The Roster Is Set

The Giants elect to carry 13 position players and 12 pitchers, which I would argue is one pitcher too many, but almost all the teams do this now. It does limit the manager’s tactical flexibility during games, since there are fewer bench hitters/runners. This is mitigated somewhat in the Giants’ case by the decision to forgo carrying an additional catcher beyond starter Bengie Molina and starting-third-baseman-former-catcher Pablo Sandoval. It’s also a great tribute to institutional memory for the multipositional virtues of Bob Brenly in the 1980s.

Uribe as a defensive replacement for Sandoval at third or Renteria at short? OK. Aurilia as Travis Ishikawa’s platoon partner at first? I cringe. It’s cool that the well-traveled Andres Torres — a Quad-A lifer — landed a gig as the fifth outfielder, but if the Giants aren’t giving at-bats to Nate Shierholtz, I fail to see why they might have any for Torres.

 

Catching Up On Transactions

High on the Giants’ list of off-season priorities is fixing the infield, and Brian Sabean appears to be trying to do that.  Pablo Sandoval will play more at catcher and probably some at the infield corners (giving the team a latter-day Brenly vibe); Travis Ishikawa will get his shot at first, with perhaps Josh Phelps platooning; Emmanuel Burriss and Kevin Frandsen will get their shots at second.  Barring trading Rowand, Molina, and/or Winn — options that Sabean should entertain, even if he really means it when he says he intends to contend in a weak NL West — the real problem area is the left side of the infield.

Bringing Edgar Renteria back to the National League — not cheaply, however — has its chances of working out reasonably well.  Adding a few points of OBP and SLG by moving to the weaker league, and adding Denver and Phoenix to his frequently-visited opponents’ parks, it isn’t hard to envision July headlines touting some sort of resurgence from a player whose skill set wouldn’t really change fundamentally.  Add in that he ought to be thoroughly adequate at the plate where the Giants got nothing of the sort last season, and I can see how this ends up being a slight improvement to the team.  (The Giants will give back some of their gains from Renteria’s offense due to his declining defense.)

This still leaves third base to stock somehow.  A full season of Sandoval at third would be a bit brutal defensively, so perhaps Sabean isn’t done.  Among the aforementioned veterans, dealing Winn remains the move I’d most like to see made, in part because I’d rather see the Giants add a rightfielder with some power, whether that’s taking another spin with strong-armed Nate Shierholtz or taking a low-end risk via free agency.  Counting on Sandoval, Ishikawa and Renteria, too, that adds up to an offense that might actually be average.

Putting the Big Unit in China Basin is yet another indication that the Giants take themselves seriously.  While one year ago I would have found that laughable, I’m just maybe starting to see things from Sabean’s point of view.  The Dodgers and D’backs haven’t made the sorts of moves that convincingly elevate them past 85 wins, and while so much of the Giants’ limited success last season depended on happy accidents in their record in one-run ballgames (going 31-21), there’s some reason to take them just abuot as seriously.  They’re not the team that fielded an almost entirely putrid lineup last April, they’re the one we saw in September, the one that had a few interesting prospects on the field.  The team needed help in the bullpen, and Sabean’s tried to scare some up.  The team needed a plausible regular at short, and whatever else you may say about him, Edgar Renteria is exactly that.  The team still needs some power in the lineup, which is why we keep hearing Manny Ramirez rumors, though the shame of that would be how it might suck playing time away from Fred Lewis, one of their better hitters, but if Lewis in turn reduces Randy Winn to a less-regular starter, even that could turn out well.  I admit, I’d be a little more enthusiastic if they came up with a power-hitting third baseman who lets them relegate Pablo Sandoval to sharing playing time at first with Travis Ishikawa and behind the plate with Benjie Moliina, but we’ll see if Joe Crede proves himself healthy enough to engender any interest in his coming workout.

So, put Randy Johnson onto that sort of team in this sort of division, and yeah, I like it well enough.  He’ll get his 300th win as a Giant.  (He’s just five away.)  He should be effective enough, he saves Team Sabean from having to count too heavily on Noah Lowry to round out the rotation, and I guess there’s something sort of amusing about having someone who reduces Barry Zito to not merely an expensive mistake, but the most expensive fifth starter ever in human history.

 

What the Giants Could Learn from the Rockies

Colorado’s capture of the National League pennant last season made it the best season in the organization’s existence. One of the accompanying narratives was that they were learning how to win in Coors Field. Another was the declining park factor in Colorado had allowed for a more stable pitching staff. While there is some truth to these, for me the Rockies are more than the product of an evolving ballpark-related dynamic. Rather, they are a perfect case study in proper player development.

 

Little to Analyze in April

The toughest time for me, from a writing standpoint, is April.  It’s just too easy to fall into the trap of putting far too much stock in a minimum of information, proffering analysis of nothing, solutions to nonexistent problems, and writing things that look ridiculous two months down the road.  (I almost did just this with a post I wrote about Dusty Baker’s tenure so far in Cincinnati when I realized that Baker had actually fixed one the problems I was blaming him for.)  As I read through each day’s baseball news, I see so much coverage that bugs me, from overanalysis of a few innings of pitching to overreaction to a two-week slump to ascribing far too much importance to three games.

I can’t help but cringe when I see one of the key lessons of sabermetrics — that small samples of baseball are not valuable analytically — has made such little penetration into the mainstream.  That Philip Hughes has had two bad starts, or David Ortiz two bad weeks, or that the Diamondbacks swept the Rockies, just doesn’t mean a whole lot for what those entities will do going forward.  We have more information than that, and whether the new information runs counter to our beliefs or supports them, it’s important that we keep it in perspective.

