The San Francisco Giants, they of even-numbered year World Series titles in the aughts, are doing it again.
They’re in the postseason, this time as a wild-card team, two years after they won it all for the second time. They seemingly have found something when it comes to the postseason that turns them into world beaters, Bryce Harper’s homers be damned. (While everyone marveled at its majesty, did anyone actually wonder if it was fair or not? Just accepted it? No good replay? Got it.)
So what is it that makes the Giants great in the postseason? Well, there’s a lot of different theories out there, and not necessarily those of the secret sauce variety.
One thing that definitely correlates with the Giants being successful in the postseason is their starting pitching. In 2010, they had a team ERA of 2.47, striking out 133 batters in 136 innings. Batters hit only .196 against them. They had four shutouts amongst their 11 victories. Two years later, they had a similar line, albeit not as good: 2.88 ERA, .218 BAA, but still had four shutouts. This year, it’s more of the same: 1.33 ERA, .157 BAA (!!!) and Madison Bumgarner’s nine-inning shutout prelude to pounding a quartet of brew. So that could be it.
What about their performance in close games? In 2010, each of the four NLDS games San Francisco had against Atlanta were decided by one run, with the Giants obviously winning three. In the ALCS against Philadelphia, the Giants won all four games by one run. In the World Series? They blew out the Rangers in their first two wins before winning the final two by two.
In 2012, they famously staved off elimination against Cincinnati in Game 3 of the ALDS, 2-1. In the NLCS, they did come back from a 3-1 deficit against St. Louis thanks to Barry Zito’s inexplicable Game 5 performance and blew out the Cards in every win from that series. And in that year’s World Series, the only one-run game ended up being the clincher. Outside of the drubbing of Pittsburgh in this year’s Wild Card game, the Giants won all three games against Washington by one run. It’s not all there in winning close games, but you might say there’s something to be said.
What about Hunter Pence’s well-known ability to talk up his teammates? Or Bruce Bochy’s mild-mannered way he runs the clubhouse? Hell, they’re trying to quantify team chemistry, too.
In the secret sauce article I linked to above, Nate Silver posited that power pitching, a good closer and good defense are the keys to a successful run in the postseason. The article is from 2006, but was based on looking at the data available at the time, and not much has been added since. More often than not, the Giants have rode a similar model to their success in the playoffs. But people who look at season stats, postseason stats or previous experience to try and measure postseason success fail much more often than they succeed. To wit: the team with this year’s best pitching by fWAR and FIP just got knocked out of the playoffs by the team with the 28th best fWAR and the 10th best FIP. It’s only one stat, but by no means should you look at a season of 162 games to try and determine what is, in essence, the definition of a coin flip.
There is no doubt that you have to be a good team to get to the postseason, but once you’re there, the idea of “throwing it all out the window” actually applies. Five and seven games series are highly volatile and offer not nearly enough to right the ship if a team falters at the wrong time. Even cluster luck, which has become en vogue this year to help determine what teams are like on hot streaks, can fail to discern just how good a team is in a short series.
So then why all the questions about why the Giants are such a good playoff team? Well, for starters, you have to explain the unexplainable. Expected stats, scouting reports and digging for examples of past success are all somewhat quantifiable. But then you have things like Cody Ross taking Roy Halladay deep twice. You have Marco Scutaro hitting .328 in the 2012 playoffs. You have Yusmeiro Petit throwing six innings of shutout relief. These things aren’t impossible. But what made them important was the time they happened.
When great players do it, it’s because we expect them to be great. The ends justify the means. We were all right because the best player came through when it counted most. Harper’s homer barrage and Posey’s seven hit performance are examples. But compared to other sports, the amount of attrition, luck, variation and general noise muddles the conventions of what baseball should be in the postseason. If the best teams are expected to win, the only way to put that theory to the test it is to eliminate three rounds of the playoffs and have the best team in the NL and the best team in the AL duke it out in the World Series. But even then you’d hear about how the teams that made it might not be deserving. And Major League Baseball ain’t about to fork over that much cash. So what then?
Like any tournament, it’s about who can put together the best performance at the time of the tournament. That’s too small a sample to quantify, too small a sample to determine by anything other than the result. Call it cluster luck, call it timeliness, but in the end, the Giants win because they happen to play the best baseball of anybody when they’re in the playoffs. For a team that was the best in the league for two months before becoming the worst team in the league for two months in 2014, it shouldn’t be at all surprising that they could put it together in October for a run good enough to get them a championship.
