Handicapping the NL West Race: Beware the Giants

We get it: the Dodgers are pretty good, and probably good enough to withstand key injuries. But take a look at projected standings from FanGraphs or the Experts Panel from ESPN, and the D-backs’ chances of beating the other three NL West teams may not be so rosy.

Here are the projected standings from FanGraphs, which use a combination of ZiPS and Steamer player projections:

What?!? Last place? Of course, I have no idea if there’s a confidence level for these projections, or what it is if there is one. But we know that baseball is baseball, and that even if all of the ZiPS and Steamer projections played out exactly correct, it’s hard to know exactly how many games that team would win. In other words, think of the FanGraphs projections as saying that there’s the Dodgers, then there’s the Giants, and then there’s a three-way scrum. The projections have the D-backs essentially tied with the Padres and Rockies.

Next, the projections from the “ESPN Forecast” — which are powered by a panel of 140+ “experts” who projected wins for all teams. The NL results were published by ESPN here. But Neil Paine and Ritchie King of FiveThirtyEight got their hands on the raw data and published some of it, so instead of rounding things off to the nearest win, we can get closer to the mean with decimals:

Phew! Comfortably in third, at least. Really, the wins projected by both sources for the D-backs are almost identical — the main difference is that the “experts” see the Padres doing a bit worse and the Rockies not really in the same group.

One thing seems fairly certain, however: we should expect a serious bounce back from the Giants this season. An 86 win projection is nothing to shake a stick at, and although San Francisco slipped below .500 last season, they looked every bit the contender in taking 3 games of the 4-game set at Chase Field this week.

So who are these Giants?

Last season, San Francisco won just 76 games, despite being 8 games over .500 on May 12. It was a serious collapse, despite a huge year from Hunter Pence (5.4 WAR) and a breakout season from Brandon Belt (139 wRC+), who has continued to rake at the outset of this season. The rest of the offense? Not so great. Overall, the team was just average offensively (99 wRC+). On the pitching side, the team did stay slightly above average: 12th in baseball with a 3.80 Fielding-Independent Pitching.

On the offensive side of the ball, the Giants didn’t chance much over the offseason. They did bring Michael Morse into the fold, an all-hit, no-field outfielder who didn’t hit last season (78 wRC+). He’s done it before, however (133 wRC+ in 2010, 148 in 2011, 113 in 2012), so if he starts to heat up, I’d expect him to be moved up the order from seventh. Otherwise, the Giants would be much better served playing Gregor Blanco, who, with stellar defense, was kind of a poor man’s Gerardo Parra last season (2.8 WAR). Alas for San Francisco fans, few teams are willing to play a guy like Blanco in a corner spot over a guy like Morse — Parra is only just now helping to break that mold, perhaps.

On the pitching side, the Giants did sign two starting pitchers — including one of their own. Which is great, because Goldy owns him. He hit his 6th HR off of Tim Lincecum yesterday. Goldy has only 65 career HR. In other words, 9% of all of the home runs ever hit by Paul Goldschmidt have come off Lincecum. Not supposed to happen.

Less good for the D-backs: the Giants also brought in Tim Hudson, who dominated the D-backs lineup on Wednesday. It was a great free agent deal for San Francisco (2 years, $23 million), as Hudson has as much promise for the next two seasons as anyone who was out on the free agent market. 2/$23 is Bronson Arroyo money. Bronson Arroyo is not Tim Hudson.

A third pitcher that started against the D-backs this week may, however, be the key to the Giants’ season. Prior to 2013, Cain went seven years in a row putting up WAR totals of 3.2 or greater, totaling 26.7 WAR in that time frame (3.8 WAR per year). He did that while consistently posting one of the highest fly ball percentages among qualified pitchers, and one of the lowest HR/FB rates. In 2014, Cain posted a measly 1.3 WAR in 184.1 innings while his HR/FB ballooned to 10.8%, easily the highest rate of his career (next highest was 8.4%). That was largely the result of getting hammered in the first half last season (12.7% HR/FB), but who will Matt Cain be going forward? Will he be Matt Cain the Unicorn, a high fly ball, low home run pitcher fairly represented by a 3.68 career FIP? Or will he be Matt Cain of 2013, an innings eater that gets burned more than most by the long ball, fairly represented by his (HR rate normalized) 4.16 career xFIP?

If Posey hits like an elite hitter, Belt and Pence keep things going, Pablo Sandoval is Good Pablo, and Giants second basemen don’t struggle too much in Marco Scutaro’s absense… the position players will be comfortably above average. If Matt Cain bounces back, the Madison Bumgarner-Cain-Hudson trio might be the best in MLB. Beware the Giants…