Your 2025 Giants: Losing Draft Picks Is Not So Bad

The Giants has been contemplating signing QO players like Adames and Burnes this offseason, which would cost draft picks, and with the signing of Adames, they have now lost their second and fifth round picks.

Signing Burnes as well as Adames would tthen cost the team its second, third, fifth and sixth selections, part of the price the Giants paid for exceeding the luxury-tax threshold while finishing 80-82.

I thought I would write on the odds of these draft picks ever amounting to a good player, given how much fans worry about losing draft picks.  Like I wrote almost 20 years ago when I analyzed the Michael Tucker punted pick, you are losing a lottery ticket with steep odds of winning, while gaining a MLB caliber player.

Your 2025 Giants: Willy Adames Signed for 7 year, $182M

As reported, the Giants signed SS Willy Adames to a 7 year, $182M contract, which beats out Posey's contract for the largest in Giants history.

Here are some good articles on the signing:

• In Adames, Giants got top target with 'sterling, sparkling' reputation
• Posey reveals why Adames became Giants' top free agency choice
• Brewers manager gushes over ‘special' Giants addition Adames

Hey Buster!!! My Giants Business Plan

This provides easy access to my Giants business plan and captures what I've been discovering and saying are the best ways to run a baseball team for competitive advantage and, in particular, to be more successful in the playoffs, and particularly, ways that has made winning the World Series more likely.  The Giants have followed a good portion of this plan, though not all.  

Zaidi followed much of it, but did not have enough successes to get to finish his contract, which had another year to go.  My kinder side wonders if the Giants replaced him because he was hospitalized, twice, near the end of the 2024 season.  But unforced errors like the furor in hiring Kapler and the waiver wire musical chairs, ate away at public and internal support, and he got replaced by Buster Posey, who installed Zack Minasian as his GM and right hand operational man, who has had GM level experience when he was with Milwaukee.

I'm happy with the ascension of Buster Posey to be the President of Baseball Operations because the strategy and tactics he talked about in his interviews so far is exactly what I think the team needs to be competitive in the playoffs:  elite pitching and defense, which leans into the park that they have.  He will also emphasize intangibles like character and make up.  

[Note:  I've re-written the original starting post to be addressed to Buster Posey, new President of Baseball Operations of the San Francisco Giants, but the original series of links were to Bill Neukom, soon after he was hired, with additional ones after Zaidi was hired.]

Your 2025 Giants: New Front Office Leaders - Buster and Zack

As most Giants fans know, Buster Posey was named to replace Farhan Zaidi as President of Baseball Operations. In that announcement he noted that Pete Putilla would no longer be the GM, and is being reassigned (to what, no news so far).  He recently promoted Zack Minasian, who was the Giant's Pro Scouting Director, to be his GM, his right hand man to execute their strategies.  

I wrote on this in my last post, but wanted to cover that and other thoughts here.  These are two good articles highlighting what Posey is thinking about what the Giants strategy is under his leadership:  Chronicle and MLB (capttures their vision).  There are nice quotes from Bailey and Chapman as well.

“I think it’s a huge advantage that we have this blueprint from not too long ago on what works in this ballpark,” said Zack Minasian, who was introduced as Posey’s new general manager on Friday. “Buster’s talked about [it]: We’re going to pitch, we’re going to play good defense and we’re going to find ways to score runs. Having position players that can beat you in a variety of ways is very important in this ballpark. It’s pretty simple. It starts on the mound and then having the right players defending to help the pitcher every given day and just scratch and claw every run we can get.”

As Posey said in his initial press conference, they will take advantage of the park by winning with pitching and defense.  

Your 2024 Giants: Why Six Years Is Not Enough (also: Posey/Minasian)

[Wrote most of this in mid-October, just never got around to finishing until today's announcement of Zack Minasian as the new GM, so I've added some comments about that]

Just read an article on Fangraphs, written a while ago, regarding how long draft prospects take to reach the majors.  It was going to be a key rebuttal regarding the six years people have been complaining that Zaaidi’s had enough time to rebuild the team. Then reality took a left turn.

I was taking off for a vacation in SoCal, to visit my daughter, and was away from my phone since I was driving my wife and I down.  So after we checked in, I checked my phone and my brother who also follows the Giants text me "Posey!"  And I'm wondering what happened.  Then I see The Athletic notifications of articles about Zaidi being replaced by Posey.

So, now, after he’s been fired and replaced by Posey, instead this post will simply be a learning experience for those who don’t understand the player development process very well (which, based on the vast majority of people commenting on The Athletic, is a vast majority of Giants fans; which aligns well with what I experienced when defending Sabean back in 2007-2010).

Your 2024 Giants: This Has Been a Transitional Season

Wrote most of this up on The Athletic, posting it here, mostly the same, but I added too.

Your 2024 Giants: Rotation Dominance, is it Enough? Maybe

Now that we have seen Robbie Ray grunt through a few starts, and see the benefits of having a good rotation, along with the fact that the Giants have a weaker schedule now (due to having a tougher schedule earlier), and the Cobb trade opening up the rotation for Birdsong, I thought I would run through some possibilities.

Your 2024 Giants: Second Half Musings

With the second half starting up, and talking with other fans, some thoughts came up.

Run Prevention is the Best Strategy for Going Deep into the AL Playoffs (Part 2 of Series)

This is the follow-up study of how well the top ranked AL teams in Runs Scored and Runs Allowed have fared in the playoffs during the Wild Card era, after I recently published my NL study.  So that new readers can understand what I'm doing, I'm including the original beginning of my NL Study here:

I've been interested in the best ways to make the playoffs for a long while because the team I'm a fan of never made the playoffs much, let alone won a World Series championship, for many decades, for the entirety of their existence in this city.  In the mid-2000's, I ran across two similar but different studies into Billy Beane's statement that his "stuff" didn't work in the playoffs, so I was very interested in if my team was following the findings.  

While my study isn't as overarching or as statistically sophisticated as these two, I wanted to first recap their findings, so that one can see the difference between their datasets and methodologies and what I analyzed.

