Younger!?

But I'm keeping the faith in Sabean.  As much as people deride the farm system, close to half the team (40%?) is now home grown and the majority of them are in their 20's.  You can't run before you walk so I take that as a sign of positive progress, even though part of that was because of the failure on the part of vets/"vets", like Munter, Taschner, Walker, Fassero, and Worrell.  

And we have a number of players who should be pushing to the majors over the next 2-3 years in EME, Valdez, Schierholtz, Ishikawa, Lewis, Ortmeier, Linden, Griffin, Joaquin, Martis, plus all the pitchers doing well now whose names I only know through Steve's diaries (Pereira, et al)

In terms of prospects, this era, for me, is probably the best it has ever been, since I first followed the Giants.  There were probably at most two handfuls of pitchers (Grant, Remlinger, Torres, Cook, Mulholland, Downs, Wilson, Garrelts) who I was really excited about as prospects (and I admit that lack of information was part of the reason, though I've collected the Media Guide for nearly 20 years now, so it's not that big an excuse, I read through the players stats to find players like Benji Simonton, Rickert Fineyte, and some pitcher named Hostetler or something like that, who had great years then fizzled) over all these years until recently and none of them ever panned out, really (though who's to say any of the current will pan out either).  And hitters, after early excitement with Dave Kingman, George Foster, Chris Speier, Gary Mathews, Garry Maddux, it was pretty sparse, Jack Clark, Chili Davis, Will Clark, Matt Williams, as far as impact type of players (and I am being kind to include Chili).

And as I noted, who's to say any of these will pan out, but I'm pretty jazzed overall about our farm system.  Perhaps it is because of such lowered expectations of all the failures we had before, but I think it is more an appreciation of how hard it really is to draft players when you do not get a draft pick in the first 10 picks overall, particularly in the first 5 picks, where you typically have a pretty good chance to pick up someone who is good or better.  I don't intend to beat a dead horse but the odds are like 9-1 against picking a good player even with a late first round draft pick.  So if you are average, you pick one good player, maybe a couple useful players, and a whole bunch of marginal to career minor leaguers, over 10 years of late first round draft picking.  And obviously the odds are even worse going to the latter rounds, much much worse.  

One of these days I'm going to calculate what the expected value, in terms of star, good, useful, and mediocre players are, when the probabilities are summed up for a draft and over a GM's career, that should give a better indication whether or not to appreciate what Sabean has done, maybe my impression is wrong.