WBC and the 2009 San Francisco Giants

Forget Spring Training. The World Baseball Classic opened in the wee hours this morning when defending champion Japan hosted the best nine baseball players so far produced by a country of 1.2 billion people. I can't imagine baseball catching on in China, but 4-0 is a competitive result, and with 1.2 billion people, you never know.

The WBC has the potential to be the most exciting international sporting event second only to the World Cup. With representation from the six habitable continents and passionate fans on three of them, the event lives up to its world billing. And as long as Fidel clings to life, any contest with the potential for a USA v Cuba championship is worth watching.

Alas, it is an unlikely showdown. While the double-elimination format for the group stages is an improvement on the round robin style of the inaugural WBC, the single game semi-finals and final are statistically coin tosses. On ther side, this means that over half of the sixteen entrants are contenders. The USA, Japan, Cuba, Mexico, South Korea, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and even Canada have a conceivable shot at the title.

I have tickets to the finals in LA in three weeks, though due to my new itinerary I will not be in attendance. Fortunately I will be passing through baseball crazed Panama and Nicaragua during the tournament, and I look forward to seeing how much interest the WBC generates in Central America.



For the first time since 2004, I will not be attending the Giants opening day at Willie Mays Plaza and McCovey Cove. Strangely, this is the first year I am a season ticket holder. I am just too far away to make back for the first week of April. Thanks to Al Gore and his world wide web, I can still deliver my pre-season analysis from abroad.

The Giants surprised me last season. I thought a best case scenario for that club would have been 70 wins. They won 72. 2008 was the start of a rebuild that if done correctly will take another five seasons, and the 72-90 was an over achievement considering the circumstances. Tim Lincecum´s 2.62 ERA and 265 strike out year won him the Cy Young in his sophomore campaign jumps to mind. A couple of veterans, Randy Winn and Bengie Molina had career years and rookies Fred Lewis, Pablo Sandoval, and Emmanuel Burriss outperformed expectations. They combined to keep what could have been an historically atrocious offense merely miserable.

The team also benefited from lucky run distribution. With one of MLB's worst bullpens, the 2008 squad still managed to go an NL best 31-21 in one run games.


With significant upgrades in the bullpen, a grizzled Randy Johnson, and a league average shortstop to replace an offensive black hole, there is no doubting the 2009 squad will be better than the 2008 team. The roster looks about 10 wins better on paper.

On paper last year's squad should have won 67 games, and on paper we can see that our two young pitching studs both were in the top ten of pitches thrown last year. Pitchers tend have comedown years after bearing such heavy workloads.

Infield defense is also a huge question mark. A declining Edgar Renteria who reportedly has minimal range to his left, a ball of lard (with soft hands) in Pablo Sandoval whom no scout considers a legitimate MLB third baseman, and a pick of rookies on the keystone mean we could be watching a lot of balls puttering into the outfield this season.

And don't forget the luck. Should this year's team be as snake bit as last year's team was lucky, the Giants could be looking at another 72-75 win season. I'm going to say 78-84, good for third place in the NL West.

The organization as a whole is on the right track. The Giants are finally spending money on the most cost effective returns in the baseball universe, best available talent in the first round of the draft. They are also signing hyped prodigies in the Dominican Republic, stepping up international scouting, and committing more manpower and resources to their domestic scouting operations.

The results are starting to percolate up through minor leagues. The Giants had the 2008 Pitcher of the Year in three different levels of the minors, in addition to 2006 draftee Tim Lincecum´s Cy Young. Scouting magazine Baseball America ranked the Giants farm system as the fifth best in baseball, the highest ranking the organization has ever received.

But at the same time Sabean keeps adding bad contracts to the big club. Last year's 60 million to a tick above average Aaron Rowand made no sense during a rebuild. This year's 18.5 million to Renteria is in part attributed to bad timing. Though with the Giants the only club interested, a few months wait could have netted Renteria for a year at the five million range, similar to what they A's did with the other Colombian shortstop on the market this winter, Orlando Cabrera. Meanwhile, the 100+ million owed to a guy who will never again be more than a back of the rotation starter is the albatross that will rot on the ownerships' purse strings for another five years

By then a few of the half-dozen heralded prospects will emerge as the next crop of homegrown stars San Franciscans haven't seen the likes of since Will Clark and Matt Williams in the 80's.

It will be a long wait.