With Steven Rubio’s kind permission, I’m reproducing two of his recent blog entries at
http://begonias.typepad.com/srubio/, partly because his stuff’s always dead on and insightful, but also because I responded at length—as is my wont, poor creature—rather than just putting it all on
this blog, which might have made more sense.
We begin with
“giants at the break”:
Might as well spend a bit of time talking about the Giants, as All-Star Fever hits San Francisco.
First, a statement of my basic set of assumptions. While it has been shown that in most cases, one individual player is not worth as much as people think (it’s common to hear people say “he saved the team ten wins with his glove,” for instance), Barry Bonds is such a remarkable baseball player that he is an outlier… he makes more difference than people think, not less. The specifics for the Giants are this: they have done well over the past decade, but far and away the primary reason for this is Barry Bonds. Duh, I know, but because he is an outlier, that statement is less obvious than it seems. Others get lots of the public credit for the team’s successes, but I give that credit mostly to Bonds. The primary recipient of the public praise (in the past… their current problems have resulted in a decline in his reputation) is General Manager Brian Sabean. I contend that Sabean had little to do with the acquisition of Bonds, so he shouldn’t get credit for Barry. I further contend that while Sabean has his strong points, they tend to be old school in an era of new paradigms, so that his strong points become less useful with each passing season. Therefore, I have always been suspicious of Sabean… that’s not true, I think he does a bad job… even though a team he put together came closer to winning a World Series than any Giants team since 1962.
OK, there’s a summation of my biases. What’s up in 2007? Is the team performing as expected, better, worse, different? And what does this tell us about their future?
First, to get the obvious out of the way: things aren’t going well. Their current winning percentage is their lowest since 1996, and they are in last place. The year 1996 is significant, because the next year was Sabean’s first as general manager, and that year the Giants won their division, starting an eight-year run of winning seasons that included four trips to the postseason and one trip to the World Series. It is that record on which Sabean’s reputation rose: he took a bad team, the story goes, and turned them into winners. The bloom is off that particular rose, though, since 2007 looks to be the third straight losing season for the club, and Sabean’s job is reported to be on the line.
What was expected in 2007? Partly, your expectations revolve around your opinion regarding the value of keeping Barry Bonds on the team. Since Barry makes a lot of money, some argue that the team is wrong to spend so much on an old guy when they could get two or three good younger players for the same amount. There are two problems with this theory. First, Barry is still performing as well or better than all the other guys at his position… he may cost a lot, but he still gives value, even at his advanced age. Second, the theory assumes that Brian Sabean would get some good talent with the money he saved on Bonds, while Brian’s track record suggests otherwise… while he doesn’t do too badly at evaluating pitching, his idea of a good hitter is very much old school, behind the times, and thus poor relative to his peers.
Anyway… the 2006 Giants were mediocre. Their bullpen was OK, and they had a couple of good starters, but they lacked depth in the rotation, and their offense was filled with old guys, some of whom were over the hill, others who had never really made it up the hill in the first place. Since the Giants had some potentially good pitchers in the organization, the strategy seemed pretty clear: gradually work those younger pitchers into bigger roles on the major league club while weeding out the bad old hitters and making moves to both improve the offense and make it younger.
The plan has not been a total bust. Some of those younger pitchers are indeed showing promise, and while mega-bucks starter Barry Zito was not worth anything near what Sabean paid for him, the guy he essentially replaced (Jason Schmidt) has fallen victim to injuries. The pitching is better now than it was last year, and there is every reason to believe that improvement will last into at least the near future.
Ah, but the offense. It’s almost exactly the same as in 2006. Last year, the Giants had Barry Bonds, two other aging but effective hitters, and a bunch of crap. This year, they have Barry Bonds, one aging but effective hitter, and a bunch of crap. Their offense is still too old, and the hitters’ skills are still too old school (I might as well be specific on this point at least once: Sabean tends to sign hitters who have proven veteran status with decent numbers in categories like RBI, but who don’t draw many walks and thus don’t get on base very often, on-base percentage being perhaps the single most important step between what was considered good back in the day and what is considered good under the new paradigm).
