San Francisco Giants Pitcher Projections… As Hitters

With Spring Training games right around, here are offensive projections for San Francisco Giants’ pitchers.

There has been a lot of discussion this offseason about Major League Baseball creating uniform rules for both leagues, and adding a designated hitter to the National League. But for the 2016 season at least, pitchers will still be handling bats.

To some, pitchers hitting isn’t fun to watch, but for other fans, a pitcher taking his hacks at the plate is good old fashioned fun. One of the most exciting plays in baseball is watching a pitcher take his counterpart deep, something San Francisco Giants’ fans have become used to seeing in the past few years.

It’s projection season, where bloggers and writers everywhere make player projections for the upcoming major league season. Not a lot of projections go out for pitchers as hitters, because, well, there’s really not much point of it. Pitchers generally don’t hit well enough to warrant having seasonal predictions done for their offense. But the Giants’ pitchers, or maybe rather one pitcher in particular, deserve the prediction treatment.

Relief pitcher at-bats are fun and will surely make Giants’ beat writer Alex Pavlovic happy, but they won’t get enough opportunities as hitters to receive projections here. For the starting pitchers, and a long reliever who could potentially receive a good share of at-bats, here are their 2016 offensive projections.

Next: Madison Bumgarner