Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 349: Brian Sabean’s Re-Signings and Rating GMs

Episode Date: December 16, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss the Giants’ offseason and their thoughts on Brian Sabean and other general managers.

I still need to look you in the eye I still need to look you in the eye Good morning and welcome to episode 349 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. How are you doing? I am well, thank you. How are you? Good. I'm tired. This book, man. The book is tough. Have we even, I guess we mentioned once that you are co-editing Baseball Perspectives 2014, which is available for pre-order through our site.

And this is the crunch time, I guess, for you. Yeah, I went to a secluded cabin in the snow with no water, no running water, for three days to work on it. And didn't even really make a dent. I mean, it's just this massive, massive pile of words that 30 hours does nothing for. But it's really good. The book is really good. It's going to be really good. I really genuinely believe that. It's excellent. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it it's a new new format sort of this year new authors and yeah i'm excited how did the jokes how did you get your water this uh there's a well i i took i took some a bunch of gallons of water and and there's a creek for watering, washing dishes and stuff. This sounds a lot like the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad to me.

Yeah, it was. Did you walk down to the fence by the road every day and stop and turn around and go back and work on the annual? I know what i did i actually had to park up i had to park about a half a mile away because the the road was totally snowed in and i was worried about getting my car stuck um and it wasn't i mean it's supposed to have water it normally has water but the the pipes froze and cracked and so the the whole the whole water system is messed up now but it had internet and that was the important thing it had internet and it had a foot of snow everywhere

around me so it was great well that's nice so that's why you don't know what happened in baseball this weekend so we're not talking about anything that happened this weekend i think i gather all i know is that you made a joke about the wire. Yeah, Omar Infante signed with the Royals. Oh, yeah. So that's all I know. So we're going to talk about something that's a little, slightly more evergreen, but not really.

It's also newsy. And it's about the Giants. And I wrote a thing last year, shortly before the season began, I think, about the Giants' standing pat and about the history of World Series winning teams standing pat and finding that they stand much more pat than teams that lose the World Series. Very, very small difference in seasons. Big difference, but small difference. It seems to cause a big strategic change in teams. And as I recall, World Series winning teams do worse the following season than World Series losing teams. Perhaps because they stand pat. Or something. I don't even remember if that's actually what I found,

but that's what I remember finding. So I thought that the Giants were standing pat because they won the World Series, but upon further review, it seems that the Giants are standing pat because that's what Sabian does. He almost never signs, it seems to me, from my memory, recently in particular. he almost never signs it seems to me from my memory recently in particular he almost never signs free agents he uh likes to re-sign guys that he has previously traded for

he re-signs his own guys he signs you know his own guys a lot and very rarely brings in a lot of free agents especially of late and so they stood pat after the World Series. They're essentially standing pat after a fourth place, I think, finish this year. They are essentially adding Tim Hudson to replace Barry Zito, which is a good upgrade and one that really they did not have the choice of standing pat with Barry Zito. That was basically a non-option. standing pat with Barry Zito. That was basically a non-option. And Mike Morse was signed to basically replace Gregor Blanco slash Andres Torres and give them dingers. And otherwise, it looks like they're going to have roughly the same team that they had last year. And that was very disappointing. And we can talk about the giants specifically but i wanted to talk about something that we reference fairly often when we're evaluating um team moves and extensions in particular and uh re-signings and it's the i forget who it was that that found this you probably you probably know matt swartz there you go uh that players that teams retain tend to outperform players that teams let go.

