I seem to have gotten a lot of flak for suggesting that Adam Dunn might be a free agent the Giants could use. I understand he’s a flawed player, but for crying out loud, so is every player on the roster, (with the possible exception of the Franchise). Dunn’s flaws are well-known, but so are his strengths, power and walks, only the most lethal combination of plusses a player can have.
Oh, and for all intents and purposes; he could be landed for something like $12 million per, or just a bit more money than the team just wasted on Edgar Renteria.
At Baseball Reference.com, Dunn’s list of most comparable players is, quite frankly, filled with Hall of Famers and superstars, names like Barry Bonds, Daryl Strawberry, Jose Canseco, Harmon Killebrew, Reggie Jackson, Roger Maris, Troy Glaus, Pat Burrell, Boog Powell, Kevin Mitchell …. I mean, are you kidding me? That’s a hell of a list. And here he is, a 29 year old who’s hit 40 or more home runs five years in a row, and he can’t find a job? He’s not good enough for the team with the worst offense in baseball?
Oh wait, he has stone hands and no range? Please. What a crock.
The guy is a poor man’s Texiera, and could be had for something like 4 years, $50 million (you know, like the deal we gave Aaron Rowand, who is half the player with a bat in his hands), and he would be a splash hit threat every time he came to the plate. Or maybe we should just give 450 at bats to this guy.
26 Backtalkers
John – great piece. It’s the sort of entry that keeps me coming back to this site. Part of me agrees that Dunn would look very good in the cleanup slot – it’s not his lack of range or defense that concerns me (I’m sure we could have someone filling in late in the game) but rather his strikeout rate – I don’t have the numbers, but isn’t it supposed to be pretty high? I’d also love a way to figure out when he hits his homers – are the the Pedro Feliz variety – late in the game when the score is too lopsided to matter?
John, out of my honest curiousity, I was wondering why you shrug off defense like you do.
I just feel that the evidence is fairly conclusive that it’s just not that important, at least not compared to offense. And sacrificing offense for defense, something the Giants have been doing since the JT Snow era began, is provably flawed.
I’ve written about it a bunch, lemme see if I can find some of my earlier stuff. It would mostly be about JT Snow, who used to flat out kill the offense….
Here’s one thing:
As for the rest of the team, well, you heard it here first, and you’re gonna hear it again. Get used to this. No team can win with just defense, I don’t care how great Neifi Perez’s arm is, or how stupendous JT Snow’s glove is, or how great a jump Marquiss Grissom gets…. Just about every study ever done on winning baseball comes to the same conclusion; you need to get on base a lot to win games. Defense is maybe ten percent of the formula.
But when you do talk about defense, you find that defense is mostly pitching, and as brilliantly examined by Voros McCracken, there are straightforward ways to analyze a pitchers ability to prevent runs. The boys at Baseball Prospectus call it defensive efficiency, and it’s deceptively simple:
You look at the number of batters faced, number of hits allowed, and then you subtract home runs, strikeouts and walks. Divide the two, and presto, a new way to look at a teams ability to pick it and throw it. Let’s look at the 2003 season.
Seattle led the AL with a .7312 DE, which means that 73% of all balls in play were turned into outs against the Mariners. The Giants(!) led the NL, with a .7117 DE. That sounds pretty good doesn’t it? Hold on, because there’s more to think about. First off, the difference between the best and the worst teams just isn’t that much, really.
The worst AL team at turning balls in play into outs was Texas, with a DE of .6876. OK, what does that tell us? The Mariners turned 73% of fair balls into outs, the Rangers turned 68% of fair balls into outs. During the course of any one game, that probably translates into maybe two extra outs, extending one or two innings. But wait, there’s more.
That’s from about 4 years ago. Point is, home runs and walks are the single most important things a player can bring to the table. The Giants are just about the worst team in all of baseball at doing those things, and until they fix that, any talk about them contending is ridiculous.
An extra two outs per game = ~1.6 extra runs per game.
The difference between the Cubs last season in runs scored per game and the Padres in the same: ~1.368 runs per game.
I still don’t see how you can discount defense so much. Yeah, hitting a home run is the best thing someone can do at the plate, but a run is a run. David Pinto, Mitchel Lichtman, and John Dewan all have good systems that help us look at how many runs (in Dewan’s case, you have to convert the # of plays into runs) each player gives up or saves in the field. The Oakland A’s, Blue Jays, and now the Rays have realized how important a good defense is to helping out a pitcher. That doesn’t mean that the pitcher is completely off the hook after the ball is struck (because extreme flyball pitchers usually will hurt their teams more than groundball pitchers, even if they have a seemingly good year *cough*EdwinJackson*cough*), but I think you’re minimalizing the true impact of a good defense, which the Giants don’t have for the infield right now.
