Reactions to the Michael Morse Signing

Reactions to the Giants signing Michael Morse:

Giants take a gamble on Mike Morse - Me at BASG

The Giants are taking a gamble that he can play the Pat Burrell role from 2010, three at-bats and then a late defensive replacement while providing some home runs down the lineup. Perhaps that’s not a bad bet to make, but it’s far from a sure thing. If he stays healthy and hits the Giants might have a bargain on their hands. If not, well, Gregor Blanco is probably a pretty decent fallback with Morse perhaps helping out against left-handed pitching.

It is not an ideal solution to the left field problem but in this free agent/trade market there wasn’t really a perfect solution to be found.

The Beast Commeth - You Gotta Like These Kids

Verdict: Good signing, especially considering the alternatives. Giving up 2 big prospects for Mark Trumbo? Chasing a bigger contract in years with Corey Hart (an overbid situation that might have/didn't happen)? Trading a SP prospect for 1 year of Brett Gardner? All this costs is a little cashish, and has some good upside, with a PLAN IN PLACE for dealing with his defensive shortcomings.

Contingency Plans: Its not perfect by any means, but if Pagan gets hurt again you send Blanco/Perez to platoon in CF. If Morse gets hurt or folds, you have Blanco/Perez as the backup plan. If Pence gets hurt you're screwed, because you don't have another 5/90MM Kale Krunching Ironman ready to go. Blanco or Perez in CF would be able to sub in for Morse still if lightning strikes twice on Pagan. Further, you still have all your AAA guys except for Peggs ready to give it a shot. No team has a full time OF ready to step in for injury. Not many teams have 3 full time OFs if you actually take the time to look around MLB. Except for the Dodgers. Those guys have a 60MM OF, all shiny and what not. We'll see how this plays out, its not the worst solution to the markets problems

Mike Morse signs, and the Giants swap defense for home runs - McCovey Chronicles

Dingers are grand. But there are other ways for players to be valuable. And there are certainly a lot of ways they can be awful. I'm not optimistic about this one.

I'll embrace the risk, though, because this team has been feckless for a while, now. Heck, wind him up and let's see if he can hit 30 homers again. Could happen. And the auxiliary benefit of the move is the Giants have some decent outfield depth for the first time in a while. Blanco is a pretty good fourth outfielder, just as Juan Perez is almost an ideal fifth outfielder. If the Giants mix and match, this could work out.

It's not Nelson Cruz for five years. It's not Shin-Soo Choo for seven. It's not a three-year deal, and it's not Jeff Francoeur. Just think of all the ways it could be worse! As such, it's pretty harmless. Except for all the harm it could cause. But, dingers! I like those. Apparently, the Giants do, too. It's not the move I would have made, but it's not the move that makes me dust off the torchfork, either.

Mike Morse: Very Large, Slow Giant - Lefty Malo

In other words, Morse is a buy-low lottery ticket. (And believe you me, a $6 M base salary these days is low, low, low.) It's a nice get for a team with little in the upper minors to speak of, hitting-wise, and lacking the resources of the big... oh wait. What did a New York scribe recently call the low-budget team from Queens? The San Diego Mets?

Then again, no one in their right Giant mind wanted Nelson Cruz for three years or Shin-Soo Choo for seven (or eight). So was Mike Morse, who has a 30-HR season in his recent past, the best possible scenario? We'll never know definitively. Retroactive rumors will emerge that the Giants were THIS CLOSE to trading for Brett Gardner or Josh Willingham, but they weren't willing to part with, well, pick a prospect. Morse isn't really what most people wanted, but then again, what people wanted wasn't so hot, either

Morse’s one-year deal with Giants a bigger risk for him than the team - The Strike Zone SI.com

As a righthanded power source, Morse is a nice compliment to the lefthanded Blanco, whose game is based around speed and defense. In addition, Morse can also play first base, where he will occasionally spell lefty Brandon Belt, and he will be the team’s best pinch-hitter on days that he doesn’t start. At $6 million, Morse is earning what, in free agency, is now a part-time salary but with half the commitment; already this offseason the Indians have signed David Murphy to a two-year, $12 million deal and the Tigers signed Rajai Davis for two years and $10 million to be backups. 

For the Giants, it’s a nice fit. For Morse, however, it’s a risk.

And the hottest take of them all from the genius behind 8th Inning Weirdness:

Overall, the consensus is that the Giants are hoping that Morse rebuilds his value and hits a bunch of home runs on a low risk one year deal. I can live with that.

---

Looking for San Francisco Giants tickets check out our partner TiqIQ.

