Eric's Giants Blog

New Blog

2007-02-19T07:24:00.000-08:00

If anyone still comes here, I've moved to http://wiesen.wordpress.com, although I reserve the right to start posting here again as well if the Giants make things interesting for us in during the upcoming year.

Cheers.

Dog Days

2005-06-21T12:01:00.000-07:00

Not really a good time to have a Giants blog, is it? I give full credit to Grant over at http://www.mccoveychronicles.com/. He manages to find stuff to write about them each day, and makes me laugh more often than not.

[not talking about LaTroy Hawkins]

The last time I wrote, I was trying to find something to be positive about, and I found it in Todd Linden's AAA performance. Well, Linden didn't disappoint. He crushed the ball for another month and got himself called up, hopefully for good. He's been up for 25 ABs now, and other than a dramatic 3-run homer (which was ultimately wasted), he hasn't done much yet. I'm not worried yet, though - I think if he's overmatched, we'll know after 150 ABs or so. But I think he's got enough skill to stick.

[not talking about LaTroy Hawkins]

The Giants are a bad team. This is pretty clear at this point. Would they better if Bonds was playing? Yep. Would they be better if Benitez was playing? You bet. Would they be better if Jason Schmidt was pitching like an ace? Absolutely. In fact, if all three of these guys (arguably the three best players on the team, really) were playing at a high level, the Giants might even be competitive this year. And while I'm the last person to support the way the current team has been constructed, it's important to remember this if you want to come by your conclusions honestly.

The Giants are currently 29-39 going into today's game. They've scored 309 runs (more than only ... Colorado? ... in the division) and have allowed 367 runs (again, more than any other team in the division other than Colorado - in fact, more than any other team in the National League other than Colorado). So how much difference would Bonds, Good Schmidt and Benitez have made?

There are ways to do this scientifically, but I'm neither patient enough to do it with rigor nor particularly interested in scientifically showing how close they'd be if nothing had gone wrong. The qualitative way to look at it is to look at it this way:

Pedro Feliz has been playing left field. His line this year is .318 / .439 (notice, btw, that Feliz gets talked about so much more when he starts out hot rather than when he turns back into himself).

When Feliz doesn't play left field he plays third base. Most of the playing time there has gone to Edgardo Alfonzo (.370 / .403). Feliz also sometimes plays first base, which is currently manned by Lance Niekro (.331 / .577) or JT Snow (.361 / .354).

Now there is no question whatsoever that Bonds is MUCH better than any of these guys. But the point I'm trying to make is that the Giants have gotten an OPS of between .773 (Alfonzo) and .908 (Niekro) from the guys who are likely taking Bonds' ABs. Not all-star performances, certainly, but neither have they replaced Bonds with automatic outs. Even Michael Tucker (.347 / .395) hasn't been a complete offensive zero.

The Giants would have scored more runs with Bonds playing, but the offense wouldn't have gone from bad to genuinely good even if he was playing.

Schmidt probably would have made a bigger difference. The version of Schmidt we currently have (5.40 / 1.60) is well below league average. The version we were expecting (say, last year's 3.20 / 1.08) is an ace. Very unscientifically, I think Good Schmidt is worth 3 or 4 wins more than Evil Schmidt at this point in the season.

As for Benitez - the whole bullpen has been a disaster, and honestly, Tyler Walker has converted most of the saves since Benitez went out. My views on closers are well-established, but of course we'd be better off with him than without him.

None of this is quantative or scientific, but I think the Giants are maybe 6 or 7 games if all the guys were playing and were healthy. That would put them at something like 35-33, three games back of San Diego.

It also bears mentioning that if the Giants were 3 back in this scenario, it would look like a complete miracle. Jason Ellison, Lance Niekro and Mike Matheny have all played FAR better than projected (as has Moises Alou), so at that point literally everything would be going right for the Giants, and they'd be only a couple of games back. It's not really relevant, since when you build an old, injury-prone team you expect things to go wrong, but it's a somewhat interesting thought experiment.

More later in the week on what the team can do going forward.

[not talking about LaTroy Hawkins]

Getting Excited about Todd Linden

2005-05-07T13:58:00.000-07:00

There are plenty of reasons why I shouldn't write this post.

The Giants don't develop position players.
It's only been 100 ABs.
It's obviously a pathetic attempt to distract from the major-league team.

But hey, it's been a few days, the big-league club isn't giving me anything to write about (I refuse to talk about Barry's knee) and as they go today trying to stay above .500 knowing that The Man isn't coming back any time soon, that the New Closer is essentially done for the season and The Leadoff Man can't stay on the field, I looked around for something to feel good about.

And found Mr. Linden. For those who follow the Giants closely, there was a lot of buzz about Linden once upon a time. He had a great little season in AA a couple of years ago, the type of season that makes one say, "This guy could really be a decent regular. He's not going to be Albert Pujols, but he could be Paul Konerko or Brad Wilkerson or Ryan Klesko". Then came his rather disappointing AAA season last year and his poor performance during ill-advised callups and suddenly he became another failed Giants prospect.

Normally the story ends here. He turns into Tony Torcato or JR Phillips or Dante Powell, spends a few seasons hitting .250 with minimal power in Fresno and then gets waived. Except that maybe we all thought Linden was good for a reason, and maybe the 2004 season was just a "building" season, and that he'd figure it out during his second time through that level.

The difference between Linden and the Torcatos of the world is that he walks. That was what I liked so much about his AA performance - his hitting for average and power were good, but plenty of guys can hit .290 with 25 homers in AA. If they don't back it up by showing that they can lay off the bad pitches, you generally expect them to get exposed at higher levels as they pitches get harder to hit and the pitchers are better at locating them. A guy who can hit .300 with 25 homers by hitting mistake pitches in the zone in AA often turns into a guy who hits .240 with 10 homers in AAA and strikes out like crazy. But a player who hit .290 with 25 homers in AA by swinging and crushing good pitches but also took 80 walks when the pitchers couldn't find the zone - that's someone to get excited about and that's what we all thought we had in Linden.

So anyway, he's kicking some serious ass at Fresno. He's putting up numbers (SAMPLE SIZE ALERT) that make one think that maybe we're talking about future Jim Edmonds or Brian Giles type if we're really really lucky.

So yes, it's only 100 ABs but...

Linden is hitting .320 - that's good, but honestly hitting .320 over 100 ABs doesn't get me so excited. Mike Cervenak is hitting .310. Lots of guys can get 30 singles in 100 ABs at some point in the season, so let's keep going.

Linden has walked 20 times. 20 in 100 ABs. It's too hard to look at 100 ABs as 1/5 of a 500 AB season and see 100 walks. A guy who walks 100 times in AAA is likely to be a good major league regular. Of course, that assumes that the next 400 Abs will be like the last 100, which is a terrible assumption (not least because if he hits like this he won't be in Fresno at the all-star break). But his current OBP is .439, which is absolutely outstanding at AAA.

He's hitting for power, too. He's hit 8 homers and 7 doubles in those 100 ABs. His slugging % is .630, again outstanding for the high minors.

The bad in the eyes of many is that he's striking out a lot - 26 punchouts in 100 ABs means over 100 through a full season. My views on this topic are well known - the walks mean he's only swinging at good pitches. Even without the .320 average the strikeouts don't bother me much as long as he walks are still there. 26 Ks to 20 BBs is fine.

And just for a little bonus (and to make it obvious that I play fantasy baseball) he's got 3 steals in 3 attempts this year.

So just for fun, if we project out a 500 AB season for Linden this year we'd get the following line:

.320 / .439 / .630; 40 HR; 115 RBI; 130 runs scored; 100 BB, 130 K, 15 SB

That all being said, if I can come back 6 weeks from now and report that his second hundred ABs were as good as his first, I'll be able to state with more confidence that the Giants have something potentially special on their hands.

Until then, I'll just be a little excited about what he's doing over there in Fresno.

13-11

2005-05-02T08:08:00.000-07:00

Huh. Really? 13-11

What a weird first month it's been for the NL West.

The Dodgers lost their best player (Gagne), had what was thought to be a very poor offseason and currently have the best record in the National League. But the weird part about that is that they are only 1.5 games in first, because running a close second is ... Arizona? The Giants, losing the best player in the game to injuries and watching most of the team spend time on the DL are in third, at 13-11, and the Padres, who many thought would actually win this division, are in fourth at 11-14.

Wtf?

Ok, there are some answers to this and then a caveat.

The Dodgers: There are reasons why they're 16-8 (other than how crappy the rest of the NL West is). For one thing, while they lost Gagne, as performance-minded GMs often do, Paul DePodesta had a young no-name called Yency Brazoban ready to close games, and he's 8 for 9 this season. But the big story, at least to me, is that maybe DePo really is a genius:

Derek Lowe: 41.1 IP, 1.96 ERA / 1.06 WHIP / 26 K

No one (and I do mean no one) thought the deal he gave Lowe was a good idea. Lowe had a great 2004 playoffs but has been very mediocre over the bulk of his innings the last few years. And frankly, it's just 41 innings, but so far, DePo is looking smarter than the rest of us. In addition, how about another guy that people thought he overpaid for:

Jeff Kent: 87 AB; .450 OBP / .632 / 23 R / 20 RBI

Part of it can be ascribed to Jeff Kent finally being in his natural environment. Kent was born to be a Dodger, and was clearly uncomfortable everywhere else he played. He is finally where he belongs, and I never enjoyed hating a Dodger quite so much. He is, as some will know, the only player ever to win the MVP with the Giants and then go sign with the Dodgers. And with full disclosure, I never liked him.

There are other reasons, but essentially the Dodgers picked up (relative to expectations) an ace starter, a superstar slugger and a shutdown closer essentially out of nowhere. Especially in a weak division it doesn't take much else.

I'm not going to spend much ink on Arizona and San Diego - I think luck explains their differing records a this point. To wit:

Arizona: 15-10
San Diego: 11-14

Arizona: 109 runs scored; 114 runs allowed
San Diego: 107 runs scored; 110 runs allowed

These teams are playing identical baseball, but one is getting luckier. That wont' last.

And the Giants? 13-11; 125 runs scored, 119 runs allowed. So they're right about where they ought to be. Lose Bonds? No problem - we have Jason Ellison (1.384 OPS in 38 ABs) and Lance Niekro (.595 SLG) to fill in, not to mention Peter Happy himself, currently putting up a respectable .826 OPS as a full-time player. Lots of Giants are hitting - pretty much everyone other than Ray Durham (.278 SLG) and Marquis Grissom (.554 OPS) but as readers know, an April does does not a season make. It's great if the Giants can steal some wins by riding hot streaks by the likes of Niekro and Ellison, but if they're in it for the long hall, something's going to have be done. The pixie dust won't last forever.

10-11*

2005-04-28T06:19:00.000-07:00

In some ways, last night's win felt like "watching" (quotation marks because I live on the East Coast now, and don't get to actually watch the games very often) a team that's already been mathematically eliminated win a pointless game in September. Why the sudden pessimism?

Nen Redux.

An MRI revealed that Armando Benitez will miss four months with a torn hamstring, trainer Stan Conte said.

Stan Conte had said that he was 99.9% sure that Benitez' injury wasn't a "Garciaparra situation". Well, as it turns out that 0.1% came up for the Giants. Four months means we might get him back for September. Call me a doomsayer (I've been called worse), but I don't think it's going to matter much by September.

So what really to say about this? It would be unfair and completely inaccurate to say "I told you so" about Benitez, since I didn't genuinely dislike the signing, all things considered and because this isn't a recurring injury.

That being said, we don't have to go back too far to get back to one of my baseline notions about roster construction - DON'T SPEND SO MUCH *&#*$&ing money on a $*!damn CLOSER!

I mean come on. One Robb Nen wasn't enough to learn the lesson? Benitez is going to make $21M off the Giants one way or another over the next three years. $4.7M of that is due this year. For that $4.7M worth of 2005 dollars, in all likelihood, the Giants will have received:

8 appearances, 1-1, 9.1 IP, 5.79 ERA, 1.61 WHIP, 4 K, 4 BB, 4 SV

Doesn't seem like a very good investment to me.

Honestly, as I read over the above, I'm just a little angry, and I have to admit it. $4.7M is a pretty decent deal for Benitez' average season, which looks something like:

2.75 ERA / 1.29 WHIP / 80 Ks in about 75 innings

If the Giants had received that in 2005, Benitez would have been a good signing, at least as regards this year, which appears to be the only calculus the Giants' front office knows. But is it so much to hope that an organization that drafts NOTHING but pitchers can't develop a closer every few years? Looking back at the Giants' closers, how far back do we have to go to find one that was actually developed in-house?

2005: Benitez - free agent (and God only knows who else)
2004: Herges - trade; Hermanson - Non-roster invite to camp; Eyre - trade
2003: Worrell - trade
2002: Nen - trade
2001: Nen
2000: Nen
1999: Nen
1998: Nen
1997: Beck - so here we find it, and I suppose 8 years ago isn't *so* long ago (considering that if we ran this exercise for a number of positions around the diamond we'd have to go a LOT further back).

Rod Beck was drafted by the Giants and came up in 1991 as a 23-year-old (one of my favorite strangenesses of the baseball world is that Rod Beck is currently only 36. I'd have sworn he was 36 in 1993) and closed for the Giants starting midseason in 1992 and held the job until the end of 1997. Looking over his 1997 line, I'm not entirely sure why the organization decided to get rid of him (this is a sidelight, but I need something to distract me from the current season). Beck's 1997 line was:

73 appearances, 70 IP; 67 H; 53 K; 8 BB; 37/45 saves; 3.47 ERA; 1.07 WHIP

I'm guessing it was the 8 blown saves that did it. It's too bad, when you look at it with 2005 eyes, because this was a pitcher who had a 7 to 1 K/BB ratio and a WHIP just north of 1.00. He just happened to be brought into a lot of one-run games.

If there's more to this story, I invite my more seasoned Giants fans to comment on it. There's certainly no question that as good as Back was in 1997, Nen was better in 1998 (when he put up a 1.52 ERA with 110 Ks in 88.2 innings), but it strikes me as curious.

The amusing thing about the Benitez situation is the absolute feeding frenzy that took place in my fantasy league as people try to get what save opportunities the Giants will deliver. Here is a list of the Giants pitchers picked up in the wake of Benitez' injury:

Matt Herges
Jeff Fassero
Jim Brower
Merkin Valdez
David Aardsma

Note that Jesse Foppert is already on a roster despite playing in AAA.

So as far as I can tell, essentially every reliever on the Giants' roster has been picked up other than Scott Eyre, Jason Christianson, Tyler Walker and the recently activated Al Levine, including THREE GUYS IN THE MINORS.

Think this is a team currently sailing in choppy waters?

9-11 (no, not that one)

2005-04-27T08:20:00.000-07:00

The Giants are 9-11 (in case anyone thought this was going to be the oft-threatened but never executed inclusion of politics into this space, fear not) and April is nearly over. They've scored 97 runs (5th in the NL behind LA, Chicago, the Mets and, of course, Colorado) and have allowed 105 runs (13th in the NL - only Philadelphia and, of course, Colorado are worse). It's sort of strange outcome given the conventional wisdom about [annoying phone company name of the week] park.

It's also strange in that what I had wanted for this team was to play .500 until Barry Bonds came back, because really to hope for more was quite foolish. But looking at the way this team is winning and losing, I have to wonder how much it will really help. Obviously it will make the team better, but this is a team that is scoring enough runs to compete, particularly if you factor in park effects, but can't pitch to save its life.

It's worth looking a little bit at how this is happening, even if it'll be relatively obvious.

The runs are being scored because of Pedro Feliz (.819 OPS), Edgardo Alfonzo (1.047 OPS), Omar Vizquel (.379 OBP, 7 for 7 in steal attempts) and terrific part-time performances from Yorvit Torrealba (1.064 OPS in 10 ABs), Jason Ellison (1.028 OPS in 22 ABs), Lance Niekro (.528 SLG in 36 ABs) and JT Snow (.441 OBP in 52 ABs).

So the scary part is 50% those numbers above - this is a team that is hitting well above its head and is still under .500. Really only Ray Durham (.596 OPS) and Moises Alou (.542 OPS) look very likely to significantly improve, while all the guys above look likely to decline. I'd probably include Grissom in the "likely to improve" category, but at 38 and with his history of helpelessness against right-handers, I'm not entirely sure. He's still hitting lefties well, although not crushing them, but it's a mere 14 ABs at this point, so nothing can be drawn from this. In his 58 ABs against right-handers he's hit like a pitcher, with an OPS of .565.

On top of all of this, Bonds' rehab is going slowly and Armando Benitez just hurt his hamstring. On April 27, 2004 the Giants were 8-13. They wound up winning 91 games. So of course it's too early to give up on this team. But I see very little I like right now.

"Westworld" is embarassing

2005-04-14T13:18:00.000-07:00

The Giants aren't creating a lot of excitement right now. I was looking over their site and saw a new feature called "Westworld", which is a "a weekly foray into the wild, weird and wonderful workings of the West divisions of the American and National Leagues, where so many interesting things often happen after all the major news organizations in this country have gone to sleep." Alright, so the opening column of this west-focused feature compares the organizational styles of the Oakland A's, known as "Moneyball" (duh) to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (is there anyone not annoyed by this, btw?), known as "Mikeyball". First things first, is there a reason it's not called "Stoneyball" after GM Bill Stoneman? He's the guy who built the team, isn't he?

Right off the bat, I know I'm going to love this. The sidebar near the author's name has a picture of Vladimir Guerrero pointing skyward, indicating his acknowledgement that yes, Jesus wanted the Angels to win that game. The caption reads, "Vladimir Guerrero fits perfectly in Mike Scioscia's game plan -- a great situational hitter and aggressive baserunner". Really? Vlad fits into Scioscia's gamplan? Amazing, because he's such a poor fit for most gameplans. Good job, Mikey?

Come on. To say that Vlad is a great situational hitter and an aggressive baserunner is like saying that a Porsche 911 Turbo has a 6-disc CD changer and connolly leather seats. It's true, but it's not why you buy such a vehicle. To the unsophisticated (which not having even read the article I'm starting to think is the case with its author), the Moneyball approach is about walks and home runs rather than sacrifice bunts and stolen bases.

So which is Mr. Mikeyball Vlad? Well, over the three-year period between 2002 and 2004 he stole 64 bases and was caught 28 times (a 70% success rate, which is pretty decent and indicates a "break-even" effort, at least according to the very anti-Mikeyball stats-minded). That being said, he stole 40 of those 64 in 2002 as an Expo. He stole 15 last year. It's an average of 21 per year. How about home runs? 103 over the last three years, 39 last year. Walks? Vlad has a reputation for being a hacker, and it was true ... until 2000 when he boosted his walk rate. Barry Bonds he isn't, but Vlad has averaged about 70 walks a year over the last four years.

All of which tells is what we already knew - Vlad is neither a "moneyball" or a "mikeyball" player. The guy is just a superstar. Alright, moving on.

Here's a choice bit:

"We want to stay aggressive and play 'little ball,' but only as long as we have the team to do it," Scioscia adds. "I just don't think you can cookie-cutter any team into a philosophy."

We'll soon see how the cookie crumbles in the AL West.

Ok, I don't mean to be difficult, but after lauding the Angels' defeat of the A's in the final series of the regular season last year, how can this comment be credibly made? For one thing, wasn't the 2004 Angels team built around Vladimir Guerrero, Troy Glaus, Garrett Anderson and Tim Salmon? Aside from the ridiculous decision to play Darin Erstad at first base, this was a power team last year. This year, with Glaus gone and Salmon out with injuries we'll see what happens when the Angels actually play little ball, rather than just claiming they're playing little ball while holding a roster full of sluggers.

This is particularly irksome to me in that the 2002 Angels, who of course beat my beloved Giants in the World Series, were lauded as the Great Littleball Team that could. Strangely, though, I remember it being Scott Spiezio's HOME RUN that put the Angels back in. It wasn't David Eckstein hitting an infield single and then skittering around the basepaths three times. It was the good old Earl Weaver-style 3-run jack that got them back in. Furthermore, the Series MVP was Troy Glaus, who hit what, seven home runs during the Series? The Angels might have been all about the sac bunt but it was pure power that got them their rings. That the conventional wisdom was so inaccurate just added lemon juice to my wounds.

The rest of the article is relatively benign, but the other bit I think is just criminally omitted if you're going to compare the A's to the Angels:

A's 2005 payroll: $55.8M (btw, when did THAT happen?), 21st in MLB
Angels 2005 payroll: $95M, 5th in MLB (after the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets and ... Phillies?)

Just for reference, splitting the difference:
Giants 2005 payroll: $89.5M, 7th in MLB

Anyway, if you insist on comparing the Angels to the A's, might at least *mention* the economic disparity. One easy thought experiment on how to equalize these teams would be this: If you moved Vladimir Guerrero's $12.5M from the Angels to the A's you'd be looking at $68.3M (A's) versus $77M (Angels). I don't think too many would argue that the A's with Vlad would have a lot of trouble taking on the Angels without him. Well, some would, and I'd be forced to write about it.

The Bullpen and Plan B

2005-04-13T08:22:00.000-07:00

Tim wrote in a comment to yesterday's blog entry:

I think the fact that it is so hard to believe, looking back, that we'd have landed Morneau, Crosby, etc. is both a testament to your baseball knowledge and to the "fantastical" nature of the entire concept.

I'd like to know what you think of this year's bullpen (an entity conspicuously missing from the "Plan B" story). I made it very clear during the first week of the season that the bullpen woes did NOT bother me, and it was because of the ineffectiveness of Spring Training for relief pitchers. If anyone else is interested, I'll explain that concept, but I'm interested in Eric's analysis (pre-season perspective, even) of the 2005 San Francisco Giants Bullpen.

While at the same time accepting Tim's compliment about the quality of the Plan B team I put together last April, I would like to divert some of this praise by saying this: The idea of a Plan B-style rebuilding isn't as difficult as it seems. It's not *that* difficult to identify the guys likely to be successful once players are in the high minors (assuming you believe the once-"fantastical" notion that minor-league performance data predicts with some accuracy the major-league potential of a player) and note that the Plan B acquisitions were almost all position players rather than pitchers. The pitching staff was composed primarily of existing Giants farmhands (Williams, Foppert, Cain, Valdez) with a handful of new guys (Blanton, Nieve, Honel) brought in to ensure that we actually got a few good ones. Pitchers are MUCH more difficult to project and injuries make them a far dicier proposition.

No, I don't think you need to be a genius to trade a team with guys like Bonds and Schmidt into a great young team. What you need, -ahem-, is balls (apologies to the likely non-existant female readers of this blog). It takes cojones to trade away Jason Schmidt, at this point a proven commodity and an extremely valuable one, to get Jeremy Reed. Do I think Reed is going to have a couple of .325 / .410 / .475 seasons with 30 steals at a good success rate while playing plus defense? Yes, I absolutely do. But I don't *know* that. I do know that Schmidt is one of the best starting pitchers in baseball. So there's a big risk in trading away proven commodities to get prospects who might become future all-stars but could just as likely turn into Ruben Rivera or Esteban German.

As well worth it to note that the Giants have some extraordinarily attractive trade pieces in Bonds and Schmidt and, to a lesser extent, Durham. I was able to put together the Plan B team with real blue chip prospects because the veterans being dealt were so good.

