Beane is a very cost effective GM, but not a very good one.
Rog -- As Giants fans, we're spoiled. The small market teams at best get into a cycle of getting high draft choices, making the most of them, fielding a good team for a few years, then having to get rid of those players as they approach free agency, when the team can no longer afford them.
The Giants have the money to sign more and better free agents than they lose, so they can remain competitive much longer. The three World Championships were built upon four straight poor seasons and making the most of the resulting early first round draft picks. In 2006 through 2009 they drafted Lincecum, Bumgarner, Posey and Wheeler, not missing on any of those top 10 picks.
The Giants spend twice as much as the A's. Is it reasonable for the A's to be able to compete on the field? Despite that, the A's have made the postseason more times this millenium than the Giants. But the Giants have had enough to take their seven playoff berths all the way to three World Championships.
Randy was the first to properly put the Giants' closing window in perspective. The Giants are paying a lot of money to Buster and Madison (even though they were fortunate enough to sign the latter to a very team-friendly contract extension), and once those guys decline, the going will get tough. The Giants are paying Posey, Bumgarner, Pence, Cueto, Samardzija, Melancon and Span about $115 million per season. That's about $30 million more than the A's entire payroll.
But when guys like Posey and Bumgarner begin to decline, they will have to spend even more money to properly replace them. And in the final years of their contracts, they will be overpaying for their services, further limiting things.
That's not to say the Giants can't keep things going. But they're going to need to do some very shrewd drafting and development.
We're so lucky not to be rooting for a small market team. Those teams have a hard time competing, and when they do, it is even harder to maintain their level of play.
Billy Beane's effectiveness now is limited by the amount of dollars he has to spend, and the fact that other teams have caught up by building analytic departments of their own.
I don't follow the A's closely enough to know if Beane is still a good GM or not. I know he's made some bad trades of late. I also know he is forced to try to juggle pieces in order to compete when he's spending half as much as teams like the Giants -- a third as much as the Dodgers.
We're spoiled. Randy keeps berating the Giants for not spending more, failing to realize that the Giants are already one of the top spenders, one of the few teams who are already spending into the luxury tax, which is essentially a soft salary cap.
The Giants haven't always made the best moves, although overall they have done pretty well. Pablo Sandoval saved them from themselves. Had the Giants re-signed him as Randy wanted, Randy would simply be bleating that they should sweep the mistake under the rug by spending more.
Most of us here saw that the Giants were making a big mistake in pursuing Pablo to the degree they did. Neither Randy nor the Giants were sharp enough to see that.
In the Giants' defense, they have built much of their success on team chemistry, which is facilitated by re-signing players to keep the chemistry going. But that strategy has resulted multiple times in the Giants' overpaying their own free agents. They're starting to get a little smarter and trying to wrap up their top young players before they are eligible for free agency. That's a strategy we've been recommending here for years.
As for Randy, how hypocritical is it for him to have espoused the Giants' essentially wasting $100 million on Pablo, then criticizing them for not spending enough. Certainly it helps to be able to spend even more, but once a team gets to certain level of spending, it's HOW the money is spent rather than how much is spent that is more important.
It's kind of like Maslov's hierarchy of needs. Just as a worker first has to make enough to meet his basic needs, a franchise has to be able to spend enough to be able to field a major league team. Then just as person can spend his money to develop a sense of belonging, then esteem, then self-actualization, teams can hope to be able to spend enough money to help build their franchise.
Thank goodness the Giants scored so well on those four top draft choices. They squandered Wheeler, but the other three were highly instrumental in building the franchise.
Rookies like Crawford, Belt, Panik and Duffy have been nice support pieces, but the franchise was built around the Big 3 and Matt Cain, another first round pick they excelled with. Now they've supplemented those pieces with Cueto, Melancon and Samardzija, and converted Duffy and prospects into Matt Moore.
But as mentioned before, the cost of the biggest pieces has risen to around $115 million, and if we throw in Moore as well, the Giants are already up to about $125 million, which is more than a high percentage of teams have to spend IN TOTAL.
We're spoiled, Boagie. I'm very glad that we are, but the least we can do is appreciate it. Criticizing the Giants for not spending more when they are already one of the big spenders is like a child complaining that his many Christmas presents aren't good enough.
I don't think you criticize them for that, Boagie. You're much too sharp to do so. You get it.
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