Your 2019 Giants: The Start of Openers

Less than a week ago, the Giants decided to try out the opener, using Nick Vincent to open for Tyler Beede.  It did not go well, as Vincent added to the Giants miseries with the first inning (from the second inning on, the Giants are basically even, a .500 team in the making, if they can fix their first inning woes).  My thoughts on this new tactic that teams are using.

ogc big picture thoughts

Openers can work, I think, under certain circumstances. But it’s like all things in life, just doing it all the time is no panacea either.

Key:  Got to Have the Right Opener

I didn’t care for Vincent being used, he is not that great a reliever. I would think either Moronta or Dyson, that is, a good set up reliever would be good, or a loogy or roogy if you know the top of the other team is going to be all LHH or RHH. That’s why the Rays used Romo, as an opener, to get out RHH.  In Vincent's case, in 15 appearances so far this season, Bochy has never used him to hold a lead.  Lack of confidence in his abilities, much?

You put in someone who normally is a middle reliever, to me, you are just rolling the dice, just like when we go to them in the middle innings without the lead. If you want good results from the opener, you use a good reliever.

Because it doesn’t matter when you pitch the reliever, if you trust the reliever to be a good set up man, he’ll do well anywhere, but if you don’t trust the reliever enough, he is liable to screw up whether it is the first, fifth, or ninth inning. There is a reason the manager does not go with the guy in crunch time.

So if you want the Opener to work, you don't throw out the guy you don't even trust with the lead, you need to use someone who you trust with the lead, a set up guy.  Or at least someone who is expected to be good.

One way I try, in order to get a feel for how good a pitcher is, is to look at his road numbers, as that generally strips out any home park advantages he might have.  Vincent's career road ERA is 4.08, which is not all that good.  Not a good choice to be the opener, so it made me wonder:  did Bochy do that to spite Zaidi's insistence for trying the opener?

Why Vincent?

Honestly, I'm still not sure why Zaidi picked up Vincent.  He has a good career ERA, but his road numbers have not been all that good.  I would have felt better having Blach, Black, and Adon fight for that spot in the bullpen, and heck, with 8 relievers, maybe instead of carrying 8, they could have had a solid other OF bat up here first.

Of course, part of the reason Vincent was picked up was Zaidi's anticipation that he would have been able to deal off a reliever or two in the off-season for the OF that he wanted.  I would have still felt better about letting our guys fight for that spot, Blach has been okay over the years too, Black showed some stuff, as did Adon in AFL.  Or give Venditte the spot, give him a real shot to show off what he could do?  And Jerez has been pretty good in AAA, he's been another interesting option in AAA.

So I never understood this pickup, and so far, still don't, other than now he can maybe throw in Vincent as a useful reliever in a deal.

Talent Evaluation

Which brings up one of my biggest question marks about Farhan Zaidi:  how is he as a talent evaluator?  He's using what I call Billy Beane's signature GM move:  cycle through a lot of prospects, to run into that one good player.  The problem with Billy, and his crew, is that isn't a sign that they are all that good at talent evaluation.

For a great example of why I question Beane's Divineness, that most seem to give him unconditionally, is his trade for Milton Bradley.  When the A's traded for him, it was the end of 2005.  Which was basically 8 years after he was promoted to GM, so you would think he would be pretty good as GM in 2005, especially since the MoneyBall draft was in 2002 (FYI:  he only found one good player with those 7 first round picks). 

But he gave up Andre Ethier for Bradley.  In 2006, Bradley produced 2.1 bWAR for the A's.  Ethier, in 2006, for the Dodgers, produced 2.4 bWAR.  In his first 6 seasons with the Dodgers, i.e. cost controlled years, he produced 12.7 bWAR, and produced 21.2 bWAR in his MLB career.  Bradley was traded in 2007, after 0.4 bWAR production, for Andrew Brown, a pitcher who produced 0.6 bWAR.  Bradley produced 7.4 bWAR in the next 3 seasons. 

It's very hard to project exactly what a prospect will do years later, they learn a new pitch (Luis Castillo learned his killer changeup after his time with the Giants, for example, and reported Santiago Castilla learned one after the A's), they change their batting mechanics (Chris Taylor, Andres Torres), things can change.  However, Beane traded Ethier in late 2005, and presumably knew his talents pretty well, and yet traded him for Bradley, and Ethier ended up not only producing more THAT SEASON, but was a good player in his career. And then Beane doubled down on that bad exchange by trading Bradley for Brown.  There has been other stupid trades in Beane's resume (CarGo for one, others), as well, but this one is the one that stuck in my craw, because it was immediately shown to be bad, and made me question all his moves as closer to throwing jello against the wall technique than Sabean's sterling record in talent evaluation.  

So that's been my back of the brain worry about Zaidi, and part of why I'm glad that Sabean and Barr are still around, because they have a pretty good record of identifying talent. 

And I'm not saying that he's bad, I'm saying that I don't know if he's good or bad yet.  Nobody thought too much about trading away Castillo when the deal happened, it was only when he started doing well for the Reds that he caught his flack, years later.  And a lot of people were mad at Sabean for trading Williams for Kent, but history proved him right.  We'll see what history has to say about all the guys that Zaidi has cycled through already, in roughly half a season.