Wednesday, July 25, 2007
The Bravos
As I wait for the new Angry Video Game Nerd video to load, I'll take the time to fawn over an organization that I think is certainly one of the best-run in the major leagues, the Braves. Many fans simpy equate the Braves' run of success (they won 14 straight division titles from 1991-2005) with three great pitchers, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, and John Smoltz, and those guys are obviously key reasons, but there's a lot more to their continued excellence than meets the eye.
Last month I read through John Schuerholz's book Built To Win, a memoir of his time running the team during their long run of success (he came aboard in 1990; the Braves went from last place that year to first in '91). While the book does contain the patented "crusty old baseball dude anti-Moneyball rant" (in the second chapter Schuerholz calls the basic premise of Moneyball "flawed", then demonstrates over the next ten pages or so that he has no understanding of what that premise actually is), overall it's a very good read. Schuerholz comes across as authoritarian and a bit of a stuffed shirt (the Braves don't allow any of their players to wear jewelry on the field; you get the idea that Schuerholz would have hated Bill Veeck), but there's no denying that when it comes to evaluating talent and putting together competitive teams, he has few peers.
What I find most impressive about the Braves is not what they did in the years when they had Maddux, Glavine, etc, but what they've done since 2004, after those guys left and after they had restrictions put on their payroll by Time Warner. As team payrolls began to escalate, the Braves were given a ceiling starting in 2001, and slowly the percentage of their team payroll relative to the league began to decrease. For a lot of teams, this would have meant bad times.
Not for Schuerholz. As their players got older and they started to lose some guys to free agency, a steady influx of young talent has kept the team afloat. The Braves won 96 games in 2004 (the first post-Maddux/Sheffield year), 90 in 2005, and now are 54-47 and three games back of the Mets in the NL East. They had a little squawk last year, finishing at 79-83, but their expected won-loss record (go here if that concept is foreign to you) was still 85-77. As Schuerholz is proud to point out, in 2005 the Braves had 17 rookies make appearances on their major league roster, and many played significant roles.
In fact, take a look at this list of players, 25 or under, on Atlanta's roster in 2007, making a significant contribution to the Braves this season (alongside is their age):
Brian McCann, 23
Kelly Johnson, 25
Jeff Francoeur, 23
Scott Thorman, 25
Jarrod Saltalamacchia, 22
Yunel Escobar, 24
Chuck James, 25
Kyle Davies, 23 (ok, he sucks, but there's still potential)
McCann and Johnson are two of the best players at their respective positions. Francoeur isn't too far away, if he'd just learn to take a freaking pitch, and "Salty" (too tired to spell his name out) and Escobar are apparently big time talents. All of these players came up through Atlanta's organization and all are making solid contributions. That's quite a list. It's a testament to the Braves' scouting department, which is clearly tops in the game.
You see, this is sort of what pisses a lot of us Giants fans off about our team. The Braves won a lot during the 90's and into the aughts, and yet here they are, still on top, producing prospects out of every orifice (um, franchises have orifices? Where...never mind). You'd think that they would have fallen into the typical cycle of producing a winning team for a decade, and then losing those players to age or free agency, then sucking for a while. It hasn't happened, because their farm system has continued to bear fruit, even as their big dogs (Glavine, Maddux, Gary Sheffield, Javy Lopez) have gone.
Meanwhile, we look at the Giants, who have been winning for a long time, and their resume looks essentially like a how-to guide to running a farm system into the ground. Let's see, ignoring potential impact hitters in the draft? Check. Giving away picks in order to have more money to spend on Michael Tucker? Check. Continuing to draft pitching projects even though the organization hasn't produced a hitter since the days of Kruk and Kuip (the playing days, that is)? Check.
The Giants' argument for their continued insistence on signing late-thirtysomethings to surround Bonds has been that they want to compete now, while Bonds is still around; they don't have time to sit and wait for young players to develop. What Atlanta has done the past few years (and their success compared to the Giants') is like the perfect rebuttal to that argument. Perhaps Brian Sabean should look at the Braves and take some pointers on how to successfully replenish your major league team with young players while continuing to win. Hint: it doesn't involve Dave Roberts or Rich Aurilia.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have some man-crush on the Braves here. I'm not particularly fond of them, and their fans (at least the ones who go to the games) are an apathetic lot. However, I'm just impressed by their smarts as an organization. It's like the samurai: I don't like you, I will kill you, but I respect you as a fellow warrior. And notice how this tribute to the Braves slowly morphed into another anti-Sabean rant? Sigh, some habits die hard.
