Kuzul

It seems as if every time The Freak takes the mound this year, the Giants community spends the following several days desperately trying to figure out what the hell happened.

The way it has generally been understood, Lincecum’s starts have featured a Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde-style dichotomy that always ends in that destructive psychopath, Mr. Hyde, taking over and ruining any chance of a win the team ever had.

Before people were even in their seats, there were relievers warming up in the bullpen before Timmy got the first out. It looked as if this was the culmination of a season-long implosion that would surely see The Franchise removed from the rotation, a scenario previously thought impossible.

But then, just as quickly as his implosions usually start, that same Timmy that we all know and love showed up and saved the day by striking out the side with the bases loaded.

And he never looked back.

Still, here we are and once again we’re trying to figure out what the hell happened. How is there such a clear distinction between the two Timmys that are of course the same person?

What controls this on/off style switch that seems to separate the former Cy Young winner with this Jonathan Sanchez-esque impostor? Well as we try to do every week, let’s try to figure it out, only this time with undertones of justifiable optimism.

What we see here (click on the link if you want to see a bigger version of the brooksbaseball.net graph) is Lincecum’s night as a whole, and it’s easily apparent that this was the sharpest version of Tim Lincecum we’ve seen in some time.

Outside of those wild first-inning fastballs, we can see that he was keeping the ball down and to the left side of plate, which is right where he wants to be.

Location-wise, the biggest thing to take away was the lack of balls just laying down the middle in the top of the zone, i.e. the crushables. So far this season, Lincecum’s biggest problems has been his location mistakes in the zone, leading to an excessively high line-drive percentage of 25.5 percent, which ranks as third-worst in the game among starters.

We can see from the graph that although he did throw some pitches up, most of them were either high enough to get swing-throughs and easy fly balls or pop-ups, or stayed to the sides enough that guys weren’t getting good contact on them.

In fact we can see that there’s only one super-hittable pitch, that light blue (which of course denotes a ball hit in play, but failing to cause an out) pitch down the middle that was the RBI single up the middle from Jemile Weeks.

That pitch was the best-handled pitch Oakland got against Lincecum all game (grounders up the middle tend to be the only ground balls that are actually well hit, handled and timed).

We can see that the other hits were all on really good locations and it’s no coincidence that these hits were merely ground balls that happened to be hit to Ryan Theriot.

Well that below-the-zone hit was that “soft line drive” (gameday’s classification) hit by Josh Reddick, Oakland’s far-and-away best hitter, but that was just good hitting combined with the fact that Nate Schierholtz was playing pretty far back, anticipating the power that Reddick later put on display.

Anyway this was his start as a whole, so let’s take a look at just his first inning so we can see where the problems lie.

Well that (again click if you want to see a bigger version of the graph) was definitely not as bad as expected.

So there were some huge misses up out of the zone, some pretty big ones to the left and some in the dirt ones down and to the left, but outside of those seven huge misses, he was pretty good location-wise.

Here’s the link for which pitches those were so you can see that he left one change a little higher than preferred, but outside of that kept the off-speed stuff down and kept the fastball to the sides for the most part, namely the left side.

Looking back on the inning, this makes a lot of sense as despite the runs, the A’s never really hit the ball that hard. We talked about the contact in the last slide, but for the most part it wasn’t really the problem as those balls would go for outs about half the time (again with the exception of that down-the-middle Jemile Weeks hit).

This marks a distinctive change from Lincecum’s usual implosions, as normally hitters are crushing his pitches left and right. Here it was just the clean nowhere-near-the-zone misses that were the cause of his struggles.

Indeed, over the start as a whole he only let up two line drives and two fly balls, both of which  were easy outs (one was even caught by first baseman Brandon Belt). Compare that to 10 groundouts and eight strikeouts, and it’s easy to see that this was not the same pitcher who has been getting torched all season.

Looking at the batted ball data from his game log (courtesy fangraphs.com), we can see that this is very distinct from his previous outings as he has allowed at least 10 combined fly balls and line drives in his previous five starts.

Looking at the graph of his previous start in Seattle (from brooksbaseball.net), we can see that there’s a pretty big difference in terms of pitch location as he threw just as many pitches in the upper part of the zone as the lower, which is just not sustainable when you throw in the low 90s.

If Lincecum can continue what he started in Oakland and even improve on those big misses he suffered earlier, Giants fans can get back to doing what they do best, and that’s blaming Barry Zito.

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As summer starts and July gets closer and closer, teams are getting a better idea of who they are and what they are trying to accomplish for the season. For the Giants, this means contending as one of the best in the league and trying to catch the team that has so far been the very best in the game, the dreaded Los Angeles Dodgers. Sitting pretty with a 42-25 record, it might take more than the patented “just enough” offense to catch the Bums and capture the division.

Fortunately, the Giants are an improving team and Pablo Sandoval’s recent return should continue to pay dividends as he inches closer and closer to a full recovery. The Panda’s addition, however important, is only one of several key differences that will shape the team as we draw closer to trade season. Without further ado, here are the five biggest differences to the club that you should expect by the end of June.

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Well, it looks like that day has finally come, and after going 0-for-3 in Friday night’s shutout, long-time minor league first baseman Brett Pill finally returns from whence he came, Triple-A Fresno.

According to the Giants Twitter, the G-men have activated All-Star third baseman Pablo Sandoval, who missed several weeks with surgery, and demoted Brett Pill back to the minors.

This move marks a refreshing change as the San Francisco Giants show their rejection of the lineup consistently marched out to face lefties, a lineup in some ways defined by the right-handed swinging Brett Pill.

Despite their unlikely victories, the Giants have hit terribly against left-handers as evident by their team wRC+ of 78 against them (wRC+ is a batting stat that incorporates everything a batter does and represents their offensive contributions in percentage above or below average which means that the Giants have hit 22 percent below average against left-handers).

