The
San Francisco Giants are one of the most confusing teams in baseball. They hit for a high AVG and OBP but
can’t hit more than doubles and win most of their games with 3 runs. But they win and as my dad says “that’s
all that matters is that the Giants win and the Dodgers lose.” As you can tell my dad is a diehard
Giants fan, most arguments in baseball end now with “how many rings do the
Astros have?” But I digress, today
I’m not going to talk about the team as a whole but that day is coming today I
want to talk about 1 player that has been a major driving force for the team
this year. Lets take a look at the
RF for the Giants Hunter Pence.
So
why Hunter Pence and not say Buster Posey? Pablo Sandoval? Matt Cain? Well it comes down to a question that I wanted to find the
answer to, what changed he’s one of the more valuable players on the team so
far this year and Pence is one of the few players actually hitting for
power. Considering he batted .219
in the second half of last season and hit nearly half the RBI’s in the same about
of time I wanted to see what changed.
Pence isn’t the best player on the team, that distinction still goes to
Poesy, but right now he’s the one thing the team really needed. Pence started off rocky as a Giant but
this year with a stat line of .292/.336/.504 he’s making Giant fans forget his
terrible playoff stats.
The
one thing that’s impressed me about Pence was the Homerun total so far. He’s on pace to get 26 if he gets his
average of 660 Plate Appearances but what makes that so interesting is that he
has 147 AB’s away from home with 6 HR’s to show for it. At home though is the interesting part;
in 127 AB’s he has 5 HR’s at home.
San Francisco is well known to sap power from even the biggest bats so
to have a HR% better at home than away from it is actually an impressive
feat. Mind you that this trend may
not continue since Pence is going to have more home games then away by seasons
end and the HR% may come down if he doesn’t get away from home but the power
seems to be legit.
Power
isn’t the only thing that Pence seems to be improving upon; his BB% is actually
down from his career average by 1%, from 7.3% to 6.4% this year but his K% is
down as well and quite a bit. His
career average K% is 18.3% and this year it’s down to 15.3%. The main question we have to ask after
seeing that is how legitimate is it so we need to take a look at the
Swing%. What’s actually
interesting is Pence seems to be swinging outside the zone about the same as
his career average says it should be (31% career and currently at 32% so no
real difference there) but he’s taking more pitches inside the zone from 70%
career to 65% this year. This
hasn’t affected his Contact% at all except Pence is making more contact on
pitches outside the zone, which is up 6% from his career total. From what I can see the Contact% and
Swing% don’t seem to be different so the BB% and K% are for real this
year. Another good sign to say
this is a legit improvement is the BABIP that Pence has posted so far is a
little low but pretty much his career BABIP meaning he’s not getting super
lucky and that he may not regress much if at all.
Another
stat I’ll bring up is the higher than his career average ISO (Isolated
Power). What this shows us is he’s
getting more 2B’s, 3B’s and more importantly HR’s. Now ISO does need a solid number of PA before we get a good
idea if this is something he can keep up but for now Pence looks like he
can. The last thing to note is
that the HR/FB rate is right on target with his career HR/FB% so it is very
possible that he can keep up the power numbers.
I
wanted to look at Pence for 1 reason and that was the power he’s showing. That and to show that the stats
actually backed up everything he’s doing so far to be more than just simple
luck but that with the improvements from the previous half season with the
Giants. Pence is going to be a big
part of this playoff hunt for the Giants and they need him to keep up the
numbers he’s producing. If the
Giants get lucky and have all they players that need to step up finally get
themselves together this could be a very interesting battle between Arizona and
San Fran.
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