2013 Giants: Bringing no-hit stuff to the ballpark every night

The phrase "brings no-hit stuff every outing" is a good thing when referring to a pitcher, like a Matt Cain or a Tim Lincecum. When it can be used to adequately describe a team's offense, mayhem ensues. But this is our 2013 San Francisco Giants. You thought I was going to say "bringing boring back to baseball" didn't you. See I mixed in a curve ball.

from Yahoo Sports:
Rockies' Chacin toys with no-hitter, beats Giants - Yahoo! Sports:

"I knew he had a no-hitter going," said shortstop Crawford, whose missed catch was costly in the Rockies' four-run sixth. "It's just nice to get a hit, put something on the scoreboard."

'via Blog this'

Brandon Crawford seems to believe that registering a "hit" is bringing something tangible to the scoreboard. Maybe that's part of the problem, we're setting our expectations a bit too low. The objective for the offense, Mr. Crawford, is to score runs. By doing that more times than ones opponent, you win games.

This is a baseball, fellas. And this is a baseball bat. Let's get back to basics here.

Giants DFA Jeff Francoeur - McCovey Chronicles

Whoopsie!!! Well, maybe throwing the bat at the ball would increase his chances for contact.

You know, this seems like the right thing to do, if only for one reason. Francoeur's Runs Created / Game with the Giants this year is 1.8 according to The Baseball Cube. 

If you don't believe me, see for yourself.
http://www.thebaseballcube.com/players/profile.asp?P=jeff-francoeur

from McCovey Chronicles:
Giants DFA Jeff Francoeur - McCovey Chronicles:

The Giants designated Jeff Francoeur for assignment on Tuesday, meaning they'll have 10 days to trade him, lose him on waivers, or release him. Which is to say, the Giants released Francoeur proactively.

'via Blog this'

This is a basic explanation of what Runs Created / Game is from a 2006 missive on Yahoo.
http://voices.yahoo.com/calculating-baseball-stats-runs-created-rc-50211.html

RC27 attempts to measure how many runs a team would score if they had a lineup made up of the same player nine times. In other words, a team with nine Derrek Lee (circa 2005) clones hitting in every spot in the lineup might expect to average about 10.6 runs per game.

Can you imagine the damage a lineup of NINE Jeff Francoeur's would create?  The game would never be the same. 

Although on many nights, it seems as if the Giants are doing exactly that. Putting out a lineup of nine Jeff Francoeur's. If you don't believe me, ask the pitching staff.  Having said that, it appears as if hitting coach Hensley "Bam Bam" Meulens job is safe. That's cool though, we love Bam Bam!!!

He's not hitting anything either. Maybe that's how he got the nickname.

The 2013 Giants - Bringing Boring Back to Baseball

Joaquin Arias was 4-4 until it mattered, then he popped up meekly on the first pitch 

I know the SABR guys like to say there is no such thing as "clutch", but the Giants can sure make the case for there being such a thing as "choke". Some evidence for that in the article below.

The 2013 Giants - Bringing Boring Back to Baseball!!

The rain delay might have been the most exciting part of this game for the Giants.

from mercurynews.com
Giants Extra | A blog about the San Francisco Giants:
— 12 runners left on base
— 1 for 9 with runners in scoring position
— Hitting .203 with runners in scoring position since the All-Star break
— 11 straight games with fewer than three hits with RISP

There’s your game. There’s your second half. There’s your season.

“It’s the same thing we’ve been talking about,” manager Bruce Bochy said. “We get our hits and get them out there. We’re just going to have to have somebody hit a gapper at some time, you think. But we’re missing it.”

'via Blog this'

ESPN Home Run Tracker: Measuring the speed of the ball off the bat

Hit Tracker is now ESPN Home Run Tracker! Hit Tracker founder Greg Rybarczyk is now collaborating with the ESPN Stats & information Group to continue tracking all MLB home runs, and helping baseball fans know "How Far It Really Went!™" Please credit any information on this site to ESPN Stats & Information Group. For more information and analysis on home runs, please contact founder Greg Rybarczyk.

