The Giants are getting into hitter's counts, but they aren't cashing in on them

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The inability to make pitchers work has downstream effects for the rest of the game, getting the opposing team’s high-leverage relievers into clean, comfortable innings, which complicates their task even more. It’s a strange development, but I can make it stranger. The Giants don’t walk a lot, but they see more pitches when ahead in the count than almost any other team in baseball. That’s right, only the Marlins and Tigers have been better this season at working a hitter’s count. Not even Dodgers hitters see a higher percentage of pitches with count leverage. The Giants are doing one part of hitting exactly right. They’re working the count to their advantage, forcing the pitcher to come into the strike zone. And that’s exactly what happens. The Giants are second in pitches seen in the strike zone, first in the National League. Before you say, “they see pitches in the middle of the plate because pitchers aren’t scared of them,” there’s a helpful twist to address that. The Dodgers have seen 30 percent of their pitches in the strike zone — just .1 less than the Giants. Teams are certainly scared to pitch to the Dodgers, but they eventually have to come into them once they lose count leverage. The Giants are doing the same thing to pitchers, and they’re getting the same pitches. And then everything falls into the toilet. The Giants are hitting .277 with a .425 slugging percentage on pitches in the strike zone. The Dodgers are hitting .331 with a .584 slugging percentage on those same pitches. If you want to figure out why the Giants have had such an erratic and disappointing offensive season so far, don’t look at what happens when they get behind in the count. Everyone’s bad when they’re hitting from behind. Look at what they do when they’re hitting while ahead. Let’s go through some of the different counts of interest. This isn’t “ahead” in the count, but it’s a good one to explore, just to get a baseline for what the Giants are doing on the first pitch of an at-bat, especially relative to the rest of the league. The Giants are swinging at about a quarter of the first pitches they see, which is pretty close to the league average. They’re not doing great relative to the rest of the league, but they’re not absolutely terrible, like the Orioles have been. It’s worth noting that this is one of the counts where the team’s bat speed drops below 70 mph, and there aren’t many of them. Luis Arraez’s artisanal bat speed will often mess with team stats like this, but it’s still worth noting. If you think of bat speed as a proxy of “getting your best swing off,” the Giants aren’t doing it on the first pitch of an at-bat. Here’s where it gets weird and ugly. The Giants have worked their way into a 1-0 count in 10.1 percent of their at-bats. And, will you look at that, the Dodgers are being helpful again by coming in exactly .1 percentage point behind. Both teams are seeing an almost identical percentage of pitches in a 1-0 count. This should help the Giants. It should be a good thing that they get ahead in so many counts. And then everything falls into the toilet, gets stuck and somehow catches on fire (?) as everyone gasps in horror. The Giants, as a team, have taken 79 swings on pitches down the middle on 1-0 counts, and they have a .254 wOBA on those swings. For the sake of comparison, the Diamondbacks have an .866 wOBA, and they’re hitting .625 with a 1.417 slugging percentage on pitches down the middle in a 1-0 count. They’ve seen 97 pitches in the heart of the plate in a 1-0 count, swung at 59 of them and have been very happy with the results. Once again, the Giants’ bat speed dips below 70 percent. It’s almost as if the Giants are having trouble with the counts that have some ambiguity, where they might get a pitch to hit, but it’s harder to sit on one pitch, one location than it would be in a 3-1 count, for example. It brings to mind the Shakespeare quote, “If you choose not to decide/you still have made a choice” (Perm. Waves 1.2-1:10-1:15). We’ll see if that theory holds up when we get to the unambiguous counts. The Giants are never going to be atop swing-speed and exit-velocity leaderboards with Arraez and Jung Hoo Lee getting so many at-bats, but even compared to themselves they swing slower. More tentatively, you might say. Again, this is on a 1-0 count, when they have the advantage. You should hope this gets better with 2-0 counts. They do damage. Their bat speed goes up. It helps here that Arraez almost never sees a 2-0 count, which removes his artisanal bat speed from the sample. The Dodgers continue to be cheeky — I’m imagining a cartoon rabbit running backward as it taunts the tortoise in a race — by having eerily similar numbers to the Giants when it comes to these specific counts. Of the pitches the Giants have seen, 3.4 percent of them have come in a 2-0 count, compared to the Dodgers at 3.5 percent. Both teams clobber the ball in these situations. The Giants hit .333 with a .667 slugging percentage, and