* Dear reader Frank made this comment a couple days ago:
Tell me again why we would sign Manny for 2 yrs at $20-25 mil per, when we could sign Bonds for one season and name our price - $5, 10, 12 mil???
I replied rather flippantly, as is my wont, but I felt it was worth stretching out a bit.
First, let’s catch all of you up who haven’t gotten the latest. Bonds looks like he’s headed to trial on perjury charges. A federal judge just unsealed the court documents, and everyone’s having a lot of fun digging through them. The trial is slated to start next month.
Bonds also had hip surgery sometime before Jan. 1, according to the Chronicle. John Shea’s anonymous source said Bonds could be recovered by Opening Day.
So: a guy who turns 45 in July; who, when he last played in 2007, needed a lot of extra days off; who recently had a mysterious hip procedure and probably won’t be able to work out until March — even if he weren’t tied up in court; and who will generate new non-baseball-related headlines every day.
Pick an angle — on-field performance, roster makeup, marketing, team chemistry, or legal questions — and re-signing Bonds doesn’t make sense. This has nothing to do with the larger questions of Bonds as a perjurer or a steroid scapegoat, or society’s acceptance of drug testing, or evidence of actual performance enhancement. Barry Bonds is simply not a good fit for the Giants or for any team, unless it has a full-time DH slot available and a team of ruthless ninjas staffing its media relations department.
* This report probably makes my Ben Sheets musings moot. (Link tip to MLB Trade Rumors.) According to the story, he signed a two-year deal with the Rangers last week but new (i.e., bad) information about his elbow scotched it. There is no other free-agent pitcher who offers the same upside as Sheets, so I promise, no more “What If” scenarios about signing a starter to add depth. If Mark Mulder and Pedro Martinez want to come to camp as NRIs and try to force their way onto the Opening Day roster, fine. It would give me something to write about, and I admit the thought of Pedro in black and orange proving wrong everyone who thinks he’s toast is a delicious thought. I mean, what if… oops. I promised not to do that.
* I just saw this blog item from Henry Schulman, in which he describes Jeremy Shelley as the Giants’ inside “numbers guy.” In my January post, “Can I Have a Department of Statistical Research, Too? Please?”, I wrote, “One of the greatest mysteries about the Giants is how much they know, how do they know it, and how do they use it.”
Schulman shines a little light on the subject. He writes that Shelley just got promoted to “senior director of baseball operations/pro scouting.” The promotion seems to point to Brian Sabean’s growing acceptance of advanced statistics, and Schulman passes along this morsel:
When I wrote my story on the Edgar Renteria signing, some high-ranking front-office types were angry that I quoted scouts from other teams disparaging the shortstop. A Giants official who scolded me on the phone and said if I'd have called him, he would have provided me with some of the team's statistical analysis on Renteria's second-half hitting, range, etc...This official started quoting me some Sabermetric stats on Renteria's ability to go to his left, viz a viz other shortstops.
As far as I know, there aren’t readily available defensive stats on range to one side or the other. Range in general, yes, but to the left or right? Unless I’ve missed something, which is a good bet, it seems the Giants have their own internal measure of defensive range. Or maybe the unnamed Giants official was just making it up. “Dammit Schulman, you moron, don’t you know that Renteria’s LFR co-efficient in 2008 remained career-neutral on a position-adjusted basis, and if you factor in league averages smoothed over a five-month curve, his range factor to the left was in fact 10.2?”
