Why I Like the Giants Focusing On Pitching Prospects

I posted the below at McCovey Chronicles in this thread, but wanted to include it here as well. Basically, Baseball America had a column where the columnist sung the praises of building up a team using hitters and gave a number of examples of how teams turned themselves around using hitters. I have a number of problems with his examples, which I outlined in my post, follow the link there if you want to see that, but I wanted to address the issue of re-building with hitters or pitchers, I think he was seeing something there that wasn't there.

I can see why he wrote what he wrote, though. Hitters are more dependable, in terms of matching their prospects, in terms of consistency of production, in terms of longevity. That makes sense, the pitching motion is unnatural and therefore has led to a lot of injuries that don't happen to position players. And pitchers generally go up and down in terms of production, depending on age, injury, or seemingly random luck; pitchers just go up and down a lot. However, I disagree, I think a pitching first philosophy - like the Giants have done - works better.

Focus on Pitching Works Better

Here's how I see it. You find two young star hitters, you still need 2-4 additional good hitters to make them a fully effective offensive machine, otherwise you pretty much have what we saw this season with the Giants, a sputtering offense. Failed hitters, at best, turn into reserve bench players and not very good at that (Ellison, Ransom), otherwise, not really worth much of anything in trade, so they normally just get dropped. And sometimes you are stuck with two great hitters at the same position (see McCovey and Cepeda, Teixiera and Hafner), you cannot always fill out your roster in a smooth way with hitters, that is, fill all your positional needs via prospects.

It is a lumpy distribution most of the times, you get multiple prospects that you then need to trade off and you sometimes don't get full value because to make that trade you need two important qualities: 1) you need to have want they want and 2) more importantly, they need to have what you need. I would think most of the time, the guy you want is with a team that don't want what you got, you either go with a second (or third) choice with a team that wants what you want, or you try to work out a multiple team trade, a hard proposition most times, or even harder, trade to get what that other team wants then trade with that team.

However, if you focus on pitchers and find two young star pitcher, you have a strong rotation for the next 10 years, and you fill in the rest of the rotation with the not as strong prospects or free agents. In addition, any pitching prospect who fails as a starter, could provide a huge contribution as a key member of the bullpen and perhaps as your closer, another key member of the pitching staff. Or they can be traded, teams are always looking for pitchers of all kinds and most times the other team will take a starter even if they want a reliever, they figure they can convert him. Or you could swap failures, like we did with Torres to get Estes.

Pitching First Philosophy

So based on this rationale, I think a pitchers first philosophy, as the Giants have mostly followed under Sabean's tenure as GM, is the best way to build up a consistent winner, let alone re-build into a winner. It gives you many more valuable pieces towards building up your team using your prospects. It enables you to complete more trades because of the flexibility, enabling you to fill out your 25 man roster more via trades, rather than free agency, which is a cheaper proposition normally and allows you to get a player who fit your need better than just if you were limited to free agents. Plus there are no free agents during mid-season when you want to acquire players. This will help speed the team in re-building itself plus keeping the success continuing indefinitely into the future, as the cream will rise to the top in terms of pitching talent, improving the pitching staff over time, particularly the bullpen, and the spill off can be traded.