Still no word on Bochy and Sabean's status, but the two of them held a post-mortem press conference earlier today. Nearly the entire transcript is
here, courtesy of Baggs. Thanks, Baggs, for another fantastic year of work. Thanks, too, to Henry Schulman for his great work, and especially for letting me call him Hank. I've never met the guy, but I have a feeling he's got a great sense of humor. And he probably drank a
Hank or two back in the day, for those you who remember the classic commercials. (Sorry, I couldn't find them on YouTube.)
Not much to say tonight except read the transcript and let us know what you think. And remember, whatever Bochy and Sabean say in public no matter how certain they sound, it could be
a completely different story a week from now.
What a joke. Between defending Renteria as the consumate pro and resigning Sanchez as a must, I see nothing from these transcripts that means they will improve the offense next year. I am also sick to my stomach of hearing about how difficult it is to sign good free agents because heaven forbit we may have to bid against other teams for them. More excuses when it comes to trading for a middle of the order bat which confirms what we all have known for several years now, Sabean has no clue how to improve this offense whether it be through trades or free agency.
and Lefty, what a pathetic response about Pennny, "signing him is a possibility." This a-hole of a GM should be singing his praises and sayying they have to have him and his attitude back!
I think this youtube clip says it all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOJy6z3d90A
That is one of the funniest things I have ever seen.
TREEEEEMENDOUS!
If Pato is surprised by this transcript, which is completely consistent with almost every action of the last three years, it can only be because he fails to understand that Sabean is betting that we're entering into a new baseball era in which pitching and defense will be much more important. He has said as much several times since the rebuilding began.
This isn't a completely crazy point of view--witness the success this year brought on exclusively by pitching and defense--and it is certainly possible that the pendulum is swinging in a new direction after 20 plus years of domination by offense. Eras in baseball have historically rarely lasted more than 25 years.
Sabes might well be wrong, but please don't be surprised by this news conference. To anyone who's paid attention, this is exactly--almost word for word--what you would expect him to say, given his primary assumptions.
For the record, I think it's far more likely that Sabes is right than Pato. I also think Sabes proved this year that he can win with far, far less offensive punch than most people would have guessed this time last year. Thus he seems to be exploiting conditions that are still largely unrecognized.
You are sadly mistaken here. No team in any era, past, present, or future, can win without some balance between pitching defense & OFFENSE. The complete failure to mount even a league average offense will produce another result like you got this year. Close but no cigar.
The problem with conventional wisdom is that it becomes a rigid ideology. No team in the last twenty years has won without a league average in offense.
The archetypal team that dominated through great pitching and a below-average offense is the 1965 Dodgers who scored only 608 runs (7 out of ten teams scored more runs). The Dodgers also hit the fewest homeruns in the National League and they had the second to worst team batting average.
The results? They won 97 games and the World Series.
People can argue that this is a different era or that this can't happen again. It is abundantly clear, however, that Sabes believes we're likely to return to a pitcher dominant era--he has said this several times--and that he wants to be ahead of the curve. The criticism, I think, should be based on whether that's a wild bet or a reasonable and calculated gamble.
The fact that it has happened only once should be a pretty convincing argument. For me, the fact that Sabean may be betting on this is exactly why we shouldn't be counting on this happening.
This theory of a new pitcher-dominant era is rationalized by a legerdemain that does not follow logically. To ascribe the success of one team out of thirty to a set of conditions transpiring in the entire league is tenuous at best. Any team can achieve success by possessing a pitching staff this strong compared to the competition. That this team is an anomaly in this day and age doesn't necessarily indicate that all other teams will trend in this direction, and indeed it is so anomalous that it actually refutes such a supposition.
The primary causes of eras in baseball, whether pitcher-dominated or hitter-dominated, have been factors external to the ratio of pitching talent to hitting talent: the changing of the height of the mound, the trends set about by new ballparks, the impact of PEDs. But in each case, the talent ratio will remain about the same, thus rendering any novel valuation of hitting and pitching less advantageous than the previously accepted one.
External factors such as rule changes, NOT talent level or perceived value, cause such eras. This THE point to recognize. A possible era may draw from decrease in PED use, however, the underlying talent ratio will not change, so though runs scored will decrease, viewing pitching and defense as more valuable than before would be fallacious.
The only radical changes in talent evaluation that have occurred recently are in the field of statistical analysis, and Sabean is not a major proponent of sabermetrics, nor is he held in particularly high regard among sabermetricians.
Let us suppose that, against all logic, Sabean has predicted an increase in pitching talent over the next decade relative to hitting talent. Then the relative paucity of good hitters would make them more valuable and the large number of effective hitters would make them less valuable. So if we assume that this expostulation is true, Sabean is investing in assets that he has predicted will decline in value in the future. I'm not impressed.
