SF Giants HQ: Giants Torture is definitely back, an unconventional pitching strategy and more

The first week of a baseball season is prime time for overreactions.

It’s when small sample sizes cloud our judgment, when a handful of players and teams look far better or worse than they actually are and when our excitement has a habit of getting the best of us.

I try to avoid writing big-picture takeaways this early in the year, but four games into the 2021 season, I feel confident in asserting one thing: Giants Torture is back.

It’s not the same kind of torture the Giants put their fans through in 2010, when Brian Wilson was testing heartbeats and San Francisco was streaking through the postseason. But there are some similarities.

This year’s Giants team may not make a surprise run toward a National League West crown and may even have trouble hanging on in the wildcard race, but when it comes to locking down a game in the late innings, there are going to be some torturous moments.

In just his second game as the Giants’ de-facto closer, lefty Jake McGee had no idea where half of his fastballs were headed. He couldn’t locate against Manny Machado, hit Eric Hosmer and then fell behind in the count against Tommy Pham.

The ninth inning looked as if it was going to unravel for McGee, but he bounced back by getting Pham to fly out to center field, stranding the tying run at second base while securing a one-run Giants win. And to beat the Padres, the Dodgers and many of the other talented National League clubs this year, the Giants are probably going to need to shut the door at the end of a lot of games in which they’ve built narrow leads.

As Giants fans have already learned, the 2021 team is bound to be shaky defensively, streaky at the plate and suspect at times in the bullpen. They’re bound to be entertaining, but they’ll also be frustrating. They’ll compete with the Padres and Dodgers, and then lose to the D’backs and Rockies.

It’s a long season, and the Giants will have to earn every out. Expect this club to test your patience.

Manager’s corner

Not every substitution is going to work in the Giants’ favor this year.

Sometimes, a manager swings and misses too, but in his brief Giants tenure, Kapler has had his fair share of hits.

On Monday against San Diego, he found the right time to insert pinch-hitter Mike Yastrzemski, who drilled a 2-0 pitch from Padres reliever Craig Stammen over the center field wall to power the Giants to a 3-2 win.

Yastrzemski, one of the Giants’ only everyday players, was scratched from the lineup pregame as he felt some inflammation in the left wrist that was hit by a pitch in the team’s final exhibition game a week ago. Instead of taking the full day off, Yastrzemski took batting practice in front of Kapler and the Giants coaches, who recognized he could still provide the team with a lift in the right spot off the bench.

With the game tied in the seventh inning, Kapler made his move.

“We made the decision that we would evaluate him right up to game time, but if we had a big spot for him, we’d use him to hit but we wouldn’t double switch him into the game so he would have to play defense,” Kapler explained. “In short, we had a good pinch-hit spot for him where that’s all he had to do.”

All Yastrzemski did was deliver the game-winning home run.

The Giants’ other subs on Monday didn’t fare as well. With a runner in scoring position in the late innings, Brandon Belt struck out. With two at-bats in place of left fielder Darin Ruf, who homered and walked, Alex Dickerson went 0-for-2. Tommy La Stella, who was signed to aid the Giants against right-handed pitchers, entered in the ninth inning and hit a weak lineout.

Things didn’t go as planned for every player, but the Giants can live with that. They know even a favorable matchup won’t always lead to favorable results, but the more they opportunities they create, the more chances they’ll have to use difference-makers at the right time.

“We’ve got a ton of talent on our bench, which not too many teams are lucky to have,” Yastrzemski said postgame. “I think that’s a weapon.”

Statcast Study

For much of spring training, Kapler and his staff harped on pace of play with their pitchers, asking them to work quickly, fill up the zone with strikes and “win time of possession.”

In other words, the Giants want to speed up the game on defense and slow things down on offense so they can grind down opposing starters, forcing them to throw a lot of pitches.

For all the emphasis the Giants place on working fast, their opening weekend series in Seattle was slow. At least from a velocity standpoint.

Only 5% of pitches thrown by the Giants in their three-game series in Seattle registered at 95 miles per hour or above on the radar gun, which marked the fifth lowest percentage of any staff in the majors this weekend. Only one team, the Baltimore Orioles, threw a higher percentage of changeups than the Giants, as they accounted for 16.9% of San Francisco’s pitches against Seattle.

Some of the early-season stats are skewed because no team has had each member of its rotation start a game yet, but it’s clear the Giants want to separate themselves from some of the other teams around the league. More than 25% of all pitches thrown across the majors during the first weekend of the season topped 95 miles per hour, but aside from left-hander Wandy Peralta and a few four-seamers from Kevin Gausman and Reyes Moronta, the Giants didn’t contribute much to that total.

Meanwhile, 46.9% of the pitches the Giants threw against the Mariners were 85 miles per hour or slower, which was far and away the highest share of low-velocity pitches around the majors. The Cardinals, who had 38.7% of their pitches register at 85 miles per hour or slower, ranked second.

No starter threw more changeups than Logan Webb, who mixed in 35 against the Mariners, while only a handful of others topped the 29 Johnny Cueto tallied. Righties Anthony DeSclafani and Aaron Sanchez aren’t as changeup-reliant as the pitchers ahead of them in the Giants’ rotation, but it will be intriguing to see how much Kapler and the coaching staff emphasize off-speed or breaking pitches with the veterans as the season evolves.

What does all of this mean? It’s too early in the season for grand takeaways, but for a Giants staff that’s determined to speed up, slowing down appears to be the primary way they’re attempting to achieve that goal.