Singer Off Key Again?

Aidan is back again with his usual insights into the numbers and analytics of tonight's matchup.  He does a great job reviewing Brady Singer's stats and debating just how much stock to put into the small sample size from this year.  He also talks about a couple new pitching stats he's interested in following throughout the year to try and determine if they might be prescriptive or not.  M follows that up with a quick look at the Reds in general, both offensively and on the mound.  He then adds a bit about the pitching matchup himself before discussing the various possibilities for the Safe Bet of the Day™.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Good morning, and welcome back to today. Your San Francisco Giants pre-game podcast. Bringing you previews, projections, and predictions before every Giants game.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Whoa! Welcome back to the pod. Hope you're having a fantastic Tuesday morning. My name is Aiden Gleason. Thank you so much for joining us once again. I guess I'll start by recapping Sunday's game. Feels like a long time ago, back at 1035 or whenever that thing started on Sunday. We're going to recap this very quickly. First of all, Giants did lose, but Dad made a great call on Safe Bed of the Day. And Casey Schmidt went three for four. So his season OPS is now over a thousand. His April OPS is 1360. So that is everything you need to know right there. Casey Schmidt's doing good. Dad's making great calls on Safe Bed of the Day. And the Giants are going to come in and get the ball rolling again, going against the Reds in this upcoming series. Heading out to Great American Ballpark. Now, I was thinking about this last time we were in Great American Ballpark. I remember we won two out of three. And I'll remember it for a while because it was the very first series of last season. And you might remember that first game, Patrick Bailey getting a big hit in the ninth, and ended up winning that one. Won the third game of that series too. Hopefully we can do at least the same in this one. Also, while I'm looking at it, looks like game time is 3.40, not 7 o'clock, not even 4.15. So make sure you get your safe bets in on time today. We got Robbie Ray going against Brady Singer in this one. And boy, Brady Singer has got to have one of the worst-looking baseball savant pages of this young season. Oh my goodness. His pitching run value is negative seven, which puts him in the bottom 2% of all pitchers. It is ERA, 7.71. Expected ERA is barely better at 7.56. And there really aren't that many metrics with like red bars. If you know baseball savant, you know that the bad stuff shows up in blue, the good stuff shows up in red. And we're talking 372 expected batting average against. That is in the bottom 1%. 97% average exit of elo coming off of uh opponents. That's bottom 1%. 64.3% hard hit rate, bottom two percent. It's just these background metrics are not doing him any favors. He's got a couple things that are okay. His walk rate's pretty good, his extension's pretty good if you care about how close he's getting to the plate before he throws the ball. But yeah, not a lot of bright spots on Brady Singer's page. But as we'll get into, it's not necessarily going to be a cakewalk for the Giants today. So far this season, Brady Singer has gone three runs and four innings. He gave up, then two runs and five innings, and then a bad one, five runs in 2.2. And so that's really just one that was kind of bad to okay, one solid start, and then one really bad start, which tells me he's kind of primed to positively regress against the Giants, unfortunately. He's still 29 years old, and his last couple ERAs for the last couple years weren't seven and a half. They weren't fantastic. It was 4.03 and 3.71. And so he'll probably end up around there too. If you look at Fangreft's projected ERA, I think they had him at like a 4.2, 4.5, somewhere in there. The point is that it's not 7.5. He's not going to just be completely washed, or most likely not, right? A couple things that might be contributing to his bad start. He has had a steadily declining fastball since 2021, or I should say in 2020, 2021, he had a 93.7 mile an hour fastball. That dropped the next year to 92.4 in his state at 92.5, but then 91.7, 91.5, and now another full mile per hour off at 90.3 so far this season. So maybe he is getting worse. And let's hope that's the case and that he continues to be worse. Although there was one really interesting statistic I found, and that was that his ERA is terrible, 7.71. His expected ERA is also terrible from 7.56. But his Sierra, his skill interactive ERA is actually really good at 3.19. And I guess I should mention that the main difference between ERA, expected ERA, and Sierra is that uh the Sierra is not uh situation dependent. So basically he's inducing ground balls and his walk to strike uh strikeout ratio is okay, but the damage is just really clumped up. So when he gives up one hit, he gives up a couple more in a row, and that's caused his ERA to skyrocket, because obviously the clumped damage influences your ERA. It also is accounted for in expected ERA. But in the skill interactive ERA, just basically how he's doing on a non-game situation, uh just like uh how his actual pitches are coming out and how the results are the results of the pitches, as in are they walks, are they strikeouts, are they ground balls, are they good contact, independent of the situation