Underdog Flummoxes Joe

I recently talked to Joe. Joe is still celebrating the Giants World Championship. And Joe has been following the Giants like he always does. But Joe is flummoxed. The season is more than half over, the Giants have booked 50 wins before the All-Star break, for the first time since 2003, and they don't have a single position player eligible for the All-Star game.

Baseball reference has this bar chart at the top of the Giants 2003 season's page. And every season for that matter. Every game is represented by either a green bar above the line which is a win, or a red bar which represents a loss. If there is a blank spot, there was no game*. The margin of victory or loss is represented by the height/depth of the bar. The longer the bar, the bigger the margin of victory or defeat. If you look across the 2003 season, you will see a bunch of tall green bars and a handful of long red bars. Mostly mountains, a few foothills, a few gullies with the occasional valley and one or two box canyons. If it were an EKG, you would think you were looking at a healthy normal heart.

Click forward to the 2011 season. The Giants have played 89 games and won 50. At the same point in 2003 they had won 55. But if you look at that bar chart for the current season, and visualize somebody's brainwave activity, you would swear it belonged to the winner of last year's Darwin Awards. If it were geography, you would be on the great plains of Middle America with little but the horizon and highway heat mirages in sight. Either that or the Giants appear to be playing 2 games per week. Its like the Rockie Mountains of 2003 vs the Salton Sea of 2011.

The equivalent  of eight seasons have passed between then and now. Or a little more than the length of a pretty good major league career. They won 100 games in 2003. Nobody is around from then except Sabean, Righetti, Gardy, Kruk, Kuip and Jon Miller. Everybody else from the Managing partner to the 40th guy on the roster is different. The Giants scored runs in 2003, but not what you would think. They scored 755, good for sixth place in the NL; the Braves scored 907 by comparison. The Giants were second in the NL in Runs Allowed with 638 trailing only the Los Angeles McCourts' 556. This year the Giants are 15th in runs scored and 3rd in runs allowed. And they lead the majors in walk-off wins with 11.

So Joe is faced with a conundrum (my "beat the word into the ground" of the week). Trying to understand how the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. Other than the pitching, this is a lineup pretty much filled with 0 to 2 tool players. A few guys can run some, throw a little, catch a little, hit a little less, and pretty much exhibit all the power of a rolling PG&E brown out. Best described as a lineup of unwatchables until the last couple of innings to see if they can scrap up some runs or hold onto a lead pieced together innings earlier.

Joe is faced with contradictions. A team that leads in walk-off victories yet has nobody with an OPS over 850

Joe  is faced with paradoxes.  A team whose two-time Cy Young winner (Tim Lincecum) is sporting a losing won loss record, yet gets selected for the All-Star team.  A team being managed by a guy (Bruce Bochy) who even after winning the world series and 50 games this season, still has a losing career won-loss record. Even after taking the Rangers down in in last year's World Series in 5 games, he still has a losing record.

Joe is faced with mysteries. A team whose other Cy Young winner (Barry Zito) has a high school fastball, since coming off the Disabled List, but throws zeros up on the scoreboard faster than you can run to a concession stand and fork over $384.00 for a burger and fries. A team whose emergency call-up from AAA after a 4 year absence from the Major Leagues (Ryan Vogelsong) is now going to the All Star Game and is in the company of Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Tim Lincecum, Cole Hamels, in leading NL starters in most important pitching categories. A team on schedule to score fewer than 600 runs in a season and averaging less than 3 runs per game at home.

Joe is faced with explaining away adversity. Buster Posey, Freddie Sanchez and Brandon Belt..the best hitters arguably in a weak lineup out for weeks and months at a time because of injuries, and others Torres, Ross, Burrell, Huff, and Sandoval all spending time on the DL themselves.

Yet the team has its best All Star break record in almost eight years.

So what's the answer. I don't think there is one. I think what Joe is seeing here is something he normally doesn't see at the Major League Level where its the best in the world competing against each other where excellence, talent and good fortune combine to give you predictable results.  What Joe is seeing here is something that happens all the time in college ball, where you have the best of their level competing against each other, not the elite of the elite. You have the best college players competing against each other, and the game becomes more team oriented. And thats probably why the Giants are where they are now. They play team ball. Good starters. Good relievers. Unselfish at bats. Focused, if not spectacular defense and comfortable that the powers that be in their own organization have confidence in them. It allows them to play with more focus more often than not than their opponents.

And that's the best I can come up with.