Studies of Success in MLB Playoffs

The findings of both Baseball Prospectus (in its chapter on Billy Beane) and Fangraphs The Hardball Times was both obvious and controversial: both found that it is pitching and fielding excellence that leads to success  (winning) in the playoffs, and in going deep into the playoffs.  The more controversial finding was that offense wasn't much of a factor in teams being successful in the playoffs.  Each used similar but widely different methodologies.

The Fangraphs article compared dozens of offensive and defensive metrics of each playoff series' opponents and gave wins and losses based on whether the one with the better metric won or loss.  Then it narrowed this win-loss data further by requiring a significant difference to record the wins and losses, as a way to filter out the borderline cases. 9 of the Top 12 were pitching or fielding metrics.  And only one of the three offensive metrics were related to hitting, the other two were related to base stealing.

Baseball Prospectus used a scoring system, Playoff Success Points (PSP) to rate each playoff teams' success in going deep into the playoffs, and used correlation analysis to investigate various metrics vs PSP, a much different and statistically sophisticated methodology, but still came to the same conclusion, that pitching and fielding defense is vitally important in the playoffs, while offense doesn't.  It only found  one offensive metric of any statistical significance, which was base steal attempts (not stolen bases, nor successfully stolen, simply total steal attempts). Through a variety of more sophisticated statistical analysis, using regression analysis and tying it to PSP, BP came to the startling conclusion that "while preventing runs correlates with post season success, scoring them does not." 

They narrowed down a long list of significantly correlated metrics, only one of which was related to offense (which as noted was base stealing attempts, there were none related to hitting), down to their secret sauce:  a dominating pitching staff (as measured by K/9), a good closer (as measured by their WRXL metric, which they no longer calculate), and a good fielding defense.  They no longer use this secret sauce, but that's another story*.

(* Side Note:  Unfortunately, they no longer use this because a few years after publishing the book, they published a few articles reporting on that year's playoffs, and it did not do well in prediction. But they clearly misapplied the results, which resulted in the poor results that caused them to stop using it. Instead of comparing current playoff teams against each other, as they did in these annual analysis, they should have placed each new playoff team into their historical dataset and see where they ranked historically, and see what similar PSP teams did in the playoffs, as that is what they did to create their original Top 10 list, which had 9 of the 10 making the World Series, 8 of the 9 winning the World Series, with the one loser losing to one of the 8).

Methodology

I wanted to try my own study of the playoffs and came up with this idea:  comparing the top NL Runs Allowed teams vs. the top NL Runs Scored teams.  I wanted to see what type of findings I could come up with using this simpler methodology, as my data analytics skills is still nascent, but I still wanted to try something.  Obviously, this is the AL version of that study.

I decided to just use the years since the Wild Card format was implemented, as that's a slightly different set of data than the divisional playoffs history, given that the original studies above were done to 2003 and 2005, respectively, so my study would have around 20 years of new Wild Card playoff data utilized in my study, while overlapping slightly with the two above, which covered the divisional playoffs which started in 1972. Given a much different set of data, though with some overlap, I was testing to see if the new playoff format led to a different conclusion than the two studies above.

So I investigated how the top 5 RA and RS teams did in the AL playoffs since 1995.  I collected the Top 5 teams over the whole period, despite the recent change from 4 to 6 playoff teams, to keep the data consistent, plus the fact that Top 5 already covers a third of the AL teams.  Then I split them into three groups:  Dual Leaders, where the teams were both RA and RS Leaders, RA Leaders, where the teams were only RA Leaders, and RS Leaders, where the teams were only RS Leaders.

Playoff Results by RA and RS Rank

Overall, it was clearly better to be be a Dual Leader, and better to be an RA leader to go deeper into the playoffs:

• Total teams:               60 Dual; 85 RA only; 85 RS only Leader Teams
• Total Playoff teams:  55 Dual; 35 RA only; 38 RS only
• Total ALCS teams:   29 Dual; 15 RA only; 12 RS only
• Total WS teams:       17 Dual;   8 RA only;   4 RS only

In total 62% of RA Leader teams made the playoffs vs. 64% of the RS Leader teams, a difference of 3 teams, and widely different from the NL, where RA Leader teams dominated.  Separating out the Duel Leaders, 92% of the Dual teams made the playoffs (which makes total sense), 41% of the RA only Leader teams made the playoffs, and 45% of the RS only Leader teams made the playoffs.  There is virtually no different between being an RA Leader or RS Leader in the AL.

However, being an RA Leader is a key factor in going deeper into the playoffs, with 25 of the 29 World Series AL participants (ALCS winners) were RA Only Leaders or Dual Leaders, and only 4 of the RS Only Leaders reached.  And 8 RA Only Leaders (23% of RA Only playoff teams; 9% of all RA Only Leaders) vs. 4 RS Only Leaders (11% of RS Only playoff teams; 5% of all RS Only Leaders) were in the World Series, double in number, even though RA Only Leader teams made the playoffs slightly less than RS Only teams in playoff participation (35 RA Only, which is 23%, vs. 38 RS Only, or 11%).

Ranking Comparisons

Overall, the Top RS teams got into the playoffs more often than the Top R teams, 64% vs. 62%, which is only marginally better.  Comparing the rankings means much less datapoint per population, but it was still interesting to see the results. 

Results were similar from 2 to 4, but much different for 1 and 5:  

1. RA 66% < RS 90%
2. RA 79% ~ RS 79%
3. RA 69% ~ RS 66%
4. RA 41% ~ RS 45%
5. RA 55% > RS 41%

Based on this data, being a Top 3 RA or RS team is a lot more effective for getting into the playoffs than being a Top 4 or 5 RA or RS team, when comparing overall ranking.  In addition, the addition of the second wild card team, starting in 2012, has made it more of an advantage of being an RA Leader team, as 9 of those 12 RA #5 teams made the playoffs, vs. 7 of the 12 RS #5 teams, which was only 58% (vs. overall 64%).  

Ranking Comparison using PSP

Using Baseball Prospectus' Playoff Success Point (PSP) scoring (which awards 3 points for making the playoffs, another 3 points for winning the LDS, another 4 points for winning the LCS, and another 4 points for winning the World Series, and then +1 for each postseason win and -1 for each postseason loss; there were no Wild Card games in their data set, so I just counted the +/- 1 for each Wild Card game), I found similar results.  