has been much better. And that there's a couple uh explanations for this. One primarily is just small sample size. We've gotten three starts into the year, he's pitched a total of what is that, 11.2 innings. So you can have a lot of clumped damage in 11.2 innings and not have that regress to the mean. The second thing is maybe he is just very uncomfortable in the stretch where once he gives gives up one guy, a bunch more guys keep getting hit because he doesn't have as good of stuff out of the stretch. And if he gets into the the full windup, then he's mowing guys down. Anyway, I did end up going back and watching his last start, that particularly bad one. I don't feel overly confident going up against him after watching it. I know I I watched the previous guy that we faced who was also having a bad start. Who was that? The ex-Blue Jay, Bassett. I watched Bassett's start from a couple days ago, or I watched a start from like a week ago, but we faced him a couple days ago. And I remember thinking, all right, we're gonna light him up. He just looks terrible. Radiusinger didn't look terrible. All of his hits that he was giving up were soft line drives right over the infielders' heads, or just well-struck grounders that found holes that won't always find holes. So it seems like they'll probably end up as double plays when he comes up to face the Giants. And then also he himself made two errors, which is definitely not the norm. It's just weird and probably messed with his psyche a little bit. So I hate to say it, but it kind of feels like a get right situation for Brady Singer. Maybe maybe get right's the wrong word. I feel like you use that mostly for an ace who's not done as well, or maybe the two guy who's who's had a rough start, and it's time for him to get back to his you know, mid-threes ERA. I'm not saying that Brady Singer is gonna get right so well that he's gonna end up this season at a 3.2 ERA, right? But I do think he is going to come back and and do all right this game. I want to pull back the curtain a little bit for this next this next part, because uh, as you've probably realized in the podcast, my role in a lot of ways is to go into some analytics, some background stats, et cetera. And then dad comes in with the experience and the expertise of watching every game closely, having a little bit more betting experience than I do. And so I think that we both kind of bring different sides of stuff to the table, right? And so when I find a new stat or I find a new series of stats or maybe a new website that I like, it's kind of exciting. And that happened for this game. And so I haven't figured out how to parse stuff plus yet. But I will get there because this is a stuff plus metrics. I mean, I've heard about stuff plus for a long time, but I've never really like dove into what it looks like on Fangrafts' website, right? So I just want to read you out some numbers and hopefully you can come to a conclusion, and it'll be similar to the conclusion that I come to. So there's three metrics that I want to go over. The first one's called stuff plus it's a number that's been normalized about 100, where league average is 100. And so you can see Brady Singer in 2025 had a 95 stuff plus, which means that his stuff, as in, is it moving? Does it have speed? Does it have a spin rate? Was a little bit below average in that 95th or it's not 95th percentile because it's been normalized around 100. So you can easily be over 100. In fact, half the league is over 100, right? So he's like significantly below league average on his stuff. But last year he was above average on what is called location plus. I think you can probably extrapolate without me going into too much uh detail what location plus is, where he's just painting the corners. He's putting stuff where sliders low, sliders low and outside, cutters on the inside hands, you know, getting those fastballs on the letters, everything that you're looking to do with location, not hanging stuff effectively. And his location plus was 101 last year. Now there's a third stat called just pitching plus, right? And it's a combination of stuff plus and location plus to get a fully encapsulating feeling about this pitcher. Uh and he had a 96 of pitching plus for that. Now, I will say that pitching plus is not just uh the mean of stuff plus and location plus. It's a third metric, which is meant to encapsulate both, where you're putting them together pitch by pitch, which is really illustrated in this year for Brady Singer. So far, I've just been talking about last year, where he's got a 96 stuff plus, so just a little below average, and a 99 location plus, so just barely below average, but his pitching plus has been all the way down at 89, which is really bad. If you know, like honestly, I need to review how normalization of crafts work. I know that it's it's not one to one. Like you're not gonna like if you if he was at a 50 out of 100, you might say, oh, so he's at the or 51 would be the first percentile, 52 is the second percentile, 100 is the 50 percentile. It's absolutely not linear at all. In fact, once you drop to 89, I'm pretty sure he's already like in the bottom 13th percentile or something like that for pitching plus, maybe worse. The point is uh his pitching plus has been really bad this year, and I believe that is predictive for him moving forward, which is obviously more promising. Meanwhile, Robbie Ray has had a 106 stuff plus, that seems fantastic. 