⚾ Baseball Bytes: Giant Steps
The San Francisco Giants keep surprising everyone, as always. Plus, Kyle Tucker might be the next Alfonso Soriano — if he's lucky.
Welcome back (!) to Baseball Bytes1 — a column in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various baseball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Baseball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
⚾ I Left My Chart in San Francisco
I’ve written before about how the San Francisco Giants are, going back just about forever, my favorite weird baseball team to follow and try to make sense of.
It didn’t make any sense that this franchise couldn’t win a World Series with Barry Bonds, but immediately formed a dynasty without him. It didn’t make sense that they only won titles in even-numbered years. It didn’t make sense how the dynasty revived itself with 107 wins out of nowhere in 2021. And their recent seasons have been all over the place, both on the field and off. What do we even begin to make of a team like this?
As I noted recently, the Giants’ season-level numbers in recent years have been quite stable — after that 107-win anomaly, they’ve recorded 81, 79 and 80 wins in 2022, ‘23 and ‘24, respectively — which in turn made me doubt their boom-and-bust potential for 2025. But I should have known that was masking the inherent volatility of this team. Here are their recent splits in winning percentage, by half of the season:
So naturally, San Francisco has gotten out to one of the hottest starts of any team so far in 2025. While the shine of their 8-1 start has come a little bit off with a couple of recent losses to the Cincinnati Reds, the Giants are now tracking for 85.5 wins in my ⚾ 2025 MLB Elo ratings and win projections 📈 model, up from 80.2 before the season, and they have a 46 percent chance to make the playoffs. They’ll take those odds, after making it only once in the previous eight seasons — surprising both for a team that made it in four of seven seasons before that, and for a team that has weirdly been a factor at the trade deadline in most recent years.
Will it last? Ehhh, I’m not so sure about that. The 2024 Giants were a mediocre team — 21st in FanGraphs WAR — and while they didn’t have a particularly good or bad offseason, their two most notable veteran acquisitions (Willy Adames and Justin Verlander) have been sub-replacement level so far. The rest of this roster just rolls with the same group as before, sans Michael Conforto, Blake Snell, and maybe even some players who didn’t get scooped up by the archrival Dodgers. And is reliever Randy Rodríguez really going to stay on pace for 7.4 WAR?
Even if they regress some off of this start, though, there are still encouraging signs for the direction of this team in Year 1 under new general manager Zack Minasian. San Francisco has the league’s best baserunning early on, along with much-improved pitching — and they’re doing it with a roster that is at least somewhat less heavily reliant on aging veterans than in the 2021 revival year:
For a franchise that is forever trying to reload on the fly, they may have built a bridge to the next wave of playoff contending Giant teams without having to bottom out again, which is always the preferable path. Now, the only problem might be this ridiculously stacked NL West that they still have to deal with, which currently has four different teams tracking for 85+ wins:
⚾ Let's Remember Some Cubs Guys
Unlike the Giants, the Chicago Cubs were absolutely on my radar as a high-variance team coming into the 2025 season — because, well, they always are. Between wondering why their 2016 team never became a dynasty and speculating about whether they will finally turn offseason wins into actual wins, it feels like I am always writing about the Cubs’ tendency to be less than the sum of their parts.
But maybe, for once, this is the year they actually cash in on their potential. Entering Wednesday’s game against the Texas Rangers, Chicago had won seven of its past eight games, with no team gaining more points of Elo rating (+15) since preseason. And the biggest reason why is RF Kyle Tucker, who leads the majors in WAR thanks to a scorching 1.178 OPS in his first season with the club.
As of now, Tucker is on pace for 15.0 WAR per 162 games, which would be the greatest single-season performance in franchise history if it holds up — which it absolutely won’t. (Rest easy, Rogers Hornsby and Fergie Jenkins.) FanGraphs’ depth charts projections expect Tucker to compile another 4.7 WAR on top of the 1.3 he’s already accumulated, landing him at 6.0 by season’s end.
If that ends up happening, Tucker will not end up as the best newly-acquired batter in Cubs history. (Hornsby’s elite 11.0 WAR in 1929 came the year after he was traded to Chicago by the Boston Braves after just one season there.)2 But he could have a shot at matching the Cubs debut of another, far more recent outfielder that was added to the team: Alfonso Soriano.
It’s a shame that Soriano is either largely forgotten today, or simply remembered either for his role in the New York Yankees’ 2001 World Series loss — he hit a go-ahead HR off of Curt Schilling in the eighth inning of Game 7, only for the Yankees to lose later — or as the main player traded to Texas for Alex Rodriguez, paving the way for New York’s A-Rod era.
But Soriano was so much better than he is usually given credit for, and many of his best performances came after he had shed the pinstripes. In 2006, for instance, he spent his lone season with the Washington Nationals producing just the fourth 40-40 season in MLB history, hitting 46 homers while swiping 41 bags.
And his 2007 campaign, which came after signing an eight-year, $136 million contract with the Cubs, was even better by WAR. (6.7 to 5.4.) Though he didn’t hit 40-40 again, Soriano did have an .897 OPS and was easily the league’s best defensive OF (33.2 runs above average). That’s the performance Tucker is chasing right now, and he needs to keep going at his current hot pace for longer to be projected to match what Soriano did at Wrigley Field 18 years earlier.
The rest of Soriano’s career with the Cubs was viewed as something of a disappointment, as he never exceeded 3.8 WAR again in a season despite the hefty contract. Signed starting at age 31 — 2 years older than Tucker will be next year, if he gets his own mega-deal with Chicago — Soriano might even be viewed as a cautionary tale about what might be in Tucker’s long-term future.
But for one season, Soriano was at the peak of the abilities that once made him one of the most coveted five-tool prospects in the sport coming up:
Filed under: Baseball, Baseball Bytes
Not to be confused with Baseball Bits, the excellent YouTube series from Foolish Baseball.
Remarkably, for a Hall of Fame player before the era of free-agency, Hornsby also spent only one season with the New York Giants before joining Boston, following a 12-year stint with the St. Louis Cardinals.