Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports
Gabe Kapler knows baseball a bit; can speak for his own team and has a pretty good knowledge of the clubs and trends around the league.
The Giants manager was more encouraged than discouraged when his pitchers struck out 20 of his hitters in a 7 1/2-inning scrimmage last week. He understands pitching can be approximated better than hitting, so he expects the arms to be ahead of the bats at this point.
Will that hold true across the league once play begins Thursday? Major League Baseball already has become a boom-or-bust, home run-or-strikeout fest. Are the busts about to heavily outweigh the booms in a game that paused for three months as hitters tried to scramble their way into cages?
“The obvious answer,” said baseball-knower Kapler on Friday, “is I don’t know.”
Nobody does, but the potential is there. Routinely many hitters are slow starters after six weeks of spring training; what will it look like after three weeks? Perhaps beginning the season in warmer weather will allow balls to fly more, but that does not account for the hitting rhythms that can take months to get down.
Justin Viele has been hopeful that what he’s seeing behind the scenes will translate to the field immediately. One of the team’s two hitting coaches said there hasn’t been a player who walked in the cage during camp 2.0 who was noticeably behind.
There has been more competition — a buzzword around the Giants — and if a player isn’t facing live pitching, he might be staring down a slider machine.
“I think if we were to start today,” Viele, in his first year with the Giants after being a minor league Dodgers hitting coach, said over the phone last week, “I would feel pretty confident going into the game and feeling like guys have everything they need and they’re ready to go. … Our training, in terms of our hitting, is pretty intense. Guys are hitting shapes on the field and velo, and in the cage they’re doing the same thing. They’re getting exposed to challenging practices, and I think that definitely helps prepare them for games.”
Ask Viele which major league hitters have stood out, and you’ll be wondering which hitters he forgot to name rather than which he praised.
“There’s been a lot of guys that I’m excited to see get into action. For the veteran guys, Craw [Brandon Crawford] and Longo [Evan Longoria] have looked awesome. Their at-bats have have looked amazing,” Viele said before Longoria’s status came into question with a moderate right oblique strain.
“… Hunter Pence looks awesome. He hit a homer off Webby [Logan Webb] the other day, a big home run to left. Pablo [Sandoval] hit one opposite field the other day. [Mauricio] Dubon’s making good adjustments, and he’s swinging the bat well, he’s getting his best swing off consistently. Duggie [Steven Duggar] looked really good yesterday. Jaylin Davis smoked a ball yesterday. There are guys that come up that you watch and it’s like, ‘Oh, dang, he’s ready to go.’”
Yolmer Sanchez, whom Viele worked with even before the Giants hired him, looks “amazing” with a revamped swing. Joe McCarthy’s patience “is really impressive.”
It’s an awful lot of praise for a team whose pitching expectations exceed its hitting hopes. The Giants will need any advantage they can get because they are at a talent deficit compared with clubs like the Dodgers. If their few regulars and many platoon options can hit right away, that could buy enough equity to keep the team in a playoff race in a blink-and-it’s-over season.
Besides, the hitting coach hoped: Maybe pitchers will be rusty.
“I think in general, pitching is always kind of ahead of hitting. It’s really, really hard to hit and the pitchers are throwing 1,000 miles an hour now,” Viele said, only exaggerating a bit. “So they’re always ahead. It’s just preying on the mistakes and not missing those mistakes. And hopefully you just get more mistakes than normal during games. Maybe we’ll get more mistakes because the pitchers aren’t fully built up, so they don’t have as crisp of a breaking ball or their fastball or they’re leaving them arm side instead of getting that cut that they need — whatever it is. I think you can look at it in two ways.
“Maybe they’re ahead in theory because hitters haven’t had as many at-bats. But their stuff isn’t as crisp, and that would be a great thing.”