The Giants Plan

ogc brief

Killion questions Giants lack of planning for future, puts them to task for not taking care of that earlier, noting their lack of identity.

First, maybe Rios deal is ownership driven, not Sabean?

Another columnist claims Giants "switch-and-bait" but I don't think so; it could be a trial balloon by owners though.

Don't beat up on Giants for not finding good prospects in draft, they were handicapped by winning.

Giants Identity is clearly Pitching.

Hard to say what decision is Sabean-driven and what is ownership-driven because spending $20M on one player (particularly older, Hall of Famer, plus over 50 years since last championship) drives you to do things you might not normally do. So his actions have been distorted the past few years. But he has been patient where it counts: we still have Cain and Lincecum.

Giants plan has been pitching, speed, and defense. Sabean has said it and shown it. The Giants pitching has been rebuilt, next up is the lineup. Fans need to be patient.

Arrogance Defined

First, someone smarter than me (Grant of McCovey Chronicles in this post) recently wrote that it is unfair and potentially arrogant to challenge a columnist point by point, and when I asked him about it, he said it was like a psuedo-debate because you invariably win them.

I know that wasn't directed at me, but being a reflective person, I examined my own posting behavior and I just want to say that I never intend to be arrogant, I just want to address my point of view in regards to the points made by the columnist. Whether I agree or not, I just want to put a stick in the ground and see if anyone agrees or not, to see if I am off base or not, plus to share the data I have dug up because I assume there are Giants fans like me who are interested in such data. Plus, this provides a position against which to frame the discussion around, which makes it easier for me to write. And for that I thank the columnists.

Killion's Turn

Ann Killion of the Merc today had a column questioning whether the Giants have a plan or not, because, to her view, it was clear to her that when Bonds's knee went out, the Giants should have started planning for the future. She noted that she felt the Giants made a bad decision losing draft picks in order to sign free agents, making things worse for the Giants, because young players is needed for a rebuild, either to play for you or to trade away. She says that the team lacks an identity and questions whether Sabean will have the patience to build around the young pitching we have that is good but unproven.

Who Made What Decisions

I've been thinking a lot about the proposed Rios-Lincecum trade and her column made me realize something: this may be a deal the owners want to do but not Sabean. Sabean, in all his public acknowledgements of the Rios proposal, always makes pains to say that Lincecum is a great talent, a rare talent, and it would be very hard to trade him away. And he notes that the longer it takes the deal to close, the less likely it is to happen. If Sabean were really for the deal, he would have pulled the trigger on it long ago, without the angst going on in the media spotlight.

However, when the Pierzynski trade was brought up with Magowan before, he stated that had he been apprised of the deal, the owners would have vetoed it, meaning that for the Giants better players, ownership has a say over it. If the owners were against this deal for Rios, they would have vetoed it already, because of what Magowan said about losing Nathan - if they could veto Nathan, they sure as hell should be able to veto Lincecum. But this trade story is still lingering out in the press.

Therefore, it could be the owners who are keeping the deal alive for Toronto, and I'm hoping what Sabean said is true, that the longer this stretches out, the less likely it's going to happen. I think that's the more likely scenario right now because the news from Toronto, after the pimple pus swelled to a bursting point, became decidedly cautious and not at all confident that the deal would go through, in fact, one source was denying that there was even a proposal, as the Blue Jays got into full CYA-mode.

Side Note on Another Columnist

I just read an article by a Toronto columnist where he argues that the Giants are doing a "switch-and-bait" with Lincecum, and I suppose that could be what is happening, but the author shows his lack of Giants knowledge. In his column, he notes that Lincecum is the Giants top prospect, as noted by Baseball America, and says the Giants are trying to talk the Blue Jays into taking the Giants "No.3 starter, Matt Cain, or No.4 in the rotation, Noah Lowry, for Rios." So is Lincecum their #1 starter or #1 prospect? And, really, Matt Cain is our #3 starter now? This seems like he is quoting stuff from spring training 2007, when Zito and Morris were considered our top pitchers and Cain and Lowry were our #3 and #4, with Lincecum as our "top prospect," which is odd to say after he has pitched nearly a full season for us.

I think that anybody knowledgeable about the rest of the baseball world would know that Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum are the Giants #1A and #1B starters. Maybe they are not proven to be them yet - as per Killion's point - but if one just look at their full performances as starters for the Giants, one would be hard pressed to say otherwise, unless you say that Zito's $18M automatically makes him one of our top pitchers - it doesn't.

Still, perhaps the Giants are trying to do a switch and bait. According to the author, the Giants made the Blue Jay's GM, J.P. Ricciardi, feel like "he was under house arrest." He then made it sound like the Giants were the ones who foisted this deal on the Blue Jays, then talked about how the "traditional belief is that getting rid of an everyday player for a pitcher is not good," though Ricciardi doesn't agree.