'65 Dodgers when there was just two divisions, no wild card is apples and oranges...there also wasnt $200 million payrolls or their 1965 equivalent...
well said!
the evidence suggests since we had an even worse offense this year than last, that pitching and defense solely will not win a championship and that is what we want...
Nothing new or unexpected here.
As leaders, you cannot really speak defensively about your position, you have to be positive about the expected results.
Plus, you'll notice that they say that no contract has been signed, blah de blah, but he did not deny that Neukom has asked them back, which is what the rumors are all about. Asking them back is not a commitment to getting a contract in place, it is the first step to negotiating, at which point, as Sabean noted, "you have to have three parties agree: The organization, myself and Boch.”
I agree with Barton for the most part. I would add that Sabean has noted that part of the change in baseball is a move towards speed, and that is a component he has been wanting to incorporate into the Giants offense, but unfortunately, Lewis, Velez, Burriss and others, have not been able to take the step up to do that yet. And there is the belief that speed on the team contributes positively to both defense (range) as well as offense (taking the extra bases).
I agree with Boof that you need a balance between defense and offense. That is why we came up short this season and will continue to until there is some offensive upgrades.
The thing is, what most fans forgot because of the excitement the team generated, is that the team is in transition. It is rebuilding. 2009 was not a year intended to be competitive for a playoff position, it was suppose to be a year in which they take a positive step towards respectability. They achieved more than most thought possible, but there were limitations because the team was not ready to truly compete yet.
The team is kind of like Angel Villalona. He accomplished so much at such a young age that it got people excited about his potential. But he's not ready for the majors and it will take time to reach that point. Same with this team, they were too young and undeveloped to really compete, but the excitement of their performance made people think that they should do more.
But there had to be a balance. Of course the team could have done more this season. At the cost of losing one or both of Bumgarner and Posey. If you look realistically at what the price the Giants would have had to pay for a middle of the lineup bat, it would have costed us one or both of them.
I'm glad we didn't make that move. I want to see both on the team in the future, adding to what our current team can produce. And I don't think the team is finished improving. There are plenty of areas where the team can be improved. The beauty is that the offense don't need to be top of the line to win. It could be middle of the league and still win a lot enough to get into the playoffs.
Not that they will necessarily be ready next year either. That is up to Sabean to engineer over the winter. There is likely some improvement offensively next season with no changes, but that is typically more risk than Sabean would be willing to take, so I would expect a free agent to be signed somewhere, fall where it may, then the dominos will fall from there and the roster will be adjusted.
Exactly.
If we were to get the kind of player some people were clamoring for--e.g., V. Martinez or Matt Holliday---it would have cost Bumgarner and /or Posey.
The suppositions that I've read on the message boards was that Alderson plus Barnes would have gotten VMart. That was never on the table.
What is truly amazing is that our fans don't go to the websites of other cities' sports publications. One could clearly see that the Indians wanted to START the conversation with Bumgarner.
No way. I agree with your position that it was better not to fall into temptation.
The repetition of the theme by obsessivegiantscompulsive that the Giants are in a rebuilding year runs contrary to his defense of the Alderson/Sanchez trade as not necessarily bad, when in fact it is a negative exchange in talent for the Giants regardless of circumstance.
Bumgarner and Posey were untouchable. The Alderson trade was 'that move', a trade that would not have been acceptable even for a contender.
Sabean did fall into temptation, and the Giants will pay the price this offseason due to a reduction of options and overall talent in the system.
The jury is still out on that trade. We need to see what F. Sanchez can do on a full-time basis.
If there is one axiom in critical analysis is that one cannot draw valid conclusion from a small sample size.
The same applies to Ryan Garko.
The Giants need to run him out there everyday. He was a solid hitter with the Indians. Why not find out if he can do the same for us?
This isn't rocket science to anyone except Bruce Bochy.
I am a proponent of the Garko trade.
Freddy Sanchez's trade value at the time of the trade was minimal, and at that time all the parties involved knew of his impending knee surgery, so the facts are the same now as they were then.
Put it this way: if the Giants tried to trade Freddy Sanchez now, could they get anything close to Alderson? If the answer is no, then it was a bad trade, because nothing has changed.
If there is one axiom about analyzing trades it is that a trade can be analyzed immediately based on trade value because trade value takes into account the probabilities of all possible outcomes in a player's future.
Sanchez-Alderson was a very bad exchange in terms of trade values.
DProfessor, we dont know what the Indians were really asking for (we dont know if Sabean even asked about V-Mart). But the Indians got Masterson and a couple of lower rated prospects for V-Mart. Tehy did not get anyone with the potential upside of Bumgarner. I dont think Bumgarner had to be the one on the list, but J. Sanchez, Barnes and Alderson would have been a very fair deal and V-Mart would have had a major impact on our season. Freddie Sanchez then could have been traded for a probably more appropriate pitching prospect or a couple of prospects. Sabean essentially got robbed. This is my biggest knock on Sabvean is that I don tthink he has the imagination of a Coletti or Kevin Towers even to get a deal doen like that that may have indeed propelled us into the playoffs.
