Newage baseball: S.F. counting on coaches, analytics

Gabe Kapler has a staff of 13 coaches. That’s a lot of helpers.

Newage overkill? We’re about to find out. If you’ve got a director of pitching, plus a pitching coach and an assistant pitching coach, you’d better trot out a pitching staff that can pitch.

This season is a big test for the Giants. This will be Kapler’s second year as the team’s manager, if you count the 2020 pandemicdimmed miniseason. This will be president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi’s third season.

They represent New Baseball. That means building a roster and managing/coaching it using every new technological, analytical and psychological tool available.

Major League Baseball was a bit late to this party. Football and basketball jumped on the

New Sports bandwagon long ago. Coaching staffs in those sports expanded like your waistline during quarantine, devouring analytics and the latest coaching gimmicks.

The A’s jumped into that fun long ago, of course, with their Moneyball successes. Since then, other MLB teams have been scrambling to catch up, and the Giants are determined to scramble to the head of that pack. They believe all the new and enlightened stuff they are doing will give them an edge, allowing them to compete against teams with superior talent (see: Dodgers, Padres, etc.).

The Giants pencil out to be about a .500 team. If they overachieve, you can really kiss Old Baseball goodbye.

Already gone forever in baseball: the three or fourman coaching staff. It used to be that if you were looking to talk ball with someone, you could find a coach sitting in the dugout two hours before the game, gazin’ and spittin’. The rule for the Giants’ coaches now seems to be: If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.

Kapler’s 13 coaches are as busybusybusy, with purpose.

Here’s an example: Coaches Alyssa Nakken and Antoan Richardson coach baserunning. They pushed the envelope this spring training, urging runners to be extraaggressive, to plant alertbaserunning seeds.

Saving one out or taking one extra base per week might be the difference between making the playoffs and going home. If baseball is a marathon, you must tie your shoes properly.

But if you want to be a better marathoner, you also need to run faster, and that’s the heart of the Giants’ plan. They believe they can make players better by coachin’ ’em up. This is somewhat revolutionary. In Old Baseball, coaching was about helping players get ready, and get out of bad habits. Hey, they’re already bigleaguers, right? In New Baseball, coaching is about making the players better than when you got ’em, and that’s what the Giants believe they can do.

So far, so good. Take Brandon Belt and Brandon Crawford, two players who went into last season looking like their careers with the Giants were winding to a close.

Crawford, at age 33, improved his batting average from .228 the previous season to .256. Belt, at age 32, jumped from .234 and a .742 OPS in 2019, to .309 and 1.015. Belt’s previous high batting average was .289.

If that’s for real, if Belt hits .300 and OPSes 1.000 this season, how can you not give credit to the quirky newage coaching?

Then there are Mike Yastrzemski and Donovan Solano. Yastrzemski played three seasons in college and sixplus in the minors before he got a desperation shot with the Giants in 2019. Last season, he hit .297 with a .968 OPS and was eighth in NL MVP voting.

Solano was 31 and hanging to his career by his fingernails when the Giants got him in 2019, and he has hit .330 and .328 for them.

That’s dramatic stuff. It could be the Giants got super lucky, stumbled upon two outlier late bloomers. But isn’t it possible that the Giants, with all those coaches and all those new techniques, helped Yastrzemski and Solano emerge?

The cases of Belt, Crawford, Yastrzemski and Solano, lumped together, make you go hmmm. Throw in pitcher Kevin Gausman, who last year at 29 had a revival season with the Giants and will be their starter on Opening Night in Seattle on Thursday.

Are the Giants chasing newage fantasies, or are they tapping into something real? That will be answered this season.

It might take Zaidi and Kapler and 13 coaches to screw in a light bulb, but if that light bulb represents a better idea, screw away.