Your 2015 Giants: One Cool Cat

Heard Sergio Romo on KNBR yesterday morning.  Keywords:  Fun; Energy; Good Vibes.  Loyalty.

ogc thoughts

I'm on jury duty for at least another month more (already served about a month too!) so I probably won't be writing much until after this trial.  So I got to do the morning commute once again and I'm listening to KNBR when I'm not listening to Jim Gaffigan (I was close to either becoming depressed or going insane until I started laughing to his routines again.  Bacon!)  Yesterday, I got the great pleasure of listening to a Sergio Romo interview.

I heard one of his first interviews in his rookie season and he won a fan in me for life.  Down to Earth guy, fun loving, good natured, all around nice guy, that was all clear in that early interview.  And better still, that vibe came through loud and clear once again in this KNBR interview, neither MLB success nor millions have changed him one whit.

SO I felt the need to highlight one of the true good guys in baseball, Sergio Romo.  Thanks Sergio for all the great performances and, especially this season, all the loyalty, as he took less years to return to the Giants.

Sabers Just Don't Understand

Sabers just do not understand the value of keeping relievers who can provide good performances more often than not.  They are playing the odds in what they recommend, ignoring the reality that teams sometimes only have that one window of success to achieve their lifelong dream to win the World Championship.  Sure, closers are available out there, but how long would it take to finally find that one guy (teams are not going to give you something you need for nothing), and will it be in time to save the good work done so far in that season or will it waste a lifetime of hard work?

Sabers are like the college professors who are said to live in Ivory Towers, ignoring what happens in real life.  They also suffer from selection bias, looking only at situations where closers rise and succeed, ignoring the difficulties teams find in reality when forced to search.  Giants fan were innoculated when they got a snootful of the bad that can happen, after losing Nen, searching, searching, searching, suffering, suffering, suffering, until BWill finally rose and claimed that mantle many years later.

Seemingly cognizant of this difficulty, Sabean and the Giants have built up a CoreFour including guys who could close if necessary in Affeldt, Romo, and Casilla.  There is value in having multiple interchangeable pieces for an important function like closing and setup.  Just like there is value in having multiple aces on the starting staff, as I've shown in my PQS studies and my business plan.  But sabers so far has been as close minded as the baseball lifers they berate as being close minded.

2014 showed the value of each.  By mid-2014, our three aces were down to one, Bumgarner.  But he rose to dominate mostly by himself during the playoffs (but some people forget that without the other guys, we don't beat the Nats, so we should always give it up to the other starters as well).  That's the model I've been selling over the years, the Koufax example I gave for why it's good to have more than one ace on the staff, that one ace could win it for you, but if you got a staff of them, there can be the expected failures of health (Cain) or performance (Linecucum), and yet you still end up champs (Bumgarner).

And look at the CoreFour situation.  Affeldt is good enough to close, but Bochy has wisely kept him in set-up so that he can shut down the typically more dangerous situations that crop up late in the game, at any point, as saber logic has said is the best way to do things:  have your best pitcher take care of these situations.  Casilla and Romo both have their pluses and minuses, but being the closer, as sabers have noted, are often not that stressful a situation, where you don't need the best, you just need good.  And that is why Bochy has been able to go from one to the other and back, they have zero ego (Bochy's training) and a team mentality, going with the one who is going well at that time.

That's why you saw Bochy put in Affeldt early in game 7, he knew Jeremy would take care of things, but then let Bumgarner finish the game, even though both Casilla and Romo were both available and ready.   Having all these interchangeable parts have enabled Bochy to bring in guys quickly when someone doesn't have it one day or another.