The Giants have been unlucky this year… they’ve scored more runs than they’ve allowed, suggesting a team that should thus win more games than they lose. The improved pitching is the reason they’re better this year than last, despite the W-L record. They have indeed taken steps in the right direction, as far as pitching goes. But they are stagnant on offense, not because they have Barry Bonds (he remains far and away their best offensive player), but because Brian Sabean doesn’t know what the fuck he is doing when it comes time to get hitting talent.
So, to the questions I asked earlier. How are they performing? The pitching is better, the hitting is the same, their luck is bad, their record is poor. What does it mean for the future? The pitching looks good, so if they can improve the hitting, they will be contenders very soon.
Which leads to the most important question of all: is Brian Sabean the right General Manager for what this team needs? Clearly, the answer is no. The area that needs the most work is the area where Sabean is at his worst. He is not the worst GM in the game, and he could be a good fit for a team just shy of contention that needed one or two players to put them over the top in 2008. But the Giants need a GM well versed in contemporary baseball analytics, they need an entire team in the front office of people who understand the new paradigm, they need, in short, the anti-Sabean. I can think of a couple of candidates… Jonathan Bernstein, a poli-sci professor in Texas and a long-time Giants fan, would be great filling an analyst role, although he kinda already has a job. Jacob Jackson has the best solution, though: a man named Paul DePodesta. You can read Jackson’s thoughts in his piece “
The best unemployed GM in baseball.“ DePodesta is available, he knows what he’s doing… what the heck, he was even fired by the Dodgers (and replaced by a Sabean protégé), which would make his successes with the Giants that much more enjoyable. If Sabean’s replacement is at the level of a DePodesta, the Giants will rise again, sooner rather than later. If they hire the usual hack, or even worse, if they keep Sabean around, they won’t be winners for a long time to come.
Here’s where I come in, daring Steven not to know that I would respond. First, I should congratulate Steven on his classiness in not mentioning that my response is longer than his article, and then some:
- “Barry Bonds is such a remarkable baseball player that he is an outlier… he makes more difference than people think, not less. The specifics for the Giants are this: they have done well over the past decade, but far and away the primary reason for this is Barry Bonds. Duh, I know, but because he is an outlier, that statement is less obvious than it seems. Others get lots of the public credit for the team’s successes, but I give that credit mostly to Bonds.”This should be such a “duh” that there should be no need to explain it to anybody more on the ball than Ali G. Indeed, it’s been pretty clear that Bonds has essentially been Brian Sabean’s armor, and the more it erodes with time, the more exposed Sabean’s weaknesses, and chitlins, are.
- “The primary recipient of the public praise (in the past… their current problems have resulted in a decline in his reputation) is General Manager Brian Sabean. I contend that Sabean had little to do with the acquisition of Bonds, so he shouldn’t get credit for Barry.”I will assume that you are employing understatement in saying “little to do,” because Sabes had zippo to do with signing Bonds in the first place. He wasn’t even around. In fact, technically, Bob Quinn, his predecessor, wasn’t even around. Evidently, during the job interview process, when asked which single player Quinn would pursue, he said “Bonds,” and that pretty much got him his job. What’s interesting to me is that most folks’ gut reaction to that would be long the lines of, well, “Duh!”—translated as, “Any general manager (or candidate for such a position) would have said “Bonds.’” But apparently this isn’t true. Al Rosen reportedly said that he never would’ve gone after Bonds. That right there made me awfully glad Rosen was out.
- “I further contend that while Sabean has his strong points, they tend to be old school in an era of new paradigms, so that his strong points become less useful with each passing season. Therefore, I have always been suspicious of Sabean… that’s not true, I think he does a bad job… even though a team he put together came closer to winning a World Series than any Giants team since 1962.”
The 2002 team was mostly about Bonds, Kent, Aurilia, Schmidt, Ortiz, and Nen. Well, those were the stars. We’ve already established that Sabean can’t take credit for Bonds—except in being savvy enough to re-sign him here and there—and Aurilia’s not really his boy either, as he came over in the John Burkett trade after the 1994 season and came up at the end of 1995. I guess one could give him credit for recognizing that Aurilia was a major leaguer, but lots of Richie’s early at-bats were stolen by Jose Vizcaino and Rey Sanchez, so just how much credit is debatable. I do give Sabes credit for getting Kent, but not for knowing how good he’d actually be. In fact, it was Julian Tavarez who was supposed to be the key acquisition in the Matt Williams trade. Certainly, though, Sabes pretty much stole Schmidt and Nen, and he deserves recognition in a big way there. Ortiz too, I guess.
