Last week, the San Francisco Giants off-season from hell saw yet another name choose the greener pastures of New York City over the City by the Bay. Former General Manager and President of Baseball Operations Brian Sabean announced that he was taking a position as a consultant with the New York Yankees, leaving a similar role he had with the Giants after 25 years with the team.
The move shocked Giants fans in two different ways. For some it was shocking to see the key leader of the Giants three World Series titles in 2010, 2012 and 2014 drift away so silently into the night. Others were shocked to learn that Sabean was even with the team at all.
Wait, I thought the Giants moved off of Brian Sabean after the 2018 season and replaced him with current President of Baseball Operations Farhan Zaidi?
Yes, that is true. But rather than tell Sabean to hit the road, the Giants instead reduced his role to be more or less a consultant, and for the past four years has been acting as a sound board and extra voice in the room in the Giants pre-draft process. It was a role that, listening to Sabean describe it, may have been below his talents.
Free from the shackles of his Giants employment, Sabean was on a bit of a mini-media tour last week, appearing on MLB Networks High Heat with Chris’s Russo, and on 95.7 The Games Willard and Dibs, and took those chances to sound off on his time with the Giants and how it all ended.
Below are a few quotes he had on High Heat and Willard and Dibs. Bolding is mine, and some of the quotes have been edited for clarity.
On His Exit From The Giants
I was seeing that I was becoming less relevant in the big picture. I still have the same passion for the game. And I still wanted to contribute mentor get back so to speak. But perhaps it wasn't happening here to my liking. When my contract ran out. You know, was very fortunate to put in a call to (Yankees President of Baseball Operations Brian Cashman) at length about how I could rejoin the club and we discussed it and (Owner Hal Steinbrenner) approved it and you know, it's good to be back in and have the face time… I guess people because that wasn't in the limelight they thought I disappeared. I didn't. I guess that's the irony about coming to a team wants and needs you.
This was from his appearance on High Heat. It’s not hard to read between the lines here. Sabean felt left out by the Giants current front office regime, and he wanted to go somewhere where he would not feel left out. His last history with the Yankees, plus his relationship with Cashman, made New York and easy destination for him.
Sabean has a right to feel scorned. He was kept on to do a job that it seemed that the Giants would not let him do.
But a change was needed, and the Giants wanted to find someone with that “Next Gen Thinking” to help the Giants catch up with the rest of the league. The Giants viewed Sabean as Past Gen Thinking. Moving on made sense at the time. Keeping him around as an extra voice in a front office brought in to fully replace his style of baseball was always a precarious fit.
He added to that sentiment on Willard and Dibs.
We had a good thing going. I have no axe to grind. It became a situation with where for whatever reason that I was becoming less relevant, and I'm still a competitor. I still have a lot of passion for this game and want to contribute.
Keeping Sabean on board after his removal was again, a bizarre fit. Think of it as your current girlfriend keeping her ex-boyfriend around to offer advice on how to date her. It creates an awkward situation with a person who you may not want to hear from to begin with because your ways are what got you replaced.
On Analytics And How The Game Has Changed
If the Giants moved on because the belief was that Sabean was not in touch with the modern day movement to analytics, someone forgot to tell Sabean that. When asked about that on Willard and Dibs, he had this to say:
(If) you take a step back and you look at what we did, the three and five years or just specifically 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016, we were playing against the field of Major League Baseball, and lord knows there was a diversity of thought and a lot of organizations are especially leaning towards the analytics world. So I would ask this question, how in the hell did we have the success we did against the field, or people that were operating in this fashion if we weren't doing this? We did a lot in house but we're in the cradle of technology with Silicon Valley down the street.
The idea that the Giants were some caveman like franchise that built their dynasty on the back of only gut thinking is definitely not accurate. Bruce Bochy has even said in the past that, despite his label as an “old school manager” that he had his own set of data that he was using.
But baseball still changed a lot from when the Giants last won a World Series in 2014 to the end of the 2018 season when the Giants moved off of Sabean and Evans. The Giants clearly believed that, despite the analytical knowledge Sabean, Evans and Bochy brought to the table, more was needed.
Whether that was the right assessment for the Giants to make is yet to be determined.
If the Giants were looking for full buy in of this new age thinking from the front office, it’s possible they were never going to get that from Sabean, as later in that same statement he added this:
The one thing I'll say is that the world that we're living in now with the current game, and I have no ill intent, but this is a fact, the game has been screwed up so much, by perhaps the new age ways that we had to change the rules of the game. So that riles me up. It is extremely upsetting that the overcorrection ended up being where it's almost unwatchable as a fan, or that the games turned into these now famous or infamous three (true) outcomes.
And to a degree, Sabean is right. Next year, Major League Baseball has made the decision to ban the shift, a welcome move to combat the difficulty of generating offense. The issue is that such a rule change became needed.
On Bruce Bochy
While Sabean was phased out after 2018, Bochy was given an extra victory lap year, though as Sabean said on in High Heat, that may not have been the case.
I think looking back, I don't want to speak for him, but perhaps, you know, he didn't go out on his own terms. I think as he did step back and travel through our minor leagues and fill out a passion for the game, he was going to get an opportunity to kind of doing his thing with somebody that understands what it was about being associated with a Bruce Bochy managed team, and I knew he had one foot back in.
This might be the statement that haunts the Giants the most this year. It’s not unusual for a new general manager or president of baseball ops to “want their guy” when taking over a new team. When Farhan arrived with the Giants, he was tasked with an awkward situation of what to do with Bruce Bochy. The Giants were in a sorry state, and a full reset was being asked to take place. The Giants were a team in transition, which Webster's dictionary defines as “a change or shift from one state, subject, place, etc. to another.” To make a full transition, the Giants could not have one foot stuck in the past.
With Bochy's contract set to expire after the 2019 season, it seemed that the Giants had hit a perfect spot to execute that transition, and Bochy stepped aside, doing Farhan a solid by not making the transition more difficult that it was already set to be.
Should the Giants once again struggle while Bochy's Rangers have a successful season, it’s going to be very tempting to use that development as yet another reason why the Giants may need to consider moving off of the current tandem of Farhan and Gabe Kapler.
Sabean said multiple times that he did not have an axe to grind with the Giants over how his departure was handled. And while that may be true, Sabean isn’t exactly leaving behind a bouquet of flowers either.
I would not classify Sabean's comments about the Giants as a damning indictment of their current process. But during this dismal off-season straight out of hell, these comments are not going to make fans suddenly feel warm and fuzzy about the ones tasked with rebuilding the Giants in the wake of the dynastic years that Sabean and Bochy had.
When making a transition to the future, the worth thing that can happen is the creeping in of doubt. But with the Giants seemingly no better off now than they were after 2018, and the architects of the last run of success now working elsewhere and looking very much ready to win baseball games, I can’t blame the doubt from creeping in.
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