Giants Draft Analysis: 2025 Update of the End of the Sabean Era Drafts (fourth in a series)

In early 2020, I was finishing up my series of draft analysis articles, using my updated draft odds results in analyzing Sabean's performance up to the 2019 season.  Now that the 2025 Season is over, I thought I would review which players can be updated to be good or great players, or dropped off the possibility list.

You can read what I wrote in the link above, but the players I reviewed were:

• Joey Bart
• Heliot Ramos
• Tyler Beede
• Seth Corry
• Connor Menez
• Logan Webb
• Bryan Reynolds
• Zack Wheeler (he was mentioned in the second article)

As you can see, most have dropped off, but Ramos, Webb, Reynolds, and Wheeler have looked like good players who either reached or potentially should reach, if he continues to play as well.  

Giants Draft Analysis: The Sabean Era Drafts Overall (fourth and last in a series)

In this series, I broke up the Sabean era into three distinct periods - basically pre-Dynasty, Dynasty Building, and post-Dynasty - and analyzed each one based on the probabilities for finding Good and Great players, that I came up with in my recent study of the first 50 years of the draft.  It examined the odds of ending up with nothing in any particular draft and the cumulative probabilities of how many good and great players a baseball operations leader would have in a random draft (that is, if the leader has an average clue, as good as the average GM, as to which player is good, and thus is randomly choosing these prospects in the draft, based on this average expertise, randomly based on past history).

In this final blog post in this series, I look at the entirety of the Sabean era, see what the odds are of where the results are now, and where he could be if some of the current top prospects end up being good players.  As I've noted, it could take a decade or more for players to retire before we know the final results of any GM's draft results, if there are any players still playing and look like they could reach Good status.

And while this is the last of this series, I'm probably going to be updating this particular post after every season or two, see where he is, based on progress or decline of the remaining remnants of his drafts.  Obviously, there will be declines where we can say that a player won't be making it most probably, and there will be breakout seasons where he puts himself back into play.

Giants Draft Analysis: The End of the Sabean Era Drafts (third in a series)

This analysis of the Giants drafts covers Sabean's final years as leader of the Giants front office, 2010-2018, using the data I collected on the picks up to 200th overall, from Gary Brown to Joey Bart.  His string of successes ended, but amidst all the complaints I see continually of the decay of the farm system, and how Zaidi has made it better, it is Ramos, Bart and Corry who are bringing up the farm ranking, and they should continue to rise, and perhaps make the ending all the more sweeter and brighter.

Giants Draft Analysis: Building A Dynasty (second in a series)

This analysis of the Giants drafts covers Sabean's dynastic years as GM, 2002 to 2009, using the data I collected on the picks up to 200th overall, from Cain to Belt.  Things turned around in a huge way, though it was still not looking good until his great trifecta of Lincecum, Bumgarner, Posey.

Giants Draft Analysis: Early Dry Sabean Years

I've decided to work on the Giants drafts first, covering Sabean's early years as GM, 1997 to 2001, and the picks up to 200.

A feat few remember is that Sabean turned around turned around the 1996 94 loss team to a 90 win team in 1997, which won the NL West, but then they unfortunately lost to the wild card Marlins in the LDS.  So while he got a good pick in his first draft in 1997, once you start winning, you get a lot of picks with poor odds of finding a good player, which continued until the Giants started losing in 2005.  My contention over the years, because of my first draft study, was that it was very hard for a team to rebuild via the draft, because the odds were against it.

Sidenote:  I've decided to create a separate blog where I'll be posting my R baseball analyses (when I'm able, still learning, part of my New Year's Resolution to get proficient in using R), probably starting with my draft database collected from baseball-reference.com, a great resource for anyone who wants to analyze baseball.