Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 71: The Giants Win the World Series/Assessing Brian Sabean

Episode Date: October 29, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss the start of the offseason and what the Giants’ second World Series win in three seasons says about GM Brian Sabean.

Good morning and welcome to episode 71 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Perspectives Daily Podcast. Coming to you from Evacuation Zone B in Manhattan, I am Ben Lindbergh and in his Honda Fit where I assume it is 70 and balmy and not sunny because it's nighttime but it will be sunny tomorrow. Sam Miller, how's the weather in your part of the world? Well, we have Santa Ana winds now, so it's very warm. And what happens with Santa Ana winds is that usually they're followed by about a thousand massive fires. So if you're feeling jealous that there's no attention being given to our natural disasters. It will happen fairly soon. You'll get your turn.

Your turn will come. Well, I am one block away from the edge of evacuation zone A, which if you're inside there, you already had to evacuate earlier this evening. So I'm hoping to hide out here. What about the diner that's open 24 hours a day and delivers? The diner is closed. So that is how I knew that this was serious. What about your 7-Eleven? 7-Eleven, I don't know. I know the Subway closed early. The 7-Eleven was open when I was coming

back from the grocery store, but I don't know if it's open now. Do you mean the subway restaurant or the train? The subway restaurant. The train is definitely closed. Oh, wow. Yes. Well, I've mentioned before that I live on the banks of the Hudson River, which is made of water. And I guess water rises when there's a storm. So I am high up in a building, so I don't have to worry about the water, but I do apparently have to worry about the winds breaking my windows. So we'll see if that happens. So baseball.

Yeah, it's over. It's over. We did it. Yeah. And now we have to figure out what to write and talk about when there is no new baseball for the next several months. Talking about it is going to be hard. Writing, I think, will be not as hard. You have to remember how to get into off-season mode, which I forget how to do, but it will come back to me, I guess. What are we going to talk about?

I don't know. A lot of people have been asking if we're going to continue the show and we do plan to continue the show. Um, and, uh, we're, I guess, gonna try to stay on the same schedule or at least see how that goes. We're not sure it's feasible um but man i i have not even i have not even a little bit agreed to this i thought i'd just say it and then you'd have no choice but to be the one that everyone would blame for not having podcasts um well as many times as we do the show we will probably rely on the kindness of others to a greater extent than we do during the regular season. And we will probably have more guests on and we will want to hear from you. So in the next show or two, we will give you an email address where you can email us and either ask us a

question or say something entertaining or give us a topic to talk about. And hopefully that will help get us through the lean months. And of course, we can talk about whatever baseball news there is during the offseason, whether it's winter meeting stuff or free agent stuff or all that usual thing. I guess now that the World Series is over, free agency has begun. So there will be new things to talk about but before we talk about those new things we should talk about the World Series that just ended

so somebody asked me on Twitter and then since then has deleted the question which makes it hard for me to credit this person but also maybe a hint that this is not actually a good question, but I think we should talk about it briefly anyway. The question was whether the Giants

are the worst dynasty ever, or whatever you want to call winning two World Series in three years. And I don't really want to answer that, but I think that the question itself reflects a little bit of a sort of a continued mistrust of Brian Sabian. I think that certainly five years ago, he and Ned Colletti probably would have been the two whipping boys of the stat head community. community. And perhaps even 10 years ago, when the Giants were winning, I think there was a sense that he was blessed to have the greatest player ever. And that if you stripped away that, there wasn't a whole lot to his roster building. I think that's a little bit debatable. Certainly, there were lean years as he kept trying to get one last good season around Bonds. And from 2004 to 2008, the Giants were quite poor. But they've not only won two World Series in the last three years,

but they were good in the year in between. They very, very easily could have made the playoffs. They were 99% likely to make the playoffs. At the trade deadline, they added Carlos Beltran, and I think that you could pretty much chalk the inability to make the playoffs last year to injuries and a little bit of flukiness rather than bad roster construction. I think that Sabian put together a good roster. And the year before they won the World Series with a team that I don't think anybody really

expected much from, he won, I think, 88. So this is a very good run for him. They're a top 10 payroll, but they're certainly not a top 3 or 4 payroll. And I don't know. I mean, I've been defending – I think I've been defending Sabian since – I don't know, for the past year or so. So maybe I'm willing to address this question because I kind of feel like that's a topic I like talking about. I like talking about Sabian now. I feel like it's kind of fun to like him after all those years of thinking he was an idiot.

