The Giants fanbase, from the view of The Athletic's comment pages for the Giants, are in an uproar about Farhan Zaidi's stewardship of the Good Championship Giants. The Zaidi Haters complaints include but are not limited to:
- Five years is enough to rebuild a farm system and the team
- 2023 season was a disaster
- The farm system has not made any progress
- They are not as good as Texas, LAD, Atlanta, etc.
- Zaidi is in love with platoons and openers
- Zaidi can't sign the best free agents; there's no stars
- What's the plan?
ogc thoughts
Okay, I'm going to tackle the first complaint about Zaidi having five years already, which they believe is enough years to rebuild a farm system and team.
Five Years!!!
This is one of the most adamant declaration among the Zaidi Haters. Unfortunately, this exposes their lack of knowledge about how baseball players develop into good players. It also exposes their lack of knowledge about how hard it is to even draft a good player, as well as develop him to become good.
Let's start with the draft. As my studies have shown, it is extremely hard to find and develop and keep healthy a good player, even with first round draft picks. My last study found that a little less than half of the #1 overall draft picks end up a good player (which I had defined as 18.0 bWAR). The #2 overall pick (like Joey Bart) was just short of 30% success rate.
By the middle of the first round, it's around 16%, which means that on average it takes up to six drafts to find one, then you need to spend the time developing him, and then the time he needs to become good (roughly 3+ bWAR). And if the team is a strong division leader contender, the odds are roughly 5%, meaning it could take up to 20 years of the draft to find that one to stay on average.
Thus, competitive teams could take from six to 20 years and it wouldn't be far from average. And that's just the time of drafting him. Obviously, no one has any firm idea at the time of the draft or during development whether that prospect will become good. Talent can only take you so far, health as well. You won't know until way after the fact.
And it could take years. Chase Utley, who many consider a really good player (he actually ended just short of the 18.0, but still a good illustration of the length of time to develop), was drafted in 2000 by the Phillies at age 21. He reached the majors at age 24, taking three years to reach the majors. He didn't have a full season with great stats until age 26, six years after he was drafted. It takes most players 4 to 6 years to develop after they are drafted.
How about an example closer to home: Brian Sabean. He took over for the 1997 season, and his first real draft success with the Giants was Matt Cain. Cain was drafted in 2002, five years later, so much like Zaidi, fans today would be after Sabean's head to be fired since he hadn't found a good player yet. And Cain didn't have a good season indicative of how good he would be, until 2007, a good ten years later.
And in reality, Giants fans were angry with Sabean, as well as the media, with the pinnacle being Baseball Prospectus spending the annual chapter for the Giants describing all the ways Sabean sucks and why he should be fired before the 2010 season (ooops...). He made up for lost time by drafting Lincecum, Bumgarner, Wilson, Romo, Posey, Wheeler, Crawford, Belt and Panik over the next five seasons or so.
Therefore, between the 6 to 20 years to find the player, and 4 to 6 years to develop, it could be many many years past the fifth year, and that GM/leader could be average still. Or better, in Sabean's case.
So how does a regular fan like us identify progress by the new front office, without waiting 5-10 years? You have to look for progress among the prospects, not just players who are elite and jump to the majors in 2-3 years and do well. In Sabean's case, you needed to see that he was finding good players, like Williams, Ainsworth and Foppert, players who look like they would be good, but something got in their way. Eventually they led to Cain and the dynasty players.
In Zaidi's case, I'll bring up one of the early discoveries when I went down the draft research rabbit hole. Most fans don't know, but Bobby Cox was the GM of the Braves before he named himself the manager of the Braves. And he tanked the team for six horrendous seasons, they averaged about 95-100 losses during that period. He picked up Chipper Jones in their 1990 draft, and Cox got his farm and team improvements, and literally took over as manager soon after the draft.
Harrison the Ace Superstar to Be
So the way I see it is you got to find those diamonds in the draft, and for Zaidi, the clear diamond from the moment he started accumulating stats as a pro, was Kyle Harrison. He has been elitely dominant, striking out far beyond what almost every other pitcher could do at every level he was promoted to. He may have struggled some with each level, but with time, he conquered each one and moved on to the next.
Now Harrison has made the majors, and he has only continued to strikeout batters at an elite level, as well as showing strong command, walking few. In fact, the only thing he had a weakness for is the long ball, which hopefully his short return to AAA helped fix, whatever the problem was. The main questions for me is when he can be an ace and if he can stay healthy.
