I was backtalking about Sabean, but I think I want everyone to read this idea…..
Brain Sabean has a blind spot, and we’ve been banging around for years now trying to understand what the hell it is, what the hell he’s thinking. I think I might have stumbled on to an explanation that makes some sense.
It’s like he looks at something a player has done, even if it’s only once, and he believes that that is what the player can do, or actually is. Neifi Perez had a .350 batting average once (in Colorado, of course), and he won a Gold Glove, and so, to Sabean, he is a .350 hitter with a great glove; it doesn’t matter that he hasn’t done any of those things in four or five years, or that he did it in an runs created context that outrageously inflated his numbers, or that he simply was never that good. To Sabean, once he sees a player a certain way, he always sees that player in that way.
Dave Roberts made one key play in his entire baseball life, and Sabean decided that Dave Roberts makes key plays.
Sabean is the absurd conclusion, the perfect example of the old adage that a player can get five years in the game off of one good season, or even one great month, or just one singular accomplishment, because people will always try and see if he can do it again. To Sabean, the player is that accomplishment, that season. Think about it, I mean, you could do this with every guy on the team, and it works.
Freddie Sanchez is a batting champion.
Randy Winn is the guy who had 50 hits that September, so let’s give him $50 million dollars, and more to the point, let’s play him every day in 2009, even though he has nothing left as a hitter at all. Randy Winn is 50 hits in a month, and to Sabean, he always will be.
Aaron Rowand is on Sportscenter every night, he must be great, so let’s give him $50 million dollars. Aaron Rowand is a human highlight reel, a “gamer,” and no matter how little evidence there is to support that, Brian Sabean will never see him as anything else, ever.
Bengie Molina hit a home run batting cleanup one day, so he is a cleanup hitter.
Juan Uribe is a backup infielder, so fuck him, he’s expendable.
Edgar Renteria is a World Series winning shortstop.
Barry Zito is a Cy Young Award winner.
You can go back in time, and it still works.
Sabean didn’t need to put Edgaro Alfonzo through a physical, because Alfonzo was a 25 home run hitting, Gold Glove winning second baseman.
He didn’t care that Moises Alou was 39 years old, because Alou was a good hitter.
He saw Livan Hernandez as an Ace, because he saw him strike out 13 guys in an NL playoff game once, and no matter how hard Livan tried to prove that he was anything but an inning-eater, Sabean never saw him any differently.
I could go on and on. On. And. On.
It also explains, perfectly, why he has so much resistance to playing rookies and young players. They haven’t done anything yet. Until he can see something that they have done; they aren’t players, they aren’t anything to him. So, on the Giants, rookies have about two weeks to prove themselves, unless somebody gets hurt, of course. And even then, after playing well for months, (like, say, Fred Lewis) a player on the Giants can still find that Sabean is ignoring whatever success they’ve had, because he sees them as they were, not as they are.
That’s also why he can’t forecast, because he sees things as if they were set in stone. There’s no room in his tiny brain for things like upside, or decline, or aging, or injuries. Players are what they are, and statistics are for the other guys. So he has a 22-year old shortstop who hit .240, which, for people who study baseball, is nothing to sneeze at. A 22-year old rookie who has any success at all at the major league level is a valuable commodity; but not to Brian Sabean. All he sees is a .240 hitter. He simply cannot see upside, or progress, or anything like it. He only sees that first thing. He is a first impression kind of guy, but taken to it’s absurd conclusion. He’s a first impression guy to a degree that would be laughable, if it wasn’t destroying the team.
Buster Posey is a rookie, he can’t possibly be expected to do what a “gamer” like Bengie Molina does, because Brian Sabean hasn’t seen him do it. And so he goes on TV telling everyone how worthless Posey is.
And, of course, once he decides a player isn’t a “gamer” there is nothing they (or anyone, for that matter) can do to change his mind. It’s why he had to trade for Double PLay AJ, even though he had Torrealba. He had decided that Torrealba couldn’t hit, or wasn’t “veteran” enough, or couldn’t call a game, or whatever bullshit he was telling himself, and there was no argument, nothing that could be done to alter that assessment. He had to have Mike Matheny, because he heard someone say that Matheny’s defense saved the team 100 runs a season, and he thinks saving a hundred runs a year is a real ability, and that only he sees the value in having a guy that can do that.
