SAN FRANCISCO -- On the final day of the first half, the Giants had players with flights to Seattle, Scottsdale, Atlanta, Southern California and various other spots across the country. Those who were staying in San Francisco for the break had fancy dinner reservations and already had started to dream of their Monday morning tee times.
Logan Webb will never need to do anything else to win over the clubhouse, but he did his teammates a solid anyway. Webb's first career shutout was thrown in one hour, 56 minutes.
"Nice," he said after Sunday's game. "It means I'll get to Tahoe a little faster."
The game was the fastest of the season for the Giants and brought their average down to 2:40 through 90 games, a decrease of 28 minutes from 2022. The pitch clock has had a huge impact on the sport, and while there were some early grumbles, at this point everyone seems to have happily adjusted.
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Through about 56 percent of the season, MLB has chopped 26 minutes off of games around the league and 32 minutes off of the 2021 peak. Pitchers don't seem to be too rushed, either. MLB announced at the All-Star Game that pitchers were delivering to the plate with 6.6 seconds left on the clock with the bases empty and 7.4 seconds with runners on. Clock violations have decreased month to month, and 60 percent of games haven't had any violations at all.
Per Baseball Savant, the Giants are fourth in the big leagues in total violations with 32, seven behind the league-leading Tampa Bay Rays. Most of those have come when they're on the mound, as they rank second in violations on pitchers but 15th in violations on hitters. The violations on pitchers are pretty evenly distributed, with 10 different Giants getting dinged and Camilo Doval leading the way at five. J.D. Davis (three) is the only hitter with multiple violations.
Aside from pace of play, the biggest early difference for MLB has come on the bases. Stolen base attempts are up to 1.8 per game across the league, the highest rate since 2012, and the disengagement limit has cut 1.1 pickoff throws per game, which also happens to be 1.1 fewer opportunities for fans to boo.
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The biggest change has been in success rate, with runners reaching safely 79.4 percent of the time, the highest rate in MLB history. The Giants are right at the league average, with 41 steals on 52 attempts. Thairo Estrada, who was 18-for-22 before going on the IL, has led the way. They still are not a team of burners, but they're on pace for 74 stolen bases, which would be their highest total since 2018.
MLB also made a major change to defensive rules, banning infield shifts, which was about the only thing the Giants did right last year defensively. There have been just two shift violations across the league -- on the New York Mets and Chicago White Sox -- and lefties have seen their BABIP (batting average on balls in play) rise by 40 points on pulled groundballs.
It's a small sample, but Joc Pederson appears to be the biggest beneficiary so far for the Giants, with a .304 average on grounders to the right side. One of them was a prime example of what MLB was hoping for with the offseason changes.
It was Pederson who scorched the grounder through the right side that led to a play at the plate on June 21 against the San Diego Padres. Gary Sanchez was called for blocking the plate at the end of what ended up being one of the more interesting plays of the first half for the Giants, but a year ago that might have been just a very, very hard out to a second baseman standing on the outfield grass.