I also don’t see how you can say that most of defense is pitching. Take even Tim Lincecum for an example. In 227 innings pitched last season, he struck out 265 batters. Even Tim had to rely on his defense for 416 outs (227*3-265=total non-strikeout outs).
Not doing even cursory research, if a team averages 4.3 runs per 27 outs, how the hell can you suggest that they would average 5.9 per 29 outs? You can’t.
Your analysis is overemphasizing defense by a tremendous margin.
My conclusion is that you damn well better have both, though occasionally you can get by with a whole lot of one; the Giants don’t have either right now.
John,
Why do you keep flailing at windmills? Adan Dunn hates hitting at AT&T Park with a passion. He is only coming here if we are the only team offering him a contract. His market will not materialize until the two sluggers above him (Teix and Manny) sign. When his market does materialize he will go anywhere else but to us. In addition, I have already shown you that he very unlikely to impact our lineup replacing last year’s 1Bs anywhere near as much as Renteria does with his projected .228 OPS advantage over last year’s SSs.
If we are to sign a LFer to convert to 1B Pat Burrell is the better canidate. AT&T does not inpact pure pull hitting power righties like Burrell like it does lefties like Dunn. In addiition Pat Burrell would be returning home by signing with us. I would not mind this persay but I think I would prefer to give the plate appearances to Travis Ishikawa to continue the offensive rebuild that we started last year with Lewis being a starter and Sandoval earning a sure starting position this year. Let’s find out if Ishikawa can get the job done on the cheap rather then just throwing money at the problem.
Personally, what I would like to do most is have Schierholtz and Bowker compete with Ishikawa at 1B just like we are having Burriss and Valez compete with Frandsen at 2B. Let’s do the smart thing and find out which of these 6 might actually be productive major league starters. I just can not think of a better use of the PAs at 1B and 2B then to get the answer to these questions.
Adam Dunn (29) vs. Pat Burrell (32)
Dunn OBP
2008: .386
Career: .381
Burrell OBP
2008: .367
Career: .367
Dunn OPS+
2008: 129
Career: 130
Burrell OPS+
2008: 125
Career: 119
Dunn’s younger and the superior hitter, especially when you throw in all the home runs. But it’s closer than I would have thought. And Burrell is not really declining in his early 30s … in some ways he might be improving.
Still unless Burrell’s defense is really that much better than Dunn’s, and if Pac-Bell’s penalizing of lefties is fairly drastic, Dunn’s the better pick-up if the prices are the same.
It also looks like Dunn’s played a decent amount of games at 1B a lot more recently than Burrell, and Dunn’s also played RF recently.
I Think AT&T’s penalty to lefties not named Bonds is indeed fairly drastic. But my bigger point is that Dunn is very unlikely to have any interest in playing here (hates hitting here) while Burrell has even said he is interested in playing for the Giants and returning home to the Bay Area.
The Bill James Handbook projects Pablo Sandoval and Adam Dunn to be roughly equally good hitters in 2009, so why pay Dunn over $10 mill/year to block your best young hitter who will play for less than $0.5 mill?
Of course this is irrelevant if Sandoval can really play 3B or C, but the comments from scouts I have seen suggest this is a stretch.
Hey John,
Wondering if you saw Sabeans comments from the Inside the Clubhouse chat. “Sabean noted a big name LHH free agent would be the ‘type seen to play first, but doesn’t want to”. Maybe Dunn doesn’t even want to move to first. Pure speculation on my part, but it seems there are a lot of factors that make Dunn not want to play for the Giants, and if that’s the case, we’d have to ridiculously overpay him to come to the point it’s not worth it.
As for AT&T park on lefties, Adam Dunn is probably the single player in major league baseball that would be most affected by it. The park can actually help a hitter like Fred Lewis who has speed, gap power, and can go to the opposite field. It’s main effect is to prevent home runs from lefties. Adam Dunn is a lefty who only has 3 possible outcomes when he comes up to bat. Walk, strikeout, or home run.