100 location plus, so right along league average, which has accumulated to a 101 pitching plus, so a little bit above average. And uh I guess it's just something that we'll be watching moving forward is how those numbers, that 101 for Robbie Ray, is that predictive? Is he going to be an above average pitcher for the rest of the year? I believe so. Is that 89 for Brady Singer? Does that mean he's going to be maybe even below replacement level down at 89 for that pitching plus? So I just want to throw those numbers out there. As I said, I haven't learned how to parse them fully at this point, but we'll keep looking at it and hopefully it's something we can add to our arsenal when it comes to making picks down the line. Anyway, today I'm going to leave it at that. I didn't research the pi uh the bets so much today. I'm going to leave that one up to you, Dad. Hopefully you can take some of those numbers I gave earlier and apply that to what your own findings are. Uh, you've been making great picks for the last few days, and so I look forward to hearing what you come up with. As I said, that's all the time I've got for today. So now I'll go ahead and turn it over to you, Dad. And as always, go giants.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Good morning. Welcome back into the pod. It is Tuesday morning, April 14th. Thank you, Aiden. It is always good when Aiden is here to help me out. I need all the help I can get. It's good to have the statistics, the numbers, the analysis like that. He goes into it from a much different angle than I do. So it's boy, it's very helpful. I like to have that. It was, like you said, like he said, another rough loss for the Giants, but at least the safe bet of the day came in, which was kind of hard to believe because Povich had five strikeouts after six, and he came out for the seventh face. Two more batteries had two strikes on both of them. But luckily, I think Romo's flight out, and then somebody got the hit before they pulled him. So that was more of a sweat than it should have been. Felt like I had the right pick, but luckily it was a winner. That's what we like to do around here. You know how we are, so that was good. And you know, it's always good when the safe bet of the day comes in when the Giants lose a game because our choicers are so narrowed down on games like that. So it was good to pluck one out because the other ones that I was looking at were all losers. It was the only one that was the winner. So it was nice to pick that one out. Let's hope we can keep doing that kind of thing. See, moving on to today's game. Tonight, I guess it's for us, it's today 340, but 640 in Cincinnati. So for today's game against Cincinnati, we got the Red Legs. And if you look at Reds' numbers, they're you know, look, they're 9-7 right now. They were a playoff team last year, they hope to be a playoff team this year. They've been just a little bit up and down so far. In their last five games, they were one and four. In the five games before that, they were on a five-game winning streak. They went five and oh. So kind of floundering just here in the last five games, but overall, they are still nine and seven and hoping to make the playoffs. There, if you look at their offense, their batting average has been terrible. Their team batting average is only 208. It's 26 in the in the league. The Giants is 243. We're number eight. You would think we would have more wins and more runs with 243 batting average. If you look at their on-base percentage, though, it's 298, which is better than the Giants at 291, which tells me they're getting a lot of walks. And they have a lot of home runs, also. They're ninth in the league at 14 home runs. So their team does a lot of getting one of the three outcomes the strikeout, the walk, or the home run. Because if you look, the Giants slugging is more than they're higher than theirs at 354 to their 330. So they must be getting the home runs without doubles and triples and that kind of thing. So it's kind of an interesting stat that they can be at 208 batting average and 298 on base percentage. I don't know, and then the home runs, but overall their batting is not beginning. They're hitting their runs, they're not doing very well. They're 25th, 26th, 28th, and all the numbers right there with the Giants in all of those categories. But their pitching numbers are not so bad. They're right in the middle. They're 377 ERA as a team, which is 14, right in the middle of the league. Batting average against is only 227, which is ninth in the league. Giants are 20th at 243, but their whip is 135, which is the same as the Giants, which tells me their pitching is walking a lot of guys, also, which is kind of interesting. Like I said, they started off hot, but they've been regressing lately. And I listened to a couple of their podcasts, like I like to do, and it was funny because the podcaster seems to be underrating the Giants. He didn't have much to say. He was like, Well, you know, we got the Giants come into town. At least we should be able to take that series, and we don't have to face Webb, so we should be alright. He was just not having anything good to say about the Giants overall, and certainly didn't take into account that Robbie Ray or Landon Roop that they're gonna have to face them because they got Ray today and Roop on the third game of the series. So, anyway, it was just an interesting way that at least he's taken it. Now, I don't think the team and the coaches would say the same thing, obviously, but