But the rest of the team? Hits and misses. Tsuyoshi Shinjo might have been to center field what Hal Lanier was to shortstop—I mean, obviously Shinjo wasn’t nearly as bad a hitter as Lanier (since almost no one could be), but I would say that he was about as below average a center fielder as Lanier was a shortstop (or second baseman), to the point where—recognizing this, amazingly—Sabean went and got Kenny Lofton, and Dusty Baker wound up changing horses after that… right up till the World Series, when he insisted on (a) playing Shinjo, and (b) using him as a DH instead of a ninth-place-hitting center fielder (if at all). I mean, it wasn’t even clear that Shinjo should’ve been on the postseason roster.
The David Bell acquisition turned out good for the 2002 team. His numbers weren’t spectacular, but he was asked to inhabit either the leadoff spot of the second slot on any given day—and that ain’t Bell—and he played all four infield positions, which he wouldn’t have had to do except for injuries. And the trade for Lofton turned out just dandy.
Snow was Snow, though he picked it up in the postseason, ish, and Reggie Sanders was Reggie Sanders. He had a rough postseason, but I don’t blame that on Sabean. And Benito Santiago was just fine. No complaints there. In the postseason, I mean. During the season, he drove me bats a lot of the time.
Kirk Rueter did more or less what he was supposed to do, and Livan Hernandez… well, I know it’s not as though he put up Jim Poole-like numbers in the World Series, but let us just say that he did not pitch well enough to win. Some Giants fans called him “the real deal” when Sabes traded for him, but no one was saying that anymore in 2002, even well before the postseason. I won’t say the guy was a head case, but it appears that he wouldn’t allow himself to be coached. What we hear about him since is that “He’s throwing inside a lot more—why wouldn’t he do that when Dave Righetti was trying to get him to?” So I’m guessing that as happy as some folks might have been when we got Livan, they were equally happy when he exited. I know I was.
Aside from Nen and Felix Rodriguez, the bullpen sort of came down to Scott Eyre, who turned out to be a good pickup, although despite a superb ERA, he gave up a hell of a lot of baserunners. Still, he was a waiver-wire pickup. It seems that whatever acumen he might have had for such transactions Sabes no longer trusted it after 2002. And Rodriguez… well, he’d been great before 2002, so congratulate Sabean, I guess; but probably he’d been overused and then went coo-coo for Coco-Puffs.
What I’m getting at, I guess, is that Sabes did have a pretty big hand in building that league champion, but so much of it also was, as you say, Bonds; and Kent was an amazingly lucky break.
- “What was expected in 2007? Partly, your expectations revolve around your opinion regarding the value of keeping Barry Bonds on the team. Since Barry makes a lot of money, some argue that the team is wrong to spend so much on an old guy when they could get two or three good younger players for the same amount. There are two problems with this theory. First, Barry is still performing as well or better than all the other guys at his position… he may cost a lot, but he still gives value, even at his advanced age. Second, the theory assumes that Brian Sabean would get some good talent with the money he saved on Bonds, while Brian’s track record suggests otherwise… while he doesn’t do too badly at evaluating pitching, his idea of a good hitter is very much old school, behind the times, and thus poor relative to his peers.”This is a great point, i.e., that baseball has passed Sabean by. Even at his best, though, would you call him an “outside the box” thinker?
The other thing about the idea of having gotten two or three or four or 80 talented guys for Bonds’ salary is the notion that those guys’ contribution would equal or surpass Bonds’. Which they wouldn’t. Still, that statement presupposes that one Bonds is worth two or three or four or 80 other talented guys, and that’s a hard one to get past the sensors.