I still think the Giants are a couple years away from being real contenders. I’d like to see us find out if guys like Ishikawa and Schierholtz fit into our long term plans. I’m fine with being marginally competetive the next year or two while we continue to rebuild around youth, and I worry that adding an Adam Dunn could start to hinder us in the long term. The main problem is the fact that so much money is tied up by Rowand and Zito, if we didn’t have either of them, I wouldn’t see the harm in signing a player like Dunn or Teix. We just can’t afford to tie up that much money for that long right now.
Adam Dunn really is hurt by his terrible defense. He’s routinely rated as one of the worst defenders in LF. You seem impartial to defense, but I think it might matter more than you think when trying to find the overall value for a player. Preventing runs from scoring is just as important as producing runs.
I read this blog a lot but I don’t post much, so I might be in the minority here, but besides Dunn’s obvious defensive problems, I’m afraid how he’ll age. He has classic old-player skills and once those start going in the wrong direction you’ve got another Richie Sexson on your hands.
With all due respect, Chris, but defense is nowhere near as important as scoring runs. You ever hear of Win Shares? Typically, a player with, sa,y 25 win shares, will have 21 of them from their offensive contribution, and 4 or 5 of them from what they contribute defensively.
There’s a reason why…. because the difference between the best and worst defense is maybe 3 or 5 or even, in an extreme case, 8%. The difference between having Adam Dunn get 450 at bats, and JT Snow getting 450 at bats is perhaps as much as 60 runs created, maybe even more.
A team full of no power, low OBP hitters can never make up those runs with their gloves. Never.
IT HAS NEVER HAPPENED!
John… win shares? Really? Do you have any idea how broken win shares (of the Bill James variety) are, aside from the fact that we can’t use them to evaluate players in a vacuum (a la VORP [ugh], etc.) because they’re based on how well or poorly the team does and will inflate a player’s talent level if they’re on a good team (e.g. Tulo in 2007), aside from not having any park adjustments and being difficult to apply park adjustments to?
Let’s start with the offense issues.
Runs Created is a good run estimator for overall team expected runs scored. I think this is the case with most run estimators, even OPS, given that the extremes between the best player in baseball (Albert Pujols) and the worst (Tony Pena Jr.?) are higher than the extremes between the best hitting team in the league versus the worst.
However, on the individual level, Runs Created gives too much credit to slugging and undervalues OBP. I didn’t figure this out; someone smarter than myself (and whom Bill James will defer to) did.
http://www.tangotiger.net/runscreated.html
http://www.tangotiger.net/rc2.html
http://www.tangotiger.net/rc3.html
Defensively… well, um, Mr. James still uses range factor, though I think he now uses a “revised” relative range factor. But in our current time, we have access to play-by-play defensive metrics that have more parameters (e.g. park adjustments, “hardness” of the batted ball, is more specific with which fielder was responsible for the batted ball). Mitchel Lichtman was the first guy to do this, and other guys, most notably David Pinto and John Dewan, followed suit with similar methodologies.
http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/primate_studies/discussion/lichtman_2003-03-14_0/
http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/primate_studies/discussion/lichtman_2003-03-21_0/
And regarding your response earlier in the comments section:
Damn I have communication issues.
Saving 2 extra plays per game on defense (which is really hard to do every single game, but you get the picture) is saving ~1.6 extra runs per game in our high-scoring run environment.
That doesn’t help the offense, but it helps the team overall. If a team scores (throwing out numbers) 650 runs in a season and gives up 750, then projects to produce 650 runs again but only gives up 725 runs, then that team goes from winning about 72.4 games to winning about 74.4. (I used PythagenPat for those numbers, which is more detailed than the original Pythagorean or the newer PythagenPort: http://www.tangotiger.net/wiki/index.php?title=PythagenPat).
I understand where you’re coming from, but there really is more than one way to skin a cat. And maybe you should catch up with the rest of the sabermetric community instead of lagging behind with Mr. James.
John:
You’re wasting your writing skills trying to convince some folks.
1. The Giants, barring something unforeseen and UNREFUTED even by the most thirsty of kool-aid drinkers, are about to establish a record for consecutive losing seasons. The previous record of four was established in the mid 70s, and tied under the current regime of Brian Sabean last year. A fact that was not noted by the ever vigilant sports media in the Bay Area.
2. There are no certainties, in the minor leagues. There are only possibilities, and the occasional probability. Swell. Its been twenty years since Matt Williams hit the scene…the last homegrown power impact hitter. I am not holding my breath. Too much can and does happen on the way from the California League to the Hall of Fame.
