San Francisco Giants GM Brian Sabean does not care what you think. He doesn’t have time for your advanced stats, isolated skill factors, fielding-independent pitching numbers or carefully weighted projections.
He wants the intangibles that statheads so readily dismiss. He wants hard-working players who are durable and mature and put the team before themselves. He wants guys who know how to win and, in the most ambiguous of baseball fallacies, play the game “the right way.” And he has five division titles, three National League pennants and two World Series rings, if you want to argue with his thinking.
Sabean has run the Giants for 17 seasons—the longest tenure of any active GM—and throughout, he has remained stubbornly committed to his way of thinking. He is bullish in preserving the pillars of classic scouting: Your eyes can tell you everything you need to know.
True, there are those in the Giants’ front office—especially in the minor league system, which Sabean has left to the more forward-thinking—who have pushed the organization toward modern, empirical player evaluation. But when Sabean has to choose between an unheralded young player whose advanced stats say he’s undervalued, or a veteran who’s won a World Series or two, you know which one Sabean wants on his team.
So it’s no surprise the Giants enter their second World Series title defence of the decade with a familiar lineup. Twenty-one of 25 players from the active roster of last year’s World Series are back, and most remaining spots will be filled from within.
Sabean signed just one free agent this off-season: Outfielder Andres Torres, who previously played three seasons for Sabean’s Giants and won a World Series with the team in 2010. If familiarity breeds contempt, no one told Sabean.
Of course, the Giants are familiar with the intricacies of championship-ring design, so who’s going to complain? This is a team that was down 2–0 against the Reds in last year’s NL Divisional Series and in a 3–1 hole against St. Louis in the NLCS. Both times they charged back, before sweeping Detroit in the finals, holding the American League champs to six runs. The World Series banner the team will raise at AT&T Park this April is a big endorsement of the Sabean ideal.
Now he’s hoping the same crew can do it again, even if they aren’t the most exhilarating bunch. Buster Posey and Pablo Sandoval are the only remotely flashy hitters and each will spray line drives from the heart of the order. The rest of the team will just put their heads down and do their jobs.
Angel Pagan and Marco Scutaro will get on base at the top of the lineup; Hunter Pence, Brandon Belt and Brandon Crawford can contribute from the bottom. Torres and Gregor Blanco could form a versatile platoon, hitting eighth and playing left field, if manager Bruce Bochy wants to get crafty—adding to a lineup that’s already well-balanced to handle both right- and left-handed pitching.
What Sabean and Bochy love about these Giants is they excel at the little things: base running, intelligent fielding; finding cut-off men in perfect position; timely use of small ball; and simple, contact hitting to advance and score runners. They play good defence and they run everything out. It’s a baseball purist’s dream.
And, oh man, that pitching. Tim Lincecum, the two-time Cy Young winner with a career K/9 of 9.8, was the team’s fifth-best starter last season, which says one thing about Lincecum’s struggles and another about the strength of this staff. The ultra-durable Matt Cain, Cy Young winner-in-waiting Madison Bumgarner, and resurgent veterans Ryan Vogelsong and Barry Zito all put up better numbers than Lincecum. Better still, the staff seems impervious to injury.
One of those five started every Giants game save for two in 2012. And they’re all back in 2013 to form one of the best rotations in all of baseball. Even if Vogelsong and Zito regress a bit with age, Cain is famously unfailing, Bumgarner should keep developing into one of the game’s top pitchers, and Lincecum can’t be as unreliable as last season, right?
Maybe. Lincecum’s progress is one reason Sabean can’t just kick his feet up this year. The 28-year-old is in his final year before free agency and needs to rediscover what made him a back-to-back Cy Young winner and the NL strikeout leader three times from 2008–10. That means getting over 2012, when his ERA ballooned nearly two-and-a-half points from 2011, and he set a career high in walks and led the NL in wild pitches and earned runs.
If Lincecum can do that, he’s in line for a huge payday; with Zito’s massive contract likely coming off the books at the end of the season, Sabean will have room.
Unless the Giants invest big, either during or after this season, this could be the final contending year Sabean can squeeze out of this team. But if they recapture whatever it was that took them to the World Series last year (against all modern analysis), that will be three titles in four years, something many of baseball’s most revered statistically inclined thinkers could only dream of. Then who’s going to tell Sabean he’s behind the times?
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine’s MLB Preview issue:
