The unlucky season of the super-lucky Giants

We’ve been here before, trying to sift through the results of a confusing San Francisco Giants team. Last May, we asked if the Giants were real. They were the best team in baseball over the first six weeks, but it was hard to tell if they were actually good or just a mirage. The answer: a mirage, mostly. Except for a four-week hot streak after the regular season ended.

This season is a little different, with the Giants sitting right at .500. They could go on an extended hot streak and make a spirited title defense. They could sink back into the same morass they were languishing in just two weeks ago. It’s time to figure out if they’re likelier to succeed or disappoint. Is this Giants team playing over its head, or does it still have room to improve?

The chair yields the floor to the odd year.

The foundation of this argument is built on the Giants’ expected record. They’ve scored 101 runs and allowed 124, which translates to an expected 13-19 record. That’s a lot closer to 100-loss territory than the postseason, and them being at even .500 suggests a heaping help of luck. While teams can go entire seasons outperforming their expected records, it’s much more likely that the expected record catches up and brings them down by the ankles. Regression’s a-comin’.

If you want to predict their exact path to ruin, look at the pitching. The entire staff is good for an adjusted ERA that’s just above the league average right now, but they’ve done it with a well-below-average strikeout rate, near the bottom of the National League. While staffs can succeed pitching to contact -- and the Giants are doing well converting balls in play, according to defensive efficiency -- all of the starters, with the obvious exception of Madison Bumgarner, have completely underwhelming stuff. We’re talking fastballs that might crack 90 or 91 in a strong outing and breaking balls that sure seem to hang an awful lot. It feels like the other shoe is going to drop and squish the entire backend of the rotation, like a Terry Gilliam animation.

Which is all to say the Giants might allow more runs than they have so far. That’s a problem, considering that the runs they’ve allowed should have put them six games under .500. Just imagine if the pitchers were even worse.

How can a team be drastically outperforming its expected record and still be unlucky? Look at the offense and avert thine eyes from the blinding frustration.

The Giants have a .694 team OPS, just 12 points under the league average. Considering the pitcher-friendliness of AT&T Park, that’s actually not bad. Adjusted OPS agrees, putting them comfortably above average and a big game away from the fourth-best mark in the National League.

Let’s compare them to another team with a similar hitting line.

2015 Giants: .257 average, .321 on-base percentage, .374 slugging
2015 Marlins: .268 average, .322 OBP, .380 SLG

The Marlins have a slight edge in all three categories, but it’s still pretty close. These two teams should be close to each other in runs scored.

2015 Giants: 3.2 runs per game
2015 Marlins: 4.3 runs per game

The Giants are almost a full run per game worse than the Marlins, despite hitting nearly as well. The Giants rank 14th in the league in runs per game, just 10 runs above the Phillies, who are hitting like an entire team of Ozzie Guillens. We’re talking Guillen today, 51 years old and hitting things with a crowbar because he feels like it.

This doesn’t make sense until you look at one more category: runners left on base. The Giants lead the world in this category, as they’ve stranded 250 runners. Part of that has to do with the Giants’ noted lack of power. Another part of that has to do with rotten luck. That’s 40 stranded runners more than the league average -- impressive, when you consider the Giants are just a little above-average at getting on base.

FanGraphs has a stat that accounts for this called BaseRuns, which estimates the number of runs a team should have scored, given its offensive statistics. The Giants fare much better in theoryland, scoring an imaginary 3.9 runs per game, which would put them 11th in the league, not near the bottom. The Giants are hitting a little bit, but they’re doing it at the wrong time and in the wrong order. That’s a problem that’s unlikely to continue.

Also, Hunter Pence is playing rehab games in Triple-A and should return soon, which would help the should-be-productive lineup actually become productive. The Giants are at .500, despite getting totally hosed when it comes to the timing of their hits.

So are the Giants unlucky with hitting, or are they lucky considering their expected record? Should they be much worse or much better than they’ve shown so far?

Here’s the freaky part: They should be right where they are. FanGraphs doesn’t just keep track of BaseRuns for how many runs a team should have scored, but also how many they should have allowed, and then they spit the results out in the form of expected standings. In those standings, the Giants are .500. So everything is as it should be, except the Giants have taken the oddest route there possible.

The Giants have shown an unsustainable ability to sprinkle their runs around at the right times, saving them for the close games instead of the blowouts. They’ve also shown an unsustainable ability to sprinkle their hits around at the wrong times, usually spreading them throughout the game instead of clustering them in one inning. The Giants have scored three runs or more in an inning just four times this season. The Marlins -- who, again, have similar raw stats -- have scored three runs or more in 15 different innings. The Phillies, who are literally starting Jeff Francoeur, have scored three or more runs eight innings, twice as often as the Giants.

And yet even through all of that bad luck, the Giants are at .500 through good luck. It’s the dangdest thing. Without any major additions -- either at the trade deadline, or with a surprising return to form from Cain -- this is probably where the Giants should stay. They’ll probably pitch a touch worse, but they’ll also hit a little better. With some unambiguously good fortune, they should be sniffing around the perimeter of contending baseball for the next couple months, at least.