3. All this talk of “the promising kids in the minors”? This is an organization that hasn’t given us an impact power hitter since the above-mentioned Matt Williams. Remember JR Phillips? Lance Niekro? Damon Minor? “Homegrown Talent”. The current crop of newbies is hopefully better. But still. Not even close to a sure thing. Sure things bring you pennants. Minor league prospects are not tangibles in the present. And baseball in the Majors is always about the present.
4. The current crop of suspects is brought to you by the same cabal of journeyman drinking buddies that have marked the Giants since Dick Tidrow and Jack Hiatt took over the farm system. Yes, there have been some minor changes in personnel, but until the Giants actually produce a bona fide position player that is an IMPACT player and not some other career journeyman, there is no there, there. Until the Baumgardners and Poseys etc. actually do something, it is still only speculation.
5. If not for Tim Lincecum, the Giants would have lost 100 games last year, something that apologists wish to overlook. Matt Cain still can’t pitch well enough to win more games than he loses. Its not that he pitches poorly. He pitches really well most of the time. He just doesn’t pitch well enough to win with this lineup. They scored 640 runs. This is a team that if trailing after 3 innings, the game was over. This is what happens when you replace Barry Bonds with Aaron Rowand, and Jeff Kent with Edgardo Alfonso and Ray Durham.
6. When you don’t have a single guy capable of hitting 20 homeruns, you “talk about defense”. And you still will lose 90 games.
7. When your biggest moves are Edgar Alfonso Feliz Renteria, two 30 something relievers and hope that Kevin Fransden and Travis Ishikawa can reach ordinary mediocrity and that Pablo Sandoval doesn’t explode from obesity, your season is already in trouble.
8. The physical conditioning of Sandoval and Molina seems to be a direct appeal to the beer leaguer segment of the market. They are a tribute to couchpotatoism. And these are the two biggest offensive weapons.
9. The Giants have clearly shown no desire to break from the past. They continue to foist Barry Zito on the public, featuring him in an upcoming special for Comcast along with Bill Neukom and Brian Sabean. If you do not change, you will continue to be the same.
10. Barry Zito is a mess. Barry Zito is an embarrassment off and on the field. His messiness is exacerbated by his obscene contract. What kind of a pussy phones KNBR unsolicitied in the middle of the offseason to whine to Gary Radnich about the way people talk about him on the radio. And says “I’m in love with myself.” He really said that and went to great lengths to try and justify his sentiments. It was embarrassing to listen to. He sounded more like a face pierced Starbucks barrista whining about his tips than a fucking ballplayer. Radnich is rarely at a loss of words, and he was simply stunned. That stunt alone gets Zito dfa’d in my book. Talk about clubhouse cancer, this guy is a clubhouse cancer and makes Giants players the target of ridicule. He is the laughingstock of baseball. This is your highest paid player. And the Giants are promoting him as the face of the franchise.
What John is proposing with Adam Dunn is a BREAK from the past that has brought four, going on five consecutive losing seasons. A pattern of throwing 35 and over shit against the wall and hoping some of it sticks. Maybe what John suggests works, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe its Pat Burrell. Maybe it was Vladamir Guerrero. At least it is trying to replace the power in the lineup that has disappeared over the past few years.
For Sabean to complain “Finding equitable trades is hard” as an excuse to have no power in the lineup is laughable. A huge budget, a great yard, friendly fans, great city. Excuses. What is clear, is that the current regime is THE WORST IN SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS HISTORY. EVER. Too bad for those of you who do not wish to acknowledge that. Or worse, the morons who want to defend it, and are not even paid to prostitute themselves. The Giants and their apologists have become expert excuse makers. Its the one thing in which they lead MLB
Maybe if this were after 2 or 3 bad seasons, I could see some reason for optimism. But the bottom line is the guys who have brought us the past 4 to 5 years of losing and defiant excuse making are still running the organization. Larry Baer has no accountability. Brian Sabean is raking in millions. Dave Righetti takes no heat for the shitty bullpen. Bruce Bochy is an admitted caretaker. Dick Tidrow and Jack Hiatt still running the minors. Some of these guys impact on winning and losing is greater than others. The point is, VERY LITTLE CHANGES. The biggest fucking change last year was Carney Lansford replacing Joe Lefay as hitting coach. Lafay who is best noted for preaching “you’ll never get a better pitch to hit than the first one.” A highschool classmate of Sabean. And this is the guy the Giants had sitting in the dugout as the hitting coach, for how many years? And it took them how long to show him the door? And he is still in the organization? Are you kidding me?