Last month I read through John Schuerholz's book Built To Win, a memoir of his time running the team during their long run of success (he came aboard in 1990; the Braves went from last place that year to first in '91). While the book does contain the patented "crusty old baseball dude anti-Moneyball rant" (in the second chapter Schuerholz calls the basic premise of Moneyball "flawed", then demonstrates over the next ten pages or so that he has no understanding of what that premise actually is), overall it's a very good read. Schuerholz comes across as authoritarian and a bit of a stuffed shirt (the Braves don't allow any of their players to wear jewelry on the field; you get the idea that Schuerholz would have hated Bill Veeck), but there's no denying that when it comes to evaluating talent and putting together competitive teams, he has few peers.
What I find most impressive about the Braves is not what they did in the years when they had Maddux, Glavine, etc, but what they've done since 2004, after those guys left and after they had restrictions put on their payroll by Time Warner. As team payrolls began to escalate, the Braves were given a ceiling starting in 2001, and slowly the percentage of their team payroll relative to the league began to decrease. For a lot of teams, this would have meant bad times.
Not for Schuerholz. As their players got older and they started to lose some guys to free agency, a steady influx of young talent has kept the team afloat. The Braves won 96 games in 2004 (the first post-Maddux/Sheffield year), 90 in 2005, and now are 54-47 and three games back of the Mets in the NL East. They had a little squawk last year, finishing at 79-83, but their expected won-loss record (go here if that concept is foreign to you) was still 85-77. As Schuerholz is proud to point out, in 2005 the Braves had 17 rookies make appearances on their major league roster, and many played significant roles.
In fact, take a look at this list of players, 25 or under, on Atlanta's roster in 2007, making a significant contribution to the Braves this season (alongside is their age):
Brian McCann, 23
Kelly Johnson, 25
Jeff Francoeur, 23
Scott Thorman, 25
Jarrod Saltalamacchia, 22
Yunel Escobar, 24
Chuck James, 25
Kyle Davies, 23 (ok, he sucks, but there's still potential)
McCann and Johnson are two of the best players at their respective positions. Francoeur isn't too far away, if he'd just learn to take a freaking pitch, and "Salty" (too tired to spell his name out) and Escobar are apparently big time talents. All of these players came up through Atlanta's organization and all are making solid contributions. That's quite a list. It's a testament to the Braves' scouting department, which is clearly tops in the game.
You see, this is sort of what pisses a lot of us Giants fans off about our team. The Braves won a lot during the 90's and into the aughts, and yet here they are, still on top, producing prospects out of every orifice (um, franchises have orifices? Where...never mind). You'd think that they would have fallen into the typical cycle of producing a winning team for a decade, and then losing those players to age or free agency, then sucking for a while. It hasn't happened, because their farm system has continued to bear fruit, even as their big dogs (Glavine, Maddux, Gary Sheffield, Javy Lopez) have gone.
Meanwhile, we look at the Giants, who have been winning for a long time, and their resume looks essentially like a how-to guide to running a farm system into the ground. Let's see, ignoring potential impact hitters in the draft? Check. Giving away picks in order to have more money to spend on Michael Tucker? Check. Continuing to draft pitching projects even though the organization hasn't produced a hitter since the days of Kruk and Kuip (the playing days, that is)? Check.
The Giants' argument for their continued insistence on signing late-thirtysomethings to surround Bonds has been that they want to compete now, while Bonds is still around; they don't have time to sit and wait for young players to develop. What Atlanta has done the past few years (and their success compared to the Giants') is like the perfect rebuttal to that argument. Perhaps Brian Sabean should look at the Braves and take some pointers on how to successfully replenish your major league team with young players while continuing to win. Hint: it doesn't involve Dave Roberts or Rich Aurilia.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have some man-crush on the Braves here. I'm not particularly fond of them, and their fans (at least the ones who go to the games) are an apathetic lot. However, I'm just impressed by their smarts as an organization. It's like the samurai: I don't like you, I will kill you, but I respect you as a fellow warrior. And notice how this tribute to the Braves slowly morphed into another anti-Sabean rant? Sigh, some habits die hard.