- “The plan has not been a total bust. Some of those younger pitchers are indeed showing promise, and while mega-bucks starter Barry Zito was not worth anything near what Sabean paid for him, the guy he essentially replaced (Jason Schmidt) has fallen victim to injuries. The pitching is better now than it was last year, and there is every reason to believe that improvement will last into at least the near future.”The Zito/Schmidt thing, I think escapes notice solely because of the sheer amount of money Zito’s getting, which I don’t think is exactly a fair way to evaluate the guy. The way I see it, he’s supposed to be our ace. It’s not that he’s not pitching like a guy worth $126 million—he’s not—but, more importantly, he’s not pitching like an ace. He’s a game or two away, maybe three, from getting his ERA down to league average, though, and he’s got a whole post-All-Star stretch to work it down even further. He’s frustrating, but not a bust. Yet. And, as you point out, there’s the Schmidt thing—i.e., Zito’s giving us at least as much value as Schmidt is giving the Dodgers, depending on one’s definition of “value” (i.e., ERA, “eating up innings,” whatever). However, since people like to bitch about Zito’s contract, the “at least as much value as Schmidt” thing will never sound good enough.
- “Their offense is still too old, and the hitters’ skills are still too old school (I might as well be specific on this point at least once: Sabean tends to sign hitters who have proven veteran status with decent numbers in categories like RBI, but who don’t draw many walks and thus don’t get on base very often, on-base percentage being perhaps the single most important step between what was considered good back in the day and what is considered good under the new paradigm).”Sabean’s preferred offense sounds a lot like Dave Barry’s mother’s idea of a balanced meal: for every food item that he and his siblings liked, such as hamburgers, she’d serve a food item they hated, such as brussels sprouts. Pedro Feliz, here, would be a Brussels sprout. And what gets to me about him is the same thing that got to me when Sabean got J.T. Snow: the notion of “How can you complain about a guy who hits 20 home runs and drives in 80 every year?” The best answer is, “Watch Feliz.”
- “The Giants have been unlucky this year….”Ha! I put it to you that they’re unlucky every year.”
- “Brian Sabean doesn’t know what the fuck he is doing when it comes time to get hitting talent.”I don’t know that the Billy Beane approach is the approach to building a champion (especially ‘cause Beane hasn’t built any champions yet), but I’m willing to find out.
- “… the Giants need a GM well versed in contemporary baseball analytics, they need an entire team in the front office of people who understand the new paradigm, they need, in short, the anti-Sabean. I can think of a couple of candidates… Jonathan Bernstein, a poli-sci professor in Texas and a long-time Giants fan, would be great filling an analyst role, although he kinda already has a job. Jacob Jackson has the best solution, though: a man named Paul DePodesta. You can read Jackson’s thoughts in his piece ‘The best unemployed GM in baseball.’ DePodesta is available, he knows what he’s doing… what the heck, he was even fired by the Dodgers (and replaced by a Sabean protégé), which would make his successes with the Giants that much more enjoyable. If Sabean’s replacement is at the level of a DePodesta, the Giants will rise again, sooner rather than later. If they hire the usual hack, or even worse, if they keep Sabean around, they won’t be winners for a long time to come.”Of course, since I’ve known Jonathan online for about 11 or 12 years and think of him as a “kinda” friend because we swap genial e-mails now and again (but not often enough), I’d be happy to campaign for him as the next Giants GM. He is, in my opinion, a fantastic analyst—one whose stuff in the newsgroup I never fail to read—and also someone who I think would have an excellent big-picture view. Plus, I’m hoping that by touting him this heavily, he might return the favor and find me a highly paid sinecure position within the organization.
- “Given where the Giants are now, [Fred] Lewis should be playing a lot more than Randy Winn… Lewis isn’t likely to be a part of the next good Giants team, but Winn is defintely not going to be a contributor to that club, so the Giants should be giving Lewis every opportunity to show what he can do. It will be interesting to see what Bochy does the second half of the season… so far, he keeps running Winn out there almost every day, and Winn’s decent BA is just covering up the fact that he no longer hits well enough to be a regular, and pretty much hasn’t since those great two months with the Giants at the end of ’05.”I don’t think it’s Winn who’s the problem. It’s Roberts, who (a) is signed to a disturbingly long contract, and (b) stinks. It’s not like he gets on base enough or hits with enough power to cover that .218 batting average—which has stayed steady since about the third week of the season. I would be much happier with an outfield of Bonds, Winn, and Lewis than Bonds, Roberts, and Lewis—or, for that matter, Bonds, Roberts, and Winn.