However, his version of reality don't seem right to me. He says the Giants came on about the deal, offering one of our top 3 pitchers, but it doesn't take a lot of homework to have found out that Sabean has said all along during the off-season that it would take a lot for another team to get Cain or Lincecum and that the Giants were not shopping them. Nor to have found out that the Giants main trading chips are Noah Lowry and Jonathan Sanchez. If Toronto couldn't have found that out relatively quickly - assuming they were the ones approached by the Giants - then they have pretty lousy researchers working for them plus perhaps didn't pay attention during the earlier meetings in the off-season when each GM stood up and talked about what they were looking for and what they have to offer.

In fact, to my way of thinking, they should have had a dossier profiling each team's needs and wants so that they would be prepared to talk during these GM meetings, that is, if they were serious about trading with anyone. Heck, at worse, they could have printed out Yahoo's list of each team's Hot Stove needs and plans off the internet plus checked out the news at sfgiants.com, Chris Haft has been a good source of info for those who want to quickly catch up with what the Giants are thinking: here, especially here, and clearly here. That took me less than 5 minutes. Or perhaps I'm too compulsive about things like, um, doing the job you are suppose to be doing.

Now, another possibility has come to mind about this whole deal: what if Magowan put this rumor out there as a trial balloon to test public opinion, perhaps because it is an ownership driven deal? That would makes some sense. He is rumored to have leaked info to the press before to control public opinion (like Dusty's tax problems suddenly popping up soon after he was let go, er, he went free agent; never proven it was Magowan though!). Sabean definitely doesn't like to talk about potential trades with the media, his motto seems to be "loose lips, sinks ships." If Magowan did put it out there, hopefully he has seen enough fans complain about this deal to kill it.

Drafting Good When Winning Is Extremely Hard

Again, like others, who share the uninformed opinion that the Giants seriously hurt their rebuilding by skipping draft picks via signing free agents. As I've noted before, my research shows that the odds of finding a good player with a first round pick is very low (about 10% chance), thus getting mad at the Giants about their drafts, is about the same as getting mad at yourself for not beating out Jerry Rice in a foot race - the relative odds of winning is very significant. Your chances of finding a good player rises about 4 to 5 times greater when looking at, say, the Giants #5 pick in 2008 versus the picks they had from 1998 to 2005.

She used the Detroit Tigers as an example of how they were able to trade their top draft picks for Cabrera and Willis. What she neglected to notice was that both Maybin and Miller were protected draft picks from when Detroit was losing games hand over fist, Maybin was the #10 pick overall in 2005, Miller the #6 pick overall in 2006. Maybin was their pick after losing 90 games; Miller was their pick after losing 91 games. In total, Detroit had 12 years of good draft pick position due to 12 years of losing.

In addition, she failed to notice that the Tigers "rebuilding" is actually very similar to what the Giants are currently trying to do: get young pitchers, buy free agent position players. Thus, when Dombrowski came on, which is where I start the clock on the most recent rebuild for them that returned them to winning, he signed older and physically questionable position free agents like I-Rod, Rondell White, Magglio Ordonez, plus signed pitchers like Urgeth Urbina, Jason Johnson, Troy Percival, Kenny Rogers, and Todd Jones, while obtaining young pitchers like Jeremy Bonderman, Justin Verlander, and Andrew Miller. Many of the high picks Detroit got, they spent on pitching: Verlander, Miller, and now Porcello, who probably made Miller expendable.

Identity Identified

Ann Killion noted that "The Giants as currently constituted have no identity." Like other fans, Killion missed the subtle change over the past few years: the identity of the Giants switched from offense focused to pitching focused. Sure Bonds was still around and got all the news and attention (from the media, by the way, so perhaps that is why she missed it), but the Giants pitching staff slowly but surely was transformed to the point where nearly everyone on the staff were either drafted by the Giants or obtained via a trade of a player drafted by the Giants.

The future, to me, is clearly about the pitching, and in particular, should be focused on Cain and Lincecum. The signing of Zito was an overt sign of the changeover in identity, along with Zito being front and center on the 2007 Media Guide. But the signs have been clear for a long while now that the Giants future is pitching, else they would not focus so much on drafting pitchers.

Sabean's Patience

Killion questions Sabean's patience, but per my point above about ownership influence, how much of the vet buying of the past few years has been because Sabean was impatient, and how much was driven by ownership wanting to win now with Bonds? And, really, as much as she is right that the rebuilding should have started when Bonds hurt his knee, how much of the subsequent moves were dictated by: 1) the tight budget situation at that time; 2) the fact that the Giants were paying future Hall of Famer (and aging) Bonds $20M per season; and 3) the last Giants championship was over 50 years ago in another city?

That would be like a newspaper signing Pulitzer for big money to join a small town newspaper that reports on the news at the local general store. If you are paying a player $20M on your roster, it behooves you to get the best players available and see what they can do together. Else, you trade away the $20M player and restart.

