Giants 2010 Draft Thoughts

A poster on McCovey Chronicles discussed the Giants 2010 pick, analyzing how 24th picks in the past fared (BTW, as reported in Baseball America, the Giants pick 24th in 2010 :^). Below is part of my answer there, regarding signability picks, that I wanted to post here as well:

And I totally agree about making signability picks with not just the #24, but going forward. That's the MLB today and there seems to be more and more of those in recent years, so it wouldn't stick out as unusual. The Giants would be remiss not to budget money for doing that, much like when they signed Ishikawa for nearly $1M in the later rounds. People were upset about not getting Porcello in the Alderson slot but you could not justify to Bumgarner's people paying Porcello $3.5M when you are only giving $2M to Madison. I like Bumgarner more than Porcello, I think Sabean and company made the right decision on who to pick there.

But now, we have no such restraints and it is much more common today to do stuff like that. Hopefully the Giants are keeping (hear this Neukom?) some budget aside for any possible signability selections in the early rounds, so that we can pick up somebody like Casey Kelly that Boston signed, for the picks after a winning season.

Heck, the money we saved this season on payroll and draft (combined, they were much less than in 2008, by $5-10M, plus didn't sign any Latin bonus babies) should just be put aside and fund rainy day signability picks, plus money should be set aside every year for that. If the Giants hope to build a dynasty during the 2010's - and they have a great base to build from - they will need to feed the prospect making machine with talent.

The only consistent ways to get prospect talent is to 1) lose big time, so that you get a Top 10 pick and ideally a Top 5 pick, 2) sign top international free agents, both Latin and abroad, and 3) when you don't have a high pick in the first round, use your first picks to try to sign signability picks. Once you start winning, 1 is no longer an option, so the team needs to keep investing, and that's the key word here, INVESTING, in the future. Not that this rule cannot be bent once in a while to sign a free agent that you need to be competitive that season, because, as shown above, you ain't losing much, but the general guiding priniciple is the need to keep feeding talent into the farm system.

Using business terms that Neukom should understand, consider this to be your R&D budget. The best companies, particularly technology companies like Microsoft, devote a large portion of their budget to R&D, because it is your pipeline of future products/prospects. This was not really possible in the MLB until the past couple of years, because teams were not doing that regularly plus, more importantly, amateurs weren't playing this game much either, so there were not that many falling, but with the Yankees and Red Sox shoving the door wide open on this practice, the leading MLB teams going forward are those who are willing to budget for these signability buys.

Not that throwing $2-3M on a signability pick is going to guarantee you a good prospect - that would be the MBD (Matt Bush Disorder) where you think the guy is good just because you gave him $2-3M - so you must still have good scouting, but if your scouting is good, they should be able to pinpoint a few signability plays for their first pick every season. I have seen picks down to the 4th round (I think it was the Angels and Harvey a couple of years ago) that were based on signability, so the Giants need to be prepared to pull the trigger when the opportunity presents itself.