The NY Times has an article about A-Rod’s value that includes a reference to the Giants:
…. Rodriguez’s 2007 season will be hard to repeat, but even a sizable drop-off would leave him among baseball’s elite. Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus projected him to hit .303 with a .404 on-base percentage and a .601 slugging percentage next year, while playing a roughly average third base. (Those numbers would be slightly higher if he left Yankee Stadium, which is quite unfriendly to right-handed sluggers.)
By contrast, a mediocre veteran third baseman like San Francisco’s Pedro Feliz was hitting .249 with a .290 on-base percentage and .414 slugging percentage entering last night’s game. If the Giants were to let Feliz go and sign Rodriguez, they could probably expect to win about eight more games next season than they would if they stuck with Feliz.
Nice.
15 Backtalkers
calling feliz mediocre was very nice of them
Winning eight more games next year means the Giants finish 75-87 instead of 67-95, and that’s without factoring in the fact that spending $30 mill on A-Rod forces the Giants to skimp on spending $ on other positions, further dragging down their record.
Pass. I say wait until the off-season of 2010, when (with luck) the Giants will be one player away from contending. All that A-Rod would accomplish over the next few seasons is to lift us from 5th place into 4th.
What’s he worth at shortstop, his actual, natural position? Don’t tell me he can’t play there anymore. He’s waaay better than Jeter at short. Alex can go to his right.
Blair
arod is not bonds
while bonds carried a team for almost 10 years, and made players around him better, there is no evidence that arod can do the same
if the giants need an arod to put butts in seats….then there is no hope for this org
i say totally pass on him and build from within
The Giants have all the money that they want to spend. Joe: I don’t understand what you’re talking about? So, Bonds has some zen-like ability as a Giant, but ARod wouldn’t? Exactly where in ARod’s numbers is the “he can’t carry a team” category? And, as to “butts in seats,” exactly what have the Giants been doing with Bonds for the last, ohh, three years?
If the Giants want to be a AAA team or an MLB-joke for the next couple of years, go for it. I’m sure that the fans will dwindle away rather than watch Nate Schierholtz (sp?) (sorry Nate) play five days a week. Shit, there are already more fans of the Dodgers, Mets, and Cubs at the park than Giants fans.
For the life of me I don’t understand why people think that ARod’s overrated. Overpriced? Okay, but not by much. What’s more, it’s all funny money and Peter Mac and others have it to spend if they want to do so.
My first thought was to agree with Kevin.
The second thought was that if he’s worth 8 more wins than Feliz, he’s worth 11 more than Vizquel.
Still wouldn’t make the Giants a good team. Excluding Velez and his 4 PA, Bonds is the only player who has an OPS above .800. And why would ARod want to get walked 150 times and be lucky to get up 4 times a game and lose more games than he wins? and how many fans would come to see it?
I’ll also add that arguments against the likes of ARod are rather dismissive of the Dodgers, Padres, Rockies, and Diamondbacks. The Dodgers spend money (albeit stupidly), but they also have young talent. The Padres are smartly run and have two pitchers better than our top three. The Rockies are improving and also young. The Diamondbacks are stacked for the future. The Giants? The Giants are taking advantage of their fans, skimping, spending $ unwisely, and losing…and their doing all of these things while (here’s the biggest insult) hiring retreads (Bochy) and renewing contracts (Sabean).
Yes, A-Rod alone wouldn’t make the Giants a good team… I don’t think ANYONE is proposing that we get A-Rod and do nothing else. The point is, he’d be a pretty darn good piece to build around and along with other improvements his presence would be significant. The idea of building from within is a nice, but to do that you actually need to have talent from within.
And we have no talent from within. The proof is on the field. It’s never a good sign when one of the call ups on a last place team is a 35 year old first basemen. It’s not a good sign when none of the call ups play shortstop or thirdbase.
Yes A-Rod would make the team somewhat better. They still won’t make the playoffs because they need a core of homegrown talent around a player like A-Rod, something they’ve never been able to do with Bonds.
And I totally disagree with you Kent on the funny money concept. There is no funny money in baseball. It’s not going to be Magowan’s money or any other Giants owners, it’s going to be yours and mine. The fans pay for the players with higher ticket prices and more expensive beer.
“The fans pay for the players with higher ticket prices and more expensive beer.” — While it’s true that the money from tickets and beer, etc. does go towards salaries, the concept of what you’re saying has been proven as an economic myth. Ticket prices are set based on supply and demand as opposed to the team’s payroll in a given season. There was an extremely conclusive study on this about five years ago… I’m too lazy to search for it at the moment, though.
The owners give us higher ticket prices and more expensive beer because they can, we’ll pay for it. When we won’t pay for it any longer, they won’t raise the prices. What’s more, while money from higher ticket prices and more expensive beer are certainly nice forms of revenue, I’d venture to guess that television money and money that owners have but usually refuse to spend are sizeably more. If Peter Magowan decided to pump $30 million of his own money into the payroll, he could certainly do so. The Giants plan worse than the goverment and usually (lately) fail to spend money wisely or with long-term stability in mind. Sadly, I don’t think that it’s going to be fixed any time soon, especially in light of the overall improvement of the other NL West franchises.
I didn’t then and I don’t now accept that, say, Carlos Beltran was too expensive for the Giants.
I think you’re right that TV money is bigger then the gate or concessions and you’re right he could pump 30 million of his own money into the payroll. But he won’t. He doesn’t have to. It’s the first rule of business. Never spend your own money when you can spend someone else’s.
None of the free agents the Giants have passed on have been too expensive, the Zito signing proves that. However the Giants didn’t overpay one cent for Zito. 126 was his price to play for the Giants. That doesn’t mean it would have cost 126 to play for the Mets. Vladimir Guerrero is another example, the rate for him to play for the Giants (and Alou) was probably much much higher then 11 mil per.
That’s why I believe that A-Rod’s price to play in SF is nowhere near as low as 30 mil per year.
John -
It seems to be the Top 100 Baseball Sites button that’s causing the slow downloads. Everything else loads quickly, but the download stalls when it gets to that button, as indicated in the status bar at the bottom of my browser.
Yeah – I just noticed myself that this is causing the stall.
When they compile the list of the worst-hitting infields ever, I wonder where the 2007 Giants will rank? Vizquel and Durham were two of the worst hitters in baseball this year; Feliz was one of the worst-hitting 3Bs; Klesko was a below-average hitter for a 1B. Aurilia and Fransden, the back-ups, were bad hitters too (Fransden’s GDP rate was 50% higher than Jim Rice’s was, the year Rice set the single-season GDP record).
If you ever have a snoot full and start to think the 2008 Giants might be good, please consider the following three points:
1) Vizquel and Durham were two of the worst hitters in baseball this year.
2) Vizquel is 40 years old, Durham 35.
3) Both players will probably be back with the Giants in 2008, and they might even be regulars again.