The Roberts signing is terrible. The part I can’t get around is that the Giants signed him and expected him to handle CF on a full-time basis (and remain healthy while doing so) after he had shown he was incapable of playing CF full-time. He was in LF with the Padres the season before we acquired him and in 2005 he rated as a -12 run defender in CF.

Yet, the Giants expected him to play in CF.

Oh, also, they tried to sign GMJ AND Juan Pierre the same offseason.

/hurls

Well, it is apparent to most that the person responsible for that strategy – Magowan – is gone now.

And I still understand, though disagreed with, that strategy. If you are going to pay Barry Bonds $20M per year, you are basically all in on your bet. To spend that much on Bonds, but then commit to a young player who might not be ready when you got the money to sign a veteran with a history, don’t make sense to some.

And I understand that position. And it is not like the Giants didn’t give young players a chance to start while Bonds was around. It was more that they didn’t have anyone talented enough to take a starting position.

But a big reason for that was that when you are a winning team, you get lousy draft position, and the odds of finding good players via the draft drops drastically. So you do what you do with any scarce resource, you focus on a particular commodity to increase the odds of finding a good player with those skills and to maximize your production.

I think it was a great idea to focus on pitching. Pitching makes up nearly half the positions on a roster and any particular pitcher can hold many of those positions. Flexibility like that allows you to rebuild quickly

That is not something you can do with position players plus you cannot control for which position player will develop and which will not. If you have Orlando Cepeda and a Willie McCovey comes up, you are stuck playing one out of position or eventually trading one off to resolve that. Or Teixeira, Hafner, and A-Gon. Trades add another layer of risk to operating a baseball team.

Howver, pitching is very flexible. If you have Matt Cain and a Tim Lincecum comes along, you just slide him next to him in the rotation, without costing your team, and in this case, improving your team. And if a Madison Bumgarner then comes along, you slide him next to them.

Or if you have a Brian Wilson, with a starter’s repertoire, if you have the makings of a good rotation, you can move him to become the closer. The bullpen can be filled with starters who failed but can be very valuable relievers.

And it is not like any team can rebuild totally with just young prospects over a few years. That’s a fallacy that many people still believe, based on what I’ve been reading here and other places. I’ll bet that no one can show me a team that is rebuilt with only with young prospects. Even the Marlins in their two World Series championships strategically signed free agents like Moises Alou, Bobby Bonila, I-Rod, Todd Hollandsworth, or trade for players like Jeff Conine to help with the playoff run. Even the Tampa Bay Rays, with all those high draft picks over the years of horrible play, needed to sign Percival to be their closer, plus Cliff Floyd to be their DH and Eric Hinske, who played significant amount of games for them.

And while you can complain about the actual results, when the Giants signed many of those high priced free agents, they were considered either the best or one of best ones available on the free agent market. At least they went for one of the best that was available, that is the least they can do if they are going to go all in and execute that strategy.

And which veteran really costed a good prospect development time in the majors? Would you really been happy seeing how the bullpen would work out without a veteran closer and not sign Benitez? As we found not, not so well. But no one could predict he would blow out his leg like that. If we didn’t sign Alfonzo, what would you have been saying about Sabean for starting Pedro Feliz at 3B? And Durham was a good signing at the time, and still was good, but was a lot more trouble than could have been expected, health-wise.

And if you say that is what you get for signing old players, then you come up with a great conundrum: you can’t rebuild unless you sign old players to fill the voids that any farm system will have in developing a team. So you resign yourself to years of losing teams, destined to develop players for other teams, because you can never put together a winning team since you don’t sign free agents because they are old nor trade your young players for them either, well, because they are old.

I think the Giants did the best that they could under the circumstances, looking at the process. There were valid reasons for doing most of what they did. The problem was that most of them didn’t work out, or work out as well as thought.

Still, they put together a great team today and for the next few years at least. Any missteps with vets have been relatively minor hindrances to the team’s farm development, only Sandoval has been really worth giving a lot of time to.

And many forget that the Giants did develop a lot of young prospects, our pitching staff is chock full of them. I think that too many people have been focusing on the pits in orange rather than enjoying the orange juice that the pits are in.

although Winn’s extension was somewhat unwarrented on a “rebuilding” team (see above) and I would never, under any circumstances sign a 33 y.o. Bengie Molina as a free agent for multiple years.

But RIGHT NOW, those contracts are basically worthless, which seems to imply that they were both signed for 1 year too many.

Not to mention the clusterfuckedness of signing Winn AND Roberts AND Rowand.

But, as the Violent Femmes would say, add it up.

and damage is contextual. No one gives a crap if n overpaid Aurilia is sucking it up on a 90-loss team, because no really cares about the difference between 89 and 91 losses. 89 and 91 wins, however, are a much bigger deal, because those particular wins tend to be the difference between playing baseball and playing golf in October.

??!!
Thought you went to Lowell.