Hey Zaidi! My Baseball Business Plan: Pitchers Produce more WAR than Position Players

Happy Thanksgiving!  What people don't really realize about WAR is how much is contributed by the good to great pitchers vs. the position players on a per game basis.

Hey Zaidi! My Giants Business Plan: Waiver Roulette

One of the tactics that Zaidi has been executing well in his first off-season running the Giants, is his extreme version of what I call, Waiver Roulette.

Republishing My Business Plan Series

My first step during my break is to update my business plan series now that we have a new leader in Farhan Zaidi.  This project sparks joy, so I'm going with that for now, especially since Giants news have been low-key, as I've expected, as Zaidi gave the fans low expectations as to what he'll be doing "move-by-move" improvement. 

I plan on appealing to concepts he seem to support.  I've listened to a bunch of interviews with him, both after his hiring and before, and I will re-write my old series, which was directed at former Giants managing owner, Neukom, when he first took over, and shade it in terms of what Zaidi says is his preferences and guiding principles.

I'm publishing the first one tonight and using his introductory press conference date and time for that post, as a symbolic gesture, but the rest will be published one by one, real time, as I update each with Zaidi in mind, and ten years of new analytics research available and utilized.  Of course, some will probably go through with minimal changes.  Analytics has not changed everything. 

Hey Zaidi! 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.  I'm hopeful that Zaidi will not only stay the course, but also will do more to enhance the team's opportunities, just like how the addition of John Barr improved the Giants.

As Zaidi has said in interviews, one needs to be aware of 51%/49% decisions and to understand that just because the results don't go your way, you want to stay the course of what your evidence and findings lead you, which is much like I've been trying to emphasize in my blog over the years, taking the big picture view (or as some like to call it, "trusting the process") and with this business plan. 

As much as the Giants have been losing in the past few years (yes, two and a HALF years), they have mostly stayed the course with their process of building up pitching and defense (not as much on the latter, to be frank, though, else they would have brought up Duggar sooner).  And Zaidi, with his comment about that quality elite defense is the key to low-scoring games (which implies having a great rotation and bullpen combination on the Giants going forward), appears to be on board with this process, only with his new twists that he will bring to the team.

[Note:  I've re-written the original starting post to be addressed to Farhan Zaidi, 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. I think that's my main thing I'll be working on during my break, is to re-examine all my prior posts, start with them as a base, re-write them giving my admittedly cursory knowledge of what Zaidi has said in his Giants interviews so far.  Like Maria Kondo advocates, it "sparks joy" for me to think about doing this.  I might do a few draft articles as well.  

I'm getting this out now, since I had started it before my decision to take a break, but probably won't start updating the rest until next year, as I research what else I can update for each chapter of my business plan.  I backdated it to the day of his press conference, hence it's calendar placement, but the rest will be published in real time.  I'll update the links below to the new chapters, as each gets published, so this post will change links over time, and perhaps other content, as noted below.]