Giants Win, Complete Improbable Comeback

A thing of beauty

Two days ago the Giants had just a 15 percent chance of winning this series. This afternoon they became the first National League team to come back from down 0-2 in a five game series.

The big inning was the 5th where the Giants scored all 6 runs and then held on for dear life. All those times putting the tying run on base nearly gave me a heart attack and made it hard to type at times with my hands shaking uncontrollably.

It wasn't easy.

It wasn't pretty.

In the end it really doesn't matter because the Giants won.

Now us fans have a day or two to recover from the stress and nerves before the NLCS ratchets up the nerves to the next level.

---

Become a fan on Facebook and follow the The Crazy Crabbers on twitter there is lots of good stuff going on there. Sign up for our free newsletter!

Giants odds at 28 percent: Updated NLDS Odds

After an improbable win where the Giants offense took a play right out of the 2010 Padres playbook the Giants season continues to today.

Since I last looked at the odds things have changed quite a bit, with Johnny Cueto out and Mike Leake brought into replace him. Today it is Leake vs. Barry Zito (another change) and if necessary it will be Mat Latos vs. Matt Cain tomorrow morning.

Here is everything updated with the changes since a ran the original projection and the updated odds:

	Reds	Giants
Game 1	100%	0%
Game 2	100%	0%
Game 3	0%	100%
Game 4	49%	51%
Game 5	44%	56%

And the permutations for the last two games:

Games	Reds	Giants
3	0%	0%
4	49%	0%
5	23%	28%
Total	72%	28%

It's still a long shot for the Giants but crazier things have happened and amazingly the Giants are actually favored in the last two games (even though they would be better classified as toss ups).

---

Become a fan on Facebook and follow the The Crazy Crabbers on twitter there is lots of good stuff going on there. Sign up for our free newsletter!

It is time for teams to have more engagement with their blogs

So I saw something on twitter today that made me insanely jealous, the Mets are having a blogger conference call with GM Sandy Alderson. 

Yes, lowly bloggers get to ask questions to the guy who is in charge of making the biggest decisions for a Major League Baseball team. 

Let me repeat that, the Mets are having a blogger conference call with GM Sandy Alderson. 

Charlotte Giveth and We Getteth

Charlotte was the location for our nation's first gold rush, way back in 1802. It's also the birthplace of Southern Presbyterianism, a holy thing for a great number of people. However, Charlotte is most famous for producing a 33 year old pitcher that seemingly found his lightning bolt embossed sleeves nestled away in the cozy crevices of his closet this off-season.

With his super shirt donned (this is the best explanation I can come up with) Ryan Vogelsong has been the most consistent pitcher on the formidable Giants staff in 2011. I don't think any fan has gotten to a point yet where they expect him to close down whichever team he's facing, but he's getting close.

In 15 games started this year, he's given up more than three runs, exactly one time. It was his second start, way back on May 3rd, and he must have had terrible butterflies in the Big Apple, because he was lit up for five runs in four innings by the Mets. Perhaps that loss was the catalyst needed for him to pitch lights out ever since. The six starts after that day in New York were 0 or 1 ER outings. In fact, not until June 28th did he give up even 3 earned runs in a start.

I think the Giants knew exactly what they were doing when they drafted him back before Y2K was threatening to end our way of life.

Sure they did.

It's been 13 season, but now he's starting to look not just legitimate  but amazing. Sure, he pounced on a Dodger team with a front office that has more drama than a weekend-long Melrose Place marathon, but the Dodgers love to beat up the Giants at China Basin. For the past four seasons it has been nearly automatic for the men in blue, but tonight Vogelsong made sure that didn't happen.

So instead of skipping rocks across Sugar Creek in Charlotte this evening, Ryan Vogelsong electrified 42,000 rabid fans on the shores of McCovey Cove in San Francisco. This has been a special All Star year for him and one of the greatest comeback stories that even Disney couldn't top.

With each consecutive start, he's getting closer to being the first Giants starter to finish a season with an ERA under 2.00 since Bobby Bolin posted a 1.99 ERA with 19 starts in 1968 and the first Giant to lead the league in ERA since Jason Schmidt in 2003.

This is a good story that I'm looking forward to continuing again in five or six days. Do you think Vogelsong will get better as the year progresses? Did he find the fountain of youth in Japan and bring it back stateside?

---

Become a fan on Facebook and follow the The Crazy Crabbers on twitter there is lots of good stuff going on there. Sign up for our free newsletter!

The Giants Win @ Twitter

The Giants do really well at engaging with their fans on Twitter with one of the strongest presences in the social media square of any team.