An organization in trouble, no matter the rationalizations for the present predicament by the incumbants, will remain in trouble until leadership is changed. One has to look no further than the current clusterfuck that was the Bush Administration to illustrate this point. Or the Raiders. Or the 49ers.
The Giants have no problems signing other teams rejects and over the hill baseball cards, but for some reason cant seem to reach out beyond their own circle of drinking buddies when it comes to finding non-roster talent. There is a reason the Giants are coming up on their fifth losing season. The folks who make all the decisions and are responsible for developing players on and off the field and evaluating and acquiring talent are as inbred and embedded as Soviet plutocrats.
And I am not a fan of the Giants. I am a fan of certain players. I happen to follow the Giants because I have lived here. When management changes and they change direction, I will root for them again. But until then, I wish them everything they have earned. Until the Giants decide to do what the Miami Dolphins did after last season. Until they decide to do what Eddie Debartolo did when he showed Joe Thomas the door.
Until they decide to make a drastic departure from the past several years, and kick the losers on and off the roster to the curb, they will amount to nothing more than the Kansas City Royals with an orange bridge.
Yaawwwnnnn
I second that yawn.
Dunn may be a BREAK from the past, but that doesn’t mean signing him is a GOOD idea. Ripping Sabean for not going after Vlad in 2004 is a legitimate criticism. The Giants were one star player away from being a pennant hopeful, and Vlad was the absolute right person to pay the big bucks to.
Except that that was four years ago. The team is in a completely different situation now and Dunn is not a star and does not make them contenders. You want to rip Sabean for the bad moves he’s made, go ahead. We all do. But getting mad when he wisely doesn’t give $10-13 million to a horrible fielder with old player skills likely to mean his decline? I’m afraid you’re bitching just to bitch.
Are you out of your mind?
So you’re saying that giving $10 million per to players who actually are old, who actually already are declining, is OK; but giving that same money to a player who will contribute about 80 more runs, who is younger, and does the one thing no one on the team does is a mistake? Holy shit.
Telling me that Dunn’s not a star, and therefore not worth the same money we’re already giving to four players who are even more clearly not stars, is fucking ridiculous, to be perfectly honest.
I’m afraid you’re defending Sabean just because he’s your father-in-law or something.
I wish Sabean were my father-in-law, because that would mean free season tickets. Unfortunately, that’s not why I’m defending him in this particular instance. I’m also not sure how you got out of my previous comment that I thought it was OK to sign Renteria (one of the “declining” players you’re referring to I assume) to $10 million, when all I said was I don’t think similar money should be given to Dunn. I guess it’s all right to make stuff up if it helps your argument…
John, you always argue against signing old players who are likely to decline, which I generally agree with. Dunn isn’t old, but he has old player skills. The list of the ten most comparable players to Dunn includes Gorman Thomas, Kevin Mitchell, Jesse Barfield, Pete Incaviglia, Wally Post, and Gus Zernial, i.e. all guys who crapped out once they hit 30. Why do you rail against one group that is likely to decline, but not another? The Sexson comparison is perfect.
You want to sign Dunn for one or two years to play first base? Good luck with that. I wouldn’t quibble with a short deal but he’s probably only going to take one from a contender and there are reports that he doesn’t want to move to first base. In order for him to come here, it’d likely mean breaking the bank, and that’s just not worth it, IMO.
Again, some here miss the salient point. If they wish to keep their index fingers firmly planted in their ears, fine. It doesn’t change a thing.
The San Francisco Giants are in the middle of the longest losing streak in the history of the franchise. It is the worst offensive team in baseball arguably. It has had no homegrown impact position players in twenty years. Its highest paid player is a laughingstock. And he is under contract for several more years and at ever increasing millions per. The second highest paid player is a punch and Judy lower part of the order outfielder who is under contract for several more years as well.
The people responsible for orchestrating this abomination are still in charge. And they haven’t changed. These are some of the guys they just announced to run their farm teams this year.
Mike Caldwell Arizona Rookie League… pitching coach. career highlight was winning 14 games for the 72-90 Giants in 1974.
Brian Cooper…pitching coach.. famous for getting sent down when Matt Cain got called up. Certainly that qualifies him to be the pitching coach in Short Season. Which is where the goofus Joe Lefay coined the famous phrase “you’ll never get a better pitch to hit than the first one.”
