Giants Link Round-Up

All of the Giants links fit to print.

Frisco Fastball: Brian Wilson Appears As Sea Mariner On George Lopez Show, Oh that bearded one.

El Lefty Malo: The Song of Kroon: Best Story Line of Spring Training? Mark Kroon will be an interesting guy to watch in the Spring as he does his best impression of Rick Vaughn from Major League. A hard thrower with a record 162kmph fastball in Japan.

Bay City Ball: Chris Ray to the Mariners – A Moment to Remember the Molina Trade. Some good perspective on the trade that quite possibly put the team over the top last year. Also a new site design that looks very nice, gotta love the addition of some more orange and black.

Raising Matt Cain: A look at the historic run of pitching in September where they held their opponents to under 3 runs per game. Check out the whole series, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII and VIII with more to come.

Give 'em Some Stankeye!: Bound To Disappoint? Paulie is on the same wavelength as me on this with the worries starting to creep in about next season.

24 Days of Magic: Demystifying the Nerd Stats: VORP and Relationships, Your introduction to Value Over Replacement Wife/Girl Friend, and situations that you can use it in like this:

Your wife watches the baby so you can go watch Timmy strike out 14 Braves even though she'd been watching the baby all day: 96 VORW

Obsessive Giants Compulsive: 2010 Giants Fluke: Sabean Naysayers and D-gers Fans Are Like One Mind. Strange bedfellows a World Series makes.

22gigantes: Sanchez On Pace For Opening Day, sweet!

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If you're on Twitter you should definitely follow the The Crazy Crabbers. If you're not you should really consider joining, lots of good stuff going on there.

The Giants “Clutch” Leaders and Laggers

Aaron Rowand Clutch Player?

This is always the story that you hear and especially after a terrible 1-0 loss, "The Giants need to do better in clutch situations." So to stir the pot a little here is the top and bottom 5 clutch hitters for the 2010 Giants.

Top 5 Clutch Players			Bottom 5 Clutch Players
Andres Torres	1.09		Bengie Molina	-0.68
Aaron Rowand	1.00		Buster Posey	-0.65
Nate Schierholtz	0.87		Pablo Sandoval	-0.61
Pat Burrell	0.42		Eli Whiteside	-0.53
John Bowker	0.21		Aubrey Huff	-0.33

Definitions

First before we break down the list I should go over the definitions of what exactly is "clutch", the definition that will be used here is the one that is published at fangaphs. The basic idea is that to be clutch a player raises their game in high importance situations. So to measure this, it looks at how well players perform in previously defined clutch situations relative to how they would have performed in a context-neutral environment. This is a measure of a player against their regular performance so it is not the same is being a good or great player.

Being clutch or not being clutch is NOT the same as being good or not being good. You do not need to raise your game in crucial situations to be a great player and those who do raise their games are not necessarily the most talented. A player with a .200 BA that hits .300 in crucial situations is, and should be, considered more clutch than someone with a .333 BA in all situations. The .333 is a better BA but it is not clutch because it did not constitute a raising of the game.

For more information read up on the whole article.

Thoughts on the Top and Bottom 5

There are definitely some surprises on each of these lists and some guys that by the gut feeling should be there.

First off Torres has been a great player for the Giants this season and there have certainly been some big hits in big situations that he has been a part of this is not a surprise. The same with Pat Burrell he has delivered with the game on the line numerous times and no one will forget the big game winning bomb he hit off fat Jonathan Broxton. Schierholtz is a little bit of a surprise but then again a lot of his limited playing time has come in big situations and there is that big extra inning triple that he had recently in Arizona.

I have a much harder time thinking of specific times that Rowand or Bowker were "clutch" but if you think back to the beginning of the season there were some big hits for both of these guys. Rowand singly handedly one some games against Florida in the late innings and Bowker had some late inning pinch hits that probably skewed the results. Also this is a measurement against their regular performance so maybe both of these guys did poorly but less poorly in big situations.

The bottom five has a lot of the same, some guys you expect including the rally killer Bengie Molina and double play machine Pablo Sandoval.

