Wednesday, July 02, 2008

International Signing Season Starts: Giants Sign Another Angel

The international signing season started and while a number of teams have busted out their piggy banks and made some big signings - A's making the biggest with $4.25M for highly touted pitcher Michael Inoa - the Giants did not make the big signing but at least did get someone, Luis Angel Mateo. Mateo signed with the Giants on Wednesday, the first day international prospects are eligible to sign with major league clubs. The terms were not disclosed, which is the way the Giants usually does it. The amount might leak out somewhere in the next few days.

Here are his stats, which I got from here:
  • a 16-year-old Dominican righthander
  • 6' 3", 175 pounds (so he's a slim one, hopefully don't have to worry about him ballooning)
  • John Barr on Mateo: "The Giants are very pleased to be able to sign Luis Mateo. He is a young, strong pitcher who shows good command of two pitches with a plus breaking ball. Today is the beginning of the signing season, and we will continue to be aggressive in signing players both domestically and internationally.”
Giants Thoughts

That is good to hear about the Giants intentions to be aggressive in signing players both domestically and internationally. Bodes well for signing Posey, Gillaspie, and Kieschnick, plus perhaps picking up that rumored Vlad-like Dominican prospect for $2.5M. That's the only way to go right now as the Giants rebuild, it's the biggest no-brainer in the history of MLB baseball, but at least they are doing it right.

Hard to imagine a 16 year old with good command of two pitches and a plus breaking ball, but given the success of the Giants with pitching, I will have to take their word for it. If he can develop nicely, he'll be part of the group of pitchers coming in after the third major wave when Bumgarner and Alderson make it to the majors (assuming they continue to develop). My assumption here is that the first wave was composed of Lowry, Cain, and Correia, among others, and next wave of Lincecum, Sanchez, and Wilson, among others. Bumgarner and Alderson will probably be the lead of the next (third) wave, with maybe Sosa, Wilber Bucardo, and others.

Pitching, Pitching, Pitching

This was what I was talking about long ago when I wrote about Sabean and his propensity toward pitching. When you develop a specialty, skill, in assessing this type of talent, this focus will pay off over time as your cup of pitching talent fills up until you reach the top and then will have a lot left over to trade away to get what you need.

Because there is a flexibility with pitchers that you don't get with position players: each pitcher can theoretically fill almost any of up to 12 positions on the team. If he is good enough, he can fill any spot in the rotation. Even if he is a back of the rotation starter, he can probably still fill any of the bullpen positions as well.

However, if you have a position player, he really can fill maybe 2 starting positions, at best. For while a bullpen pitcher can be very valuable to a team, being used regularly, a bench player is not really that valuable to most teams, unless he can really hit well, just not good enough to make up for his bad defense. That limitation makes it harder for that player to contribute to your team and thus to any other team, you have to find a team who really needs that position player to find a trading partner. As well, that limits the talent you get back for your position player, a limitation that doesn't apply to pitchers as much (their inherent health risk is, however).

I will have to update that article I wrote long ago, probably after my "Hey" Business Plan series.

3 comments:

  1. More on Mateo from the Merc: Mateo throws a fastball at 88-91 MPH and a hard, biting curveball "that we think can be a real plus pitch for him," said Barr.

    Giants had been eyeing him for 8 months, making a particularly strong impression during the Giants' camps in the Dominican, where the team gathers top prospects and pits them against each other.

    "It's the purest in scouting, when you're in the Dominican Republic or Venezuela, because there's no track record," Barr said. "You're not reading his press clippings. You're watching and evaluating the player."

    The Giants envision him as a potential starter, although Barr said it's too early to make that call. He estimated Mateo would have gone anywhere from a sandwich pick to the third round had he been eligible for the amateur draft. The pitcher probably will participate in the team's instructional league this fall.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, I'm going to keep making the same objections to this build a surplus of pitching prospects and trade the overflow to get what you need plan:

    1) Sabean's been saying this for close to 10 years now and the singular occassions when he actually enacted it are the AJ and Hillenbrand deals -- two notable howlers.

    2) Until the front office shows some ability to identify what makes good offensive players, trading for bats is a rather futile exercise (and they've got to get over the anti-statistical analysis issue).

    3) trading young pitchers for young offensive players is a tricky transaction that there really aren't many good examples of recently. This year actually did see an exceptional one with the Garza/Young deal, but typically teams looking to pick up other team's prospects are themselves looking to dump vets, not looking to exchange their own prospects. It's going to take I think really uncommon matchups between organizations for some deal of this nature to commence, and anomalous situations really don't make for very good plans because, by definition, they're not very repeatable.