Health isn't anything one can predict very well. Matt Pryor had a pitcher's body and great mechanics, and his body failed him. Harrison has a pitcher's body, much like Cainer. He's an electric dynamic pitcher, much like Lincecum, striking out a lot, but good control and command, much like MadBum. And he has the bulldog mentality that MadBum had. Fortunately, he also seems to have the maturity that Cainer had too, unlike Lincecum and MadBum, so I don't expect him to burn out like those two.
Pitcher injury has been found to be predicted by prior injury. And Cain had elbow problems almost from the moment he was drafted - it was so bad that another prospect rose above him after their first pro season - and, really, seems to be a miracle that he had as long a career as he did. Harrison's only health issue was his hamstring this summer, and the Giant have brought him along slowly, building up pitch count and innings, so they have not put a lot of wear and tear on his body. So health appears to not be an issue, yet.
As to when he can be an ace, Bumgarner was good from the get go, but both Cain and Lincecum needed a full season to figure things out. It depends on what Harrison has to give up in order to limit the homers, and we won't know too much how much he's succeeded with just a couple of starts. But ZIPS predicts a 3.78 ERA for 2024, and that would be good as a middle starter behind Webb and Cobb, both of whom are top of rotation starters for the Giants, and if he can make his jump by mid-2024, he could clean up wins facing middle rotation guys for half the season.
An ace, as I see it, has to be above 9.0 K/9, as well as have a K/BB ratio at least 3, but ideally 4+. Kyle is at 9.1 K/9 and 3.2 K/BB, so he's pretty good already in small samples. And he's doing this as a total rookie, only 21 YO, not knowing the batters in the league at all, so he's just challenging hitters willy-nilly, likely. So he'll dial it back some, maybe learn some pitch sequencing, and whether 2024 or 2025, he's likely their ace for the next decade, give or take, health permitting. He and Webb should make a formidable duo atop the rotation for the rest of this decade.
Zaidi Magic
Then there's Zaidi's pickup magic over the years. He found Gausman, Rodon, and Cobb, and the team helped them figure out how to utilize their abilities, as well as stay healthy enough to last a season. Obviously, can't rely on that every season, but once every two or three seasons is roughly the rate he's been finding them, and that would make the rotation that season elite, having three aces (or more).
He won't be able to take on as many fliers, but as the team roster solidifies and there's not as many moving (platoon) parts, there would also be less need for platoons, openers, and waiver wire roulette.
It's much like Sabean's M.O. during his reign. Players like Uribe, Casilla, Torres, Blanco, Petit, and Strickland, who he picked up for basically nothing, but got a good complementary player who made the team a bit better. Zaidi seems to have a knack for this type of pickups, and I expect it to continue.
Fire Sabean! Five Years!
The irony has not escaped me that these people would have fired Brian Sabean anywhere between 2001 and 2006, before any of the good stuff happened. Sabean was appointed the Giants GM officially after the 1996 season. He had been poached from the Yankees when the team was bought, for Bob Quinn to teach him the business.
Now, it was different in that Sabean had more to work with on the team, so he was able to turn them around immediately to win the division. But by the end of 2001, it was five years and none of the Giants drafts were delivering players to the team, let alone a good player. Based on their statements about Zaidi - "It has been five years, and he doesn't even have one good player developed" - Sabean would have been fired for incompetence in developing the farm system.
And that's what changed my opinion about Sabean, because I was one of those worried about his lack of success in the draft, but excited about his ability to find great players in trade. So I decided to research how good teams like the A's, Yankees, Braves, and I think Dodgers, did and I was going to compare Sabean with them to prove his incompetence. Instead, I discovered that other teams with good reputations for drafting actually got those players when they were not all that good, netting them good draft position, but once they became competitive regularly, their draft success ended.
Because of that discovery, I decided to research the draft, pulling the data on the first 100 picks overall, from The Baseball Cube, which was the only source back then. I set up some parameters for what constituted a good player, and my research showed that it is extremely hard to draft and develop a good player, even with first round draft picks, even with the top picks overall. I recreated the research using Baseball-Reference.com's draft data, utilizing bWAR this time (before, batting average and ERA, tweaking for who I thought was good).
And both times, the draft is a crapshoot, every seemingly successful pick appeared random. Using my percentages, I calculated the odds of finding good players, and Sabean has been above average, from what I recall, with Bart and Ramos still on the clock for producing under his era. Bart probably is not getting there, but Ramos is still young enough and good enough that he could still become a good player.
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