When It’s Time For a Change

Today I’m counting my series looking at Brian Sabean’s track record as GM of the Giants. Last time out I wrapped up my look at Sabean’s trade record so today we start looking at the draft.

There has been an image of the Giants’ draft strategy under Brian Sabean: They draft pitchers or they don’t draft at all.

The team has a reputation of drafting and developing mainly pitchers and during the team’s run of success of using free agency to get rid of as many picks as possible.

I’ll get to those topic eventually but today I wanted to start small and just see how well the Giants have done compared to other teams in finding major league talent in the draft since Sabean took over. I’m using restrosheet transaction info, Dave Studeman’s win shares database and the Lahman database to see how many win shares teams have drafted and kept during Sabean’s tenure, starting with the 1997 draft.

During that time the Giants drafted players who would generate 220 win shares in their time in the majors, with 129 coming with the Giants. That means of all the value the Giants have drafted in that time they kept 59 percent of it.

Those 220 win shares rank 24th in baseball during that time span (this study doesn’t look at players who debuted in 2007). For comparison here are the top five teams:

	Team	WS
1	SLN	725
2	OAK	706
3	TOR	673
4	PHI	546
5	COL	531

The Giants kept percentage of 59 percent was 19th in baseball. Again, here are the leaders:

	Team	WS	WSKept	PCT
1	MIN	272	259	95%
2	MIL	185	171	92%
3	HOU	469	407	87%
4	ATL	228	196	86%
5	TBA	417	354	85%

The Giants were in the bottom half of the league in both respects. And it wasn’t simply a lack of first round picks. The Giants had more first round picks, 18, than all but five teams. Unfortunately the team’s average position in those picks was 28th, lower than all but five teams.

Just for fun here’s Sabean’s greatest hits list, first for win shares with the Giants and then win shares overall:

First	Last	WS
Marvin	Benard	71
Bill	Mueller	63
Russ	Ortiz	50
Noah	Lowry	30
Joe	Nathan	19
-----
Bill	Mueller	139
Keith	Foulke	110
Russ	Ortiz	74
Marvin	Benard	71
Joe	Nathan	66

Finally, a list Marvin Bernard can top.

Overall the Giants have been a poor drafting team in Sabean’s time as GM. Of course that’s not Earth-shaking analysis as the farm system has been threadbare for quite a while.

But why has the team done so poorly? Next time I’m going to dig into the types of players that Sabean likes to draft and see if I can’t figure out what it is about those players that keeps them from developing.