Peter Majors
On the eve of Major League Baseball’s 2021 Opening Day, the San Francisco Giants had a 5.7% chance to make the playoffs, a 0.2% chance to win the National League West, and a minuscule 0.1% chance to win the World Series. The middling franchise had just come off four consecutive seasons of missing the playoffs and had a roster composed of many former stars that most would agree were past their prime.
However, over the course of the past six months, the Boys by The Bay have proven all the projection systems wrong. Their 107 – 55 record (.648 W%) was the best in baseball this season - and even though they were eliminated by the mighty Dodgers in the NLDS, that does not take away from their feat this regular season.
The Giant’s ascent to playoff contention in 2021 did not come as the result of a slow-build or, even in the case of the Cardinals, as a quick burst. They have been one of the top-5 teams in baseball since the season began and have held the best winning percentage in the league since mid-June. As the graph above shows, even FanGraphs’s projection system had trouble determining whether the Giants were “for real” around that time in the season.
So, how did the Giants do it? How did they dismantle all of the projection systems and assert themselves as one of the best teams in all of baseball? How did a team with the third-highest average roster age (30.1 years) and more than 71.8% of their total payroll ($114 million) committed to players 32 or over flip the league upside down?
Let’s take a deep dive - starting with their team performance as a whole.
The Team
Looking at their offensive league ranks, their team 108 wRC+ and 241 home runs both led the NL. They had a collective 9.7 BB% and .329 OBP, which ranked second and third in the NL, respectively. lso, they had a strikeout rate of 23.6%, which was 12th among all teams in baseball. Finally, despite placing anywhere between 6th and 16th in terms of Barrel%, Exit Velocity, and xwOBA – their 14.8° launch angle ranked first in all of baseball.
This tells us that the Giants were great at getting on base and hitting home runs, but did not shine with respect to some of the more advanced batted ball metrics. In addition to this, they only hit the ball on the ground 39.7% of the time, which ranked first in all of baseball. So while the Giants’ offense did not possess many big-time sluggers and exit velo darlings, they did an excellent job of putting the ball in the air - and out of the ballpark. The great teams tend to do those two things; and in 2021, the Giants joined their ranks.
On the pitching side of things, Los Gigantes were just as lethal. They ranked in the top-5 of nearly every important pitching statistic, including ERA- , xFIP-, and SIERA. Each of these metrics suggests a slight overperformance when compared to their team ERA, but it is hardly anything to be concerned with. The two teams ahead of the Giants in all three of these categories, Los Angeles and Milwaukee, “overperformed” more than them according to the below figures.
As a general comment, it is important to remember that most teams at either end of the bell curve tend to over or under-perform in more ways than one. Pitching outcomes that outperform peripheral statistics is just one way that is exhibited in baseball.
However, with over 800 IP for each team, “noise” alone cannot be not the sole driver of Los Angeles’ and Milwaukee’s pitching prowess. Better coaching decisions, superior defense, and a host of other factors were all partially responsible for such a feat. Nevertheless, this season the Giants possessed one of the best pitching staffs in the sport by almost every measure conceivable.
Nearly mirroring their offensive approach, the Giants struck out opposing batters at a pedestrian rate of 24.5% but walked extremely few. At 6.8%, their walk rate trailed only the Dodgers and Athletics for the lowest in the league. And when it came to home runs allowed, well you guessed it - they allowed the second-fewest in the sport with 84. Have you caught on yet?
The Giants had an offense that got people on base and drove them in with the long ball paired with a pitching staff that prevented the opposition from doing exactly that. They weren’t overpowering in terms of stature on the mound or at the plate, but what they lacked in those facts they made up for by playing the game the modern way.
The Ballpark
Before digging into which Giants have truly been the drivers of this organizational turnaround, I think it’s important to take a look at one element of the Giants franchise which has plagued their offense for the past two decades: their ballpark. Originally opened in 2000, Oracle Park (formerly Pacific Bell Park, SBC Park, and AT&T Park) has consistently been one of the least hitter-friendly ballparks in all of baseball.
The graph below shows yearly park factors for every active MLB stadium since the Giants began playing at their current home park. For the sake of maintaining consistent sample sizes, I decided to omit data from the 2020 season. The string highlighted in orange represents Oracle Park, while the horizontal grey line represents the league average offensive output.
