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 complaint about the Giants farm system not making any progress.
What is Kyle Harrison, Chopped Liver?
Much of the outrage is about how the Giants don't have any premier prospects. Yet, here was Kyle Harrison, the top ranked LHP in most Top 100 prospect rankings that I saw, that's about as premier as you can get. In addition, the stats he put up in the minors are elite in terms of strikeouts per 9 IP and K/BB ratio. While he didn't excel in the majors immediately, that's to be expected, even Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum struggled in the majors before they became the great pitchers we think of today.
In my mind, just having an elite pitching prospect like Harrison is already a great improvement over what the Giants farm system had when Zaidi took over. As any regular reader knows (or new reader who reads my business plan series), I believe in the power of great dominant starting pitching. And we have a crop of young good prospects rising behind him: Carson Whisenhunt, Mason Black, Hayden Birdsong, Landen Roupp, Trevor McDonald. And Tristan Beck and Keaton Winn did well in the majors already, and look to be good back of rotation or featured relievers in the coming seasons.
Meanwhile, back in 2019, Bart was the only good prospect drafted (Luciano was clearly good, Ramos was always viewed as a lower tier). But with his issues with strikeouts, while he had a lot of potential, that was a huge obstacle that was clearly inherent, even then, and as we have seen, has hurt his ability to hit MLB pitching. The farm system is clearly better in terms of high end, high potential prospects, just by having Harrison over Bart.
2019 vs. 2023
One way of comparing how good the farm system was when Zaidi was hired is to compare what contributions the Giants got from rookies in 2019 vs. 2023.
2019:
- Tyler Rogers (0.8 bWAR)
- Austin Slater (0.6 bWAR)
- Sam Coonrod (0.4 bWAR)
Total of 1.8 bWAR contributions in 2019 from the prospects who were above zero WAR.
2023:
- Tristan Beck (1.1 bWAR)
- Ryan Walker (1.0 bWAR)
- Patrick Bailey (0.8 bWAR)
- Keaton Winn (0.3 bWAR)
- Kyle Harrison (0.2 bWAR)
- Tyler Fitzgerald (0.2 bWAR)
Total of 3.5 bWAR contributions in 2023 from the prospects who were above zero WAR. I've included Beck because he became part of Zaidi's farm system when he was acquired, but didn't include Yaz or Dubon in 2019, because we are trying to compare what the farm system was producing before Zaidi took over.
Wasn't a lot, either way, but the amount was doubled, as were the number of positive contributors. There were also a tripling of prospects who produced at least 0.8 bWAR, and from zero to 2, the number of rookies who produced at least 1.0 bWAR.
Other Farm System Contributions
Another difference is that in 2023, we had four other homegrown players who are long-time veterans: Webb, Tyler Rogers, Camilo Doval, and Austin Slater. Including them would add 9.4 bWAR. While Zaidi didn't acquire them, they developed significantly after he took over, and wasn't traded away, like Preller trading away Trea Turner before knowing what he had. And the thing is also that in 2019, we didn't have any young players who were significant contributors, unless you want to count established veterans like Madison Bumgarner and Will Smith, who were 29 YO, though we could include Reyes Moronta, but it was already his 3rd season.
In addition, if you include Yaz as part of Zaidi's farm system contributions, he produced 2.3 bWAR. If you also count his acquisitions of Estrada, Junis, and Wade, who didn't have much experience, they produced 5.5 bWAR. If you include all of these to the above six players as Zaidi farm system production, that's 20.7 bWAR produced by the Giants farm system in 2023, vs. if you add Moronta's 1.5 bWAR, 3.3 bWAR contributed by the Giants Farm System in 2019, looking only at players with 6 years or less in the majors.
The differences might be considered minor, for rookies, but looking at all of Zaidi's contributions to the farm system, we have made a ton of progress from looking at the Giants roster, with more to come, in particular, Kyle Harrison.
Speaking of Farm System Production...
A commenter on TA noted something to the effect, "wake me up when the Giants have another Posey and Lincecum". I replied that they already have them, Patrick Bailey and Kyle Harrison. And we got them in the same draft!
