Weird.

The first thing is pray for a shortstop for next year. I hope Burris can be the answer, because if he is not then we are in trouble. The organization(if all the picks sign) has depth at 1st base, 2nd base, catcher, every outfield position, and plenty of pitching. In terms of the left side of the diamond though, in the upper minors, we have second basemen parading to cover short and third. Bocock, Burris, Rohlinger and maybe culberson in a few years are the only four that have a chance, and Bocock is a defensive sub and probably nothing more. So, at least through my glasses, it seems that if there was one individual that the future depended on it would be burris…. baring of course our top pick next year is a shortstop or third baseman.

Sign the draft picks, but don’t overpay. If Posey really is holding out for a record bonus tell him to fuck off. Same with the others if they’re asking for too much. Granted we knew most of these would take until the deadline before they’d be signed.

Avoid going after the big name FA’s this off-season like Furcal, Teixeira (who is 0-11 at AT&T Park), and Dunn. I would be ok with Burrell, he should come cheaper then the other 3, he walks and would give us a RH power bat. And he can play 1B or LF.

Sign Rocco Baldelli to a minor league contract. He likely will just get hurt again or fade into oblivion, but the guy has major tools and the last 2 years when he was healthy enough to get onto the field he showed an improved walk rate and more power than he did earlier in his career. Virtually no risk to signing him, and possible big reward + great PR if he is able to make it back.

Hopefully Randy Winn will have already been traded within the next week, but that seems unlikely. So hopefully he can be dealt before next season. Give Schierholtz his tryout. I don’t think he’s really anything more than like a Matt Murton with way less walks. Also trade Bengie Molina. I like both players but they are NOT part of the team’s future and to get their salary off the books would be nice, although we’ll probably be stuck with both for another year. If Molina can be traded, sign a temporary replacement like a David Ross to a 1 yr or 2 yr deal, and hopefully Pablito can continue his ascent to taking over the catching duties by mid-season of next year.

Next year should all be about seeing what we have with guys like Burriss, Denker, Frandsen, Lewis, Bowker, Schierholtz etc. Since a lot of those guys were blocked this year by veterans who we needed to let play to see if anybody would want them via trade. It worked in Durham’s case. Vizquel will obviously be gone next year. Aurilia I could see being brought back on the cheap as a platoon/bench guy and veteran presence. Winn and Molina will both only have 1 year left next year. Roberts too. So after next year we’ll be all youth other than Rowand and he’ll still be in his early 30s.

Keep Castillo if he can be kept cheaply as another temporary fill-in for a year or two.

And if guys fall off like Lewis, Schierholtz, Bowker etc and (assuming we didn’t sign Burrell) we can put up big money for 5 years of Matt Holliday as he hits the FA market at 30 after next season.

As for our pitchers, I would definitely listen to offers for any of them. If they can get back a lot of ML ready talent or young ML players back they would have to think about it pretty hard. Preferably though we’d like to keep the pitchers obviously.

and that is their young trio of starting pitchers. As Grant alluded, trading any of them to fill a hole elsewhere would weaken that foundation and would really amount to running in place. If the Giants had someone who could immediately step in to fill a gaping hole in the starting rotation, then by all means consider trading one of the Big Three. But until they have replacements it would be ludicrous to break up the team’s strongest facet.

I would consider it a three year plan, since that is when the Little Three is likely to be ready. Imagine a starting rotation of five from among Lincecum, Cain, Sanchez, Bumgarner, Alderson, and Sosa. It certainly gives us hope. But until then I say the Giants should continue with the program that seems to have been installed this year… draft high upside offensive players and continue to uncover the hidden pitching gems they have been so good at finding in years past.

I think this plan is excellent. Please allow me to give a couple of caveats at the beginning, comment on each of Grant’s five points and then add one more at the end.

The two caveats would be, first that while Grant doesn’t want more than a three-year plan, I think it will take four. That doesn’t mean his three-year plan is bad though. In fact, it is quite good. It’s just that plans sometimes take a tad longer than was, well, planned.

The second caveat is that I don’t see Freddie Lewis or Nate Schierholtz as likely to be better than average corner outfielders. Freddie strikes out too much to likely hit for average once his BABIP re-enters the ozone, and Nate just doesn’t draw enough walks, particularly for a guy with modest pop for his position.

I do believe that between those two and John Bowker, it is reasonable to think that the Giants should get one and might well get two average corner outfielders. Anything above that would enter the part of Grant’s plan that rests on pleasant surprises.

Grant’s plan starts with finding undervalued assets, which by the way will tie in to the final point I would like to add. Hopefully the Giants’ new scouting additions will excel at this facet of scouting. The Giants’ free agent scouting hasn’t seemed to be exceptional in the past (at least not in a positive manner), but perhaps that has changed when it comes both to potential free agent acquisitions and to potential trades.

