I've been reading this blog for a few months and this is the worst post I've read here. Fans want to see their team win a World Series. The Giants were trying to accomplish that goal. They had the BEST (by far) player in the game and he was getting old so the time to try to win was NOW. "The Giants decided that after the 2003 season they would build a team to help Barry Bonds win the World Series." That's a good strategy. They had 100 games and made it to the World Series behind Bonds and Schmidt. They were both coming back so if you add some great players to their team there was every reason to believe that they could win a World Series soon. You could argue and say that they overachieved and they really had no chance of repeating but it still wasn't a bad strategy. This is the really crazy statement of this post:
"By catering to a superstar rather than the fans, San Francisco not only won't win a World Series for their star slugger, they've set themselves up to be poor for years to come." They catered to the superstar by trying to win the World Series. Awesome. It's not like he pulled a Jeff Bagwell and demanded that they sign Brad Ausmus. He let them improve the team and try to win a World Series. I'm sure fans were devastated. How dare they try to win a world series for the wrong reason?

Jeff Bagwell never demanded that the Astros sign Ausmus. That is asinine.

The Giants signed a bunch of very, very old players (that weren't that great to begin with) and brought along zero good young players. The AJ Pierzynski trade was an awful trade designed to win right away.

You can argue that some of their trades were bad but that doesn't mean that they had the wrong intentions. They wanted to win now which made sense given the age of their nucleus. That makes sense and it's crazy to criticize them for "catering to a superstar."

Sorry if the Bagwell example is a bad one. I thought I remembered reading that somwhere but the point is that Bonds never made such demands.

Bagwell did, in fact, make his feelings about Ausmus clear.

This is a wrongheaded post; one can say that the Giants erred in mortgaging their future to win now, but to say that was "catering" to Bonds is silly. The Giants made a calculation that this route was their best opportunity to win. Given that the Giants have never won a WS since the move west, going all in while being able to benefit from the greatest hitter in baseball history doesn't seem a bizarre plan. It may have been error, and some of the moves within that strategy have absolutely been error, but the thought that the organization put what was best for Bonds ahead of what was best for it is beneath this site.

There is an unfortunate tendency to attribute as many negative qualities as possible to those we don't like. With Bonds, we've moved from "he's not nice to people" to "he cheated" to "he cheated not because he's competitive but because he's selfish" to "he's so selfish that the Giants have made moves only for him."

There will come a day where people will be embarrassed about much of what they've written on Bonds. It's just beneath the level of intelligent people.

I'm somewhere in the middle on this one. Trying to build a win-now team around Bonds and Schmidt is a reasonable strategy, but I do think the Giants went too far. Plus, they made too many bad choices; players like Alfonzo and Grissom were not going to help anybody win a title.

I'd argue that, even if you're trying to win immediately, you still have to keep an eye on the future. And, if you decide to invest all your resources in middle-aged or older players, you'd better sign the right ones. Otherwise, you don't win now AND you're screwed for the future. Which is where the Giants find themselves, whether it was Barry's idea or not.

Sabean's main problem is that he has a pretty bad history of signing borderline replacement-level players for way too much money:
Neifi Perez
Michael Tucker
Jason Christiansen
and that doesn't even account for the barely defensible (players who were probably MLB-caliber, but not worth $5+ million/yr):
Marvin Benard
JT Snow
Edgardo Alfonzo
or the deals that (kind of) worked out:
Omar Vizquel (until next year, when he'll be one of the oldest SS ever)
Mike Matheny (last year)
Jose Cruz, Jr. (until he dropped the FB in the playoffs)
Brett Tomko (okay 4th starter)
Matt Morris (as long as he's a 3rd/4th starter)

Yes, David lost his way on the post. We al have a bad day once in a while.

How trying to a World Series by building around, not only the best play of his era, but possibly the best player of all time, amounts to catering to that player rather than the fans is an argument that is so inane it defies analysis. The Giants nearly won with that player in '02. The strategy was not in any sense an unreasonable one.

Nothing's more fashionable than beating up on Barry Bonds (though not, say, Jason Giambi), so even good basbeall analysts produce silliness like this.

I never claimed this was Barry's idea. My criticism isn't of Bonds, but of an organization that put more effort into winning while Bonds was there than by preparing for the future. Given the age of the players they tried to put on the field, the injuries they've seen over the last two years were almost inevitable. They probably could have done as well putting a bunch of 23 year olds behind Barry, and then having a chance to win once Bonds was gone and the youngsters started to mature. Instead, they took a strategy that if it failed, doomed them to many years of mediocrity.

This is a much more reasonable take on the Giants choice, but I didn't draw this inference from the original post.

"They probably could have done as well putting a bunch of 23 year olds behind Barry, and then having a chance to win once Bonds was gone and the youngsters started to mature. Instead, they took a strategy that if it failed, doomed them to many years of mediocrity."

To some extent, I disagree. The Giants ended 2002 with virtually no position talent in the minors, and very little under-30 talent in the majors. They would not have done as well putting their 23-yr-old talent behind Bonds (except on the mound, and we all know how volatile young pitching talent can be). They might have done OK if they'd signed all the right minor-league free agents and spring NRIs, but I doubt that anybody they could have obtained for free would have matched what Cruz, Durham, Alou, and Vizquel have given them.

Further, in years past, the Giants had a good record at keeping people on the field - c.f. Ellis Burks. (How much of that was Dusty Baker and how much was the training staff is up for debate, but judging by Dusty's record in Chicago ...) If any team could mitigate the risks of an old lineup, it was the Giants.

I believe the Giants made a calculated choice, one that they felt gave them the best chance of a Series title before Bonds' contract expired, and one they knew was risky. It fell apart on them (and they made mistakes in the implementation, which are driven home with every scintillating Liriano performance), but saying they weren't catering to the fans makes you sound "mistaken in your mind".

I probably should have made the post more about short term vs. long term success. One of the problems with going for the short term success and failing is that you run a good chance of hurting attendance. Look what happened in Baltimore.

In a way, Sabean's strategy reminds me of the Detroit Lions during the Barry Sanders era. The Lions had fair-to-middling success largely because of Barry. And because of Barry, they didn't feel much pressure to build the rest of the team. As a result, they wasted one of the finest talents in NFL history.

Too often, Sabean has settled for mediocrity in his complementary players (Benard, Alfonzo, Matheny, Snow). Either he drastically overvalued the talent he was acquiring, or he believed he could get by with mediocrity at other positions because he had true excellence at a few (Bonds, Schmidt, and formerly Nen).

On another issue, I would urge "Baseball Musings" posters to take a deep breath before writing, and try to keep a civil tone. Whether or not you agree with David, he does his best to observe the sport from a rational, objective point of view. We should carry on the dialogue in the same spirit.

John, good point.

David, I just want to add that I really enjoy this blog and I think you do a great job with it. I disagreed with this post so I decided to write something but in rereading it I realize that I wasn't quite civil enough. Thanks for the blog and keep it up.

How different would people feel if Sabean had not made the horrible Pierzynski trade? If Liriano was in the rotation and Nathan closing games, I think there would be a different attitude about the team.

It just goes to show how much can turn on failure to adequately evaluate and/or acknowledge the talent you have... that is Sabean's failing moreso than his bad luck with all the AAAA players (Linden, Niekro, Ellison, Merkin Valdez, Hennessey, Correia, etc.) that haven't quite panned out.