Sabean, Bochy receive two-year extensions<\/a>. Our General Manager and Manager were at the end of their contracts, you see, and the Giants put together a winning season despite stinking up the league, and the Powers That Be have decided that midstream is not the place to change dead horses. Or something. All I know is, they are the only guys we’ve got.\nNow, it is true that the close you follow baseball, the more complaints you will have about any GM and Manager. They will do something to piss off any fan, or rather, there are enough fans of Major League Baseball that the cumulative overlap of piss-off triggers is the whole damn plane. I’m thinking here, of a Venn Diagram, you know—this circle is the things that piss me off, and that circle is the things that piss off my father, and they overlap quite a bit but not altogether, and that circle is the things that piss off his cousin, and that doesn’t overlap quite so much, and the upshot is that everything the GM does pisses somebody off, and (this isn’t actually proved by the Venn Diagram, but is implied by the Completeness Theorem) if he is in the job for long enough, everybody will be pissed off at least once.\n
So I am aware that if they did turf Mr. Sabean and Mr. Bochy, then I would just be irritated anew by the new blood. I do know that. Mr. Bochy gets up YHB’s nose, but not so far as Mr. Alou did, probably slightly further than Mr. Baker, much further than Mr. Craig, and so on and so forth. Being a fan is being pissed off, at least in baseball, where a very good team loses sixty games a year, and wins despite having some bad players and some bad decisions. So my crankiness over this rehire is tempered at least somewhat by the knowledge that the baseline, as it were, is annoying.\n
But. Here’s the thing. Or a<\/i> thing, anyway. The Giants appear to have no plan, and no way of making a plan. They don’t seem to understand that while their cleanup hitter did have a reasonable slugging percentage of .442 (not All-Star quality, but in the Shane Victorino region), his on-base percentage was .285<\/strong>, which was the worst of any regular starter in baseball, one of only three that dipped below the .300 mark. Let me say that again: the guy who made outs at the fastest clip of anyone in baseball not only played for the Giants, but batted fourth<\/i>. It’s not that Bengie Molina can’t hit, it’s that he can’t hit clean-up. He’s a seventh-spot guy, with a little pop in his bat, but you by jingo don’t want him to have any more at bats than you can help, and certainly don’t want him following your high-OBP guys, who are in your one-two-three spots. Right? Except, we don’t have guys like that, and we don’t start them one-two-three when we do.\nI mean, Pedro Feliz can help a team if he’s batting seventh. Right? But a GM has to start with a Pedro Feliz by grudgingly admitting that on the whole, one thing and another, with the good fielding and a little power, and he isn’t very expensive, well, you can afford to have a Pedro Feliz on your team, if you’ve got Chase Utley and Ryan Howard and Raul Ibanez (and you think you have Jimmy Rollins), or if you’ve got Barry Bonds and . You don’t start with the idea that he is your all-star, the center of your offense and the foundation of your lineup. And anybody who thinks that Bengie Molina is anything other than a Pedro Feliz, a luxury you are carrying on your team for some other reasons and because all the better options are unavailable or unaffordable at the moment.\n
Now, Brian Sabean didn’t understand that about Pedro Feliz. And he doesn’t understand it about Benjie Molina. And there is no reason to think he will understand it about the next guy.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger grumbles and gripes and gr\u2026 there should be a third there, should there?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[193],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baseball"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18891,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12458\/revisions\/18891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}