So I stumble onto this site surfing the 'net and it tracks HR's hit in MLB and the speed of the ball off the bat on said hits.  This is a very neat statistical toy.

2013 Top Home Runs, Speed Off Bat - Full List
http://www.hittrackeronline.com/top_sob.php

Here is the developer's bio so you can see the data is likely very reliable and and I won't hear from either his or ESPN's lawyers for my use of the data.

Bio

Greg Rybarczyk was born in Lowell, MA and raised in Ayer, MA, graduating from Lawrence Academy in Groton in 1986 and Union College in 1990, where he earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. He was awarded an officer's commission in the U.S. Navy in 1990, and served in that capacity for seven years, fulfilling assignments aboard ship as a nuclear engineer and his ship's navigator, and later ashore as a physics instructor at an ROTC prep school.

Since leaving the Navy in 1997 Greg has worked as a reliability engineer, design engineer and as a Six Sigma "Black Belt" and "Master Black Belt" for two major U.S. & global corporations. In these roles he has made extensive use of data gathering and statistical analysis to solve business problems, making numerous quality improvements to his company's products and saving the company many millions of dollars during his career.

In early 2005, Greg began designing Hit Tracker, which combines several of his interests and talents: baseball, physics, statistics and automated spreadsheet design.

Greg lives in the Portland, OR area with his wife and two children.

So I scan the names and notice the Giants appear to be under-represented at the top of the list, which is littered with the premier HR hitters in  the game.  No surprise there.

It turns out you can copy/paste the list into Excel and sort by team.

So I did that. With interesting (IMO) results.

Here are the stats for the entire bucket of HR's up until August 7th.

Average	103.37
Median	103.20
High	120.10
Low	88.50

The Giants came in at about 103.1 and the rays at 103.5. The Blue Jays were the top team at 105, not surprising, their guys are all over the top of the list and near the high posted by Trumbo of 120.10. The Marlins, Braves and Angels were around 104.5. Philly and Seattle were among the worst at around 102.25.

The data for the top readings for each hitter by team was even more illuminating, but again not very surprising.

For the Giants, Hunter Pence launched one at (115.6) followed by Posey (112.4) Sandoval (111.3) Tony Abreu, maybe he should play more (107.1) Crawford (106.0) Quiroz (105.6) Torres (105.2) Blanco (103.4) Belt (102.1) Scutaro (101.5) Pill (101.4) Pagan (97.6). 

Now, Brandon Belt is too big a kid to be swinging it 102 tops. Maybe they were onto something with this whole lining up the knuckles bit. He just hit a HR off the Brewers, so it will be interesting if the mechanical change translated into a higher bat speed reading. My guess would be yes. Belt is five for ten AB's since the change coming into today, so it has had an immediate impact. I just wonder why it took so long, his hard  headed-ness or their organizational air headed-ness.   

For the Rays, Evan Longoria (112.8) Luke Scott (112.8) Joyce (112.0) Myers (110.7) K. Johnson (110.0) S. Rodriguez (109.7) Loney (109.6) Escobar (109.3) Lobaton (108.7) D. Jennings (108.6) Zobrist (108.1) Roberts (104.5) S. Duncan (102.0) Fuld (101.8) Molina (100.1) 

Aside from the fact that the Rays have 11 guys with readings > 108.1 and the Giants had only 3 a couple of other embarrassing observations. The Rays have guys coming off their bench that would be in our top three or four. They have middle infielders that would be in our top four!!! 

What the heck are they doing to identify and develop hitters that we aren't? If you look at the top-end speed, their guys beat our guys across the board by about 5 MPH. Now that may not seem like much, but it translates into about 25-35 more feet on a line drive or a fly ball. Heck, more speed on grounders = more singles through the IF. More bat speed on line drives and fly balls = more doubles and triples, to say nothing about more HR's versus warning track fly outs.   

No wonder the Giants haven't hit a HR at home in about a month. They don't have decent bat speed. 

And they're quitters. 

I'd like to play around with the data more and see how much the bat speed correlates to some of the FanGraphs hitting data, especially the RunsCreated and some of the slugging / extra-base hit data. 

Maybe if the Giants keep bringing boring back into baseball, I can free up some time.