Joc Pederson attracts your attention for all sorts of reasons.
He was an involuntary yet central figure in one of the most bizarre and viral stories of the baseball season when the Reds’ Tommy Pham slapped him across the cheek over a fantasy football dispute. He stands out in a crowd with his shock of bleached blond hair. He broke out a new strand of pearls for a four-game series in Atlanta last month when he received multiple ovations along with his World Series ring. He is a Palo Alto native who signed with the Dodgers out of high school, and if that doesn’t brand you as an iconoclast from the very beginning of your professional baseball career, nothing will. Whether he grew into that personality or whether it perfectly suited him, only he can say.
It’s not easy to be a ballplayer who attracts attention, especially when half your job responsibilities involve standing in a lonely patch of grass within easy vocal range of the sodden outfield bleachers, and half of that time is spent in hostile road environments. No matter how self-assured or grounded you are, it’s a tax on anyone’s sanity when total strangers, for whatever reason, feel especially entitled or empowered or uninhibited (or sufficiently inebriated) to give you the business. Especially when you don’t have the option to walk away.
For so many professional athletes who put themselves out there, the attention is the goal. For Pederson, it’s a byproduct. He isn’t an Instagram influencer. He’s just living his best life, being an occasional clubhouse goof, getting a rise out of the people closest to him even if it means making himself into an easy mark for those who aren’t. As Della Reese once sang: if it feels good, do it.
Pederson grabs your attention in the traditional baseball sense, too. On May 25, he hit three home runs in a game at the Giants’ waterfront ballpark — something Barry Bonds never did — and matched the San Francisco-era franchise record with eight RBIs. As if one of the most impressive box score lines in Giants history wasn’t enough, his three-run home run tied the score in the eighth inning and his line-drive single tied it again in the ninth as the Giants beat the New York Mets 13-12 in one of the most exhilarating regular-season games in the annals of Bay Area baseball.
It wasn’t a one-game outlier. You already knew that Pederson was having a terrific offensive season and represented a tremendous bargain on the one-year, $6 million investment the team made in him. He ranks in the 98th percentile in hard-hit rate, the 98th percentile in average exit velocity and the 97th percentile in barrel rate. He is hitting a home run once per 12.7 at-bats, which ranks eighth among 232 major leaguers with at least 200 plate appearances.
Pederson has been one of the National League’s best hitters, and when the final batch of All-Star votes were tabulated on Friday, he was named one of three starting outfielders who will represent the NL on July 19 at Dodger Stadium.
“It means a lot,” said Pederson, who will start alongside the Dodgers’ Mookie Betts and the Braves’ Ronald Acuña Jr. “It’s a really cool accomplishment and I’m looking forward to representing the Giants. I don’t know. I guess ‘expecting it’ sounds arrogant. But just the way the voting had been going and my year had been going, I had a good feeling.”
(Sam Navarro / USA Today Sports)
Are you, dear Giants fan, surprised that Pederson was voted in as a starter? Then maybe it’s worth exploring a somewhat novel and counterintuitive notion. The way this usually works, nothing makes you appreciate the subtleties of a player’s value more than watching him every day. But perhaps Pederson is a rare example of that aphorism in reverse. Perhaps it’s easier for the broader baseball fan to appreciate his offensive contributions and overlook the fact that he still doesn’t start against left-handed pitchers. Perhaps it’s easier for the broader baseball fan to avoid getting bogged down in the malaise of a Giants team that has lost eight of nine to tumble back to .500 following a 6-3 defeat Friday night in San Diego (a game Pederson didn’t start because Padres left-hander Blake Snell did). Maybe it won’t register beyond the Bay Area that Pederson has given back a chunk of his offensive WAR because he’s a human tugboat in left field and he’s had to tootle for more innings out there because Tommy La Stella’s mobility, in seafaring terms, is nearer to dry dock and has made him the de facto DH against right-handers.
Or maybe the fantasy football slap heard ’round the league gave Pederson a notoriety bump. If we’ve learned anything about the psychological process of voting over the past six years, it’s not an entirely rational exercise.
But none of this should suggest that Pederson is an undeserving All-Star, as the Giants’ first outfielder to be elected to start since Melky Cabrera in 2012. Rather, it’s possible that the Giants’ platoon scheme and Pederson’s defensive limitations have allowed his first half to be underappreciated by Giants fans.
So let’s take stock using one basic metric.
Pederson entered Friday with a 144 OPS+, which is a catchall offensive stat — 100 is a league-average player — that controls for park effect and across seasons, making it handy to compare players from different eras. So let’s see how Pederson stacks up:
Pederson has posted the same OPS+ this season as a 22-year-old switch hitter who hit 25 home runs and batted .330 in 2009, while turning furry panda hats into a surprisingly significant revenue stream for the Giants organization. We tend to think of Pablo Sandoval as the guy who homered three times in Game 1 of the 2012 World Series or who trust-fell backward into the grass in exhilaration when he gloved the final out in the 2014 World Series. But looking back at what he did in his first full season, it’s a wonder that they didn’t build the statue right then and there. Sandoval was otherworldly in 2009. Pederson has been just as productive with the bat this season.
