…and we couldn’t wait that long.

Why?

It’s pretty obvious that the Aubrey Huff deal cost us any shot at Carlos Beltran. They’re not going to pay Beltran 13 million and Aubrey 11 to rot on the bench. Sabean needs those Pilates to work more than Huff does!

Sounds just as much like they didn’t want to go to 2/26 as they couldn’t go there. I can see how the uncertainty with Wilson could help the Lopez/Affeldt deals as well.

At the beginning of this offseason, I had three criteria for success for Sabean:

• Resign Beltran (or obtain a similar impact bat)
• Sign Cain and Lincecum to long-term deals
• All the piddling shit a team’s gotta do to get minimally replacement-level players at each position

So far, he’s done only the last. I’d call it more of a failure of an offseason than a success.

Also, he says a lot of dumb things in that quote.

• “we weren’t going to go to what the Cardinals went to money-wise” – the Cardinals signed Beltran for eminently reasonable, in-this-market-cheap amount. He makes it sound like 4y/$60m or something.

• “And not knowing if Willie was going to be at full stretnth at the beginning of the year, how could we weaken that bullpen?” – Wilson is one of the most overpaid and replaceable players on the Giants roster

• “Quite frankly, in our league, in our division, no matter how many runs you score, you’re going to be in one- and two-run games.” – Well, the way to be in fewer of those nailbiter games is to score more runs and put the game away early. You know, like with a Carlos Beltran in your lineup.

• “We didn’t think (Dan) Runzler was ready to take over for one of them. " – Sabean has over the years, to his credit, put together great bullpens, largely by dumpster diving/no-name guys coming up through the system. As good as the pen has been the last couple years, there is no reason to consider them an Olympic Pantheon That Must Not Be Altered.

• “we were exploring trade options, the (Jonathan)Sanchez/(Melky)Cabrera " – I’d be happier having Beltran over Cabrera, and Sanchez as insurance in case Zito or Vogelsong implode (or one of Bumcaincicum gets injured)

• "The problem was, if he became the left fielder, we still had (Aubrey) Huff under contract. We still had (Brandon) Belt, who perhaps makes the team as the first baseman. In doing so, can you really juggle all that?" – So he obtains Melky Cabrera, which create the exact same “logjam”.

Also, the answer is easy. Nate in right, Pagan in center, Beltran in left, Belt at first, Huff as backup (move Beltran to right and play Huff or Belt in left on Nate’s days off). (I’d also go for signing Cody Ross as CF/OF backup, but, hey, it’s all money Sabean already said he didn’t have).

• “at the end of the day”, “kick the tires”, etc

"at the end of the day", "kick the tires", etc

And a new one “gut-check-time”

First, I don’t understand the Beltran must play LF part. Certainly the defense would be a lot better with Beltran in LF and Nate or Cabrera in RF, but I don’t think its fair to say Beltran could never have slid over to RF. I’ll be fairly surprised if Belt doesn’t begin the year in Fresno so the argument that they needed to make room for him seems a bit disingenuous. And even assuming the team plays about 12-13 games every two weeks I don’t see why the playing time couldn’t have been broken down something like this:
1B-Belt (9/13) Huff (3/13) Posey (1/13)
LF-Beltran (7/13) Huff (6/13)
CF- Pagan (9/13) Cabrera (4/13)
RF-Schierholtz (6/13) Beltran (4/13) Cabrera (3/13)
And all of that is assuming Huff would’ve been impossible to move via trade. I’m not saying there would’ve been much interest in him but a swap for another bad contract like Chone Figgins actually would’ve cleared some 2012 money to help offset the cost of Beltran and also saved another small bit of money by filling Theriot’s role on the team. Having to pay Figgins next year hurts but with other money coming off the books it doesn’t seem too bad. Seattle isn’t likely to be able to clear that much of Figgins’ contract and acquire a bat as potentially strong as Huff’s in any other deal.

"Quite frankly, in our league, in our division, no matter how many runs you score, you’re going to be in one- and two-run games." – the obvious continuation of that quote would be, “and because we didn’t sign Carlos Beltran, we expect to be on the short side of those.”

He wanted to upgrade the OF and had the Sanchez/Cabrera deal sitting there in front of him, which provided another bat in a pretty payroll-neutral transaction. If you wait around for Beltran to make up his mind, you risk getting outbid or the player just deciding to go elswhere and then end up with neither.

It’s a dilema for GMs that I think gets minimized here; things don’t happen in a nice linear time frame. You do some transactions without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.

This smells of typical Sabean bullshit to me but if you are not committed to bringing Beltran back then why in the holy shitfuck do you trade your #1 prospect for him?

It is just an inexcusably shortsighted deal in a time when cheap pitching could really give the Giants some flexibility.

No more magic 8 ball.

"It ended up being a Rubik’s cube, which was very difficult for us to make a decision alone with a forever-changing time line.

If Huff sucks this year, I think he will be gone just like Tejada was last year. Hopefully it will happen before the all star break rather than after if he continues to be awful.