Latest crop of SF Giants call-ups give them two attributes they have sorely lacked

LOS ANGELES — The San Francisco Giants aren’t fast. They don’t hit the ball hard. They’re slow, and more often than not, so is the contact they make.

It doesn’t strain the imagination to believe this hasn’t been a fruitful combination. Teams that don’t hit homers can create runs on the base paths. Those that go station-to-station can quickly clear the bases with one swing of the bat. The Giants don’t do either, and in all likelihood they will be sitting at home this October.

If there is one upside to their spectacular collapse, the final week of the season can serve as a showcase for many of the 12 prospects who graduated from the minors and made their major-league debuts this season. And some of these guys possess the exact attributes the Giants have lacked for much of this year.

In two games since being called up, Marco Luciano has collected three hits, and each one has left the bat at 105 mph or more. Of the Giants’ four hardest-hit balls the past two games, three have come off the bat of Luciano, including a 111.8 mph single up the middle for his second hit Friday night.

“We don’t have guys who hit the ball that hard very often,” manager Gabe Kapler said.

In fact, the Giants have one guy — Joc Pederson — who has hit the ball that hard all year. There is only one team, the Nationals, with fewer balls in play at 110 mph or harder.

They also don’t have anyone, even Thairo Estrada, their leading base stealer, who rivals the speed of Tyler Fitzgerald, who became the latest to make his major-league debut Thursday night. It didn’t take long for him to show it off.

Despite only picking up the outfield this season — 23 professional games there, all this year, before starting in center field in the first three games of his MLB career — he closed enough ground on a ball into the gap that he nearly made one of the Giants’ defensive plays of the year. The play ended in a triple, but only because the ball kicked out of his glove when his diving body hit the ground after racing from center nearly all the way to Mike Yastrzemski in right.

Yastrzemski, who had to track the ball down as it rolled away, said he was “in awe that he even got to that ball.”

“That’s what I had heard mostly about him, that he can really run,” Yastrzemski said. “He showed it off on that play.”

The Giants are the third-slowest team in the majors by average sprint speed, behind only the Yankees and the White Sox. No team has stolen fewer bases.

But Fitzgerald intends to change that. He has put together 20-20 seasons each of his past two years in the minor leagues.

“I like to say I’ll be aggressive,” he said. “We’ll see. I’m gonna try to get a couple, though.”