San Francisco Giants: Three Areas Where The Offense Can Improve

The San Francisco Giants usually have the pitching down every season. The question of success often lies with the offense. Will they score enough runs to match their pitching? Here are three areas where the Giants can improve their offense in 2017.

The San Francisco Giants have not had anybody hit more than 30 home runs since Barry Bonds did it in 2004. Despite the so-called “power outage” the Giants have experienced, they have still won three world series over the last decade, which is more than any other team in baseball can boast.

There offense those seasons have never been about power numbers, it’s simply been about scoring runs. There are multiple keys to how the Giants offense ticks: high on-base percentages, coupled with smart base-running and timely hitting, the Giants have easily scored enough runs to give their pitching staff something to work with.

Last year, the bullpen failed, but the offense failed in a few places as well. Injuries don’t help, as that plagued consistent production cogs in the lineup like Joe Panik and Hunter Pence. But there were some stark production level drops in players where we had come to expect that level of output.

For the purpose of credibility, most stats in this article are provided by Baseball-Reference and their play index and splits tool, unless noted elsewhere. So here are three areas where the Giants offense needs to fix for 2017.

The Third Hitter

Literally the next area of improvement is the next batter. The third hitter in the lineup for the Giants in 2016’s slashline was really bad. Including pitchers, it was 7th in batting average on the team with a .246 (only the eighth hitter and the ninth spot had worse batting averages). That’s really bad. What’s even worse is their slugging percentage was again, seventh on the team, and only four points higher than that of the eighth hitter.

For comparison, the 2014 Giants saw the best slashline on the team, a .303/.353/.452/.845. For a visual comparison the 2016 Giants out of the third spot hit .246/.333/.379/.712. That’s absolutely horrific. So who was playing there? Posey and Belt were tied there in 2016, spending 51 games a piece in the third spot. Matt Duffy came in second with 36 appearances in that spot as well. In 2014? Buster Posey spend 117 games in the third spot in the lineup. So is it as simple as moving Posey back to the third spot? Just maybe.

Buster Posey has spent the majority of his career batting third or cleanup. He has nearly double the games logged in the clean-up spot as he does in the third spot. Even then, his batting average is nearly 20 points higher out of the third spot, and his slugging percentage there is higher than the cleanup spot.

The question then begs, who bats in the cleanup spot? Right now, the most likely candidate would be Belt. The only issue would be how much contact he made last year. That was most certainly a contributing factor to how low the batting average out of the third spot was. Buster had a .288 average there, and Belt had a .249 average there.

The third spot is different than the first and second. They need to be making contact, and positive contact. That’s why Buster excels there. Belt didn’t. But guess what! Belt had better numbers in the cleanup spot than Buster did. He also had more similar amount of games and way better production out of the fifth spot. So maybe Belt as the cleanup guy wouldn’t be the answer quite yet. But is it worth a shot? Definitely. Especially if Pence is back to being the Pence we saw in 2013 and 2014.

So that’s another issue that needs improvement. We have one area left, and it actually might surprise you.

Yes, I’m Serious, Buster Posey

Buster Posey sometimes seems like he can be untouchable from criticism, right? And fair enough, he was the best player on the team last year (that doesn’t pitch). But still, that doesn’t make him exempt from critique and criticism.

It’s hard to measure how someone will do in clutch situations. You really have to rely on what they’ve already done in clutch situations to quantify how “clutch” a player is. And even then you can’t use that to expect when they’ll come through in the clutch. The big thing thing that I took away from my analysis of what the Giants issues were offensively in 2016 was how “un-clutch” Buster Posey was in 2016 compared to years past.

Don’t take this as me saying “Buster isn’t a clutch player,” because I’m not. I’m not into the “hot-take” business. And simultaneously, this isn’t a hot-take. The numbers don’t lie. Buster had his worst year in “clutch” situations. Let’s take a look at his “clutch numbers” from 2012-2016:

I created a little table for you to visualize what I’m talking about. It is sorted by year from 2012-2016, and displays his average when hitting with two outs and RISP, his average when batting in “Late and Close” situations from baseball reference,  how many plate appearances in both situations, and his clutch rating from Fangraphs:

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Baseball Reference defines late and close situations as: if he comes to the plate in the seventh inning and the score is they are ahead by one, tied, or the tying run is at least on deck. Also, to help understand Fangraphs’ Clutch rating, an average rating is 0.0. If you would like more info on how their Clutch rating is calculated, go ahead and check out their explanation for it.

So what can we take away from this? Buster has been a sliver better than average in clutch situations his entire career. And even though he’s had worse seasons, last year was still not good. Not for a guy batting third or fourth in the lineup. Not for the star of the team. Not for the best player on the team.

Don’t expect Posey to return to 2014 and 2015 levels of “clutch.” It is fair, however, to expect him to be better than what we saw in 2016. Even if he returns to his career average, that could be the difference in maybe a win or two. A win or two would’ve put the Giants’ wild card game at AT&T Park, to help gain some perspective.

Next: Strickland Needs to Dominate in 2017

If you couple all three of these improvements together? The Giants offense *should click back into gear for 2017, and really be the type of offense we saw in the successful years past.