And this has always been interesting, and to our mind, this speaks to the team's informational advantage in assessing players. So if you take it that way, then let's say, let's say every team signs 30% of their players in Swartz's cohort. And so if, if the theory, if the theory that, that, you know, we've kind of been operating on, which is that teams pick the best 30% and that they're particularly adept at choosing those 30% because they know the players so well, then if they bumped it up to 40% or 50%, that would not be useful. They would get diminishing returns. I mean, they would actually be going against their advantage, right? So obviously they should not the the result uh of reading swartz study in that case is not sign all your players right right second secondly it might be that

a certain percentage of players um and i don't remember i swartz did dollars per win right that's how he they were better bargains they didn't just outperform but they were better bargains yeah they i think they they aged better um they didn't necessarily outperform but they they aged better and and yeah they were more efficient signings okay so uh looking specifically thinking about the efficient signings part of it uh you could also this might be a leap it would be a leap but you could also conclude that well maybe some players take hometown discounts and so if those 30 of players that sign for less with their original team than they would have elsewhere uh they're simply going to be better bargains because they've taken a hometown discount again if you read it like that then the solution

is not to then sign all your guys because presumably the other 70 percent were not taking hometown discounts. That's why they didn't sign. as much as the preferred hypothesis that we started with is that players are more comfortable when they don't have to move and that players actually do better when they're retained. And if you think that that, if that's your hypothesis, and if you, if you find evidence that that is actually what is happening, then in fact, 30% is not your threshold, uh, your, your, uh, your, your max, your cap, you should be signing all your guys. Because if that's the case, and if that's a consistent effect, then basically all players are more valuable to you, all of your players are more valuable to you than to another team. And basically,

we can look at it as like, I think I've used this analogy before, but like when you sell a house, somebody takes 6%. And you have to pay all these fees. And so there's like a little bit gets siphoned off every time there's a transaction. And if we think about that as a kind of an emotional 6% fee or something that takes players – takes a little bit out of players when they have to move and when they are relocated and when they are finding a new comfort zone in a new park and all that. Basically, they have less incentive to leave and teams have more incentive to keep their players. So I just wanted to bring this up because I've spent probably the last 10 years trying futilely to find Sabian's secret genius. Yes.

And now I'm sort of hoping that this is it. So I just wanted to mention it. Yeah, that's an interesting theory. That's an interesting theory. And it wouldn't mean that you should just resign all your players because you would end up overpaying sometimes. I mean, some team will pay your player more than you want to pay him, more than you think he's worth to you. Even if you think that he'll be better for you than he would for that team, you might still decide not to do it. But you're right. I guess that is one possible explanation for that effect.

Yeah, so they brought back Vogelsang, and then they brought back Pence and Lincecum on contracts that were pretty pretty widely criticized not for bringing back those players but for how much they paid for those players also javier lopez which was criticized by some for being uh unnecessarily long for a loogie uh it was three years and not not not a super high annual value and lopez is uh extremely good at what he does. So I don't, I don't particularly mind that, but I mean, the, the point that you basic, that relievers are never so scarce that you need to give three years to, you know, to all, but a couple of them, uh, holds, I guess.

Yeah. While you were in your, in, in seclusion this weekend, the Rockies signed Boone Logan to a three-year 16.5 million dollar contract uh and I I panned it I panned it hard because that's a three-year deal for I felt like probably the the least useful reliever to sign a three-year deal this this winter I would rather have Joe Smith or Javier Lopez at a lower AAV, or I'd rather have them at the same AAV, but they signed for less than Boone Logan did,

and the Rockies already had two pretty good lefties, and they just don't seem like a team that really needs to spend on a third lefty. I didn't like that move. Boone Logan sounds like the kind of guy who would live in a cabin without water. Yeah. I have been wondering how long it will take for the internet to turn on Sabian again because, I mean, bloggers were pretty unified in their feeling that he just didn't know what he was doing. He was, he's just signing all these veterans to,

to contracts when they're on the downside of their career. And he just doesn't give young guys a chance. And, and then he won these two world series. And even when he won the first one, it was like, well, a lot of strange things happened and Cody Ross was amazing.