A Giants team with V-Mart at first and a rotation of Lincecum-Penny-Cain-Zito in the playoffs may have in fact been able to challenge for the NL Pennant...
Your proposal may be a fair deal in your mind, in all of our minds for that matter, but that's not what the Indians wanted from us based on what their beat reporters were saying.
We can speculate all we want, but it doesn't change the fact that the Indians wanted Bumgarner. They looked at this as an opportunity to nab another team's top pitching prospect.
We fans keep dumping on Garko when in fact he has been a very good (albeit not great) hitter.
Judging from the rumor mills, I doubt we'll get Juan Uribe back. He's a better, healthier option than Beltre.
We need to replace Uribe 15/16 HR's at a cost effective rate. Why not Garko ( Clev and SF)? He's already cost us Barnes?
Why spend more and throw away that deal? Just because we're mad that Garko didn't set the world on fire right away, which is unrealistic if you don't know the league?
Will it hurt that much to try with a commodity we already have and invest our money into Lincecum and Cain?
So let's stop spinning our wheels: Cleveland wanted Bumgarner, not a package of second tier players.
Final thought: Maybe they didn't get first tier from someone else, but from us they were focused on Bumgarner. Sabean isn't as stupid as he's made out to be. He would have coughed up Alderson et al for V-mart in a heartbeat.
Meant to say Garko's 13 HRs combined.
They stated that they wanted Bumgarner...according to beat writers. However, they settled for something much less than that from the Red Sox. Ergo, what they were asking for is not really relevant in this discussion.
Who knows if the Giants had a shot at V-Mart? Howeever, what we can already determine is that Sabean got hosed in the 2 deals he did make. What were the odds on that?
Aside from setting ourselves up for heartbreaking losses like so many that we saw this season, by focusing on only pitching you are also putting together an extremely boring product. Gary Radnich always defends Sabean by saying that he was entertained this season but I beg to differ. Games that we lose 2-1 are not entertaining and there were at least 10 games in the last 2 months that the Giants could have had a chance to win if only they had a little more offense.
Good pitching and defense with no offense is like watching a 7-3 football game. They just aren't as entertaining and when your team falls behind by a few runs early you might as well pack it up and go home cuz they aren't gonna come back!
The stat that stood out most for me this year was the Giants record when they scored 4 or more runs. They were 75 and 25 or something like that. By that stat alone, don't you think it would be wise to get some offense to help this pitching so that we score at least 4 runs on most nights? Maybe Sabean thinks he is managing a football team because even with a horrible offense, in football the defense can score or dominate field position but I have never once heard of pitching and defense scoring any runs and in order to win games you have to be able to score at least 1 run!
Just take a look at every team in the playoffs and you can pretty much determine that there isn't a single team that got in without offense. In fact, none of the teams that made the playoffs has an offense that ranked in the lower half like the Giants and every one of these teams has at least 2 bonafide middle of the order bats in their lineups. The Twinkies are the only team that comes even remotely close to the offense that the Giants have and they made the playoffs without a single "Ace" pitcher so what does that say for Sabeans theory of pitching being most important.
The truth is that it doesn't matter if you have a great pitching staff if your offense sucks and the opposite is true as well. Pitching is obviously important but you really only need 2 stud starters and 3 guys that don't kill you every 5 games along with a decent offense to make the playoffs. I don't mind building the team around Lincecum and Cain but that means that guys like Sanchez and even Bumgarner are not necessary and if we could have traded Bumgarner to get VMart, chances are it would have done wonders to improve this team not just this year but for several to come. Let Zito and Sanchez be the 3 and 4 guys and sign a Brad Penny or Whoever else is out there to be the 5th starter.
With an offense you would have seen Cain and Lincecum approach 20 wins each and we all know what Zitos record is when he gets 4 runs of support or more. Wheeler is a few years away and guys like Pucetas and Sosa deserve to show what they can do but the way things are going, none of them will ever truly reach their potential simply because this team doesn't score enough runs.
Just a note: the Twins offense is quite strong this year; the Giants aren't even close to their level.
I think my point still stands, all the teams in the playoffs have very good offenses. With the twins, there are only 2 true super stars on that team (Mauer and Morneau) but a few younger players who could develop into stars. The Giants have one super star and a bunch of guys you couldn't trade for a six pack of naty light. Pitching is a big part of making the playoffs but offense is also a big part and Sabean continues to ignore that fact.
True. Span, Kubel, Cuddyer are all well above average too I think. The difference is past that they're not deep at all.
Oops forgot to add name.