Giants takeaways: Bullpen mystery box, avoiding the gravitational pull of .500 and more

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Then, over the weekend, they looked like the worst version of themselves, giving up runs in bunches, losing hitters in 0-2 counts and flailing at pitches outside of the strike zone. Beyond the poor play, there was also a sense that the baseball gods were mooning the Giants, as well. The Orioles kept winning ABS challenges by a third of an inch, while the Giants were out of challenges by the middle of the game because they kept losing them by a third of an inch. The Orioles’ flares fell in, and the Giants’ hard-hit balls started double plays. That kind of luck wasn’t the difference in the games, but it was a rancid cherry on top of the sundae, your boss saying “and your dog’s ugly, too” after he fires you. A little something to make you feel worse as you can’t fall asleep. Thoughts on a series loss to an Orioles team that really needs to pick different colors. The first time I was in a high school chemistry class, with actual Bunsen burners and vials of strange liquids, I knew that I would eventually do something very, very stupid. I didn’t know exactly what, mostly because I didn’t know what any of the stuff actually did. I just knew that I was going to do something for laughs that might start a large fire or create mustard gas. It was simply my nature. Which brings us to the Giants’ bullpen and how it’s being deployed. It’s a bit of a science experiment, and fires will get started. They’re not doing it for teenaged yuks, though, they’re doing it for science. They, too, are accidentally creating mustard gas, but it’s in the spirit of discovery. Tony Vitello and the front office are experimenting with different pitchers in different roles, and they’re bending, if not breaking, traditional roles to do it. Ryan Walker is both a closer and a middle-inning guy, depending on the need, which makes him the unsettling bullpen equivalent of an old SNL gag. Erik Miller is the only reliever whose usage looks semi-familiar, as he’s only been seen from the seventh inning on, but even that’s not entirely normal. He’s expected to be an “eighth-inning guy”, if not exactly the eighth-inning guy, but the Giants haven’t given anyone a lot of opportunities to protect a lead late and close. Here’s how far the Giants have been ahead or behind at the start of the eighth inning in every game. That’s a minus-15 overall, which confirms your suspicions that the Giants have been “bad” and “hard to watch” for most of this season. They’re not even losing the close games in the eighth or winning dramatically in the ninth. The last couple of innings of Giants games this season have been like watching dry paint, which is different than watching paint dry. At least with paint drying, you get some kind of transformation, some kind of narrative arc. This is just the dry paint. You know what’s going to happen. Regardless of the aesthetics, it’s just a reminder that the bullpen usage might seem even weirder because there haven’t been a lot of traditionally close save situations for the Giants, for better and (more often) worse. That doesn’t entirely explain away the mystery box that has been the Giants’ bullpen, though. It’s still hard to know who the most trusted … anybody … is on any given day, and maybe that’s for the best. Maybe that’s for the manager to know and us to find out. When it works, it looks like bullpen optimization at its finest: Every pitcher willing, capable and ready to pitch in the scientifically determined spot of maximum advantage, wherever that might be. You don’t want your seventh-inning guy to face Bryce Harper in the seventh; you want the pitcher who is likeliest to prevent runs from scoring in that inning, however it happens and whomever it might be. When it doesn’t work, though, hoo boy, you can see the mushroom cloud from the next high school over, and it doesn’t look great. It was an easy problem to spot from the beginning. You wonder why it was allowed to happen in the first place. This is not a compliment or a slight. It’s not backhanded criticism or anything like that. This is me pointing at a pencil and saying, “That’s a pencil.” Houser’s three starts so far: Game 1: 5 1/3 innings, 1 ER, 1 BB, 4 K Game 2: 6 innings, 4 ER, 2 BB, 3 K Game 3: 4 2/3 innings, 4 ER, 2 BB, 3 K When a team is signing a pitcher like Houser, they are signing a pitcher who can give you one of three kinds of starts. These are those three kinds of starts. There’s the pretty good one, where the hard stuff is hitting the corners and the soft stuff is missing bats. Then there’s the yeoman’s effort, the one where he keeps the team close enough to have a chance. And then there’s the one where he doesn’t pitch out of the fifth inning. Choose your path, fifth starter. The specific details of some of these games don’t exactly support that narrative (the defense let him down in his first start, and there was plenty of soft contact in Sunday’s start), but this is the sort of variety the Giants signed up for. And it could work, too, if the team could hit consistently. The Giants haven’t had one of those extended offensive hot streaks yet, where a couple of different guys are in a groove at the same time, and it doesn’t matter who’s hitting behind them, because they’re hot too. And while it seems like fantasy from here, I can almost guarantee that one of these is coming. Why? Because if you add a couple of those impressive, short-lived streaks to this team, you get a .500 team, which is truly their final form. While this is going on, Houser will make so much sense. If that reads like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin, you’re not wrong. But I believe in this team’s ability to get back to .500 and hover just above and just below for most of the season. The first rule of a .500 team is that when it works, it looks like they should be even better, which is why the under-.500 periods are such a drag. Keep the faith. It’s still April, of course, and if you’re shoving those .500 remarks up my nose in September, I’ll be having too much fun writing to notice. There are still paths that lead to the postseason, and they offered glimpses of some this weekend. An exciting part of every successful team’s season is the out-of-nowhere player, but this isn’t a phenomenon the Giants have enjoyed very often lately. After Mike Yastrzemski in 2019 and just about everyone in 2021, the Giants’ most surprising contributors have been players with previous success elsewhere — players like Wilmer Flores, Carlos Rodón or Alex Cobb. Outside of Tyler Fitzgerald, they haven’t been getting their surprising performances from inside the organization. They certainly haven’t been getting transformative seasons like Andres Torres in 2010 or Pablo Sandoval in 2018. That’s partly because the Giants have been stuck in quicksand for a few seasons now, and partly because those kinds of players typically don’t show up for any teams, save for the Brewers and maybe the Rays. Over the weekend, however, the Giants offered the following: • Landen Roupp lowered his ERA to 3.24 and looked good doing it. He’s not getting outs with smoke and mirrors, but smoke and curveballs, and it makes a lot of sense when it’s working. • Casey Schmitt is on a torrid stretch, raising his OPS from .449 to 1.008 in the span of five games. • Daniel Susac went 1-for-3 and lowered his batting average by 142 points. There are other possibilities, ranging from Bryce Eldridge to Jesús Rodríguez to anyone else you’re high on. The Giants are almost certainly going to be sucked into the gravitational pull of .500 throughout the season, and the only way they’re going to escape is if some of these players inspire articles from FanGraphs or MLB.com with headlines like, “How is Player X Doing Good Baseball Things?” The articles will make you think and challenge assumptions and leave you with hope. Right now, they don’t exist because we’re still in the part of a season where an OPS can go from .449 to 1.008 in five games. If the Giants are going to be better than expected, though, they’ll inspire plenty of those articles, and players like Roupp or Schmitt keeping up their recent performances will go a long, long way. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Grant Brisbee is a senior writer for The Athletic, covering the San Francisco Giants. Grant has written about the Giants since 2003 and covered Major League Baseball for SB Nation from 2011 to 2019. He is a two-time recipient of the SABR Analytics Research Award. Follow Grant on Twitter @GrantBrisbee