Running. It was running all along.

Published by on February 29, 2012 | 8 Responses

Grant, at McCovey Chronicles, has a neat little post on the Giants and one of their newfound strategies for success this year: running.

We’ve been force-fed some variation of this for the past five springs. The hitting isn’t expected to be stellar, so there’s some mention of the dedication to the little things. Baserunning is always one of those little things. Apparently, the Giants are focusing on it this spring. Again. Makes me want to punch Ned Ryerson in the face.

Running more effectively, I think, feels like one of those classic spring ideas. On the surface of things, it’s kind of heartening in a way: “Hey, if we can’t hit, we can always try to run the bases better.” But, the problem with “running the bases better = success!” is largely based on the fact that the Giants, at least last year’s version, rarely got on base. And, also, largely based on the fact that for the past few years, the Giants have actually been a pretty decent team at running the bases.

Year	BP Rank	FanGraphs Rank
2011	10	7
2010	23	27
2009	6	8
2008	26	26
2007	16	15

Those are the team baserunning ranks from two different sources, Baseball Prospectus’ metric and FanGraphs’ version of a baserunning statistic. The 2011 Giants, the one that had arguably the worst offense in baseball, were a damned good running team. The 2011 Giants were better than two-thirds of all the other teams in baseball at running the bases. And yet, they were still a godawful team on offense. The team that was pretty darned good at running the bases only scored 570 runs.

You’ll also enjoy that in 2010 — the year that something big happened, I can’t recall now — the Giants were pretty bad at running the bases. If you go by BP, the team ranked 23rd in all of baseball; with FanGraphs, the Giants were 27th in all of baseball at running the bases. Yet, for the Giants, the biggest reason the team did so well in 2010 — besides the great pitching, of course — was the addition of a league average offense. Not ‘league best’, just average.

So, running. It’s not totally pointless — the very, very best teams are adding a couple of wins by good baserunning — but the team would see much greater gains in the win column if it first improved its offense.

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TSF
TSF

>If you go by BP, the team ranked 23rd in all of baseball; with FanGraphs, the Giants were 27th in all of baseball at running the bases. How much of this was due to Bengie Molina?

Nivra
Nivra

Good article. Nice debunking.

The Miracles
The Miracles

Another reason the 2010 Giants won was because they hit home runs in September. Every time I looked around someone like Burrell was putting one over the Chevron sign. According to ESPN stats only Toronto hit more HR than us in September 2010. Stolen bases? 7.

Damon
Damon

But on top of just competent base running, now we can have three guys who could swipe one, no? Pagan, Melkman, The Riot! It's like an international trio of top notch thieves has been assembled. Wait.. Quartet! http://www.csnbayarea.com/blog/giants-talk/post/S... Note: Theriot actually went 4 for 10 last year in SB, so he might have already fallen victim to Torii Hunter Syndrome.

Alex
Alex

Focusing on base running along with other baseball fundamentals is a sound approach for making the best with the players they have. There is no real opportunity cost to having the players do base running drills. It's not like anyone was a couple batting practices short of being good last season. I'm sure every team does this at some point during spring training. Of course, the Giants would improve more by improving their offense, but that would require roster moves and money.

tzill
tzill

IIRC, the Giants were right around league average with runners at 3rd and less than 2 outs. The NL average is usually around 50%. Nonetheless, we were awful at scoring from second on a single.

the A-Man
the A-Man

Whats the point of stealing a bag if you can't hit them in when they are in scoring position. How many times did the Giants have someone on 3rd with less than two outs and not get them in. That was a major problem with the Giants last year.