SAY IT AIN'T SO!

Just say no to Joe. Crede, that is.

Check out two fine posts at Bay City and Stankeye.

Trade Rumors has the skinny.

Just say NO.

Tell me something I don't know!

Writer and renowned stat-head Rich Lederer has a feature called BASEBALL BEAT on his excellent website Baseball Analysts. His latest posting is called 2007 Payroll Efficiency. Waaaalllllll, I wonder who-all comes up lookin' lousy in this-here department? Yep: Petey Mac, The Sabester, and the SFGs. We were 9th in payroll and managed only 71 wins. Let's all hear a big fat "Bleah!" OK, again: "Bleah!" Of course, we knew this already. There is a link in the article to some more detailed analysis. I'll save you the surfing time: only the Baltimore Orioles were worse than us in terms of wins per dollars spent (that's an oversimplification, of course). Just what you wanted to hear, eh?

Pete is Happy!

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3219098

Pedro signs with Philadelphia (according to Jayson Stark).
Does this mean Kevin Frandsen is our new 3B?
Discuss.

Boch & Sabes, Act II, Scene II (Finale)

Top of the Mark: pre-season banquet for Giants bigwigs and families. End of the evening; Sabes still resplendent in tux, silver mane immaculately coiffed. Boch in a rumpled earth-tone Pat Riley-edition Armani suit, collar and tie loosened. Cloth-covered table center stage with party residue--plates, glasses, silverware.

Sabes: (pacing SR) Meddling sonsofbitches.
Boch: (seated SL, beer in hand) Huh?
Sabes: (snappish) Nothing!
Boch: (belches) Loosen up, Bri, have a beer.
Sabes: Oh, just drink, eh? That's good, Bru, real good.
Boch: Hell, it's free! (downs drink, raises and waggles empty, looking offstage for a waiter)
Sabes: (fidgeting, rambling) . . . that Burns witch . . . Baer's wife and her brats . . . Magowan's pile of punks . . . the hell with them . . .
Boch: Hey! 'Nother beer here!
Sabes: (bitter) What do they know anyway? All their help. All their advice. I wouldn't make one of their moves if even it was a good one! Who the hell do they think they are?
Boch: Lighten' up, Bri. They're owners. S'what they do.
Sabes: (ignores him, continues fretting) I'll show them . . . first it was the bloggers, goddamn geeks! Then the reporters. Smart alecks--not one of 'em ever worked in baseball--telling me what I should do! This is the last straw . . . damn wives and kids think they can run the damn club!
Boch: (fresh beer in hand, burps loudly, takes a drink, burps again). Aaaaah, now that's mighty tasty!
Sabes: Is that all you can think about? Beer?
Boch: It's a party!
Sabes: For you, Bru. Yeah, for you. Oh, but not for me. No, not for me.
Boch: (glassy eyed, head wobbling) C'mon, Bri. Have a goldurned drink. Unhook that cummerbund. Them things give ya gas. (burps again)
Sabes: (whips off coat, frantically works on bow tie) You want loose? Huh? Well, Bru, my drunken comrade, you just wait!
Boch: (alarmed) What's got stuck up yer bunghole, amigo? Yer gonna pop a nut!
Sabes: (viciously rolling up sleeves of shirt) They want action! Oh, that's what they think! Just wait, they'll see some goddamned action from their goddamned GM!
Boch: (dazed, but concerned) Uh, Bri? Y'alright, there?
Sabes: (now pacing the whole stage maniacally) They ALL want a piece of me. Well, I'll give it to them! Yeah! Right now! (leaps on to table)
Boch: Easy, boy!
Sabes: (grabs plate, flings it off stage) Take that! (crashing sounds and hubub) And that! (throws glass)
Boch: I'll git 'im! (lurches out of seat and falls)
Sabes: I'm not kissing your asses any more, you bastards! (continues heaving objects)
Boch: (on floor, hands over head) Look out!
Sabes: (now punting the flower arrangements) Hah! Haha! Hahahahahah! Wheeeeee!
Boch: I seen 'im like this before! Duck!
Sabes: (turns around, drops trousers and moons audience) Whooooooooooo! Yeeeeeeee-hawwwwwww!
Boch: (crawling) Git out! He's crazy!
Sabes: (slapping butt with hands) Yeah! Kiss my patootie! Up yours! Up mine! Hahahahahahahahahah!
Boch: (looking up) It's the cops, Bri! Somebody called the cops!
Sabes: Chickenshits! (removes rest of clothes, dances naked on table) Pussies! Can't take me, huh? Had to call the cops! Wusses! Girls! (cavorts madly) Aaaaaaaaaghhhhhh!
POLICE: (offstage megaphone voice) Put your hands up! Stay where you are!
Boch: (prone, hands shooting up) Don't shoot!
Sabes: Come and get me, coppers! (waves arms wildly) I'm armed! Hahahahahahaha! (thrusts pelvis) And dangerous! Whooooooooooo!
Boch: Bri, git down! Yer wigglin' yer whacker like a damn pervert!
POLICE: Mr. Sabean! We'll give you one more chance! Get down! Stop right now!
Sabes: Down! Down? Down?! I'm on top of the world! You'll never take me down! (starts heaving plates again) You hear me? Top of the world!

