Wandy Peralta had a sneakily impactful season

The next player on our San Francisco Giants season reviews is someone you may have forgotten about: left-handed reliever Wandy Peralta

2021 review

10 games, 8.1 innings, 5.40 ERA, 3.89 FIP, 1.680 WHIP, 8 strikeouts, 3 walks, -0.1 rWAR, 0.0 fWAR

For the most part, the Giants 2021 season can be accurately described in numbers. The state of baseball analytics is such that you can take a good look at team numbers and individual numbers and paint a pretty clear picture as to what happened. You can find the reasons for why so many games were won (or lost).

You know, for instance, that the Giants won 107 games because they got borderline MVP performances from Buster Posey and Brandon Crawford, borderline Cy Young performances from Kevin Gausman and Logan Webb, quality outings by a few other starters and a dozen bullpen arms, and steady production from seemingly every production player.

It made sense. You can imagine taking Crawford off the roster and losing at least five more games. It all checks out.

There was one exception: Mike Tauchman.

Tauchman was worth negative WAR. In theory, you could remove him from the Giants and they would have a decent chance at adding to their obscene win tally.

Yet you know that isn’t true. Without me mentioning any specifics you can think of three Tauchman plays that might have won games for the Giants. One of them would have for sure been a loss with anyone else on the roster. Two of them very well might have been.

It was the rare case where the numbers that are meant to assign value to a player don’t really assign value. There’s also a reason why those numbers are still considered predictive, but if I get into that discussion it ruins my narrative a little.

Anyway, this isn’t an article about Tauchman. It’s an article about the guy who helped the Giants get Tauchman, and that’s Wandy Peralta.

Peralta didn’t pitch much for the Giants this year, but he was the center piece (accompanied by Connor Cannon, who was the player to be named later) in the Giants trade with the New York Yankees. If you think that Tauchman, despite his awful hitting, helped the Giants win 107 games, then you think that Peralta helped the Giants win 107 games by proxy.

As for his time in New York, Peralta was pretty much the opposite of what he was in San Francisco. After having his ERA greatly underperform his FIP with the Giants (5.40 to 3.89), Peralta reversed course in the Bronx, with a glistening 2.95 ERA that begs you to not glance at the FIP column (where you would see a 4.39).

But he got the Giants Tauchman, and Tauchman robbed Albert Pujols.

Good Giant then.

Role in 2022

Playing for the Yankees.

Duh.

Grade: Sure