An average total of 19.7 for the Top RA teams was tallied, versus 17.7 for the Top RS teams tallied, or 11% better overall.  So, this datapoint confirms that the RA teams also did much better overall in going deeper into the playoffs.

Cutting deep into the data, for RA Only and RS Only, across the Top 5, while the data points count ranges from 14 to 20 (less than the 30 data points that text books teaches), I thought it would be interesting to present:

	RA Only			RS Only
Rank	Avg PSP	World Series	Playoff Pct.	Avg PSP	World Series	Playoff Pct.
1	0.71	0%	36%	4.88	23%	81%
2	2.63	20%	63%	1.00	0%	67%
3	4.35	33%	53%	1.60	17%	40%
4	0.95	25%	20%	0.75	0%	35%
5	2.39	29%	39%	0.00	0%	11%

The RA Only teams mostly outperformed the RS Only teams when comparing by ranking.  Oddly, the #1 RA Only teams have not done well at all in making the playoffs and hasn't gotten to a World Series yet.  More of them are Dual RA teams, so perhaps it is a quirk of the data set, where the Dual RA teams do very well.  For the other ranks, generally, while they have made the playoffs at about the same rate, RA Only teams made the World Series many more times than the RS only teams.  And overall, RA Only teams made the World Series 8 times vs. 4 times for RS Only teams, and this is in spite of the fact that RS Only teams made the playoffs more often (38 times) than RA Only teams (35 times)

Here is the data for the Dual leaders by their ranks in RA vs RS (total data points ranged from 9 to 15):

	Dual RA Rank			Dual RS Rank
Rank	Avg PSP	World Series	Playoff Pct.	Avg PSP	World Series	Playoff Pct.
1	10.00	50%	93%	10.54	46%	100%
2	5.46	15%	100%	3.14	8%	93%
3	6.08	36%	92%	7.93	46%	93%
4	6.11	38%	89%	4.33	33%	67%
5	2.39	11%	82%	5.00	20%	100%

Clearly it is best to be a Dual Leader, as noted before and clear to any baseball fan.  The Average PSP is much higher for most of the Dual splits than it is for the RA Only and RS Only splits by rank.  There is randomness by rank, but compared to their RA Only and RS Only fellow rankers, they are obviously much more successful in the playoffs, which make obvious sense, they are best in both, and not just one.  However, generally, a lower rank hasn't been as good a combination for Dual Leaders going deep into the playoffs, even if they are a Top RA Leader.

In any case, the AL playoffs are even more dominated by RA and RS leading teams than the NL.  There were a total of 133 playoff spots in the 29 years of playoffs, and these teams took 128 of them, or 96% of them.  These Leader Teams also went to the World Series 29 of those 29 seasons, or 100%.  

Recent Trend:  Dual Leaders Are More Prevalent

Dual Leader teams have become more common in recent years. In the first 15 seasons, there were 25 Dual Leader teams (1.7 per season).  In the 14 years since, there has been 35 Dual Leader teams (2.5 per season, 50% higher). As shown above, being a Dual Leader has meant making the playoffs almost 100%, with only five teams out of 60 not making the playoffs.

Once making the playoffs, things are as expected for Dual Leader teams.  

• 31% of the Dual Leader playoff teams made the World Series (28% of all Dual Leader teams)
• 23% of the RA Only Playoff teams made the World Series (9% of all RA Only teams), and lastly,
• 11% of the RS Only Playoff teams made the World Series (4% of all RS Only teams).  

Altogether, 53% of the Dual Leader playoff teams made the ALCS (48% of all Dual Leader teams), 43% of the RA Only Playoff teams made the NLCS (18% of all RA Only teams), and 32% of the RS Only Playoff teams made the NLCS (14% of all RS Only teams).  Again, RS Only Leaders do not perform as well as the RA Leader teams in going deep into the playoffs.

Wild Card Effects

The Wild Card has helped a lot of the RA/RS Leader teams make the playoffs.  Out of the 43 Wild Card teams (excluding 2020, when all the teams were Wild Card teams), 41 of them were RA Only, RS Only, or Dual Leader teams (95%).  Only 2 non-leader teams got into the playoffs via the Wild Card (versus 5 in the NL).  

Unlike the NL, where there were 5 non-leader teams and 3 of them made the World Series, the AL only had 2 non-leader teams and they fizzled out of the playoffs quickly with a Wild Card loss and a Division Series loss.  Also unlike the NL, the Dual Leader Wild Card teams did much better in the playoffs, with 3 of 17 (18%) making the World Series, and 8 (47%) making it at least to the ALCS.  Only 1 of 11 RA Only (9%) made the World Series and 1 of 13 RS Only (8%) made the World Series, and 2 of 11 RA Only (18%) made the ALCS and 4 of 13 RS Only (31%) made the ALCS, all much less than the Dual Leader Wild Card teams.  So while the RA Only teams ruled the Wild Card teams in the NL, it was the Dual Leader teams that ruled the Wild Card teams in the AL.  

Making the Playoffs: The Non-Leaders

Altogether, from 1995 to 2023, there were 133 playoff teams, with 55 Dual Leaders, 35 RA Only Leaders, and 38 RS Only Leaders, which means that there were only 5 Non-Leader teams that made the playoffs, or 4% of the playoff teams were not categorized as a leader in that season. That's half of the NL (which had 11 and 8%).  

Unlike the NL, these five teams did not do much in the playoffs.  There were one Wild Card loss, two Divisional Series losses, and two Championship Series losses.  And 3 of the 5 were from the Wild Card.

Looking at the teams inhabiting the 43 Wild Card teams, I noticed a few teams who benefited most from the Wild Card slots.  The Yankees and Red Sox benefitted the most, with each gaining the playoffs 8 times via the Wild Card, in the 28 seasons with at least one wild card team (skipping 2020, where every team was treated as a wild card team).  That's 19% of the open slots each.  And the Rays got a Wild Card slot 5 times, while the A's got one 4 times, and the Rays got 3 slots.  Altogether, these teams got 28 out of 43 slots, or 65% of the slots.