Grant wants to keep the young rotation together, and that seems sound. The Giants seem to have three legs of a very nice rotation in Lincecum, Cain and Sanchez—and in Bumgarner and Alderson they would seem to be well positioned to add two strong legs by about 2010. Kevin Correia, Noah Lowry, Barry Zito, Patrick Misch, Steve Hammond and Henry Sosa remain other possibilities.

If the Giants don’t mess things up, they could be putting together as we speak the pieces of a dominant rotation.

Grant wants smart free agents signings, and the Giants do indeed have money available prior to the potential free agency of Lincecum and Cain. His idea of signing TOP free agents, not merely mediocre-to-good ones, is sound and imperative. One issue in signing a top free agent is that well over a third of the salary budget could wind up being tied up in two players, one of whom hasn’t yet been productive.

But the Giants seem to have enough money in the short term to pull that off. Somewhere in the early-to-mid part of next decade salary will likely become a huge issue, one which might best be dealt with by making Billy Beane-type trades of established players who are soon to become expensive for younger, less expensive assets. But for now the Giants would seem to have enough money to pay someone REALLY good.

They have tried and failed to land the top free agents the past two winters, although Aaron Rowand wasn’t a bad consolation prize—and an asset that could perhaps be traded down the line.

The fourth thing Grant wants is luck, and sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. Luck will likely determine whether the Giants become competitive in three years - or if it will take longer. It may determine whether they merely become competitive - or if they will have one of the top teams in baseball. If their luck is bad, of course, all bets are off.

Finally Grant want the Giants to exercise patience, which may well be the strongest leg of very solid plan. As the Giants begin to improve, it can be tempting to go for the quick fix. that hasn’t worked for the Giants in quite a while now and should be rejected.

The one point I would like to add to Grant’s plan - Dare we call it magnificent? I don’t think that would be inappropriate. - would be a corollary to finding undervalued assets. The corollary says to quickly identify the OVERvalued assets in your own organization and trade them for undervalued assets before anyone else realizes they are overvalued.

Oh, and one more point I just thought of. Put together another really nice draft in 2009. The farm system is gaining more depth quickly, but it could use another shot in the arm next year, when the Giants might well have another top-five pick. If they trade off enough veterans (which would yet another point of emphasis that Grant likely implied), they might even get the top one or two picks. They’re not that far away.

And one or two of the 2009 picks could be contributors in 2011 or at least by 2012.

In addition to the young players I mentioned previously, the Giants have a potential solid foundation from their first four draft picks this year, from Rafael Rodriguez, from Angel Villalona and from Pablo Sandoval, Nick Noonan and hopefully Manny Burriss and Charlie Culberson.

And they have a brigade of young relievers led by closer Brian Wilson.

The future actually look quite bright from where I sit. As long as the Giants don’t try to rush it.

Grant ended his plan with patience, and it might well have been his very most important point of all.

that it’s a very unpredictable position to account for.

There was a time when Shawn Estes was an All-Star in his first full big league season. And fizzled out the next year. Russ Ortiz won 18 games his first full season and he too fizzled out shortly after. There have been others like Jerome Williams, Foppert etc who too have fizzled out into oblivion, albeit their success was far less.

Obviously our current 3 have more talent and to an extent (with exception to Sanchez) have had more success than some of the previously mentioned above, but the main point remains the same. You cannot really count on or expect to continue to get the same kind of performance from young pitchers.

Further compounding this problem is in the past with such young pitching failures, the Giants actually had the ML talent to overcome those injuries or dropoffs in performances. The Giants today and likely in the near future as it stands will not have the talent level to overcome such a drop in performance. So while it may hurt to think of such things, I think its awfully naive to expect the Giants to have a future rotation of Lincecum, Cain, Sanchez, Mad Bum and Sosa/Alderson. That just is not going to happen.

Isn’t super clear. While we are all resistant to Roberts type signings, there is some justification for this.

The team has about 3 years before they will need to throw money at Cain and Lincecum to keep them around. (not sure what the deal is w/ Sanchez).

So, at that point – we want to make sure we have the money to do so, and Roberts like signings sucking up salary would really be bad.

However, in the 3 year interim, the team has about 20-30 million to play with (depending on who we can get off the books this season, plspls Randy Winn). If they do not spend it on players, it just goes into the owner’s pockets – and that doesn’t do us or the team any good.

So, that being said, If we can find players that help the team at positions where young talent is not available (3b, 1b maybe, SS?) and we can sign them to deals that expire prior to the Caincecum FA bonanza, then we shouldn’t hesitate to spend the money.

3 years of Crede, for example, wouldn’t necessarily be a bad choice.

Consider them transitional players – not part of the “future”, but also not blocking anyone and in the meantime making the team better. I look at Rowand as one of these signings.