For those unfamiliar, park factors attempt to quantify the effect that a given venue has on run-scoring, as well as a host of other metrics, to help normalize for their effect on a players’ production. Park factors are set so that the league average is set to 100, and every point above or below that represents the percentage that a venue inflated or deflated offensive output.
In 16 of the 21 seasons under consideration, Oracle Park has had a negative impact on run-scoring. On top of that, it has achieved the lowest park factor in baseball 3 times since 2015 (93 in ’15, 92 in ‘17, and 91 in ’19). If this doesn't sound particularly extreme, let’s take a look at their home run park factors each year by batter handedness since 2017. Home run park factors are simply another interaction of a ballpark’s overall park factor that only considers the long ball.
For a three-year period ending in 2019, Oracle Park was quite literally the worst stadium for hitting home runs - especially for left-handed batters. Giants such as Brandon Belt and Mike Yastrzemski felt the brunt of this effect - with a brutal 58 home run park factor that placed them dead last in the league. However, in 2021 that all changed.
According to this article by Andrew Baggarly and Eno Sarris in The Athletic, the two main reasons for Oracle Park’s offensive resurgence were moving in the field’s center-field wall and manipulating the airflow within the stadium.
Before the start of the 2020 season, the Giants positioned Oracle Park’s center field wall 8 feet closer to home, bringing in the field’s left-center and right-center gaps in with it. This mildly reduced the square footage of their outfield and made it far easier to hit the all-important home run. Fans around the league didn’t think much of it at the time - but now that we have a full season’s worth of data, the magnitude of this change cannot be understated.
Below is data on barrels hit to the “straightaway” part of the field, or balls hit with optimal launch angles and exit velocities to center field, at both Oracle Park and throughout all MLB ballparks.
In the “xwOBA – wOBA” column, we see a drastic underperformance on barrels hit to the middle of the field in Oracle Park between 2017 and 2019. This trend reversed in 2021 to the tune of a difference that is nearly half of the league average.
“So what?”, you might ask. “Why does it matter that Oracle Park is a little harsher on deep fly balls hit over the centerfielders head? If both teams are playing at the same park, shouldn’t they be equally affected by this disparity?”. To that, I’d say “Not at all a partner”.
In that same article in The Athletic, ex-Los Angeles Dodgers general manager and current San Francisco Giants president of baseball operations, Farhan Zaidi said “If there’s a belief (that), ‘Hey if I have a good process and hit the ball hard, I’ll get rewarded,’ then that can create a positive feedback cycle. And I think we saw some of that as well.”
The difference between the Giants and their opponents is simply that they play 50% of their games at Oracle Park, while any one of their opponents plays less than 5% of their contests there. In life and in baseball, confidence goes a long way. And even though we’re an analytics blog, it’s important to never lose sight of the fact that players are people too.
Even if a player tells the media they don’t look much at stats or obsess over the numbers, hitters know when they aren’t playing well. They can feel when they’re up at the plate or just around the game, and those few extra balls they crushed that went for homers or doubles as opposed to flyouts add up over time. Those few extra hits may have given Buster Posey or Lamonte Wade the confidence they needed to believe they’re on a hot streak, allowing them to tailor their approach at the plate to be a bit more aggressive.
Now, should we expect Oracle’s centerfield to play like this going forward? A 113-pitch sample of barreled baseballs to centerfield this season isn’t especially promising, so I’d bet on some minor regression towards league average moving forward.
The other, more nuanced factor in Oracle Park’s offensive turnaround was something far fewer fans were aware of – the closing of the outfield’s “wind tunnel”. Following the 2019 season, the Giants also closed off archways in the right-center field arcade area with black wind cloth – supposedly to prevent people from congregating in that part of the concourse to watch the game.
However, the effect of this alteration may have been felt far more than the moving-in of any one wall. We’ve already discussed Oracle Park's improvement in regards to park factors and wOBAs on two types of batted balls: home runs and barrels. But what about regular old fly balls?
After all, they should be the type of batted ball event that is most affected by this reduction in wind. In the below graph, the blue line represents the average flyball distance in all major league ballparks, while the orange line represents Oracle Park.
And would you look at that? This graph checks out as well. It seems that fly balls, as well as barreled balls, have been affected by this closure of the wind tunnel. As you can see, since public data has been available Oracle Park has had a negative impact on flyball distances relative to the rest of the ballparks in the league.