Hence the signing of vets tactic that the Giants have used since the 2002 World Series. As much as people want to complain, the Giants went out and got the best players available on the market at the positional needs they had that off-season. What more can you ask out of the team?

Sometimes the choices are between a rock and a hard place, and sometimes you are just plain unlucky. There is no way one can complain about the Durham signing, who knew he would become a regular on the DL when he had never been on the DL before, but he was the premium 2B available. Alfonzo was a risk for performance problems, but if the Giants had given Pedro Feliz the job at the time (he was their only alternative internally), the fans would have had a cow, and again, he was the premier 3B available, Boston had a fit when we signed him under their noses. Benitez, as bad as the press was on him, was the best closer on the market, and we had tried internal options but none of them worked out, so if he wasn't signed, I think Herges would have been the closer. Is that the closer of a team competing for the title? It was bad enough to have Hammonds/Tucker as our combination in RF, but there was little money to acquire anyone better, and thus the alternative was starting Todd Linden, and I doubt any team serious about winning would do that, at least Tucker was a proven veteran.

So if you are holding onto a $20M player, who, even after he returned from his knee problems, was still a great player, just not as great as before, you keep on trying to find that magic combination of free agent signings that gets the team winning. Hey, I wasn't happy about the results either, and I would have preferred that the Giants bunched the money together and signed Barry's successor instead of filling the roster with mediocre players, but that's life sometimes. But the vets signing (versus a rebuild) was a matter of putting your best foot forward and trying to the utmost to try to find the combination that would win it all while you have arguably the best player ever still playing for you, we did owe that to Barry, to try to win it while he was still here.

Rebuild Already Started

As noted, Killion wonders if Sabean can be patient in rebuilding. However, as I noted, the Giants have begun their rebuild under fans' noses. The pitching staff is almost totally redone. We don't really have enough to trade off a bunch to get good players back, like the Tigers can afford to do, now that their rebuild was done, and now they are competitive, they are in a different part of the team lifecycle, the Giants are rebuilding, the Tigers are done rebuilding and going for the gold now.

The comments Killion and others are making about the Giants could have been made about the Tigers a few years back: where is the plan, why are they signing aging free agents, why are they subjecting Bonderman to such horrible losses from their horrible offense, they lost 119 games after Dombrowski's first year, 13 games worse than before he took over, does he know what he are doing? You need to be patient with your talent, keep your clearly great talent, you trade away the others to get parts you need, you sign free agents to hold together the team until the young talent is ready to take over.

Here's what I see about Sabean's patience thus far: out of all the prospects the Giants have drafted during Sabean's tenure as GM, he has kept the two who probably means the most to our future, Cain and Lincecum. He could have trade off Cain and Lowry years ago and gotten better replacements than the free agents we signed over the years, but kept them. Lincecum could have been traded last season and gotten us a better 1B. As much as it hurts that we traded away Nathan and Accardo, they are not players who you would build a winning team around as a foundation. All you need to do is look at the churn in closers over the past few years to see how things can change in a hurry.

And that bring up a good point to my mind: for all those thinking the Rios trade is so good, the arguments made against keeping Lincecum could have been applied to Nathan, Liriano, and Bonser. So is the Pierzynski trade therefore good too in your mind? Or are they clouded by the final, horrible reality?

Giants Plan

The Giants plan has clearly been pitching since Sabean took over. As much as the team has been about offense with Bonds around, the Giants drafts have been overwhelmingly about getting pitching, pitching, and more pitching. Our first major group of widely respected prospects were pitchers (Ainsworth, Williams, Foppert). And when it was not pitching, it was speed and defense. And that, if one has paid attention to Sabean's press conferences over the past few years, is what Sabean has been saying is the Giants plan, pitching, speed, and defense.

In particular, Sabean has said that he believes that the MLB will be shifting back to speed dominated offense in the coming years, as the cycle of power/speed goes back and forth and, obviously, the last cycle has been all about power (with the silent understanding that it was PEDS driven). Hence why our farm system, up and down, is full of players who are speed burners, Velez, Burriss, Richardson, Izturis, Sanders, Bocock, McBryde, and most of them are in the lower minors. And speed often translate to better defense, generally, particularly in the outfield.

So the Giants have rebuilt their pitching and are pretty much done. Now comes the lineup, and some of the pitching will have to go. I think 2008 is a pivotal year, if prospects develop as expected or hoped, we should have enough to trade off next off-season to get the team back into the win column. But for now, fans need to be patient and see how things unfold. Hopefully the Giants don't take a giant step backward and trade off either Cain or Lincecum. That would be taking the eye off the ball and swinging at a pitch clearly out of the strike zone, much like a Pedro Feliz hack: useless and the end result will be bad.