So yeah, I'll say it. Like Billy Beane. Beane was criticized by those who don't know as much as they think they do for trading away two of the "big three" for younger guys. In trading away Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder for Dan Haren, Dan Meyer, Juan Cruz, Kiko Calero and Daric Barton, Beane is essentially putting in place his own Plan B team (the part I don't understand is why he hasn't traded for Ryan Howard and done something about the Scott Hatteberg situation). Hudson and (to a lesser extent) Mulder are known quantities. Those guys he got aren't. But they're good and they're cheap. And they will allow Beane to build his team with the knowledge that he has inexpensive skilled players. But you have to admit, Beane has balls to trade Mark Mulder for Dan Haren. No matter how smart you think it is, it's a pretty gutsy move regardless.

So yeah, thanks for the kind words about Plan B. I think it would have made being a Giants fan very interesting and fun to watch a team full of great young position players the for the next 5 or 6 years. Hopefully when it comes time to rebuild, there's still some value on the Giants roster to trade for the generation. Certainly Mike Tucker and Jeff Fassero aren't going to do it.

As far as the bullpen goes - the original Plan B posts explicitly omitted the bullpen, partially because it turns over so quickly that I didn't feel it worthwhile to try and figure out who is still there by 2006 and partially because, honestly, I don't think it's that hard to build a decent one. 2004 notwithstanding, this is something Brian Sabean has always done well, although his fascination with Jason Christianson appalls me.

The current pen will, I think, be fine. Benitez will be good, although not as good as he was for Florida last year. The rest of the guys will be ok, particularly after Foppert is brought up to be the long man. I haven't watched him this year, but I think Herges might be done. He's been solidly average to above average most of the last few years, but last year and so far this year he's been scary bad. If he's really done he needs to be let go quickly. I have little use for Eyre, but he's acceptable. Not sure why we have Fassero. Brower is a solid righty, and if/when Foppert joins the pen it'll give the Giants plenty of right-handed depth. Ideally, I'd like to see Matt Cain break in as a reliever midseason after 10-15 starts in Fresno. Assuming he's dominating hitters there as I suspect he's capable, I think a half-season (at least) of the Johan Santana treatment will do him well.

Note to all that I've added some guest bloggers to the site, so you might see their stuff as well from time to time. Let me know what you think of it.

Looking back on Plan B

2005-04-12T14:02:00.000-07:00

Last April I posted a long plan to dismantle the 2004 Giants team and rebuild to contend in 2006. My theory was that the current team built around Bonds and Schmidt wasn't good enough to go all the way, and that we'd all be better off trading the few (very) shiny baubles the Giants had on the roster for a boatload of prospects that would form the next great Giants teams. Some thought my notions of the Giants' players trade values were a little inflated, but most of the disagreements were on the margin.

As it turns out, I was both right and wrong. I was right in the Giants, built to win in the present, missed the playoffs. I was wrong in that they just barely missed it. Fantastic second-half surges from Brett Tomko and JT Snow kept the Giants in the thick of it until the bullpen imploded against (who else?) Steve Finley and the Dodgers.

I'll be honest, I don't think last year, looked at as a whole, really deserved Plan B, but it was an idea that I thought about a lot, so now, near the outset of 2005, I want to look back at the "Plan B Team" to see what they're all doing and how we'd be looking as a franchise if we'd put that in place, rather than watch the Tuckermohr's almost make the playoffs last year.

Note for those that might actually be checking: Comments on the Giants early-season exploits will be forthcoming. If last year proves anything it's that you can't rely too much on April.

Going around the diamond, I'll check in with the Plan B team one by one, along with how I had the Giants acquiring each player:

Catcher: Yorvit Torrealba (already on the team)

Yorvit is still on the Giants, but Sabean signed Mike Matheny to a 3-year deal that relegates Yorvit to a perennial backup role. I still believe he'd be at least an average starting catcher in the NL, possibly better.

1B: Justin Morneau (acquired from the Twins for Ray Durham)

For those who will immediately exclaim that Minnesota would never trade Morneau for Durham, remember that at the time of this post Morneau was languishing in the minors. He's currently the starting first baseman for the Twins after a very good (.271 / .340 / .536) 280 post-callup ABs. The consensus is that Morneau is going to be a very good, possibly great slugging first baseman for many years to come. He's currently 24.

2B: Bobby Hill (acquired from the PPirates for Pedro Feliz)

I think I might have blown this one. I had a strong sense that Hill was a late-bloomer, and that his on-base skills would make him at least a Todd Walker for relatively little coin. He did his best David Eckstein hitting impression with the Pirates last year (.266 / .353 / .339) over 233 ABs as a backup to Jose Castillo. He was 0 for 3 in steal attempts. All that being said, his OBP was still .353, and that's nothing to scoff at. A lot of leadoff guys are worse than that. A guy like that, particularly if he developed just a smidge of power, is valuable.

SS: Bobby Crosby (acquired from Oakland for Barry Bonds & Neifi Perez)

I had the Giants getting the A's crown jewels for Bonds (Swisher and Blanton along with Crosby) and I still maintain that Beane would have done it. Crosby was last years ROY in the AL (in real life, of course, he was still with the A's - in the NL he'd likely have lost out to Jason Bay just like Khalil Greene did) and looks to be an above-average starting shortstop going forward.

3B: Morgan Ensberg (acquired from Houston for Edgardo Alfonzo and Jason Christianson)

Ensberg had a terrible 2004 and lost a ton of playing time to Mike Lamb (for those who don't think Houston would have traded him, note that he lost playing time to MIKE LAMB). He's off to a great start this year and I still think that had he been allowed to settle in and play full time he'd have had no trouble (cheaply) hitting .270 / .350 / .475, which is quite adequate. Ensberg wouldn't have been a long-term solution at third base (he's 28) but he'd have manned the position nicely while the Giants developed someone else (like Eric Duncan, who I had the Giants picking up from the Yankees for Felix Rodriguez. Amusingly, FeRod is now on the Yankees).

LF: Todd Linden (current Giants player)

Likelihood is this rare selection from the Giants' own system would have been inadequate. Linden struggled badly in 2004 at Fresno and probably wouldn't be ready this year. A Michael Tucker or someone like him would be required to see if Linden is ever going to build on his big 2002 at AA.

CF: Jeremy Reed (acquired from the White Sox for Jason Schmidt)

I love this guy. And he could most certainly have been had in the deal I envisioned, since he was ultimately dealt to Seattle for the far lesser Freddy Garcia. Reed was called up last year, hit .400 over a few ABs and is now Seattle's #2 hitter.

RF: Nick Swisher (acquired from the A's for Barry Bonds & Neifi Perez)

Swisher is many peoples' pick for this year's AL rookie of the year. He does a little of everything and is going to be quite good, even if he does receive undue scrutiny because of his Moneyball fame. Sure Beane would have hated to give him up, but he could just look at that ring on his finger every time he thought about it (and yes, I think the As with Bonds could have beaten the Red Sox in the ALCS).

Starting Pitchers:

Jerome Williams (already on the team)

Jerome isn't genuinely ready to be a #1 starting pitcher, but remember that the 2005 Plan B Giants weren't really supposed to contend. By the time certain others on the staff develop, he'd settle in as the #3 starter he probably is.

Jesse Foppert (already on the team)

Foppert will probably need 2005 to develop after having Tommy John surgery, but the low-pressure of a non-contending Giants team would have given him the ideal conditions under which he could log 150 innings and get his groove back. And remember, the Plan B team is a 2006 team. I'd allowed for the possibility of some Hermanson-style stopgaps to eat innings in 2005.

Merkin Valdez (already in system)

Valdez had a tough 2004, but like Foppert I still think he's a year of development away from being really good. See above comments on how to use 2005.

Matt Cain (already in system)

Same deal. Cain needs at least 4 months in AAA, but by 2006 he's going to be a ROY candidate if he stays healthy. This guy is awesome.

Kris Honel (acquired from the White Sox for Jason Schmidt)

Honel was/is is a good prospect, but he missed most of 2004 with elbow problems. Hey, building a pitching staff out of young guys is frought with peril.

So anyway, looking at the 2006 "Plan B" Giants, I think you're looking at at least three potential all-stars on offense (Morneau, Crosby, Reed) and at least two potential ace starters (from among Foppert, Valdez, Cain). Not bad considering that the 2006 plan B team was not designed to be real, it was designed to be the team the Giants would put on the field if it spent essentially no money on payroll. It was anticipated that they'd use all this cheap talent to free up the funds to sign a couple of really big players after 2005 or midseason in 2006.

At any rate, instead we have the exact opposite of the Plan B team - we have the aged roster of the 2005 Giants. Will they be good enough to make it, even with Barry Bonds missing at least a month or two? Give me at least until May to decide.

RIP Mitch Hedberg

2005-03-31T11:13:00.000-08:00

This has nothing to do with baseball and it's been so long since I posted that I suspect few people are still paying any attention to this blog.

I'm not generally a big fan of standup comedy. Not a big enough fan to go out of my way to actually see them in person anyway. Except for Mitch Hedberg. Mitch's comedy was original, hilarious and rare in its ability to find humor without significant reliance on profanity or sex or politics. He made me laugh so hard it hurt. So it hurts that much more that he's gone so prematurely. I don't know how he died, and it doesn't really matter. I'll miss him.

At least I got to see him once.

P.S. more baseball coming soon.

Traded for scraps

2005-01-29T09:20:00.000-08:00

So all that Sammy Sosa commanded in trade was Jerry Hairston Jr. and two B-grade prospects? That's pretty astonishing.

Most people who know me know I am no fan of Mr. Sosa, mostly because I think he's a whiny bitch but his gentle treatment of reporters made him everyone's darling. This is a guy who whined about his contract, his manager and his lineup protection. Can anyone see Barry Bonds, noted surly "bad guy" of baseball doing any of those things?

True to form, Sosa reverted to his natural whiny ways when things went badly for him in Chicago, skipping out early when the Cubs missed the playoffs and blaming everyone but himself. Putting the overrated media favorites Sosa and Dusty Baker together was bound to result in something relatively fun.

So now Sosa goes to Baltimore and out of the realm of relevance. I'll miss his big smile on WGN, because you know a guy that smiles like that just loves the game so much and is SO GREAT for the game.

Sheesh

(P.S. He really was unbelievably great from 1998 to 2002. During those five seasons he did basically everything - hit for a good average, drew walks, played defense and, of course, hit 292 home runs in five years. It was legitimately among the greatest five-year spans for any player, ever. I still hate him)

Does anyone else want to claw their own eyes out?

2005-01-27T21:57:00.000-08:00

According to the AP, Magglio Ordonez has INSTRUCTED HIS AGENT to make an offer to the Tigers.

That's right. The Tigers. They won 72 games last year and honestly, that was a pretty good year for them. I lived in Southeast Michigan for three years and I watched a fair amount of Tigers baseball from 1998 to 2001. The team they fielded in 2004 was a pretty good Tigers team.

Huh. So let's imagine someone had given Ordonez a choice: Go to to the Tigers, where he'd have to battle ... Carlos Guillen? as the team's best player (to stifle the chorus of Pudge Rodriguez supporters, Guillen was better last year, posting a VORP of 70.5 to Pudge's 63.1. In fairness to Guillen, he was second among shortstops to Miguel Tejada, and in the top 5 in the AL (Melvin Mora, David Ortiz, Travis Hafner, Guillen, Manny Ramirez - interesting list, btw) or go to the Giants to be Barry Bonds' sidekick, hitting 5th behind him (yes, I've officially given up the dream of putting Bonds back in the 3-sport where he belongs) and playing for a team that has contended every year for about a decade.

Ah, but the chorus of outrage continues - we have Alou! And Maggs has a bad knee. He might miss time...

It's all true. If Ordonez didn't come with serious warts, he'd already have received a 5-year, $75M contract from Anaheim, Baltimore or one of the New York teams. So the real question is, which are the greater set of risks - Magglio's twice-operated knee or the combination of Alou's age, the likelihood of a park-related decline and the defensive disaster of playing an average left fielder (yes, I'm in a generous mood tonight) in a very difficult right field?

Alou's been a pretty great player at various times in his career. He was awesome in 2004, there's no denying it. He was nothing short of spectacular from 1998 to 2001 (not counting the entire 1999 season, which he missed due to an ACL tear). He has a lifetime career OPS of .880 and a lifetime batting average of .300.

Ordonez became a very good player in 1999, putting up his first .300 season in the majors (only his second full season), with a nice .349 / .510 line to go with it. He played in 157 games. Since then, he did nothing but get better before getting hurt in 2004.

1999: .300 / .349 / .510
2000: .315 / .371 / .546
2001: .305 / .382 / .533
2002: .320 / .381 / .597
2003: .317 / .380 / .549

Note that I'll still give 2003 the nod over 2002, since he played in 160 games that year, compared to 153 in 2002. His Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP) went up every year from 1999 to 2003.

This is the development of a fantasic ballplayer. He hits for average, draws plenty of walks (although he'll never be Barry Bonds or even Jim Edmonds in this regard) and hits for power.

We'll have to see how many years Ordonez gets from the Tigers or whoever signs him. If it's five (it won't be), I'll be the first to say to that brave team - enjoy him. But if it's 4 or less (my guess is 3 with an option if he's lucky, 2 with an option if he's not), he's a better investment than Alou. It's not that he's better so much as it's more likely he's still as good as he was. Call me crazy, but I just can't get over how old Alou is. And that the Giants were the ones who decided to pay for his 2004 season.

At least he and his dad will have fun in the clubhouse.

I guess.

Even Mike Harmon gets it.

2005-01-25T09:54:00.000-08:00

"Mike Harmon is a Yahoo! Fantasy Sports expert" according to Yahoo. He's one of the guys that has me contemplating starting up my own fantasy website just so that people will have something worth reading. If you read a lot of fantasy sports columns, his are the ones that involve the largest number of synonyms for "hit" when discussing home runs. In a Mike Harmon column, a hitter "bashed 20 taters" or "crushed 17 dongs". A hitter never "hit 25 homers" in his columns. He's not among the worst, btw, but regardless - generally doesn't get it.

And yet, in his review of right-fielders...

Moises Alou, SF
Alou leaves the North Side of Chicago to reunite with his father in San Francisco. The 38-year-old slugger established a new career-high with 39 home runs last season. He reached the 100-RBI mark for the fifth time in his career and topped 100 runs for the second time. Alou will miss Wrigley Field, where he launched 29 of his 39 home runs. Additionally, his batting average was 92 points higher at home than on the road.

When even mediocre fantasy sports columnists see things that a team's GM doesn't see, you know you have a problem...

So let's see...

2005-01-23T07:42:00.000-08:00

The Giants needed a slugging right fielder. Michael Tucker clearly wasn't it. Even if you buy Dustan Mohr's 2004 breakout, he played as a plate-selective table-setter, not a traditional power guy. Alright, I think that as a baseline the need for a slugger in that position was pretty clear.

So what they did was sign an extra left fielder to play right field. Eh. He's old and he can't play defense. He was really good in 2004. He was halfway decent in 2003. And he stunk it up in 2002. They paid him about $13M for his age 39 and 40 seasons, hoping that his .900+ OPS would hold up for two more years (even though he had big home/road splits, is moving into a much tougher park and is at an age where dropoffs are usually sudden and swift). All in all, I'd say it was a pretty high-risk gamble with pretty good upside, because if Alou actually hits for a .293 / .361 / .557 line in 2005 the Giants are going to win the division and Barry Bonds is going to challenge Jeff Bagwell's record for runs scored (152, if memory serves).

But let's think about another way they could have gone. Remember this guy?

Player X; Age 30; Pos: RF

2001: .305 / .382 / .533 (160 games)
2002: .320 / .381 / .597 (153 games)
2003: .317 / .380 / .546 (160 games)
2004: .292 / .351 / .485 (52 games)

Player X is currently unsigned, because ... he's high-risk. The knee injury that caused him to miss most of 2004 is still a question mark. More of a question mark than a 39-year-old left fielder who has suffered through chronic injuries for most of his later career? Who knows. As of right now Player X (known to some as Magglio Ordonez) looks likely to sign with some irrelevant team like the Orioles or Tigers. Possibly to an incentive-laden one-year deal.

Score another one for Sabean's "sign 'em early and overpay 'em" approach.

The morning after

2004-12-23T08:49:00.000-08:00

Note that this began as a comment and morphed into a full post when I realized how lengthy it had become. It responds to the first comment left by "The Bosnian" to my post entitled "Nightmare Scenario".

Respectfully, I must disagree with virtually everything The Bosnian wrote. Since there appears to be a need for further explication on some of my exasperated one-line conclusory statements above, I'll go into slightly greater detail about why I think the 2005 Giants represent a nightmare scenario.

Responding to the overall point that this is no time for a "youth movement" like the one Billy Beane is ostensibly undertaking in Oakland - I never said now was the time for a rebuilding period (actually that's not true, I said it in May of this year, but I'm not saying it now). What I did say was that signing ancient, overrated veterans to multiyear deals is NOT the solution. The two best things that will be said about the 2005 Giants will be that they a) had Barry Bonds and b) had a lot of guys who used to play great defense. Between Bonds, Snow, Grissom, Vizquel, Matheny and Alfonzo the Giants will have no shortage of late-30s players who used to play great defense in their prime.

Vizquel:

Player A: 567 AB; .291 / .353 / .388 / 7 HR / 19 SB / 6 CS
Player B: 250 AB; .244 / .321 / .336 / 8 SB / 3 CS
Player C: 582 AB; .275 / .341 / .418 / 14 HR / 18 SB / 10 CS

I wouldn't mind terribly getting player A to play shortstop for the Giants, although I can't see I'd be jumping up and down. Player B, of course, is a disaster. Player C - similar to player A, I guess.

Player D: 1399 AB; .276 / .343 / .391 / 23 HR / 45 SB / 19 CS

So of course Player A is Vizquel in 2004, B in 2003 and C in 2002. D is his 3-year line. So figure if you look at D divided evenly among 3 seasons, you're talking about:

466 AB; .276 / .343 / .391 / 8 HR / 15 SB / 6 CS.

That's the Giants new shortstop and he plays stellar defense, so that's good, right?

Not really. The three-year numbers are for his ages 35, 36 and 37 seasons. Vizquel turns 38 in late April. So the Giants will have him for his 38, 39 and 40 seasons. How many productive 40-year-old shortstops can you name? For that matter, how many 40-year-old shortstops can you name? And why stop there? How many 38-year-old shorstops can you name?

Because Vizquel hit .291 in 2004 you seem to assume that he'll do so in 2005. There are a lot of very good reasons to believe otherwise.

Reason #1: He has hit over .290 twice in the last 8 years. Four times over a 16-year career. In 2004 Vizquel had a fluky high batting average, and most of his offensive value is batting average.

Reason #2: He's 38. Barry Bonds and Randy Johnson notwithstanding, the VAST majority of players are in steep decline in their late 30s.

Reason #3: He's played his entire career in the American League. Now, at 38, he has to face a league's worth of pitchers the majority of whom he's never faced. The majority of hitters who switch leagues suffer a significant performance decline (see Pierzynski, AJ).

Reason #4: He is moving from a neutral environment in Cleveland to an extreme run-suppressing environment in San Francisco.

The likelihood is, Vizquel is going to be a very substantial liability offensively. My suspicion is that his offensive line will look something like this, assuming a full season's worth of ABs:

.260 / .325 / .345 / 5 HR / 12 SB / 7 CS

Let's look at a couple of other things:

Player E: 397 AB; .292 / .322 / .431 / 7 HR / 1 SB / 3 CS

Player F: 542 AB; .276 / .344 / .351 / 4 HR / 53 SB / 23 CS

These represent (some of) the alternative universes to the one where the Giants overpay for Omar Vizquel. Player E is, of course, 2004 Deivi Cruz. Of course, I don't believe that he'd do that again either. Player F is the average season over the last three years for the recently-released David Eckstein, who as of right now could be had off waivers from Anaheim, who cut him after signing Orlando Cabrera.

Cruz has the advantage of being cheap. No, he doesn't have the greatest range of any shortstop you ever saw. But at $800,000 he allowed the Giants to spend money elsewhere. Eckstein is young and relatively cheap (likely to make about $2.5M in arbitration) after only four years in the league. Yes, he looks silly playing shorstop.

Of course, the rejoinder to all of this is that Vizquel was signed for his DEFENSE (this will be an ongoing theme here). To which I can only respond two ways. 1. DEFENSE WASN'T THE PROBLEM. 2. THE GUY IS 38! Once upon a time Vizquel was a defensive wizard. In fact, he's probably the best defensive shortstop I ever personally watched play ... in 1995. But to give the guy a 3-year contract based on his defensive back when he was young? That's just foolish.

There is no real basis for the conclusion that Vizquel will be "productive but not spectacular" for his age 38 and 39 seasons. He was productive but not spectacular in his age 37 season in Cleveland. To give him a 3-year deal based on that season is crazy.

Moving on.

Mike Matheny. I don't even know where to start on this one. So many have posted exactly what I think that to exhaustively demonstrate the reasons this was a bad signing would be a waste of time. So I'll simply summarize it.

1. He's too old. How many productive 37-year-old catchers can you name?

2. He's a terrible liability at the plate. I mean, seriously - Neifi-esque liability.

3. His defense is on the decline. It's still good, but ... who cares?

4. The idea that he'll magically make the young pitchers better is a myth. I'm sorry, it just is. If you look at Cardinal pitching stats w/Matheny and wo/Matheny, pitchers weren't any better with Matheny behind the plate.

5. (and this is the big one) The Giants ALREADY HAD a guy who can give everything Matheny supposedly offered for a tiny fraction of the price. Yorvit Torrealba is a young, cheap, home-grown catcher who offers respectable offense and above-average defense. At the very least he'd have outperformed Matheny at the plate while slightly underperforming defensively. That would have been the worst-case scenario for a 500 AB year from Torrealba. But of course, why go with the cheap, superior alternative you already have when you can badly overpay for something worse, right?

Moving on.

Benitez. This is the best signing they've made, but it's still not very good. Benitez is 32 and they gave him a 3-year, $27M contract. As I recall, the last time they gave a fireballing closer a 4-year, $32M deal it didn't work out very well.

Benitez is a very good reliever, although not as good as he was in 2004. He strikes guys out, seems to have improved his control, and his mental issues don't scare me as much as they do some people. The bullpen was a complete disaster in 2004, and Benitez is a huge improvement over Hermanson or Herges. I'd much rather have Benitez than Troy Percival.

It's only not a great signing because there were better ways to spend those millions of dollars. Like on a real right fielder (wait for it, we're getting there), a real center fielder (rather than a 38-year-old platoon player) or a slugging first baseman. But I'm ok with Benitez.

And now we get to the meat of it (the point where steam starts coming out my ears) - the coach's boy. Yet again, many many reasons not to pay $6.5M per year for Moises Alou. Some of them have already been posted to this blog.

Reason #1: HE'S TOO OLD. I'm sorry that I'm being repetitive, but didn't anyone watch the Diamondbacks last year? When you build a team entirely out of really old players eventually the odds will get you and the team all collapses at once. Moises Alou turned 38 in the middle of last season. He'll turn 39 during his first year with the Giants and 40 during his second. Newsflash to Brian Sabean - NOT EVERY PLAYER IS BARRY BONDS.