Defense Is Best for Winning in the Playoffs

The findings of Baseball Prospectus and Fangraphs/TheHardballTimes were partically supported by this study of the Wild Card playoffs era in the AL.  The RA and RS teams were making the playoffs about the same amount of the time, and similarly for RA Only and RS Only, though I should note that so far, the RS teams have made the playoffs a few times more.  

However, deeper runs through the playoffs happens more often for RA teams than RS teams.  Overall, 44 RA teams made the ALCS vs. 41 RS teams (although 93 RS teams made the playoffs vs. 90 RA teams), and 25 World Series teams for RA vs 21 RS teams.  

This is repeated for RA Only vs RS Only teams.  There were 15 ALCS RA Only teams vs 12 ALCS RS Only teams, but 8 World Series RA Only teams vs. 4 World Series RS Only teams.  

All of these findings from this study, that it is defense (RA excellence) that more frequently leads to winning in the playoffs and thus deeper runs into the playoffs, aligns with the findings from the Baseball Prospectus and Fangraphs/The Hardball Times studies.  But unlike the NL playoff study, being an RA Leader in the AL did not lead to more playoff spots. 

As follow up to these studies, I think I will look into the Top 5 overall RA and RS for the MLB, and see what that data shows.  Clearly, within the NL and AL, being an RA Leader helps with making deeper runs into the playoffs.  What I also found was that so far, more AL teams have won a World Series than NL during the Wild Card era.  I've suspected for a while now that the AL has had an advantage because they had a full time hitter at DH, which I feel is an advantage when the DH is used (because they have a full time hitter in that role, vs. the NL having, at best, an okay hitter off the bench) and an advantage with no DH (a full time hitter now sitting on the bench, who can come in and deliver a key hit or walk at least a third of the time).  

Your 2024 Giants: Heliot Evolution

One of the great developments of this 2024 Giants season is the break out of Heliot Ramos. But, as great as his early start was, his BABIP was unsustainably in the .400’s, which even the greatest hitters in MLB history has never sustained over a full season, so I expected a fall, though to still good (800-ish OPS) from great (over .900). I thought I would reinvestigate his stats now that he seems to be sustaining a great OPS, and see what his numbers look like now.  

Especially since he was named to the All Star NL team just the other day.  He's the first home grown Giants OF to make the All Star game as a Giant since Chili Davis did it some 40 or so years ago.  Some call it a curse, some call it a streak, I just call it an anomaly due to Sabean focusing the Giants on pitching since he took over in 1997.  

Giants Long Wait for All-Star Outfielder Was a Feature, Not a Bug

This post was created in response to discussion about the Giants 40 years and counting wait for an All Star Outfielder, which might end soon anyway the way Heliot Ramos has been on fire. It was pulled from some comments I shared on The Athletic, and, of course, I then added more, as usual. 

ogc thoughts 

Many haters of Sabean and/or Zaidi love to bring up the fact that the Giants haven't produced an All Star caliber outfielder since Chili Davis.  It's like producing Will Clark, Matt Williams, Matt Cain, Tim Lincecum, Madison Bumgarner, and Buster Posey with first round picks wasn't good enough for them.  We want outfielders!!!

The thing is, waiting for an OF is understandable when you consider that during the Rosen era, he used his best first round picks to get Will Clark and Matt Williams, then during Sabean’s era, which encompassed most of the rest of those 40 years, he spend almost every first round pick he had on pitchers, selecting Cain, Lincecum, Bumgarner, and Wheeler, and, of course, there was his front office’s rare position pick, arguably his best, Buster Posey.

As well, looking at Zaidi's drafts should not be done with any finality yet because even his first draft, the 2019 draft, has had only three full pro seasons to play (equal to his 2020 draft), because they lost one in the pandemic, and it takes 4 to 6 seasons to get an accurate assessment of how well or poorly that draft went. It takes time for prospects to develop, and as we learned painfully over the years, even good prospects fizzle out, even after a good MLB season (Jerome!), and don't amount to much.

Sabean not only spent most of his first round picks on pitching, but even though rosters then were comprised of more hitters than pitchers (13/12), Sabean’s front office always drafted and signed more pitchers than hitters. They were all in on pitching! Zaidi has been similar overall, but differently, going all in on pitching for his 2021 and 2022 drafts.

Thus, if you thought nothing of Clark, Williams, Cain, Lincecum, Bumgarner, Posey, and especially 3 in 5, then keep on pointing out this lack of producing outfielders as that was the sacrifice made to get these players. No outfielders is a feature, not a bug.  And, ironically, this "streak" may end soon if Ramos makes the All Star game this season, he's on the ballot, and currently leads all outfielders in bWAR, so it seems likely that he (and likely Webb) will end up the Giants All Star representatives, assuming he can continue hitting well enough.

Analysis of Sabean First Round Picks

I thought it would be interesting to see how skewed Sabean was for pitching, by looking at who he picked in the first round, and with which picks. To be clear, when I am talking first round picks, I am talking the proper first round picks, not any supplemental players like McKinley or Crick. So just the first 30 picks of the first round.

That brings me to 24 picks within the first 30 picks for Sabean. Here’s that breakdown:

• 2 catchers
• 3 infielders
• 4 outfielders
• 15 pitchers (63%) 

As regular readers know, I once analyzed the first 50 years of the draft (and wrote a blog post) and calculated the odds of finding a good (18+ bWAR) player, and if you add the odds up by these positions, that is the number of good players one can expect on average from Sabean’s various first round picks (through simple addition of the odds; for example, if the odds of finding a certain player is 5% or 0.05, and you have four of those picks, you can expect to find that player 0.20 of the time or 0.2 players).

On average, based on Sabean's first round picks, he would have found:

•  0.46 catchers
•  0.21 infielders
•  0.21 outfielders
•  1.72 pitchers 

Why do it this way? It shows not only what position he picked but also the quality of the pick used for them.

Based on these averages, Sabean needed to have almost 5 times as many similar sets of first round draft picks (another 120 years of drafts, basically) in order to find one good outfielder or infielder with a first round draft pick, because he did not spend a ton of draft bullets on outfielders (19, 24, 29, 29) or infielders (19, 25, 29).

