And assumed that article was going to be about Jason Grilli kicking puppies.

Can’t put the blame on all those drafts on Sabean. Plus SF was able to trade some prospects for MLers.

Verducci don’t like Livan Hernadez or Robb Nen, they aren’t not worthy of the prospects we gave up for them.

Frankly, the lack of players playing for us reflected more the fact that we had lousy picks during that period who didn’t play much in the major leagues, let along play for the Giants. I’ve not been impressed by Verducci’s columns…

Whats our chances of getting Beckham?

He’s right about punting the draft picks. But only once did the Giants deliberately time a free agent signing to forfeit a pick (the infamous Michael Tucker episode). That the Giants “gladly forfeited” picks to sign free agents otherwise is conveniently ignoring that all teams do the same. You can question the wisdom of certain free agent signings - and oh boy, get in line, Tom - but it’s disingenuous to say the Giants are alone in this standard practice.

I also take issue with this: “the Giants regarded top picks as something of nuisance, using them as trading chips to acquire veteran players.” Often some very very good veteran players. It’s easy to make fun of Livan Hernandez now, but he pitched fairly well for SF, especially in 2000. And they got him for Grilli and Bump, both of whom have done close to nothing in their careers.

Again, some of these trades haven’t worked out. OK, fine. There’s an argument to be made against Sabean and the Giants’ draft/trade strategy, but Verducci is making it badly.

Verducci and whats-his-nuts there at SI.com have always seemed to have had an anti-Giants thing going on. I think that’s attributable to Bonds, they never liked him and made no bones about showing it. Whichever of those numbnuts used to do mailbags would dedicate an entire page to talking about how much they don’t like Bonds. It was amazing!

So I stopped reading SI.com.

But Sabean’s strategy of utilizing the farm system primarily for trade fodder worked pretty well for a while. But two things changed, in my opinion:

1) So-called “small market teams” began seeing sharply increased revenues, mainly due to a dramatic increase in TV money, but also coming from luxury tax (instituted in 2003) money. The main result was that the free agent market shrank considerably, both in size and quality, as even small market clubs now moved to sign their young stars to long-term deals before they reached their walk year.

2) As traded Giants prospects repeatedly failed to stick-much less produce-at the major league level, the league began to shy away from Giants prospects. Brian Sabean was forced to either give away much more in trade than he’d offered before, or not make trades at all.

My beef with Sabean is that he didn’t forsee any of this happening. It took him five years to wake up to the fact that the Giants had virtually no means of putting major league caliber position players on the field. This is just one example of Sabean’s backward thinking, intellectual laziness, and general indifference towards evaluating the way he does his job and considering what is the best way to put together a winning roster of talent.

But the point is, Sabean’s way (combined with several years of Barry Bonds) did work…for a while. He did make some spectacular trades and free agent signings, from when he took over as GM right through the end of the 2002 season. After 2002, though, MLB changed and Sabean didn’t.

Verducci, as is his wont, isn’t interested in any giving a complete, accurate picture where cheap shots, sweeping generalizations, exaggeration and obligatory Bonds bashing will suffice much better for his purposes.

This teams philosophy, in-regards to minor league structure and organization, lacked behind basically every other organization in MLB for a time in the 1990’s because of severe underfunding. I sometimes wonder what road this organization would have gone down if not for the miracle run in ‘97 that kept them afloat until Mays Park became an actual reality. Obviously, this team now has a much more clear and concise draft and player development process. But it seems that to get this, the plan for the 25 and 40-man roster suffers from a dysfunctional and disjointed plan that is more “done on the go” than long-term planning. So to get one form of success, we are always sacrificing another. And that falls on Magowan and his “hands on” approach, which is rather schizophrenic when you get to the nuts and bolts of it.