Reason #2: Wrigley. He's been with the Cubs for three years. Check this out:

Overall OPS: .837 (pretty good, not special)
Wrigley OPS: .940 (very productive)
Other OPS: .744 (miserable and useless)

Another newsflash to Mr. Sabean - if "Other OPS" represents an amalgamation of other road parks for a Chicago Cub, SBC Park is MUCH WORSE than that amalgamation. Alou was basically a useless scrub outside of Wrigley the last three years. .264 / .327 / .417 kind of useless. And he's going to be 39 - you think he's going to get BETTER at this point?

Reason #3: He gets hurt. A lot. He's played 140 games twice in the last five years.

Reason #4: Defense. Anyone who reads here knows I'm not obsessed with defense, but playing a guy who's known as a really bad left fielder in an extremely difficult right field is just asking for trouble. Alou is going to be Glenallen Hill bad. Playing him in right field is like asking a first baseman to play right field. This is going to be ugly.

The Giants probably just signed Alou to play like Michael Tucker with fewer walks and inferior defense for 4 times the price. Nice job, guys. For those who think that hitting behind Bonds will magically undo all the above factors (and since when is "The Bonds Effect for the guy hitting behind Bonds? Didn't it use to be the guy hitting in FRONT of Bonds who got the "steady diet of fastballs" and the corresponding 200-point OPS boost?), enjoy your time at Hogwarts. Sure worked well for AJ Pierzynski.

Just because I'm a glutton for punishment, I'm going to actually go through this lineup that he posted.

1 Durham (2B) - no complaints. Solid leadoff hitter.
2 Vizquel (SS) - out-machine in the two-spot. Assuming he's not hurt and we're not looking at Deivi by June.
3 Snow (1B) - This is almost too funny. Snow has 346 great ABs and people are ready to anoint him Carlos Delgado. 2004 was JTs best year as a pro. By a lot. At age 36. He turns 37 in February. Which represents real life, the 346 ABs in 2004 or the 2500 ABs of mediocrity between 1997 and 2003?
4 Bonds (LF) - Not to put too fine a point on it, but he's 40. At some point...
5 Alou (RF) - Would you have wanted to see Michael Tucker in this spot?
6 Alfonzo (3B) - Learn to spell. .740 OPS since joining the Giants. You know that's really bad, right, even for a #6 hitter?
7 Grissom (CF) - Over the last three years, .717 OPS against right-handed pitching in 1,070 (wasted) ABs. This is not a regular player anymore, and age 38 (in April) he's not getting better.
8 Matheny (C) - This team couldn't afford another automatic out.

That is so NOT a nice lineup. That's a lineup with two hitters in it, hitting first and fourth.

To say this team is in place for a "respectable run at the world series" assumes that Brian Sabean has The Sports Guy's magical "juvenation machine" and can conjure up 1997-1999 versions of Snow, Vizquel, Grissom, Matheny, Alfonzo and Alou. Barring that, this team is a disaster waiting to happen. Expect more Plan B ideas early in the season.

Note that this is being posted simultaneously as a comment response as well as a regular post.

Go Giants.

Nightmare Scenario

2004-12-22T22:59:00.000-08:00

Moises Alou playing right field for $6.5M a year. My opinion of Alou is below.

Mike Matheny catching for $3.5M a year. Yorvit on the bench. Others have commented on this extensively. I agree with them all. He's old, overrated defensively and could never hit.

Omar Vizquel. See below.

Armando Benitez. When this is the best thing you do...

Too angry and depressed to write more right now. More later if I'm feeling self-destructive.

A problem of Vizquellian Proportions

2004-11-15T11:50:00.000-08:00

It's not really that hard to divine what was going through the heads of the Giants' "brain trust" as they decided to sign Omar Vizquel to a 3-year, $12.25M deal. Their thinking on all of these decisions starts and stops with the utterly fallacious thinking that because the 2004 Giants were a 91-win team that scored 850 runs and missed the playoffs by one game, the 2005 Giants will be essentially the same team. Of course, with this impossibly foolish precept as the foundation for their thinking, they will proceed as if minor improvements will get the Giants those 1-2 extra wins and vault them into the playoffs in 2005. Winning in the playoffs, even under this analysis, is not a priority.

The thinking goes that the Giants middle-infield defense wasn't very good. The two shortstops on the 2004 roster, Deivi Cruz and Cody Ransom, are both poor-range defenders who don't flash particularly impressive leather. This, of course, is true. And as Tim pointed out in his review of shortstops below in the comments section, Vizquel represented a halfway decent 2005 stop-gap solution. And if they'd given him a 1-year, $4M contract with a mutual option year, by all means. Vizquel is still a decent player - he can play defense, draw walks, steal bases. I have no doubt we'll enjoy him in 2005. But for God's sake, the guy will be 38 when the season starts - teams with limited resources don't give 38-year-old players 3-year deals. Not everyone can be Barry Bonds (congrats on another well-deserved MVP, big guy) and it's unlikely that Vizquel is anything like him. Hell, the guy failed his physical when Cleveland tried to trade him to Seattle last year.

So basically Sabean signed a guy who is likely to help our team in 2005 and very likely to hurt our team in 2006 and 2007. He plays with a weak hand to begin with, and he plays it poorly. As I understand it, Vizquel had competing offers from several other teams. The winning move in such a scenario is to back out. Getting a guy for more than he's worth is the fabled "winner's curse" and that's what we have with Mr. Vizquel. In 2007 we'll have a $4.5M 40-year-old shortstop. Go Giants. For your enjoyment:

Vizquel:

Age 35 season: 582 AB .275 / .341 / .418
Age 36 season: 250 AB .244 / .321 / .336
Age 37 season: 567 AB .291 / .353 / .388

Shortstop X

Age 35 season: 583 AB / .293 / .390 / .420
Age 36 season: 396 AB / .313 / .389 / .487
Age 37 season: 156 AB / .256 / .373 / .372
Age 38 season: 507 AB / .245 / .305 / .367
Age 39 season: 241 AB / .282 / .345 / .382
Age 40 season: 346 AB / .289 / .352 / .419

It bears mentioning that Shortstop X is a better player than Omar Vizquel. And Shortstop X (Barry Larkin, obviously) didn't have to switch leagues after his age 37 season and move into one of the toughest ballparks in the NL to boot.

Go Giants.

WHAT THE HELL IS SABEAN DOING???

2004-11-14T20:39:00.000-08:00

Why Omar Vizquel? Why for so long? Why for so much? And why give away ANOTHER first-round pick for NO REASON??? Cleveland had no intention of offering arbitration to Vizquel. I'm too angry to even analyze why this is so stupid it makes me want to vomit all over myself. Maybe someone can comment and give me an explanation that doesn't make me want to abandon my fandom of this team. It's like they're trying (really hard) to lose.

More unjustified hope

2004-11-09T07:42:00.000-08:00

Note: There is no evidentiary basis for any of what follows.
Note also: This is the year for ideas with no evidentiary basis.

So I'm reading a fantasy baseball column on Rotoworld.com (can you tell I miss baseball season) and the author, one Matthew Pouliot (who writes with greater intelligence and a more obvious connection to reality than most fantasy baseball columnists, the majority of whom would finish last in most of my leagues based on the harebrained advice they dish out) is running over his projected lineups for the American League. It's an interesting and fun exercise, and one which I may try myself at some point later in the offseason.

At any rate, as I'm reading and skimming over the teams in the AL, I notice a couple of oddities in the entry for the Chicago White Sox. For one thing, they still have Paul Konerko, even though my assumption was/is that he will be traded. And as I scan down their starting lineup I was surprised to see:

C: A.J. Pierzynksi

And then further below:

RHP: Jerome Williams

Needless to say I read a little more closely, curious to see how he arrived at these two 2004 Giants being on the White Sox roster. What I see is that he envisions a "mutually beneficial" trade between these two teams. The trade sends Jerome and AJ to Chicago for Carlos Lee and Damaso Marte. The logic runs as follows: The White Sox want to trade one of Konerko or Lee, presumably for financial reasons (it's not for performance reasons, given that he has Lee being replaced in the White Sox lineup by either Carl Everett or Brian Jordan. The theory continues that it will be Lee that gets traded rather than Konerko, the market for the latter being depressed because of the presence of superior free agent options in the market, named Carlos Delgado and Richie Sexson.

Let's examine the premises of this trade and see if it's either feasible or beneficial (to the Giants) or both.

First off, let's at least look at the assertion that Konerko will run distant third to Delgado and Sexson in the 2005 market.

2004 Stats:

Konerko: Age 28; 563 AB; .277 / .359 / .535 / 41 HR / 117 RBI / 107 K
Delgado: Age 32; 458 AB; .269 / .372 / .535 / 32 HR / 99 RBI / 115 K
Sexson: Age 29: 90 AB; .233 / .337 / .578 / 9 HR / 23 RBI / 21 K

3-year averages:

Konerko: 525 AB; .275 / .344 / .483 / 29 HR / 95 RBI / 75 K
Deldago: 511 AB; 284 / .403 / .561 / 35 HR / 114 RBI / 126 K
Sexson: 422 AB; .273 / .369 / .530 / 21 HR / 83 RBI / 103 K

Of course, all of these numbers arguably don't tell the whole story. Konerko had his best year in 2004 while Sexson only logged 90 ABs because of injuries. Delgado had an off-season. The 3-year numbers reflect that each of them has had one year that was either off because of performance (Konerko's 2003) or injuries (Delgado's and Sexson's 2004).

I think it's safe to say that Delgado is a better hitter than Konerko, but that doesn't mean he's a better investment. For one thing he's four years older. Let's look at a couple of examples:

Slugger X: Age 31 season: .314 / .435 / .598
Slugger X: Age 32 season: .250 / .412 / .527
Slugger X: Age 33 season: .208 / .342 / .379

Slugger Y: Age 31 season: .337 / .402 / .591
Slugger Y: Age 32 season: .281 / .358 / .508
Slugger Y: Age 33 season: .272 / .365 / .498

Of course there are plenty of counterexamples to Sluggers X and Y (Jason Giambi and Mo Vaughn) but both were big, slugging 1B/DH types just like Delgado and both began to decline and fall to injuries around Delgado's age, so to simply assume that Delgado will rebound from 2004 and go back to being the monster he was before is foolish.

As far as Sexson is concerned, he's always been a little overrated because he hits 40 homers and because when he does get ahold of one he hits it so damn far. But this is a guy who has never hit .300 over a season, never had an OBP of .380 and never slugged .600, despite playing in some pretty favorable ballparks. So he doesn't really deserve to be in the same discussion as Delgado, especially since he's coming off a shoulder injury that caused him to miss almost all of the 2004 season.

Which brings us to Konerko. At age 28, he just had his best season at the plate, following his worst season (a downright depressing .305 / .399) 2003. But if you view 2003 as a fluke, you're talking about a player who has a very defined level of performance:

1999: .863
2000: .844
2001: .856
2002: .857
2004: .894

My guess is that this represents Konerko's performance level, and that he'll probably have a career year some time in the next three years when his batting average, stable at around .285 for the most part, will spike up to .310 and he'll put up a Jeff Kent 2000 season, something like .310 / .395 / .580. Konerko is a solid slugging 1B but is not likely to ever have the kind of career peak that others mentioned in this post (Delgado, Giambi, Vaughn) have enjoyed.

Let's look at one other axis:

2004 Salaries

Konerko: $8M
Delgado: $19.7M
Sexson: $8.75M

In my view, Konerko probably represents the best investment of these three, given the injury concerns for both the other two and their higher price tags. But that's just me. Let's move on, since this was a long diversion (like something else I could name...)

Turning to the trade itself, let's examine the players:

Carlos Lee. I love this guy, with caveats.

He can hit a lot, but often only does so in the second half (2002 and 2003). He's a lot like Konerko has a hitter, actually - hits for a decent average, draws enough walks but not a ton, hits for good power (although he's yet to have the 40-homer season that Konerko just had). He's more useful than Konerko on the basepaths (29 steals over the last two years on 38 attempts) and doesn't strike out much (which you all know doesn't matter that much to me).

One thing I do like a lot about him is that he doesn't hit a lot of ground balls, relatively speaking. In 2004 his GB/FB ratio was 0.68. If we're auditioning the guy for the spot behind Bonds, this is crucial. We've learned the hard way with our various slow, groundball-hitting catchers that if you put a ground ball hitter behind a guy who's constantly on base, you wind up with a lot of double plays. This is why I used to want to see Rich Aurilia hitting behind Bonds (back when he was good), because he hit a lot of fly balls.

A problem - he plays left field. For some reason a lot of commentators looking at potential right fielders for the Giants are looking mostly at mashing left fielders like Lee and Alou. I'm not sure why - Lee isn't a particularly good left fielder despite his natural speed, so he'd have to be really terrific at the plate in order to be valuable given his likely defense in right.

The upside is this:

2nd half, 2002: .283 / .407 / .521
2nd half, 2003: .325 / .350 / .569
Season, 2004: .305 / .366 / .525
2nd half, 2004: .322 / .376 / .599

There are a lot of hitting skills here, and they're possessed by a 28-year-old outfielder with speed who manages to stay on the field (569 ABs average over the last 3 years). He hasn't hit better at Commiskey than away from it. He doesn't have big platoon splits (in fact has a slight reverse platoon split).

So really the evaluation on Lee comes down to defense and cost. He made $6.5M in 2004 and earned it. But he'll be more expensive in 2005. He'll make $8M in 2005. If he can manage to string two of those big halves together and hit .315 / .375 / .550 for a whole season, he'll be worth it. It will be left to people with a better sense of defense than me to decide if he is capable of manning right field at SBC Park.

Damaso Marte. Are we smart enough to trade for this guy? All he's done is strike out 269 batters in 258 major-league innings. 2004 was his worst year, mostly because he allowed 10 home runs after allowing only 3 the previous year. Other than that, his peripherals were pretty steady. He has a career 3.10 / 1.18 line over those 258 innings. He's left-handed and he absolutely devours lefties, who hit a pathetic .154 / .245 / .225 off him over the last three years. He's also effective against righties, who hit .238 / .320 / .368 off him over the same period.

He has closed a little for the White Sox (27 career saves) but has blown too many for them. Remember, this is the same team that gave up on Keith Foulke. Marte would be a fantastic addition to the Giants bullpen, and hasn't yet gotten too expensive (although he is arbitration-eligible this year).

So it's safe to say that the Giants get a lot of value in this deal, although there are caveats about whether or not Carlos Lee fits into a team that clearly does not have an opening in left field. Let's look at what the Giants would be giving up.

AJ Pierzynski - my views on him are well-known. He's not nearly good enough to justify either his cost ($3.5M in 2004 and only going up) or his personality. His stats in SF are not likely ever reach his 2003 career season in Minnesota. He's not particularly good defensively and is a clubhouse cancer. The White Sox can have him. I am a little curious that the Giants don't get Miguel Olivo in this deal, though.

Jerome Williams - this is who we're really giving up in this trade. People have hopes for Jerome ranging from solid #3 starter to staff ace. So far he's been more the first than the second, averaging 130 innings of .377 / 1.28 ball with a merely adequate strikeout rate. But he's 22 and there are a lot of possible futures for him. Truth be told, while I like him, I was never as high on him as a lot of others. I expected Foppert to be the one of 2003's "big three" prospects that turned into an ace. But if Kenny Williams (and his noted disdain for the "fantasy baseball" approach of, say, Theo Epstein) can be convinced that Jerome is 200 innings of 3.30 / 1.25 waiting to happen (which might actually be true) for several cheap years, and if he's unhappy with Marte for whatever reason (we know he's bad at reliever evaluations - he traded Foulke for Billy Koch), this is a deal that could actually get done.

So IF Carlos Lee can play right field for the Giants, I think this would make the team better. It could get done because it saves the White Sox money and gives them a starter they feel they need and gives the Giants both the slugger they need to back up Barry as well as a guy who will immediately become the best reliever in the bullpen (but does he have enough moxie... hrm...). If this deal is to get done, The White Sox will have to have given up on 26-year-old Miguel Olivo. Personally, I think that's a little crazy, and would be happy to see the Giants pick him up and make a project out of him. I think his strong first half in 2004 (.264 / .310 / .486) demonstrated some actual hitting skills. But that's a separate issue. I don't think the Giants are going to get even Kenny Williams to just throw Olivo into the deal. And I'd take it the way its been presented, given a favorable defensive evaluation.

Maybe Moises

2004-11-08T16:45:00.000-08:00

I suppose it was inevitable that this rumor / news would come up. Despite playing for the ultimate players' manager, a guy that gets more out of his players than anyone else in the game, Moises Alou is talking about leaving the Chicago Cubs and coming to San Francisco to play for his dad. The real question is - do we want him?

The good

He can still hit. Alou was a great hitter this year and stayed healthy. His .293 / .361 / .557 line over 601 (!!!) ABs for Chicago made him extremely valuable, and an all-star. He hit 39 home runs. For those who care about such things, 106 runs and 106 RBI. I know that "Goliath himself couldn't protect Barry Bonds" but having Alou instead of the collection of scraps we had hitting 5th this year probably would have put Barry at 150+ runs scored and the Giants in the playoffs.

He got better as the season wore in in 2004. Pre-break: .836. Post-break: 1.017. (!) He's actually been a second-half player for years.

The Bad

He's old. 38. Imagine a starting outfield of Bonds (40), Grissom (38) and Alou (38). He's managed to stay healthy the last two years, but injuries are an issue.

He can't field. I mean, he's a left fielder with a bad arm. We're talking about having him play right field at Pac Bell Park? That seems like a very bad idea. Playing right in our yard is tough, and he's not even a particularly good left fielder. We might gain on offense (well, we WILL gain on offense) if he hits like he did last year, but there will be a lot of cringe-worthy defense if he's playing right.

Wrigley really helped him. Over the last three years with the Cubs, he logged 1,650 ABs total (really good for a brittle guy). Look at this:

Home: 782 AB; .304 / .381 / .559
Road: 868 AB; .264 /.327 / .417

These splits were never so stark as they were in 2004:

Home: 301 AB; .339 / .405 / .714
Road: 300 AB; .247 / .316 / .400

Those are Coors-like splits, folks, and unless we think there's a good reason that they are misleading, attention must be paid. For reference:

Tucker: .256 / .353 / .412

The Ridiculous

They aren't talking about having hit 3rd. They aren't talking about moving Bonds back to 3rd and having Alou hit 4th. No, they're talking about having Alou hit 5th, presumably leaving the likes of JT Snow, Pedro Feliz or AJ Pierzynski hitting third. Madness is sweeping this country in more ways than one.

Conclusion

I can't sign onto this one. Given his age and his home/road splits I just don't see Alou hitting like he did in 2004 for the Giants in 2005. And he'd need to hit that way to be a real asset. More likely he'll hit somewhere in the same vicinity that Tucker did or maybe a little better while being a terrible liability in right field and giving fly ball pitchers (of which the Giants have several) fits as balls dropped all over the field. I started this entry hoping I could sign onto Moises Alou for one year, $4.5M, but I'm afraid I just can't do it.

Which almost assuredly means it will happen.

Comments

2004-11-05T16:37:00.000-08:00

Just to let everyone know, you can now leave comments at the bottom of each post. Leaving them will give me an idea that people are actually reading, which will encourage more posting. If that's desirable.

Standing Pat

2004-11-04T10:37:00.000-08:00

I think a few were expecting to see some off-topic election ranting in this space, and truth be told, I considered it. But that's not what this space is for, and so I'll refrain, and stick to why we're here - the Giants.

The Giants made a number of unsurprising moves, and these moves say a lot about what we can expect in the next year. Suffice it to say, we're going to have a very similar to team to the one we had last year.

Deivi Cruz signed: This isn't any kind of surprise. Cruz has, as I and many others have noted, a surprising and helpful season for the Giants in 2004. Is anyone shocked that they read this to mean that, at age 31, he's become a better player? Here's what Cruz did for a few years before getting to the Giants:

2003: .250 / .269 / .378 over 548 ABs with the Orioles
2002: .263 / .294 / .366 over 514 ABs with the Padres
2001: .256 / .291 / .379 over 414 ABs with the Tigers

So the question is, which is the real Cruz? That 1,500 AB span or his 397 ABs of .292 / .322 / .431 in 2004 with the Giants? His offense is highly dependent on batting average, and .292 was his highest since 2000. If he hits .292 again, he'll be valuable. If he regresses to the previous 3 years and hits .258, he won't be.

The good news is at least they didn't pay too much for him. After the team gave Neifi Perez a 2-year, multi-million dollar contract I was terrified at what they'd do with Cruz. But in a rare move, he was signed to a one-year, $800,000 (guaranteed) deal with some incentives. At this price, I don't feel bad about him being on the roster even if he isn't very good.

JT Snow's option picked up: How great was Snow in 2004? And how unlikely that he'll be similarly great in 2005? Snow was largely considered to be on his way out, of the Giants and possibly of the league at age 36, but then he put up an Edgar Martinez-like line in 2004 and so now he'll be back, for $2M in 2005, presumably playing 1B against right-handed pitchers and playing good defense. Obviously if he recreates 2004 he's very valuable for $2M, but if he returns to the previous few years (where he still got on base, but didn't hit for anything like the average or power of 2004) he'll be merely acceptable. Snow isn't really a problem, given his likely .380+ OBP, but first base was an area where the Giants could have improved, and now won't.

Here's what really bugs me, as will surprise no one. They also picked up Marquis Grissom's $2.5M option. I mean come on - how much blood do you want to squeeze from a stone? It's hard to believe the Giants still haven't realized that Grissom is a platoon player. I just don't see how it's hard to figure it out. He wasn't good overall in 2004 like he was in 2003 (although still performed over my projection):

2004: .279 / .323 / .450 over 562 ABs. Of course, the problem is really this:

Vs. RHP: .266 / .311 / .404 over 413 ABs
VS. LHP: .315 / .356 / .577 over 149 ABs

Are you really trying to tell me that those 413 ABs can't be put to more productive use? Grissom isn't Andruw Jones, Jim Edmonds or Tsyoshi Shinjo in the field anymore. He once was, but now he's 37 and will turn 38 in April, and there aren't many good 38-year-old center fielders. Just for giggles:

Dustan Mohr vs. RHP: .297 / .433 / .466 over 148 ABs

Mohr looks a little silly, but he could play CF in a platoon with Grissom and actually give the Giants good offense out of the CF position. Of course, we've been over this before with other players and it hasn't happened, and won't now. The Giants have an expensive weapon in Grissom that they will make into a moderately-priced liability by playing him full-time. It's obviously wrong and has been obviously wrong for several years and they will continue to do it.

Finally, they also picked up the $2.5M option on Brett "Bombko" Tomko. I guess that's what he gets for pitching really REALLY well down the stretch (which admittedly, he did). I don't have too much to say about this. Tomko pitched well enough to be worth $2.5M in 2005, but I don't believe he'll pitch the way he did in the second half. If he does, and gives the Giants about 200 innings of slightly above-average pitching, he'll be a reasonable investment. Still, I've already gone on the record that I want the Giants to sign Brad Radke, and that creates a logjam in the rotation. At that point, we'd be looking at Schmidt, Radke, Rueter, Tomko, Williams and Lowry all deserving of rotation spots, with Foppert on the outside looking in. They say you can never have too much starting pitching, and I generally agree, but if Tomko pitches like he did in the first half he's a liability. We can hope that his second half represents a breakout. He's 31. It's possible. And that second half (3.15 ERA / 6.6 innings per start /2-1 K-BB ratio after the break) was really very impressive.