But, I mean, what do you think? Does Sabian kind of belong to his reputation, or is he better than we ever gave him credit for? reputation or is he better than we ever gave him credit for? Uh, I think, I mean, I think a lot of it, like you say, was based on that transition period from bonds to not bonds. Um, and I do think it's debatable to say, I mean, maybe he could have surrounded Bonds with better players and done more with Bonds, but he did get to a World Series with Bonds. And, I mean, when you have Barry Bonds, maybe you don't have to do as much surrounding that greatest player ever. And there were good players surrounding Bonds. The Jeff Kent trade, I guess. Jeff Kent trade was pretty much one of the great trades, I think, of our lifetime. He got Rich Aurelia

for John Burkett. He signed Ellis Burks on the cheap, and Ellis Burks was, I mean, you should really go back and look at his numbers as a giant. They're delightful. He got JT Snow for Alan Watson. I mean, there was a pretty well put together team around Bonds. And they won a lot. They won the division in 97.

They had the best record, I believe, in baseball in 2000. They went to the playoffs, I believe, in 2001. They had the best record in baseball in 2000. They went to the playoffs, I believe, in 2001. They had the best record in baseball in 2003. And then 2002, of course, was the World Series. So that was a pretty good run as well. And he's been a general manager now for, what, 13 years, I think, something like that, which is very impressive. Not many general managers stick around that long.

So, I mean, you almost have to think that he's doing something right if he's just managing to keep his job for that long. I think, I mean, you can kind of have it both ways, right? You can say that he's made mistakes and that maybe some of his philosophies are, are not the best and yet also acknowledge all the good things that he does well. Um, I mean, it, for a while there, it seemed like he had gone overboard on veterans and was all about signing veterans and extending veterans and maybe was trying to sustain the success of sort of the previous successful incarnation of the team longer than its shelf life, maybe, and didn't perceive the need for a rebuilding when he should have, or at least an exchanging of good players.

or at least an exchanging of good players. But, I mean, he built this pitching staff that has won two World Series now, and that is an impressive accomplishment. And he's, I think, done a good job at retooling or rearming at the deadline or in the middle of the season. In 2010, when he did that and it worked so well, it was a bunch of guys who really no one anticipated doing as well as they did. And then the last couple of years,

he hasn't been shopping at the bargain bin quite so much with Carlos Beltran and then with Scudero and Pence. Those are more quality players than the, you know, the guys that kind of took them all the way in 2010. Well, kind of Scudero, kind of not. I mean, Scudero, obviously now we look at him differently, but he was, he was, he had a 73 OPS plus with the Rockies. And I mean, that was more or less a dump.

Who'd they give up? Culberson or something? Coming off a couple good years at least. At least kind of a useful player. Certainly not nothing. Yeah, a useful player. Cody Ross-like, I would say. Yeah, I guess so.

And then Maharis is sort of Ramon Ramirez, Javi Lopez-like in that pickup. But yeah, Pence is obviously more of the Beltran kind of acquisition. Yeah. So, I don't know. I mean, a record of mostly sustained success and being able to last as long as he has. I mean, clearly, whatever you think of his individual moves or his team building philosophies or his way of constructing a roster, he certainly elevated himself far above kind of the dregs of the GM world as he was regarded several years ago. Yeah, there are – I mean I guess if you – how many years did you say? It's been – I think this is his 17th year.

I thought it had been longer. I am just looking at his Wikipedia page, and it says that his 13 years is the longest run by a general manager in the club's history. But that can't be right. No, that can't be right because he made the trade. No, he can't trade. Okay, so he took over in 1996. Okay, so 17 years, you're going to make a lot of moves, and there are obviously going to be bad ones.

I think that it's fair to point out that the decision to sort of willingly give up draft picks, like not just to treat them cavalierly, but to actually intentionally punt them to forfeit them was odd. And I don't know that we've ever gotten a real good answer about that. I think that the Zito contract, there's never been a moment in history where you could rationalize that. I don't think the Aaron contract, similarly, was a deal that looked bad the day it was made, and Rowan didn't do him any favors. I don't know, maybe his Nafee Perez infatuation, although maybe that wasn't his fault. You can clearly point to specific... I think he extended Marvin Menard. That was pretty ugly.

There are specific moves that you can point to that make you question sort of his consistency or his discipline. And I think that it is fair to say that when he has money to spend, he is not necessarily the best protector of it. But, you know, I just don't know how many GMs are good at that. I mean, the free agency market has made a lot of smart GMs look really poor, and I don't know that he's alone in that. He maybe is near the worst in that sense, but there are certainly things that he does really well that I think every, if he did it with a sort of this is luck. Probably a great deal of it is luck.

But his draft success since 2004 or so is probably unparalleled as far as high picks go. He really hasn't had a miss yet in his last eight or something like that. And to get Posey, Bumgarner, Lincecum in three years is pretty amazing. And he picks up spare parts the way that you normally expect a small market team to do it. He does not have any prejudice against guys that are cast off, either mid-season or kind of over the course of seasons. And I think that on both the 2010 team and this team, there are certainly guys that you can point to that were freely available to all 29 teams. And he hit on them. And that's probably the most admirable skill that any of us ask for in a GM is the ability to find value that is free.