The important information at this time of year comes from the manager’s office, comes from the trainer’s room, comes from the GM’s chair.  How is playing time being distributed?  What roles are being shared, are being changed, are being defined well or poorly?  What are teams doing in reaction to injuries?  What are they doing in reaction — or better still, in non-reaction — to small samples?

Take a look at what Bruce Bochy has done.  An injury to Dave Roberts has cleared a path for Fred Lewis to start in the veteran’s absence.  Eugenio Velez is chipping away at Ray Durham’s playing time at second base.  The next logical move is to bench or release Rich Aurilia and let Dan Ortmeier play first base.  It’s not that the younger players are stars-in-waiting; in each case, though, they are better than the veterans in their way, and have better chances to contributing to the Giants beyond 2008.  Bochy may finally be coming around to that mindset.

It’s not about performance in April, not on the field.  The wins and losses count, the homers and hits all go into the final record, but because all players can do just about anything in a month of play, the numbers don’t have meaning.  To learn in April, one has to follow the lineups, and the reactions by management, and the way roles change.  That’s the stuff that is meaningful, for good and bad. 

 

The Diamondbacks: Beating Pythagorus in the Desert

The Arizona Diamondbacks won the West last season, shooting past a poorly-directed Dodgers team and the twice-defending division-champion Padres, while keeping just barely ahead of the surprising Rockies. I’ll toot my horn a bit and reveal that in an office pool in March 2007 I picked the Diamondbacks to have the second-best record in the National League. However, if you’d told me then that the Snakes were going to allow more runs than they scored, I’d have said they wouldn’t be a contender.

As explained here, teams’ won-loss records generally reflect their run differentials. A team that allows more runs than it scores is almost always going to have a losing record. The Diamondbacks allowed 732 runs last year and scored just 712, yet still won the division with a 90-72 record. So the Snakes’ record was nearly 11 games better than their run differential would have suggested.

What the Diamondbacks did last year goes against our accepted beliefs about how baseball teams win. The relationship between run differential and overall record is so consistent that it has created a measure of certainty among performance analysts. When that relationship is fractured to the degree that it was by the Snakes last year, we’re tempted to write it off as a fluke, but if we take a closer look, we can see how they managed to undermine sabermetric orthodoxy to such an alarming degree – and perhaps get a picture of how well we should expect them to play in 2008.

 

Money Poorly Spent

The Chronicle headlined Gwen Knapp’s column this morning “For those who think Zito is a bust, here’s the evidence.” Yes, Zito’s performance in yesterday’s opener was bad, but it was only disappointing to those who ignored evidence readily available on the day Zito was signed in December 2006. At the time, Brian Sabean evidently thought the twenty-eight-year-old Zito was coming into his prime, but Zito had actually been on a downward trend since 2004. In his first four major-league seasons from 2000-2003, Zito was 61-29, with a 3.12 ERA in 119 starts, and boasted nine-inning rates of 7.2 hits, 10.9 baserunners, 7.2 strikeouts, and 3.4 walks. Over the subsequent three seasons, Zito went 41-34 with a 4.05 ERA in 103 starts and his nine-inning rates were 8.3 hits, 12.5 baserunners, 6.6 strikeouts, and 3.7 walks. The Giants are paying a number-three starter $80 million over seven years. Do you think Johan Santana’s agent used those numbers as a starting point in his negotiations with the Mets as the New Yorkers attempted to sign the best starter in baseball?

Similarly, the Giants are never going to get their money’s worth from the Aaron Rowland contract (five years at $60 million). On the plus side, the signing gives the pitching staff the double break of replacing Dave Roberts in center with Rowand, and Bonds in left with Roberts. Since the only real point to playing the 2008 season will be to let Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum do their things, building a better defense isn’t such a terrible bit of off-season work. But I expect the Giants to be almost as rudely disappointed by Rowand’s hitting outside of Philadelphia as they are with Zito’s pitching away from Oakland. In only two full seasons of play has Rowand been an above-average hitter, and his numbers in the vastness of AT&T Park will not look so good as his numbers in that bandbox in Philadelphia. Given the abandon with which Rowand plays center, the chances that he lasts the full five years while playing every day seem pretty slight to me. What I don’t get is Rowand’s decision, since it involves paying California taxes and leaving playoff-picture relevance for the balance of his career, but as he’s already 30, we can at least acknowledge that he did choose a lovely place to play out that career.

 

A Roster Suggestion (The First of Many, No Doubt)

At least twice a week, my colleague Ed comes into my office bemoaning the Giants’ refusal to claim yet another guy placed on waivers by some club with actual talent on their roster. Ed’s right that the Giants don’t take advantage of the free talent that’s out there for the taking. This is all the more damaging to the Giants since some of that freely available talent is better than most of what the Giants have on their roster.

In what may be a never-ending series of suggestions of ways the Brian Sabean could improve the ballclub, I present Matt Murton. He lost his spot on the Cubs when they signed Reed Johnson (also someone the Giants could have looked at), and today they announced they’re not even going to carry Murton as a reserve. He simply needs a new organization, and like Johnson, he brings a perfect package of skills to the table in terms of what the Giants should be looking for in an outfielder; right-handed, gap power, lefty masher, solid to plus defender in a corner OF. Toss in the fact that Murton is just 26 years old and has only two years of service time, and he’s the kind of player who could help the team both in 2008 and beyond. With players like Murton available, the Giants simply shouldn’t settle for their internal candidates for the fourth OF job — that includes Dave Roberts — they can do better. While Murton is not exactly free talent (he’s not out of options, and the Cubs announced Thursday that they will send him to their AAA affiliate if they cannot trade him), the Giants should certainly be willing to include one of their current outfielders in a package that nets them Murton. I’m willing to bet that Murton, wherever he goes, will put up a better OPS in 2008 than any of the Giants’ outfielders.