Giants Future is Pitching, Pitching, Pitching

I was going to write on the free agent situation for the Giants but I have seen some Giants fans contemplate trading some of our young pitchers, particularly Cain and Lowry for position players. All I can say is: no, no, no, no, no, no, NO! Unless, that is, you can get a better or equivalent pitcher in return.

Giants Strength is Pitching

The Giants farm system's strong point is pitching, pitching, and more pitching. The Giants need to fill up our pitching staff, both starting and relief corp, and build from there. And whatever is left over, we can then trade them for position players,

The Giants pitching prospects are like a big pot of soup. It has been slowly simmering for a long while now and it is starting to boil up, with Lowry, then Cain, much of the bullpen, plus Lincecum, Sadler, and Anderson apparently on the way as well. Trading them off now would be like killing the fire and stopping the boil.

The Giants cannot fix everything on their team internally. Because of their obvious problems developing position players, they should concentrate on fixing on their pitching, particularly because you can never have enough pitching. They should let the cream rise to the top and fill the starting rotation and bullpen, then the leftover can be used in trades.

And as better pitchers are developed internally, they will suppplant the then-current MLB pitching staff, making it better and better, more and more talented, and the players we slough off can be traded for position prospects or starters if possible. This will keep our pitching staff competitive - as they will compete with each other to try to stay a part of the Giants MLB pitching staff - plus keep our farm system stocked with ready replacements since any falter or become injured.

As Baseball Prospectus has famously noted - "There is no such thing as a pitching prospect" or TINSTAAPP - so we also need to keep a steady supply of pitchers either ready or near-ready to promote every year. As the Cubs learned, their dreams of pitching domination has been as injured as Wood's and Prior's arms. And it was interesting to see what the teams in the playoff fight had to put up with as starters, St. Louis had to resort to Jeff Weaver, he of horrible season stats in 2006, the Mets had to resort to a bunch of rookies pitching important games, St. Louis also didn't even have their regular closer, most of the teams had starting rotations that were in shambles OR incapable of repeatable pitching performance.

Pitching Our Way to a World Series Championship

That is my dream for the Giants, whether it is Cain, Lowry, Lincecum, and Sanchez or whoever: four starting pitchers who can be relied on to pitch really dominatingly more than 50% of the time - which Cain and Lowry has basically done in their short careers so far, Cain in 2006, Lowry in 2005 - and to ride that plus a dominating bullpen into the playoffs and hopefully to a World Series championship.

I think it is ludicrous to think that the Giants are going to be big competitors in 2007 and 2008, but I don't think that it is impossible for them to make the playoffs in the weak NL West. And if they have a strong pitching staff - and they have Cain, Lowry and Morris as strong points plus possibly another good starter - they could possibly ride that to the championship. We have seen it time and again, the better team does not always win.

Look again at the lousy pitching talent that teams had to put up with during the playoffs. Think the Cards wouldn't have preferred a better pitching than Weaver? But they were stuck between a rock and a hard place and threw him out there and what do you know, he actually pitched well. That's like betting on "00" on the roulette wheel and winning the bet, he has been absolutely horrible this season and absolutely ordinary all his career, but he came up aces when the Cards needed him. It is like Billy Beane said, the playoffs is a crapshoot.

And with a strong pitching rotation, who can pitching dominatingly consistently, like Cain, Lowry and Morris can do when healthy, we have as good a chance as anyone, as long as our offense is adequate. And that probably means getting back Bonds plus picking up another offensive clog or two, to replace Durham and Moises Alou. Hopefully Sabean can pull some rabbits out his hat and be a great base stealing team that can generate offense with their speed, like he has been saying the league is shifting to.