Bailey in his rookie season was a Gold Glove finalist and came in first in a number of key catching statistics, like DRS and framing. While his bat needs a lot of work still, he is not going to be as good as Posey, as there are few rookies who can come in and show that they are Hall of Fame worthy, not even Posey did, but that doesn't mean he's not the Posey for the next competitive Giants team.
He should be our catcher for the next decade or so, and should have a handful of Gold Glove trophies along the way, given how he led the majors in a number of catching categories in his rookie season while only playing only roughly 75 percent of the season, then was a finalist for Gold Glove. Per Baseball-Reference.com, he only produced 0.8 bWAR, but Fangraphs had him at 2.8 fWAR (they include framing value, of which he provided a lot), which is above average and good starter WAR contribution.
Harrison has been dominant from basically Day One as a pro, much like Lincecum. He has also struck out a ton of hitters, much like Timmy, as well as walk too many, much like Big Time Jimmy Tim, but the key is that he strikes out so many that his K/BB ratio is great most of the time. AAA was his worse, but even then, after a tough intro to the league, he settled down, figured out some stuff, and from his 8th start on, where he had zero walks finally, he got his ratio back up to nearly 3, which is great, and then continued that in the majors, while also showing less wildness, with only a 2.9 BB/9 rate.
He has dominated at every level he's been at, even the majors with over 9 K/9, and he did this as a rookie, and thus should only get better as he and Bailey learns hitters. His 2024 majors stats were almost uniformly impressive except for the unfortunate problem giving up too many homers, which hurt his ERA greatly. Still, he got his ERA down to 4.15 by season's end, which is above average and great for a rookie.
Sabean Would Have Been Fired By Giants Fans Today
That brought this thought that I've had recently, about Sabean, to mind while writing this. I'm totally a Sabean supporter, always been, but nobody is perfect and Giants fans forget that his draft record wasn't that great, which is why I did all my draft studies, because I wanted to show how bad he was, but then learned that most good, and even mediocre, teams don't draft well, good players are very hard to find. Fans seem to focus on the good (3 in 5 Dynasty; other teams good results like Texas), focusing on the results which occurred only because of the pain of the down periods, with the fans ignoring the pain that went with it.
Well, the first good player that Sabean drafted was all the way back in his fifth draft, when he drafted Matt Cain. So by the complainers I see in TA, using their logic and structuring, after six years, Sabean hadn't drafted anyone good, the farm system is not improved.
Cain wasn't even universally considered good. He had arm problems his first pro season, and fell behind a fellow pitcher draftee from the same draft. He was always rated below the current flavor of Dodger pitching prospect that analysts loved. And Cain didn't make the majors until 2005, 9 years after Sabean took over (though to be fair to him, he reached the majors in 3 years, at age 21).
Moreover, Cain didn't have a second great season until 2008 (Jerome Williams had that great first season), so it was 12 years after Sabean took over that one of his draftees had a good season after another. Of course, then he had his epic streak of selecting Lincecum, Bumgarner, Posey, and Wheeler, plus Wilson, Romo, Sanchez, Crawford, and Belt along the way as well.
Zaidi Outdoing Sabean Already In Draft
Meanwhile, Zaidi found the next Posey and Lincecum in his second draft, which was truncated because of the pandemic shutdowns, plus they also selected Casey Schmitt, who is already an elite MLB 3B defender with some pop in his bat, and a few other interesting prospects still percolating. Three prospects who look like long term major league starters, from one draft. Sabean hit on a lot of draftees, but usually only one per draft, who started regularly for the Giants, that I can recall.
So the irony is that fans want Zaidi to be more like Sabean, but Sabean was not that productive for most of his early tenure, and only produced the players everyone remembers about a dozen years after he took over the Giants, and only drafted the first of those six years after he was promoted. Meanwhile, Zaidi is looking good for finding three, at least average, major league quality starters, with his second draft. Still, most is still unproven, much like the Giants in 2007-8 was mostly unproven, things can turn quickly sometimes (perhaps Luciano is the Pablo Sandoval of this era...).
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