we have a few issues:

1) Zito’s contract
2) What CC is likely going to demand
3) A poor offense which we likely will not improve much due to 1 and 2 above.

I don’t know; perhaps they can get Zito to defer some of his money or perhaps they can get a big home town discount on CC. Maybe all the young hitters will mesh and we’ll have a much better offense; I just think that counting on those things to happen is wishful thinking at best. We won a ton of one run games this year, and I would imagine that would be hard to duplicate.

I think if you look at those stats the most apparent thing is that we rarely come back from behind…which wasn’t exactly a head-scratcher. Our focus needs to be on upgrading the offense with a legitimate bat. If we are going to spend some serious dough this off-season it should be for a true #4 bat.

But if you want me to bite on bringin’ CC home, then here is the only way I can see us doing it without crippling our future: structure his contract the opposite of Zito’s. 7 yrs/$140M, give him $24M for the first 3 yrs, $18M for the next 3, and $14M for the 7th year.

This would work because the bullpen arms and young bats are all relatively cheap for the next 3+ years.

But to me it is no where near a gib of a problem as the fact that we only had 63 leads to try and protect while we had 74 defects to try and overcome. Again, replace the clowns we used as 5th starters with CC and this will be reversed. This one action will help alot more then adding a non elite but true middle of the order bat which is all we could hope to do if we focused our dollars on offense rather then CC.

Doesn’t the fact that the team had essentially the same record in Cain starts and Zito starts highlight the problem with this sort of analysis?

But you already knew that. Add a pitcher and automatically win 13 more games. Why didn’t I think of that???

/head explodes

the Giants cannot afford the risk of signing CC. MLB Trade Rumors has the asking price at $144 M for 6 years. The Giants would be one leg injury away, a reasonable possibility due to his weight, from a totally disasterous payroll situation, crippling the team for the foreseeable future.

The most interesting thing about this would be seeing whether any of us change our minds over the course of the winter. The stupid part is using 2008 as the benchmark for the NL West. The Dodgers, having broken in younger players, are definitely better going forward than this year, particularly if they keep Manny. The Rockies should improve. Who knows about the Snakes and Pads. Have you done the analysis of what we would have looked like with Hanley Ramirez at short instead of Omar? Utley at second? Pujols or Howard at first? The reality is that with more runs Cain and the other failures might have pitched better. We sucked at so many positions there is no way to know which one change would make us better. Sad to say, it might be an injury to Zito, particularly if he’s insured..

One way to evaluate this would be to look at the RA IF we had CC instead of Correia/Henessey/Misch/Palmer.

Then re-compute the Pythag based on that RA value.

Let’s see…

Sabathia allowed .123 runs per inning pitched. Our current 5 spot mess allowed .6 runs per inning.

Doing a little bit of rounding and assuming to make this easier, I get a run differential of -110 runs if you substitute Sabathia for the #5 crew this season.

That changes our run overall differential from 640/759 to 640/649, or nearly even. That changes our pythag to 80-82.

This doesn’t take into account the affects of the bullpen, so it’s possible he could have been worth a few additional wins.

However, since Sabathia pitched out of his mind this season (and our 5 hole did especially crappy) I think it is safe to say that adding Sabathia to this staff is worth less than 10 wins next season.

Adding Sabathia isn’t gonna win the division, but it would make things interesting.

Signing Orlando Cabrera and Joe Nathan would also add about 10 wins with far less financial risk, although I don’t know if Nathan would come back to the Giants. A Romo/Wilson/Nathan bullpen would be truly awesome.

Of course it’d be better to add a big bat but it’s just not going to happen.

A Timmy/CC/Cain/Sanchez/Zito rotation would be terrifying for other teams. I don’t care if two pitchers would be making half of our payroll; that rotation would really, really be worth it. We’ve got payroll space anyways. And also, it’s really not often a perrenial Cy Young cantidate actually wants to sign with your team. Even if pitchings not our biggest weakness, I still think we should take advantage of that. I think our offense will work itself out eventually, and since we’re not signing Tex and there’s nobody of interest the next couple years besides him, why not? I think a few of Pablo, Posey, Anvil, TI, Bowker, and Juggernate could help us build a solid enough lineup, which is really all you need with a rotation like that.

He seems to be about as solid as Zito was questionable entering his free agent year. He’s a horse who avoids injury, eats up innings and mows down hitters with overpowering stuff. He can pitch in any park, esp considering his awesome numbers in hitters parks like the Jake and Miller Park. You can add pieces here and there in the lineup as the years go along, but a top 4 of Timmy, Cain, CC and Zito gives you 30+ starts each and well over 800 IP.

Don’t forget that CC can handle the bat as well, and might hit better himself than any FA hitter on the market!

Sign CC now for whatever it takes and acquire bats via trade.

If the Giants use all teir money to sign CC, they will not be able to put an offensive lineup together to make playoffs. So any discussion about winning in the playoffs with that rotation is just a pipe dream, at best.

Is that if he gets injured or becomes ineffective, the team will be so financially crippled by the Sabathia AND Zito contracts as to be doomed to 60 win seasons for the next five years. You would essentially be trying to operate the team on a 50m budget.

While the upside is solid, the downside is abhorrent.

The risk/reward just does not work out. If we did not have huge money already tied up in another ineffective player it would be totally different.

Yes, Sabathia would make this team a lot better over the next two seasons, and the return on investment would be very good.

But if he fails, the team will turn into the Pirates until the contract expires. That is not an acceptable outcome no matter how small the chance of it occurring is.

I thought I wanted CC once the Giants got thrown into the mix, but it would be a terrible signing. We are loaded down with pitching that were considering trading it for a big bat, and yet one of if not the main target this offseason is a pitcher? We need a realiable 3rd baseman who can hit 20-25 homers, and have a decent average and on base percentage. Feliz was able to do the homerun part, but hit into 2334329 double plays and struck out a lot. If we can get a nice starting 3b and 2b even,then I think it will help a ton.

Breakfast.

The chart used here was very informative. But what it did not reference was also significant. Yes, the Giants were a MUCH better team when Tim Lincecum pitched, but they also scored over a run per nine innings more for him than for their other pitchers as a group.

Adding another starting pitcher would be nice, but the Giants have far greater weaknesses among their hitters and relief pitchers.