Meanwhile, I feel a little bad for both Dan Ortmeier and Nate Schierholtz, because it’s Roberts and Lewis who are keeping them out of the bigs. Though certainly Schierholtz, is the better hitter and younger player, I liked what I saw of Ortmeier, to the point where maybe it’s Mark Sweeney who’s keeping him out of the bigs.
- “They should dump Roberts and Winn for whatever they can get, run Lewis and Schierholtz or whoever out there every day, live with the losses that will surely pile up, and work on the future.”I could live with this. Sadly, if they get any takers for Roberts, we’ll wind up either paying some Neifiesque clown a million and a half dollars to suck, or some 25-year-old single-A pitching “prospect” whose fastball went from 98 to 88 after Tommy John surgery.
Next, poor Steven makes the mistake of commenting on Barry Bonds and
the Home Run Derby:
I’ll post some pix later, but here are some quick thoughts:
It’s more fun than you’d think. The competition, I’m talking about… the endless breaks for television commercials meant the entire affair moved at a snail’s pace, but watching these guys hit homers was actually a blast. Much of the between-batter “entertainment” was lame, although I understand they felt the need to do something to fill those five-minute commercial breaks. Kudos, though, to the Bucket Boys, four guys who pounded on buckets with drumsticks… they rooled.
More proof, if needed, that Barry Bonds is from another planet: they had some of the best home run hitters in the game here tonight, and after the first round, all of the lefties were eliminated. AT&T Park, you see, is a very hard place for lefties to hit homers. Barry Bonds, who has hit more homers than anyone not named Hank Aaron, is a lefty hitter. He set the single-season record for HR playing his home games at AT&T Park.
Apparently there are a lot of people saying Barry crapped on the local fans by opting out of the contest. We’ll show America just how much we hate him for that tomorrow when he is introduced. Here’s a preview: he’ll get far and away the most cheers of any player unless Willie Mays gets more.
Probably the most entertaining thing about the contest was… no, not the Counting Crows mini-concert… was the kids they had shagging flies during the competition. Some big stud would hit a fly ball about two miles into the air in right-center field, and 25 kids would chase after the ball, most of them beginning from some place far away from the eventual destination of the ball. They wouldn’t come anywhere near close to the ball when it landed, of course, but they sure didn’t lack for hustle!
Maybe it’s standard Giants-fan paranoia, but I feel as though he, and the ballpark, have been denigrated in the sense of the park being tailored for him, making it that much easier for him to set records and such. Paranoia or not, though, somehow the place really
was built for Barry Bonds. I have no idea why he, and no other hitter, including lefties, succeeds at that place. (Obviously, lots of folks who hate the guy will say that
they have an idea why, but I don’t care.) But it’s not like he’s a dead-pull-hitter (Shut up, dissenters: a ludicrous infield shift doesn’t mean he pulls all his fly balls, too.) in a bandbox with a low fence and the win always blowing out.
Indeed, when Bonds set the single-season home run record, I think he hit one more home run at home than on the road, but I wanted to mention, for those who might not know, but not for
you, ‘cause you know, so you can stick your fingers in your eyes and hum “Camptown Races” during this part, that the place is hard on
all hitters, including lefties, which the distance to the right-field foul pole might well belie. I could be wrong, but I think there’s a general assumption that Bonds just pokes lazy little fly balls down the right-field line that somehow carry into the bay, but in fact, it’s not as though he hits all his home runs in the same place. He’s lost plenty of home runs in the wind and high off that right-field wall, but he’s hit a bunch just over the 421 sign. Anyway, what I’m getting at is, somehow that park works for him, and all the naughty substances in the world can’t explain it. Neither can I.
Any reasonable fan can understand Bonds opting out of the home run derby—He’s 87 years old with 151-year-old knees, doesn’t want to get hurt of screw up his swing for the rest of the season, etc.—but lots of
unreasonable fans have wet lots of pants over it: “What a horrid human being he must be!” Of course, if he had opted in, these same goofs would be ripping him for
risking his health and the rest of the season. No way this guy ever wins.
As I’ve said in the past, if Barry Bonds were to save the life of a sportswriter by pushing him out of the way of an onrushing bus, the headlines would read, “Bonds Shoves Reporter.”
And, yes, I know: Why am I not putting this stuff in
my blog?
