No longer waiting for Boof

Sabean might have been in charge of the farm system and scouting, but as far as I know, he was not in charge of picking the draft picks during those years; you can only give so much guidance, if they are not following it.  Given that over his reign as GM the drafting has improved greatly, based on talent being picked up, I figured that once he was fully in charge, he has been moving the deadweights out of the scouting organization and replacing them with better people, I also noticed that he hired one or two people who worked with him in the Yankees organization.

And if you are going to blame him for the bad years before he became GM, then you should give him credit for putting together large parts of the Yankees core World Series team.  While he has director of scouting for the Yankees, they drafted these players:  Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, Ramiro Mendoza, and Andy Pettitte.  Other players drafted while he was their scouting director include Scott Kamienieki, Hal Morris, Turner Ward, Kevin Maas, Gerald Williams, Brad Ausmus, Pat Kelly, Russ Davis, Deion Sanders, Fernando Vina, Andy Fox, J.T. Snow, Russ Springer, Sterling Hitchcock, Brian Johnson, Carl Everett, Ricky Ledee, Shane Spencer, John Wasdin, and Mike DeJean.  They got the Yankees other useful parts by being trade bait.

About the Kent trade, the philosophy that I read that that move entailed was not of getting useful parts but of how no team can succeed with two players sucking up so much of the payroll.  Magowan has stated this over and over again in interviews.  So the move was as much a salary dump as it was getting useful parts.  

In addition, it was clear to me at the time of the trade (or soon thereafter, I was raging at the trade like most Giants fans at first) that Kent was a good player just waiting for his opportunity to play full time.  Pro-rating his stats, one could see that he had huge HR potential and be a legitimate power source, though obviously not as big as Matty was, but at that time no one was sure if he could play a full season anymore so it all could have evened out.  And if I could see that using what little stats that were available back then for analysis, I would assume Sabean's staff would have caught that too.

Vizcaino and Roa I viewed as throw-in on the trade, Viz because of his salary and because the Indians weren't going to use him so he would have been deadweight and Roa just to get another prospect.  So Aurilia might have played just as well, but if you have a salaried vet on your roster, you are going to play him.  But I agree that Aurilia should have been starting a long time before he did, it was clear to most casual fans.

The two centerpieces for the trade was Kent and Tavarez.  I think what Sabean was doing was getting a developing power hitter to replace Williams, particularly one who teams did not want because of his "bad" attitude, which lasts to this day, and getting a power pitcher who potentially could have been a good starter, but who ended up merely as a very good setup man.

He took a risk, and that's something any manager needs to be able to do, take calculated risks, because the status quo would have been death.  No one, including Sabean, knew that Kent would develop into what he did, but anyone could have seen that he should have been a power hitting 2B at the time of the trade, which is not far off from what he became.  He was, after all, trading Matt Williams, legit 40 HR power, so he should have gotten some good value for him.

That the trade did not "end up" the way he intended should never be the point of focus for the analysis of any managerial decision.  By that measure, no manager would ever look well in that light and get fired, nothing ever turns out exactly as intended.  All managers have to make calculated risks in all they do, things never turn out the way you intended, so what you hope for is that for all the ones that don't turn out the way you wanted, there are others which turn out better than what you wanted, resulting in an overall improvement in your organization.  

That's what happened in this case:  it was suppose to net a good starting pitcher, eventually, and a good power hitting starting 2B, which was still rare, but it ended up with a good reliever but a superstar 2B.

About your last point, if Sabean thought that about superstars, he would have signed Vlad instead of the long list of useful players that he signed instead that off-season.  Don't get me going on that, we could have had Vlad for 3 years now and ...   No, it is clear that the Giants still believe in not having two players take up more than 30% of the payroll and until Bonds is off the payroll or takes a big cut, he won't get a young superstar buddy to play alongside with.  

I agree, in general, that a superstar player is better than a bunch of mediocrities and hoped that the Giants would at least bend the rules for, say, the final year or two of Bonds' contract, in order to juice the lineup when Bonds was out of the lineup.  But the best they could do was get another ageing hitter in Alou.