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.
The latest words from Sandoval give an irony to the terms you mention for Romo. Fun, Energy, Good Vibes, Loyalty. These are really part of Romo, and Sandoval was in many fans' minds a poster boy for the same terms. When he started to get fat and out of shape, all of us should have seen that fun and loyalty didn't go together very well for Pablo, and that for him good vibes meant keeping him free from criticism no matter how well deserved. Now that he has dismissed all his old WS comrades except for Bochy and Pence, and indirectly blamed the Giants for trying to be sure that he was more loyal to his team than to his belly, he has shown the difference between how those four terms interact for a team guy like Romo and for himself. No wonder that in the poll over at Around the Foghorn over 40% of the voters say they're glad he's gone and none too soon.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's just sad and yet, not too surprising that Sandoval shows off his immaturity so easily and soon after leaving the team. He has showed zero growth in maturity while he was a Giant and this is just emblematic of that missing piece of the brain that guys don't grow in until their mid-20's.
DeleteHe's also emblematic of the spoiled and delusional modern athlete who gets a bunch of sycophants and "yes" men, who boost up the athlete by telling him that "he's da man" and suck up to him constantly.
His problem is that his current agent hit the jackpot by signing him up, even though the agent has zero talent for the job (in fact, he's worse than that, he's a negative talent, based on that horrible deal he got that catcher Perez on the Royals) as evidenced by how he presented the Giants offer to Sandoval during negotiations. He was probably insulted by the Giants OPENING offer, not understanding that this is how professional agents in the past 40 years have been negotiating contracts, and so he passed on this "insult" to Sandoval and the spiral downward just accelerated, as it was clear that Sandoval had some sort of issue with the Giants as far back as spring training 2013 when he said he didn't need to get in shape for two years, when he becomes a free agent (he couldn't figure out the math that he needs to first have a good season to JUSTIFY giving him a big contract, until somebody told him and he worked on in late in the 2013 season and into 2014; and still had a worse season hitting! Lucky for him Boston somehow got suckered into desperately wanting him, if they thought the contracts they got rid of to LA was bad, wait until they get midway into this contract with Sandoval). All this was made clear by all the "leaks" his agent gave on the negotiations and the amounts being offered. I'm surprised Boston didn't get scared away by that, but then I guess I'm more thankful that they did, else he might have stayed just for the money.
And to be clear, I've been a Sandoval supporter most of the time he was with the Giants, I mean, he could be a good hitter when he puts his mind to it, but as we all saw from 2012-2014, he didn't feel like it very often, whether through injury or whatever.
And that's because his salary was low enough that he didn't have to do a lot to justify. But his current contract, oy, he needs to be motivated to produce. And looking at his physique in spring training, it appears that he's only motivated to pop off his mouth instead of letting his bat do the talking. Which is what mature players would do.
He mentioned that he didn't want to sign with the padres because of all the "crazyiness" that would cause. I'll bet he was afraid of that the Giants would do to him now that he's an opponent, particularly because they probably know some of his weaknesses and would make him look silly. And they would probably pitch him inside a lot.
I don't wish him any ill though, this is America and we'll see what he does in Boston.
OT: but I was looking at my blog stats because that's part of the dashboard they provide, and I was shocked to see that my pageviews went out the roof today, jumping up around 7 times the normal volume for some reason. So I played around with it to see if I could pinpoint it and the best I could do was see that it happened around 5PM or so, all 700 pageviews, apparently something was, for lack of a better term, attacking my site at that time. No spam in my inbox, so that's good, but that's pretty weird, anybody ever heard of anything weird like that?
ReplyDeleteThen again, maybe that happens regularly and I don't see them because I don't post a lot and even when I do, I generally head straight into the new post and don't even look at the opening page's infograph. And it makes my coming milestone, as I'm nearly 300,000 pageviews, not so much of one, who knows how much of that was just bot-access. Not that it matters to me much, but I do like round numbers.