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.