However both Buster Posey and Aubrey Huff make the list. This is again the compared to their average performance creeping in. Posey has decent high leverage numbers but they pail in comparison to his regular numbers. In low and medium leverage situations Posey has a wOBA of .410 and .345 and in high leverage he sports only a .320 wOBA.

Aubrey Huff has the same thing going on, in low and medium leverage situations he has a wOBA of .420 and .366 and in high leverage he sports only a .343 wOBA.

I still want these guys hitting in pressure situations over guys like Rowand or Schierholtz.

No Hope and Lowered Expecations

Some Random Giants Thoughts:

I am in the middle of driving to Sothern California taking in the beautiful sights that I-5 has to offer. There's not much else to do so writing a post seems like as good of a thing to do as there ever could be.

First, this loosing streak sucks. I knew that the team was bound for a correction but I didn't see this collapse coming.

The offense is in a collective funk. The pitching been less than steelar. That is a combination that is very bad for trying to win games. It is also not a good combination for me as with anything Giants related I am generally pessimistic.

The Dodgers series on top of everything just makes things worse. The Dodgers were just too comfortable in AT&T Park and let me tell you that is not a good thing. The Dodgers should loathe traveling north, this should be a house of horrors that haunt there nightmares.

I have to say that I am disappinted with Giants fans. Normally they are among the best fans in baseball but two series in a row visiting team fans have come in taken over the park. This is not acceptable and it should really embarass anyone who considers themselves a Giants fan.

To top it all off there seemed to be a lack of emotion from the team the whole homestand. A little red ass would have been apppreciated.

Next in my random thoughts I think I should comment on the Bengie Molina trade. Much has already been written but I just want to add that Bengie did seem to do everything the Giants asked of him and during the lean years provided some offense to a punchless team. He may not have been an All-Star caliber player but on a team of below average hitters even average seem pretty dang good. So he has that going for him.

The way things ended were less then ideal, it was probably not the best thing to bring him back this season. It would have been a nice clean break to have him go after last season without any hurt feelings but that is not the way things turned out.

The big thing is that it opens up the catcher position for Buster Posey which is an upgrade by itself right there even without the additional player. The two guys the Rangers included are not spectacular but there is a replacement level bullpen guy which could be helpful, and a former 1st round pick who may have some upside.

Moving on, I have a feeling this will be really tough patch going into the All-Star break. There are no more offdays and things are not going very good right now. So I will just keep drinking my pessimistic tea and stew in my depression. That seems to be the best way for the
Giants to snap out of their funk, I lose hope and think the worse will happen and then things get better.

So here is to no hope and lowered expecations.

Bochy and His Guys:

Bruce Bochy has talked about the way that he manages his team, in a nutshell Bochy has his guys and it takes a sign from God to make him loose faith in them. This is his is strategy, in the beginning of the season he decided which people on the team were his guys and that he is going to stick with him until the end.

Bochy's core guys have seemed to be Pablo Sandoval, Aaron Rowand, Bengie Molina and Edgar Renteria and these are the ones that with Bochy at the helm are the ones that will take us to the playoff. Andrew Baggarly on the Murph and Mac show in defending this mind frame said that you don't quit on a player that you have classified as one of your core guys. That the season is a 162 game marathon and that sticking with your guys through their up and downs is the best way to manage the day to day.

However if you look at last season you can see that this state of mind hurt the Giants last season when Edgar Renteria was obviously hurting and not the same.

This one I agree much less with. I understand where Baggs and Bochy are coming from. You have the guys that make up your core and these are the guys that will bring you to the dance or leave you waiting outside.

However I think that if your guys are in a funk you should be able to give them some time off to work on their things and get their mojo back. For some reason Bochy has less trouble doing this with the pitchers; when they are struggling mightily he has no problem skipping a start or sending them to the bullpen for a little while, but heaven forbid giving a position player 2 or 3 days off to work things out.

I think that sticking with your guys is a good thing, but when things are going horrible it can be a disservice to the rest of the team to keep going with your “guys” if they are a detriment to the team as a whole. I think that Bochy needs to find the right balance between playing his guys no matter what and doing what is in the best interest of the team.

Right now it seems that things are a little to slanted toward helping out the guys instead of the team.