This is unlike catchers (2, 5) or LHP (10,30) or RHP (4, 6, 10, 14, 18, and eight picks, 20-25), where Sabean spent all his best draft picks. Sabean spent way more picks on pitching (almost 4 times as many as on OF, 5 times as many on IF) as well as quality of picks (8 times as much). Even adding up all the position players (0.88) is still roughly half that of pitchers (1.72).

This illustrates what I was talking about, he rarely spent any of his best draft picks on outfielders, because he was using more of them on pitchers, as well as more of the best picks (not one better than 19, whereas six picks from 4-18 we’re used on pitching), and thus the odds were tremendously against him in finding an outfielder while focusing so much on pitching. Similarly for IF in the first round.

Why don’t I look at the other rounds? Picks at the end of the first round became good players about 5% of the time, then it dropped to 2% by the middle of the third round, and 1% by the end of the fourth round. When compared to 1.72 pitchers, they don’t make a lot of difference, 20 drafts of the 5th round adds 0.20 (20 times 1%). Plus, as noted, Sabean spent more picks on pitching than hitters in the draft anyway, so whatever you add in the later rounds for the position players, it would be matched likely by a pitcher selected in the later rounds. The disparity of the first round picks is so great that the position players cannot catch up in odds after the first round.

Sabean Was a Good Drafter

Obviously Sabean did much better than average, which I covered in a series of posts after publishing the draft study linked above. He found a great (certainly HOF caliber) catcher in Posey, and four good to great pitchers in Cain, Lincecum, Bumgarner (he likely would have been HOF caliber if not for his bike accident), and Wheeler. That’s 5 good and better players when the odds expected 2.6 good players in total, or almost double as much. Add in Belt, Crawford, and Reynolds (hmmm, Reynolds has in fact done veery well, I should revisit that analysis and update it) from the other rounds, and he’s doing exceptionally well, and Webb (also doing very well), Rogers, and Ramos (out of the possibles for reaching 18 bWAR) are still on the clock for his drafts.

To show how good that is, Sabean would have to have another 20 or so first round picks that fizzle in order for him to fall back down to average in terms of first round pick success.  That almost doubles his number of first round picks, and that would only bring him to average.  He was clearly very good at drafting in the first round.  

The "Actual" First Round Further Accentuates Sabean's Pitching Focus

Thinking further about this, I realized that the first round is an artifice based on how many teams are in the MLB.  When there were only 16 teams, the first round was only 16 picks, for example.  So I then connected that to the fact that there is a tier of picks, 15-23, which has odds of 10.8%, then the next tier is 24-76, which has odds of 5.2%.  So let's take a look at the distribution of Sabean picks for the first 23 picks (the best picks) of the first round:

• 2 catchers (13%)
• 1 outfielder
• 1 infielder
• 11 pitchers (73%)

Now it is nearly three quarters of his best picks were used on pitchers, nearly 4 times as much as the other three categories combined.  

And by total bonuses:

• Catchers: $13.2M (34%)
• Outfielders: $3.1M (incidentally, the pick of Heliot Ramos)
• Infielders:  $1.1M 
• Pitchers:  $21.3M (55%)

Here, now we see the prominence placed on catchers and pitchers, and both catchers (Posey and Bart) were considered good to great defensive catchers, which is key for a team focused on pitching.

And while I'm at it, if we do it by bWAR:

• Catchers: 46.2 bWAR (24%)
• Outfielders: 1.9 bWAR
• Infielders:  7.1 bWAR
• Pitchers:  135.3 bWAR (71%)

Again, pitchers far outweighted the position players, and catchers (really, just Posey) had a significant portion as well.  And together comprised 95% of the bWAR produced.

Zaidi Drafts

Complain about no outfielders if you want (and many Sabean and Zaidi haters want), but that was the plan for the most part, until recently, when Zaidi drafted Hunter Bishop and, recently, Bryce Eldridge, as OF, with first round picks. To compare, Zaidi has had five drafts so far, and selected outfielders with two of the five. In 24 drafts, Sabean selected three outfielders out of his 24 selections, a wide disparity.

Still, Zaidi has been focused on pitching. He moved heaven and earth to save up enough bonus money in the 2020 draft in order to draft Kyle Harrison in the 3rd round. This was made that much harder because this draft was only 5 rounds, instead of the usual 10 rounds, and thus less rounds to carve out bonus from. Despite this, he still found a Gold Glove caliber starting catcher in Bailey and possibly the 3B of the future in Schmitt.

Then in the 2021 and 2022 drafts, he used 17 of the 20 picks, that he had out of the first 10 rounds picks that he had in each draft, on pitching, and still found interesting prospects in Vaun Brown and Wade Meckler.

As I noted above, it does not make sense to try to judge Zaidi's drafts negatively yet.  Prospects regularly take 4 to 6 years to become good players.  And this makes sense as future major leaguers often take at least a season for each level, and there are five levels:  A, Advanced A, AA, AAA, and MLB.  Sometimes a prospect needs to repeat a level.  And his 2019 and 2020 drafts have only had three full pro seasons so far.

Still, despite this, he has already found a Gold Glove caliber catcher in Bailey who should be the starter for the rest of the decade, at least, and an ace in training pitcher in Harrison, who has done ace type stuff at each level, including the MLB last season, with 9.1 K/9, 2.9 BB/9, and 3.14 K/BB, which only the best pitchers accomplish.  As well, Whisenhunt and Eldridge have both made Top 100 prospect lists, and Crawford has zoomed up to AAA and might pitch in the majors this season, health permitting.  Meckler and Schmitt have also made the majors, and Schmitt is hitting about league average, while playing 3B at an elite level last season.

Lack of Outfielders is a Feature, Not a Bug

Thus, as we can see above, the Giants have not spent a ton of picks, and really, not many (or really, any) good picks, on outfielders over the years, especially after Sabean took over as GM.  They have mostly devoted their top picks on pitchers and catchers, and have done rather well there, Sabean found a lot of pitchers who contributed (five pitchers in total with 10+ bWAR, four good pitchers with 19+ bWAR) plus Posey (and potentially Ramos as well, and now I realize I should add Reynolds into this conversation), and Zaidi has already found a Gold Glove caliber catcher in Bailey, as well as a good starting pitcher in Harrison, health permitting.  

