Sabean Avoiding the Awful

There was an interesting article on Fangraphs recently about "avoiding the awful".  It was about teams (and their GM's) avoiding players with negative WAR (however, he didn't include pitcher's negative WAR would be fair).  The Giants were sixth, and with one random bad game, could have been fifth, as they were only 0.1 more negative than the Orioles.  This covered the 2014-2016 three year period.

This was a follow-up analysis of what the author had done two years ago.  That one covered 2012-2014.  The Giants were 10th in that one.

Unfortunately, he didn't do a table on 2012-2016, which would have combined the data between the two studies/articles.  Knowing that 2014 is double counted, the Giants were 4th when the stats from the two studies were added (I included all the teams in the top 10 in each study to get totals), so they were at worse probably no farther back than 5-6.

Also, he didn't follow up on his note in his first article about the Dodgers getting their new GM, and how they would improve because Friedman did so well in Tampa.  The Dodgers went from near last to near the top, even though it included one year with Colletti.  In spite of his ups and downs with Tampa, it appears that he has been good at avoiding the awful too.

ogc thoughts

This has been my contention over the past dozen or so years I've been writing about the Giants and, in particular, Brian Sabean:  that he can identify talent.  His trades have been good in both dimensions:  getting talent while not giving up young talent.  Sure, not every trade got us talent (nor good free agent), but that's hard to do from afar, when you don't have all the information, plus, nobody is perfect (and oftentimes you just need a player so you sign the best available, which he generally has, except when there are budgetary limitations).  Hence why I have preached this for a long time now:  take a look at the big picture, mistakes are bound to happen, so what is the results overall?

What he has had is information about Giants prospects and from that evaluation, he has not given up very much in trades over the years while getting a lot of value in return for them.  And what has been more important, he has kept the players worth keeping:  Cain, Lincecum, Lowry, Sanchez, Sandoval, Wilson, Posey, Bumgarner, Belt, Crawford, Panik, Law, Okert, Osich.

Sure, injuries and declines happens, especially on our dime, but that's how the MLB works, you need to sign them long-term knowing that at some point, the contract will stink.  As a GM, you need to balance out the roster so that you don't have too many stinkers at the same time, plus develop enough prospects that they make up for the lack of production by the bad contracts.

Who has done well since leaving the Giants?  For a long while, it was minor prospects like Keith Foulke, Bobby Howry, Carlos Villanueva, then Francisco Liriano did well, but the injuries that haunted him as a Giants prospect continued while he was a Twin, costing them some of the best years of Morneau and Mauer, and lately, Zack Wheeler, Dan Otero, Adam Duvall, Joe Biagini (I feel like I missed some).  While many have been good complementary players, none has really broke out as a core player, though Duvall has the marings of it with his first great season with the Reds.

While that's a lot of good complementary players, when it comes to the trade ledger, the balance tilts decidedly to the Giants during the Sabean era, for when you look at the big picture for trades, we got players like Jeff Kent, Jason Schmidt, Hunter Pence, JT Snow, Randy Winn, Angel Pagan, most of whom were key players for key teams during the Sabean era.

Overall, Sabean has been excellent at identifying talent when they are in his control, and good at trading for players using the prospects and players that he did not think were as good as the talent he kept.  Hard to find a stinker of a Sabean trade, only the player who must not be named (OK AJP) was a bad one (and some, including me, suspect that it was a Colletti trade, not a Sabean trade).