it was just interesting that the podcasters over there thought of the Giants in that way. Also, they did make the the comment that just yesterday or today they dropped down Neueville Marte and brought up a guy named Reese Hines because he's been doing he did so well in spring training and has been doing so well in triple A at the plate, and their offense has been so bad that they're trying to get something going. So the podcaster was very hopeful because he had spent quite a bit of time talking about how their hard hit rate was down, how bad their offense was doing, just how frustrating it was to watch their games. So they've made a change. We'll see if that helps them at all. He did also go into quite a bit about their bullpen depth and how good their bullpen is. So that gives me a little bit of pause for concern, also. So now getting into today's matchup, it is like Aiden said, Brady Singer against Robbie Ray. And like Aiden said about Brady Singer, most of his numbers are not good. Although, if you look in the past, you know, four or five years when he was at Kansas City, he was around a four. I think I mean he would go for 491 to 323. He went up and down with his ERAs. But overall, he's probably around a 4.0 type of pitcher, an established veteran, more than serviceable. Last year he went 32 games, 4.03, after being traded to Cincinnati. So I think that's kind of what we should expect from him. Maybe not the bad numbers that Aiden gave out because they were terrible. Also, a couple other reasons that though that I'm worried about Singer today. One of the podcasters said that his field independent pitching wasn't that bad. Like Aiden said, his Siri number was not nearly as bad as all the other numbers. He has not given up a lot of walks. He really reminds me of Bassett. Like Daydon said, when Bassett came into town a couple, was it last week? His last outing, his numbers were terrible. Even though historically he was a good pitcher. His numbers were terrible so far this year. And he came out and had a good outing against the Giants. And I just got a feeling that Singer, who is he is historically a pretty decent pitcher, he's certainly better than his numbers show so far this year. So I think, like Aiden said, he probably has positive regression, if anything. Don't think he's washed up. He's too young to be washed up. The Sierra number was good. The idea that he had the outing where they've been clumping hits against him, because that does kind of make sense. And the Giants, they don't really clump hits. We get one or two, and we don't seem to get that clutch hit that we need. Also, it's a such a small sample size for this year that any change, if he has one good outing, those numbers are gonna change drastically. So I really like all those numbers. I really like that stuff plus number that Aiden ended up with. I'm gonna really look forward to seeing how that pans out going forward because this early in the year, it's a little tough to decide if it's prescriptive or if it's just reflective of what's happened in those first three games. So, with all that, that's gonna take me to kind of my prediction for the game is I think I've said this before. I think Ray, I like Ray. You guys have heard me say this before. I think he's one of the Giants' best pitcher. I kind of almost like him. I feel more comfortable with him than Webb sometimes. If he can have control, if he doesn't walk batters, that's kind of he had three walks each of his last two games, and that's kind of been trouble. He threw a lot of pitches in that last game, 109. We had him going over on the outs, and he hit it easily, but he threw way too many pitches, and I'm worried about his stamina tonight. And another reason that he needs to throw strikes tonight, but I think if he does, that he can outpitch Singer for five innings. The Giants bats are at least as good as the Reds for five innings, and so I want to leave the bullpins out because I don't really have any faith in ours, and sounded like they might have a good one. So I'm gonna kind of focus in on the first five innings when I look at today's safe bet of the day. The first five run line, I just wouldn't want to take it because of I think Singer and Ray could be even. So the first five money line is minus 110, exactly even. So that's the one I'm really liking right now because I think the Giants should at least be able to play even. We don't have to have the lead. The Giants money line, we can take the bullpen out of it. I don't want to have that because we don't want to have to go the whole game. I don't have faith in Ray's outs today because he threw so many pitches last time. I kind of lean toward the under nine because I think Singer is gonna be better than his numbers. I think Ray will be good, and the bullpins are rested, so I kind of lean toward the under nine. But for the actual safe bet of the day today, it is gonna be Giants first five money line at minus 110. I think that's all I have. I know it's going kind of long because Aiden did his, and then I've been kind of long, so I apologize for the length of today's. Tune in tomorrow. It is a 3:40 start time again. Tyler Malley against somebody named Rhett Louder, who I have not done any research on. So hopefully, we will have some numbers on both of them and just an idea of how that game's gonna pan out. We can talk about that, we can recap today's game. And with that, that's all I have. So enjoy your day. Stay safe out there and go, Giants.