And finding Bailey is amazing because Posey is HOF caliber, so I expected to not be so lucky with our next starting catcher, figuring the new guy won't even be close to what Posey was originally envisioned, a great defensive catcher who can hit, and maybe develop some power eventually (they projected he would eventually get into the 20 homer range eventually, but he got there right away).  Even that is a lofty performance to match, but Bailey has been doing it so far.

So the lack of outfielder development is a feature of Sabean's and Zaidi's draft strategies (didn't bother to look at Rosen's, it was so short and so long ago, it is what it is).  Both have focused a large amount of their picks on pitching and catching.  Zaidi has actually spent two first round picks on outfielders, out of five drafts, but Bishop has been constantly injured and only this season reached AAA (drafted in 2019) and Eldridge not only was drafted last year, but he has also been moved to 1B, and currently not a two-way OF/pitcher, as originally drafted, so he won't be a starting OF unless he changes position again.  

In any case, the outfield of the future looks filled with Matos, Lee, and Ramos, so Zaidi does not look like he needs to develop any outfielders in the near future, at least.  And Ramos has been playing so well, for so long, that he could possibly break that streak by making the All Star game this season.

Your 2024 Giants: Zaidi Not Going Anywhere

I wrote most of this post because someone commented about how much they admire the Dodgers, who happened to hit a bunch of homers on a night our offense was limp (albeit against a pitcher who had a 2.78 ERA, so he was’t chopped liver, he was pretty good).

Your 2024 Giants: StatCast Hitters' Analysis as of May 2nd

There has been so much hew and cry about the Giants offense that I thought I would peep into StatCast's team stats and see how things look.  And as I thought, giant bad luck for the Giants.

Your 2024 Giants: Kyle Harrison Ace Analysis

Lots of people are doubting on Kyle Harrison, so I thought I would write a post on him.  In particular, a poster of the name Brian M on The Athletic, said that Harrison is no more than a 3-4 starter in baseball, and dismissed the idea that he could be an ace.  

Your 2024 Giants: Your Big 6 Prospects

Annually, if I remember in time, I produce a Big 6 List of Giants Prospects.  The 6 for this post are:

• Kyle Harrison
• Marco Luciano
• Jung Hoo Lee
• Carson Whisenhunt
• Hayden Birdsong
• Bryce Eldridge
• Landen Roupp is the bonus

I usually pull a lot of information from websites like MLB Pipeline, but you can easily read from there, and I don't have time to get all my research done as well as pull information in from other sources and get it out before more of the season goes by.  

Fangraphs: Run Prevention is the Best Strategy for NL Playoffs

[ogc's note:  I tried to publish this on Fangraph's Community Blog section, but just realized that nobody has published there for over a year. If it ever makes it through their review process, I will take down this post, and replace it with a link to Fangraph's version. Thank you for understanding.]

This is a study of how well the top ranked NL teams in Runs Scored and Runs Allowed have fared in the playoffs during the Wild Card era.  

I've been interested in the best ways to make the playoffs for a long while because the team I'm a fan of never made the playoffs much, let alone won a World Series championship, for many decades, for the entirety of their existence in this city.  In the mid-2000's, I ran across two similar but different studies into Billy Beane's statement that his "stuff" didn't work in the playoffs, so I was very interested in if my team was following the findings.  

While my study isn't as overarching or as statistically sophisticated as these two, I wanted to first recap their findings, so that one can see the difference between their datasets and methodologies and what I analyzed.

Studies of Success in MLB Playoffs

The findings of both Baseball Prospectus (in its chapter on Billy Beane) and Fangraphs The Hardball Times was both obvious and controversial: both found that it is pitching and fielding excellence that leads to success  (winning) in the playoffs, and in going deep into the playoffs.  The more controversial finding was that offense wasn't much of a factor in teams being successful in the playoffs.  Each used similar but widely different methodologies.

The Fangraphs article compared dozens of offensive and defensive metrics of each playoff series' opponents and gave wins and losses based on whether the one with the better metric won or loss.  Then it narrowed this win-loss data further by requiring a significant difference to record the wins and losses, as a way to filter out the borderline cases. 9 of the Top 12 were pitching or fielding metrics.  And only one of the three offensive metrics were related to hitting, the other two were related to base stealing.

Baseball Prospectus used a scoring system, Playoff Success Points (PSP) to rate each playoff teams' success in going deep into the playoffs, and used correlation analysis to investigate various metrics vs PSP, a much different and statistically sophisticated methodology, but still came to the same conclusion, that pitching and fielding defense is vitally important in the playoffs, while offense doesn't.  It only found  one offensive metric of any statistical significance, which was base steal attempts (not stolen bases, nor successfully stolen, simply total steal attempts). Through a variety of more sophisticated statistical analysis, using regression analysis and tying it to PSP, BP came to the startling conclusion that "while preventing runs correlates with post season success, scoring them does not." 

They narrowed down a long list of significantly correlated metrics, only one of which was related to offense (which as noted was base stealing attempts, there were none related to hitting), down to their secret sauce:  a dominating pitching staff (as measured by K/9), a good closer (as measured by their WRXL metric, which they no longer calculate), and a good fielding defense.  They no longer use this secret sauce, but that's another story*.

(* Side Note:  Unfortunately, they no longer use this because a few years after publishing the book, they published a few articles reporting on that year's playoffs, and it did not do well in prediction. But they clearly misapplied the results, which resulted in the poor results that caused them to stop using it. Instead of comparing current playoff teams against each other, as they did in these annual analysis, they should have placed each new playoff team into their historical dataset and see where they ranked historically, and see what similar PSP teams did in the playoffs, as that is what they did to create their original Top 10 list, which had 9 of the 10 making the World Series, 8 of the 9 winning the World Series, with the one loser losing to one of the 8).

