A Giant At First, At Last

This probably deserves a more in-depth discussion, but I've only got some stray moments to make the following point. Sometimes, your team's biggest pickup isn't the gold-plated free agent acquisition; it's the journeyman whose signing escapes your attention.

Case in point: the offfensively offensive San Francisco Giants signed Aubrey Huff in the off-season, following a desultory 2009 campaign in which he hit .241/.310/.384 for Baltimore and Detroit. (Plus, he attempted six steals in 2009 and got thrown out each time. Ouch.) But Huff had a stick befitting a first baseman prior to that, so the Big Men took a flyer on him.

Huff has rebounded to a more representative .281/.361/.450 so far in 2010, which is nothing for a first baseman particularly to write home about unless your sister has been staffing the position the last five years. Which appears to be the case in the West Bay. Here is the Giants' recent production from that position:

2009: .271/.328/.405
2008: .248/.313/.371
2007: .262/.324/.410
2006: .257/.307/.410
2005: .257/.316/.399

A .734 OPS from a first baseman, which is the best of this bunch, is the profile of a weak-hitting second baseman, and costs a team a win or two relative to the back-up first-bagger on any decent roster. The word for this is dreadful, or perhaps abysmal, or possibly awful. This is the level of expectation that awaited Aubrey Huff when he arrived.

Huff, at the sustainable pace he's on, adds four wins beyond replacement level. So San Fran has boosted its offense by five or six wins thanks to this one player whose addition was little noted. That's the difference between being a .500 team and competing for the wild card in the NL.

The Giants are nonetheless mired in an offensive swamp, scoring just 4.07 runs/game, worse than everyone but Pittsburgh and Houston, which is to say, the worst in the majors. It's not Aubrey Huff's fault that he's the second best hitter on the team, but even a side with the Giants' lights-out pitching can't win consistently with a lineup for which a hard foul ball is a moral victory.

So San Francisco may squander the six-game edge that Aubrey Huff gives them. That doesn't diminish the value they added when they made -- what seemed at the time -- a pretty nondescript offseason pickup.

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