This is in no small part to Brett Pill, who starts over platoon mate Brandon Belt every time a southpaw  starts a game. Brett Pill, just as his minor league numbers would suggest, has struggled in limited playing time in 2012 boasting a pitiful line of .215/.271/.367 in 79 at-bats.

Ironically, Pill was even worse against lefties as his .200/.262/.350 line against them inspired much doubt to manager Bruce Bochy’s decision to consistently start him against the southpaws who so easily bested him.

Giants fans can look forward to two attractive outcomes of this move as not only will team MVP Pablo Sandoval return, but Pill’s departure should open the door for consistent playing time for former top prospect Brandon Belt. Belt’s infamous mismanagement has inspired enormous backlash from fans and experts alike as the “Free Belt” movement has been going on since fans first saw how short his leash was in 2011.

Hopefully this marks the beginning of a commitment to consistently start Belt which should further sweeten the return of the beloved Kung-Fu Panda.

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I’m not going to lie, I’m writing this in a state that is inadvisable for writing. As Virginia Woolf illustrates in her essay about writing called “A Room of One’s Own”, there is a clear distinction between writing in the “red light of emotion” versus “the white light of truth” and that distinction does not advise the former. Well, after watching game after game without my current favorite player starting, I’ll admit right off the bat, I’m freakin’ pissed.

Here comes a player who has the talent and ability to make what has recently been a terrible offense not so terrible. The Giants know this, the fans know this, the experts know this, so why are they so intent on mishandling him? After his admittedly rough 10 at-bats in Arizona, which in his defense came against two really good pitchers and one above-average pitcher, we got an insight on Bochy’s plan via Andrew Baggarly, “But Bochy reiterated that he will not yo-yo Belt in and out of the lineup. The talented first baseman will get every opportunity to settle in, the manager said.”

Since then, here is a summary of everything he’s done offensively: sat a game, came in via double switch in the third only to be taken out in the fifth (he went 0-1 with a walk), sat a game, sat a game, sat a game, started a game in which he accounted for two of the Giants’ nine base runners, started a game against Roy Halladay in which he again got on base twice, sat a game to pinch hit a fly ball out, sat a game (presumably because the starter was a lefty) before pinch-hitting against a left-handed specialist, who posted a 13.95 K/9 against lefties last year, and still got a hit and the game winning run, sat a game (presumably because the starter was a lefty) before pinch-hitting against another left handed specialist who posted a 12.46 K/9 against lefties last year and proceeded to strike Belt out on three sliders, and sat today before pinch-hitting a bloop double to tie the game. That seems like the dictionary definition of yo-yoing Belt in and out of the lineup and the complete opposite of giving him every opportunity to settle in.

Over that period, Belt is hitting .364/.500/.545 over 14 plate appearances, whereas Huff is hitting .158/.227/.316 over 22, not to mention Huff’s terrible defense (in today’s game, he committed an error at first, and then ruined a game-saving double play with a mental mistake while playing second base). So why the hell is Huff starting over Belt?!

The first and most obvious answer is Bochy’s long-established gritty veteran fetish. The second is the rumors that Belt is at odds with Giants’ coaching staff about adjusting his stance to better protect an alleged hole in his swing. Apparently the Giants believe that Belt has a hole in his swing that gets exploited by inside fastballs and that this is the biggest reason for his alleged struggles.

Upon further analysis, this “hole” seems grossly overstated, as his heat maps reveal that there isn’t really a statistically relevant hole on the inside of the plate. Now that is for all pitches—I can’t find a heat map for fastballs exclusively—but his pitch value data from FanGraphs shows that last year he actually hit fastballs pretty well. Above-average, in fact. (He may be below-average so far during 2012, but the sample size is irrelevantly small.)

Belt detractors claim that pitchers keep pounding the inside part of the plate with fastballs, but that is also not the case, as he’s been getting fewer than 50 percent fastballs (as opposed to 58.2 percent last year, compared to the NL average of 56.8 percent). And he hasn’t really been exploited by the inside fastball since Ian Kennedy and Daniel Hudson did so in Arizona.

The real trouble for Belt has always been breaking balls, as again FanGraphs’ pitch value data shows. Bay City Ball posted an article late last year that talks about his problem with breaking pitches and features a very handy swing/miss (the pluses are misses) map against breaking pitches. Most of his whiffs against breaking pitches have been low and inside, which would give the impression that he was sitting on inside fastball and chasing the breaking pitches. People have always been getting on his case to hit the inside fastball, and perhaps this is the cause of his tendency to chase pitches down and in. In fact, the most recent example came in his last start, when his only swing-and-miss came against Roy Halladay, down 0-1 in the count, on a low-and-inside changeup.

It seems that because of this problem, Belt made the adjustment to move a little further up in the box and hit a little more aggressively in order to better hit breaking balls, which sounds by all measures of logic to be a good decision. Three games later, facing the nasty two-seamers of Kennedy and Hudson, apparently people had all the evidence they needed to say that Belt’s methods weren’t working and that he needed to adjust his swing. Ten at-bats are definitely not an ample sample size to make these kind of conclusions, but that hasn’t stopped Bochy from relegating Belt to bench duties.

The more troubling thing is that even if Belt did in fact actually have this hole or some other problem that was causing him to struggle, how would relegating him to bench duties fix this? How is he supposed to adjust to big league pitching by sitting on the bench? The bottom line is that Belt is not playing to his potential because he hasn’t gotten chance to settle in and adjust to big-league pitching, but even the uncomfortable Brandon Belt is still a better player than Aubrey Huff. As a result there’s absolutely no reason Belt should be riding the pine.

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