He saw JT Snow save a couple of runs in a game once, and he said to himself, “Wow, over the course of 162 games, that must translate into hundreds of runs being saved.” So JT Snow’s black hole offense was allowed to kill the team for 8 fucking years, and Sabean didn’t even notice. All he saw was a human vacuum cleaner at first base.
Listen, we all do this, in some way or another. It’s a way to simplify the complex. Think about a player, and immediately, one thing comes to mind. Cal Ripken? Games played streak. Hank Aaron? Home runs. There is nothing wrong with it. It’s when you are trying to evaluate players according to your team’s needs and the players values that parsing details becomes important. Sure Ripken plays every day, but he’s 35 years old. How many days is he really gonna be worth something at that age? How many 0 for 4′s can you handle?
Sure Edgar Renteria was on a champion, and that counts for something; but is he still playing at a championship level today? You need to be flexible in your view of a player to even ask that question. Sabean is not. He thinks he just signed a championship-level shortstop, even though Renteria’s championship was over ten years ago.
It’s OK to form a picture when you first consider a player, but a GM has to fill in the blanks, add some depth and some color to the image, step back and get a more clear view. He can’t just decide that Freddie Sanchez is great, and then keep trying to acquire him for five fucking years; with no concern for any parts of his game that may have changed since the first time you decided you liked him. That’s what fans do. For that matter, that’s what kids do. A general manager has to go way beyond that.
This is Brian Sabean’s blind spot, in a nutshell; and he’s given no indication that he will ever change. And maybe that’s why he sees people this way. Maybe he sees people as set in stone, because he is.
I honestly think this is the greatest analysis of Brian Sabean I’ve ever seen. Well done, sir.
Thanks. I’ve been struggling to describe what I’ve been seeing for going on almost seven years. Sort of the hundred monkeys banging on a hundred typewriters analogy might suffice….
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ok…..this is what drives me crazy
“Nate Schierholtz has helped himself by playing winter ball in Puerto Rico. The 25-year-old candidate for the right field job entered Wednesday batting .339 in 15 games for the Gigantes de Carolina, helped partly by tutelage from San Francisco’s globe-trotting hitting coach, Hensley Meulens.
“I give Nate a lot of credit,” Sabean said. “We really appreciate what he’s doing to go to winter ball and he has made some changes with Hensley. Everybody’s pulling for Nate. He’s got too much passion for what he does and he works at it. He’s a good outfielder (with a) good arm, good baserunner. We just haven’t seen enough consistency with the bat, or more so the power that we thought we’d have at this time. But he certainly (has) a captive audience right now. He wants to be out there.”
no brian….nate has a GREAT arm
and the reason you didnt see consistency from him is because….YOU AND YOUR MONKEY REFUSED TO PLAY HIM
the kid sat for the better part of a month to start the season, while you stuck with winn
guess i should be grateful for the small things though…at least sabean knows his name now
I’ve gotten to the point of skipping over the ad hominem bashing here, but John’s larger point is tremendously valid.
It amazes me, in these modern times, that a GM doesn’t have everyone from a grizzled old scout to a stat geek to a tea-leaf reader on the payroll. It’s absolutely in the category of “reasoned decision” that Sabean fails miserably.
I don’t get too excited about the money part, but nonetheless, you sign Edgar Renteria, he takes up space. And unless he’s hideously bad, he stays there at short.
I may be wrong, but I think if you look back at all the signings over quite a few years, the Giants got exactly what one logically would have expected them to get. Randy Winn, Aaron Rowand, Michael Tucker, are only disappointments if you’re thinking as John suggests Sabean is thinking. You look at Randy Winn’s career, there’s no real anomalies there, he is what he is – as is Rowand. The anomalies are realities in Sabean’s head, though – it becomes bizarre that the possibility that Sanchez, say, could hit .350, is taken quite seriously, yet that Rookie X might be an All-Star if he could just fucking get some playing time gets almost zero attention.
Massive risk-aversion. Meanwhile, rookies just die on the vine – not just misused, but wasted. You take Lewis or Frandsen, go back a couple-three of years, they could’ve brought something in a trade. Now, you can’t give them away. Really foolish. Remember when Feliz was the second-coming? Someone had to have known better.