Labels: atlanta braves, brian sabean rant, sucky giants farm system
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Pondering Sabean
I was perusing McCovey Chronicles the other day when I happened upon a diary with the headline "In Defense of Sabean". Immediately upon reading this title, I thought to myself, "uh oh." From time to time over at Grant's site, some poor soul will begin a diary trying to defend an unpopular notion, with a title like "Feliz Isn't So Bad" or "Give Benitez a Chance." Sure enough, the other denizens of the site soon catch wind of it, and things get reaaaaal ugly. Insults get tossed, VORPs and EQAs get thrown around, and soon enough the little troll who started the mini-argument is chased back into his little cave.
Thankfully, though, the debate sparked by this latest contrarian diary, while very passionate, was actually quite cordial, and I recommend that all fans go and read it. There are a lot of intelligent arguments pointing out the pros and cons of Brian Sabean's tenure as Giants GM, and whether or not he earned his extension.
That's what I'm here to talk about now. I, like many Giants fans, was baffled by the full vote of confidence given to Sabean by Giants ownership. I wanted to see the Giants go in a different direction. The Giants' future outlook is relentlessly bleak, and most (if not all) of it is of Sabean's making. I can see giving him the chance to dig himself out of the mess he's created, but what indication is there that he's competent enough to do it? He rebuilt the team from scratch in 1997, and did a hell of a job, but he also had Bonds in his prime and a bunch of other solid players entering their prime, so comparing then to now is apples and oranges.
Now, to be fair, I would argue that from 1997-2002, Sabean was one of the five best GMs in baseball. As I said before, he did a great job revitalizing this team at the major league level. Through 2002, he surrounded Bonds with adequate talent, and he found that talent through a number of shrewd trades. He absolutely robbed teams of Jeff Kent, J.T. Snow, Ellis Burks, Robb Nen, Jason Schmidt, Felix Rodriguez, Brian Johnson, and even Wilson Alvarez and Roberto Hernandez, if for just half of a season. His general philosophy was: trade your prospects (i.e. risks) for known commodities, and for a while it worked beautifully. Most of the prospects he traded flamed out completely, while the guys he traded for shined. He had the Giants in contention every year from 1997 to 2002, and while the farm system did continue to decay, you can't deny those results.
From 2003 to the present, though, I think it's clear that Sabean has been one of the worst GMs in all of baseball. His "prospects for vets" philosophy became increasingly cockeyed to the point where it almost became self-parody, as he began sacrificing draft picks for guys who he thought would help the team now. It might have worked, but instead of bringing in good players in their primes like Snow or Nen in '97 and '98, he was throwing away picks for mediocrities like Michael Tucker.
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same dumb thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome each time. Perhaps Sabean's old person fetish drove him into insanity's cold embrace, because he kept on signing bad veteran after bad veteran in the hopes that the team would get better, and now we're stuck with the results of that plunge off the edge, as the team has a bunch of old guys and a horrible farm system. Where Sabean was once ahead of the curve when it came to building a contending team, at some point many other GMs grew wise to his ways and realized it was cheaper and easier to build through a solid combination of young talent and smart free agent pickups, and Sabean got left in the dust.
The Giants need to retool, and they need to do it by overhauling the farm system and just blowing up the roster as it is now. Sabean isn't the man to do it. Maybe if there were a quick fix, if it were a situation like 1997, Sabean would be the right man, but there's just no evidence whatsoever that he has the ability to rebuild this franchise. And don't start with the cries that he's rebuilt the pitching staff. Yes, Matt Cain rocks, and so does Lincecum, but Lincecum was a guy the Giants basically lucked into because a bunch of scouts had their heads up their asses. Noah Lowry? I like him, but he was an afterthought in the farm system who was thrown into the rotation in 2004 and, voila. He was a huge surprise. Plus, his control problems and below average stuff don't portend future greatness. These three guys are hardly indicative of some underlying genius.
