Giants find secrets to competing with Dodgers
One hundred and seven wins can do a lot for a ballclub.
For one, it all but guarantees entry to MLB’s postseason.
For the San Francisco Giants, who startled the baseball world with a franchise-best 2021 season that wrested the National League West Division title from the star-studded Los Angeles Dodgers, it also built a foundation of trust and conviction, a nearly blind allegiance to even the most radical ideas passed down from an emboldened front office.
And in a clubhouse where tomorrow’s at-bats are not guaranteed but victory almost certainly is, 107 wins means even the most seasoned players now know what’s possible.
Through two weeks, the 2022 season reveals a new beginning but also a continuation – that an 11-5 record produced by a rotating cast of contributors feels a good bit like last season and, perhaps, like the new normal in San Francisco.
“We knew we were good before the season started,” veteran first baseman Brandon Belt says of the 2021 campaign. “I don’t know who predicted 107 wins – we’d never done that before. I’m not saying we’re going to win that many again, but we’re going to win a lot of baseball games. And I think this goes to show you that it wasn’t a fluke. We’ve got a good team, and we’re here to stay.”
One of the greatest pennant races ever – and the very first postseason meeting between the Giants and Dodgers – ended not with one team atop the heap but rather the protagonists looking an awful lot like the end of a “Rocky” flick, two bloodied fighters holding on for dear life. The Giants won the West on the final day of the season, 107 wins to 106, forcing the Dodgers into the wildcard game, which they won to set up a five-game NL division series.
It was the ultimate Pyrrhic victory – LA won Game 5 only with ace Max Scherzer closing the ninth inning, aided in part by a questionable called third strike on Wilmer Flores. The outing also rendered Scherzer unavailable for the NL championship series, no small reason why the Atlanta Braves are now showing off championship rings with 755 diamonds.
Now, though very early, it’s looking an awful lot like a rerun: The Dodgers are a half-step ahead of the Giants at 11-4 one week away from the teams’ first meeting of the season.
How both got here – and how they stayed – is a good indication of how much influence one executive can have switching places, and how each team is best served to stay at the top.
‘It’s 25 through 40’
Farhan Zaidi’s move from LA to San Francisco was greatly anticipated in baseball circles. His reputation bloomed as Billy Beane’s third-in-command in Oakland, before Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman hired him as his GM in LA. FriedmanZaidi built a monster, the big-bucks dream of sustainability so many arbitrage-seeking executives fantasize about. Their eight-year run of division titles was ended only by Zaidi himself, after he left LA in 2019 to lead the Giants front office.
In less than three seasons, Dodgers North suddenly was as formidable as the original.
“I’ve been a Farhan believer since my time in LA with him,” says Giants starter Alex Wood, who signed up for three more years with the Giants after the club’s pitching brain trust helped him to a career year in 2021. “A lot of the core beliefs, he’s brought over to San Francisco. The biggest difference is, he runs the show now. He can sprinkle his personality and his beliefs into how he wants to compose a roster and a staff and a team in general.
“Friedman used to say, Farhan’s best thing isn’t putting a 25-man roster together. It’s putting together 25 through 40. Back-end roster guys that can step in and become LaMonte Wade, or Max Muncy in LA.”
It was Zaidi who unearthed Muncy and Chris Taylor for the Dodgers, and both remain integral parts of the machine. Friedman and Zaidi also built out the finest player development apparatus in the majors and pulled off a Houdini-like trick of building a top-five farm system despite drafting near the back of the pack every year.
Yet a funny thing has happened since Zaidi left for his native Bay Area: The Dodgers keep burning trade capital and nine-figure salaries on superstars. And Zaidi keeps unearthing gems.
From Mookie Betts (12 years, $365 million) to Trevor Bauer (three years, $102 million) to Freddie Freeman (six years, $162 million), to the trade for Scherzer and Trea Turner, the Dodgers have admirably flexed their spending might to pair with their developmental powerhouse.
Meanwhile, Zaidi turned Wade into “Late Night LaMonte,” a situational ninth-inning hero. Flores and Darin Ruf and Mike Yastrzemski were merely platoon monsters awaiting a perfect situation. A whole pitching rotation worth of arms was burnished.
And this past offseason, we finally saw what Zaidi might do with San Francisco’s not-insignificant resources.
There was no re-signing of Kevin Gausman, who struck out 227 batters last season and received $110 million from the Toronto Blue Jays. Kris Bryant, whose multi-position versatility and affable nature made him a perfect trade deadline fit, wandered to the Colorado Rockies on a $182 million deal. Lefty Robbie Ray, a quintet of franchise shortstops, a true closer all waiting to be had on the market?
Nah – not even after franchise icon Buster Posey announced his retirement.
Instead, Zaidi took Gausman’s money plus a little bit more – $154.35 million, to be exact – and spread it among eight players, including one short-term splurge and nearly an entire pitching rotation.
Lefty Carlos Rodon was the big ticket, getting $42 million for two years. Wood (two years, $25 million) and Anthony DeSclafani (three years, $36 million) were retained in the rotation, with another salty veteran, Alex Cobb (two years, $20 million), filling out the line behind young ace Logan Webb.
Belt accepted an $18.4 million qualifying offer. Joc Pederson received $6 million to continue hammering righthanded pitching. And reclamation projects Jakob Junis ($1.75 million) and Matthew Boyd ($5.2 million, currently rehabbing a shoulder injury) will be heard from before summer’s over.