No. You’re not wrong.
That is the point. People who use observational tools other than their own arrogant prejudicial stereotypes, mixed in with the sycophantic opinions of cronies even further down the evolutionary scale, to form their judgments, are routinely going to differ with the Sabean’s and Hendrys and Bowden of the world.
Unforeseen injuries and even inexplicable downturns and failings are part of the game. We all know that. Even if a 50/50 risk like a Brad Penny had not turned out, it was still a good decision to acquire him.
This is why I keep referencing the 1980s when I bring up Sabean. He is stuck there. The evaluation tools were so different then. Radar guns, pitching deliveries, body types, conditioning methods, nutrition, sports medicine…all of these things have advanced since then. Its not just the technologies and sabermetrics. Its 25 years of progress–four generations of ballplayers.
When Sabean makes a decison he is using 1980s criteria, and he scratches his head, wonders why those guys don’t do shit, looks around and blames Ishikawa, Bwoker, Shierholz, Burris, Lewis and others for the shortfalls of Renteria, Winn, Rowand, and Zito.
The rest of world is in the 2010s. Along with the franchises who are eating the Giants lunch between the lines year in and year out.
The Giants have a “Coordinator of Baseball Operations/Quantitative Analysis” in their FO. Either the guy sucks or Sabean doesn’t really listen to the guy.
The kid was a scrubini pitcher at U.C. San Diego.
Of course Sabean listens to him. As he contemplates another booger on the end of his finger and walks away mid-presentation
Being an MLB GM is being in a pretty exclusive club. Hell, there’s 3 times as many guys in the US Senate! I think that “inner circle” mentality has a powerful grip on Sabes’ ego and indentity, hence his arrogance and aloofness and complete unwillingness to explain his actions or justify himself to the paying custotmers. “I am an MLB GM and you are not therefore I know and you don’t.” The worst part is that the ownership group think he’s doing a good job–they are as blind and as stubborn as he is. They saw a “Sabean-built” club win a lot of games and go to the playoffs and so they think he’s a winning GM. I think John’s diagnosis–forming a first picture and never moving on–goes all the way up the organizational ladder.
Excellent analogy! That is Sabean personified. Senator Bluster. The GM Club. The House of Lords. Where it is not what you do, but who you keep company with. That is what matters most.
“I Exist. Therefore I Deserve”
“If I say JT Snow saves 100s of runs with his glove, than he simply does. It is fact. It is Brian-Law.”
Delusional self-satisfied prick.
He certainly talks like a crooked politician. Is he, by any chance, related to Rod Blagojevich? Sleaze like that may be genetically linked.
Neukom looks to be keeping a tight rein on the purse strings which should minimize the damage Sabean will be able to wreak on the club. But if Neukom doesn’t trust Sabean to do deals, why the hell did he extend his contract?
I think the Giants would be MUCH better off with an inexperienced GM who would listen to advice. If the GM isn’t being given any money to make deals then what would it matter if he was inexperienced? This season could be an on the job training season. Same with the manager. There are lots of younger men who could better fill the shoes of Mr. Putty Bochy. A younger man, an ex-player not so long out of the show. Somebody that knows how to play small ball and can relate to the rookies. They don’t want to borrow your car, Bruce, they want to play ball.
I’ve said it before and I say it again: play the rooks, let the team have a horrible season if that’s what it takes. That’s what a youth movement means. I would pay to see that. I would root for a bunch of young players who were getting their asses shelled while ramping up their skills. Because you could love a team like that.
There is nothing loveable about a bunch of has beens who mean nothing to the future of the club.
“I’ve said it before and I say it again: play the rooks, let the team have a horrible season if that’s what it takes.”
Sigh. This is one of my biggest problems with the last few years. We could have been one of the worst defensive teams in baseball at any point the last few years playing the young guys. We WERE one of the worst offenses in baseball each of the last, what, 4 years? What difference would it have made? We wouldn’t be worse off, that’s for sure. And at least by now we’d know if guys like Bowker or Schierholtz actually have it in them to contribute in some fashion. Even if they weren’t very good, knowing they can give us something for essentially free (as opposed to nothing for a lot of money, see: Winn, Randy) is good info – or even knowing they aren’t capable and we should move on is useful. I just don’t understand it.