Strange note on Tomko - he pitched far better on the road than at SBC. I have no real explanation for this.

Just to show there is some modicum of sanity in the front office, at least Jason Christianson's $3.25M option was declined. Christianson never got anywhere near the flak, but his contract was probably a worse investment than Marvin Benard's. At least Benard used to be good.

So at this point improvement is going to have to come either in right field, catcher or pitching. I think we all expect movement within the bullpen, and Tucker's got another year under contract, so we're looking at basically the same team as last year, but with (in theory) better relievers. I'm sure the thinking is that we missed the playoffs by a game, so getting a better set of relievers will push us over the top ... into a first-round playoff exit. And even that assumption is flawed, since that assumes that none of Bonds, Snow or Cruz decline at all from 2004. All are likely to do so, as is Lowry.

Will continue to post on moves. If the Giants sign Magglio Ordonez to play right field, then we'll talk about the playoffs.

The overratedness of Brian Cashman

2004-11-01T16:21:00.000-08:00

A friend emailed me this question, and since the response kind of took on a life of its own, I figured I'd put it up here:

I found myself in a minority at an office party last week with my argument that Cashman's an overrated GM. And these were Mets fans, not Yankees fans. My basic argument is that Cashman has, respective to anyone else, an unlimited budget and a team for which free agents (generally) want to play, yet he ends up with Tony Clark (Tiger reject) splitting with Olerud at first, and with Miguel Cairo at second. I know he had Giambi slated for first, but if Cashman had taken the gazillion dollars he's paying A-Rod and spent it on a quality utility infielder/first baseman/second baseman and another decent reliever, they'd have been even more dominant this year and may have avoided The Collapse. Also, who exactly has Cashman brought up through the farm system? He wasn't around when Jeter/Williams/Posada/Rivera were drafted and brought up. - Josh

I absolutely couldn't agree more. He had $183M to spend on his team, and he still only wound up with about 16 good players on his 25-man roster. Put it this way - this is the Yankees' final 25:

C: Posada / Flaherty
1B: Olerud / Clark
2B: Cairo
SS: Jeter
3B: Pay-Rod
IF: E. Wilson
LF: Matsui
CF: Bernie
RF: Sheffield
OF: Lofton
OF: Bubba Crosby
DH: Ruben Sierra

SP: Mussina
SP: Brown
SP: Vazquez
SP: El Duque
SP: Lieber
RHP: Rivera
RHP: Gordon
RHP: Quantrill
RHP: Sturtze
RHP: Loaiza
LHP: Heredia

Of that 25-man roster you essentially have nine stars that make most of the money (Posada, Jeter, Pay-Rod, Matsui, Sheffield, Mussina, Brown, Vazquez and Rivera), one player who produces more than he earns (Gordon), a bunch of expensive, washed-up veterans (Bernie, Sierra, Olerud, Lofton, Quantrill) and a bunch of scrubs (Flaherty, Cairo, Clark, Wilson, Crosby, Lieber, Sturtze, Loiaza, Heredia).

On a team that spends $183M there should only be stars and solid midlevel players. Cashman is fine as long as he can just overbid for the best players (although even that is generous, as he picked up Brown and Vazquez for a ton of money and neither performed for him - but I don' t think that's his fault. I expected both to do well. Still, if you look at failed experiments like Steve Karsay, Chris Hammond, etc... ), but is actually very much like Brian Sabean when it comes to picking up quality replacement-level players. He equates experience with talent. Compare the efforts of Theo Epstein at specific positions to those of Cashman:

First Base

Cashman signs GIambi to a gazillion-dollar contract, then when Giambi gets hurt Cashman picks up Tony Clark off the scrap heap (after he wasn't good enough for either the Red Sox or the Tigers) and Olerud, who was cut by the Mariners. He couldn't have traded for someone better than that? Hell, I imagine Ricciardi would have traded Delgado...

Epstein, by contrast, claims Kevin Millar off waivers when the Marlins try to sell him to Japan without passing him through waivers first. Millar costs a paltry fraction of what Giambi or even Olerud cost the Yankees. Millar posts an OPS of about .840 over his two seasons (about $6M) for the Red Sox.

Designated Hitter:

This one just seems too easy. All you have to do is sign a big fat guy who can hit homers, right? Yet the Yankees never seem to do it right. Ruben Sierra? You've got to be kidding me. Sierra was a pretty good player, once upon a time. Of course, we were in high school then. His last good full season was 1991, when he had an .859 OPS for Texas. Since then he's been above replacement-level just once, in 2001 for 344 ABs, also for the Rangers. As Joe Sheehan is so fond of saying, $183M should buy more than this. For the Yankees to have a 40-year-old DH with a .752 OPS is utterly pathetic. This is what happens when Cashman tries to sign players that don't cost eight figures. By contrast, even Tino Martinez was better than this, posting an .823 OPS for Tampa Bay. Of course, Tino was also better than the first basemen on the Yanks roster.

Who did Theo sign? David Ortiz. He basically got him for free from the Twins. He made $4.5M this year because of an arbitration award after his monster year last year, and will make a lot of money soon, but he was around $7M these last two years and was an MVP candidate both years. I don't think anyone saw how good Ortiz was going to be (he was good with Minnesota, putting up an .839 OPS with huge platoon splits, but he wasn't signed to play full-time initially) but he was clearly a productive player who was in his prime (age 27) when Theo signed him.

Infielders:

Both teams had to find second basemen. The Yankees had traded Soriano to get A-Rod and Todd Walker had been allowed to leave to be overpaid by the Cubs. Everyone expected Cashman to trade for someone great (Kent? Durham? Vidro?) but didn't get a deal done, partially because he has nothing to trade away. So he elevated backup Miguel Cairo to a full-time job. The results were predictable: .292 / .346 / .417 from the Yankees second baseman. That's actually a little better than I'd have expected from Cairo, but as I wrote above - $183M should buy more than this.

Of course Theo signed one of my favorite guys, Mark Bellhorn. I had him on my fantasy team when he broke out with the Cubs, then laid off him last year. All he does is walk and hit for some power. Sure, he strikes out a lot, but he gave the Red Sox the season they thought they'd gotten from Walker the year before. Got on base a ton for the big hitters and scored a bunch of runs.

In addition, the previous year Theo had inherited Shea Hillenbrand, who you could tell was someone he was itching to give away (which he did). Who did he start in his place? Former Giant Bill Mueller, another guy with great strike-zone judgment. Mueller won the batting title and contended for the 2003 MVP.

Outfielders:

Hard to really fault Cashman for his outfield. Matsui and Sheffield were both his signings and both were terrific this year. Bernie is clearly over the hill, but his contract is immovable and he was a great player when that deal was signed.

Similarly, not a lot to say about the Red Sox outfield. Damon is a star who is good but underperforms relative to his salary, but he was signed by Duquette. Similarly, Nixon is a budding star who's been in the organizaition forever and Manny is a star with the second-largest contract in the game. His backup outfielders are better than the useless nobodies that Cashman picked up, but Kapler and Dave Roberts aren't stars either. Still, they're good situational players.

Pitching

Getting long here, but just briefly - compare Mike Timlin to Tanyon Sturtze and Alan Embree to Felix Heredia. Mariano and Gordon are stars, but Cashman's bullpen basically sucked besides them.

So yeah - he's totally and massively overrated. I could build a better team for $130M than he built for $183M. And so can Theo. :-)

P.S. The best prospect to be developed under Cashman is Soriano. He's drafted a couple of good players, but for the most part trades them away before they make it up to the big club.

Dare we hope...

2004-10-31T08:24:00.000-08:00

Ah yes. The offseason, and so shortly into it we're already talking about prospects. Which, for a Giants fan, is always a dicey proposition. With 2004 stats and some 2003 books in hand, I'll look at a couple of Giants farmhands every time I do this. We'll see if we have any legitimate basis for optimism.

Boring, I suppose, but I think any conversation about Giants minor-league players has to start with Matt Cain, even though I don't believe he'll make it to the majors this year. That the Giants' best prospect is a 19-year-old pitcher is, of course, depressing, but he's a pretty impressive 19-year-old pitcher.

Cain was drafted in the first round of the 2002 draft right out of high school. His 2003 season in the Sally league was a terrific success in terms of performance, but of course was also marred with an elbow injury. He made just 14 starts, but averaged almost 7 strikeouts per start. So that's nice. 2004 was a good year for Cain, one in which he certainly solidified his prospect status. For one thing, he began the season at single-A San Jose as a 19-year-old, which is not outrageous but still a stretch for a guy his age. He was pretty dominant at San Jose.

He made 13 starts for San Jose, averaging about 5 1/2 innings per start. I don't have his pitch counts in front of me, but I'm at least hopeful that this indicates a level of care with his arm that is utterly crucial at his age. His numbers at San Jose were eye-catching:

72.2 IP; 1.86 ERA; 58 hits; 17 BBs; 89 Ks

Let's pause for a second here, only because I so enjoy looking at that stat line. This pitcher is 19 and only walked about 2 batters per 9 innings while striking out 11. A 5.5-1 K-BB ratio. At age 19. I don't care that it's in the California league. Most pitchers with incredible stuff can't throw it for strikes initially. Cain can. And so the Giants front office, seeing a level of success this tremendous (more strikeouts than baserunners), send the fast-tracked Cain up the latter to AA Norwich for the second half of the season. And Cain more than held his own. He made 15 starts for Norwich, totalling 86 innings, or about 5.7 IP/start. He totaled 158.2 innings this year. I think that's probably 15 too many, but it's a quibble (I hope). Cain was a very good pitcher at AA, putting up the following numbers:

86 IP; 3.35 ERA; 73 hits; 40 BBs; 72 Ks

Clearly this is not the same level of performance he enjoyed at San Jose. Duh. But he still struck out nearly twice as many as he walked. My guess is that as a 19-year-old at AA he didn't quite trust his stuff as much after getting hit hard initially. So what can we expect from Cain? Well, the fast track that he's on would suggest that he starts the year back at AA. If he succeeds he could see a promotion midseason to AAA Fresno and then could compete for a job in 2006. In a strange parallel universe, Cain makes the San Francisco Giants as a short reliever out of the bullpen - sort of the Johan Santana approach. Use him as what would likely be a highly effective reliever on the big club for a year or two and then make him a starter in 2006. The Giants don't typically work this way, so I consider this extremely unlikely. But I think a couple of years of throwing 80 innings instead of 160 would be good for his exceedingly valuable arm.

I guess we'll also look at last year's darling, Merkin Valdez. After a similarly dominating 2003 for Hagerstown in the Sally League, 2004 was an off-year for the Magician, although not as bad as some might think. He pitched a total of 84 innings this year at four different levels, from San Jose all the way to San Francisco. Predictably, the tougher the competition was, the worse Valdez pitched. The numbers sum it up better than I can:

San Jose: 35.2 IP (7 starts); 2.52 ERA; 30 hits; 5 BBs; 40 Ks
Norwich: 41.2 IP (7 starts, 3 relief appearances); 4.32 ERA; 35 hits; 15 BBs; 15 Ks
Fresno: 5 IP (1 start); 7.20 ERA; 6 hits; 4 BBs; 5 Ks
San Francisco: 1.2 IP (2 relief appearances); 27.00 ERA; 4 hits; 3 BBs; 2 Ks

And what did we really expect? Rick Ankiel in 2000? This is the Giants and Valdez had pitched in LOW-A in 2003. So while they were hoping to have K-Rod on their hands, I'd characterize 2004 as an experiment in ultra fasttracking gone wrong. Valdez is 22 (we think) and while it was reasonable to hope for a meteoric rise from the Sally League to the Pacific Cloast League, we shouldn't be terribly surprised that it didn't happen. I'd toss out the tiny sample numbers from AAA and MLB (while noting that even though he got knocked around over that 6.2 inning period, he still struck out 7) and look at the 77.1 IP he threw between A and AA. If I told you that his season following his prospect-status breakout in 2003 was marred by injury but that he threw 77.1 IP (14 starts) of 3.49 / 1.10 / 75-22 BB ball, I think we'd all agree that this represented a pretty decent step forward for a guy with minimal minor-league experience.

So what can we expert from Merkin in 2005? Looked at through a lens that doesn't account for the San Francisco Giants' bullpen woes that resulted in him getting called up in August and his one bad start at Fresno, the guy pitched extremely well for San Jose and then held his own at Norwich. He may some day wind up as the Giants closer (I hope not - if he can add a third pitch and build arm strength, he's much more valuable as a starter, and besides - that's what Aardsma's for), but for now he should be starting for Norwich, with with a promotion to Fresno if he can get his ERA into the mid 3s and keep his K/BB ratio where it was in San Jose this past year. Bringing him into San Francisco's bullpen as a reliever (similar to Cain above) is also an option, but he's almost 4 years older than Cain, so I'm not sure this is as compelling, particularly given the need to enhance his pitch repertoire, something he's not likely to do as a reliever in the majors.

And since we talked about two guys with dominating stuff, let's talk about someone without it. Let's talk a little bit about Brad Hennessey. I really like this guy, even though I never wanted to see him on the 2004 Giants. He's a story. He missed almost two years to cancer and came back in 2003 to pitch for Hagerstown. He wasn't great there (walked too many for a guy with his stuff) but what did anyone expect? 2004 was probably going to determine if Hennessey had a future, and I think he proved enough to stick around, barely. Hennessey threw a total of 171 innings this year at 3 levels - AA, AAA and MLB. Looked at individually:

AA - 101 IP (18 starts); 3.56 ERA; 106 hits; 34 BBs; 55 Ks
AAA - 35.2 IP (5 starts); 2.02 ERA; 26 hits; 15 BBs; 16 Ks
MLB - 34.1 IP (7 starts); 4.98 ERA; 42 hits; 15 BBs; 25 Ks

Looked at in terms of a season:

171 IP (30 starts, or 5.7 IP); 3.52 ERA; 174 hits; 64 BBs; 96 Ks

Unfortunately, the 5 starts at Fresno look like the fluke here. The numbers for the Giants are about what you'd expect based on his performance at Norwich. Hennessey walks too many for the amount of strikeouts he gets and doesn't look like an innings-eater. If he can refine his control, he's got a shot to be a good #4 starter or long reliever, but I think that's about what we're looking at from a guy who'll turn 25 during the offseason. My guess is that he'll start at Fresno and will only make it out of Fresno if the Giants need help.

One more, since we have to at least pretend the Giants have position players in their system.

I've never seen Mike Cervenak play, and don't know a lot about him. He hasn't made any of my books (Although I'm guessing he will this year after his year at Norwich) but at least based on 2004 he has more promise than just about any other Giants position player in the minors. Cervenak is a third baseman who played most of the year at Norwich and enjoyed a brief trial at Fresno. At AA he looked like the type of player who doesn't typically get drafted by the Giants:

410 ABs; .337 / .414 / .583 / 21 home runs / 53 Ks

Of course, it will surprise no one that the .337 batting average actually scares me, but the guy drew 52 walks in 400 ABs, which is (barely) acceptable for a genuine hitting prospect. In his time at Fresno he continued to show his power, but predictably his average fell:

44 ABs; .250 / .267 / .614 / 5 home runs / 7 Ks

In those 44 Abs, Cervenak didn't draw one walk. The "isolated patience" was actually just a hit-by-pitch. This worries me, as I don't want another Pedro Feliz on the team. Cervenak's not a prospect (he's 28) but I wonder if he can take enough pitches to put Edgardo Alfonzo's numbers for one twentieth the price.

We'll look at a few more later. It's time for football now.

A perfect fit (and a pipe dream)

2004-10-30T15:13:00.000-07:00

I have no doubt that I will talk about this right up until the day he signs with another team, but there is an available free agent player could potentially put the Giants over the top, in a way that's not flashy or massively expensive, but would require some work and medium amounts of money.

2004 was very good for this player, which is unfortunate from my perspective, since I'd still want him even if he'd had a more typical year. Here's what 2004 looked like:

219.2 IP; 3.48 ERA; 1.16 WHIP; 143 Ks; 26 BBs; 23 HR allowed

There's no question that in 2004 this was a very very good pitcher, especially when you consider that he pitched in 2004 for a team in a very friendly hitting environment. Anyone who knows me (which is everyone who reads this) already knows who this is, but I'll talk a little bit more about him in the abstract, so humor me.

This is a pitcher whose skill is clearly control. His strikeout rate is acceptable, but his walk rate is astronomically low. David Wells low. He allows contact, but his unwillingness to put extra guys on base makes this manageable. Now, compare 2004 to his last couple of years.

2003: 212.1 IP; 4.49 ERA; 1.27 WHIP; 120 Ks, 28 BBs, 32 HR allowed
2002: 118.1 IP; 4.72 ERA; 1.22 WHIP; 62 Ks, 20 BBs; 12 HR allowed
2001: 226 IP; 3.94 ERA; 1.15 WHIP; 137 Ks, 26 BBs; 24 HR allowed
2000: 226.2 UP; 4.45 ERA; 1.38 WHIP; 141 Ks; 51 BBs; 27 HR allowed

Let's throw out 2002 simply because it involved injuries and will skew the counting numbers. The three-year average of 2000, 2001 and 2003 look like this :

221.2 IP; 4.29 ERA; 1.29 WHIP; 133 Ks; 33 BBs; 28 HR allowed

Brad Radke, I hereby dub thee - SBC Park pitcher.

Brad Radke, age 32. Brad Radke, pitched his whole career in the AL, facing DH'ed lineups. Brad Radke, played his whole career for the Twins in the Metrodome. Brad Radke - only one year in the majors where he's thrown fewer than 210 innings. Brad Radke, who has pinpoint control. Brad Radke, who has one flaw in his game - allowing the long ball.

Think about it - this is a guy whose ERA is regularly in the mid-4's while his WHIP is in the 1.25 range. Pitchers with a discrepency of this kind are typically those who have trouble keeping the ball in the park. The Giants have a ballpark that helps pitchers like this tremendously.

Of course, as always, there's a problem. Well, a couple of problems. First off, Radke just finished the last year of his contract, a contract that was clearly from the previous era. In 2004 he made $10.75M, and earned it. His previous deal was a 4-year, $36M deal. Unfortunately, with the 2004 year he just had, and in his pitching prime, he is likely to get a deal not terribly dissimilar to this. He was considered by most to be the third-best pitcher in the AL this past year, after Johan Santana and Curt Schilling. Schilling, clearly a significantly better pitcher than Radke, but also quite a bit older, earned $12M at age 38 from the Red Sox this year, as part of a contract signed recently. My guess is that Radke is looking at something around 3 or 4 years at $8M a year.
And he'd be worth that and then some to the Giants.

Without going through and actually running numbers on park effects and a league-switch, I'd very roughly project the following numbers for 2005 if Radke pitched for the Giants (note that these numbers assume that his 2004 breakout was real but probably also represents something of a career season):

220 IP; 3.25 ERA; 1.18 WHIP; 165 K; 28 BB; 18 HR allowed

I believe this projection is conservative, and represents several factors.

1. The switch from the AL to the NL and away from the DH is good for a decrease in offense allowed and in increase in strikeouts, both because of facing hitters for the first time and by facing opposing pitchers.

2. The switch from the Metrodome to SBC park is likely to suppress home runs allowed, probably meaningfully.

3. I believe that at 32 Radke is in his pitching prime.

So for their $8M (or a little more), the Giants get a workhorse pitcher who doesn't give up free passes and whose one weakness is likely to be muted significantly by his pitching environment. I leave you with a comparison:

1. Jose Lima - park effects

1998-9 (Astrodome - yearly averages): 239.2 IP; 3.64 ERA; 178 K; 38 BB; 32 HR allowed

2000 (Enron/ Minute Maid): 196.1 IP; 6.65 ERA; 124 K; 68 BB; 48 HR allowed

2004 (Dodger Stadium): 170.1 IP (24 starts); 4.07 ERA; 93 K; 34 BB; 33 HR allowed

Now Lima's psycho and even more prone to the long ball than Radke, but I'm just saying...

Postscript

2004-10-29T11:17:00.000-07:00

Pedro Feliz; San Francisco Giants
3B/1B Age: 29
.276 / .305 / .485 / 72 / 84 (503 ABs)

Is it too early to start praying that Sabean can sell this ".276 / 22 HR / 84 RBI run-producer" to an old-school GM for something more valuable? His power is real, as I've consistently stated, but the guy just can't get on base. It's astonishing to me that he gets any pitches to hit with his lack of strike-zone judgment (45 unintentional walks in 1,111 career ABs).

At least he's cheap(ish).

Damon Minor; Fresno Grizzlies
1B Age: 30
.302 / .399 / .538 / 48 / 56 (338 ABs)

I'm just saying...

Of Curses, the New School and a bit of Giants baseball

2004-10-28T08:44:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's been a very long time since I've been inspired to put up anything in this space, but frankly I was totally uninspired by the nominal subject of this blog, and even now am not going to spend much time writing about my beloved Giants, as they are not worthy of too many words right now.

However after seeing such a series of historical baseball events these last two weeks, I feel compelled to put down a few thoughts, not so much of the Curt Schilling / Bunch of Idiots mythos that fills the mainstream press, but rather a few observations that, by virtue of being less romantic and quite a bit more ornery than what I read elsewhere, probably won't get mentioned.

First off, let it be known that I was rooting for the Red Sox. Rooting pretty hard, truth be told. This isn't because I'm a Red Sox fan - in fact, I was rather seriously anti-Sox up until a couple of years ago. My position on the Red Sox then was similar to my position on the Cubs now - that they were a big-payroll team that tried to recharacterize incompetence as loveability. I had no patience for a team that spent $100M+ on payroll and then complained about being underdogs all the time. Yes, their fans had suffered through many heartbreaking losses, and care about their team in a way that I found appealing, but as is probably quite foreseeable to anyone that knows me, my opinion on any non-Giants team is usually an opinion of the front office or of an individual player or two. In the Red Sox' case, their ownership and front office were pathetic bumblers who spent like crazy and still couldn't get anything done. Their players seemed to fade at crucial moments and I had no use for them.

All that changed when they decided to hire a guy my age to run the team. The day I read up on Theo Epstein was the day I decided to adopt the Red Sox as my unofficial AL team. Those who got my baseball rant emails from those days might remember that for weeks I would speculate as to what I thought Theo might do, only to find out a few days later that he'd been working on such a deal already. Sign a defensively-superior contact-hitting third baseman with a great eye who will come cheap because of his two years of knee injuries? Done. Claim a productive outfielder / first baseman who'd done nothing but hit well above league average and was on his way to Japan? Done. Claim a power-hitting Mo Vaughn-clone who was disfavored by his AL Central team because he doesn't fit their slap-hitting athletic mold? Done. Move after move I watched Theo Epstein make and just kept nodding my head. People complained that he was doing his job as if he was building a fantasy baseball team. He picked up guys who were cheap and who could hit. He picked up relievers who struck guys out and didn't walk too many. What others saw as building a fantasy team (I'm still not sure what that meant, btw), I saw as a guy simply using the large resources provided him to build a great 25-man roster (as opposed to a great starting lineup and a cruddy group of reserves as Brian Cashman did with the Yankees). I was superbly impressed.