the Dodgers hit .368 with a .737 slugging percentage. These are the counts hitters live for, and the Giants are executing in them. If you’re wondering why I keep bringing the Dodgers into this, it’s simple: They’re a familiar stand-in as “the best lineup in baseball.” They’re currently a few runs behind the Braves, but let them represent a lineup that works about as well as you can hope. And it’s useful to find situations like this, where the Giants are acting normal. Once they get the count firmly in their favor, they turn into the lineup they were supposed to. Add another strike to that 2-0 count, though, and now you’ve got ambiguity. I have a hunch. Just like that, the Giants are awful again, with a .276 wOBA on pitches in a 2-1 count, the worst in the NL. They should have the advantage. They worked hard to get there. And then … woof. It gets even more repugnant when you control just for pitches down the middle, what Baseball Savant terms the “heart” of the plate. These are the meatballs, folks, and they’re simply not spicy enough. The Giants have seen 79 pitches down the middle and swung at 65 of them. They’re hitting .250 with a .306 slugging percentage on those pitches. That’s awful. No other adjective for it. The Dodgers, of course, are hitting .455 with a .758 slugging percentage because that’s what good teams do with pitches down the middle. The league as a whole doesn’t go nuts — with a league-average .368 wOBA on pitches down the middle in 2-1 counts — but they certainly do better than the Giants. Let’s check with 3-1 counts next. It’s tempting to look at 3-0 counts, but they’re weirdo outlier swings that don’t tell us much. (They can sure be entertaining, though, even when the batter doesn’t make contact.) Another of the pure hitter’s counts, the ones that batters work so hard to get. The bad news is that the Giants aren’t seeing as many of them as other teams, mostly because they’re ending at-bats earlier. The good news is that, once again, when you remove the ambiguity from the count, the Giants rake. They’re hitting .318 with a .636 slugging percentage and a .544 wOBA. They could be doing better, as they’re in the bottom third of the league even with those numbers, but it’s not as if they’re flailing. And when they get a pitch in the middle of the plate on 3-1, they do damage, like they’re supposed to. More evidence for the theory that the Giants do better when they don’t have to think a lot. This doesn’t qualify as “ahead in the count,” but I can certainly cherrypick some data to support the above theory. And when it comes to 3-2 counts and pitches in the heart of the zone, the Giants are one of the worst teams in the league again. All of this is subject to sample size shenanigans, but it’s telling the same story. Give the Giants unambiguous count leverage, and they’re the Gashouse Gorillas. Add a single strike into the mix, and suddenly they can’t hit pitches in the heart of the strike zone. Some notes that didn’t quite fit up there: • The Giants see a lower percentage of pitches on the corners and edges of the strike zone — the “shadow” zone. That’s good! That’s what teams should want. • They aren’t especially worse than other teams in the league when they go out of the strike zone. • They aren’t being more passive on balls in the heart of the zone — they’re swinging just as often as the average team. • wOBA is not park-adjusted, and Oracle Park definitely affects these numbers, as well as a pitcher’s willingness to challenge when behind in the count. When the Giants are ahead in the count, even with the solid production they’re getting with their 2-0 and 3-1 swings, they’re the worst team in baseball when they have count leverage. No, wOBA isn’t park-adjusted, but there’s no adjustment that’s going to remove this kind of stink. The Giants are doing the first parts of the at-bat correctly, only to twist their ankle on the landing. There’s no “here’s what this means” to take out of this, no silver linings or grayer clouds to explore. Not yet. It’s data from the first month of a season, which is always messy to work with. It’s all pointing to the same thing, though: The Giants are screwed up something fierce right now. They’re the kind of team that can work counts, but not walks. They can hit the snot out of the ball when they get their pitch, but the definition of “their pitch” might be overly finicky if it doesn’t include 1-0 and 2-1 counts. My hunch is that this becomes one of those articles that comes up in a search five years from now and makes me think, “Now what was I on about?” because the 2026 Giants will eventually be a normal offensive team. Until then, they’re broken in some very strange ways. It’s probably Occam’s Razor to think the Giants will start hitting pitches, especially the ones down the middle in hitter’s counts. Because if that’s not the case, and there’s a deeper systemic problem to unpack, good luck figuring that out in the middle of the season. You can only hope the hits will start falling and going over the fence. Spot the pattern. 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