Methodology

I wanted to try my own study of the playoffs and came up with this idea:  comparing the top NL Runs Allowed teams vs. the top NL Runs Scored teams.  I wanted to see what type of findings I could come up with using this simpler methodology, as my data analytics skills is still nascent, but I still wanted to try something.  

I decided to just use the years since the Wild Card format was implemented, as that's a slightly different set of data than the divisional playoffs history, given that the original studies above were done to 2003 and 2005, respectively, so my study would have around 20 years of new Wild Card playoff data utilized in my study, while overlapping slightly with the two above, which covered the divisional playoffs which started in 1972. Given a much different set of data, though with some overlap, I was testing to see if the new playoff format led to a different conclusion than the two studies above.

So I investigated how the top 5 RA and RS teams did in the playoffs since 1995.  I collected the Top 5 teams over the whole period, despite the recent change from 4 to 6 playoff teams, to keep the data consistent, plus the fact that Top 5 already covers a third of the NL teams.  Then I split them into three groups:  Dual Leaders, where the teams were both RA and RS Leaders, RA Leaders, where the teams were only RA Leaders, and RS Leaders, where the teams were only RS Leaders.

Playoff Results by RA and RS Rank

Overall, it was clearly better to be an RA Leader and best to be a Dual Leader:

• Total teams:               55 Dual; 90 RA only; 90 RS only Leader Teams
• Total Playoff teams:  53 Dual; 47 RA only; 22 RS only
• Total NLCS teams:   24 Dual; 21 RA only;   8 RS only
• Total WS teams:       11 Dual;  11 RA only;   4 RS only

In total 69% of RA Leader teams made the playoffs vs. 52% of the RS Leader teams.  But the closeness of that was influenced greatly by the fact that 53 of the 77 RS Leader teams were also RA Leader teams.  Separating them out, 96% of the Dual teams made the playoffs (which makes total sense), 52% of the RA only Leader teams made the playoffs, and only 24% of the RS only Leader teams made the playoffs.  Pitching and Fielding excellence is much better at making the playoffs, than Hitting excellence, with over double of the RA only Leader teams making the playoffs vs. the RS only Leader teams.

Clearly, if you want to make the playoffs, you need to be a RA Leader team, as those leaders make the playoffs over double that of the RS only Leader teams. In total, 69% of the RA Leader teams made the playoffs, and took 75% of the available playoff spots, meaning that they took 3 out of every 4 playoff spots usually.  Meanwhile, if you were only an RS Leader, only 24% of them made the playoffs, and took roughly one out of every four playoff spots.  Being an RA Leader means likely being a playoff team, as well as going deep into the playoffs, whereas RS only Leader teams struggle to make the playoffs (about a quarter), and does not go as deep into the playoffs.

Moreover, 22 of the 29 World Series NL participants (NLCS winners) were RA Only Leaders or Dual Leaders, and only 4 of the RS Only Leaders reached (and to put that success rate into perspective, as we'll see later, 3 non-leader teams made the World Series).  And 11 RA Only Leaders (23% of RA Only playoff teams; 12% of all RA Only Leaders) vs. 4 RS Only Leaders (18% of RS Only playoff teams; 4% of all RS Only Leaders) were in the World Series, nearly triple in number, even though RA Only Leader teams slightly doubled RS Only teams in playoff participation (47 RA Only vs. 22 RS Only).

Ranking Comparisons

Overall, the Top RA teams got into the playoffs more often than the Top RS teams, 69% vs. 52%.  Comparing the rankings means much less datapoint per population, but it was still interesting to see the results. 

Each ranked RA team did better than the similar ranked RS team from 1 to 5, by a large margin:  

1. RA 86% > RS 66%
2. RA 76% > RS 55%
3. RA 62% > RS 52%
4. RA 76% > RS 59%
5. RA 45% > RS 28%

Based on this data, being a Top 5 RA team is a lot more effective for getting into the playoffs than being a Top 5 RS team, when comparing overall ranking.  In addition, the addition of the second wild card team, starting in 2012, has made it more of an advantage of being an RA Leader team, as 9 of those 12 RA #5 teams made the playoffs, vs. only 3 of the RS #5 teams.  

Ranking Comparison using PSP

Using Baseball Prospectus' Playoff Success Point (PSP) scoring (which awards 3 points for making the playoffs, another 3 points for winning the LDS, another 4 points for winning the LCS, and another 4 points for winning the World Series, and then +1 for each postseason win and -1 for each postseason loss; there were no Wild Card games in their data set, so I just counted the +/- 1 for each Wild Card game), I found similar results.  

An average total of 17.8 for the Top RA teams was tallied, versus 13.3 for the Top RS teams tallied, or 34% better overall.  So, not only were they more successful in getting into the playoffs, this datapoint confirms that the RA teams also did much better overall in going deeper into the playoffs.

Cutting deep into the data, for RA Only and RS Only, across the Top 5, while the data points count ranges from 14 to 24 (less than the 30 data points that text books teaches), I thought it would be interesting to present:

	RA Only			RS Only
Rank	Avg PSP	World Series	Playoff Pct.	Avg PSP	World Series	Playoff Pct.
1	4.29	23.5%	77%	2.00	11.8%	41%
2	1.61	5.6%	61%	1.32	5.3%	32%
3	1.83	11.8%	41%	0.14	0.0%	7%
4	2.41	5.9%	59%	0.44	0.0%	31%
5	2.71	14.3%	29%	1.33	4.2%	13%

The RA Only teams clearly outperformed the RS Only teams also when comparing by ranking.  The majority of the time, RA Only teams will make the playoffs, and when they do, they are much more successful than the RS Only teams, as we can see with the PSP averages.  Oddly, the #5 team in both RA and RS has done very well in the playoffs, second only to the #1 rank.

