A GIANT ACHIEVEMENT
San Francisco has the long-term staying power to compete with the Rays
You’re probably waiting for the other shoe to drop, bracing for the floor to fall out on the San Francisco Giants, winners of nine of their past 12 games entering Tuesday night’s game in Texas. You’re likely thinking that the Giants can’t keep up with the Padres and Dodgers in the National League West — that, apples to apples, those teams should roll over San Francisco with their superior talent.
There’s no way these guys are this good, right? I get it. But you’re looking at this all wrong.
This Giants team isn’t a fluke; it’s just misunderstood. You see, at this juncture of Farhan Zaidi’s rebuild, the Giants need to be compared to the best team in baseball.
And that’s not the Dodgers, the Padres, or the White Sox. It’s the Tampa
BayRays.
Yeah, the Rays — the defending American League champions — are still winning a ton of games. They have one more win than the Giants at the start of play Tuesday, giving them the best record in baseball.
And you’d have to be a pretty serious baseball fan to name a single player on their team after they traded Blake Snell to the Padres this past offseason. And no, half-names like “A-rose-a-something” don’t count.
Seriously, can you tell me a single thing about Austin Meadows, who leads Major League Baseball in RBIs?
No, it’s not glamorous to be compared to the Rays with their no-name roster, but the results on the field are worth emulating. Since the start of the 2019 season, Tampa Bay has won 61% of its games with those no-names.
That’s juggernaut status, but because the Rays have a payroll that makes the A’s look like big spenders, they don’t get much respect around baseball. Despite proving, year after year, that they’re one of the best teams in the game, they’re still viewed as a gimmick, a team that’s not to be taken as seriously as the league’s big spenders.
Yes, baseball’s national conversation still equates money with success, but that’s an antiquated way of viewing things. It’s not the 90s anymore. Just ask the Yankees.
Now, this isn’t to say that money doesn’t matter — it can — but in this new era of the game, you can’t chase wins with cash. No, there needs to be a solid foundation first.
So how do the Rays win so many games? What’s that foundation?
They have a big-time talent pipeline. Every few weeks a new future superstar seems to come up from the minor leagues.
The Rays also find gold with second-chance major leaguers. Joey Wendle (138 OPS+) was acquired from the A’s for a player to be named later. Ji-Man Choi (184 OPS+) was in five organizations before joining the Rays. Brett Phillips was a top prospect that two teams decided wasn’t good enough to be an everyday player.
Though perhaps those teams were right about Phillips.
Lucky for him, the Rays don’t really have everyday players. Tampa Bay platoons so much they effectively have two different lineups — an effort to only put hitters in positions to excel.
The Rays are also able to coax the best stuff out of their starting pitchers. The Rays reintroduced the opener to the modern game, and they almost never let starters face a lineup a third time. This allout mentality, paired with an organizational emphasis on pitchers only throwing their best pitches, has produced a 3.41 ERA from starters this year.
Then there’s the analytically minded manager who seems to press all the right buttons.
Does any of this remind you of anyone else?
Yes, the Rays’ formula is the Giants’. (When you look at Zaidi’s resume, it’s hardly surprising.) The only differences are that Tampa Bay has an elite bullpen — the Giants do not — and that the Giants are spending money and have plans to spend even more.
But it shows that spending is a bug and not a feature of winning in baseball. Does the money make building a team easier? Of course. But it doesn’t guarantee wins.
There’s no virtue in being cheap, and there’s certainly value in spending when it comes to building a strong fan base, but whether this is Moneyball version 2.0 or 15.8, teams like Rays and A’s have proven you can win without splashing cash.
And that’s good news for the Giants.
Maybe the Giants spend some of those ballpark bucks at the deadline or in free agency 2022. Or maybe they don’t. But regardless of what they do on that front, the expectation should be to keep winning. Success and spending are two separate concepts. In some places, they meet, like in Los Angeles. In other places, like Tampa Bay, they couldn’t be further apart.
The Giants are somewhere in the middle. They’re flexible. And that makes them dangerous both today and in the future.
For now, though, they should be viewed as more like the Rays than those bigspending teams with big-time expectations.
Of course, San Francisco might not be able to hold off LA or San Diego. Perhaps the money wins out. But the Rays have taught us over the last few years, there’s no inevitability to such a fate. And that when you remember that, it’s almost impossible to be pessimistic about this Giants season.
It simply doesn’t matter how this team was built — it’s a good one, and that’s the only thing that matters. So stop holding your breath and waiting for the worst, Giants fans — you might just miss the good stuff.