Down goes Hunter Pence. Again.

Rest of the San Francisco Giants offense, that’s your cue to get going now.

After playing in only 52 games due to injuries in 2015, Pence has hit a major snag at the 50-game mark of his 2016 season. As reported by Alex Pavlovic of CSN Bay Area, the veteran right fielder needs surgery to repair a torn right hamstring.

The timeline in the air for Pence’s return is eight weeks. But as Henry Schulman of the San Francisco Chronicle reports, it could be longer:

Considering the circumstances, it wouldn’t be surprising if Pence ends up missing more than eight weeks. The surgery he’s having is to repair a hamstring tendon that was torn clean off the bone when he came up lame while running to first base Wednesday in Atlanta. Good luck reading that without saying, “Ow.”

If there’s a bright side here, it’s that the Giants are arguably better suited to withstand Pence being out for a while than they were in 2015. 

Last year’s Giants had plenty of offense, but the struggles they had with their non-Madison Bumgarner pitchers rendered many of the runs they scored moot. It’s been a different story in 2016. The Giants’ Big Three of Bumgarner, Johnny Cueto and Jeff Samardzija has combined for a 2.35 ERA, and their starting rotation as a whole owns a 3.45 ERA that’s good for fifth in Major League Baseball.

The Giants’ much-improved pitching is the reason they are where they are. The club has responded to a slow April with a 22-9 showing since May 1. Their pitching has surrendered only 3.2 runs per game in this span, allowing for a fairly large margin of error.

This being said, Pence’s injury is indeed a threat to make that margin of error significantly smaller.

With a .298/.375/.486 batting line to his name, Pence has been San Francisco’s second-best hitter after Brandon Belt. And because the club’s offense as a whole has only a .734 OPS (eighth in the National League) despite their efforts, Belt is right on the money with his assessment of the situation:

Replacing Pence will indeed be hard. Neither Angel Pagan, who is due back from his own injury before long, nor Gregor Blanco packs a high-upside bat. Mac Williamson hasn’t fared well against major league pitching. Fellow youngster Jarrett Parker could do the trick if he picks up where he left off in an explosive 2015 debut, but that’s asking a lot. 

What the Giants can do, however, is hope to replace Pence in the aggregate.

All the key members of last year’s offense, which ranked in the NL’s top five in both runs and OPS, are back this year. The problem is that too many of them just haven’t gotten rolling yet. Just take a look at where each Giants regular is in OPS+, which adjusts OPS to be on a scale of league average (100):

After star turns in 2015, Matt Duffy and Joe Panik have been below-average hitters in 2016. Denard Span is also in that realm. Brandon Crawford has barely been above-average. And though Buster Posey has been good, he’s well short of his usual production.

These guys are largely responsible for the sputtering nature of the Giants offense this season. They’ve been able to get away with that until now, but Pence’s absence needs to be the call to arms that gets them to snap out of it and live up to their capabilities.

For Duffy and Panik, that means doing something anything to recapture what was working for them in 2015, when they spent the season whacking line drives in every direction. But for the others, it only means they need to keep doing what they’ve been doing recently:

Posey, in particular, could give the Giants a huge boost if he builds on his recent surge. That would mean him turning back into one of the NL’s best all-around hitters and also back into the engine in the middle of Bruce Bochy’s lineup.

“He does make us go,” the skipper said after Posey’s recent two-homer outburst at Coors Field, per John Shea of the San Francisco Chronicle. “When he goes, it just relaxes everybody.”

If things don’t come together for Posey and the others, the Giants will head into the heart of the summer trade season with some decisions to make. As Jeff Todd highlighted at MLB Trade Rumors, Ryan Braun and Jay Bruce figure to be available. Josh Reddick and/or Colby Rasmus could be as well. There’s also bound to be a selection of solid platoon guys there for the taking.

But for now, the Giants have the time to see if they can solve the Pence problem in-house. Though they don’t have the guys to fill his shoes, they do have enough offensive talent to make everyone forget he’s gone.

All it needs to do is finally show up.

 

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

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