Pederson’s OPS+ this season is one point higher than Buster Posey’s in 2014, when he hit .311 with 22 home runs and caught a World Series winner while finishing sixth in MVP balloting.
It’s one point higher than Bobby Bonds’ in 1973 when he led the NL in runs and total bases, and came within one home run of the first 40-homer, 40-steal season in baseball history. (He accomplished it if you count the homer he hit in the All-Star Game that season in Kansas City, when he was named the MVP.)
It’s two points higher than Aubrey Huff’s in 2010 when he posted an 891 OPS, finished seventh in MVP balloting and was the best and most consistent offensive player on the first World Series championship team in the San Francisco era.
It’s three points higher than Matt Williams’ in 1994 when he owned a major league-best 43 home runs and was on pace to threaten Roger Maris’ single-season record before a players strike wiped out the season in mid-August.
It’s three points higher than Brandon Crawford’s last season when he finished fourth in the NL MVP balloting and was so resurgent with the bat and glove that he earned a two-year contract extension.
(Brad Mills/USA Today Sports)
That is the company Pederson is keeping in terms of offensive value. Maybe that doesn’t resonate when the Giants are struggling to produce as a lineup and when they managed a total of two runs on six hits over two games in San Diego before Brandon Belt connected on a two-run pinch-hit homer in the ninth inning Friday to pretty up the final score a touch. Maybe it’s tough to appreciate a player like Pederson whose usage is gerrymandered when the Padres have an everyday masher like Manny Machado, who basically decided Friday’s game with a three-run homer in the first inning against Giants lefty Sam Long.
The Giants don’t have a wagon train that relies on the same horses every day. That’s just not how they’re designed to work. And we aren’t wired to think of All-Stars as platoon players. All-Stars should be a manager’s best and most talented option regardless of matchup.
But it’s worth noting that Giants manager Gabe Kapler said that Pederson would start against a lefty on Sunday, when the Padres send MacKenzie Gore to the mound.
“It’s a roster that’s built for our right-handed bats to face left-handed pitchers and our left-handed bats to face right-handed pitchers,” Kapler said. “But we’re not dogmatic about it. It’s not set in stone. I think we’ve demonstrated that.”
Pederson might not be alone at the All-Star Game. The Giants could send Logan Webb, Carlos Rodón or both. But Pederson is almost assured to be their only representative from a disappointing position player core. And it’s a neat way for him to close a personal loop, since the game will be at Dodger Stadium where he played the first six seasons of his career. It’ll be his first All-Star appearance since 2015, when he was a 23-year-old in his first full season. His world was a Vegas buffet and he loaded up and ate so fast that he didn’t stop to taste a morsel.
“It’ll be cool to re-soak in some of the moments I maybe missed,” Pederson said. “So much has happened since then — a lot of games. I have a whole different perspective about baseball. … Fresh into the big leagues, everything is just a whirlwind. You do everything you can play well and there’s so much you miss out in the game, the enjoyment. Going into different cities now, I like to go explore the city more so where before, it was just, like, sleep, baseball. I guess that’s part of growing up.”
Prior to Friday’s game, the Giants placed La Stella on the COVID-19 IL. The Giants also activated infielder Thairo Estrada from the COVID-19 list.
They used the brief interlude between the two roster moves — and the 40-man roster spot they temporarily freed up — to claim third baseman Colton Welker off waivers from the Colorado Rockies. The Giants immediately recalled Welker and placed him on the 60-day IL and will essentially pay him major-league money to rehab from recent shoulder surgery. That’s a nearly identical gambit to the one they pulled off last year when they added outfielder Luis González after the Chicago White Sox designated him for assignment while he was recovering from a shoulder procedure.
Welker, 24, is a former top prospect who was a fourth-round pick out of a Florida high school in 2016, and hit .350 as a 19-year-old in Low A the following year. After missing 2020 because of the pandemic, he had to sit out 80 games last year after testing positive for a trace amount of DHCMT, a banned androgenic substance that has caused controversy because several players suspended following a positive test, including Webb, claimed to have no idea how it got in their system.
Welker underwent surgery June 1 to repair a torn labrum.
One of the Giants’ own third base prospects had a moment to remember amid an otherwise forgettable loss on Friday at Petco Park. David Villar hit a hanging breaking ball from Snell for his first major-league home run. Villar was surprised he only had to trade an autographed baseball to the fan who caught his home run. “He was really nice,” Villar said, “so I threw in some batting gloves.”
(Photo: David J. Griffin / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
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