And, you know, Pat Burrell and all these people that just were added mid-season. Maybe it was just sort of a fluke and then it happened again. And once you win two World Series, you have a honeymoon period or a grace period where even if you do some strange things, it's almost impossible to criticize them because it's hard to luck into two world series but uh i wonder how many how many losing seasons it would take before the old

sabian chorus comes back well this is not a perfect proxy but there's a guy who um used to tweet as fake brian sabian and he was he was good at. It was one of the better fake GMs out there, maybe the second best fake GM out there. And he was called Sryan Babian, I believe. And he, about, I don't know, a few weeks after the World Series, I noticed that he had changed his name on Twitter, and it was no longer Sabian.

It was like, he might have changed it to fake giants gm or something like that but it was not so uh directly aggressive at sabian and and the tone of the tweets changed a lot too and i asked him about it and he basically said oh well you know he'd won a world series the shtick doesn't work as well yeah it wasn't so much that he didn't you know that he didn't want to you know make fun of saving anymore but like you know, he'd won a World Series. The shtick doesn't work as well. It wasn't so much that he didn't, you know, that he didn't want to, you know, make fun of Sabian anymore, but like, you know, you don't get good feedback when you're mocking the GM who ended a 50-year World Series-less stretch

in a franchise's history. And so, anyway, he did that, and it was, I believe, midway through the next season that he reverted back. So that's how long you get. You get basically four months or so, or around there. It's basically one season. Tough crowd. Yeah, very tough.

Yeah, two is a lot but uh i mean what am i who was i thinking of who had a good reputation and and just i mean it wasn't jack z because we've talked about jack z but i was thinking about someone the other day who's gone no it was i've been thinking about that yeah i i forget but yeah it doesn't it doesn't last long you um i don't know i guess anthopolis is still considered pretty good i feel like most fans would you don't you don't know uh i don't know i don't know that i have changed my mind about him that much but i i think the popular opinion seems to have shifted a little bit. Or at least we did an episode on him, I don't know, like a year ago or something, talking about how there was pressure on him either from ownership or from the fans or something.

And I just kind of remember back like old up and in episodes when he was first hired and he made a bunch of smart moves or what seemed like smart moves. And he was just people, I think, put him right into the sort of, you know, the cool sabermetric successful GM club. Uh, it was, you know, like being in Friedman and anthopolis all of a sudden um and i remember kevin sort of telling everyone to to pump the brakes he hasn't won anything yet let's let's wait a while um i don't know how much my opinion of him has changed but uh it you know he he built up the farm system and then sort of traded it for a contender and then that blew up and how responsible he was for that you can you can debate but um his i would say his reputation has has suffered somewhat uh yeah i i i personally have not changed my opinion of him i think that he did the right he did the right thing. Everybody applauded it. It didn't work

out. Those things happen. That's the problem with evaluating people on one trial. It's not necessarily all that telling. So I don't know. I feel like if my team had an opening in the GM's office, I'd be clamoring for him. Terry Ryan is a guy whose reputation, I mean, he was always like, even when he was winning, there was this like, it was almost like he was the anti-Billy Bean. Like, nobody really gave him credit for his tactics, but there was a, uh, a sort of grudging admiration for his results and this sort of quiet sense that, you know, he had basically earned a book himself somehow, but nobody was that interested in writing about it because it would

have been aesthetically unpleasing. Uh, but I mean, nonetheless, he was doing amazing things in Minnesota and then he leaves his predecessor or his, uh, his, um, he was doing amazing things in Minnesota. And then he leaves his predecessor or his the opposite of predecessor. Successor Bill Smith. Yeah, his successor blows everything up. Ryan comes back, builds the best farm system in baseball. And basically nobody likes Ryan at this point. Yeah, I don't know. And there was some, I mean, Ryan, I think, had lost some of the magic touch before that.

