The San Francisco Giants and the Importance of Front Offices in MLB
In football, you can’t win a championship without an elite quarterback. In basketball, good luck even competing for a title without a generational talent, a star or two, and a group of competent role players. In baseball, all you need to win games is Wilmer Flores, Darin Ruf, and Austin Slater. Or maybe all you need is Farhan Zaidi? The gap between how a team is performing and our perception of how they should be performing lies a combination of variance and unquantifiable edge that a front office provides. Look at the lineup that the Giants rolled out yesterday for example. You would maybe guess that this assortment of players wins about 80 games a year. Last year, a group with pretty much the same cast won 107.
Ask anyone walking down the street how many of these players they could name and they could maybe name one, if that. They possibly remember Brandon Crawford from the Giants recent World Series runs or Joc Pederson’s pearls and postseason heroics last year. Beyond that, a group of Curt Casali, Austin Wynns, and Thairo Estrada leaves a lot to be desired on the name value front. However, what these types of players represents is the Giants mastery of player acquisition and development.
Ask any sharp investor what the most important aspects of a company are and I would guarantee one of them is leadership. The c-suite of a company plays a large part in the processes that the company utilizes as well as the hiring decisions. The impact of these decision makers is undeniable. However, baseball discourse doesn’t nearly give enough credit to front offices and the majority of the savvy moves these teams make are rarely discussed in mainstream baseball media. Jarlín García, one of the premier relievers on the Giants, serves as a good example of one of these stories.
García was waived by the Marlins after the 2019 season and claimed by the Giants in 2020. Garcia struggled in his Miami tenure, but he seemed to be gradually improving. He posted a 6.52 xERA in 2018 followed by a 4.23 xERA in 2019. The Giants didn’t miss the forest for the trees when it came to Garcia’s skillset; they noticed the inherent upside of his pitch movement profile.
Above are García’s horizontal movement averages spanning from his time in Miami beginning in 2017 to today with the Giants. García’s pitch movement is unlike many pitchers as his movement versus average indicates. In addition to his unfamiliar movement, García boasts 98% active spin on both his fastball and changeup paired with a funky release which appears to hide the ball for the majority of his motion. In unison with an understanding of his pitch movement profile was a plan to gradually shift García’s pitch usage. In his last season with the Marlins, García threw 42.6% sliders, 40% fastballs, and 17.4% changeups. This year with the Giants, García has thrown 43% fastballs, 31.5% changeups, and 25.5% sliders. The Giants realized the true strengths of García and worked to maximize them. Last year, the Giants gave up the second least amount of runs with a stable of players with little name value. But what the Giants have done better than almost anybody is put their players in a position to succeed. They understand that they don’t have Josh Hader or Aroldis Chapman, but they know that a lefty hitter has a similar probability of doing damage against Jarlín García as he does Chapman or Hader. The Giants work to find every edge possible is one of the main reasons that they never had to go into full rebuild mode, much to the credit of Zaidi and company.
The starting pitching for the Giants has been no different. They drafted Logan Webb, added 8 inches of vertical movement to his sinker since he debuted in 2019, and he burst onto the scene during the last year’s postseason, looking unstoppable. Thought to never relive his prime in Tampa Bay, Alex Cobb went to Driveline over the offseason and in harmony with the Giants front office, completely transformed his game. He added two miles per hour to both his sinker and splitter and added multiple inches of movement on both planes with his curveball. Since the change, Cobb has one of the most absurd Statcast profiles you’ll come across this season.
Baseball teams are no different than Fortune 500 in the fact that no company will be successful without good leadership. You would be hard pressed to find a successful Fortune 500 company with an inadequate leader and the same goes for a baseball team. Cite any cliche quote about packs of lions, wolves, or sheep and they would fit the bill. But the reality is that whether it’s a business or a baseball team success is organizational. Last year, the Rays minor league system absolutely dominated on all levels. Their AAA team was 77-43, the AA Montgomery club was 62-55, and their A ball clubs sported winning percentages of .695 and .683. Their big league club was no joke either. I think the likes of Farhan Zaidi, Andrew Friedman, Erik Neander, and any other sharp baseball operations executives are worth some wins above replacement. The amount is unquantifiable, but you can see the impacts these front offices make league wide, especially with some rebuilding teams with bad records. Win-loss record doesn’t serve as an accurate scoreboard for front office aptitude as teams are operating in different organizational cycles.
Take the Pirates and Orioles for example. These two teams aren’t expected to make waves in the postseason and most think of them as 100 loss ball clubs. However, win-loss record aside, the Pirates and Orioles have both managed to create a baseline of losses through pitching development methods. If you create good pitchers, you are bound to raise the floor of projected losses just due to the powers of variance. Over a 162 game season the group of pitchers you have will eventually string together low run outings and the better the pitchers the more low numbers they will post. The success stories of some of the pitchers on bad teams fly under the radar due to the stigma surrounding the teams, but the work these front offices have done is astounding in this department.
Once a castoff starter on the Brewers and Royals, the Orioles moved Jorge López to the bullpen, added two miles per hour on all five of his pitches, and now he is one of the better closers in all of baseball. Last year, Wil Crowe sported a 5.26 xERA after being the main piece in the trade that sent Josh Bell to Washington. This year the Pirates shifted Crowe to the bullpen, had him start throwing more offspeed pitches, and now Wil Crowe has the lowest hard hit rate in all of baseball.
Again, these instances are no coincidence. You can find them across the league as teams grind out the little edges that the game has to offer. It’s a beautiful thing that a league with no salary cap can have a team of with no name value and win 107 games because of practices that smart people put into place. Over time, I think we will see the competitive bar be raised as teams get sharper and sharper. Obviously there are still some really bad teams in the league, but eventually they will adapt. Although we are far removed from the edge OBP provided in Moneyball, the idea remains the same - pick the players from the island of misfit toys and make them the best group of toys you possibly can.