I bet on the Red Sox last year. I thought they had a great team. And as Red Sox teams have done so many times, they lost to the Yankees in the post-season. I thought the Sox had a better team last year. If not for Grady Little, the 2003 Red Sox would have done at least part of what the 2004 Red Sox accomplished. Old-school baseball idiots wrote in defense of Grady Little, saying that he was smart and wise to stick with Pedro through 137 pitches. I'm not going to bother rehashing that, but needless to say I strongly believe that a combination of Mike Timlin and Alan Embree could have closed out Game 7 last year.

Regardless, after that loss Theo went back to work, and because the Red Sox are financially unlimited for all intents and purposes, he went out and signed two of the five best pitchers in the American league. He traded for Curt Schilling (as a side note, giving up on Casey Fossum at just the right time, after refusing to trade him to acquire Javier Vazquez the previous year), probably the second-best pitcher in the AL this year (after the deity that is Johan Santana) and signed Keith Foulke, recently of the also-Sabremetric Athletics, who has been really just amazing for 6 years and strangely no one seems to realize just how good. This is how good [warning: stats tangent coming]:

Over the 6-year period between 1999-2004 (all of which he spent as a reliever) Foulke averaged 87 innings per year. Just for reference, Mariano Rivera, widely and correctly recognized as the best closer in baseball over that span, averaged 70 innings per year. Foulke posted the following numbers over that six-year period:

512.2 IP
2.23 ERA
380 hits allowed
113 walks allowed
0.96 baserunners per inning
514 strikeouts

I bring this all up not because it's all that relevant, but because Foulke is currently the best player in the major leagues who was drafted by the San Francisco Giants, so I just wanted to point out that this guy is an absolutely top-notch, dominant closer, and should be part of the discussion every time the top closers are discussed. And because he gave the Red Sox something else they didn't have in 2003 - a shutdown closer. So the 2004 edition went into spring training with (at the time, arguably) the two best pitchers in the American League and a newly-added top-flight closer to what was already a dominant bullpen.

The point of all this being two things - first off, I root for pretty much any team that has a GM who does things that I think make sense, and secondly, I thought the Red Sox had the best team in the AL. And so I'm happy that they won the World Series. Just not for the same reasons as a lot of other people.

Reason #1 - this is a huge victory for "new-school" baseball analysis. One of the things that allowed the Joe Morgans and Tim McCarvers of the world to continue to stay things like "yeah, all that Moneyball stuff works great in the regular season, but what really matters in the postseason is making sure you bunt a lot and steal a lot of bases" was that none of the new-school GMs (Beane, Epstein, Riccardi, DePodesta) had ever won a World Series. Never mind that Beane runs one of the cheapest teams in baseball and Epstein, Riccardi and DePodesta are all new on the job - none of them had won anything. The A's especially provided fodder for this with their running streak of first-round exits from the postseason.

That's all changed now. The Red Sox played arguably the ultimate Moneyball postseason. With the exception of Dave Roberts' crucial steal against Mariano Rivera in game 4 of the ALCS, the Sox played the most prototypical "big ball" I've ever watched. They won with dominant starting pitching, walks and home runs. It was beautiful. When the leadoff man got on board, they didn't bunt. When Trot Nixon was up 3-0 with the bases loaded Francona gave him the sign to swing away. This was the anti-Angels of 2002 (well, even the Angels of 2002 weren't really what they were portrayed to be, but that's another topic). The Red Sox made lots of errors in the field, stole (to my recollection) zero bases in the world series and swept the thing. McCarver spent the entire series hoping for more bunts, but the only one he got was from Tony LaRussa, bizaarely bunting with Larry Walker with no outs (he later claimed LARRY WALKER was trying to bunt for a hit). It felt, to me as a very biased observer, like watching a generation of outdated baseball thinking pathetically trying to reassert itself against the newer, more effective generation.

Reason #2 - Red Sox fans don't get to whine anymore. This is something I alluded to above. This is a big-money team (#2 overall in payroll after the Yankees) that has largely been the victim of its own incompetence these past decades. As a fan of a genuinely mid-market team (or at least, mid-payroll... grr....), I got tired of hearing Red Sox fans bitch about the teams they were running out, teams that every year picked up new, expensive free agents while I watched my Giants pick up Neifi Perez or Doug Henry. After 2004, the Red Sox are just like the Dodgers - if they suck, it's because they suck, not because they're cursed, and Red Sox fans will just have to deal with it.

Reason #3 - Now people will focus more on the futility of the Cubs who, partially because they have Dusty Baker as their manager, are likely to remain futile.

And that's probably enough for anyone that bothered to read this, but I have to vent a tiny bit about the Giants.

Clearly I was mistaken, at least quantitatively, about the 2004 Giants. Anyone who read my blog could see that I figured them to finish near the bottom of the NL West and have a horrible season, and that didn't happen. They missed the wild card in the NL by a game and played yet another season of competitive baseball.

And this is almost worse than if they had just been awful and had rebuilt. Because it forces me to look at just how easy it would have been to win the NL West. So let's look at a couple of things. First off, how did the Giants outperform my projections by such a vast margin?

1. Barry Bonds had, at age 40, his best season as a pro. Bonds put up an OPS of 1.421, the highest in major-league history. He won another batting title (.362). He set the all-time major-league records for OBP (.609), walks (232) and intentional walks (120 - get your mind wrapped around THAT!). With a player like the 2004 Bonds in the lineup, it's damn difficult not to score runs, and the Giants did score them in bunches. In fact, the Giants had the best offense in the national league, scoring just 5 fewer runs in a far tougher park than St. Louis.

2. JT Snow came back from the dead. After six seasons of failing to top an OPS of .850, JT turned in his best season at the plate at age 36. His .429 / .529 season was arguably more impressive than David Ortiz' .380 / .609 season if you factor in the relative importance of getting on base versus hitting for power and just how difficult it is to hit for power as a lefty playing half one's games at SBC Park. And Ortiz is legitimately considered an MVP candidate.

3. Deivi Cruz. DEIVI CRUZ. When I saw that the Giants had signed him to a minor-league contract, I almost retched. And yet he wound up becoming a productive member of the Giants offense this year. While I wouldn't oversell a .297 / .322 / .431 season, the contrast between this above-average (especially considering ballpark effects) hitting performance and what he replaced (Neifi Perez), Sabean clearly hit a home run by picking up Cruz and then cutting Perez. As I mentioned many times in this space, replacing Perez with even a league-average player is like adding a middle-of-the-lineup hitter to a team. And Cruz was above average.

4. The emergence of Noah Lowry. When you have the top offense in the league, all you need from your pitchers is solidity. And Lowry was quite solid for the Giants this year. In 14 starts, he averaged about 6 innings per start and had an ERA under 4.00 - something the Giants desperately needed, and didn't get from other starters besides Jason Schmidt. When the rotation all but fell apart midseason, Lowry was an enormously important band-aid.

Mostly, they just scored a lot of runs. Mostly, that was because of Barry. If they'd just built a league-average team around him, they'd have won 95 games easily and taken the NL West without breaking a sweat. There are a couple of obvious things they could have done that would have been worth at least the one more win they needed to force a one-game playoff with Houston:

1. Don't trade for AJ Pierzynski. This was something that the "Lunatic Fringe" said all along - Catcher wasn't one of the Giants' glaring weaknesses. Pierzynski was considered a strong player - 27 years old, hit .300, blah blah blah. What I saw was a defensively mediocre catcher who hit a relatively empty .300, was switching leagues, and was facing a huge increase in ballpark difficulty. And sure enough, he went from .360 / .464 his last (career?) season in Minnesota to .319 / .410 with the Giants. Almost all of that decrease was the result of a batting average that went from .312 to .279. Part of that is switching leagues, part is ballpark, part is probably a fluky good 2003. But what killed the Giants were the players they gave away. Joe Nathan, who presumably would have either started the season closing for the Giants or who would have assumed that job when Herges proved (again) that he can't close effectively, was unbelievable this year. Foulke-esque, you might say. It hurts me to look at these numbers, but Nathan blew 3 of 47 save chances this year, had an ERA of 1.62 and struck out 89 batters in 72 innings. Putting him atop the Giants bullpen depth chart and pushing everyone down a rung would have been far, far more than sufficient to give the Giants a playoff spot this year. The Giants would have been forced to see if Yorvit Torrealba could be a full-time starter. I'll be honest - I'm not a huge Yorvit fan. He doesn't hit much (.302 / .407 this year, .322 / .402 for his career). But the difference between full-time Yorvit and AJ is worth at WORST 1-2 wins on the season, and I actually think Yorvit's demonstrably superior defense probably makes the effect neutral or even a win in Yorvit's favor. Just to pour lemon juice in the wound, the Giants traded away two minor-league pitchers along with Nathan - Boof Bonser and Francisco Liriano. Bonser is a bust, a typical Sabean pitching prospect. Liriano had been considered untouchable in 2003 (as Nathan had in 2001) because his upside was so high. He's a lefty who throws 97 mph, but had missed almost the entire 2003 season due to elbow problems. Well, he got right in 2004. Liriano pitched
117 innings (21 starts) for Single-A Fort Myers before being promoted to AA New Britain for 40 innings (7 starts). He actually performed better at AA than he had at A ball. Over the course of 156.2 innings in 2004, Liriano sported an ERA of 3.79 and struck out 174 hitters to 60 walks. Liriano turned 21 two days ago. If he stays healthy, he probably makes the majors in 2006. His upside is, theoretically, Johan Santana.

2. Don't trade for Ricky Ledee. No one has explained this to me yet. Felix Rodriguez is no longer what he was a few years ago, but he was the best reliever in a very bad bullpen and Sabean traded him away for yet another 4th outfielder (we didn't already have enough of those?). For a team that was scoring runs and blowing a lot of saves, this move was totally inexplicable. Felix was only decent this year (3.27 / 1.37 / 59 K's in 65.2 IP) but decent would have been a hell of an improvement over Matt Herges and Dustin Hermanson. Continuing to hold Felix is probably worth the one win needed for a tie, and likely the two needed for an outright win of the wild card / tie with the Dodgers.

3. Re-sign Tim Worrell. I'm sorry, but the cheapskate shit is really getting old. Worrell wasn't expensive and signed with the Phillies to be a setup man for setup man money. Worrell made $2.75M for Philly this year, and put up a workmanlike 3.68 / 1.23 season for them, with 64 Ks in 78 innings. Adjust for ballpark and defense and you're probably looking at something similar to what he got for the Giants in 2003. He'd have been perfectly adequate closing for the Giants in 2004 just like he'd been in 2003. Nothing special, but adequate. He converted 38 of 45 save chances in 2003. Herges, by contrast, converted 23 of 31 before being removed.

There are plenty of others (sign Vlad, trade for Carlos Beltran, etc...) but these three were easy and required almost nothing. And any one of them would have been sufficient to put the Giants in the playoffs. Do I think they'd have done much? Who knows. The playoffs are pretty random. Anyone can get hot at any time. The way Tomko was pitching I actually liked the Giants' 3-man rotation if they'd gone with one with Schmidt, Tomko and Jerome Williams, which allows Lowry to become an effective lefty and long reliever out of the bullpen and pushes Christianson off the roster. But that's all water under the bridge now. We'll never know how Barry might have done against Schilling and Pedro in the Series.

The 2005 Giants look to be more of the same. Sabean has already started the "we came close so why make major changes?" talk, and is probably already steaming at the lunatic fringe's requests that we not allow Bonds to get 200 intentional walks next year. He says that Goliath couldn't protect Bonds. That's fine - then let's sign a Goliath and watch him drive in 200 runs. It's not a matter of just getting Barry pitches to hit. It's a matter of scoring him if they're going to walk him. The Giants did a halfway decent job of this in 2004. He scored 129 runs this year, tied for the most of his career. Of course, he got on base 375 times. You wonder just how many times even a Paul Konerko or Carlos Lee could drive him in, to say nothing of a Beltran or Vlad.

But that's all talk for the upcoming offseason. For now, congratulations to the 2004 Red Sox, a great team put together by a great GM with great resources who performed at a high level and dispelled the notion of curses for, hopefully, another 86 years.

What about Randy Johnson?

2004-07-13T07:45:00.000-07:00

Remember the "White Flag Trade"? The "Matt Williams Trade"? The "Jason Schmidt for Armando Rios trade"??? (that one was my favorite)

Even though in some years his moves have been decidedly underwhelming (in 2000 the Giants' big midseason acquisition was Doug Henry), Brian Sabean has developed a deserved reputation for willingness to make midseason moves to fill what he perceives to be holes in the team and to bolster what are usually contention teams' playoff chances and strength.

So let's look at the current situation in the NL West:

LA 48-38 0
SF 49-40 .5
SD 47-41 2
COL 36-51 12.5
AZ 31-58 18.5

Clearly we're looking at a tightly-contested 3-team race. This wasn't so tough to predict, although I admit LA is better than I thought they would be (mostly because Adrian Beltre got back on the track he was supposed to be on and Paul DePodesta picked up Milton Bradley. Career seasons from normally non-hitting players like Alex Cora and Cesar Izturis have also contributed and of course they still have a dominating bullpen), but these three teams are all fairly closely matched. San Diego is still the most talented in my opinion, and I think the Giants will need to add some pieces if they want to compete through the long stretches of July and August, especially since I still believe that even though the Giants would be the NL wild card if the season ended today, ultimately the wild card will come from the NL Central.

Looking at this another way:

LA 382-352 (+30)
SF 454-437 (+17)
SD 377-360 (+17)

Keeping in mind that the Giants play in an extreme pitchers' ballpark, their pythagorean numbers are really quite astonishing. The Giants are an offensive juggernaut this year, although you'd never know it by looking at the lineup card. In fact, the Giants have scored more runs this season than all but two teams this year. On of those teams is St. Louis, who have scored exactly one more run than the Giants and the other is Colorado with 465, and they doesn't count for obvious reasons.

If you adjust for ballpark effects, the Giants had the best offense in the NL during the first half. And I think that bears repeating.

The Giants had the best offense in the NL during the first half.

So even though the instinct of most Giants fans is almost assuredly that the team needs more offense, if the first half is at all indicative of the true state of the team (and half a season usually has at least some predictive value unless there are obvious reasons why it should be discounted), it's the pitching that needs help. Big help.

The Giants' 437 runs allowed is worse than all but three other NL teams. One of those is pythagorean overperformer Cincinnati, who is 47-41 despite a run differential of -31 (411/452). Of course, that's not surprising - other than Danny Graves, how many Reds pitchers can you name? Expect to see the Reds play substantially below .500 in the second half. The other two teams are Arizona (499) and of course Colorado (525). Arizona's woes are testament to why you need five starting pitchers and not two and Colorado, as I said before, doesn't count.

So to go with the Giants league-leading offense, they've had among the worst pitching staffs in the league. If you adjust for ballpark you might argue that it's the worst in the NL, but I probably wouldn't. Either way, you're looking at a team that has been clubbing its way into contention, and that informs what ought to be done going forward.

To get it out of the way - damn right they need a closer. Anyone who is familiar with my ranting knows I'm not a fan of paying a good reliever a lot of extra money so he can collect saves. That has NEVER meant that having a bad reliever close is a good idea. Matt Herges is god-awful. Just horrid. He's 22 for 28 in save chances. That's 78%. That's just bad. A league-average reliever should close out around 82% of opportunities. He has a 1.61 WHIP. I don't know why Herges can't close, but it looks like he's in the same category as Arthur Rhodes - good pitchers who just can't close for whatever reason. Call it mental block, call it lack of clutchness, call it whatever you want, just don't call for Herges when you have a one-run lead. Get someone in there who can handle it and put Herges back into the setup role where he's been successful.

The Giants do need to add someone good or at least decent. There are plenty of guys out there who can do it and plenty of teams who would be happy to have a contract gone. Call Seattle and ask about Eddie Guardado. Call the Mets if and when they decide they aren't going to make it this year and talk about Braden Looper. Hell, I'd rather take a chance on a guy like David Riske of Cleveland or Tampa Bay's Lance Carter - these are guys with a little closing experience who can pitch. It would be hard for most major-league relievers to be as bad as Herges has been.

But even though I agree that a closer is needed, let's talk about something a little more exciting today. First let's look at the Giants pitching rotation, which based on their overall runs numbers need serious help:

Jason Schmidt: 122 IP / 2.51 ERA / 0.96 WHIP / 11-2 / 134 Ks Grade: A+
Jerome Williams: 102 IP / 4.66 ERA / 1.28 WHIP / 8-6 / 70 Ks Grade: B
Kirk Rueter: 104 IP / 4.85 ERA / 1.58 WHIP / 5-6 / 33 Ks Grade: D+
Dustin Hermanson 87 IP / 4.34 ERA / 1.38 WHIP / 3-3 / 63 Ks Grade: C-
Brett Tomko: 94 IP / 4.98 ERA / 1.54 WHIP / 4-5 / 45 Ks Grade: D

Keeping in mind what SBC park typically does to a pitchers' numbers, you can see that the Giants have three really bad starting pitchers in there. I love Kirk Rueter, but he has really stunk up the joint this year, and Hermanson and Tomko are little more than bodies to throw inning, although Hermanson has given the Giants the kind of innings a team can live with while Tomko has not.

There are no internal answers coming unless Jesse Foppert makes the most amazing recovery from Tommy John surgery in the history of the procedure (I'm rooting for him), so Sabean will probably have to go outside the organization.

Which leads me to my title - what about Randy Johnson?

What about Randy Johnson?

He has recently made some noise about being willing to accept a trade to a team that has "a real chance to win the world series". Everyone thinks that means the Yankees, where he'd slot in nicely in front of Mussina and Vazquez, or Boston where he'd create a trio of himself, his old friend Curt Schilling and Pedro Martinez.

But what about the Giants? What about the team with the best player of the modern era, the #1 offense in the NL, the best starter in the NL and a desperate need for another quality starter? Johnson would actually be the #2 starter on the Giants behind Jason Schmidt, and would give San Francisco the kind of 1-2 punch that Arizona had the year they won the series. Johnson-Schilling was all that team had going for it and they went all the way. They had an offense with one outstanding player (Luis Gonzalez) and a bunch of stalwarts. They even had bullpen problems.

With Randy Johnson the Giants would probably become co-favorites to win the NL along with Chicago. A three-man rotation of Schmidt, Johnson and Jerome Williams would compare favorably to those thrown up by any other team, with Chicago's Prior / Wood / Zambrano axis being the most competitive.

Now generally teams don't make trades within their division. But why, really? During the offseason, when teams are trying to compete, it makes perfect sense, but now? Arizona knows they aren't going anywhere in 2004 and Randy Johnson is in his 40s. Hell, if anything it makes sense to trade for young players from a divisional rival, because as you set yourself up to rebuild for the future you're taking pieces away from a team that will be a direct competitor in that future-state where you envision yourself contending.

Of course, I have no idea what Arizona is asking for, and I have bemoaned the woeful state of the Giants' farm system plenty of times in this space. But if the other contenders for Randy Johnson are Boston and New York, neither of them have much to offer either. So let's see Johnson stay in the NL, stay on the West coast, and play for the good guys for a while.

(and after all this, he'll go to the Braves)

Poor Rich Aurilia

2004-07-12T07:26:00.000-07:00

While the Giants are enjoying a breakout season from the most unlikely source (who really thought the Giants would get above replacement-level performance from Deivi Cruz, and that he'd actually be drawing a few walks? You can be sure this overly critical fan missed that one), a former Giant has fallen on some hard times.

Over this past weekend, the Seattle Mariners cut former Giants shortstop Rich Aurilia.

When I was first getting serious about baseball (which I freely admit was far later than it ought to have been) during the short dry spell between the 1993 non-playoff juggernaut team and the recent six-year run of Sabean miracle teams, two guys came up from the relatively barren Giants minor league system and quickly became my favorite two players.

Of the two, my favorite was the slick-fielding, average-hitting patient and inccorectly-pronounced Bill Mueller. I always felt like Mueller was just a massively underrated player, a guy whose defense was gold-glove worthy but who didn't get enough attention because his bat didn't make him stand out, even though he brought very real skills to the plate. When he was traded for Tim Worrell after his off-season in 2000, I was very upset (even though Worrell turned out to be a great acquisition). When he was brought back after his short, injury-filled tenure with the Cubs, I was thrilled, and thought the Giants were going to make him a cheap and home-grown solution to the void filled by David Bell's depature for Philly. Instead, they signed Edgardo Alfonzo to a four-year contract and let Mueller head to Boston, where he won the batting title I'd been waiting for.

My other favorite Giant was the hard-hitting, Brooklyn-born, hard-working shortstop my brothers and I referred to as "future hall-of-famer Rich Aurilia". We just loved that guy. Totally out of step with my current approach to player valuation, but Aurilia when he came up first in 1995 and then played part-time behind Ray Sanchez before finally getting a starting job in 1998 - the guy just seemed like a ballplayer to me. Looking back, he wasn't actually that good. Those first few stub seasons predicted relatively well what he'd become - a guy who could hit for an acceptable average and had nice power for a middle infielder, who couldn't control the strike zone and who played decent (if not pretty) defense. In short, s solid, stand-up player.

Aurilia really only had a three-year shelf life. He took over the starting job in 1998, but didn't do a whole lot with it (.726 OPS) but had two solid seasons in 1999 and 2000 (.780 and .783 respectively) before having a career season in 2001 (a season in which he perpetuated the myth of The Bonds Effect, as he hit ahead of Bonds that year). After 2001 he had some injury problems and never again reached his 1999-2000 level of production, to say nothing of his 2001 numbers.

Since 2001 Aurilia has put up season OPS of .718, .735 and was looking at .641 when he was cut by Seattle. What seems unfair about this is that, at age 32, this isn't all that surprising a development. Looking at his career since he became a starter:

1998: .726
1999: .780
2000: .783
2001: .941
2002: .718
2003: .735
2004: .641

Two of these years look like aberrations, don't they? 2001 was obviously a career year and a fluke. This isn't a player who could be relied on to hit .320 or hit 37 home runs again. But expectations were set by that year, and he's never been able to live up to them since. If Aurilia had put up .718 and .735 in years following .783 instead of .941, would people have been so disappointed in him? Unlikely. And .641 is really bad, but he's adjusting to AL pitching in a tough pitchers' park over fewer than 300 ABs.

There isn't really a message here. I like Aurilia, but what he's doing now doesn't entitle him to much. He was never great defensively, but as he gets into his mid 30's, playing shortstop regularly is going to be a stretch unless he starts hitting again, at least as well as during his two consolidation years. Is that likely to happen? I think in a part-time role, yeah - it really might. Put him in a position to succeed, playing some shorstop and some third-base in the NL and preferably in a ballpark where some of his moderate power can translate into more home runs and fewer flyball outs (Aurilia is an extreme fly-ball hitter, one of the reasons I always wanted him hitting BEHIND Bonds and not in front of him) and he might continue to be a good major-league player through his mid 30's. He could be an older Shea Hillenbrand who can also fill it at the middle-infield positions, picking up 300-400 ABs for a good team, and there are worse things to be than that.

And because he's still one of my favorite players and one of my favorite guys in the game, I'm hoping he finds that right situation.

And... we're back.

2004-06-23T10:57:00.000-07:00

Ok, I know that all 3 or 4 of my readers are feeling very betrayed by the lack of entries these last few weeks. A couple of responses to that - I was out of the country for a piece of it, and didn't have much to say about baseball. But more on point, you didn't really need me and my overly critical rantings during the layoff, now did you? I mean, the Giants have been playing like crazy, including a 10-game win streak. Who saw that coming? Obviously I didn't, based on the very public record of this blog. So all there is to do now is look at what's happened, and what is likely to happen going forward.

