You don’t want to hear it, but it’s early. The best way to remember this is to check in with a team that isn’t the Giants. In my head, the Mets were 5-13 and about to fire their manager. Turns out they’ve been on fire lately? Good for them. And if the Giants do the same thing over the next week or two, fans of other teams would be bemused, not confused.
You, however, have watched the 2024 Giants. You would be confused. You’ve seen how they’ve struggled to score runs, and it makes perfect sense to you. You’re not expecting a lot of miracles. Nor should you.
But not all struggles are created equal. Some of them you can brush off, and some of them should worry you. Here’s a ranking of these struggles in order of “least concerning” to “most concerning.” The statistics are batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage, and they’re as of the start of Thursday’s game. Forgive me if one of the hitters has a four-homer game on Thursday night.
7. Nick Ahmed — .268/.317/.339
He’s literally Nick Ahmed. This is fine. This is great. If he keeps this up, he’s a one- or two-win player. If he can work in a couple doubles or walks, that will temper the regression that will inevitably come when his seeing-eye grounders stop sneaking through the infield. My guess is that a .650 OPS is the Mendoza Line when it comes to complaining about Ahmed and advocating for a Marco Luciano call-up. Ahmed’s over that line for the moment. And that’s fine.
6. Tom Murphy — .100/.217/.150
A backup catcher with 23 plate appearances. He’s probably OK. Don’t forget that he was the Giants’ hottest hitter for a large part of the spring. If you’re worrying about the struggles of a part-time player with two dozen plate appearances, consider obsessing over a different sport. That’s not meant to be mean, dismissive or snarky — seriously, if a small-sample struggle like this bothers you, baseball is going to kill you.
If you’re worried about Murphy, you’re worried about his ability to avoid the IL, not what he does with 23 PA.
Since the fifth game of the season, Chapman has hit .179/.220/.339, with two walks and 16 strikeouts in 59 PA. That’s a pitcher. That’s Mike Krukow’s career batting line with a couple extra homers.
But the five games before that count. They happened! Nobody likes a cherry picker, except maybe cherry farmers, and people with cherry trees on their property, and I guess PG&E needs them to do their work, but we’re talking about statistical cherry-picking. Don’t do that. With the first five games of the season, Chapman has a less un-respectable line of .208/.256/.416. It’s still not great.
It would appear that Chapman is back on his nonsense, which means that he’s simultaneously a) someone who makes some of the hardest contact in Major League Baseball, which means he’s better than almost anyone alive at hitting line drives and b) someone who’s usually just a slump away from the Mendoza Line.
Matt Chapman is still hitting the ball very hard. He’s also still struggling to hit better than .200. (Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
The difference so far is that Chapman is chasing more pitches out of the strike zone than ever. He has a 36th-percentile chase rate so far, which is down from a 94th-percentile rate last season and a 98th-percentile chase rate (!) in 2022.
My guess is that he’s pressing with a new team, especially one that’s struggling to score runs. He’s also trying to hit well enough to become a free agent again and make a lot of clams. The strike zone starts to look bigger, I’d imagine. For now, Chapman is hitting the ball as hard as ever, but also chasing more than ever. I’ll take that over him making weak contact with his typical discipline, as the chase rate seems likelier to even out.
This is in 18 at-bats. Eighteen at-bats. If Slater goes 2-for-3 with a home run and a walk on Thursday night, his OPS nearly doubles. Unlike the other Giants, he’s swinging at the meatballs, so it’s probably just a matter of time until he does what he’s supposed to against left-handers.
The real worry about Slater is his health, just like always. He’s had a .773 OPS (115 OPS+) since the start of 2020, with contributions on the basepaths and in the field (when he plays a corner spot), so if his surgically repaired elbow is fine, he should be that player again. If Luis Matos was dominating the Pacific Coast League, there might be a conversation to have about how to make room, but that’s not happening right now.
The injury history puts him comfortably above Chapman on the worry rankings, and Slater wouldn’t be the first 31-year-old fourth-outfielder to collapse suddenly. But he’s contributed to varying degrees in each of the past four seasons. Maybe give him another 18 (or 180) at-bats before you feed him to the sea lions.
Flores is the anti-Chapman in some respects. He constantly hits the ball softer than his peers, but he typically gets more hits than the average player. His exit velocities are much, much closer to all-glove, no-hit players like Myles Straw than most of the 20-homer players around baseball, but he’s been doing it for a while, so he’s clearly doing something that works.
Just not this year. He’s now in the bottom 10 in exit velocity, which is even worse than before, and almost every hitter in baseball has hit a ball harder than him this season. He’s still making a lot more contact than the typical batter, but he’s also chasing more than normal. He’s a blistering series away from getting his numbers all the way back to his career averages, and he’s a hot month away from getting them back to his excellent line from last season. According to a quick search, I used the term “sample size” five times last April, and I’ve used it only four times this April. So I get one more.
Sample size? Probably. It’s the exit velocity that gives me concern; Flores already had a lower margin for error than most hitters.
For a few years now, most of the Giants hitters have had a similar profile, regardless if they’re producing or not. Focus on the pitches in the zone and swing hard. Spit on the pitches that aren’t in the zone, because they’re not worth swinging hard at. It’s what Buster Posey was doing during his All-Star seasons, and it’s what Mike Tauchman was doing when he was sent down to Triple A for the rest of the 2021 season. The Giants have a type.
Estrada is the exception. He swings at more pitches out of the strike zone than almost any hitter in baseball, which isn’t great, but he makes things even worse by swinging at fewer pitches in the strike zone than the average hitter. This isn’t just a fluke; he had the same profile last year. He’s never been an exit-velocity champion — although he’s merely below-average this season, instead of close to the bottom of the league, like last season — so good swing decisions are going to be how he helps an offense. Unless something changes, though, there are no guarantees that he’ll make those good swing decisions.
If the weakest link in a lineup is an excellent defensive middle infielder who runs well and hits the occasional home run, that lineup is probably a very good one. So don’t confuse these concerns with a larger conversation about Estrada’s overall value. But this is a ranking of the hitters you should worry about the most, and it’s very possible that what you see is what you get with Estrada. He’s a lot more Paul DeJong than Paul Molitor, and that’ll stick out even more when the rest of the lineup is struggling around him.
It’s not looking great.
As a reminder, Yastrzemski hit .241/.327/.462 (115 OPS+) in his Giants career before this season. Even if you ignore the short-season numbers from 2020, he’s hit for power, run the bases well and been one of the better defensive right fielders in the league in a ballpark that punishes even average defensive right fielders. He has been a Good Giant™, regardless if you remember him striking out with runners on base more than actually getting a hit.
He’s still looking for his first extra-base hit of the season. The good news is that he’s had a streak of games without an extra-base hit this long before. The bad news is that it came in his final eight games of last season, which means that he’s played in 21 straight games without an extra-base hit. The really bad news is that just about every batted-ball statistic is trending in the wrong direction by a bunch. Small sample, small sample, small sample, but it’s not nothing that he didn’t hit a homer in spring training, either.
It’s too early to say he’s cooked. We have 554 games and 2,107 plate appearances worth of evidence to suggest Mike Yastrzemski helps his baseball team win. We have 13 games and 39 PA worth of evidence that suggest he’s no longer capable of helping a baseball team. When in doubt, go with the thousands of data points over the dozens.
It’s not too early to put him atop of the Worry Power Rankings, though. A hot streak gets him back to his old numbers in a hurry. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be concerned, though.
(Top photo of Yastrzemski after a strikeout: Eric Risberg / Associated Press)
