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 Top Of The Lineup

One key production area has come out of the first two spots in the batting order. For a lineup like the Giants, with well rounded hitters, not necessarily sluggers, the players from the first two spots in the lineup need to produce. By the time we get to the middle of the order (3-6 in the lineup), the ideal situation is having one of them on, if not both, in scoring position. Let’s take a look at their two of their three world series years, 2012 and 2014 (since it’s as similar of a team makeup as we’ll get).

In 2012, the Giants slash-line from the first two lineup spots combined was: .282/.340/.406/.746.

In 2014, the Giants slash-line from the first two lineup spots combined was: .277/.325/.408/.733

In 2016, the Giants slash-line from the first two lineup spots combined was: .262/.323/.393/.715

In just looking at the slash-lines here, the 2012 and 2014 teams were more productive in their plate appearances. While walks and getting on base from them is nice, the hits usually help runners advance to third, especially from the second guy in the order. Joe Panik was definitely not himself last year. He had a rough start to the season at the plate, then got concussed and didn’t return to normal until the postseason.

Hopefully the postseason performance from Panik shows that he’s got his groove back. If Panik can return to 2014/2015 form, and Denard Span can be consistent, the top of the Giant order will feed really well into the heart, and bottom half of the Giants lineup. Why do I say that? Well, the 7-9 hitters in the Giants lineup had a better OPS+ than the first two hitters last season, an 89-110 difference (above 100 is good). That’s completely flip flopped from 2012 and 2014.

So that’s one massive area for the Giants offense to improve upon. What’s the next?

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.