Bryan Srabian, the Director of Social Media for the Giants, has done a great job of engaging the fan base and giving something extra and special for the fans who follow the team.

I had the pleasure of meeting him and he is a really nice guy who looks out for the fans. If you are on Twitter, you should follow the Giants official account. If not, you should really consider joining because following along with other fans while the game is on adds a whole new dimension to watching the game.

---

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

Giants/Cubs Series Preview

After the Atlanta series these next four games vs the Cubs become huge, to be honest we should have been swept in the ATL but they gave us game two.

Game one:  Carlos Zambrano (3-6 5.61 ERA) vs Madison Bumgardner (4-4 3.20 ERA)
Mad Bum had a Rocky start in Colorado but i like him at home facing the Cubs who have never seen him before and i like him to have a nice bounce back game. hopefully the Giants offense can find itself in this game.

Game two: Ryan Dempster (9-8 3.76 ERA) vs Tim Lincecum (11-5 3.15 ERA)
Timmy didnt pitch bad in the ATL he made a couple bad pitches but other than that he pitched well. If he keeps the ball down and doesnt lose control with the fastball we could see a magical outing. Timmy still has not thrown a no-hitter so if he wants to be in contention for the CY Young that might need to happen enventually.

Game three: Tom Gorzelanny (6-6 3.51 ERA) vs Barry Zito (8-6 3.35 ERA)
Barry has had quality start after quality start i look for that to continue in this game. If the Giants offense scored they win.

Game four: Randy Wells (5-10 4.37 ERA) Matt Cain (9-9 3.03 ERA)
Bottom line if Cain does not get run support the Giants will lose 1-0

Conclusion: If the Giants offense wakes up and scores runs they will sweep.

---

If your 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.

Giants/Rockies Series Preview

The Giants are coming off a HUGE sweep of the Dodgers and leave the friendly confines of AT&T Park for the mile high city to square off against the red hot Rockies.

The Evolution of The N.L. West

Much has been said about the National League West over the last decade, but most of the talk has been negative with quotes like " The N.L. West is in fact the worst division in the MLB." But if you look at the past decade the N.L. West really hasn't been that bad.

Over the last Decade a National League West team represented the National League in the World Series three times, What makes it so special is that three different teams were in it. The Arizona Diamondbacks in 2000, The San Fransisco Giants in 2002, and the Colorado Rockies in 2007.

In addition the Wild Card winner has been from the N.L. West in 09, 07, 06, and 02. The division has not been dominated by a single team unlike the A.L. East (Yankees) or say the N.L Central (Cardinals). Since 2000 only one team has not won the division (Colorado but they have been to the promised land) and all of the other teams have won it more than once with Arizona and Los Angeles having the most titles with 3, then San Fransisco and San Diego with two.

The current N.L. West features four of the five teams with reccords above .500 and the team with the best record in the Nation League. Try and tell me now that we have the worst division in Baseball now East Coast Bais pushers. The current N.L Wild Card leader comes from our division that team happens to be our San Fransisco Giants.

The division has evolved into the best division in the National League, it is the most complete and balanced top to bottom. The torch Ladies and Gentlemen has been past to the A.L. Central for the worst division in Baseball.

---

If your 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.

Looking at the Rest of the Season

The official first half of the season is over now that the All-Star break is behind us. Many people have looked back and told you how the season has gone thus far, but here at the Crazy Crabbers we are interested in where things are going to go. 

The Giants have 74 games remaining to make a run at the playoffs. They sit four games back of the Padres in the division and two games back in the wild card. The road is going to be rough and it is almost guaranteed to be torture. Here is a breakdown of things to come. 

July: The Giants coming out of the All-Star break have 18 straight games that takes them through the first of August. They play a pair of tough teams and two others that could challenge them but they should be favored to win. The way they get out of the gate should determine how they attack things at the trade deadline, if they come out flying Brian Sabean maybe emboldened to pull the trigger on a big trade if not he will certainly be more hesitant if there are struggles. 

One of the silver linings for the the rest of July is that the team has 10 home games against 7 road games, however 6 of those are against good teams where every advantage will be needed. 