Tom Trebelhorn…Manager short season. Fired after 12 years as the bench coach in Baltimore. But he did play 5 years of minor league ball 35 years ago.
Steve Kline—pitching coach in Augusta. Yeah. That Steve Kline. A journeyman loggy. But a good drinking buddy and fair poker player.
Lipso Nava. 14th round draft choice of Mariners. A ham n egger minor leaguer whose extensive coaching career consists of 1 year as a hitting coach in the independent league before being hired by the Giants.
I could go on, but you get the point. There is no change. Its still the same old way of doing things. Sabean, who used to brag about not knowing who was in the farm system, is full of shit. If the Giants were as dedicated to developing young players as some of you would like to believe, they would not be putting these kinds of guys in charge of their farm clubs. Guys who have little, if any recognizable coaching successes.
Always good to see our new and improved draft choices turned over to such stellar and stalwart professionals with a long history of success in player development. No coaches or instructors raided from Minnesota, Tampa Bay, Toronto, or Atlanta or any other organization with a long history of player development. Just plenty of Renterias, Howrys’ Afleldts Finleys Alfonzos, Aurillia’s Sweeny’s Zitos, Tomkos, Durhams, Fasseros, Walkers ad nauseum to infest the MLB roster though.
The Giants are and will continue to be a farce. And if the prospect of some kids getting left behind by the asshats running the Giants farm system is enough to keep you spending money on tickets to PacBell Park, then Brian Sabean, Larry Baer, and the rest of the Giants propoganda machine is a hell of a lot smarter than you are.
Actually, Caldwell’s career highlight was probably winning 22 games with the Brewers in 1979 and winning two World Series games three years later. He was hardly as crappy as you make him out to be. And are you really going to dismiss these coaches offhand based on their playing careers? Earl Weaver, one of the great all-time managers, never played a game in the bigs.
My central point to my continuing postulate that the new Giants organization is still the same as the old Giants. None of the guys I cited is anything other than an old crony of the current regime. None of them that I could find have anything stellar in their recent resumes to suggest that they are a good fit for developing, teaching, evaluating the current crop of “GREAT PROSPECTS IN THE LOWER MINORS” that so many Giants apologists wish to deflect attention to. I could care less about their playing careers. And as a fan, you should care about their resumes in developing, teaching, evaluating, and improving young players, as so should all the Giants apologists, kool-aid drinkers, and sycophantic ticket purchasers.
Here’s a couple of more quick shots.
Hensley Meulens: Hitting coach in Fresno. Career .220 hitter in Yankee organization. Hitting coach in the Orioles, Pirate organizations since 2003. But he did play for the Netherlands in the 2000 Olympics and runs a baseball clinic in Curacao.
Gary Davenport. Hitting coach San Jose. Starting sixth season in Giants organization. Claim to fame? Jim Davenport’s son.
If you swallowed the bullshit from 3rd and Townsend, I am sorry. Its not my fault.
Mia – what is your point? Are you seriously suggesting there’s a correlation between a coach’s playing career and his ability as a coach? Most coaches and managers had less than spectacular playing careers. By your logic, Righetti should be the best pitching coach in the majors, right? Not every organization can have a Frank Robinson.
Stick to whining about something you know, because it clearly isn’t baseball.
Mine and Johns position is that the Giants continue to do the same things, with the same people over and over again and expect different results. And despite what your wishful thinking leads you and others to spittle, that is the crux of the Giants organization coming up on five year nows.
If you knew how to read, you would know I was not drawing the comparison you are so wrongly implying. Are you as obsequious as you sound, or do you just like to see your idiotic blathering in print?
OK, but here’s the thing: This isn’t abnormal. If you look through any organization, you’re going to see that many of the coaches and managers are former players and organization men given jobs in the farm systems of their former teams.
Go way back, and take Tommy Lasorda. He was an awful pitcher and would be deemed unqualified, by your criteria, to be a coach or player in any organization. When the Dodgers awarded him a scout job it would, by your definition, have been simple blind cronyism. What in his track record showed that he had any business in a baseball operations position? And yet Lasorda went on to become one of the greatest managers of all time (boy does it pain me to spit those words out).
I’m not saying any of those new coaches are qualified or will be any good. I have no friggin’ clue, and frankly you don’t either. But to accuse the Giants of cronyism in this regard is to condemn every single major league franchise going back to the early 1900’s, basically.
Leo Mazzone sucks because he never won games in the majors!