So overall, I mean, if you look at the sort of, I don't know, maybe the three main components of roster building, the big money, the draft, and the small money, he really excels at two of them. And it's a lot of temptation to resist spending money when you're granted permission to spend money because you never have a very long leash as a general manager. And so if the question, I mean, you know, if your choices between spending maybe a little more than a player is worth and yet at the same time making your team better in the short term and then maybe the other choices being more prudent or taking a longer view and investing in the international market or the draft or something where it will take several years to see any return, even if it is in the best interest of your organization. That takes a lot of discipline to do. Yeah, and particularly I'm glad you brought that up because it's pretty much accepted that he didn't have much to do with the Zito move,

that that was kind of a decision that was made above him and he merely carried it out. I mean, obviously we don't know the conversations that went into that. We don't know if it was the sort of thing where he could have talked somebody out of it or if he wanted to. Maybe he was just as happy to have Zito as anybody else. But I think that there's a general sense among Giants fans that maybe he doesn't deserve all the blame or even most of the blame for that,

although maybe some of the blame. So bottom line, if your favorite team was hiring a GM and they hired Sabian, is your initial response at this point excitement or dread? point, excitement or dread? Probably neither, I guess. Somewhere in the middle. Yeah, that's probably fair. Yeah. Okay, let me rephrase it. If you, well, what do you think?

There's 30 GMs. Best guess, where does he rank? Where does he rank? I guess I would put him in the top half, certainly. But I don't know if I would put him in the top 10. I don't think so. Not that my opinion on this is all that educated or informed but uh but yeah i would maybe put him somewhere in the top half but not in the top 10 and in game three of the division series homer bailey

completely dominated the giants they nearly lost and they could have lost if they had lost that game and been swept out of the nlds Do you think that your opinion would be significantly different? Because if it would, we probably have a problem. I don't know. I hope not. I mean, just the fact that they got to the playoffs again speaks well of him. So, I don't know. It's hard to kind of write him off as a good GM after winning two world series in three years. Um, and yet I guess I still have some inclination to, I mean, anytime you win the

world series, really, there's some luck involved. There are a lot of things that have to go right. And, and maybe some other GM who made decisions that were just as good as yours or just as defensible as yours at the time, uh, didn't have them work out as well in a way that couldn't have been anticipated. Um, so I don't know, I guess, uh, as you mentioned, the draft record, I mean, is that if that is sort of his true talent to either draft really well, or if you want to say that he picked a scouting director who's so good that he can draft really well, then he's maybe one of the best GMs. If he could keep doing that, if he could do that year in and year out and pick a great player with the top pick every year, then that would make him one of the best GMs if he could keep doing that if he could do that year in and year out and pick a great player with the top pick every year then that would make him one of the best GMs or is he just a little lucky with that um and made good picks and had them work out whereas other teams that made good picks did not have them work out uh I don't know if that's something that I would expect him to be able to do in the future.

And you take that away, maybe what's left isn't quite as impressive as it would be for other general managers. Okay, one more. The Dodgers seem to be willing to spend something like $80 100 million dollars more than the giants over the next you know per season over the next few years um would you rather knowing what you know about their current rosters and also now knowing what you know about their gms would you rather be uh in the position of rooting for the giants or for the dodgers over the next three seasons uh so what you're asking is whether one I think will be more successful? Yeah, exactly.

Next three years, I might take the Giants just because they'll still have most of this pitching intact. Beyond that, I would probably go with the payroll and the Dodgers. Are the Giants the favorite for the National League next year? Probably not. I don't know. Depending on what happens over the winter, I don't really think they were the best regular season team.

So I guess not, I would say. And so does that just make you a hater? Yes. Are you a hater? Quite possibly it does. It's weird. Cito was interviewed after the game, and he said what players say a lot, which is, oh, well, you know, number.

The stats maybe didn't say that we were going to be the best, but this isn't about stats. It's about heart. Which seems weird because I certainly thought that the Giants were the favorite in the National League West coming into the season. Was there any sort of disputing that people thought they were a pretty good team and they could easily win? I think every team likes to use that as motivation.

The idea that everyone is against them or is writing them off for some reason. Well, everybody is against Barry Zito and everybody has written him off. Yes, him personally, specifically, yes. At the team, I don't think so. All right, well, tomorrow we will talk about something other than the 2012 season. Is there anything that you want to say about the game before it becomes not timely anymore?

Nope. Okay. Not really. I mean, I don't think it's timely right now. Yeah. Okay, then. Weather permitting, I will be back, and Sam will be back on Tuesday.