Mid-Season Awards: Goose Gossage Award

As a part of the Baseball Bloggers Alliance there is the participation in the end of year awards voting. As a practice run I am going to do a vote for who should get the awards based on the first half of the season. (Note: I write for a national league blog so I vote for the national league only).
My choices will be spread through out the All-Star Break as follows:
Monday: Rookie of the Year Award and Manager of the Year Award
Tuesday: Goose Gossage Award (Reliever of the Year) and Pitcher of the Year award
Wednesday: Most Valuable Player Award
The Goose Gossage Award (Relievers):

Are the Giants Contenders

Only Baseball Matters linked to a very interesting piece from Bill James (registration required) regarding winning teams and close games. This should be required reading for anyone who has concerns about the 2010 Giants.

…. Baseball teams play 162 games a year. I just realized last week that,
sometime in the last 20 years, baseball experts have fallen into the habit of
saying that a baseball team has about 50 games a year that you are just going to
lose no matter what, 50 games a year that you’re going to win, and it is the
other 62 games that determine what kind of season you’re going to have. This is
not ancient knowledge; this is a fairly new one. A more inane analysis would be
difficult to conceive of. First of all, baseball teams do not play one hundred
non-competitive games a year, or anything remotely like that. Baseball teams
play about forty non-competitive games in a season, more or less; I would be
surprised if any team in the history of major league baseball ever had a hundred
games in the season that were just wins or losses, and which the losing team
never had a chance to win after the fourth or fifth inning. The outcome of most
baseball games could be reversed by changing a very small number of events
within the game.

But setting that aside, this relatively new cliché assumes that it is
the outcome of the most competitive games that decides whether a team has a
great season or a poor season. In reality, the opposite is true. The more
competitive a game is, the more likely it is that the game will be won by the
weaker team. If the Royals play the Yankees and the score of the game is 12 to
1, it is extremely likely that the Yankees won. If the score is 4 to 3, it’s
pretty much a tossup. The reasons why this is true will be intuitively obvious
to those of you who work with statistics for a living. It is the non-competitive
games—the blowouts—that play the largest role in determining what kind of season
a team has. Misinformation about baseball continues to propagate, and will
continue to propagate forever more, without regard to the fact that there is now
a community of researchers that studies these things.

It doesn’t take a lot to notice the Giants do not blow a lot of teams out, almost everyone of their games is pretty close. This is a direct reflection of how the team is built; they have great run prevention and poor run production. The Giants pitching masks the horrid offense by making every other team we face look like how our offense performs night in and night out.

Only Baseball Matters sums up the realization perfectly, this hit me in the face and knocked the thoughts of pennants and parades right out.

It’s like a light in a dark closet.

Of course we’re frustrated, being in nail-biters game after game, week
after week. It’s because we can sense that something’s not right. There’s
something about a team that wins by being perfect that fails to inspire
confidence. Of course it doesn’t. As James explains so clearly, it shouldn’t.
Winning teams dominate. Winning teams consistently win big. Winning teams are
not built upon winning one-run games. Winning teams don’t win because they
always win the close ones. They win because they blow teams out. Close games are
far too often decided by one single mistake, on missed play, one error, one
walk, just like Monday’s game. Teams dancing along that fine line are simply far
too dependent upon luck to win enough of the time to be a real contender. And we
can see that, even though the Giants are winning right now, they are not really
a contending team.

This takes me back to the end of last season; I had doubts about the “realness” or what not of the Giants resurgence. They are too one-sided in talent. Their pitching is among the top 5 in the majors and their offense is among the bottom 5, they have no margin for error in their games and a run of bad luck and they can loose 6 in a row.

These doubts have continued into this season as well. The offense might be a little better but it is still below league average. The faults and weaknesses of last season have not been corrected, the reason this team doesn’t win more games is not because they fail to execute it is because they are playing at their talent level.

When you have a roster of average to below average hitters you expect futility in driving in that runner with two outs, or getting a big 3 run homer to put a team away. I thought that I was being irrationally pessimistic about this team but I think that I am being completely rational in expecting them to not come through in most situations. The Giants are wonderful with the lead but coming from behind is an impossible task.

The reason that the Padres have our number is because they are a mirror image of ourselves just with more athletic and some younger guys. They have the same formula for beating teams and that is why when the teams face off it is a battle of ineptness, a pillow fight, a duel with water guns, I could go on.

This team isn’t bad but they are not a championship caliber team either. They don’t have the offense to support the awesome pitching. If they make the playoffs they will face a team that has both and will be run out of the building. This is the truth and it is the reason that this season will be torture.

Maybe a GM dumber then Brian Sabean will trade the team a good hitter at the deadline for a bucket of balls and marginal prospects. This is the only hope I have left.

The Road Map to 90 Wins:

The 2010 season is 15% done and the Giants are sitting at 14-10 in second place. The team has excelled at preventing runs (even better then last season at this rate) and has been about average offensively which is good enough to give them the second best run differential in the National league behind only the Cardinals.

