When the Giants Come to Town, It's Bye-Bye Baby

10.08.2007
The Ballad of Joe Greenvalley

ValverdeAs you all know by now, the Cinderella Diamondbacks have no right to be playing for the N.L. pennant because they were outscored during the regular season. Their unlikely success is mainly due to a Cy Young winner at the top of the rotation and an ironclad bullpen led by closer Jose Valverde.

Arizona’s top three relievers, Valverde, Lyon and Pena, were 10th, 9th, and 14th in major-league WXRL, the best 1–2–3 punch of any bullpen in the N.L. and matched in the majors only by Cleveland. (Yes, Cleveland. Other teams whose top three relievers topped 10 points of combined WXRL: Boston, Los Angeles, Minnesota, San Diego and Seattle.)  

For those of you who haven’t followed Ol’ Joe Greenvalley’s career closely — or that of Brandon Lyon, for that matter — there’s a lesson here. Good relievers can come from nowhere. Valverde has been mercurial in his five-year career, excellent one season, injured the next, excellent again, then so bad last year he was demoted to triple-A. All through it, though, there’s been one constant: A ton of strikeouts.

Brandon Lyon was a young guy probably brought up too early by Toronto. He missed the entire 2004 year with arm troubles then resurfaced in ‘05 in the desert. Last year he became a good set-up man, this year a great set-up man. Next year: who knows. All this, and the punditry says Arizona manager Bob Melvin has been a master of bullpen strategy this year.

Let’s recap: Arizona is in the NLCS because of a dominant starting pitcher, three excellent relievers who have just as much chance to collapse next year as excel again, a top-ten MVP year from journeyman Eric Byrnes, and good defense. It also has one of the worst offenses in the league.

Here’s what the Giants will have next year: Possibly two dominant starting pitchers, a revamped bullpen with two relievers who showed flashes of excellence in September against playoff teams, an outfield defense that could be much improved, and the possibility (probability?) of one of the worst offenses in the league.

I’m not saying the Giants could fluke their way to a division championship next year; everyone else in the division has hordes of young position players far more likely than the Giants young position players to kick serious ass the next few years. No matter how much the Giants improve next year, the competition will be that much tougher.

I am saying that the Giants have some interesting pieces in place, pieces that if your high school science teacher laid a clear slide labeled “2008 Giants” on top of a clear slide labeled “2007 D-Backs” and put the two slides into an overhead projector, you might stir from your teenage torpor in the back row of class, rub your eyes and say, “Dude!” because there are some weird similarities. Besides, Justin Upton is no Raj Davis. Shazam!

If you hadn’t noticed, I only wrote this post because I like translating Latino names into their funny English counterparts. Other than Peter Happy, what are your favorite foreign baseball names?



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[October 8, 2007 4:50 PM]  |  link  |  reply
Boof said

The main dissimilarity....which should be obvious....is that the D'backs have young position players that will only improve with experience while the Giants have old position players that are getting worse every year. Whose shoes would you rather be in?

[October 8, 2007 7:40 PM]  |  link  |  reply
obsessivegiantscompulsive said

And the D-backs have old pitchers who will only get worse, with only Micah Owings looking good enough to replace any of them, shame on them for neglecting their starting rotation, and their only good starter was a fluke, he was on nobody's radar for even a cup of coffee and he turned out to be a Cy Young contender. Lucky for them they found that winning lottery at the bottom of the barrel.

Throughout the baseball history that I've known, teams with great pitching usually are able to stay in contention and often do well enough to make the playoffs. It is the teams with great offense who have seemed to come up short - witness Giants of 60's for one.

And that's the pattern for all major sports, monster offense teams frequently suck against better defensive teams, though I would say that defense is still more important to other sports because excellence on the defensive end frequently results in good offense opportunities, like an interception and runback or shot block and fastbreak - in baseball, there's not connection like that, each inning is almost self-contained, other than how one inning ends affects who bats the next inning.

Rebuilding is not a "hey, let's fix everything today" type of proposition. If you are lucky, it will take only a few years but it could take longer, depending on your luck in drafting and trading.

The pitching is barely reaching what I would call it's optimum level. Obviously the rotation will be great, but the bullpen needs some strengthening - though as noted, it looks like we have some good pieces in place from Wilson and Walker's performance in Sept.

I think people are too worried over the offense. What we should be looking for are average offensive players from our farm system. Their cheapness will allow us to afford expensive top hitters at 2-3 positions, because most teams don't have good hitters 1-8, they have average or worse hitter in most spots in the lineup too.

Heck, with our pitching, just having an average offense that can generate a run when necessary is probably all that we really need to win the division.

And still, I am going Missouri on the D-backs: Show Me. Any team can have a lucky year and do well. Sure they have good position prospects, but they have had good prospects for many years now, and those prior ones didn't pan out.

And frankly, neither are the guys they have out there today too, none of them are doing much better than 100 OPS+, they are slightly above average at best or much below. Sure, I would agree that their prospects are worlds better than ours, in terms of potential. However, for now, our guys have performed as well as their's have. And potential is often not met, sometimes not until far down the line, like Cust or Carlos Pena. But for guys like that, there's guys like that lefty 1B from Korea who never panned out, or Jeffrey Hammonds who fizzled out, and so on.

All I'm saying is that I was fooled once by the Baby-backs potential over the Giants, and thus far they have underwhelmed, so to assume that they all are going to do well? Well, I'm not willing to go there until they perform well.

[October 8, 2007 8:19 PM]  |  link  |  reply
Boof said

Underwhelmed? Hello, they won the most amount of games in the NL this year. That is a hell of a lot more important than your OPS, OBP, AVG, VORP, etc. Lat time I checked, the none of those statistics mean anything when stacked up against W-L. That's the bottom line.

The D'backs are young & talented at almost every position on the field, with almost ready prospects right behind them in the minors. Yes, they could use a couple of starting pitchers, but as was so clearly pointed out, they overcame that deficiency by being so efficient out of their bullpen, which is also relatively young & talented, by the way.

You are just so far offbase in criticizing the D'backs that it is difficult to adequately address it. If they were failing, that would be a different story, but they're not, so your criticism is misplaced. The Giants organization could learn a lot from them.

[October 9, 2007 1:17 PM]  |  link  |  reply
Elbo said

Joe Table, of course.