Giants Draft Analysis: Building A Dynasty (second in a series)

This analysis of the Giants drafts covers Sabean's dynastic years as GM, 2002 to 2009, using the data I collected on the picks up to 200th overall, from Cain to Belt.  Things turned around in a huge way, though it was still not looking good until his great trifecta of Lincecum, Bumgarner, Posey.

Your 2020 Giants: Trade for Will Wilson

It's been a while since the Giants traded a PTBNL (Garrrett Williams eventually) for Zack Cozart and the 2019 15th draft pick overall, SS Will Wilson,.  The Giants recently DFAed Cozart (FYI:  Cozart was ironically DFAed so that the Giants could add an Angel's pitcher who had a horrible 2019, who has now been DFAed to pick up another Angel's player, who was ranked #11 on by MLB Pipeline, oddly enough), so I have provided some analysis on the trade, now in this context of not even seeing if Cozart could meet the value of his contract, both in comments on The Athletic and on my own blog.

Thus, I thought I would capture most of my thoughts together here in one post, for reference on this trade, which now clearly was done to buy a prospect by taking on a large contract, which Zaidi mentioned he would try to do.  Below, I look at various ways one could evaluate the trade, as well as discuss likelihood of events, as I think the Cozart trade is interesting enough for future Zaidi tea leaves reading to capture all the following points in a blog post.

Giants Draft Analysis: Early Dry Sabean Years

I've decided to work on the Giants drafts first, covering Sabean's early years as GM, 1997 to 2001, and the picks up to 200.

A feat few remember is that Sabean turned around turned around the 1996 94 loss team to a 90 win team in 1997, which won the NL West, but then they unfortunately lost to the wild card Marlins in the LDS.  So while he got a good pick in his first draft in 1997, once you start winning, you get a lot of picks with poor odds of finding a good player, which continued until the Giants started losing in 2005.  My contention over the years, because of my first draft study, was that it was very hard for a team to rebuild via the draft, because the odds were against it.

Sidenote:  I've decided to create a separate blog where I'll be posting my R baseball analyses (when I'm able, still learning, part of my New Year's Resolution to get proficient in using R), probably starting with my draft database collected from baseball-reference.com, a great resource for anyone who wants to analyze baseball.

Draft Analysis of First 50 Years (a series): Definitions and Initial Analysis

As I've been saying I would do, I'm finally done collecting and doing initial analysis of the June MLB draft.  I collected the data from that great baseball resource, www.baseball-reference.com, after the 2018 season (so the data is up to date up to then, plus I bumped up a few players who look likely to move up to the next category).  But given that it takes a number of years for prospects to reach the majors, I thought I would just focus on the first 50 years of the draft, covering 1965-2014.

I'm not done with the more serious analytics, but there are a lot of random bits of info that I wanted to share now, as well as providing my methodology and definitions.  I've been releasing some of this in posts this year, covering the early parts of the draft, in relation to the Giants picks, as I had the early parts of the draft done before, but just recently finally went over and inputted the last picks I had captured, covering the first 200 picks overall in the draft.  As usual, my semi-long post has grown large.