It would be asking a miracle of Buster Posey to elevate the San Francisco Giants to the top of the National League West in his first season as president of baseball operations. The archrival Los Angeles Dodgers, a megateam coming off a World Series championship, are the undisputed kings of the hill.
But there might be ways for the Giants to shrink the gap between themselves and the San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks. And one of those ways could be to emulate what those two teams did so well last season: executing in situational at-bats, hitting with two strikes, putting the ball in play, and in general, applying pressure to an opposing defense.
This is the offensive identity that the Giants plan to create in 2025. It’s one of the major areas where Posey and manager Bob Melvin find themselves most aligned. It will offer clues to the free agents that the Giants pursue and the players they are willing to trade this winter.
In some respects, it’ll represent a departure from one of the prior organizational hitting priorities, which involved selectivity within the strike zone and swinging with the intent to do damage as often as possible. And it’ll require some recalibration from young hitters who came up through the organization under the previous administration, a group that includes but is not limited to Patrick Bailey, Tyler Fitzgerald, Casey Schmitt and Grant McCray.
“A lot of it was based on swing decisions and chase rates and I get that: you get good pitches to hit, you’re going to have a better chance to have success and hit the ball hard,” Melvin said in a phone interview. “Exit velocities, swing decisions and (reducing) chase: that was a real priority in the organization. To an extent, that should be a priority anywhere. But if we’re going to be a little more athletic, there has to be a ‘put the ball in play more’ dynamic, especially with two strikes.
“That might mean talking about choking up. It might mean having different types of swings. Everyone wants to get in a good count and get their ‘A’ swing off all the time. But in situational at-bats, it doesn’t always take a 108-mph line drive to get the run in. Sometimes it’s an 80-mph ground ball. It’s got to be case-specific.”
The Giants are in the process of selecting at least one hitting coach to supplement Pat Burrell and replace Justin Viele and Pedro Guerrero, each of whom had another year on their contracts but were allowed to depart for opportunities with the Texas Rangers and Miami Marlins, respectively. The club is expected to promote from within and the top candidates are minor-league hitting coordinator Mike McCormack and Triple-A Sacramento hitting coach Damon Minor.
Although Minor is well respected throughout the organization, McCormack, who started with the Giants as a complex league hitting coach in 2021 following more than a decade as an assistant at Brown University, is viewed as a rising star who might be an ideal complement to Burrell with McCormack’s grounding in biomechanics and swing science. The Giants also must consider that Guerrero’s departure leaves them without a fluent Spanish speaker on the hitting side.
However Melvin’s coaching staff shapes up, the hitting group will be tasked with implementing new priorities. And unlike exit velocity, those priorities might be a bit tougher to quantify.
If you’re looking for ways that the 93-win Padres and 89-win Diamondbacks separated themselves from the 80-82 Giants, perhaps begin with this: the Diamondbacks and Padres ranked 1-2 in OPS when hitting with two strikes; the Giants ranked 22nd. On a potentially related note, the Diamondbacks (16.6) and Padres (15.3) ranked second and fourth in baserunners scored percentage; the Giants ranked 21st (13.8 percent), and there were days when their two-strike hitting got downright ugly.
The obvious caveat is that nobody’s goal is to hit with two strikes. The Padres’ major league-best batting average with two strikes, achieved largely because of the contributions of hitting savant Luis Arraez, was just .201. The Giants, like every team, will continue to preach the importance of count leverage and being selectively aggressive early in at-bats.
But even good teams will find themselves in tons of two-strike counts. The Milwaukee Brewers, who finished sixth in the majors in runs scored, had more two-strike plate at-bats than any other team. And competing a little better in those plate appearances is a skill that the Giants will prioritize in the big leaguers they pursue as well as in player development.
“It’s finding guys that have a knack for finding the barrel,” Posey said at the GM Meetings in San Antonio last week. “I do think there’s a skill set and an art to taking a tough pitch that’s down and either fouling it off or, for a lefty (hitter), fighting it off over the shortstop. Those are innate abilities. They’re harder to, I think, measure at times.”
One of those players with innate contact skills is expected to be healthy again in the spring and set a tone atop the lineup. Posey gushed over center fielder Jung Hoo Lee, who began to demonstrate his elite contact skills in 37 games this past season before he sustained a season-ending shoulder dislocation. Wade Meckler is another player in the pipeline who has shown elite contact skills, although other areas of his development have been a challenge.
In Posey’s holistic model, a young power hitter shouldn’t be a one-trick pony hellbent on launch angle and exit velocity with every swing. A young hitter should be able to do those things to create damage and exhibit strike zone discipline and be capable of adjusting to compete with two strikes.
Perhaps it should be obvious why Posey holds these views. So many of the Giants’ World Series-winning rosters were populated by dangerous hitters with adjustable swings capable of covering more of the plate when necessary: Pablo Sandoval, Hunter Pence, Marco Scutaro, and even Posey, who was a .233 career hitter with two strikes.
Being proficient at getting a bunt down will be an across-the-board expectation, too.
