Grading Darin Ruf and the designated hitters and bench for the 2020 Giants

I’m a sucker for a good bench. Fourteen months ago, I asked if the 2019 Giants bench was the best in team history. They had a strong argument, though it will be hard to ever replace the sweet, sweet 2000 bench in my heart. Where have you gone, Felipe Crespo? A lonely nation turns its eyes to you.

But that article helps us realize just how imperfect this exercise is. Mike Yastrzemski was mentioned back then because he was a part of the 2019 bench if you squinted. It was possible to build a respectable three-man outfield without him, and he was occasionally saved to be a late-game weapon. Stephen Vogt was a big part of the bench, but he was also in the lineup a lot, sometimes in the outfield.

What does “bench” even mean in 2020?

The modern game is all matchups and versatility. The guy in center can also play second, but he can also slide over to short if there’s the right lefty on the mound. The guy playing second can play short or third, and the guy playing first might be able to at least pretend to play second or third, but only if the first baseman is playing left because the catcher is playing first.

It seems like a word salad when it’s written out, but it makes sense when the lineup is posted. Consider these five players: Brandon Belt, Donovan Solano, Wilmer Flores, Brandon Crawford and Evan Longoria. Those are five players for four spots (1B, 2B, SS, 3B), assuming that we’ve seen the last of Belt in left. There’s the DH to consider, which is a new wrinkle that might be permanent.

So which one is the bench player? It’s like a zen koan, and there isn’t really an answer. They’re all starters. They’re all bench players. They’re all DHs, except for Crawford and Longoria.

If we ignore the specific names, a typical Giants bench in 2020 was populated with some combination of the following:

• Whichever catcher wasn’t starting
• Whichever outfielder wasn’t starting or DHing
• Whichever infielder wasn’t starting or DHing
• The fifth outfielder up from the alternate site
• A couple other dudes who should probably never play in the field

That last one is an artifice of the DH, and I’m not really sure what the Giants were going to do with Hunter Pence and Pablo Sandoval without it. You could squeeze one of those guys onto a National League bench with 2019 rules, but it was always a stretch to carry both. In a normal season, the Giants might have had to make a tough decision in April or May.

The modern bench is a general concept, not a finite collection of non-starters. If we’re going to grade the 2020 bench, we’ll need to wing it.

Players

Here are all of the players who didn’t rank in the Giants’ top nine hitters when it comes to plate appearances:

• Austin Slater, 104 plate appearances
• Darin Ruf, 100
• Pablo Sandoval, 90
• Chadwick Tromp, 64
• Hunter Pence, 56
• Tyler Heineman, 50
• Steven Duggar, 36
• Daniel Robertson, 24
• Luis Alexander-Basabe, 18
• Jaylin Davis, 12
• Joe McCarthy, 10
• Justin Smoak, 6
• Joey Rickard, 6
• Rob Brantly, 3

After all that hand-wringing, that … looks like the bench for the 2020 Giants. Apparently, the real meaning of a bench is the players who don’t finish in the top nine of a team’s plate appearances (eight without the DH).

And if that’s the case, hoo boy, is there a steep drop-off after the first two.

Except maybe the true meaning of a bench is found in who is getting all of the opportunities to pinch hit. The player with the most pinch hit plate appearances wasn’t anyone on that list: It was Alex Dickerson, who did it 15 times. After him was Darin Ruf, with 14, and Pablo Sandoval, with 13. Maybe that was the real bench.

The Giants’ best options were tremendous, depending on the situation. When the Giants faced a left-handed reliever late in the game, assuming that they didn’t stack the lineup against a lefty starting pitcher, they would have Ruf and/or Slater. That’s a heckuva combination to play around with, especially with the three-batter rule forcing the lefty to stay in.

When the Giants faced a right-handed reliever late in the game, and they were looking for that perfect left-handed bat to neutralize him. If Dickerson wasn’t in the starting lineup, they were rolling. If he was in the lineup, though, they were lacking. Deeply lacking. It was Sandoval or bust. Rather, it was Sandoval and bust. The Justin Smoak experiment was short-lived, and the Giants will attack the offseason by looking for that left-handed bat that they missed so dearly.

The stats

There’s no single group of stats that will describe the Giants’ depth. You want pinch hits? The 2020 Giants absolutely dominated when it came to pinch hitting.

There’s a lot of statistical noise that can happen with that few at-bats, but when the Giants sent up a pinch hitter this season, he hit like an All-Star. Kind of makes you want to bottle it and send it through time to the next contending team.

They absolutely stunk when it came to designated hitters:

Those last two stats need an explanation. sOPS+ measures the Giants at DH vs. the rest of the league at DH. It’s their OPS+ relative to the OPS+ of everyone else. Because their DHs stunk at AVG/OBP/SLG, it’s not a surprise that they stunk at sOPS+.

But tOPS+ measures the Giants at DH vs. the rest of the Giants. Anything under 100 means that the Giants were worse at DH than at every other position combined. And the Giants were ghastly at DH compared to everywhere else. Here are the five Giants who got the most time at DH in 2020:

Is there a reason for this? Probably not. Just noise.

Is it bonkers? Absolutely. When the Giants were asked to catch, throw and hit, they were great. When they were asked to sit on their butt and hit, they were lousy. That tOPS+ was the second-worst in the history of the DH. Doesn’t make sense, but we have to factor that into our evaluation of the team’s bench.

If I had to give a grade for the Giants’ bench, though, it would be a firm INC. The most pinch hit appearances were from Dickerson. The most DH plate appearances were from Flores. Both of them were nominally starters, right? Hard to grade a bench when your starters are the bench, and vice-versa. Then there’s the paucity of at-bats available in a 60-game season in which it wasn’t necessary to pinch hit for pitchers. The numbers are almost meaningless.

If I had to give a grade for the team’s overall depth, though, it would be a solid B-. They were hurt by Pence and Sandoval in the beginning. Steven Duggar didn’t help. The effort to replace Sandoval went up in a puff of Justin. Whenever they chose a ninth player and labeled him a DH, he stunk.

Overall, though, it was a deep team. If one of Dickerson, Yastrzemski, Slater or Dubón wasn’t starting, that meant he could be an asset off the bench. Chadwick Tromp had a couple of well-timed homers, and he was a strong framer behind the plate. Even if Ruf didn’t do much as a starting DH, he was a huge addition to the roster. The relative flexibility of Dubón, Flores and Solano allowed for regular rest and favorable matchups.

A common thread between this team’s depth and that of the season before is that it improved dramatically as the season went along. Remember that the 2019 season started with Yangervis Solarte and Erik Kratz. Once the front office and coaching staff get a good, long look at an underperforming player, they don’t hesitate to mix and match. By the time Slater was healthy and Sandoval was gone, the Giants probably had their best roster, but then the season ended. Get them another month, and maybe that depth gets them into A territory.

Most benches don’t go five or six deep. It’s hard enough to find eight or nine regulars. Some teams pulled it off, like the Rays and Dodgers, which helps explain why they’re still playing. But it’s far more typical to dread the end of the bench. There have been recent Giants benches that left you begging for one good option.

The Giants usually had that good option. It was a deep group, even if it took a while for them to settle on a permutation. Expect the same kind of shuffling at the start of next year, but know that they’ll probably land on an agreeable combination to support the regulars. They’ve done it for two years, now, which is a welcome development to us bench-fanatics everywhere, even if the definition of a bench isn’t as simple as it used to be.

(Photo: Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)