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As stated on the Home page, this site presents fact-based opinions about the present and future of the San Francisco Giants. The facts those opinions are based on come from my main baseball web site, The Owlcroft Baseball-Analysis Site. I recommend a reading of all the “Background” material there (the links in the green block of the drop-down hamburger menu in the upper right of every page there).
But, for the TL;DR folks, here—in very brief—are the high points.
The key measures are the Owlcroft TOP (Total Offensive Productivity) and TPP (Total Pitching Productivity) stats. The TOP for a team is the number of runs that team would normally score given their actual stats; for an individual batter, it is the number of runs a hypothetical team comprising nine exact clones of that man would score in a full season. The TPP for a team is the number of runs that team would normally yield given their actual stats; for an individual pitcher, it is the aggregate TOP of all the batters he has faced (that is, the number of runs a hypothetical staff comprising nine exact clones of that man would yield in a full season).
For those who wonder just how good the TOP is, here is a page from my main site examining just that: Proving the TOP.
And here are the pages from the main site of main interest to Giants followers:
I should next explain my beliefs about optimum player use. You can find a thesis on optimum player use by following that link. Or you can just go by the following summary.
For batting, using a seven-day week as an arbitrary but convenient basis, batters should get played at least five days a week, but not more than six days a week (follow the link above to see the reasoning behind that statement). The old idea that a team is, or should be, nine “regulars” and (now) four “bench guys” is (like young Dr. Frankenstein’s view of his grandfather’s work) doo-doo. One really needs twelve “everyday” players and a thirteenth utility guy who can back up almost any position for a day or two in an emergency. Isn’t finding just nine good players a hard enough task? Yes, but finding twelve is not, given good analytic tools to rightly judge productivity, as difficult as it might at first seem.
For pitching, things are more complicated, chiefly because we still don’t seem to have good understandings of how hard and how often men really can pitch on a continuing basis. An excellent piece about rotations by Will Carroll, who writes the valuable and insightful feature “Under the Knife” on Substack (well worth subscribing to!), appeared in his July 15, 2026 column. The piece examines the now-universal belief that rotations comprise five pitchers. As Will remarks, The problem is that the teams now seldom have five good ones even when they use eight or more over the course of a season. They steal starts from their best and give them to the guy they hoped they wouldn’t have to use in equal measure…The result is a strange compromise where we spend years developing a thoroughbred only to ask him to run fewer races. I cannot recommend that piece strongly enough: it is very, very thought-provoking.
Various alternatives to the current common pattern of pitching use have been suggested over the last couple of decades, and some experimentation in the minor leagues has been tried. Despite apparent success in the minors, no team (to my knowledge) has ever really pursued any alternative. Some of those are listed below (“BFP is Batters Facing Pitcher”, the pitching equivalent of PA):
Note that we avoid the dread word “closer”, one of the greatest follies of modern baseball. Designating a “closer” and always using him to close is nearly the textbook definition of “stupid”. The word “leverage” seems unknown to most if not all managers: but clearly you should save your best for when you most need him—that is, for really high-leverage situations. Yes, one cannot always know when this high-leverage situation is going to be the worst in the game, but evaluating tactical needs on the fly is (supposedly) what managers get paid for. (Note that on average, 72% of all major-league innings pitched are scoreless; does that somehow suggest that you should use your best reliever to pitch an inning that an average pitcher can pitch scoreless 72% of the time? (And we won’t even get into two and three-run leads.)
(Incidentally, the MLB average success rate for closers is only 64% (ranging from 82% down to 46%); why would that number be less than (at least) 72%? Probably because the manager let the pitcher preceding the poor sod who absorbs the blown save get runners on base before the cry for help went out: almost 29% of relief calls go out when there are already runners on base, and about a quarter of inherited runners score. So it can be the case that the man charged with the blown save gave up no runs of his own.)
You should next read (if you haven’t already seen it) the page here on Winning Games.
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This page was last modified on Sunday, 13 September 2026, at 5:37 pm Pacific Time.