Garko trade one of Giants all time worst?

This needs more green.

+1. Barnes will let you know how this pans out in terms of badness.

that this was a dumb trade, but certainly not one of the Giants all time worst. Unfortunately, the Giants recent history is filled with way too many dumb trades, and unless I’m forgetting something, the last time they made a decent trade was five seasons ago when they picked up Randy Winn.

Yep… the jury is still out on this one.

Should have held out for a llama.

Bill James did a published analysis a while back. What I recall is that he came to the conclusion something like that, post-1960, the Giants were far and away the worst team in terms of lopsided trades, like worse than the next two bad teams combined. He said something like that the late sixties early to mid seventies Giants would have been like the mid seventies Reds or late nineties Yankees, if they had not traded, or had just broke even on the trades they made.

good point, I’d forgotten about Rutherford. Bell was so much fun to watch that season, especially with the glove.

You allude to a lack of process. Or a faulty process.

I attribute the kinds of transactions the Giants engage in, the Garko acquisition and subsequent non-tender being the most recent, not to a lack of process, but rather a disconnect in the priorities. The Giants only keep guys who they think are uniquely qualified to be part of the “Giants Way”.

Zito-Rowand-Renteria-Sanchez

Lincecum is part of it for the time being only because he dominates, but he is exactly the kind of player Sabean loathes. Lincecum is a 21st century West Coast athlete. Sabean is a stuck-in-the-80s guy who hates long hair, dredlocks, ’tude, baggy units, cocked hats, and most of all; fans, critics and guys with opinions who speak up.

The ownership/management view Garko as a marginally productive player, who is going to cost them approximately 1percent of their revenue stream if he goes to arbitration. According to Sabean, they don’t consider Garko worth the one percent. “Grab some pine, Meat”.

No surprise to me. Or anybody else who sees the Giants for what they have become since the ouster of Magowan and deaths of Harlan and Sue Burns.

Zito will cost them 20 percent of their revenue stream. But he was acquired to be the “face of the franchise.” That was a marketing decision. They then went out and acquired Aaron Rowand to be the new Bobby Murcer (who replaced Bobby Bonds in 1973) to replace Barry Bonds, and threw $60 million dollars at a guy, who like Murcer, was a nice fair to middlin’ unremarkable outfielder. Again it wasn’t baseball performance, it was marketing. Rowand was going to be the guy they built the gritty, gravy, gamey, gumball, horsehit and gunsmoke warrior spirit Giants way marketing campaign around.

And like Zito, he has been pretty much a bust in terms of results. Edgar Renteria, Freddy Sanchez. They are just additional, yet overpaid expensive cogs in the marketing mantra of the “Giants Way”.

The Giants way is endemic to college coaches, of which Sabean was one. Grind it out. Batting Averages. 55 game seasons in which talent can be evaluated. Nothing will change.

Neukom loves this stuff. He is basically a fanboy who got put in charge of his pals’ checkbook.

“Have a good time collecting autographs Billy, but remember we can take your allowance away if you spend too much”

This is the kind of thinking that made me so happy for the Ellison-for-Blackley trade. The Giants gave up a nothing outfielder for a former top prospect. Sure, Blackley didn’t end up being especially good or anything, but the thought behind it was sound. In 10 years, no one will remember Jason Ellison or Travis Blackley, but the thought process was a good one and it was a good trade.

I hoped that would end up being a trend. It didn’t.

the only point I disagree with is the “fair market value”. None of us have any idea what other teams think of “our” prospects, or how the Giants’ value them internally. The Giants’ do have a very good track record of evaluating internal pitching prospects, and this may have totally made sense from their point of view. IF Barnes becomes Spahn, Carleton, Johnson, or Glavine then clearly this was absurd beyond belief. If he becomes Jason Grilli, Boof Bonser, or never pitches more than a couple of insignificant innings in the MLB than it’s not so bad. We, as fans, are not privy to the process that goes into these trades as far as internal evaluations and that is an important point to remember. Because of this, I don’t think you can judge whether or not the trade is lucky.

No one else was talking about Garko and we gave up a top 10 prospect for him. We could’ve probably gotten Pavano as a throw in and that could’ve prevented the Martinez-Sadowski experiment. Brian Sabean is a jackass.

BTW, after reading the full thread I find it really good and I’m wondering why nobody has rec’d it. Some cool info about trades that were before my time.

11:29pm: Baggarly writes that Garko did not see eye-to-eye with manager Bruce Bochy and likely wouldn’t have seen much playing time in 2010.

I have it the other way around. I thought the Garko trade was meh, and the Sanchez trade was absolutely shitcrap terrible.

Sanchez is market value at best on his contracts, which makes him almost no trade value whatsoever.

There was a feature on MLB Network about the 1979 Pirates and players from that team credit the addition of Madlock for helping the Pirates to win the title.

At least Whitson was eventually traded for Duane Kuiper. Not a good trade in a baseball sense, but it did give us a quality announcer for the last few decades.

I was going to mention the Maddox one. I also didn’t like losing Gary Matthews, but that was a free agency thing.

Such a well-compiled list. The Perry, Bonds, and Clark trades really demoralized young me, and set me up for a lifetime of low expectations for Giants GM’s. In that context, Al Rosen and Brian Sabean have contributed almost all the highlights.

worse than Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas?

or

Lou Brock for Ernie Broglio?

It may be a little overblown, but not much, which is saying something as to how bad this trade was. As was said so well in the FanGraphs article, the fact that we gave up our #9 prospect for him means either the organization was willing to give up that kind of talent for a two-month rental (they knew they were going to non-tender him), or more likely, they judged him worthy of our #9 prospect in July, but didn’t think he was worthy of a roster spot and a couple million dollars after 127 bad PAs here. Both options represent poor thinking, planning, and decision making on the part of the organization, and should throw up serious red flags to ownership and fans.

It wouldn’t have taken much for him to provide a big lift over what they were getting from Aurilia.

Unfortunately, as you said, Bochy didn’t give him much of an opportunity