Policemen flood the stage as Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries blasts out amid the crashing and hollering.


Lights out. Curtain.

Sabre-Rowand & the Sabes-ster

ZiPS projections and discussion for Aaron Rowand here.

FanGraphs Rowand analysis here. Click on the tab labeled "graphs" for comparison to the league and other players.

I'm willing to admit I may be wrong about Sabes. Maybe he has a plan, and maybe he can build a good team without Barry Bonds being the Greatest Player of All Time. I'd love to be wrong, actually. A winning SFG team is more important than my "record" of being consistent, intelligent, articulate or accurate. But Sabes strikes me as a Rowand kind of guy: solid MLB pro but nothing fancy. My problem is: I want fancy. It think Sabes should hire some "assistant" GMs to do the real work of player evaluation and talent scouting. He can drift into the background and "oversee" the smart, young bucks. How about that Kim Ng from LA?

Blogroll

Just staying on top of the blog-o-sphere is a full-time task. I wonder how Sabes & The Brain Trust do it. Oh yeah, I forgot. They don't.

Check out Bay City Ball for a long analysis of Beezy and promises of more to come on the rest of the ro'. The crux of the post is the PITCH/fx data that the stat-heads are creaming over.

Giants Win has a post referencing a Give 'em Some Stankeye! note called Terror at 6'8" about the Giants interest in--you guessed it, another aging vet--Tony Clark. Bleah.

In Defense of Sabean

or: WTF is this guy smoking?

Hillary or Obama, Mitt or McCain, Patriots or Giants, buy or sell? It seems no one can agree on much of anything these days, except for one thing. Brian Sabean is universally regarded as an idiot. So, in the spirit of contrary thinking, I would like to present several reasons why Brian Sabean is not the world's worst baseball GM.

First, some good things Brian has done for the Giants (for those of you who can't think of any): Kent, Schmidt, Nen, Roberto Hernandez, Wilson Alvarez, Andres Galaraga, Randy Winn. These were all trades that went on to help the Giants, some of a patented end-of-season sort that provided a push to get the Giants into the playoffs sort. That we didn't win the world series as a result is hardly Sabean's fault. Then too: Mattheny, Zito, Matt Morris. Now some may take exception to adding Zito and Morris to a good things done list. But the fact is that Sabean went out and got the two best free agent pitchers two years in a row for the Giants. Some may argue that we overpaid, but that arguement can't really be validated until a contract is over, and in context with what comparable pitchers are being paid by the end of the contract. Remember how excited we (at least we at RMC) were at these acquisitions? Yes, we thought they were good things.

Now, to be fair: Joe Nathan. This was a horrible trade, and made worse by the fact that Pierzynsky was such an flaming asshole to compliment with his total suckiness as a player. But seriously, if Rob Nen had been able to come back, would we be whining about this now? No, it would have gone down in history as a poor trade, not a terrible one. And that brings us to last year. According to the Giants, Sabean chased Soriano, but came up empty. It seems like Aurilia and Durham were less than inspired signings, but they also underperformed what would be a reasonable expectation (although, to be fair, they would have had to overperform a reasonable expectation to make the Giants competitive).

Now, this year. Aaron Rowland. Have we overpaid? Perhaps not, if you review the contract values of free agents this year. Do we need more? Yes. Have we pissed away our best young pitchers for dubious, aging talent? No. Not yet, anway, in spite of everyone's expectation that this will happen any minute. This alone should get a few folks to lighten up on Sabean, except that, well, it won't.

And another thing, on personality. Would you really rather have a GM who tells everybody what he is going to do all the time? Doesn't seem like a very good strategy to me, sort of like Warren Buffett telling everyone what he will be buying and selling this year. Look at what Brian Sabean does, not what he says. The big moves, historically, have been largely un-heralded before they were made. There has been much discussion of whether Bonds' presence on the Giants in 2007 was the result of Sabean or ownership. We may never know the answer to this, but as a sage observer said back about 2006, "It's all about Barry."

Were I a GM, I think I would hire the best computer people I could find, and then make statements to the press about how I made these trades because the players were hard-nosed and scrappy. I would not refer to any stats other than era and batting average and wins when talking to the press. I would talk about how I need to look into a player's eyes to see his drive and desire, and I would use the phrase, "Knows how to win" a lot. I'm not saying that Brian Sabean is a genius, only that the Giants have been a pretty good team to watch for most of the last decade. I don't think the worst GM in the universe could have achieved that.