What happened?

Jason Schmidt pitched a 144-pitch gem, and somehow his arm is still attached to his body. He has been the most dominant starter in the national league (in baseball?) since coming off the disabled list, and is the definition of a staff ace. Every time he goes out there the Giants have a great chance of winning.

But there's a lot more to it than that. A lot of it has to do with previous holes getting miraculously filled internally. (that sounded a lot worse than it was meant to, btw)

Shortstop has been a huge problem, as I've pointed out many times. Yet recently instead of the offensive disaster that is Neifi Perez, the Giants have had a version of Deivi Cruz who's hitting .326 (after a 5 for 5 night last night) with very nice (for a shortstop) rate stats of .371 / .453. I've said it before and I'll say it again - going from Neifi Perez to even a league average player is worth several wins over the course of a season. While it's only over about a hundred ABs, Cruz is playing well above the normal offensive level for a shortstop, and his defense, while not as spectacular as Neifi's, is quite acceptable.

Third base has also been a problem, with my good friend Pedro Feliz playing some of the time and an underperforming Edgardo Alfonzo playing the rest of the time. What happened? Well, Feliz hasn't fallen apart nearly as badly as I thought he would. His OBP is exactly .300, which is really bad, but not as bad as I was expecting, and amazingly he continues to get enough fastballs to pound into the stands every once in a while, and he's sitting at .484 SLG, which really isn't bad for a third baseman who plays at Pac Bell Park. But Feliz is mostly playing first these days with JT Snow mercifully on the disabled list, leaving the aforementioned Alfonzo at third base. If I had to point out one reason for the Giants' surge, it's Alfonzo hitting 5th. His overall numbers still aren't very good (.344 / .399) but in the last month he's put up a .371 / .481 line, almost exactly what I thought he was capable of before the season started (but of course I cut him off my fantasy team shortly before he got hot) with a crazy 29 RBI (nice to hit behind someone with a .600+ OBP, isn't it Edgardo?).

What else? Right field - Michael Tucker. I'm shaking my head right now. Tucker is having the best season of his career this season, and given how cold he was the first month or so it's even more staggering. At .384 / .478, Tucker looks like a really good player. I'll say that again - Michael Tucker is really good this year. In the last month he's basically been Jim Thome. .446 / .642 over 81 ABs. Let me reiterate - those are numbers posted by Michael Tucker. In real life. AJ Pierzynksi has decided to start hitting. In June his OPS is over 1.000. Maybe that's why Sabean traded for him.

Other things - Bonds is pretty good. Grissom is still having a very good year. The rest of the rotation isn't good, but the team is scoring so many runs that it isn't really mattering very much. And the team continues to be somewhat lucky, outperforming it's pythagorean projection by a fair bit (they have still allowed more runs than they've scored, yet are 7 games above .500).

What's going to happen? Hell if I know. If the Giants get career seasons from Barry Bonds (who despite being less red-hot as of late is still posting the best OPS of his career, at 1.398), Jason Schmidt, Michael Tucker, Marquis Grissom and Deivi Cruz, and if Edgardo Alfonzo and Pedro Feliz play like average corner outfielders, the Giants have a pretty good team. In fact, the Giants might be a couple games further out front if Matt Herges wasn't a sub-replacement level closer (as I've discussed, replacement-level closers convert in the 83-86% range, and Herges is 18 for 23, or 78%). In fact, the NL West is so sorry that the Giants can win it if those guys (Tucker, Alfonzo, Cruz, Feliz, Pierzynksi) play like a league-average or slightly better group of hitters, because as I've said plenty of times, you surround Barry Bonds with league average hitters and you have a dominant offense. He's that good. And if the offense is dominant, a pitching staff of Jason Schmidt and a bunch of scrubs can probably keep the team in games. After taking last night's game, I'm excited about Giants baseball for the first time all season.

Did I mention that the Giants are in first place?

Tidbits

2004-05-11T19:28:00.000-07:00

I wrote this up earlier and it got erased. It was probably me being stupid. This version is abbreviated.

Following up on my earlier entry, Felix Diaz has been called up by the White Sox and will start Thursday. I'm not predicting a star career for him, but he's a rare Giants prospect that makes it to the majors as a starter.

Edgardo Alfonzo has been getting on base like crazy the past few weeks (over .400 OBP since April 30). He's out of the lineup to today again for Pedro Feliz. Wouldn't it make sense to hit Alfonzo in front of Bonds when he's in the lineup, and bench Snow for Feliz for good if Felipe feels he needs the "power bat" of Feliz cleaning up for Bonds? Alfonzo's about the only real table-setter with Durham out. Snow just doesn't hit enough. On that topic - why hit Grissom in front of Bonds when Grissom is about the only guy on the team capable of knocking Barry in? I swear this stuff just isn't that complicated.

To touch on the Pirates' second-base situation briefly, Bobby Hill is still getting on base a lot, but not hitting much. Jose Castillo is hitting a little but not getting on base all that frequently. I still say send Feliz to Pittsburgh for Hill and set the table with Durham, Hill and Alfonzo (assuming God has spoken to Felipe and told him that the 11th commandment is that Bonds must hit fourth). Make one of them play shorstop. I don't really care who.

For those who are interested, I'll be out of the country starting tomorrow. I don't know how much access I'll have to the internet, baseball news, or time to post here. I'll do my best, but no promises. If anyone wants to post a guest entry, email it to me and I'll put it up, assuming it's any good. Just kidding. Go Giants.

The price of a certain strategy

2004-05-10T07:06:00.000-07:00

For the entirety of the Sabean era, the Giants have been playing under the same strategy: Draft a lot of pitchers, fill the lineup with veterans, trade for help midseason by dealing away minor-league arms. It appears to have worked fairly well thus far, mostly because so few of those arms have actually developed into major-league pitchers. If the Nate Bumps and Jason Grillis had been turning guys like Josh Beckett and Roy Oswalt, the strategy would, in hindsight, look a lot weaker.

I read the following blurb on a website this morning:

"Felix Diaz is considered the leading candidate for a start this Saturday against Minnesota when the White Sox need a fifth starter."

Remember Felix Diaz? He was a top Giants prospect a few years ago, a right-hander who threw gas and projected as a #2 starter. He was not the Giants top prospect, but he often got mentioned in the list of the bounty of arms in the Giants' system. Diaz was traded in 2002 as part of the deal for Kenny Lofton, who played a few months with the Giants, helped the Giants get to the World Series, and then insisted on playing the field despite having a hernia that limited him defensively, sending the all-glove, no-bat Tsyoshi Shinjo into the DH spot for the games in Anaheim. As I recall, the Giants had a real "players' manager" back then, who wasn't about to tell the veteran Lofton that his claim that he could only hit when he played the field and couldn't concentrate when he was DHing were completely ridiculous, and that he was hurting the team by being a prima donna about playing the field when he was hurting, and when Shinjo was better anyway. As a sidelight, if the Giants had even one decent hitter on the bench that year who could reasonably DH, the contours of this dynamic would have been very different - as it was, we were getting Lofton and Shinjo, it was just a matter of who played the field and who DH'ed.

Diaz was playing for AA Shreveport when he was dealt in the Lofton trade. He was 21 years old, young for the level, and was 3-5 with a 2.70 ERA and 48 Ks in 60 innings (that must have been a very bad team) at the time of the trade. He finished the season with the Birmingam Barons and was successful there as well (4-0 with a 3.48 ERA and 30 Ks in 31 innings). Overall, 2002 had to look like a serious breakout season for Diaz, posting an overall line of:

7-5; 18 GS; 91.0 IP; 2.97 ERA, 1.21 WHIP, 78 Ks to 31 BBs

For a 21-year-old in AA that's very nice performance. He followed it up with a solid, if unspectacular season in AAA last year (3.97 ERA, 83/33 K/BB ratio in 115.2 innings). It was the type of year for a 22-year-old pitcher that will look like a different thing based on what happens to him. If he becomes a major-league pitcher and has some success, it will be looked at as a consolidation year. If he doesn't, it will be looked at as an example of him getting exposed at higher levels.

That being said, he's absolutely on fire this year:

5-0; 6 GS; 39.1 IP; 1.83 ERA; 32 K to 5 BB

As the note I read above said, if someone on the White Sox gets hurt or isn't performing well enough, it's likely Diaz that gets the nod and will be a starting pitcher in the major leagues. Renting Lofton helped the Giants that year, and even if Diaz turns into Javier Vazquez, he was a AA pitcher at the time. Still, the point is that the Giants haven't had to feel the pain associated with this strategy because, in hindsight, they've been dealing away non-prospects for these veterans rather than actual prospects. If and when some of these guys (Foulke, Diaz, Liriano, etc...) start turning into good major league players, the price of doing business this way becomes a lot clearer.

Rethinking Peter Happy?

2004-05-08T09:11:00.000-07:00

Nice Giants win yesterday 6-1 over the Reds. Of course, it was the Reds...

Probably the most notable item in my view was Pedro Feliz' attempt to make me look like an idiot for bashing him so much. (Yes, Rueter's terrific game is also notable, but after pitching so poorly it's not so surprising that he would have a great start eventually - for those who think it's just a theoretical concept, that's what regression to the mean looks like, folks) After Bonds drew his 4,825th intentional walk of the year Feliz crushed a Cory Lidle breaking ball at the bottom of the strike zone and sent it into the center field seats. He also hit a ground ball for a single later in the game. His OPS is now up to .784 (I figure if I'm going to post frequent updates to this I can't just do it on days when he goes 0-4).

I have no doubt that if I listened to KNBR I'd hear a parade of people declaring this game to be Peter Happy's coming out party, that the Giants are now finally prepared to make opposing teams pay for the sin of walking Barry Bonds. It goes without saying that I think that this is wildly optimistic. I have said all along that if given 500 ABs Feliz would probably hit 25 home runs and sure enough he's currently on pace for 464 ABs with 22 home runs. His power is certainly real, but his approach hitting ... I just don't understand why any pitcher would ever throw Feliz anything close to the strike zone. Lidle had Feliz 0-2 yesterday, and I was expecting a quick strikeout. Why Lidle didn't throw that breaking ball in the dirt is completely beyond me - Feliz committed early to swinging, which was the only reason he was able to lunge out and dig that breaking ball out from the bottom of the zone to lift it. It's a strikeout or harmless dribbler if the ball is lower.

And this is what worries me - Feliz is like Damon Minor was in 2002 and like Marvin Benard was his whole career. He only hits mistake pitches. Cory Lidle is pitching in the NL for the first time and never saw Pedro Feliz before this. I think that Lidle, like most pitchers (but not all Giants catchers apparently), will watch film of his start yesterday, and he'll see where he went wrong when he faced Feliz. Same goes for the rest of the pitchers in the league. Feliz can hit the ball really hard - but he's an easy out, and it's only a matter of time before pitchers figure that out.

Aligning fandom for a player like Feliz is interesting. I don't think he's going to be good, ever. He's too old and makes too many outs. He can't tell balls from strikes. I also don't think the 2004 Giants make the playoffs. Which makes it difficult to know what to root for when Feliz stands in. On the one hand, I always want the Giants to win and their players to do well. On the other hand, I don't want to see the team commit even more than they already have to a player that I think stinks. In an ideal world, I'm rooting for Feliz to get really hot, be hitting .325 at the all-star break (with a .330 OBP) and see him get traded to a contender for a good prospect or two (which would never happen). I don't think he's genuinely an upgrade for too many contenders, but there are a lot of GMs out there whose eyes light up at a high batting average and some nice home run stats. Of course, to be fair, it bears mentioning that if Feliz could consistently hit .325 he actually would be a valuable player, since with so much batting average built in his OBP wouldn't be a killer and his power numbers would be very nice. If Feliz could hit .325 he'd be Garret Anderson.

But more likely, I see his .300+ batting average wearing away and as it does his lack of secondary skills will become more and more pronounced. Worst of all, but thinking well into the future, Feliz is going to be eligible for arbitration at the end of next season, and the arbitrators have long shown that they don't really understand performance analysis. They're going to see Pete Happy's homers and RBI (both of which he'll get if he's let out there every day for the next two years) and annoint him a league-average or better third baseman and pay him accordingly. And based on the way the current Giants regime spends money, they'll choose to pay Feliz.

The elder statesman

2004-05-06T08:12:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time Barry Bonds was a really good defender. Many gold gloves kind of defender. He never had a cannon arm (which is why he's always played left field), but he was fast and no one got better reads on fly balls. Barry had an impressive ability to just be in the right place at the right time for a given hitter (partially because I think one element of his game that routinely gets ignored is just how smart a guy he actually is).

Now, at age 39, Bonds isn't a particularly good defender anymore. He doesn't make a lot of errors, because the mental part of his game is still in place, so he usually gets good reads and doesn't do anything stupid (I'd still rather watch Barry play defense than Marvin Benard), but his speed is reduced and he doesn't try to make plays that are on the margin. This gets characterized by some as a lack of hustle, but in my view it's the result of a carefully conducted cost-benefit analysis of the likely outcome of the play. The potential benefit if Barry dives for a fly-ball? He catches it and the hitter is out. Maybe the Giants win a game they wouldn't have won. The potential cost? The 39-year-old who hits better than anyone else in the game hurts himself and winds up on the disabled list for a month. Bonds is right not to try to be Jim Edmonds or Darin Erstad out there. The criticism is silly.

What occured to me recently, though, is that Bonds isn't just old for an outfielder - I'm pretty sure he's the oldest starting outfielder in the major leagues. There are only a handful of players his age still in the game. Of those who are older than he is a few are pitchers (Jamie Moyer, Roger Clemens) and the majority are first basemen or designated hitters (Julio Franco, Edgar Martinez). When I initially thought about this question, the only starting outfielder I could think of was Steve Finley, who still amazingly plays center field every day. And Finley is close, but he's six months younger than Bonds. After that, you're talking about Craig Biggio (38), Moises Alou, Marquis Grissom, Kenny Lofton, Jeff Conine (37) and a bunch of guys who are 36 (Reggie Sanders, Luis Gonzalez and others).

It's something to think about when considering that Bonds takes days off or sometimes appears to let a ball bounce in front of him rather than go all-out and dive for it. The guy is the oldest starting position player in the major leagues other than Barry Larkin, who can never stay healthy. Most players never make it to Barry's age, and most of those who do have long since become designated hitters. Bonds himself allowed for that possibility in a recent interview (cue reference to Plan B - someone call the A's). For a 39-year-old starting outfielder in the national league, Bonds has done a pretty good job over the last few years of keeping himself on the field. And that is and should be his #1 priority.

Fun with old predictions

2004-05-05T07:07:00.000-07:00

There are some current events moderately worthy of discussion. The Giants lost again last night (a loss? In a game started by Tomko? nah...), Barry made some comments about retiring after next season (and also that he'd play as a DH for a California-based AL team), and that he might retire before breaking Aaron's record. Fine, fine.

I was flipping through my old 2001 baseball books (mostly Baseball Prospectus, which everyone who reads here knows I think is an invaluable source of information and evaluation). What I thought would be interesting would be to randomly look through and see how some of the comments wound up turning out. It's fine to make predictions based on certain past events (in the case of sabremetricians, often concrete data, rather than scouting reports), but it's useful to sanity-check those by seeing how they turn out.

Bobby Estellala is a fine ballplayer who is only going to get better...He will be at least a reasonable MVP candidate at some point during the next five years.

He's a shaky defensive third baseman who has drawn a grand total of 105 unintentional walks in seven minor-league seasons. You want to be a good player in the majors? Get on base. You want to get on base while drawing less than a walk per week? Hit .350. Feliz won't.

Ballplayer. Ramon Martinez swings hard and can play any infield position well enough to be a defensive replacement. On another team I'd be clamoring for him to at least receive a shot at the starting shortstop or second-base jobs.

The Giants can carry JT Snow because of Aurilia, Bonds, Kent and Estallela, but imagine the offense with a true bomber at first base like Jason Giambi, Carlos Delgado or Frank Thomas.

Tony Torcato is a good athlete... There's an overriding problem here, though, and I don't mean just with Torcato but throughout the Giant organization: these guys have no plate discipline! ... I wonder what Torcato would look like at this point if drafted by, say, the A's.

Many Giant fans think Kurt Ainsworth is a prospect like Rick Ankiel or Ryan Anderson. He's not, and he's not close.

Ryan Vogelsong's numbers and stuff are promising, but if you watch him pitch it's hard to imagine him having a really bright future.

I prefer Jerome Williams to Ainsworth; if he can avoid the dreaded injury nexus, I think he'll have a major-league career.

This stuff all came from a book published between the 2000 and 2001 seasons. There's a lot of other interesting stuff in there, including a prediction that a single-A masher named Albert Pujols might be starting for the Cardinals before anyone thought possible. They missed a few above (obviously they didn't see Estallela's injury-induced fall from the majors) but for the most part I think those look pretty good with almost four years of hindsight. I find the comment about Ainsworth particularly illustrative - the comment was, at the time, true. Ainsworth wasn't the prospect that Rick Ankiel or Ryan Anderson was. What's interesting is that of those three, all considered top or near-top prospects, only Ainsworth is still in the majors, the other two having succumbed to injuries (and in Ankiel's case, control problems). This is just a general comment on pitching prospects and should probably be considered relevant to a team that only seems to draft pitchers.

Some other tidbits that have come to my attention:

Damon Minor is outhitting Snow and Feliz by a lot right now: Remember Minor? Old non-prospect who mashed the ball in Fresno but couldn't do a whole lot with it when he got called up for a couple hundred ABs. Well, the 29-year-old is currently putting up a tidy little .333 / .425 / .613 batting line for Fresno. Of course, it's over only 75 ABs, so expectations should be tempered a lot, but this is a guy who hit pretty well in the minors for a lot of seasons and costs nothing. What is JT Snow doing? .217 / .327 / .313. I don't care how deeply you discount AAA stats to MLB stats, no translation equates these two. Feliz (.299 / .304 / .416) is outhitting Snow too, but Tiny is outhitting either of them.

The Giants might actually have some players in AA this year: Yes, call this irrational exuberance based on a month's worth of stats. As a Giants fan who is pretty sure his team isn't going to go Plan B and actually rebuild the minors, I have to look for hope where I can get it.

With Todd Linden doing his best Orlando Palmeiro impersonation at AAA for the second year in a row (.304 / .368 / .391 in a hitters' league), we turn to Daniel Ortmeier (is that a baseball name or what?) as the guy who might come save us all from the chimera-like beast of Jeffrey Tuckermohr. Ortmeier is 23 and is big, strong, not too old and seems to be able to tell balls from strikes and hit the ball hard. His .295 / .370 / .505 line in 95 ABs at AA Norwich isn't quite enough to call exciting, but it's encouraging.

Also in the "remember that guy" category is Carlos Valderrama, who at 26 is clearly old for his league. Still, this is a guy who I've always sort of liked. Why? Because even when he wasn't hitting much (which has been relatively frequently) always maintained his batting eye. Players who can tell balls from strikes can learn to hit for average with a lot greater success than Feliz / Niekro types can learn to take pitches and draw walks. Valderrama is currently pretending to be a power hitter at AA (.361 / .417 / .557) with 8 steals (in 8 attempts) in 97 ABs. I've always liked that Valderrama consistently draws about one walk for every 10 ABs. If there's a problem right now it's that he should just emphasize the leadoff skills he naturally possesses and not try to be a power hitter. He's striking out too much, which doesn't bother me much, but it probably bothers coaches and scouts. If he could cut his strikeouts and increase his walks, it would be worth it, even if the cost was a loss of power. A guy with his profile doesn't need to have a .200 point IsoP anyway. If he could hit .300 and draw a bunch of walks, steal a bunch of bases and play defense, he'd have a future on this club. He should try to be Dave Roberts or Juan Pierre more than Carlos Beltran or Bobby Abreu.

Who is Mike Cervenak? He's old (27), was drafted by the A's, and appears to have been part of the Norwich roster when the Giants acquired the team from the Yankees (still not sure how this works, btw). He's currently hitting .352 / .434 / .670. The batting average isn't real (.289 career in the minors) and there's little to suggest the power spike is totally real either, but it could be. I guess call me in a month - if you're still slugging over .550, we'll talk.

Chris Begg appears to be done with AA and made a AAA start last week. He was moved from A to AA last year, and was 2-1 with a 3.05 ERA and 16-2 K-BB ratio in 20.2 innings. He didn't go too deeply into games, which leads me to believe he's young for his level (I can't seem to find that info) but his first start at Fresno was a 7-inning shutout. Someone to keep an eye on.

Simply because my brother once played with him - Jay Pecci is actually in the Giants organization now, and is hitting the cover off the ball in a very small number of ABs. Pecci is 27, was drafted by the A's, then bounced to the Mariners and then to the Giants. There's not much in his history that suggests he can really hit (the A's took him in the 11th round because of his .407 OBP at Stanford in 1998), but he's currently hitting .382 / .447 / .559 in 34 ABs at AA.

What I find sort of interesting is that these guys, some of whom are actual prospects, are down at AA while Fresno appears stocked with a bunch of guys who are just there to be roster filler when the Giants need help. I've heard it said a few times that AA is where a lot of teams are keeping their real talent. I'm hoping this is true of the Giants as well.

Money well-spent

2004-05-04T07:33:00.000-07:00

I'm late to the table on the topic of the four-year, $48 million contract the Angels gave Garrett Anderson to play for them from 2005 through 2008. This topic isn't Giants-related and probably seems all but obvious to those who think in the terms that commonly populate this space.

We're told constantly and from many sides that "baseball is a business". We're told that by certain owners to justify spending eight times the amount other teams spend on their teams in order to produce wins, arguing (correctly, in the case of the New York Yankees) that investing more money in the team brings in more revenue, and is thus a smart business decision. We're told the exact same thing by cheapskate owners who *don't* want to invest money in their team, because they believe the team should turn a profit. We're told by players (and their union) when they are trying to justify ever-escalating salaries. Of course, in the most nominal sense of it, it's true - baseball is a business. Which is why I'm often surprised when a baseball owner makes a decision that seems fairly senseless from a business standpoint.

Garrett Anderson is a good player. He's not a five-tool player in the traditional sense. However he hits for average, hits for power and plays good defense. He doesn't run particularly fast or have a particularly strong arm. I would posit, as a sidelight, that we could rewrite the identity of these tools, and separate them into separate offensive and defense skillboxes, rather than toolboxes. I'm going to leave the defensive one alone for now, but clearly "fielding ability" isn't complex enough to really evaluate a player. I'd call the measurable tools the following:

1. Ability to get on base
2. Ability to hit the ball hard
3. Strike Zone judgment
4. Durability

These are a fairly obvious sabremetric reworking of the three offensive tools (hitting for average, hitting for power, foot speed) to correspond to OBP, SLG and GP rather than AVG, HR and SB. The ability to get on base includes the ability to hit for average, but doesn't ignore alternative methods for generating baserunners the way a focus on AVG does. The key statistic that measures this ability is OBP. The ability to hit the ball hard is different from the power tool only insofar as I prefer to shift the focus from home run power to extra-base power generally, specifically IsoP (SLG - AVG), which measures the portion of a hitter's total bases that are the result solely of extra-base hits. I've separated out strike zone judgment from the ability to get on base for the benefit of players with a low enough batting average that their OBP is still low, but who demonstrate an exceptional batting eye. The measurement here is OBP - AVG, or an Isolated Patience metric.