“We’re probably going to bunt more,” said Melvin, who might have been tempted to facepalm last season when he watched minor-league call-ups ranging from Donovan Walton to Fitzgerald to McCray struggle in sacrifice situations. “We’ll do some hit-and-run in certain situations against ground-ball pitchers. Buster has talked about this: ‘Hey look, we want everybody we’re developing to at least know how to sacrifice bunt. Because when you need one run late in the game, it’s prudent we put emphasis on that.’
“Not that we’re going to just bunt our way around. I came up managing in the Oakland organization. I know that you don’t like to give away outs. But there’s times when you’re trying to get one run against good pitching and that’s when a bunt comes into play.”
Mostly, Posey said he wants the Giants to acquire and develop hitters who lean into their best attributes while also demonstrating a well-rounded approach at the plate.
“How does a player feel like they’re valued? It’s playing time and how they’re paid, right?” Posey said last week, when I asked him whether prospects are being steered into prioritizing metrics-based skill development over competitiveness. “If the industry is paying a guy to have an .850 OPS, but he only drives in 40 runs, well, where’s the incentive to drive in runs if it doesn’t matter? So the challenge, from my perspective, is that driving runs does matter to me. There’s probably a lot of people who’d disagree with me and say (RBIs) are all based on luck, right? I disagree with that. I don’t think it is (totally context-dependent). I think it’s a mindset and a want-to.
“But how do you convince your players to do that when (they’d say), ‘Well, if I drive in 80 but I’ve got a .770 OPS instead of an .850 OPS, am I going to be penalized for that?’ So that’s what I see as the crux of the issue.”
As Patrick Dubuque of Baseball Prospectus noted while discussing Posey’s top-of-mind example, there has been just one full season since the Integration Era in which a player finished with an .850 OPS and fewer than 40 RBIs: Phillies leadoff hitter Richie Ashburn in 1958. (Dubuque’s thoughtful and nuanced piece, which explored the cycle of overreaction, is highly recommended, by the way.)
But the Giants had a player who nearly met those criteria last season.
You might be thinking (as I did while listening to Posey speak) about LaMonte Wade Jr., who posted a .381 on-base percentage and .761 OPS while driving in 34 runs. But Wade drove in 13.7 percent of runners on base during his plate appearances, which was just a bit below league average (14.4 percent).
No, it’s actually Fitzgerald who almost perfectly fits Posey’s example. The 26-year-old rookie was a breakout star while leading the team with an .831 OPS in 96 games. He also drove in just 34 runs. He drove in just 9.8 percent of his 193 baserunners — the sixth-worst rate among 267 major-league batters who came to bat with at least that many runners on base last season. Fitzgerald’s primary issue was a 31.7 percent strikeout rate that was 14th-highest among 286 major-league hitters who had at least 300 plate appearances. And Fitzgerald’s strikeout rate was even higher (44.8 percent) in 67 at-bats with runners in scoring position.
Under the current administration, it’s hard to imagine that an otherwise gifted player like McCray, who had high strikeout rates at every level, would have been promoted to make his major-league debut this past season after playing just 97 games above A-ball. McCray’s 43.1 percent strikeout rate was the highest among 455 major-league hitters who logged at least 100 plate appearances this past season. It was also the highest single-season strikeout rate in Giants history among position players with at least 100 plate appearances.
To hear Melvin speak, it’s athletic and fast players like Fitzgerald and McCray who can benefit the most from a contact-oriented two-strike approach.
“We’ve played teams recently, the Milwaukees of the world, that put pressure on you,” Melvin said. “When they put the ball in play, there’s a little more angst about picking up the ball and making a play. We’ve got to be better that way. If we’re talking about being a team built around defense and speed, all that plays into it. Sometimes you won’t hit it hard, but if you put it in play, someone has a chance to make an error or things can happen.”
Like, say, the first baseman fielding a ground ball flat-footed and a pitcher failing to cover the base?
The Dodgers, of course, benefited from charitable errors on balls in play to beat the New York Yankees in the World Series. The Dodgers also slugged their way to the division title and through three rounds of postseason play. The Yankees, until they were exposed as a bad fundamental team, slugged their way to the AL pennant. The highest-scoring offenses will almost always be the ones that do the most damage. It’s hard to imagine that a team will ever win a World Series again while hitting the fewest homers in the majors, as the Giants did in 2012 (when Posey was the NL MVP).
The Dodgers just demonstrated it: the best teams are the ones who do damage in big ways in addition to applying pressure in small ways.
That’s the final stage that the Giants hope to reach someday soon. For now, anyway, they believe the most meaningful year-over-year improvement they can make in their ballpark will be to pitch effectively, play solid defense, win close games at home, and compete better at the plate with the personnel they have.
“I got to see it,” Posey said. “When you’ve got great pitching and you’ve got guys to catch the ball, you’re in a lot of (games). So I think you start with that foundation, give yourself a chance to win, and then just try to find players that give us opportunities to score runs in different ways. It goes without saying Oracle Park is historically a tough place to hit homers. Not that we’re going to discount the value of a home run, but just have complete players that maybe can steal some bases and take the extra base when they need to, and just … pressure.
“You know, I think that’s the word that keeps coming up in my mind constantly, is being able to pressure the other teams in multiple ways, other than just waiting for the long ball.”
(Top photo of Fitzgerald: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
