Team Offense, San Francisco Giants

The 2023 series on team offense continues with the San Francisco Giants. The Giants finished eleventh in the majors and seventh in the National League in 2022 with 4.42 runs scored per game.

This season I am using FanGraphs Roster Resource Depth Charts* as the source of default lineups. That Gabe Kapler batting order is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections. That information produces the following results (Runs per game):

Best lineup: 4.66
Probable lineup: 4.58
Worst lineup: 4.50
Regressed lineup: 4.33

This may be the most boring lineup I have ever seen. The spread between the best and worst lineup is just 0.16 runs. That means that over a full season, the worst lineup would score just 25 fewer runs than the best possible batting order.

While the small spread is not a problem in an of itself, in this case it points to a team without stars. This is a group of batters who get on base okay and hit for power okay. There are no great OBPs or slugging percentages. No one to root to come to the plate in a high leverage situation. No one can be counted on for majestic home runs. The Giants field complementary players, with no one to complement.

On top of that, San Francisco manages to split the difference the best and worst lineups, the default order coming out right in the middle. I can understand why they don’t want to lead off with Michael Conforto after he missed a season. I hope that as soon as he shows he can get on base again they put him at the top of the order. Otherwise, it just doesn’t matter that much as they put their non–descript players anywhere in the order.

You can follow the data for the series in this Google spreadsheet.

Previous posts in this series:

*This is the best version of this information I’ve seen, with everything you might want to know on one page.

March 9, 2023

Team Offense, San Francisco Giants

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