Remember May 1st? I don’t. But on that date, I wrote this about March & April:
The Giants were not a good baseball team, which doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be a bad baseball team going forward. Nobody wants to root for a bad team anyway.
That was the start of a post that looked at some of the fun/not fun stats from a bad first month of the season. Look at that language! Reader, I am an eternal pessimist, and the Giants have been so bad for so long (sorry, 2021 team!) that my default expectation for them is to come off more like a 100-loss team every season than a successful one, and it’s a belief that’s served me well. But sometimes, I have to pretend that We Can’t Predict Baseball just to conjure a thesis and compose an article about this increasingly putrid organization. This was one of those times.
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And yet, here we are, midway through July, a hopeless 66 games ahead of us. There are plenty of numbers to look at to explain how we arrived at this bleak place, but in putting the post together, I was surprised to find one positive worth examining. So, let’s start there before getting into all the obviously bad stuff.
Hitting
I spent some time gushing about Luis Arraez yesterday as he’s the only plausible MVP case on the Giants’ roster here in 2026, but for the purposes of examining the team’s numbers from the first part of the season, it’s basically just Luis Arraez. He’s the 8th-most valuable player in Major League Baseball mainly because of his defense, yes, but his .330 batting average is second only to former Giant Otto Lopez (.334), the same 1-2 as the MLB Hits leaderboard (Lopez: 127, Arraez: 119); plus, his 4% strikeout rate is the lowest in the sport (Nico Hoerner is second with 7.9%). His 7 triples trail only Corbin Carroll. His 87 singles are #1 in MLB and he’s 20th in doubles.
While he probably won’t stay at 127 wRC+, I’ll take the opportunity to list all the Giants who’ve hit that or better since 2017 (min. 200 PA):
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Rafael Devers wound up with a 135 wRC+ between the Red Sox and Giants, but specifically with the Giants he hit to a 126 wRC+. Yes, this is an arbitrary cutoff line, and it’s not as though Arraez is one of the top-top hitters (36th), but I declare this season of his to be fun!
Meanwhile, the Giants have scored the second-fewest runs in the National League (395 to San Diego’s 379). They have the sixth-lowest total in the sport just ahead of this weekend’s opponent, the Seattle Mariners (392).
The team’s walk rate has inched up to 6.7%. Still worst in the sport, but they have the sixth-best strikeout rate (20.6%), trailing the Cardinals (20.5%), Dodgers (20.3%), Diamondbacks (19.6%), Blue Jays (19.6%) and Rays (18.9%). And it’s not like they’re just hitting a bunch of singles. Their team ISO of .164 is 9th in MLB, 5th in the NL. The 106 homers is a mere 21st, but they’re tied for 1st with the Rockies in doubles (179) and tied for 2nd with the Diamondbacks in triples (21). Fun!
They’ve also managed to do okay avoiding the double play, with just 58 grounded into so far (14th in MLB). Knock out 2020 (51 GIDP), and these 2026 Giants are on pace for the fewest GIDPs by a Giants team since 2017. Last year, they hit into just 103, which is the fewest of the Oracle Park era when you remove 2020. The 2001 team is 2nd-best with 108. They’ve come a long way since Casey McGehee. Fun!
And after Willy Adames ended a decades-long drought of a 30-home run hitter in the lineup, the team looks like it could have two or (if Adames gets really hot in the final two months) even three 30-home run dudes in the lineup. Devers and Schmitt already have 19 and Adames has 15. It was at this exact point last season that he went on his tear, hitting .232/.335/.494 (.828 OPS) with 18 homers over his final 64 games. Fun!
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Pitching
As I’ve said before, I tend to ignore Baseball Reference’s Wins Above Replacement in favor of FanGraphs’ fWAR (since FanGraphs contributors are hired by MLB teams more frequently), but every so often, rWAR will stick out to me. For instance, the Giants have 16 pitchers with negative rWARs. Yes, among those are Christian Koss (-0.1) and Buddy Kennedy (-0.1) , but even taking them out of the picture leaves us with 14 pitchers, which I’d say is a lot.
The total value is -3.8 wins above replacement. I’ll be that guy and do this: +4 wins for the Giants is 45-51. That would put them 6.5/7 games back of a Wild Card, sure, but it would’ve saved everyone a lot of embarrassment. Still, this is where the rWAR vs. fWAR is meaningful. I don’t think the Giants are four wins short because of the pitching staff. I think the negative values given to the position players or, like, Spencer Bivens is sort of not worth examining and I’m not sure that Houser, Mahle, and McDonald add up to -0.9 wins. That’s 1.2 rWAR right there.