Here is the data for the Dual leaders by their ranks in RA vs RS (total data points ranged from 5 to 15):

	Dual RA Rank			Dual RS Rank
Rank	Avg PSP	World Series	Playoff Pct.	Avg PSP	World Series	Playoff Pct.
1	7.73	41.7%	100%	5.33	25.0%	100%
2	4.73	18.2%	100%	7.10	20.0%	100%
3	4.00	8.3%	92%	7.07	26.7%	93%
4	4.69	8.3%	100%	2.54	7.7%	92%
5	5.25	25.0%	88%	2.20	0.0%	100%

Clearly it is best to be a Dual Leader, as noted before and clear to any baseball fan.  The Average PSP is much higher for most of the Dual splits than it is for the RA Only and RS Only splits by rank.  There is randomness by rank, but compared to their RA Only and RS Only fellow rankers, they are obviously much more successful in the playoffs, which make obvious sense, they are best in both, and not just one.  However, being 4th or 5th in RS hasn't been as good a combination for Dual Leaders going deep into the playoffs, even if they are a Top RA Leader.

In any case, the NL playoffs are dominated by RA and RS leading teams.  There were a total of 133 playoff spots in the 29 years of playoffs, and these teams took 122 of them, or 92% of them.  These Leader Teams also went to the World Series 26 of those 29 seasons, or 90%.  

Recent Trend:  Dual Leaders Are More Prevalent

Dual Leader teams have become more common in recent years. In the first 17 seasons, there were 27 Dual Leader teams (1.6 per season).  In the 12 years since, there has been 28 Dual Leader teams (2.3 per season, 47% higher), and 12 Dual Leader teams in the past four seasons (3.0 per season, nearly double). As shown above, being a Dual Leader has meant making the playoffs almost 100%, with only two teams not making the playoffs.

Once making the playoffs, things are as expected for Dual Leader teams.  

• 21% of the Dual Leader playoff teams made the World Series (20% of all Dual Leader teams)
• 23% of the RA Only Playoff teams made the World Series (12% of all RA Only teams), and lastly,
• 18% of the RS Only Playoff teams made the World Series (4% of all RS Only teams).  

Altogether, 45% of the Dual Leader playoff teams made the NLCS (44% of all Dual Leader teams), 45% of the RA Only Playoff teams made the NLCS (23% of all RA Only teams), and 36% of the RS Only Playoff teams made the NLCS (9% of all RS Only teams).  Again, RS Only Leaders do not perform as well as the RA Leader teams.

Wild Card Effects

The Wild Card has helped a lot of the RA/RS Leader teams make the playoffs.  Out of the 40 Wild Card teams (excluding 2020, when all the teams were Wild Card teams), 35 of them were RA Only, RS Only, or Dual Leader teams (85%).  And 5 non-leader teams got into the playoffs via the Wild Card.  

The oddity here is that 3 of the 5 non-leader teams made the World Series. Stranger still, gaining the Wild Card spots as a Dual team was not that great, only 1 World Series out of 11 teams, 5 NLCS.  Meanwhile the RS Only teams made 3 World Series out of 9 teams, 4 NLCS.  The RA Only teams ruled for Wild Card teams, with 4 World Series out of 15 teams, and 7 NLCS.  

Making the Playoffs: The Non-Leaders

Altogether, from 1995 to 2023, there were 133 playoff teams, with 53 Dual Leaders, 47 RA Only Leaders, and 22 RS Only Leaders, which means that there were 11 Non-Leader teams that made the playoffs, or 8% of the playoff teams were not categorized as a leader in that season.  I thought it could be interesting to explore these 11 teams, mainly because I noticed that sometimes the line between a leader and non-leader was very slim.

In total, there were 133 playoff teams from 1995 to 2023, and 122 (92%) of them were a leader in RA or RS or both, and 11 (8%) were not a leader.  That's not surprising, obviously, to make the playoffs, you have to be either pretty good at scoring runs, preventing runs, or both.  Still, I was kind of shocked to see 8% of playoff teams being non-leaders.  And the wild card helped 5 of the 11 non-leaders make the playoffs.

Looking into the 11 teams, I found that many of them were within 6% of the least of the leaders.  8 of the 11 (73%) were within 6% of the qualifying RA, and 5 of the 11 (45%) were within 6% of the qualifying RS.  This reinforces what we saw when comparing RA and RS leadership, where being an RA Leader is better than being an RS Leader.  And 5 of the 11 were within 6% in both RA and RS.

As one can see, many of these non-leaders were really close to being a leader. Had I extended the number of teams counted as a leader by one, that would have converted 6 of the 11 teams into leaders.  Just amplifies the fact that being a RA or RS leader is what is necessary to being a playoff team, which is obvious to most fans.

In addition, the dual near leaders were a very successful grouping.  There were two World Series winners (2003 Marlins, 2012 Giants), one World Series loser (2023 D-backs), and one NLCS losers (1996 Cardinals) out of the eleven non-leaders.  They were highly successful, which mirrors what we saw with teams who were dual RA/RS leaders.

Defense Rules!

The findings of Baseball Prospectus and Fangraphs/TheHardballTimes were supported by this study of the Wild Card playoffs era in the NL.  Teams that were good at Runs Allowed/Prevention (i.e. defense) got into the playoffs (69% of the RA teams; 75% of all playoff teams) many times more often than teams that were only good at Run Scoring (24% of the RS teams; 17% of all playoff teams).  Even the teams that were only good at Runs Allowed/Prevention, but not run scoring, made the playoffs over twice as often (52% of all playoff team vs. 24%) as the teams that were only good at Run Scoring.  

Furthermore, 11 teams made the playoffs not as a leader in either category, versus the 22 teams that made the playoffs as only a Runs Scored leader.  8 of the 11 teams were within 6% of being a Runs Allowed leader and 5 of 11 teams were within 6% of being a Runs Scored leader, and basically half of the 11 teams were Dual Leader adjacent, showing again the potency of being good at both Runs Allowed and Runs Scored.

All of these findings from this study, that it is defense (RA excellence) that more frequently leads to a playoff spot, and thus towards deep runs into the playoffs, aligns with the findings from the Baseball Prospectus and Fangraphs/The Hardball Times studies.  My study also showed that simply making the playoffs is strongly associated with RA excellence, and, as well, deeper runs in the playoffs.  

I actually started this study actually looking into something else and ended up capturing the data to do this analysis.  I plan on studying about these effects for AL playoff teams as a follow-up, as well as shorter articles looking into some other playoff data points collected.