Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Something people don't mention about why the Giants offense stinks

I was looking at ESPN.com today and noticed that, according to the website, the Giants player with the higher batting average is .242. Of course, that's absurd. Pablo Sandoval has an average floating around .300 right now. But ESPN was listing the player with the highest batting average on the team who has enough plate appearances to qualify for consideration for the batting title. According to official stats, a player needs to have 3.1 plate appearances for each game the team has played to qualify for the batting title. According to this measure, the Giants only have two players who qualify for the batting title: Tejada and Aubrey Huff (who is hitting a miserable .232).

This seemed pretty low, so I decided to compare to other teams in MLB. The problem is that the AL has the DH, which means that one player is receiving most of the plate appearances for that slot in the lineup while the NL has plate appearances divied out among the five starting pitchers. So, you could subtract out one qualifying player from AL teams to make them equal to NL teams. After doing that, there is only one other team as pathetic as the Giants and that is the Minnesota Twins. Every other team has at least four players who qualify for the batting title.

There are some issues that might explain why the Giants have so few players receiving enough plate appearances to qualify. One is that the whole offense is bad so players have fewer plate appearances. Another is that Bruce Bochy makes ample use of his bench and platoons players a lot because the team isn't that good. Both of these are good reasons (the latter is probably the reason why Nate Schierholtz doesn't qualify as he platooned a lot up until lately). But, I think the real reason is that the Giants have been beset by injuries and no one really talks about it. Buster Posey and Freddy Sanchez are out indefinitely. Cody Ross, Andres Torres, and Pablo Sandoval all have missed at least 20 games this season with leg injuries. Mark DeRosa has been out with a wrist injury. Bill Hall was brought in to replace Freddy Sanchez and got hurt immediately. Oh, and Mike Fontenot has been out a number of games as well. This is compounded by their top prospect, Brandon Belt, having a wrist injury for about 6 weeks or so.

The Posey and Sanchez injuries are particular tough because they were both hitting in the .280s at the top of the order. (I know, batting average isn't the best measure. They are fifth and seventh on the team in OPS.)  It's not that the Giants were built with a bad offense. It's more that they have been savaged by injuries. Thankfully, the Giants have incredible pitching again this year to buoy the team which is why they are 15 games over .500. (Although, it is fun for ESPN and SI to just say, "The Giants offense stinks!" without mentioning that it's because half their lineup should be playing for the AAA Fresno Grizzlies.)

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