WASHINGTON D.C. -- Wins Above Replacement is calculated in a complicated way, so much so that the two leading statistics websites -- FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference -- use different versions.
On Friday night at Nationals Park, it was pretty simple. You can give Austin Slater one WAR for his performance, or at least give him a mark that's pretty, pretty close.
Slater, starting for just the third time this season, saved two runs in the first inning and then drove in three just about right away, breaking open what ended up being a 7-1 win over the Washington Nationals. He swung the momentum twice in a span of about 15 minutes, pleasing a manager who has been consistent in his support despite Slater's slow start.
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SIGN UP HERE "We never lose sight of our players' talent and their athleticism," Giants manager Gabe Kapler said. "Slater is a guy who can at any point (drive) it into the right-center field gap and out of the ballpark. It just feels like that's one swing away all the time, so when there's a stretch of at-bats that don't end with hard contact, we know that that's always coming.
"He brought some swagger to the plate. It was timely. We needed him to emerge in this game and he did."
That message was not just one that Kapler saved for the cameras and notebooks. After Slater struck out to lead off the game, Kapler found him in the dugout. At the time, Slater's average was hovering around .100.
"He just reminded me that I was a good hitter, said 'swag it out' and be you and remember that you're a good hitter," Slater said. "I guess the pep talk worked."
The homer was Slater's first of the year, but his bigger play might have come with the glove. Slater covered 106 feet and reached 30.5 feet per second -- the fastest recorded sprint of the Giants' season -- while tracking down a flare to left that would have given the Nationals an early 2-0 lead and possibly cut Sam Long's start short right off the bat.
Asked which play was bigger, Slater smiled and said it was a tough call. But the catch probably meant more to the win.
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"Saving the two runs was bigger for us from a momentum standpoint," he said. "It's keeping Sammy out there, confident, he was attacking the zone -- so it's giving him the confidence that when he attacks the zone and they put it in play, we're out there to make plays."
The all-around performance came after a surprisingly lengthy period spent mostly on the bench, and mostly because of the hand opposing pitchers were throwing with.
Slater saw by far his most action as a big leaguer last season, playing in a career-high 129 games and getting 306 plate appearances after never topping 225 in his previous four seasons. He played well, hitting 12 homers and balancing the lineup by showing an ability to handle center field in addition to the outfield corners.
After years of bouncing back and forth between the big leagues and Triple-A, Slater entered camp this year with a job locked in. He is, somewhat incredibly, the third-longest tenured Giant behind Brandon Crawford and Brandon Belt, but early on it's been hard for him to crack the lineup.
The Giants faced just two left-handed starters in the first 13 games and Kapler -- in a change from the previous two seasons -- played the same lineup in five of them. He stuck with the left-handed hitters in the outfield, and aside from those two starts, Slater had not appeared before the fifth inning of a game this season. On a team heavy on platoons, he had to wait his turn.
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Slater said he looks ahead on the schedule, using FanGraphs depth charts and the MLB app to try and figure out upcoming pitching probables. And then, there's "a little guess work," he said, laughing.
The Giants had not yet faced a left-handed starter on this trip, but Patrick Corbin had long been set for this series. Slater was ready. He smiled when asked how long ago he identified Corbin as a starter in this series.
"A couple weeks ago," he said. "Or at least the beginning of the road trip. I was joking, 'I'll see you guys in D.C.' "
