Giants’ win a shock to baseball’s system
Baseball’s best team in 2021 is winning in the most 2021 way possible.
Iwrote a column comparing the Giants not to their National League West rivals, the Dodgers, but instead to the Tampa Bay Rays.
Only the Giants have a bit more cash than the broke boys in St. Petersburg, of course.
Three months later, I feel the comparison between the two teams is even more apt, as the Rays and Giants have the best record in their respective leagues and are holding off big spenders in their own division.
And frankly, it’s still a bit baffling as to how they’re doing it.
I maintain that the fundamentals win championships in this sport. The team that strikes out the least, has the better starting pitchers, and plays the best defense will win the championship.
But my faith in that model is wavering as the Giants and their soul brothers from the other coast — the Rays — keep winning.
Maybe, just maybe, this regular-season approach — swing-for-the-fences hitting, bottomless bullpens, and super-shifting defenses — that will win in the postseason these days.
The next two months will give us the answer, but as regular-season games turn tense, the early returns look good.
The Giants have three — just three — starting pitchers right now. Eventually, that number will rise to four, but no one can say how long Alex Wood will be sidelined with symptomatic COVID.
Still, the Giants won their series with the Dodgers over the weekend behind 23 innings of bullpenning, capped by a nine-pitcher performance in Sunday’s win over the Dodgers’ one-time Cy Young favorite Walker Buehler.
The Rays must think that’s cute. They moved two of their core three starters — the guys who anchored their rotation to the World Series in 2020 — this past offseason and lost the third to injury. As a result, they’ve had 13 pitchers start a game for them this season, with Shane Mcclanahan the only pitcher with more than 20 starts.
And yet, the Rays keep winning, thanks in large part to the best offense in baseball. They’re holding off the red-hot Yankees and the young, dynamic Red Sox.
It should be noted that Giants’ offense — this past week excluded — has been pretty excellent as well. This past week was a bit of a mess, but the offense certainly came through on Sunday.
That rubber-match Giants win on Sunday Night Baseball was, without a doubt, a shock to the system. Who would have bet on the Giants’ “strength in numbers” pitching model working vs. Buehler in the biggest game of the regular season?
And what’s to say it can’t work on a repeated basis in the playoffs?
While there is, of course, a tremendous amount of risk and volatility in using seven, eight, nine pitchers during a game, there’s also an advantage — serious reward — particularly against other teams playing the Giants’ brand of baseball, which is nearly every one of worth in the National League.
The Rays’ offensive success — which has reached new heights this season — was predicated on a two-lineup approach for the last few years. When a team started a righty, they loaded up their lineup with lefties and vice versa. The Giants have been doing the same thing since Gabe Kapler took over as manager last season.
It’s catching on all around baseball.
Other teams with lesser, but still stark platoon lineups built to beat that day’s opposing starting pitcher? The Brewers and Dodgers.
But what do those teams do when there is no “bulk” pitcher and they’re going to face nine different hurlers?
Surely there’s a computer somewhere that can
figure out the optimal lefty-righty distribution for a lineup when facing a bullpen game, but I’m yet to see it in practice.
And until then, teams that bullpen games have
the upper hand in the chess match that is modern baseball. When the margins are tight, as they will be in September and October, that upper hand is huge.
Add in the rest days that the playoff schedule provides — rest days the Giants haven’t had in weeks (they’re currently in the final series of a 16-in16 stretch) — and there’s
perhaps even more validity in eschewing starting pitchers altogether come the playoffs.
It’s hard to recognize step changes when they are happening. Only in hindsight are they plain and obvious.
What the Rays and Giants are doing right now might just be a quirk. Bullpenning might blow up in the Giants’ face over the next few weeks and
the Rays offense — which strikes out at the secondhighest rate in baseball — could go silent come the playoffs. The fundamentals have won for decades — they might just get the last laugh.
But if the teams with the two best regularseason records in their leagues do meet in the postseason, they’ll do so by winning in a way that’s counter to the established norm. And because this is a copycat league, they’ll usher in a new norm in the process.