    4) To get quality back, you have to give quality and the way prospects are valued these days, cutting loose a real A prospect (Bumgarner) can be very hard to do. The deal goes south and you're kicking yourself like AJ once again.

    5) Finally, as I noted over on McCC, I don't see a necessary surplus because, while in a best case scenario we're within three years of getting some high ceiling arms to the majors, we're also within three years of losing several starters or potential starters (Lowry, Correia, Cain).

    ReplyDelete
  3. And I'm going to keep giving my same good reasons why this strategy should work.

    You can improve in a number of ways. As much as vets are downgraded by Giants fans, they are more reliable than prospects are. For an example of building on a young rotation and supplementing their offense with vets, look at the Tigers.

    And as I showed in my business plan series, you don't need a great offense if you have a great pitching staff and defense.

    Also, a nit to pick, but Sabean also acquired JT Snow for Watson, a pitcher. But I know for some of you that is a negative too. :^)

    But you cannot ignore other trades where he picked up good offensive players like Kent and Burks, just because a pitcher wasn't involved in the deal, it still involved assessment of whether a player is good offensively or not.

    Or the non-deals like keeping Aurilia while trading away that other SS in 1997 to ChiSox.

    Given that the Giants had a great offensive team for a long while, I think that speaks volumes of Sabean's ability to assess offensive value, Bonds or no Bonds. As the last few seasons have shown, even a good Bonds does not add up to a good offense, pinning our hopes on only the available free agents was too limiting, but necessary because everyone wanted Cain or Lincecum in any deal the Giants would bring up. That's why I have been preaching patience.

    There were a lot of deals you neglected to mention. You left out Volquez/Hamilton as another deal. And I would include the Haren deal with Arizona as another one, the A's picked up a lot of offensive prospects with that deal, particularly Gonzalez, but I like the other guys they got in the deal too. Of course, there was the rumored Rios for either Cain or Lincecum deal that the Blue Jays trumped up all over the media. And that's three just this off-season off the top of my head that you missed.

    Who said that we have to trade Bumgarner. As much as I like Cain and Lincecum, while I don't want to trade either now or the near future, if it is clear that we are not able to sign them up for the long-term, they will certainly be up on the block when they get close to free agency. They should get a block of players at least equal to, if not better than what the A's got for Haren.

    Just because we might lose them does not mean that we won't get value in replacement for them.

    The whole idea I've been talking about is that the cup will be full - but not necessarily full with the same group of pitchers. As long as we have an adequate or preferably better replacements coming up to take the place of others, the Giants are going to be fine.

    So while we have nobody like him (yet), Johan Santana could have brought a bounty of offensive players had Minnesota played their cards right with the Red Sox or Yankees, instead of that package they got from the Mets. If you are patient enough to stand by this strategy of focusing on pitching, soon your young pitchers will be vets and will garner you a lot of talent back from another team, you won't have to worry about whether other teams want your young prospects.

    And if you are going to be afraid to trade a good young prospect again, then you shouldn't be in the business. If you are around long enough, there are going to be mistakes. If you expect perfection, then you will be sadly disappointed.

    Last thought, but I'm not saying pitching focus over everything else, just generally focused on pitching. The Giants, despite selecting 8 position players out of their 10 or so top draft picks in 2007-8, still drafted a lot of pitching in the later rounds. Sanchez was one of those later round picks a few years back.

    The idea is that once you get a critical mass going in the pitching rotation, then you only have to throw another log on there once in awhile to keep the dominance going. The need for top pitching is not as great as it was in the early years when you had nothing.

    That allows you to start selecting more position players with your top picks, while occassionaly picking off top pitching that is too good to pass up, as apparently Bumgarner and Alderson were last season. The Giants thus far appear to have made the right decisions there.

    Pitching as a focus does not mean to the detriment of everything else, but as a overarching strategy that governs the entire organization. The idea of trading is not to fill all your needs through trades, but to make the great occassional trade that gets you something you need, and ideally you still fill most of your needs via the draft and international free agents.

    Like the Tigers getting Cabrera. I would like the Giants to get to the point where they have everything set up pretty nicely offensively and defensively, but still have talent enough to trade for the next Cabrera. Yeah, you might trade Bumgarner for a bum, but the idea is that you have scouts you trust enough, are good enough, that you don't do another AJ trade.

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