports officiating; the inevitable disasters that turn a game around because of bad strike zone calls.
What the rulebook clearly spells out to be an objective measurement (the strike zone) has been relegated to the same subjective judgment methods as ice dancing competitions. The only thing baseball is missing are the three East German judges.
And unlike replay, the game never misses a beat with the aural-prompted strikezone. It is invisible to fan and player alike, and makes for 99.999 percent accuracy, allowing for the inevitable equipment failures along the way.
A collateral benefit would be the re-training of the eye by the electronic strike zone, so in the event of equipment failure, the ump's strike zone would have been retooled so that his strike zone would more likely replicate the electronic one.
It makes the game fairer, by far. And if there was ever a game that is meant to be measured objectively, it is baseball. Because it is in fact a game of inches, fairness demands as much accuracy as possible.
There is nothing fair about bad strike zone calls at all. Bad strike zones ruin innings, ruin games, ruin seasons, ruin careers. I see nothing endearing, whatsoever in any of that.
More tension and animosity have been created by bad strike zone calls than any other fixable officiating deficiency that I can recall. If you have your own favorite, speak up and we can debate it.
Refusing to change is not maintaining tradition. Using a rusty scalpel to render living flesh under General Anesthesia is not tradition either, particularly when arthroscopic surgery with a local is indicated.
And after far too many bad strike zone calls, I sometimes feel like I've been put under by General Anesthesia.