The team is underperforming the expected win-loss at this point which pegs them as a 17-7 team which suggests that the start is not just a mirage and that they may have been a little unlucky so far this season. Part of this is there performance in 1 run games where they are 1 and 5 this season, hopefully that balances out a little bit over the course of the season.

The NL West this season seems to be pretty bunched with the talent level of each team pretty close which means that no team should run away with the race. I imagine that it will be close going down to the wire with at least 3 teams maybe more within 5 games down the stretch. I think that the ultimate winner will finish with between 88 and 92 wins.

This is the road map for the Giants to get there:

Giants and Marlins Series Preview:

The Giants head east for a six game road trip, the first stop is Miami and the Florida Marlins. The Marlins are 13-12 tied for third in the National League East. They boast a solid pitching stuff and a young lineup that has some pop through out the order. The team is lead by there solid 3-5 hitters of Hanley Ramirez, Jorge Cantu, and Dan Uggla. Keeping these bats quite and having patience against the Marlins pitching will be the key to winning this series.

The Giants are coming off an impressive home stand where they won all three series against 3 of the top teams in the National League and had a chance to sweep all three. The wins against solid opponents look nice on the resume and hopefully give the team some confidence heading into this road trip.

The Giants are skipping Wellemeyer’s turn in the rotation which will give them the top three guys going in this series. Hopefully that leads to a fourth consecutive series win.

Good Bye Freddie Lewis

Good bye Mr. Lewis. Your tunure with the Giants is best described as a decent player who was in a bad situation.

Fred had the job of replacing the one of if not the most feared hitter to ever wear a Giants jersey in left field. That cannot be easy for anyone and I do not envy the task of trying to crawl out the shaddow that was left out there.

Fred has been a polarizing figure during his career by the bay with some thinking that Fred is a decent major leaguer with others falling on the side of thinking he is a bum.

Let's do a quick comparison of some tripple slash lines (AVG/OBP/SLG) to see where he comes down here:

Player A: .281/.339/.449
Player B: .228/.290/.365
Player C: .277/.355/.420
Player D: .265/.306/.401
Player E: .274/.343/.423
Player F: .284/.316/.415
Player G: .245/.292/.403

These are the career numbers of Fred Lewis and the other Giants outfielders. Would it surprise you if I told you that Lewis is player C and has arguably the second best tripple slash line for his career.

Here are the identities of each:

Player A: Aaron Rowand
Player B: Andres Torres
Player C: Fred Lewis
Player D: Eugenio Velez
Player E: Mark DeRosa
Player F: Nate Schierholtz
Player G: John Bowker

Fred compares very well with both Aaron Rowand and better than Mark DeRosa who Giants signed to a 2 year $12 million deal this winter.

This type of move is pretty typical for the Giants front office. Fred Lewis doen't have the track reccord and reputation of a Mark DeRosa or a Aaron Rowand but he is a league average player these are not the types of player that good teams just give away especailly when he still only makes the league minimum.

Over at Fangraphs they have a nice write up on Fred. Here are some of the highlights:

His 109 wRC+ suggests an above average player. 2009 was a down year for Lewis, however, as his ISO dropped from .158 to .132. As a result, his wOBA and wRC dropped to .327 and 98 respectively, the first year in which he has been below average in either statistic. The projection systems see him as slightly above average this year, and ZiPS in particular expects a return to 2008 levels.

Defensively, both UZR and +/- are fans of Lewis, despite his poor reputation among Giants fans in Tom Tango’s Fan Scouting Report. Both systems have Lewis between +9 and +11 over his 326 game career, which would still make him a below average position-neutral defender over 150 games.


Overall, not only does that make Lewis an MLBer, but it makes him nearly an average player. There is no way that Lewis is only the 6th best outfielder on the Giants roster. Aaron Rowand is projected to have a similar or worse year. Nate Schierholtz has similar projections. Andres Torres is 32 and projected to be well below average at the plate by both CHONE and ZiPS... Eugenio Velez has put up 201 games of replacement level baseball in his career so far, and the projections don’t see improvement in his future – only a data-starved Marcel projects a wRC+ greater than 90.

The Giants gave away Fred Lewis a decent major leaguer for cash or a PTBNL. These are not the moves of savy GM with a roster that is not overflowing with talent.

Good bye and good luck in Toronto.

Update: Grant over at McCovey Chronicles has some nice thoughts on the Lewis trade. Check it out. Chris at Bay City Ball weighs in with some similar thoughts.