“I’m sure you could improve any team out there,” says Belt, “but with the chemistry we have and the talent we have, it’s not like we have to go and force something.”
Externally, it was a modest haul, even if the opening-day payroll neared $175 million. To those joining up, San Francisco’s magical development machine was too good to pass up.
“You hear a lot, through friends, teammates who have come through here,” says Cobb, an 11-year veteran who spent the previous five seasons with the Los Angeles Angels and Baltimore Orioles. “You chat, and the constant theme is just how awesome it is here, how everybody loves playing here, the culture here. You see the energy on the team and the expectation to win. I think those things are, as you get to be older, you hit a run there where you’re on a team like Baltimore for a little while and you forget what winning feels like. You wanna feel that feeling again.”
At this point, the special sauce is on the table, its ingredients well known.
Cobb reiterates that the Giants – perhaps even more so than his original Tampa Bay Rays – excel at interpreting strategic information from the front office to the clubhouse: “They, without getting into the details of how they do it, have a really good understanding of how to translate that information and dumb it down for athletes,” he says. “They have a way to bridge that gap.”
Wood believes implicitly in the team’s plans for pitch usage and development, effusive in his praise of pitching director Brian Bannister and pitching coach Andrew Bailey, both veteran pitchers who serve as crucial conduits from analysts to pitchers. Call it pitching and defense or call it “run prevention” or “home run suppression” if you must, but the Giants excel at it all.
The staff recently went 308 consecutive batters without giving up a home run. Webb ran his streak of homerless innings, including playoffs, to 59 1⁄3 innings.
Unsurprisingly, the Dodgers (plus 44) and Giants (plus 37) are 1-2 in run differential, continuing a theme from last year where the clubs fairly lap the field in the game’s most desired virtues.
Wanna know how to build a team? Find guys who can do the following:
• In 2021, Dodgers and Giants hitters ranked 1-2 in lowest chase percentage and 2-5 in zone percentage (joined by the Rays, Houston Astros and New York Yankees).
• Giants and Dodgers pitchers ranked 1-2 in first-strike percentage and were even (50.9%) atop the heap in strike zone percentage. The Giants relatively lagged in whiff rate, so to replace some of what Gausman left behind they snagged Rodon, who ranked fifth in that category (33%).
Control the strike zone on both sides of the ball. Don’t chase. Miss bats. Slug.
“Don’t swing at balls out of the zone,” says Wood. “That’s how you beat the Max Scherzers of the world.” Easy?
Sure, if an entire 40-man roster can be constructed to maximize matchups – and dozens of players are willing to accept the at-bats and innings given them.
That’s where the vibes come in.
‘So much talent in the room’
There are few ecosystems like that of the Giants, where players wear messages on shirts touting mental health, where manager Gabe Kapler espouses newer-age lines of thinking he communicates to players, where third-year coach Alyssa Nakken remains the only uniformed woman on an MLB coaching staff.
This isn’t to suggest the Giants clubhouse is that much different from any other lair occupied by high-performing athletes. Yet in an environment where “best version of yourself” is trotted out and consumed like a pregame spread, 107 wins has a funny way of ensuring buy-in.
“I’ve been on teams that have had superstar players,” says Flores, who played in the 2015 World Series with the New York Mets. “We have some superstar players, but it’s not everybody. You don’t have to have a team full of superstars to win. You need a team full of players who know how to play the game and be willing to do whatever the manager asks you to do.”
For outfielder Austin Slater, that means checking FanGraphs and analyzing other data to see, days out, when his next start against a left-handed starter might arrive.
For Flores, that means a full-time job right now as Evan Longoria returns from finger surgery. His relatively modest .283/.340/.415 slash line belies the fact that he’s one of seven Giants regulars with an adjusted OPS (119) well above the league average. It should go even higher once players on the IL return and Flores is placed in better matchups.
That’s also Kapler’s hope with Pederson, who is off to a smoking start – five homers in 44 at-bats, a 1.133 OPS – after high-profile stints with the Dodgers and Braves.
Kapler wasn’t sure how the pearlwearing, quietly swaggering Pederson would accept spot duty. Pederson has sat out five games already. So far, the boat has not rocked.
“I think he embodies a lot of the characteristics of the team we had last year, a seamless transition from a personality standpoint,” Kapler says. “He has a lot of flare on the field, but in the dugout he’s just so calm. And we all really appreciate that.
“He also knows that from a volume perspective, it’s not such a bad thing to not have every rep. We’re trying to keep our guys healthy and strong throughout the season.”
Pederson is on pace to play 132 games, five under last year’s total and his fewest since a 102-game campaign in 2017. Sunday, after hammering a pair of home runs, he strolled through the Giants clubhouse in Aviators and a FazeClan T-shirt, ever the enigmatic slugger.
He knows what he’s gotten into. So far, it sounds like he likes it.
“There’s so much talent in this room,” says Pederson, who would thrill the Giants if he neared his career-high 39 home runs in 2019. “No one person feels they need to take care of the full job themselves. There’s a lot of trust in the person behind them.”
That brings us back to those 107 wins, and a 23-7 final sprint to ward off the Dodgers. There is data and there is trust and then there is conviction, and perhaps that’s one tool this latest Giants version now possesses.
Collectively, perhaps the “best version of themselves” is yet to come.
“We basically played a month of playoffs. Every game was a must-win,” remembers Flores. “That showed us that the sense of urgency we had, we have it in us. Whenever we want to put the gas on the pedal, we can.
“It was exhausting, mentally. But we did it.”