[DC 86]

And I "get" that HRs, launch angle all the rage; but I don't know why that should preclude situational hitting.  But I guess it must. Yesterday another good example - bases juiced and no outs:  Dickerson Ks; Crawford pops out to 3B; and then Vosler comes up "big" . . . with a HBP.  Fly out by Duggar.  One (gift) run.

In B8, Slater with a single; followed by Ruf with PH 2 run dinger.

Out, out, out.

That just encapsulates the Giants this year.

I don't think that a power-oriented offense necessarily precludes situational hitting at specific times, but in the current baseball environment it's usually necessary to produce big innings in order to win games. Consistently putting together a series of contact-oriented, manufactured single scores is not feasible, and consistently protecting small leads over multiple innings is not realistic either. In your example, with the bases loaded and no outs you have the opportunity to score a lot of runs and you need to try to do that. You can't rely on a squeeze play or a sacrifice fly to score a run and then have Koufax shut out your opponent the rest of the way. Of course sometimes instead of scoring a bunch of runs you end up with none, but that's the price for those three and four run innings that give your pitchers sufficient margin of error and put the pressure on your opponent to score a lot of runs in response.

[DC 86]

And I "get" that HRs, launch angle all the rage; but I don't know why that should preclude situational hitting.  But I guess it must. Yesterday another good example - bases juiced and no outs:  Dickerson Ks; Crawford pops out to 3B; and then Vosler comes up "big" . . . with a HBP.  Fly out by Duggar.  One (gift) run.

In B8, Slater with a single; followed by Ruf with PH 2 run dinger.

Out, out, out.

That just encapsulates the Giants this year.

I don't think that a power-oriented offense necessarily precludes situational hitting at specific times, but in the current baseball environment it's usually necessary to produce big innings in order to win games. Consistently putting together a series of contact-oriented, manufactured single scores is not feasible, and consistently protecting small leads over multiple innings is not realistic either. In your example, with the bases loaded and no outs you have the opportunity to score a lot of runs and you need to try to do that. You can't rely on a squeeze play or a sacrifice fly to score a run and then have Koufax shut out your opponent the rest of the way. Of course sometimes instead of scoring a bunch of runs you end up with none, but that's the price for those three and four run innings that give your pitchers sufficient margin of error and put the pressure on your opponent to score a lot of runs in response.