Why I Like Sabean (Again)

Someone on Andy Baggarly's blog, Extra Baggs, complained about Sabean's poor trade track record and in general dissed Sabean. Here is my response there:

Why are the Giants winning? Lincecum, Cain, Sanchez, Wilson, Romo, Valdez, heck, Affeldt, Miller, Medders, Johnson. In other words, the pitching staff.

Who put that together? Sabean.

What's the bottom line? Winning.

What has Giants been doing more than any of you expected? Winning.

GM's don't get accolades for being the most prudent with his budget. Nor do they get accolades for being efficient with his spending. And no GM is ever not going to make a lot of mistakes. Any GM not making mistakes, particularly big mistakes every once in a while, is too risk adverse to be in his position. Any decision maker has to accept that risk is there and to take it on as necessary and prudent, whether that is baseball or any other business.

We all know the free agent problems. But no one ever talks about the process involved nor the availability issue either. Sometimes you need a body and that's the best body available, whether free agent or trade market. Sometimes you just need to make a move to give a signal to the troups. Sometimes it is done for marketing to the fans. Sometimes the owner just wants that player. Decisions made there often result for reasons that demonstrates none of his knowledge or expertise, but rather is what is available on the market. Like having to buy a gold (or chose a color you wouldn't want) colored car because that's the only one left in the lot and you need one.

People also seem to have the misconception that a team can totally rebuild using the draft. That's a fallacy. Most teams do not do that, they take the random luck involved with the draft on what you get, then fill in with free agents and trades where you are lacking. Find me a team that rebuilt to win a championship using only the draft. I know you won't find one because I've looked at all the best teams and none of them did that.

It gets even worse when you are winning because then none of your draft picks are that likely to become a good player. Only the losing teams get the picks position where you have a very good chance of getting someone good from the draft.

In the last third of the first round, where the contenders are, the odds of finding a good player is like a crapshoot, around 10% chance of finding someone. That means on average, a team will find one good player in 10 years of drafting in the first round. Can't really build a team around that.

What I love about what Sabean did was that he focused his scarce resources - draft picks - on pitching, which is very versatile. If you end up drafting 3 great firstbasemen (like Texas did with Teixiera, Hofner, and A-Gon), you have to trade off two and hope you get someone good in return (they didn't). If you end up with 3 great starters, that's 3/5ths of your rotation.

Also important, when position players fail, they become bench players, hardly used much. When starting pitchers fail, you can still see if they can become good relievers, maybe set-up men. Or even closers.

Building upon pitching can create a great situation where the cream rises to the top, and the cup that can hold pitching is much larger than another other function on the team. You can't just move one of your immobile firstbasemen to 3B or LF (McCovey and Cepeda; McGwire and Nelson) and hope for that work in the long run. SS can move, but how often does that happen that you have two, you are lucky to have one. And OF rarely can move to the IF easily. But for each good pitcher you develop, you just kick the low man off the ladder and insert the better pitcher, until you have a stellar pitching staff.

This is what I've been saying for 6-7 years now and I am heartened to see it come to fruition and be so successful. We have a great pitching staff this season and it only looks to get better with Bumgarner, Runzler, Joaquin, among others, plus the guys drafted this year, Wheeler, the closer we picked 4th round.

Soon, we will have a cup running over with great pitching, and then the Giants can do a trade like the A's did with Haren, pick up a whole platoon of position prospects (maybe make it a three team deal to bring in more and better position prospects) to put on the finishing touches on the offense that should be led by Sandoval and Posey for the next 5 seasons at least.

That's why I hope Sabean is extended for another two years.