Giants Don’t Have to Chase Last Year’s Ghosts

San Francisco has reshuffled the roster effectively enough during the offseason to instill confidence for 2022, even if it doesn’t win 107 games again.

A year ago at this time, little was expected of the Giants. Since making the playoffs as a wild-card team in 2016, the club had turned in four straight losing seasons without finishing better than third place in the National League West. The typically ineffable baseball minds at SI predicted a similar outcome in 2021 (it was an odd-numbered year, after all)—only to be proven gloriously wrong when all was said and done.

The aging core of Buster Posey, Brandon Crawford and Brandon Belt turned the clocks back to deliver the greatest regular season in franchise history. San Francisco won’t sneak up on anybody this season, though it’s also a near-certainty that the club won’t rack up 107 wins again in 2022. With Opening Day looming, has the team positioned itself well enough to keep pace with the juggernaut Dodgers?

Gauging expectations for the 2022 Giants is tricky. The team could finish 20 games off of their 2021 pace and still be a good team—the Braves just won the World Series after winning 88 games last year, and postseason expansion will give three wild-card teams in each league at least a three-game playoff series to keep their seasons going. Still, predicting just how good San Francisco will be is no easy task considering just how right everything seemed to go for them a season ago.

Kevin Gausman, Anthony DeSclafani and Logan Webb all had career years, while Belt, Crawford and Posey each enjoyed late-career revivals. Across the board, players not only outperformed what was expected of them coming into the year, but in many cases played better over the course of the season than they ever had before: Darin Ruf, Steven Duggar, Alex Wood, Tyler Rogers, LaMonte Wade Jr., Jake McGee and José Álvarez all fit into this category. This reflects well on the front office’s ability to identify overlooked talent, manager Gabe Kapler’s ability to put his players in positions to succeed and, of course, on the players themselves for making improvements—but also certainly is a result of numerous stars aligning in just the right way.

Lamonte Wade Jr. is one of several players who had breakout campaigns out of nowhere last year in San Francisco :: Ray Acevedo/USA TODAY Sports

Key pieces have shuffled in and out this offseason, raising the question of how effectively the team has retooled. Gone are Gausman, Posey and Kris Bryant, as well as role players Donovan Solano and Alex Dickerson (Johnny Cueto remains unsigned). On the rotation front, the Giants appear to have brought in sufficient reinforcements. Carlos Rodón will almost certainly not match the 33 starts that Gausman churned out a year ago, but he’s an elite talent who’s a safe bet to produce when he’s able to take the mound, even if his starts end up in the low 20s range. Alex Cobb and Matthew Boyd also fit a similar “effective when healthy” profile, though with lower ceilings than Rodón.

Beyond the health risks for San Francisco’s newcomers in the rotation, regression risk abounds. The rotation has more depth than it did last season with six viable options, though it’s worth noting that Steamer projects five of the six to fall short of their 2021 outputs:

Player	2021 fWAR	2022 Projected fWAR
Carlos Ródon	4.9	3.8
Logan Webb	4.1	3.3
Alex Cobb	2.5	2.0
Alex Wood	2.5	2.0
Anthony DeSclafani	3.0	1.7
Matthew Boyd	1.4	1.5

Source: FanGraphs

And then there are the faces of the franchise: Crawford and Belt. Crawford’s bat had been in a steady decline for years prior to last season, with the slick-fielding shortstop posting an 87 wRC+ from 2017 to ’20. He then hit .298/.373/.522 in 138 games last season, setting career highs in nearly every category at age 34. Belt, meanwhile, had his worst offensive season in 2019 yet has sneakily been among the league’s best hitters ever since. Over 148 games since the start of the 2020 season, Belt has hit .285/.393/.595 with 38 home runs, with a 163 wRC+ that’s topped by only Juan Soto (171) and Bryce Harper (164) among players with at least 500 plate appearances during that span.

Crawford is 35 and Belt will turn 34 in April, so expecting them to match that type of production feels overly optimistic. The team’s top six projected hitters for next season will all be 30 or older, as Evan Longoria (36), Tommy La Stella (33), Mike Yastrzemski (31) and Wilmer Flores (30) round out that group. San Francisco has plenty of young talent as well, but with a core of players closer to the age where most begin to decline than the typical prime years, there exists an added layer of uncertainty to a team with lofty standards to reach and a behemoth of a division rival to compete with. Put it all together, and the Giants are projected by FanGraphs to finish third in the NL West with an 84–78 record.

The team showed last year, though, that projections are far from being written in stone. It’s true that surpassing expectations to the extent San Francisco did last season for a second straight year would be an incredibly tall task. Luckily for the Giants, they won’t have to beat the 2021 version of themselves to get to where they want to be in 2022.