Finally, there's durability. A player who can stay healthy and play every game is valuable, and while there are some players who get unlucky with injuries, it's pretty clear that Cal Ripken Jr. wasn't just luckier than Rondell White. A guy like Miguel Tejada is valuable to begin with, but his value is at least partially derived from the fact that he can play every single day. Health is a skill, and should be viewed as such. Part of the problem with durability is that it needs to be valued for what it is, and not for what it isn't. Durability tends to be both undervalued and overvalued. It's undervalued in the sense that players who don't have it should be discounted and often aren't - a guy like Nick Johnson could be a great player for a decade, but he just can't stay on the field. It's overrated in the sense that it has secondary effects on a player's stats that should be attributed to durability, but usually aren't. Tejada is a good example of this. A player like Tejada has a big reputation as an "RBI man" or "run-producer" and it's true, he tends to collect a lot of RBI. But what gets lost in the shuffle is that part of why the guy has so many RBI relative to other players at his position is that he is in the lineup every single day. It's easier to hit 100+ RBI if you play 162 games than if you play 150. That seems obvious, yet it seems almost totally ignored. All of which is to say that durability is extremely valuable, but it should be understood that it doesn't actually make a player a better hitter on an AB by AB basis.

Which leads us back to Garrett Anderson. He has two of the four skills I mention above - he hits the ball hard and he plays every day. His critics cite his low OBP (typically hovers around .325) as a flaw in his game, and they're correct - it is a flaw in his game. I can't say for sure that Anderson doesn't have a good batting eye - watching him play, it seems like a conscious choice to trade OBP for more AVG. He swings at a lot of pitches trying to get that extra hit. He's a good hitter, doesn't strike out too much, and can sometimes make something happen when he gets a poor pitch to hit. Do I think he'd be better if he took those pitches and played a take-and-rake style? Yes, but he's pretty good the way he is now.

Which isn't to say his contract was a good idea. It wasn't. Anderson is a 31-year-old left fielder (playing center field because Mike Scoscia decided that Darin Erstad, who's basically the outfielder version of Neifi Perez, should now be playing first base - for the record if I ever see Neifi Perez playing first base for the Giants I believe my head will literally burst) who turns 32 on June 30, 2004. He'll turn 33 during the first year of this contract and 36 during the fourth year. Is it possible that he'll remain productive and durable through age 36 and justify $12M per year? Well, no, probably not - even during his best seasons he hasn't been worth $12M. But it's possible that he'll still be good at 36 (look at someone like Reggie Sanders for a 36-year-old who is still productive).

According to Baseball Prospectus, in Anderson's best season (2002) he was worth about 5 wins more than a league-average left fielder. That's a very good number. Figure that if a team of league-average players produces a .500 team you only need a couple of guys producing 5 wins over the average to create a 90-win team (this approach should sound familiar to Giants fans). Problem is, Anderson has only produced close to this kind of value in two seasons out of nine - 2002 and 2003. The Angels are banking on this spike in skills at age 29 and 30 being permanent, and it's pretty reasonable to assume that it isn't. BP thinks Anderson will be basically a league-average player by 2007, producing only 0.8 wins above a replacement-level fielder at that time. Essentially Anderson is an expensive but valuable luxury in 2004 and will be an absolute albatross by 2007.

The top comparable BP lists for Anderson is Tony Oliva, who played for the Twins from 1962 through 1976. He had some very Andersonesque seasons in there.

1969: .309 / .355 / .496
1970: .325 / .364 / .514
1971: .337 / .369 / .546

What happened to Oliva? He got hurt in 1972 at age 31 and was never the same player again. He retired at age 34.

Did I mention that Garrett Anderson is on the DL with back problems right now?

The Angels probably signed Anderson to this contract because he's liked by fans and because he's been in the organization so long. It was a reward for what he's done in the past. But I have to think he's not as much a fan favorite as David Eckstein, Troy Glaus or some of these new fellas like Vladimir Guerrero, and spending $12M a year for a guy who might just as well produce Garrett's 2001 season (.289 / .314 / .478) as his 2002 (.306 / .332 / .539) is going to seem really foolish down the road. Especially after Magglio Ordonez signs a contract that's not so different from this one. Isn't baseball supposed to be a business?

There but for the grace of Darren Oliver...

2004-05-03T07:47:00.000-07:00

The Giants won 9-8 yesterday in the bottom of the 11th inning. They took 3 out of 4 from the Marlins, who entered the season with a league-best ERA and some hot hitters. So why don't I feel better about this?

Well, they took 3 out of 4 by scoring 30 runs and allowing 23. They got a quality start from just two starting pitchers in the series (Schmidt and Williams, of course). They played really terrible defense during the series. For a team whose most glaring weakness is its lineup, the team essentially slugged their way to a good series, scoring 7.5 runs per game against a very good pitching staff. It's hard to believe that anyone believes a series that was determined by such an outcome is meaningfully predictive.

What I thought this series demonstrated perfectly was the old adage that "every team wins 60 and every team loses 60", which obviously isn't literally true, but which has a large measure of accuracy - the vast majority of teams fall within that middle portion of the bell curve between 60-102 and 102-60. No one (well, not me at any rate) has claimed that the Giants are going to lose 100 games. The most negative claims I've seen have them finishing a few games under .500, which means sure, they're going to have some series like this one. Baseball, on the level of an individual game, can be pretty fluky. Infield singles that get caught in the grass, double play balls that spin strangely off the shortstop's glove, routine fly balls that a converted second baseman playing right field can't handle - we saw all of these, and for the first time this season a lot broke the Giants' way. And that's great, even though these games weren't very fun to watch.

But they're still playing really bad baseball. Three of the five spots in the rotation are still providing way too many 4.1 IP 5 ER starts. The defense is nothing like it was last year, so while some nice regression to the mean by some of the hitters who were doing nothing in April (AJ, Mohr, Tucker, Snow) is nice, and will provide some offense, nothing has really changed. This isn't a team that's going to score 8 runs in too many games. And Barry's walks continue to pile up (on pace for 274 as of today) because no one can protect him.

A few things about yesterday's game:

Where was Barry? With the bases loaded and two outs in the bottom of the 7th inning, Felipe Alou used Deivi Cruz to pinch-hit for the pitcher. With Barry Bonds on the bench. I heard rumors that Bonds wasn't suited up (he came in later as a pinch-walker and scored the winning run, of course), and if that's the case Felipe can't be taken to task too strongly (there were better options available, including Tucker, but choosing Cruz over Tucker can be safely placed within the purview of managerial discretion - choosing Cruz over Bonds cannot).

Felix Rodriguez appears to be back. He's not employing a breaking pitch the way it was reported he might, but he's using the inside part of the plate this year, which I don't remember ever seeing him do with any regularity. His 2.63 ERA / 0.88 WHIP to date are very encouraging, although his K rate continues to fall from a very high 10.47 in 2000 to a worrisome 4.61 this year. Still, he's clearly the best reliever on the team right now.

Et tu, Wayne Franklin? At what point do we believe that Sabean really is a genius when it comes to bullpens, and that Wayne Franklin, like a soft-throwing lefty Eric Gagne, was never meant to be a starter and is now in his proper role as a lefty out of the bullpen. Franklin has allowed struck out 11 in 11 innings pitched and given up just one homer. He's holding lefties to a .566 OPS in the early going. (Note to Sabean: I just gave you the sales pitch. Go call Hunsicker and keep this in your back pocket in case he doesn't want to take Christianson and his salary)

Big game for Yorvit Torrealba. A lot of people (myself included) believed that the smart move would have been to replace Santiago with the younger and cheaper (25 years old, $334k) Torrealba. Yorvit is never going to be Jorge Posada or Pudge Rodriguez, but in 363 career major-league ABs he has put up a line of .270 / .335 / .405, which makes him solidly above-average for a catcher, and if you take into account his youth and home ballpark it's not impossible to see him develop into a Ramon Hernandez type in a year or two. Of course, this type of reasoning is based on a view that Yorvit Torrealba represents an opportunity to get replacement-level (or better) performance from a young, inexpensive player, and we all know how Brian Sabean feels about such players. So instead, he went out and traded three young pitchers (including Twins closer Joe Nathan and lefty fireballer Francisco Liriano - Florida State League player of the week last week, and who is striking out more than a better per inning for Fort Myers) for AJ Pierzynski, then promptly went to arbitration with him and lost. Pierzynski now makes more than ten times what Torrealba does. The early results?

Pierzynski: 76 AB, .263 / .291 / .303 ($3.5M)
Torrealba: 23 AB, .261 / .414 / .478 ($334k)

It is generally accepted by people who know more about this than I do that Torrealba is a better defensive catcher than Pierzynski.

Burnout worries. Giants bullpen threw 6 2/3 innings again. I'm assuming this worries people with a lot more ability to act on their concern than me.

Neifi led off again. I can't really say anything else about that.

It's only April...

2004-05-02T08:54:00.000-07:00

I wish I had Jayson Stark's job, mostly because of his access to historical stats and people to crunch them for him. He's gone through and run an analysis that I would have liked to run if I had the tools, but since he's done it I'll just quote a bit from it here.

Note that the Giants were 10-14 coming out of April, and were 5 games behind the Dodgers.

Stark tells us that of the 120 playoff teams since 1982, only four (or 3.3 percent) finished April more than three games under .500. He also tells us that only three of those 120 playoff teams (or 2.5 percent) finished April more than 4½ games out of a playoff spot.

Does this mean that the Giants aren't going to make the playoffs? No, we already knew that. What this tells us is that April matters. The baseball season isn't like an NCAA pool, where the games at the end matter more than the ones at the beginning. Every game counts the same, and generally a team that plays poorly in April isn't going to make it to the postseason. Not every time, of course - just most of the time.

Those who wish to believe more than they wish to know will probably take umbrage with all of this. "The Dodgers and Padres are playing over their heads", they'll tell me. "The Giants are turning things around, and Pierzynski, Alfonzo and Tucker are starting to hit" they'll add.

There's some truth to that. Neither LA nor San Diego really have the pythagorean numbers to support their current records. Of course, the Giants are currently a game over their pythagorean projection as well, but that's neither here nor there. I think those claims are still specious. There are some crazy things going on in San Francisco too. Barry Bonds is hitting nearly .500 after a month of play and his OPS is still closer to 2.000 than 1.500. Grissom is still playing over his head (when he plays). And Ray Durham, the second-best hitter on the deal, is hurt for at least a month. The other thing, though, is that as maligned as they've been, check out some things about the San Francisco bullpen:

The three-headed lefty monster of Christianson, Eyre and Franklin has a combined ERA of 2.53. Is this going to last? No, not unless Damaso Marte, Eddie Guardado and JC Romero are currently wearing Christianson, Eyre and Franklin jerseys.
Matt Herges, despite an ERA of 4.70 and a WHIP of 1.50 has converted 9 of his 10 save chances (90%, for those who are really bad at math). Last time I checked, closers with those kinds of peripherals don't convert saves at a 90% clip for a whole season.
Jim Brower has an ERA of 2.93 and is on pace to appear in 101 games this year. Unless we really have the Brower twins who take turns appearing as Jim Brower on The Giants Show, he's going to have problems pitching this much.

I've said before that there are things this team could do to actually make the playoffs this year, but with Durham out the lineup is going to feature two of Neifi Perez, Deivi Cruz and Brian Dallimore (who it should be pointed out is likely to be better than either of them, and not just because he hit a grand slam in his first AB), Pedro Feliz every day and the now-familiar platoon-like object in right field, with Grissom playing CF most of the time except when Hammonds plays it. Unless the bullpen continues to sparkle and Rueter, Tomko and whoever is pitching in the 5-spot get a LOT better, a couple of wins in a row at the end of April and on May 1 don't make me really *believe* any more than I did this time last week.

Oh - and Barry Bonds (noted selfish player who doesn't care about the team) is currently projected to appear in 155 games this year, as he's put himself back into the lineup for a couple of games he'd ordinarily take off. I applaud him in more ways than I can list here, but after seasons of 130 and 143 games played the last two years, one of the few things I don't think he can do is play 155 games.

Win Streak

2004-05-02T00:28:00.000-07:00

Look at those Giants - two game winning streak. Sure, they got a bit lucky today (AJ went 3-4, but one of them missed Alex Gonzalez' glove by six inches, another was a DP ball the marlins misplayed, and then Damion Easley dropped a routine fly ball for two more runs) but they only allowed three runs and made the Marlins pay a little bit for walking Barry so many times (he scored once anyway).

Of course, the Giants really ought to win a Jason Schmidt vs. Carl Pavano at SBC Park game, but let's not quibble.

The Pedro Feliz watch continues - after coming into the game late and going 0-1, the savior of the Giants offense currently stands at:

.286 / .292 / .400

I will reiterate the hard truth even for those who refuse to acknowledge it. This guy must play EVERY day. I just wish we had seven more like him.

Searching for Bobby Hill

2004-05-01T06:46:00.000-07:00

I recently had a lengthy conversation with some Giants fans about Bobby Hill, currently a utility infielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates. I'm a big fan of Hill - he does a lot of the things I appreciate in a player (well, mostly he gets on base and steals bases well enough not to cost his team more outs than those steals are worth), is young, is cheap and is undervalued by both his current and former teams. In my Plan B team, he's the starting second baseman for the Giants (traded straight up for Pedro Feliz). I don't understand why this guy has had the career that he's had so far. I think he's been very unlucky and is currently underappreciated. It is from such situations that a profit of wins can be obtained.

Hill just tuned 26 on April 3. He was drafted by the Cubs in the second round of the 2000 draft to be their future at second base after an ugly contract holdout the previous year (the White Sox had drafted him, but Scott Boras had him hold out and go back into the draft - good job, bud). In 2002 he was supposed to start every day, but after 190 ABs that were nowhere near as bad as Don Baylor thought they were (Hill had a low batting average of .253 but his .327 / . 374 line wasn't so disastrously bad that the Cubs couldn't have waited it out), and Baylor benched him for Delino DeShields. DeShields got 163 ABs of .292 / .308 hitting before he himself was benched for the far superior Mark Bellhorn. Once Bellhorn started hitting, he never stopped, and Hill spent the rest of 2002 at AAA.

As recently as 2003 he was still viewed as the second baseman of the future for the Cubs, part of a youth movement that also included Corey Patterson and Hee Seop Choi, along with Mark Prior of course. And yet he broke camp in the minors again, after a poor spring defensively. The Cubs that year chose to go with Mark Grudzielanek who went on to have a career season and probably helped get the Cubs into the playoffs.

On August 16 the Cubs decided to call up some players from their AAA franchise in Pittsburgh, including a guy who was at one point considered likely to develop into one of the premiere third basemen in the game, Aramis Ramirez. Ramirez had an all-star season in 2001 (at age 23) but then had two off years in a row in 2002 and the first part of 2003 (only the first of which was really that bad) and at age 25 the Pirates decided to give up on him and send him to the Cubs. Part of what they got for him in return was Bobby Hill, who presumably had been somehow worked out of the Cubs' future.

And here's where I get confused. Hill came into spring training with the Pirates expected to win the second base job, as far as I can tell. He had an unbelievable spring training (he hit .339 with 5 home runs in 56 ABs and slugged .643) and yet ... isn't the starter. A younger prospect named Jose Castillo, who never played above AA before 2004, apparently beat Hill out by hitting a couple of home runs the first week or two of spring training and, presumably, with flashier glovework. So now Castillo plays second base, Chris Stynes plays third base and Bobby Hill is a backup, a situation which only gets worse when you realize that Freddy Sanchez (who's probably a better prospect than either Hill or Castillo) is coming back very soon from an injury. Playing time will be hard to come by for our hero.

And now Ray Durham is hurt. Not that I think the Giants are likely to contend in 2004 (I believe this position is well-established) but why not go get him now, put him at 2B while Ray is out and then use him as a sub at 2B and 3B (remember that he's traded for Pedro Feliz in my perfect world) until Ray can reestablish his health and then go assist the Twins in their attempt to win the AL Central this year? After that, Hill can take back over at 2B and learn to really hit major-league pitchers on the job in 2004.

This is a guy who just turned 26. He has 233 career major-league ABs and has put up a .262 / .344 / .365 line in those. At worst, he's Ramon Martinez (career .333 / .392 hitter) and at best he's a young Ray Durham (.353 / .431). He's hitting .306 with an OBP over .400 with the limited playing time being given to him by the Pirates this year. He makes $300,000 this year and won't be eligible for arbitration until (I believe) 2006, free agency in 2008. Around guys like this winning teams are built. Put enough Bobby Hills in your lineup (and by Bobby Hills I mean players who can put up league average or slightly above average performance (with the potential for growth into better players) for a low price) and you can go out and get one or two really expensive players who you know will perform at a very high level. Replace a Neifi ($3M), Tucker ($1.5) and Pierzynski ($3.5M) with three Bobby Hills of the appropriate defensive flavors and you suddently have $6M to play with. Combine that with the $1.5M the Giants pay JT Snow and you're looking at someone like Richie Sexson ($8.725M), Brian Giles ($8.5M), Derrek Lee ($6.15M) or Cliff Floyd ($6.5M). It's not just about spending money - it's about spending money well. $82M is plenty, if it's spent correctly.

By the way, for those who picked April 31 in your When Will Pedro Feliz' OBP Dip Below .300 pools, you got it right. Peter Happy currently sits at .290 / .296 / .406. An offensive juggernaut, to be sure.

The obsession with Pedro Feliz

2004-04-30T06:19:00.000-07:00

There's a temptation to just write this off as desperation, but it really does appear that Giants management, Felipe Alou and even Giants fans believe that Pedro Feliz is actually a good player, and that getting Feliz more ABs is going to help the team. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe where none of what I know to be true is actually fact. Let's address the positives first:

1. Pedro Feliz is currently hitting. .292: It's true, Mr. Feliz is hitting .292 (19 for 65).
2. Pedro Feliz hit 16 home runs in only 235 ABs in 2003.
3. Pedro Feliz is young and cheap.

Responding to each of these, with negatives attached:

1. There is nothing in the history of Pedro Feliz that indicates that he's anything approaching a .300 hitter in the major leagues. In 673 ABs thus far he's hit .247. In 7 seasons in the minors Feliz hit .268 over 2,433 ABs. So let's review - hit .268 in the minors, hit .247 in the majors over 3 seasons (albeit in limited playing time), hitting .292 in 65 ABs in April. Right, so if there's going to be a reason to play Feliz it had better not be his batting average.

2. It's true, he hit 16 homers in 2003 and had a slugging percentage of .515 doing it. He also made an out 177 of the 268 times he came up to the plate (72.2% out percentage to go with his .278 on-base average). I believe 2003 represents Feliz' career season. His home run power is real, and pitchers hadn't realized yet that he has utterly no strike zone judgement, and occasionally threw him a pitch to hit. He's sort of the anti Barry Bonds: it makes no sense to throw Barry a strike because it's better to walk him, and if you throw him one he'll whack it out of the park. Well, Feliz will also wack it out of the park, but if you throw him balls in the dirt you won't walk him - he'll swing harmlessly over them and get himself out.

3. Well, he's cheap. Feliz aged during the post-9/11 revelation of true player ages. In fact, he's 29, not 26 as originally thought. At 29 it's unlikely that Feliz develops into anything other than what he currently is (and no, I'm not saying here that a player can't develop plate discipline or strike zone judgement later in a career, because it has happened before), and what he currently is is a player who can't tell a ball from a strike and never has been able to.

His age puts in greater perspective his minor-league career season in 2000. That year, hitting in a hitter-friendly league in a small ballpark, Feliz put up the following traditional stats, and put himself on prospect lists:

.298, 33 HR, 105 RBI

Ordinarily if I saw a minor-league player in the Giants system put up those kind of numbers I might get pretty excited too (in fact, I was, at the time, hopeful that Feliz was going to develop into a good major-league player at that time). There are problems with using that season as an indicator of trend, though. First of all Feliz was 26 that season, not 23 as originally thought. Why is this so signficant? Because at 26 a guy having that season in AAA could be a late-bloomer, but could just as easily simply have had a fluke season. At 23 the likelihood is that a guy has broken out. Feliz had never hit for either average (career high to that date was .272 in 1997 at single-A Bakersfield) or power (career high slugging % to that date was .437 for AA Shreveport in 1999), so chances are his 2000 season wasn't predictive. Secondly, so much of his performance was based on a batting average spike, which tends to be the statistic most prone to fluctuation. And finally, even in that season Feliz swung at everything, just like he'd always done. He drew 30 walks in 533 plate appearances (which was and remains a career high). If it looked like Feliz had learned to distinguish balls from strikes and the result was better numbers, I'd believe in that 2000 season, but to my eye Feliz continued to swing at everything - he just happened to connect more often. While there are players who can get away with this (Alfonso Soriano, early-career Vladimir Guerrero, Miguel Tejada) these are all guys who utterly destroyed the minor leagues and are some of the most amazing atheletes in the game. Pedro Feliz can't get away with it.

So yes, Feliz is hitting .292 right now, and for his near-.300 (over .300 at the time) batting average, Mr. Genius Sabean has declared that Feliz will play every day. Looking behind his batting average, here's what Feliz is actually doing this season so far:

.292 AVG (19 for 65), .303 OBP (1 walk), .415 SLG (4 extra-base hits)

The batting average is the only thing Feliz is bringing to the table. All of his OBP and SLG are based on hitting singles. He's a .250 hitter (at best) in the majors. Do we really want to see what he's doing to do to the Giants offensively if they wait around for his batting average to drop to .250? This guy is supposed to help on offense? Goodness.

It's not like he's even good defensively.

Giants lose again

2004-04-29T21:34:00.000-07:00

Yet another wasted quality start from Jerome Williams and a waste of a Barry Bonds home run. Marlins win 4-3. The uncanny luck that the Giants possessed last year in one-run games now turns around on them, as they currently sport a 3-6 mark in such games. The law of averages can be your friend one year, enemy the next. Giants currently in last and things look grim.

Sabean admits there are problems

2004-04-29T09:23:00.000-07:00

You know things are getting rough when even Brian Sabean admits the team is in trouble. From today's merc:

"I wish I knew,'' the Giants' general manager said with a wince before Wednesday's surprising, but probably only temporary, 10-7 uprising over the Atlanta Braves at SBC Park. ``I'm completely at a loss right now what our identity is. . . .

I'll tell you Sabes - the team's identity is Barry Bonds and all the overpaid midlevel scrub vets you like so much.

"When you're changing the roster 30 or 40 percent every year to try to be the best team possible and have the winning ingredient to get to the playoffs, there's a percentage of `what-if' involved or fallibility.

Yes - "what if" Neifi Perez, Brett Tomko, Dustin Hermanson, Michael Tucker, JT Snow and Pedro Feliz do EXACTLY what they were expected to do - perform at a low level? Where is the shock here?

"Now, in our case, deservedly so, we've got people's [the "lunatic fringe"] expectations up so high, and it's their right to be frustrated and to voice their opinions and voice their concerns,'' Sabean said.

So nice of you to acknowledge our rights, Mr. Sabean. - A proud member of the Lunatic Fringe.