I have a mental image of Brian Sabean, cocktail shaker in his hands, dancing around his living room with Frankie Goes to Hollywood blasting on his “hi-fi”. It is 2009.
The image of Sabean being nostalgic, of clinging to first impressions, is probably accurate to a degree. It feels right. It is an incomplete image as he is undoubtedly a more complex and self-aware man than we would give him credit for, but there is a strong element truth in that observation.
Sabean had some measure of success early in his career, along with a great deal of luck. Over the years he has, like the baseball players he keeps signing, played back to average. Long careers have that affect. Sabean is coasting along on the inertia of his early career. It is particularly telling that he has taken to surrounding himself with men who will not challenge him, or through their own excellence make him look bad by contrast. I am referring of course to Alou, and now Bochy.
The frightening prospect is that things could become worse because Sabean has been making them progressively worse for several years now. If there is anything more frustrating than the Giants not making the right decisions to improve the team, it is Sabean’s making decisions that harm the team.
Sabean’s career was extended by luck and Barry Bonds. Now that Bonds is gone Sabean’s deficiencies have been exposed. He has made one bad deal after another. Whether he bases his decisions on nostalgia, or some other process, they are bad decisions.
This is what all insecure delusional self-important fakers do.
And in turn he does not challenge Neukom nor Baer, anymore than a ship captain challenges the fleet admiral. He just merely continues to stridently obsess as to the perpetrators of the missing strawberries whilst the ship founders in a typhoon.
I think of two word phrases when I think of this sophomoric pile of ooze.
Stupid and Stubborn
Ignorant and Arrogant
and what you just so eloquently wrote
Nostalgic and Nonsensical
He evaluates players the same way he evaluated players when he was coaching at Div II Tampa U in the mid 1980s. For fuck sakes John, he still wears a mullet and a late 80s goatee!
He is 53 going on 98. It doesn’t even matter anymore why he is incapacitated in terms of player evaluation. His bosses don’t give a shit as long as the refuse he signs keeps them schlepping through the turnstiles. He’s stuck with over 50 percent of his payroll being WASTED on REFUSE like Rowand and Zito and Renteria and Sanchez.
But it does not matter because the Giants are still going to take in 35 million from Comcast alone. Add to that their share of the Central Fund and an average of $50.00 per head in tickets, parking, concessions, psls from 2.75 million fans for about $125 million the Giants are at close to $200million in revenue again with a sub-$90million payroll.
To the shysters, slumlords, and idiotic beneficiaries of inherited weatlh who own this franchise, it just doesn’t matter who Sabaen signs as long as they get their 2.75 million shmos stumbling through the turnstile. And the folks looking for a ballpark experience go for the same bullshit that Sabean peddles to which you allude.
Snow saving 100 runs
Sanchez 3 time all-star
Zito Cy Young
Alfonso 25 homer third baseman
88 win season
Felipe Alou/Moises Alou nostalgia season
Steve Finley Grand Slam in 2004
Its all marketing hype to be repeated over and over and over again by Baggarly, by Jenkins, by Ratto, by Shulman, By Shea, by the mouthpieces at KNBR, Comcast and just on and on ad nauseum.
Its all a fucking shell game. Sabean is just the run-down field master, doing the plantation owners bidding, abusing the younger players, playing favorites from the old days and generally oafing around mumbling, grumbling with an occasional snarl thrown at anybody who even hints at questioning his veracity, ethics and machinations.
[...] Only Baseball Matters examines Brian Sabean’s blind spot. [...]
I think another reason Sabean values veterans because beween 1997-2004 several Giants veterans (Bonds, Kent, Burks, Santiago, Galarraga, Grissom) played unusually well into their late 30s. Of course in hindsight we know that some of these veterans had chemical “assistance,” but maybe Sabean says to himself “Whadaya mean players past 35 are a bad risk? What about Bonds, Burks, Santiago…”
If Sabean has to choose between believing that these players played well for so long because he has a great eye for talent, or because these players achieved better living through chemistry — well, which would you prefer to believe, if you were Sabean?