And he's made some, you know, horrible, well, arguably horrible moves at the big league level. So there's a lot of reason to pick on him. But his reputation has not aged well. Kevin Towers? is not aged well and kevin towers towers felt like about three years ago towers was i i would guess like a top eight gm consensus yeah now i feel like has has fallen down to just above amaro in the uh uh in the in the punching bag ranking rankings yeah uh which sort of suggests that we are probably a little too reactive about these things right i mean is it possible to actually go from being one of the better gms to one of the worst gms in the span of a few years is it possible that you either lose

your touch that quickly or the the competition improves so quickly that you you know you actually your your true talent ranking falls that far or are we just sort of wildly swinging our opinions based on of course yeah no of course we're wildly so this is these are horrible rankings we have no idea like all of these are dumb we're I feel pretty confident saying that Friedman is is really good and that Billy Bean is at least very good and maybe maybe better and uh Antonetti seems to be above average and Dombrowski seems to be at least average and I'm being very conservative I mean I think Dombrowski's great be at least average. And I'm being very conservative. I mean, I think Dombrowski's great.

I think he's probably like a top six. But being extremely conservative, I feel confident saying he is at least average. And that's about as far as I'll go. Will you go negative on anyone? I've never, I've always thought Coletti was a poor GM. I've always thought Coletti was a poor GM, but I am being conservative in my conclusions. I would be much I would be especially conservative going negative as opposed to positive. So I'm not sure I would say with confidence that Coletti is below average.

He and Amaro are the first names that sort of jump out at you or at me, but no, it wouldn't surprise me at all if God came down and told me that they were average or better. It would surprise me. That actually would surprise me. So do you think that the Giants have significant bounce back potential? I mean, it seems like maybe, you know, Kane would bounce back, and do they seem like a team that you bring them back and they perform better than they did, or is the upside just sort of what they were? Probably what they were has probably been in between all along.

It's an interesting, to me it's very interesting to see Sabian as committed to the World Series club now as he was a year ago, more or less. That's like super fascinating to me. And I mean, I don't think they're they should be anybody's favorite i didn't think really they should probably be anybody's favorite last year either um my guess is i mean hudson's hudson's probably a solid three or four win upgrade over zito uh and i don't like morse um but I would say that something like 83 to 86 true talent is probably fair. And if you're there, they probably haven't done enough.

Yeah. I guess the interesting thing about the Matt Swartz, he called it the other people's players effect or something like that, is that a guy like Hunter Pence, for instance, has been traded twice, right? I mean, he was traded by the Astros to the Phillies and then he was traded by the Phillies to the Giants. And now the Giants are bringing him back. So he is the Giants' own player that they are keeping and so i guess we're more optimistic about his performance because the giants kept him than we would be if they'd let

him go to some other team but he's also a player who's already been been moved by a couple of organizations i guess the astros were sort of selling all of their players so yeah so i guess of selling all of their players so yeah so i guess right so you have to sort of maybe go case by case if it's just a a team that's selling everyone who's making any sort of money or has any sort of trade value then maybe you you discount the effect in that player's case and you do wonder how yeah you do wonder how long it takes before a player becomes your player. I mean, they re-signed Scudero after two and a half months. They kind of famously re-signed Randy Wynn after two and a half months of, like, insane hot streak. But, you know, was Randy Wynn the Giants player yet? Probably not, right?

Yeah, right. It would take some time to acclimate to the city and the ballpark and all those things that would make you better if your theory is correct. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, both those guys were pending free agents, so you know they didn't buy a house or relocate their family or anything like that. I mean, if it's anything like that that causes comfort level, that would certainly not have kicked in. So it seems like, uh, I mean on it, on an individual, the whole thing seems like a stretch then, but on, on an individual basis,

a few of these seem like particular stretches. All right. Well, uh, I will link to Matt Swartz's research on that stuff at the, on the podcast post at baseball prospectus. if you want to go check that out. And we're done, right? Yep.

Okay. So send us emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. We will get to those later in the week. And we'll be back with another show tomorrow. Two of the worst seasons in Dodgers history. Bounces back with one good one and gets two years and a raise yep below average gm