2004-04-29T08:59:00.000-07:00

2004 Giants Rant - Immediate Rebuilding

This is the second part of my current thoughts for the Giants franchise. This rant examines the possibility of tearing down the team and building it back up from scratch to contend in a few years. - Eric

Yesterday's rant spun an improbable plan for reloading the Giants' roster using players from unlikely sources or in unlikely roles. Of course, expecting Brian Sabean to trade for Craig Wilson, scouring the Japanese leagues and admitting his mistakes (like Neifi) is totally unrealistic. Almost as unrealistic, in fact, as the substance of this rant.

Plan B - Use 2004 to rebuild the team

When the Cleveland Indians decided that the core of players they'd developed and assembled in the mid 90's (Thome, Lofton, Colon, Vizquel, etc...) weren't going to be enough to get them back to the World Series, GM Mark Shapiro made a series of trades designed to obtain maximum future value for each of their star and veteran players, acknowledging that a couple of years of rebuilding with young players would lead to a franchise filled with cheap major-league talent a few years in the future, and that this was preferable to watching the veterans struggle to go all the way and fail. Now Cleveland is still in the rebuilding process, having acquired or developed players like CC Sabathia, Cliff Lee, Victor Martinez, Milton Bradley, Jason Davis, Chad Durbin, Travis Hafner, Brandon Phillips, Grady Sizemore, Jody Gerut etc.. and look to contend in 2005.

Generally, I believe that there are many ways to build a winning team. A team can draft and develop a core of players and sign them to deals before they become too expensive (the Indians model). A team can develop stars internally and sign external veterans as well (the Yankees model). A team can try to build exclusively from without using undervalued players (the Giants model). A team can try to build from without using expensive players (the 1990's Orioles model). Each of this models has risks associated with it. Obviously teams that base their future around the draft and the development of young players require that their scouting and draft teams pack the minor leagues with players likely to develop into major league regulars. Teams who try to sign undervalued veterans need to be able to evaluate those players better than the other teams around the league. Teams that sign expensive veterans better have a lot of money.

The Giants don't have a lot of money. They don't draft well. And for at least two years running they have not shown an ability to unearth players whose value is greater than the one given them by the general baseball market.

Plan B posits that the current team is done, mostly through the poor use of limited payroll funds, and that the time has come for the Giants to do what Cleveland did. The Giants have not assembled a core of players the way Cleveland did, but they have a number of veterans who can tremendously help those teams that are likely to contend in 2004 achieve their goals, and these teams are likely to provide San Francisco with the young players that will be needed to build the next great Giants franchise. Partially because of the frequency with which Brian Sabean trades minor-league players for veterans but mostly because he doesn't draft at all well, the Giants farm system is nearly bone-dry. If they try to continue doing what they're doing now and play with the current team in 2005 and 2006 and just wait for the the star players' contracts to expire, the situation will be extremely dire, since not only will these teams not have brought home any World Series banners, but the rebuilding will be enormously difficult and lengthy.

It bears mentioning for what must be the tenth time that this isn't a suggestion of what might actually happen. Of course this isn't going to happen. I just think that the next 5-8 years are a whole lot better for Giants fans under this scenario than under the "keep signing the next Michael Tucker until Barry retires" scenario.

Step 1: Trade Barry Bonds and Neifi Perez to Oakland for Nick Swisher, Joe Blanton and Bobby Crosby. There may never have been a player with as much midseason trade value as Barry Bonds. He is the best player in the game and getting better. Any contender who picks up Barry has to become an immediate favorite to win the pennant. Oakland is the only real option for a trade. A trade to Oakland makes sense for San Francisco, Oakland, Barry, Giants fans and A's fans.

It makes sense for San Francisco because no contending team has the kind of prospects that the A's have. The Giants need to get three prospects who are likely to turn into good major league players if they're going to trade Barry Bonds. The A's are the only team that a) will contend, b) have those prospects to trade away and c) play in the AL. Swisher (OF), Blanton (SP) and Crosby (SS) can be part of the next great series of Giants teams. In exchange for the unparalleled greatness of Bonds, the Giants force Beane to take Neifi Perez just so the Giants can get rid of him. They split his salary.

It makes sense for Oakland because they immediately become the favorite to win the World Series. In Oakland Barry could play left field and DH when he wasn't playing the field. He would displace the likes of Eric Byrnes and Scott Hatteberg when he did, which would make the Oakland offense (currently based around Eric Chavez, Jermaine Dye and a bunch of OBP guys) go from average to among the best in the AL. Their pitching is already the best in the AL. They'd probably field the best team in the majors. In addition, Barry would give the A's the ability to draw a lot more fans, since he's basically a self-contained marketing machine as he chases HR records. There are very few things that could convince Oakland ownership to take on this kind of payroll, but getting Barry Bonds is a unique opportunity, and with Jermaine Dye's contract coming off the books next year, their payroll would only truly balloon for 2004 and not for the 2-4 years Barry might play for them.

It makes sense for Barry because he'll get his ring, he can DH and extend his career and can stay in the bay area. In fact, I think this trade is best for Barry among all parties. He deserves to win a World Series after the career that he's had, and the Giants haven't built a team that can get him one. The A's have. Drop him into a roster with that pitching staff and a league-average offense and he'd take them right to the top.

It makes sense for Giants fans because the current team is killing us. This way we can watch Barry across the bay while rooting for a squad of emerging players who can develop into a great squad while we watch them.

It makes sense for A's fans for obvious reasons.

Step 2: Trade Ray Durham to the Twins for Justin Morneau and Grant Balfour. The Twins are likely to win the AL Central, but no thanks to perpetual scrub Luis Rivas. Durham is a perfect fit for the Twins, providing needed leadoff skills and pushing Shannon Stewart to a more natural 2-spot in the lineup.

Minnesota seems to grow guys like Morneau in a field somewhere, but he's the best of these guys they've developed in a long time. He's 23, is currently destroying AAA, and is the type of guy who becomes a cornerstone of a good team for years. The Twins have a multi-year commitment to Doug Mientciewicz and have guys like Mike Restovich and Matthew LeCroy coming out their ears. They have no one like Durham, so this trade works for them. Grant Balfour is a 26-year-old Australian pitcher with very high strikeout rates that I think is capable of becoming a #2 or #3 starter in the majors if he can stay healthy.

Step 3: Trade Jason Schmidt to the White Sox for Jeremy Reed and Kris Honel. The White Sox are the Twins' most likely competition in the AL Central. Schmidt gives them the ace they badly lack and puts their pitching more on pace with an impressive offense built around Magglio Ordonez, Frank Thomas, Carlos Lee and Paul Konerko. With Schmidt as the #1, Esteban Loiaza becomes their #2, Mark Buehrle their #3, John Garland their #4. With Schmidt they'd have a playoff rotation. Without him, they really don't.

Reed is arguably the best outfield prospect in the game. He's 23, hits for a very high average, draws walks, runs like the wind and hits doubles. His power could develop as he gets older. He, like Morneau, is likely to develop into a core player in a very good team. Honel is a young (21) starter who projects as a #3 starter in the big leagues. He is a complimentary player in this deal, and would drop in among a number of Giants prospects who are a couple of years away.

OR

Step 3: Trade Jason Schmidt to the Blue Jays for Alexis Rios and Dustin McGowan. If anything can enable the Blue Jays, who despite their slow start are going to have a big offense built around Carlos Delgado and Vernon Wells, it would be the addition of a second ace alongside Roy Halladay.

The Blue Jays (like most teams run by sabremetric GMs) have a collection of very good prospects in their system, and Rios is among the best (although some would make arguments for Gabe Gross). Rios is 23, projects as a center fielder who hits for average and some power. He's not the prospect Reed is, in my view. McGowan (no relation) is a 22-year-old right-handed pitcher who has great stuff and is currently tearing up AA.

Step 4: Trade Edgardo Alfonzo and Jason Christianson to the Astros for Richard Hidalgo, Morgan Ensberg, and Fernando Nieve. Alfonzo doesn't have anywhere near as much trade value as he would if he were actually hitting. Because of this, the Giants need to take on Richard Hidalgo's contract, which the Astros would like to move to make room for Jason Lane. Ideally, they work it out so that this trade is a money wash in 2004 (after which Hidalgo's contract comes off the books while Alfonzo's is a gift that keeps on giving). Christianson gives the Astros a major-league lefty for their bullpen, which currently is entirely right-handed.

Houston manager Jimy Williams obviously hates Ensberg, but I like him. He's not a huge prospect (he's 28) but in 572 major-league ABs has established (to my satisfaction) that he's a good major-league hitter. He'll be cheap for at least 2 or 3 more years. Alfonzo gives Jimy a veteran he can play, and the ballpark there will help him re-attain his career numbers. Nieve is a young pitcher currently at single-A who gives the Giants another electric power arm to go with Merkin Valdez and Matt Cain.

Step 5: Trade Pedro Feliz to Pittsburgh for Bobby Hill. I hate Pedro Feliz (but I'll be Lloyd McClendon would love him) and the Giants have (in this scenario) already picked up real players for 1B and 3B. By the time I envision this new team contending (2006), Feliz will be 31, will have spent six years in the major leagues, entitling him to arbitration at best, free agency at worst. Given that he isn't a good player, I'd rather see him out of the picture sooner rather than later.

Pittsburgh is obviously down on the 26-year-old Hill, who despite a mediocre 190 early-season ABs for the Cubs in 2002 (did anyone really think Dusty would stick with a then 24-year-old player?) has never really lost the abilities that made him a prospect in the first place. He has a good approach to the plate, draws walks, has good speed. He'd make a good, cheap second baseman for a team that doesn't have options at the position.

Step 6: Trade Felix Rodriguez to the Yankees for Eric Duncan. The Yankees can definitely use Felix's power arm, don't mind his salary, and given that they have A-Rod playing 3B for the next 7 years they don't exactly need Duncan, a 19-year-old 3B who hits a ton but who probably winds up playing LF at some point.

Summation: These moves rid the Giants of a majority of their salary commitments. I've chosen to leave Rueter on the team for 2004 and 2005 to preside over what will be a terrible team. There's always someone left over to keep things under control (see: Omar Vizquel). I haven't traded Grissom because, frankly, I can't find a contention team that would be better off with him than with their current option. Certainly if a trading partner could be found who offered a prospect for Grissom's services as the smaller half of a good center field platoon, I'd happily take the deal. After 2004 the contracts of Nen, Snow and Grissom expire.

Under this plan, the second half of 2004 and all of 2005 are going to be painful. However by 2006 I think this team would field a very competitive squad and would pack the house again with exciting, winning baseball. I envision the 2006 team looking something like this (obviously a lot of speculation here, since who really knows what will happen with young players):

1. Jeremy Reed (CF)
2. Bobby Hill (2B)
3. Justin Morneau (1B)
4. Nick Swisher (LF)
5. Morgan Ensberg (3B)
6. Todd Linden (RF)
7. Bobby Crosby (SS)
8. Yorvit Torrealba (C)
9. Pitcher

SP1. Jerome Williams
SP2. Jesse Foppert
SP3. Merkin Valdez
SP4. Matt Cain
SP5. Chris Honel

Rather than try to build a bullpen for 2 years out, I'll just say that Aardsma is probably the closer and the rest of the pen can be assembled during the 2005 season, using various players within the system as well as veterans who are picked up as they become available.

I feel compelled (for the few who got this far) to say yet again that I don't expect this to happen. This is not how the Giants organization is run. That I even suggest it means that I believe that both the major and minor-league personnel currently on board cannot contend either in the present OR the future. I think this is an extreme response to an extreme problem, but that after a couple of bad years the Giants would be contenders again. I think the window for Bonds to win with the Giants is closed. Let's give him the chance he deserves and be on our way to our own future.

Best to all,

Eric

2004-04-29T08:54:00.000-07:00

2004 Giants Rant - The possibility of Contention

This rant was circulated to an internal list a few days ago. After a month of Giants baseball, I had a lot to say. This one focuses on a plan to reload the Giants' pathetic 2004 roster, employing unconventional means and without spending extra money. - Eric

Most of you know I'm not that happy with the current season and the team the Giants' front office have assembled for this year. I don't believe the 2004 iteration of this team can contend no matter how great Barry Bonds is (and he's that great, but even so...), but rather than just bang my head against a wall, I thought I'd put together two plans of action (neither of which will take place of course, but it's a thought exercise and a bit of stress relief for me to do so, so if you're interested, read on, if not, feel free to delete and don't tell me you did) detailing out what I think ought to happen. The first is contained here, the second will be sent out at a later time (I have no doubt you're all breathless with anticipation).

Plan A: Try to contend in 2004

The team they have right now isn't good enough to contend, even in a weak division. The insistence on spending needed money on crappy veterans and the lack of awareness of the freely-available pool of replacement-level (or better) talent have created an $82M roster that looks like a $40M roster because so much money is wasted, whether it's on injured players (Robb Nen makes $9M this year) or overpaid veteran scrubs. Worse, some of the players are not just overpaid, they perform at a lower level than what the team could get out of a league-minimum player. Plan A involves a massive shakeup of the lineup, an acknowledgement that costs are sunk, and creative thinking. Note: I freely acknowledge that Plan A will NEVER happen.

Step 1: Shortstop. The Giants currently start the worst hitter in the major leagues at shortstop. They will pay him about $3M this year to generate hundreds of unproductive outs and make a few impressive-looking throws. Signing him was an indication that the general manager has taken leave of his senses. However that money will be spent on him regardless of what the team does going forward. Sending him out there to hit like a (bad) pitcher is the problem now. He has no trade value unless Sabean can convince the White Sox to take him to fill in for the injured Jose Valentin (doubtful), so they need to bench him or, if he whines about that and won't come into games as a defensive replacement (as he refused to do when he was a Royal) just cut him outright. Playing him is worse than paying him not to play.

There aren't going to be any really good players out there to play shortstop for the Giants at this point, but there are several guys they could go get who would at least perform like a league-average player, rather than the most destructive offensive nightmare in the game. First on my list would be Julio Lugo, who I'm guessing the DRays would be happy to trade away given that they aren't contending and their top prospect is BJ Upton. He's no A-Rod, but he'll give the Giants decent offense out of the #7 or #8 spot and is cheap (relatively speaking). It wouldn't take a blue-chip prospect (of which the Giants have precious few) to acquire him. Alternately, they could trade with Cleveland for Omar Vizquel, who they have already tried to deal (to Seattle). Vizquel is like an older, better version of Neifi - he doesn't hit much (but more than Neifi will) and plays the position well defensively (but probably not quite as well as Neifi does). Vizquel is obviously not a long-term or even medium-term solution, and the Giants have no internal replacement coming up any time soon (the Giants don't draft hitters). Alternately, depending on how serious the Mariners take their early slide and his poor April numbers, they could try to trade for Rich Aurilia back, since if Sabean understood the arbitration game at all Aurilia would still be a Giant anyway.

Step 2: Right field. The Giants have long been using middle-class veterans to play right field, and while they were out getting good (but underrated, for various reasons) players it worked fairly well. They got Ellis Burks on the cheap because other teams were worried about his knees. They got Reggie Sanders cheap coming off a terrible season for the Braves. They got Jose Cruz cheap 2 years off a 30/30 season because he had a low batting average. All of those guys were pretty good players, but the three-headed monster they have assembled this year is a disaster. Michael Tucker is a 4th outfielder (at best) and Hammonds is the smaller part of a decent platoon in center or right field. Dustan Mohr doesn't belong on the roster of a good team. There are plenty of option that can be looked at to fix this problem. First prize is a player who is a very good hitter but doesn't "look like a good ballplayer" and whose manager begrudges him every AB he gets. That player is Craig Wilson, who's off to a hot start, which might make him a little more expensive, but who is still eminently acquirable, particularly with Pittsburgh getting Jason Bay back and having a glut of infielders (Freddy Sanchez is coming back from injury soon and enters an already crowded picture). I'd send some toolsy prospect plus one (preferably both) of Tucker or Mohr (Giants would pay them of course) to Pittsburgh for Wilson. As a sidelight, if I could get them to throw in Bobby Hill (currently backing up Jose Castillo) I'd pick him up in a heartbeat to back up Durham and play 2B for the Giants after 2006. An alternative, if Wilson proves too expensive or unavailable, would be to pluck Termel Sledge from Montreal. He's off to a disastrous start, but he's a good hitter and would pay dividends as a league-average or slightly better RF for 4 or 5 years at a low price.

Step 3: First base. When the Giants got league-leading offensive production from Jeff Kent and Aurilia at the middle infield positions, they could nominally justify having JT Snow playing first base for his glove work. That is no longer the case, and having a defensive specialist at first base is a luxury the Giants can't even remotely afford. There are so many guys out there who can put up a .265 / .350 / .475 season while competently playing first base that the Giants have no excuse for playing JT and his non-existent bat anymore. I understand that Sabean thought he was going to be able to make an off-season deal for Sexson or Derrek Lee, but it didn't get done, and Snow is a big problem. There are plenty of options out there. The first few calls I'd make would be to Japan - Roberto Petagine, Alex Cabrera and Tuffy Rhodes are all out there hitting 40, 50 homers a year in Japan, and while these guys obviously aren't Jim Thome, they'd be a whole lot better than what the Giants have. Other alternatives would be to call the wins asking about Justin Morneau or Mike Restovich - these guys have killed the minor leagues and both are (seemingly) blocked - see if the Twins want to part with either (or both) of them. In the "the hell with the defense" department, a trade with Texas for Brad Fullmer would be a smart move. Texas always needs pitching. He hits a lot and is cheap. As a sign of how desperate I think this situation is, I think even Damon Minor (currently going .321 / .410 / .547 at Fresno) would be a better option than Snow. Of these, the prize would be Morneau, but I think he's also the least attainable.

Step 4: Third base. In a truly ideal world the Giants would trade Edgardo Alfonzo and his 4-year contract to the Astros for Morgan Ensberg, since I think they're very similar players. Houston's Jimy Williams refuses to play Ensberg (routinely benches him for the likes of Geoff Blum and Mike Lamb), especially with Ensberg off to a poor start, and he costs a lot less than Alfonzo. However since I don't think I could make a good-faith argument to Gerry Hunsicker that this trade makes sense for his team, even in Plan A the Giants probably have to stick with Alfonzo. Note: no plan that involves the word "contention" has Pedro Feliz being anything more than a backup at any position. He is likely to finish the season with an OBP of under .300 - that's just too low for a regular player, even if his power is real (which it probably is).

Step 5: Center field. I've been singing this song a long time, and it doesn't seem particularly relevant in a year where Marquis Grissom has started the year on such a tear, even against right-handed pitching. However the fact remains that Grissom is a 37-year-old lefty masher who is horribly miscast as an everyday center fielder. He's consistently proven that he hits lefties like Richie Sexson and righties like a 165-pound middle infielder. Unfortunately there aren't a lot of options for a left-handed platoon partner for him that immediately make themselves obvious. No one in the Giants farm system can do it (Jason Ellison isn't anywhere near ready and probably never will be), Hammonds hits from the same side as Grissom and I'm not aware of too many cheap hard-hitting center fielders out there unless the Expos have decided to give up on Brad Wilkerson after a few weeks of bad hitting (which I seriously doubt). One option, based on how healthy he is, is former Giant Kenny Lofton, who has platoon splits that are the mirror image of Grissom's. It would require some creative and rational lineup management by Felipe (like I said before, I know this is a fantasy scenario), but a Lofton / Grissom platoon in center field would actually make a lot of sense and would keep both older players fresh for the latter part of the season.

Note: Pitching rotation. There is only so much a team can do with the rotation at this point in the season. Obviously having signed Maddux or Colon in the off-season would have helped. If Schmidt is healthy (if he isn't, there's no way this team contends anyway), he, Williams and Rueter make a fine 1-2-3, but Tomko and Hermanson/Correia are a problem at the back-end. Having a strong pitching rotation from top to bottom has been an organizational strength for several years and now it isn't. The hope was (obviously) that Hermanson and Tomko would flourish at SBC park. I think that was sensible, but not very realistic. I don't think there's a lot that can be done unless Sabean can trade for some midlevel pitcher like Steve Trachsel. Ultimately if the 4 and 5 spots in the rotation were the only problem, I think the team might be good enough and there's little that can be done now anyway.

Note: Bullpen. The idea was clearly that Robb Nen was coming back and was going to fix the bullpen's woes. That's apparently not going to happen. The refusal to bring back Worrell, who ultimately signed with the Phillies for setup man money (see my earlier comment about arbitration) is evidence enough of this. I actually think the bullpen will be alright if given time to work itself out (this represents relatively new thinking for me over the last week or so). Matt Herges shouldn't be the high-leverage reliever ("closer" for those who think in such terms). The best reliever on the staff is Felix Rodriguez and he should probably be used in crucial situations, even though I worry about his command problems this year and lack of an off-speed pitch. Herges is a fine third righty out of the pen (which he was last year) and acceptable as a second. Brower is decent enough long man. From the left side they have the interchangeable (as yet unscored upon) Christianson, Eyre and Wayne Franklin. Unless they can get someone to take Christianson and his $2.5M salary, the answer is to convince some fool GM that Franklin was always meant to be a reliever, and that his 1.23 ERA is for real and try to get something of value for him. If the eventual construction of the bullpen is Felix, Herges, Brower and Correia (or Aardsma) from the right side and Eyre and Christianson from the left side, I don't think this bullpen will destroy the Giants' chances (unless they are so overworked that they all break down). It would certainly help a lot to get a healthy Nen back, but I don't think it's likely.

Conclusion: As should be obvious, it's the lineup that I think can be fixed, and while I don't know if it would be enough, I think fixing it would give the Giants the best chance to contend while not spending any additional money (which they've made it very obvious they won't do) and without waiting until July to acquire players (at which time Neifi, Snow, Tucker, Mohr and Feliz will have made so many outs that the team will probably be out of contention for good at that point). In my ideal scenario (note that I'm building in my views about lineup construction) the Giants would run out the following lineups:

Versus a right-handed starter:

1. Lofton (CF)
2. Durham (2B)
3. Bonds (LF)
4. Wilson (RF)
5. Morneau/Petagine (1B)
6. Alfonzo (3B)
7. Pierzynksi (C)
8. Lugo (SS)
9. Pitcher

Versus a left-handed starter:

1. Durham (2B)
2. Alfonzo (3B)
3. Bonds (LF)
4. Grissom (CF)
5. Wilson (RF)
6. Morneau / Petagine (1B)
7. Pierzynski (C)
8. Lugo (SS)
9. Pitcher

Whichever of Hammonds or Tucker remained on the team would be the extra OF and back up all three spots. Snow can be kept on as a backup 1B / defensive replacement. Feliz can be the #1 pinch-hitter and can back up each infield position.

Like I said - I don't know that this would be enough, but I think this team would score enough runs to give the Barry and pitching staff enough help to put the team over the top in a very weak division. And if you got this far, congratulations.

2004-04-29T08:44:00.000-07:00

INTRODUCTION

After my various Giants-related rants, both via email and on various public message boards (yes, now my lack of a life is public knowledge), it has been suggested to me that I put them up in a place where even people who don't know me well enough to yell at me in person can read (and comment on) some of my baseball ravings. I will probably spend most of the space in this blog criticizing the stupidity of various baseball front offices (particularly the Giants), making wildly unrealistic personnel suggestions and taking poorly-written sports commentary to task. There will be a lot of love for Barry Bonds. Occasionally there might even be something I approve of, which you as readers might appreciate all the more by virtue of the scarcity of such events. Anyway, enjoy to whatever extent you do, and let me know if there are things you think I should rant about in this space.