However, that all changed in 2020. For the past two seasons, the Giant’s home ballpark has been at average or just above average in terms of flyball distances. Unlike wOBA, this change cannot be attributable to field dimensions and must be the effect of blockading the “wind tunnel” in Oracle's right-center field. While other factors could be at play here, including better hitters in the NL West and a smaller-than-usual sample size in 2020, the most apparent influence is the closure of the tunnel.
Thus, Oracle Park’s flipping of the script in 2021 is the result of a combination of factors, many of which were the impact of decisions made by the organization to improve offensive output at their home ballpark. Judging by multiple types of park factors, wOBAs on barrels, and flyball distances, the Giants succeeded immensely in their efforts.
The Players
Now that we’ve discussed the Giants as a team and the ballpark they play in, let’s discuss the players that have propelled this historic franchise to its winningest season ever.
If you’re a baseball fan in any capacity, I’m sure you’re at least heard of the names Brandon Belt, Buster Posey, and Brandon Crawford. These three hitters have been the centerpiece of the Giants’ offense for years and have each had somewhat of a resurgence this season. While they are very much at the heart of the Giants’ 2021 turnaround, they will not be the topic of this section.
Furthermore, if you’re a dedicated baseball fan, you’re probably familiar with Kevin Gausman, Darin Ruf, and Logan Webb. These three breakout stars have arguably been more valuable than the previous bunch – but have already been covered in great detail by the rest of the baseball writing community. Despite their immense value, they will also not be the topic of this section.
Now, even if you’re a diehard baseball fan, you’re likely only somewhat familiar with Wilmer Flores, Camilo Doval, and Lamonte Wade Jr. I would argue that these lesser-known contributors are the ones who allowed this team to reach the 107-win plateau, which is one that seemed insurmountable on the eve of opening day.
Every great team has its cast of established stars, its collection of breakout surprises, and its crew of supporting characters. Flores, Doval, and Wade Jr. were the crew of supporting characters - and they are the individuals I have dedicated this next section to.
Wilmer Flores
You could argue that Wilmer Flores’ 2021 season was the best of his career. After spending 6 years as a New York Met and 1 as an Arizona Diamondback, the 30-year-old infielder seems to really have hit his stride as a Giant. This season, he posted a 113 wRC+ and collected 1.2 fWAR over 436 plate appearances in a career-high 139 games.
Photo by Nuccio DiNuzzo/Getty Images)
He acted as a versatile infielder for the Giants - playing 58 games at third base, 34 at first, and 30 at second. While he was an average defender at each of these three positions according to Outs Above Average, his value as a utility man stretched much further than any defensive prowess he had to offer.
This is because the Giants often platooned their hitters, or started ones who hit exceptionally better against opposite-handed starting pitchers. This meant that Giants’ manager Gabe Kapler needed positional versatility from his position players, and that is exactly what Flores offered.
Flores’ Baseball Savant page doesn’t show many glaring deficiencies or strengths. His 88.6 mph average exit velocity pits him below league average and none of his expected statistics are especially telling either. He was an all-around player in 2021 and shined in many of the same ways that the Giants did as a team.
He struck out at a minuscule clip of 12.8%, (97th percentile) and walked 9.4% of the time (58th percentile). For a bit of context, these percentiles were all taken from a sample of hitters with a minimum of 400 plate appearances in 2021. This tells us that Wilmer knows how to put the ball in play but is also capable of taking the free base when given to him.
Looking at some of Flores’ plate discipline metrics, he had a 29.6% O-Swing% (61st percentile), a 76.1% O-Contact% (92nd percentile), and an 84.8% Contact% (90th percentile). These tell us that Wilmer has above-average plate discipline paired with elite ball-to-ball skills on pitches thrown inside and outside the zone.
For those unfamiliar, O-Swing% is the rate at which a batter swings at pitches outside of the strike zone, Contact% is the rate at which they make contact with the pitches they swing at, and O-Contact% is the rate at which they do so when pitches are outside of the zone.
I cited O-Contact% because, in two-strike counts, the metric is an excellent indicator of run expectancy, as discovered by our own Matt Lengua in an article earlier this year. Run Expectancy or its cumulative form “run value”, is a metric that attempts to measure a players’ expected contribution to scoring in a given situation against their actual contribution. These situations are dependent on the state of the count, number of runners on base, and outs in the inning,
As it turns out, Wilmer Flores accumulated 12.5 run value with two strikes in 2021, which means that he produced approximately that many runs over expectation in two-strike counts this season.
