These 3 stats illuminate the Giants' offensive struggles

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Heck, it’s even possible to be amused by how bad it’s gotten. Gallows humor, they call it. And after a quick spin around the early, early numbers at Baseball Savant, I was inspired to write about the Giants. In the wrong kind of way. Boy, howdy, have they been awful so far this year. You knew that based on the results, but exactly how they got to those awful results? By awful execution, of course. It’s been so awful, that it’s worth pointing out in addition to the results. It’s important to make this distinction, though, because there’s another way to get to bad results, which is by a disproportionate amount of bad luck. Teams can endure painful low-scoring streaks where it feels like every line drive finds a glove, where it feels like they’re cursed because they stole the secret of pine tar from the baseball gods. This is not one of those times. And over at Baseball Savant, they have the numbers to prove it. There are a couple of very, very important points of context here. These are going to be batted-ball statistics, which shouldn’t have park effects. Marine layers generally aren’t messing with the exit velocity of a baseball as it flies off the bat. However, it’s also important to remember that these are absurdly small samples. Think of these numbers like you would any rate stat, like batting average, on-base percentage or slugging percentage. A 4-for-4, two-homer day can turn an awful OPS into a great one. A hot stretch in a single series can get a player’s numbers right back to normal. It’s the same thing with this level of batted-ball data. A few extra hard-hit and barreled baseballs, and the Giants are normal again. Until then, it’s important to point out just how abnormal they’ve been. According to Baseball Savant, here’s where Giants batters have ranked out of the 280 batters in Major League Baseball this season. 84. Harrison Bader (11.5) 155 (t.) Willy Adames (6.9) 155 (t.) Rafael Devers (6.9) 200. Patrick Bailey (4.0) 206. Heliot Ramos (3.8) 225. Matt Chapman (2.9) 242 (t.) Casey Schmitt (0.0) 242 (t.) Jung Hoo Lee (0.0) 242 (t.) Luis Arraez* (0.0) The definition of a barrel from MLB’s website is a little convoluted, but it’s consistent and makes sense. They’re collecting all of the data from batted balls that land for extra-base hits more often than not, and they’re measuring how hard and how high those balls were hit. These are the hardest-hit of the hardest hit. And the Giants have been rotten at hitting baseballs like this so far. The actual name of the stat is Barrels per Batted Ball Event (Brls/BBE%), which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and it’s not always something that correlates with offensive production, because it doesn’t penalize the hitters who swing and miss. Oneil Cruz (.676 OPS) was keeping company with Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge in this statistic last season, so it’s more of a “will you look at that?” kind of stat. The asterisk is another piece of important context. Luis Arraez is a freak. A wonderful, delightful freak. He will show up at the bottom or the top of every list, and you need to find another way to evaluate him. He is Tyler Rogers, an outlier’s outlier, someone screwy enough to mess with the entire team’s statistics. 108. Casey Schmitt (15.8) 135. Rafael Devers (14.6) 170. Matt Chapman (13.2) 178. Patrick Bailey (12.7) 179. Willy Adames (12.6) 190. (t) Harrison Bader (12.2) 190. (t) Heliot Ramos (12.2) 195. Jung Hoo Lee (12.0) 258. Luis Arraez (8.5) A hard hit is a ball that leaves the bat at 95 miles per hour or faster, and it’s helpful to measure hard hits against swings taken to show us who is swinging the most without doing much damage. A quick note: Jung Hoo Lee is not exactly Arraez when it comes to being an outlier, but he’s not not Arraez, either. He’s a hitter who can (and is supposed to, in theory) have success without lighting up the Baseball Savant leaderboards. So don’t freak out when you see him staying down at the bottom of this list throughout the season. That’s where people like him and Arraez and Steven Kwan hang out. It’s a beautiful sport. Everyone else, though, usually hits the ball a lot harder. It’s tempting to wonder if this has something to do with an organizational approach, or the failings of an individual or an organization. Fight that temptation and remember the part where we’re talking about less than two weeks of data. All you need to do right now is point at the data and say, “Gee whiz, that sure is awful!” You can take a moment to do it right now, if you’d like. 55. Heliot Ramos (92.1 mph) 137. Casey Schmitt (89.7) 142. Harrison Bader (89.6) 143. Willy Adames (89.6) 179. Rafael Devers (87.9) 186. Jung Hoo Lee (87.8) 187. Matt Chapman (87.7) 197. Patrick Bailey (87.4) 231. Luis Arraez (85.9) Again, this has nothing to do with Oracle Park. This is just about how the ol’ Giants are whomping the baseball with their whomping sticks. And they’re not really whomping much, it would seem. Three of these hitters — Rafael Devers, Matt Chapman and Heliot Ramos — are typically exit-velocity darlings, with Devers often ranking in the top 10. All of them are down here in the basement with the least effective hitters in baseball. This is not a prescriptive piece of analysis. There is no solution, no a-ha! moment to explain why the Giants’ best hitters have been unable to hit baseballs hard this season. All we know is that they sure aren’t hitting baseballs hard so far. It’s in the “one of those things” file for now, but it can get escalated to “hey, boss, get a look at this” status in a hurry. 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