the san francisco giants and me: the 2000s, part 2

Or, how Brian Sabean made my life miserable.

If you want the details of my long-lived problem with the work of Giants general manager Brian Sabean, just take a tour through this blog’s archives. I want to focus on the big picture … I don’t want to say “why did he sign Player X,” other than to illustrate what his philosophy seemed to be. Because that is where the differences between Sabean and I occur. And they were big, big enough than when the Chronicle ran an article celebrating Sabean’s tenth year as GM, they interviewed me to offer a negative opinion.

To explain this, I need to tell you about my friend Jillian. Jillian and I met in graduate school, and have known each other for almost 20 years, now. She’s from England, and while she has a feel for the sports she grew up with, baseball is a bit alien to her. At least, it was until she and I started going to a game each year. One of the best things about Jillian is that she is interested in lots of things, and so when we’d go to the game, she’d let me pontificate about this or that baseball matter. Since we share an academic background, I found myself explaining my positions as if we were in a graduate seminar. Which is how I ended up spending many years talking about the “dominant paradigm” in baseball.

I haven’t mentioned Bill James and the rise of sabermetrics in these posts, but they’ve been in my mind, and for 30 years or so, I’ve been a convert. Some years ago, I offered a theory to Jillian, that astute statistical analysis would make a franchise more effective. OK, it’s not my theory, but stick with me. Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball, which came out in 2003, put the ideas of Oakland GM Billy Beane in the spotlight, and Beane was a cutting-edge proponent of new theories about the game. The book’s message has been misinterpreted since the day it was published, but it marks a moment when you could no longer ignore that new ways of approaching the game were upon us. And this is what, in my conversations with Jillian, I called the new paradigm. It was far from dominant … as is usual, the acceptance of the new was a slow process, and baseball is kinda slow to change, anyway. So first you had one team trying out new methods, then a couple more, then a few more after that. Eventually, the paradigm did indeed become dominant, and today’s baseball organizations all have analysts whose job is to focus on the numbers … “statheads,” as they are called, usually in a pejorative way.

The ultimate triumph of the new, now dominant, paradigm came when the Boston Red Sox won their first World Series in 86 years, in 2004. A year earlier, they had hired Theo Epstein as general manager. Epstein was 28 years old, the youngest GM in baseball history, and he was one of the new thinkers. More importantly, at least in a symbolic sense, that same year the Red Sox hired Bill James himself to work with the club. Success breeds imitation, and other teams couldn’t help but notice that an 86-year-old curse was lifted two seasons after Epstein and James entered the front office.

There were still good organizations and bad ones, smart front offices and dumb ones, canny general managers and GMs who made their teams worse. Brian Sabean was very good at certain parts of his job, and when everyone was pretty much playing by the same rules, Sabes was probably an average-to-above-average GM. But he never accepted the new paradigm … he was rumored to say, in what may be an apocryphal story, that stats gave him a headache … and once the new became the dominant, Sabean was no longer average. He was being left behind.

This was frustrating for Giants fans. We had the greatest player in the game on our roster, but the championship eluded us. Some of Sabean’s traits helped the team … he was never satisfied, which meant he was always willing to change the team in mid-season once flaws in the club’s structure were exposed (this worked out great for him, and for the Giants, in 2010), and he had a knack for building nice bullpens out of spare parts. But his track record with hitters was not good. Arguably the single most important individual statistic for a hitter is on-base percentage, which measures how often you get on base. The more players a team gets on base, the more runs they score, and the more runs they score, the more games they win. Back when I was a kid, no one cared about OBP, and as long as OBP remained on the backburner for most teams, a GM like Sabean could get by. But once Moneyball explained how Billy Beane went for undervalued players, and that at the time, ragamuffins with good OBP were very undervalued, everyone jumped on the OBP bandwagon. Everyone except Brian Sabean. He, and thus the Giants, were left behind. This led to the signing of players like Neifi Perez and Pedro Feliz and Bengie Molina.

It is true that the Giants had some successful seasons under Sabean, but they had unsuccessful ones as well. And the primary reason for their successes was Barry Bonds, who arrived four years before Sabean became GM … it’s far from clear whether Sabean deserves any credit for the continued presence of Bonds.

So, when I think of the Giants in the 2000s, I think of all my frustrations, knowing I was rooting for what seemed to be the only team that didn’t understand how the game had changed.

And then came 2010.