Sabean Scouting Pick 5 Possibles

Andy Baggarly of the Merc a week or so ago noted that Sabean is out scouting the usual suspects for our number 5 overall draft pick and so I wrote this post. I think it still holds up so I'm posting it.

Sabean is/was scouting all the top prospects. These names are familiar to any prospect hound looking at the draft:

• Pedro Alvarez, 3B, Vanderbilt (Boras is agent)
• Gordon Beckham, SS, Georgia
• Justin Smoak, 1B, South Carolina
• Buster Posey, C, Florida State
• Yonder Alonso, 1B, Miami-Florida
• Tim Beckham, SS, HS (Georgia), no relation to Gordon
• Eric Hosmer, 1B, HS (Florida) (Boras is agent)
• Brian Matusz, LHP, University of San Diego
• Aaron Crow, RHP, Missouri

He quoted Sabean:

You don't stop at five or six because you never know what can happen with injuries or you get a (high school) player who won't sign. Plus you get a better comparison when you go deeper.

Sabean hopes to personally scout the top players multiple times, as well. He mentioned that he was going to look at the top dozen or so, which means there are three other players to add to the list above. In addition, he noted that Boras is not necessarily a deterrent either, at least not this early in the process: as noted above, Alvarez and Hosmer are Boras clients.

Draft Budget: Just Do It

Baggarly notes that it "remains to be seen whether the Giants will augment their draft budget to draft premium players later. He also noted that the Giants are at $87M for their major league payroll, much below last year's mid-$90M budget. What he did not note in that article (he did later in his blog), was that Sabean had at the start of the last off-season said that he Giants would be in the mid-$90M range again. So there is an extra $5-10M leftover from what the major league payroll was budgeted for last fall.

Now, its possible that they reduced it when the sales of season tickets came in shorter than expected, but there is still that $6-7M they were willing to spend on Greg Maddux a few years back, so either way, the Giants should use the money to draft these premium players. There were a number of them who fell as far back as the fourth round and the Giants have picks in Round 1, 3, and 4 plus a supplemental 1st round pick for losing Feliz (they had lost Round 2 for signing Rowand).

That's what the Tigers did last year to get Porcello late in the first round, and the D-backs got Stephen Drew in the mid-first round (both Boras clients). There were also a couple in the 2nd and 3rd rounds who were drafted but were unsigned because they wanted too much. But if the Giants are going to defy the slots, they may as well get it all out in one draft and go over slot multiple times early on, where there is more talent.

With such a big cushion of cash, they should be able to do it with their top 4-5 picks, unless, that is, Alvarez falls to them (doubtful, but then Lincecum fell to us too) as his hefty demands could soak up all that money and more.

Still, doing it with the later picks would still only cost a couple or three more millions, very little when compared to the opportunity cost of losing another year of Cain/Lincecum pairing up to prop up a poor offense.