It’s been a while since Your Humble Blogger was moved to write about Baseball. I just haven’t had much to say on the topic, other than grumbling, of course. My Giants stink. The interesting thing is that my Giants have the second-best record in the National League, despite stinking. They are on a pace to win 88 games, which is not a stinky record at all, despite stinking. They are nearly on a pace to win 90 games, which is a good working definition of a Good Team, and they are doing it while stinking up the league.\n
Now, some Gentle Readers, those that don’t follow the NL in any depth but are familiar enough with the game to know what is meant by stinking<\/i> and winning<\/i>, may at this point be perplexed. Surely<\/i>, y’all may be saying, surely if they are winning, they can’t be that bad, as the point of the game is to win<\/i>. And there is something to this, in general: my observations of the team are biased, the statistics presumably are not, so if the statistics (including that record of wins and losses) tell me the team is good, well. Who am I going to believe, the facts or my own eyes?\n
The problem is that the rest of the statistics aren’t very impressive. In 74 games, we’ve scored 295 runs; that’s second-worst in the league and third-worst in the majors. An average offense, such as the Mets or Pirates, is at 333 runs. That’s more than half a run a game more than us. And here’s this: the Washington Nationals, as a team, have drawn 307 walks, most in the League. 10th in the league is the Florida Marlins with 262 walks. Fifteenth in the league is the Astros with 230 walks. The Giants, sixteenth and last, have only 174 walks. That’s right; a walk a game less than the second-worst<\/i> team. Our On Base Average is an atrocious .302, worst in the league, of course, because we are hacking away like anything, but are we making up for it by hitting the ball hard? Well, first of all, we have 536 strikeouts, seventh-worst; it’s not like we’re putting the ball in play all that much more than anybody else. But our slugging percentage is at .385, three points above the last-place Padres, and a good fifteen points below average (good would be another ten points above that). We are weak on the long-ball (tied for fourteenth) and middle-of-the-pack in doubles and triples, so our total bases come in fourteenth. There isn’t a single offensive category where we break the top five. And, I should point out, we accomplish this largely with having a stable of consistently crappy hitters, rather than with a few good hitters balancing out the crap.\n
Oh, and we don’t have any good hitters who are hurt, or who are hitting well below expectations. That’s the team we came with.\n
So how are we winning any games at all? Well, we don’t give up very many runs: the fewest in the League, in fact, and the fewest Earned Runs, too, if that matters. We’ve given up only 62 home runs, second-least in the league, and we have struck out 586, most in the league. Walks are in the middle of the pack. How are we keeping the runs down? We have two wonderful starting pitchers. Depending on how you stack them up, they are two of the best five, or anyway the best ten starting pitchers in the league. That’s wonderful, and they really are great. But that’s two days out of five; there’s another pitcher who is, again depending on what stats you like, is about average, and another who is about average. Not great, not lousy.\n
And the bullpen is fine. Not great, not lousy. Our Closer has lost four games and blown four saves. Two of the losses were blown saves, but two were not; that’s six crappy games, not counting 4\/18, where he didn’t get the loss but came in tied and gave up the hit that scored the winning run. Anyway, going by Blown Saves + Losses, which is easy to eyeball, he has 8; Brad Lidge has 9, but then Brad Lidge stinks, too (A WHIP of, say, 1.5 stinks: Lidge has 1.94 so far), and other than him, I don’t see anybody with more than 5. There are other guys in the bullpen who don’t stink. And some who do.\n
So. There’s my team. Two great starting pitchers, a handful of non-stinker, and a whole lot of stink. And forty wins. There’s a lesson in that. I just wish I knew what it was.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger wins a few and loses a few, and then wins a few more and loses a few more, and then (and this is the surprising part) wins a few more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[193],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baseball"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12205"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18809,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12205\/revisions\/18809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}