Two Birds in the Hand or the Bird in the Bush

I've been in a discussion about whether the Giants should trade Lowry and Sanchez for a good young hitter like Carl Crawford (and noticed after posting this that sfgfan posted something similar, beating me to the punch...). Now, dodging the issue of whether such a trade is even possible as it seems like other teams could outdo that easily, what if we could trade the two for a studmuffin of a hitter, would that be a good thing? Right now, hopefully Sanchez and Lincecum join the rotation and provide the Giants a killer rotation of Lowry, Cain, Sanchez, and Lincecum, but if we trade off them, right now that would make it Cain, Lincecum, and Hennessey maybe, and not that Lincecum is a sure thing either, though he has been outstanding so far.

That's partly why I am not for trading off, say, Lowry and Sanchez, for a young stud hitter. Pitchers are fragile and that's why they came up with TINSTAAPP: there is no such thing as a pitching prospect. And that's one very good reason for getting a sure thing like a stud hitter. But this involves two of our hopes of the future.

And the Giants future is their pitching rotation. If we are re-building for the post-Bonds era, that is what we should be concentrating on, not trading that away, which is potentially a huge area of strength. Pitching strength will come from a Jell-O strategy: you throw enough Jell-O at the wall, eventually enough of it will stick.

Ideally, the Giants build up their rotation such that you regularly have really good pitching prospects rise with the cream and regularly slough off good prospects you can trade to fill position needs. The Giants are not there yet, Lowry needs to show 2006 was a fluke injury year, Cain needs to show he can build off his second half of 2006 and not regress, Sanchez and Lincecum will need to show they can actually start in the majors. Hopefully the four can make a killer rotation in a couple of years, but killer prospects do not always translate into major leaguers, we might have nothing, like the A's and Met's with their Four Aces potential of the early 1990's fizzling out to not even ONE decent starter.

But at this point, this seems to me to be the fastest route to a return to domination, you have to roll the dice somewhere and to have a killer rotation seems to be the best way to it. That's how the Dodgers of the 60's did it, very strong pitching backed by JIT offense built on speed. I understand the times are totally different, with the era now of offense, and there are different ways to win, but it seems to me that the surest way to regularly win is to have a great defense, pitching in baseball's case, with an offense that is adequate. Good offense is no guarantee of winning, but good pitching always keeps you in the game.

And in this particular hypothetical trade, we are trading off half of that potential to get one hitter, an admittedly good hitter, but it takes more than one good hitter to get our offense going, which thus far has looked like a problem that will be hard to solve via free agency. There are not many obvious upgrades at the positions we have open over the guys we had this year and this year our offense was subpar for much of the year, or so it seemed. So getting this one good, maybe great, hitter, would not make our offense that much better, but losing those two starters would pretty much kill off any potential for a killer rotation, at least until we see who the Giants pick with their 10th overall pick (again) for the 2007 draft and who among the Giants prospects take that giant leap forward and become a viable pitching prospect for our starting rotation.