Jake Roth-USA TODAY Sports
It is hard to reconcile the team the Giants put on the field and the team they put on paper.
A team that has won 53 games and lost 51, that is 2 1/2 games out of the wild-card race, that is 18-4 since June 30, should not exist. The Giants’ Pythagorean winning percentage — which evaluates how much a team scores and how many runs it allows and projects what its record should be — says the Giants should be 48-56.
BaseRuns — a more thorough formula that takes not just runs but baserunners into the equation, looking to find and eliminate outliers — is less generous. The Giants should be 45-59, and the season should already have turned to saying goodbye to Bruce Bochy. Instead, Bochy is leading a team that is on the verge of dodging a trade-deadline sell-off that seemed imminent a month ago.
How do you make sense of a team whose reflection looks different on the field than on the agate pages?
“You start with the heart of this team,” Bochy said recently, asked to square the numbers with the results. “The fight they’re showing every day.
“… Some things you can’t measure, and that’s what’s inside you.”
It’s a pretty explanation that doesn’t hint at the job Bochy has done to win on the margins. A team that doesn’t score enough and gives up too many runs has to pick its spots to use its weapons. Bochy has managed the bullpen, the team’s strength all season, to near perfection.
The Giants’ 25-10 record in one-run games is the best in baseball. They’re 11-2 in extra-inning games, the best in baseball. After Friday’s thriller in San Diego, they’re 7-0 in extras in a 15-game second half.
When Bochy decides the Giants should go for it, Reyes Moronta is the first live arm he calls for. Typically Sam Dyson, Tony Watson and Will Smith follow, and Bochy saves his bullets for when he needs them. In games Watson pitches, for example, the Giants are 38-7. His left arm is rarely wasted in a losing effort.
The Giants being a winning team, despite the numbers, “speaks to the bullpen, speaks to the offense and the defense,” Stephen Vogt told KNBR recently. “When you’re winning one-run games, a lot of times the manager gets the credit. He should. The strings that are being pulled — it’s putting the bullpen guys in to stop their offense to give our offense a chance to win, and we’re doing that really well right now.”
San Francisco is 6-2 in its past eight games, a stretch in which it has scored 24 runs and given up 28 runs. They lose big and win small, with very few exceptions.
They have a negative-42 run differential. The Nationals, the team currently occupying the fickle second wild card, are plus-47.
Asked about the BaseRuns formula, Vogt said it’s “grabbing at air. The only stuff that really matters at the end of the day is wins. Doesn’t matter how they come. Should they have come? Who cares?
“There’s only one team that wins the World Series. So whoever wins the most games has one of the best opportunities to get to a World Series and then they have an opportunity to win a World Series. So I don’t think there’s any explanation other than the fact that we’re playing well, and we’re winning. And that’s all that matters.”