CLEVELAND — With an 8-1 win Sunday against the Guardians, the San Francisco Giants secured their first sweep of the season, won their fifth straight game and improved to 7-2. Here are some takeaways from their red-hot start to the season.
That’s some good pitching
With Alex Wood’s five-plus shutout innings Sunday, all but one Giants starter has gotten two turns through the rotation. Factoring in their bullpen performance, too, it’s hard to imagine much better results. The staff has allowed the fewest runs in baseball and has the lowest ERA of any team.
Is it sustainable? Their 2.51 FIP (fielding independent pitching) would seem to indicate so, but it’s worth noting that the 4.5% rate that fly balls allowed are leaving the yard ranks second-lowest in MLB and is about half their rate of last season (10.9%), which also ranked second-lowest in MLB.
Wood’s outing Sunday also gave the Giants their ninth straight start of two or fewer runs allowed, only the second time in modern major league history (since 1901) that a team has started a season with that many consecutive starts without allowing more than two runs.
“I think everybody’s really happy with the start we’ve had as a staff,” Wood said. “I think we’ve got some competitive juices flowing and guys want to back up what the guy does the day before. It’s been a lot of fun so far, so hopefully we’ll keep throwing it well the rest of this road trip.”
However, the feat has been accomplished in a different style than baseball has ever seen, really.
Wood got the hook in the sixth inning Sunday despite not allowing a run, a side effect of this year’s condensed spring training but also a result of the Giants’ focus on managing their pitchers’ workloads. Wood had allowed only four base runners through five frames but put the first two runners on in the sixth — and had reached 87 pitches — when Kapler came out with the hook.
While Logan Webb and Carlos Rodón are making an early case as the best 1-2 punch in the game, combing for 26 innings and allowing only four total runs over each of their first two starts, they are also the only members of the Giants rotation to complete six innings. For comparison, the 2002 Giants, who started their season with eight consecutive starts without allowing more than two runs, had one pitcher go less than six innings during their streak.
“I choose to enjoy that stat,” manager Gabe Kapler said. “We’re aware our starters are pitching well. We expected it to be a strength of our club. They just come out and fill up the strike zone. It’s exactly what we’re asking to do. All of them have left the games giving our bullpen a chance to win games for us. From the standpoint of one of the strengths of our club coming out of spring training, I think it’s been solidified since the season began.
Bats heat up in the cold
The Giants and Guardians had gone 15 matchups without either team scoring more than five runs, the longest active streak of its kind in the majors, until Thairo Estrada raced home from second base in the fifth inning to extend the Giants’ lead to 6-0.
Estrada played a role in all of the Giants’ first six runs, smacking his second home run of the season into the left field seats in the second inning, forcing a bad throw on a potential double-play ball that led to two more runs in the fourth, and doubling home Joc Pederson and then scoring on a single by Steven Duggar in the sixth.
“We see Estrada as a pretty complete player,” Kapler said. “He’s a heads-up base runner with pretty top-end quality sprint speed and the ability to drive the baseball. Sometimes he drives it on the ground for several days in a row and you’re waiting for that big one, but not many people were able to leave the yard to left field during this series — and a lot of balls were hit out there — and Estrada’s got out.”
Just before Estrada’s home run, Wilmer Flores gave a ball a ride in the same direction. It left the bat harder than Estrada’s hit and traveled 14 feet further, according to Statcast, but only provided Estrada one more run to knock in when he came to the plate.
When they returned to the dugout, Flores had a playful question for Estrada.
“He basically asked me, what is it that you’re doing? What are you doing?” Estrada said through Spanish language translator Erwin Higeruos. “I just said, ‘Hey, I just put the ball where there’s a home run.'”
Brandon Belt extended the lead to 8-0 with a two-run jack in the seventh that landed in the right field seats, 384 feet away from home plate, giving him his team-leading third home run and sixth and seventh RBIs of the season.
The Giants’ 4.8 runs per game is nothing to scoff at — it’s just above the MLB average last season (4.4) — but that figure is padded by outbursts of eight runs Sunday against the Guardians and 13 against Yu Darvish and the Padres, the only two times since Opening Day that they have scored more than four runs. Their 100 wRC+ so far this season would also indicate exactly a league-average offense.
After last season, when the Giants scored the sixth-most runs in MLB, anything less can feel like a disappointment.
But there are encouraging signs in the peripherals.
No team in the National League is barreling up more baseballs than the Giants, in 6.8% of their plate appearances. And the Giants’ average exit velocity — 91.3 mph — is also best in the NL, trailing only the Yankees and the White Sox.
Pederson, who got two more hits Sunday and scored both times, is making hard contact on more than 75% of his batted balls, the highest rate in the majors. Pederson is notorious for his loud contact — he owns the hardest-hit ball of the Statcast era, 114.3 mph as a rookie back in 2015 — and is leading the majors again with the average ball leaving his bat at nearly 100 mph.
But right behind him on the leaderboard are Joey Bart and Darin Ruf, two less certain qualities in the batter’s box. Bart has impressed enough at the plate to earn the occasional start at designated hitter, even when he needs a rest from catching duties. Ruf’s meager numbers early this season — a batting line of .172/.333/.241 entering Sunday — bely his 97 mph average exit velocity and 66.1% of batted balls on which he is making hard contact.
“I don’t know that we’ve been particularly rewarded for all of our good swings,” Kapler said. “I can think of several from Craw, several from Darin Ruf and others — Joc, for sure — but these things tend to even out over a long period of time.”
Brrrr
Wood and his batterymate, Curt Casali, were the only two Giants to expose any skin under their jerseys Sunday. Pederson played left field with a hand-warming pouch attached to his belt and a balaclava ski mask covering every part of his head except his eyes.
Why’s that? The 35-degree temperature at first pitch made this the Giants’ coldest game on record, dating back to 1990.
The Giants could experience a temperature difference of 50 degrees on this trip alone, with their series against the Nationals in Washington forecasted to be in the mid-80s.
But perhaps more intriguing about the week ahead will be the pitching matchups in the series before the Giants arrive in the nation’s capital. They head to Citi Field for four games, where they’ll face one of only four starting pitching staffs with a better ERA than their own.
The Giants are scheduled to face the Mets right-handers Tylor Megill, Max Scherzer, Chris Bassitt and Carlos Carrasco, who have combined to allow six total runs in 45 innings through their first two times through rotation. The Giants, however, have a pretty good counterattack, with Webb set to face off with Scherzer on Tuesday and Rodón against Bassitt on Wednesday.