For comparison, FanGraphs has only 6 pitchers with negative values: Matt Gage (-0.8 fwAR), Ryan Walker (-0.3), Reiver Sanmartin (-0.3), Jose Butto (-0.2), Ryan Borucki (-0.1), and Carson Seymour (-0.1). That’s about 2 wins lost to relief pitching, which would be 43-53 and seems a bit more correct if we’re just looking at which model can best help us diagnose the problem. The starting pitching has been top heavy (Landen Roupp @ +2.1 fWAR, Logan Webb @ 1.9), but the rest basically replacement level, and that feels more correct.
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Having said that, the Baseball Reference numbers sent me to Stathead to conduct this search: how many teams in the San Francisco era have featured a sub-replacement pitching staff? The current Giants’ staff is at 2.2 rWAR, and maybe thanks to Logan Webb alone they might manage to stay in the positive, but I was curious. Unfortunately, the only two results that came up were 1996 (-2.3) and 1995 (-10.4). So, I expanded the scope a bit to see which teams had below 5 wins above replacement in value. That list was a bit more illustrative. 9 teams registered:
9. 1992, +4.9
8. 1994, +4.5
7. 2013, +4.1
6. 1991, +3.8
5. 1997, +2.4
4. 2026, +2.2
3. 2020, +2.0
2. 1996, -2.3
1. 1995, -10.4 rWAR
Just one winning team in the bunch and all pretty (in)famous teams to some degree. That 2020 might’ve been something had there been some good in the bullpen. That got corrected for 2021.
Now, contrast this with FanGraphs’ bottom 9 of the San Francisco era:
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9. 2013, +7.1
8. 1991, +6.9
7. 1984, +6.3
6. 1994, +6.1
5. 1979, +5.8
4. 2026, +5.4
3. 1996, +4.7
2. 2020, +3.8
1. 1995, +2.2
Okay, so, some actual agreement between the systems here. The four worst pitching staffs in San Francisco Giants history were in 1995, 2020, 1996, and 2026, with the only real controversy being 2020 vs. 1996. But at the end of the day, Zack & Buster’s Pitching Staff has been a top-5 worst of the San Francisco era. Fun!(?)
Fielding
The Giants wound up one of the worst fielding teams in the sport. They have the distinction of being “first worst,” as their -6 Outs Above Average (18th in MLB) trails Houston’s +0. They’re followed by an eclectic mix of teams — Nationals (-8), Rockies (-10), Pirates (-11), Rays (-11), Phillies (-15)… Tigers (-19), Twins (-19)… Mariners (-30; yes, they’re dead last) — so, maybe Outs Above Average isn’t the best measure? Or, defense hasn’t been the deciding factor in team success this year… unless you’re the Mariners?
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They were particularly bad (-12) against left-handed batters, which makes sense because of (1) Oracle Park and (2) Jung Hoo Lee, who is -2 in right field but -6 in Fielding Run Value overall thanks to also being -2 in CF.
And, to be clear, it is the outfield that’s hurt them, especially in left field (-8, 29th in MLB). On the infield, they’re +5 Outs Above Average (13th in MLB), and even there, the number has been dragged down by Willy Adames (-12) and first base (-2).
Okay, I’ve taken a break from gushing about Luis Arraez, but now it’s back to the gushing. His +10 Outs Above Average is 6th-best in the sport of any position. He’s 11th in terms of Fielding Run Value, which Statcast defines:
Fielding Run Value is Statcast’s metric for capturing a player’s measurable defensive performance by converting all of Statcast’s individual defensive metrics from different scales onto the same run-based scale, which can then be read as a player being worth X runs above or Y runs below average. Currently, the conversions for those metrics are as follows. (Unless otherwise noted, all metrics are available since 2016.)
How to read it: In 2024, Andrés Giménez had a Fielding Run Value of +17 runs, which came from 14 runs on range and 3 runs via his involvement in double plays, making him the most valuable defender in baseball among non-catchers that season.
Matt Chapman still checks in 40th on the Fielding Run Value list at +5. His +4 Outs Above Average ranks 55th.
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Regrettably, Willy Adames is in the bottom 3 of Outs Above Average (-11), behind Junior Caminero (-13) and CJ Abrams (-11). Moving Adames off of shortstop as soon as they trade Luis Arraez is probably the move, even if doing something like that in-season is tricky/inadvisable.
And the less said about Heliot Ramos’s defense (-2 Outs Above Average & -3.6 Defensive Runs Above Average in 58 games), the better. Yikes. He’ll need to hit like he did in 2024 — 20% better than the league average — to be a valuable player. Fun!(?)
It hasn’t gone well and what’s a little amusing about the whole situation is that it was entirely predictable. Sometimes, it’s fun to predict outcomes and be right, regardless of if it’s a positive or negative outcome. But bad bullpens are really hard to watch. And the team’s continuing inability to develop pitching prospects at a useful rate has really added insult to injury. Oh well.
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