This was the 35th most of all hitters in the sport (97th percentile), and placed him between Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Juan Soto on that leaderboard – two of the top three hitters in baseball!
Unfortunately, even Flores’ excellent restraint at the plate couldn’t save him from the horrendous call below that ended the Giants’ season. My apologies to any San Francisco fans in the room.
Despite this abomination, Flores’ incredible bat-to-ball skills, slightly better than average discipline, and ability to produce in two-strike counts are what made him so successful in 2021. Like so many Giants this season, Wilmer outperformed expectations.
Camilo Doval
Camilo Doval is the definition of electric. In the 27 innings of relief he pitched for the G-men this season, the team’s 24th ranked prospect struck out 34% of the batters he faced, had a walk rate of 8.4%, and surrendered a measly .257 wOBA against. The rookie won NL Reliever of the Month in September and was considered one of the team’s elite relievers heading into a highly anticipated playoff run.
Photo Courtesy NBC Sports
He offers a blazing fastball that touches 102 mph with a spin rate of 2533 rpm, of which 66% is active spin. He also attacks hitters with a slider that sits in the upper 80s and averages 6.8 inches of horizontal break, which is 35% greater than league average.
Doval’s slider is his main weapon, as he deployed it 58% of the time in 2021, which was the 15th highest of all pitchers with at least 200 sliders thrown. The high usage from the right-hander was well warranted, however - as the breaking ball yielded an impeccable .202 wOBA, 40.5 O-Swing%, and 39% CSW against.
This means that the pitch is effective at suppressing offensive output, getting hitters to chase outside of the zone, and take inside of the zone. That’s a pretty good combination if you ask me! As you can from the pitches below, Coval’s stuff is indeed nasty - which is what has allowed him to ascend the ranks in the Giants bullpen.
While he was sent down to the minors in early May due to issues with command, he has since proven that those woes are behind him. In 15 appearances since being recalled in early September, he has sported a 5.8% walk rate, as compared to a 10.5 BB% in his previous 14 appearances. Even though these samples are far too small to draw any major conclusions, they do show a noticeable improvement on Doval’s part.
With a 100-mph heater and a wicked slider, sometimes all Doval needs to do to be effective is to keep the ball in or around the strike zone. However, he has proven to be able to do much more than that. This season, Doval has located this slider low and away to right-handers and low and into left-handers at one of the highest rates in the league.
Above is Baseball Savant’s zone classification chart as well as a heat map of where Camilo Doval throws his slider. For those unfamiliar, the above graphics are from the catcher’s perspective.
In 2021, the Dominican flamethrower finished his slider in zones 18, 19, 28, and 29 of Savant’s classification 21.9% of the time, which is the 6th highest among pitchers with a minimum of 200 pitches thrown. These zones are also where hitters tend to have the most trouble with sliders and are most prone to swinging at them. In 2021, the league had a collective .197 wOBA and a 45.8 K% on at-bats ending in sliders in zones 18, 19, 28, 29.
Thus, Camilo Doval located his best pitch in a location where it is especially effective and did so at a rate that was tops in the league in 2021. This, paired with his blazing fastball is what made him such a lethal force this season and will allow him to be one for years to come.
Hundred-mile-per-hour heaters and sliders are low and away. It is, as Doctor Strange would put it, “a simple spell but quite unbreakable”.
LaMonte Wade Jr.
If anyone other than a diehard Minnesota Twins fan told me they had heard of LaMonte Wade Jr. before 2021, I’d probably call their bluff.
Photo Courtesy of Chris Victorio of The Examiner
The third-year major league outfielder, truly broke out for the Giants this season - playing in a career-high 109 games after combining for just 39 between 2019 and 2020. At 27 years old, LaMonte finally got a chance to play and did not squander it. He gathered 1.6 fWAR over 381 plate appearances (2.5 fWAR/600) with a .343 wOBA and 117 wRC+. So on the surface, he performed well this year. But, as with almost every player, there is much more to the story.
Pulling the ball in the air is the most valuable outcome for any batted ball - and LaMonte Wade did that just about as well as anyone in 2021. His 44.2% fly-ball rate and 46.9% pull rate placed him in the 87th and 86th percentile of hitters with a minimum of 350 plate appearances in 2021 - which contributed mightily to his career-high 18 home runs. In fact, 13 of Wade’s 18 home runs this season came on pitches he pulled.
