The Giants’ struggles against left-handed starters has a few potential in-house solutions

Sports

add

CHICAGO — The Giants made four errors in their 9-2 loss to the Cubs on Monday night, with Matt Chapman and Willy Adames each committing two. Since moving to San Francisco in 1958, the Giants are 41-122 when committing four or more errors. That’s exactly one loss worse than the 2024 White Sox, which means that when the Giants commit four or more errors, they’re worse than the team with the worst regular-season record in modern baseball history. The Moneyball-esque solution is for the Giants to not make four errors.

Everyone on the field and in the front office already knows this, and it’s not like there’s anyone worried about Chapman’s errors suddenly becoming an issue. He’s now played 1,058 career games, and in 1,049 of them, he didn’t make two errors. File it under “one of those games,” close the drawer and push the file cabinet into Lake Michigan.

The concern for the 2025 Giants going forward shouldn’t be the four errors in the box score. It should be the two runs they put on the board. The Giants didn’t fare well against Cubs left-hander Matthew Boyd, and the loss gives them a 2-9 record this season against left-handed starting pitchers. You can’t go with “one of those games” when talking about their struggles against lefties. It’s been nine of those games now, which is a full quarter of the entire season to date.

Start with the good news: Luis Matos was responsible for all of the runs, hitting a two-run homer off Boyd in the fourth inning to tie the game for a few minutes. It’s probably not a coincidence that the homer came in his third consecutive start.

“He’s gotten three games in a row, and for a young player, getting consistent at-bats is obviously beneficial for him,” manager Bob Melvin said after the game.

Matos didn’t just play every day in Triple-A Sacramento for a majority of the second half last season. He played every day when he was winning rookie of the year for the Tiburones de La Guaira in the Venezuelan Winter League. He led the Giants in Cactus League at-bats this spring. It was creeping up on a full calendar year of him getting plenty of starts.

Then Opening Day came, and his starts were tethered to the whims of the opposing teams. If the Giants were facing a lefty, Matos was in the lineup, but that was never going to be a path to reliable playing time. It works out when they see three lefties in five days, like they did in New York and Philadelphia. It’s much harder when they go 10 days between left-handed starters, like they did between Jose Quintana and Kyle Freeland.

If getting Matos regular playing time is a dilemma, it’s one without an easy solution. The Giants’ best hitter against left-handers this season has been Jung Hoo Lee, and he’s not sitting against them unless he needs the rest. Mike Yastrzemski leads the team in OPS, so it’s not like you’re going to sit him against right-handers just to keep Matos fresh. You could take some at-bats against right-handed pitchers away from Heliot Ramos, but that wouldn’t do his development any favors, and the Giants have long-term hopes that he’ll be an everyday player for years to come. You could DH Matos more often at the expense of Wilmer Flores, but Flores has never had big platoon splits and typically hits right-handers just as well as lefties.

None of it fits neatly into the Giants’ plans, and Matos’ starts will still have to be at the mercy of the probable pitchers for the other team. That’s the job description. Monday’s home run was movement in the right direction, especially considering he was just 2-for-26 against lefties entering the game. (He’s still looking for his first single against left-handed pitching this year, which is both good news and bad.) If the Giants are going to have a reversal of fortune against lefties, Matos should have a lot to do with it.

Apart from Matos, the Giants have two other built-in paths to more success against left-handers. The most obvious one is Ramos reclaiming some of the production he had against southpaws last season. After going 0-for-3 against Boyd with two strikeouts, Ramos’ season line with the platoon advantage is down to .237/.293/.421. While it was always unrealistic for him to match his performance from last season, that doesn’t mean he has to regress to a below-average hitter against southpaws. Getting just some of that production back is both an easy fix and a reasonable expectation.

The other built-in answer the Giants might have is Jerar Encarnación, who is taking batting practice and might start a rehab assignment as soon as this weekend. It wasn’t long ago that he was inspiring columns with headlines like “Jerar Encarnación might be the power bat the Giants need,” when it looked like the Giants were going struggle to score runs against anyone, left-handed or not. It could be time to dust off the Jerar-shaped bat signal and dump an unfair amount of responsibility on him again.

There’s one more answer out there, too. After the game Chapman talked about the Giants’ struggles against left-handed pitching this season.

“It’s probably one of those things that will even out over the course of the year,” he said. “We have a lot of righties in the lineup. We have a lot of guys that have hit lefties well. We’ve faced some really good pitchers, some really good teams … some of it is that, and I think over the course of the season we’ll make adjustments and be able to capitalize against those lefties.”

Maybe nine bad games against left-handed starters isn’t proof of anything. Adames went 0-for-3 against Boyd, which dropped him to 6-for-45 without an extra-base hit against lefties on the season. While he’s always had reverse platoon splits, he’s probably not the league’s worst hitter against left-handed pitching, and there’s some positive regression coming. There might be some positive regression coming for a few Giants hitters against left-handers. Maybe it is possible to brush off a 2-9 record against left-handed starters just as easily as it is to brush off a four-error night.

Or maybe we’ll be back here in a month, checking with Buster Posey to see if he has Darin Ruf’s number. The world is a lot simpler when there’s a guy on the roster who absolutely annihilates left-handed pitchers. The Giants have had a few over the years, but they haven’t had one this season. Their best hope is that help comes from someone they already have, whether it’s Adames, Matos, Ramos, Encarnación or (especially) all of the above.

This doesn’t have to be a defining storyline of the 2025 Giants; it just looks that way right now. In a crowded NL West, the Giants’ inability to hit lefties so far might be the biggest gap between them and the top teams. Their ability to hit lefties for the rest of the season is how they’re going to close (or not close) that gap.

(Photo: David Banks / Imagn Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

Share on

email

Previous

trending_flat

Conor Bradley is Liverpool’s future. He has to start their final three games

Sports

Next

trending_flat

Chiefs’ changes continue: Andy Reid gets another free agent and cuts another player

AFC West - English