SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- It was a good day for Casey McGehee on Wednesday in his second spring game with the San Francisco Giants. He ripped two hits. He cleanly fielded a couple of chances at third base. And with reliable good cheer he faced the latest series of questions about the challenge of replacing a franchise legend as he takes over at the hot corner for departed free agent Pablo Sandoval.
“I’m excited. I grew up in the Bay Area. I grew up watching the Giants, so it’s pretty cool from that standpoint,” McGehee said. “There’s nothing negative about it.”
“He’s a grinder, and we’re excited to have him,” Giants manager Bruce Bochy said after Wednesday’s spring training game. Recalling McGehee's second-inning single to right, Bochy observed, “That at-bat showed you the hitter he is, the kind of guy who moves the runners, a smart player. He’s going to help us lighten the blow of losing Sandoval.”
That all sounds remarkably upbeat, but it is spring training, and everyone is ready to accentuate the positive. But Pablo Sandoval was the Kung Fu Panda, a fan favorite who helped produce three World Series titles in five years, while the mighty Casey needed a waiver claim to break into the majors with the Brewers in 2009, was traded after just three seasons, and had to resurrect his career with a desperate move to Japan for the 2013 season as a springboard for a big league comeback in 2014. If that doesn’t sound like a one-for-one replacement to you, that’s OK, it doesn’t sound like it to McGehee either.
“As far as Panda goes, he was great while he was here,” McGehee said. “The fans should celebrate him and remember him. Even if you wanted to, I don’t think we should talk about ‘replacing’ him because of what he meant to the organization. I don’t think about it; thinking about it doesn’t help me do my job, and that’s to help this team win. I may do that in a different way than Panda did it, but I think that I bring enough to the table to get back where it needs to be and where it expects to be.”
What McGehee brings to the table might not have been something even he would have recognized just a few years ago, though. That’s because McGehee has fundamentally rediscovered himself as a player. His 2014 comeback with the Marlins found him a very different but still effective hitter, but also someone who had changed his game at the plate. In this case of necessity being the mother of reinvention, McGehee focused on making good contact. Result? He dropped his strikeout rate to a career-low 14.8 percent while simultaneously walking more than ever (9.7 percent). He put more balls in play than ever while delivering a career-best .335 batting average on balls in play. So he was more patient and hit more singles. This wasn’t the Casey McGehee that Brewers fans had gotten to know; it was a different Casey McGehee than anyone had ever seen in the majors.
Then again, the hitter who broke in with the Brewers wasn’t really who McGehee sees himself as, not ultimately. McGehee remembers coming up through the Cubs’ organization, where he had never been a big-time power guy. In four years bouncing between Double- and Triple-A from 2005-08, his single-season career highs were 31 doubles (in 2005) and 12 homers (in 2008). His strikeout rate between the two levels was under 15 percent. He topped those slugging marks in Milwaukee in 2009 (with 16 homers) and 2010 (38 doubles, 23 homers), all while his strikeout rate crept toward 20 percent. Then came his 2011 stumble that ultimately cost him his job with the Brewers, leading to brief stints with the Pirates and Yankees.
What had gone wrong? “I started trying to turn 23 [homers] into 35,” McGehee says.
Trying to be a 30-homer hitter might have helped him crank out an impressive three-homer game on Aug. 3, 2011, but his overall production tumbled. In 2013, running out of opportunities to stick around in the majors after being traded first to the Pirates and then the Yankees, he headed to Japan as a free agent.
“Japan was good for me, in that I rediscovered what made me successful and what kind of hitter I had been my whole life,” McGehee said on reflection. “There was some sense that this could be the end of the line, going to Japan, and that, if I’m going to go out, I wanted to go out the right way, to go out my way. In doing that, I kind of rediscovered some things that helped me get to the big leagues in the first place. Now I definitely want to make sure that I don’t lose that ever again. I think I rediscovered what made me successful in the first place.”
Given a chance by the Marlins to come back stateside as a non-roster invite, what McGehee rediscovered also produced a modest four home runs as their regular third baseman, which makes for a hard sell if you see him trying to take Sandoval’s place in the Giants’ lineup.
“Last year, I know the home runs weren’t there -- which was a little bit of a disappointment to me -- but I think there was a little bit of a tradeoff,” McGehee observed. “The [Marlins’] ballpark really lended itself to hitting the ball hard and on the ground, and not hitting the ball in the air. I was glad that I was able to stay disciplined and not try to worry about the home run.”
That won’t be easy for McGehee considering that AT&T Park rates as an even tougher place to hammer homers for right-handed hitters, with a park index of 67 from 2012-2014 against Marlins Park’s 78 (with 100 representing average). His renewed hack-happiness understandably lacks Sandoval’s power, although last year’s high-contact approach managed to plate a comparable number of baserunners. There’s the reflexive expectation in the analysis community that his high BABIP has to come back down. And batting in the middle of the Giants’ lineup might also be problematic since they don’t run all that much; last year, McGehee grounded into a league-leading 31 double plays, the less-happy side effect of putting a ton of balls in play.
There’s also the step down on defense the Giants will have to accept. Advanced metrics aren’t kind in their evaluations of McGehee’s glove work, while crediting the remarkably agile Sandoval (See DRS and UZR in the table above). But that’s not to say McGehee is as bad on defense as some think. Per Baseball Info Solutions data, while facing an MLB-high 19 sacrifice bunt attempts at the hot corner last year, McGehee allowed 14 sacrifices and three bunt hits, as well as allowing five hits in seven attempts to bunt for a hit. In contrast, Sandoval allowed sacrifices on all eight sac bunt attempts, and hits on all nine bunts attempts for a hit. So McGehee was challenged much more often with the Marlins, but handled it well.
McGehee’s take on that info was philosophical, reflecting a guy who isn’t trying to do something he can’t: “I don’t pay attention to the metrics. On defense, there are some things you just have to give up.”
Instead, McGehee is focused on what he’ll be able to add to the Giants, not to replace Pablo Sandoval one-for-one, but to simply give the Giants bang for their buck.
“Going into this year, there are definitely times that I wish I had been a little more selective or drove the ball a little more than I did,” McGehee said. “That’s something that I want to improve about myself this year. But I don’t want to do that at the risk of changing my approach.”
Will it work? Not in isolation. Per WAR, Sandoval was a three-win player, McGehee a one-win guy -- still valuable if he can repeat it, but the Giants need to get those other wins from somewhere. But at this time of year, all things seem possible. The Giants are banking on a player who already stretched the limits of possibility by changing his game midcareer back to where he wants it to be. If it works, it will be lauded as the organization’s latest stroke of genius. If not, McGehee can look forward to free agency in 2016 and another shot at reinvention.
Christina Kahrl writes about MLB for ESPN. You can follow her on Twitter.