When LaMonte pulled the ball this season, he achieved a .496 wOBA with a 92.3 mph average exit velocity, whereas in 2019 and 2020, he had a .234 wOBA with an 88.5 mph exit velocity on those types of batted balls.
Furthermore, Wade Jr. had his highest exit velocity reading of any batted ball in his career this season at 109.3 mph. According to Park Hageman on Twitter, a large reason for these improvements were the mechanical adjustments he made during the offseason.
Whether Wade Jr. intended for it or not, getting off his backside has allowed him to drive the ball better than he ever has, and has allowed him to be a far more productive player. Does this mean that all players with middling exit velos need to subscribe to a similar philosophy? Not necessarily. But it worked brilliantly for LaMonte Wade Jr. and that’s all that matters.
The other element of LaMonte Wade’s 2021 season that simply cannot be ignored is his ability to do something undeniably valuable, but arguably skillful: hitting in the clutch. This year, LaMonte Wade Jr. had a clutch rating of 2.41, which was the highest of any hitter in the league. According to David Appleman, this metric explains “…how much better or worse a player does in high leverage situations than he would have done in a context neutral environment.”
The formula simply subtracts a hitter’s win probability added in all situations from ones in high leverage contexts. So despite the fact that Wade Jr. was not the best hitter in high leverage situations among all hitters this year, he was with respect to his overall performance. Sadly for LaMonte, clutch ratings do not correlate at all year-over-year.
For the above scatter plot, I chose the 2018 and 2019 seasons - which are the last two consecutive non-Covid shortened seasons to date. The data has an R^2 of .003 - signifying no evidence of certain players playing above or below their true talent level year-over-year in high leverage situations.
This is not meant to be a knock on Wade Jr, however. His stellar performance when it mattered most made him a fan-favorite in the bay area, and the Giants could have easily lost the division without his contributions. This Giants team was a surprise in many ways, and LaMonte Wade Jr. perfectly exemplified that in 2021.
Conclusion
No matter which way you look at it, the 2021 San Francisco Giants were one of the most interesting teams of the past decade.
Their roster was composed of veterans who were thought to be past their athletic prime, rookie sensations, and breakout stars - each of which I highlighted above. Wilmer Flores was for a long time seen as a middling utility infielder, who this season had a career year. Camilo Doval was a rookie sensation, who shined out the bullpen with a 100 mph heater and a wicked slider. LaMonte Wade Jr. was barely a major leaguer who turned the trajectory of his career around with a few mechanical tweaks and clutch hits.
Those three were just a few of the incredible stories this Giants team had to offer, but each highlighted a different strength of this roster. They were also some of the less talked about stars of this team who, in my estimation, did specific things extremely well.
In Wilmer’s case, excellent bat-to-ball skills and a great two-strike approach allowed him to be the most productive form of himself. As for Doval, the ability to locate a lethal breaking ball made him especially effective when it mattered most. Finally, LaMonte Wade Jr. pulled the ball in the air with authority, which is one of the most valuable skills in today’s game.
As for the Giants’ home base, Oracle Park’s resurgence as a stadium that allows for run-scoring and home runs only benefited the team. The moving in of the centerfield wall and the blockading of the right-center field wind tunnel gave more confidence to their hitters, especially lefties, and boosted the morale of their entire offense. Because of this season, hopefully, free-agent hitters will begin to realize that Oracle Park isn’t that bad of a ballpark to call home.
Farhan Zaidi and a culture of data-driven decision-making led the Giants to their greatest regular season in team history. And they did so with a roster that almost nobody from the outside looking in believed would be one of the powerhouses of the National League at this season’s start. This Giants’ season also proved that no matter where a team sees itself in its window of contention, there is always a reason to innovate and find new ways to win.
I truly am excited to see what the future holds for this franchise. For a team and fanbase that ten years ago I would’ve said is spoiled with World Series championships, it’s good to see the Giants back in contention. After all, somebody’s gotta challenge the Dodgers.
Sources:
Peter Majors is the Founder and President of the Fordham Sports Analytics Society and a junior at Fordham's Gabelli School of Business. He is majoring in Accounting Information Systems, minoring in Computer Science, and plans to attend graduate school for Applied Statistics and Decision-Making. He is currently seeking a Summer 2022 internship in Data Science, Information Systems, or Baseball Analytics.
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