So no, I'm not thrilled about Sabean's coming back, and a lot of Giants fans share my view (as do Joe Sheehan of BP and John Perricone of OBM, only they are way blunter about it than I am). I personally think the Giant front office is behind the times when it comes to talent evaluation and how to build a franchise. In extending Sabean, it's unfortunately likely to stay that way.
Thankfully, though, the debate sparked by this latest contrarian diary, while very passionate, was actually quite cordial, and I recommend that all fans go and read it. There are a lot of intelligent arguments pointing out the pros and cons of Brian Sabean's tenure as Giants GM, and whether or not he earned his extension.
That's what I'm here to talk about now. I, like many Giants fans, was baffled by the full vote of confidence given to Sabean by Giants ownership. I wanted to see the Giants go in a different direction. The Giants' future outlook is relentlessly bleak, and most (if not all) of it is of Sabean's making. I can see giving him the chance to dig himself out of the mess he's created, but what indication is there that he's competent enough to do it? He rebuilt the team from scratch in 1997, and did a hell of a job, but he also had Bonds in his prime and a bunch of other solid players entering their prime, so comparing then to now is apples and oranges.
Now, to be fair, I would argue that from 1997-2002, Sabean was one of the five best GMs in baseball. As I said before, he did a great job revitalizing this team at the major league level. Through 2002, he surrounded Bonds with adequate talent, and he found that talent through a number of shrewd trades. He absolutely robbed teams of Jeff Kent, J.T. Snow, Ellis Burks, Robb Nen, Jason Schmidt, Felix Rodriguez, Brian Johnson, and even Wilson Alvarez and Roberto Hernandez, if for just half of a season. His general philosophy was: trade your prospects (i.e. risks) for known commodities, and for a while it worked beautifully. Most of the prospects he traded flamed out completely, while the guys he traded for shined. He had the Giants in contention every year from 1997 to 2002, and while the farm system did continue to decay, you can't deny those results.
From 2003 to the present, though, I think it's clear that Sabean has been one of the worst GMs in all of baseball. His "prospects for vets" philosophy became increasingly cockeyed to the point where it almost became self-parody, as he began sacrificing draft picks for guys who he thought would help the team now. It might have worked, but instead of bringing in good players in their primes like Snow or Nen in '97 and '98, he was throwing away picks for mediocrities like Michael Tucker.
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same dumb thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome each time. Perhaps Sabean's old person fetish drove him into insanity's cold embrace, because he kept on signing bad veteran after bad veteran in the hopes that the team would get better, and now we're stuck with the results of that plunge off the edge, as the team has a bunch of old guys and a horrible farm system. Where Sabean was once ahead of the curve when it came to building a contending team, at some point many other GMs grew wise to his ways and realized it was cheaper and easier to build through a solid combination of young talent and smart free agent pickups, and Sabean got left in the dust.
The Giants need to retool, and they need to do it by overhauling the farm system and just blowing up the roster as it is now. Sabean isn't the man to do it. Maybe if there were a quick fix, if it were a situation like 1997, Sabean would be the right man, but there's just no evidence whatsoever that he has the ability to rebuild this franchise. And don't start with the cries that he's rebuilt the pitching staff. Yes, Matt Cain rocks, and so does Lincecum, but Lincecum was a guy the Giants basically lucked into because a bunch of scouts had their heads up their asses. Noah Lowry? I like him, but he was an afterthought in the farm system who was thrown into the rotation in 2004 and, voila. He was a huge surprise. Plus, his control problems and below average stuff don't portend future greatness. These three guys are hardly indicative of some underlying genius.
So no, I'm not thrilled about Sabean's coming back, and a lot of Giants fans share my view (as do Joe Sheehan of BP and John Perricone of OBM, only they are way blunter about it than I am). I personally think the Giant front office is behind the times when it comes to talent evaluation and how to build a franchise. In extending Sabean, it's unfortunately likely to stay that way.
Labels: brian sabean rant, sucky giants farm system
