Posey and Bumgarner … coming soon?
Posted By Jeff Fletcher on June 22, 2009 7:38 pm
Buster Posey is going to be promoted soon, and it might be all the way to Triple-A. That’s what GM Brian Sabean said when I talked to him this afternoon at the Coliseum for a little State of the Giants. As you’ll read in that story, Sabean also said that Madison Bumgarner looks like he may be able to skip a level. Since he’s already at Double A, that can mean only one thing: his next stop could be the majors.
Aside from those items, Sabean didn’t really give me much in terms of headline-grabbing stuff. Obviously I asked him about the chances of picking up a hitter. He waffled on that one.
“We’d love to add something to the group,” he said. “How and when that happens remains to be seen. It’s not a real interesting market.”
I asked Sabean if the Giants would be inclined to go after an impending free agent: “We’ve got to find out where we are closer to the trade deadline and exactly who would be available. Unfortunately, right now there are more free-agents-to-be who are potentially available. If we went that route, it would have to be something that was affordable in terms of who we’d be willing to trade. Part of the dance, and what we’re doing right now with everybody, is you evaluate your own organization and you come up with a list of guys you would trade and a list of guys you absolutely would not trade. In terms of a rental, we’re not going to let it pain us. We’re not going to give up a heck of a lot for that.”
Sabean said that Bumgarner is one of the players who will not be available. He also implied that they wouldn’t trade any of the good young pitchers in the majors (read: Tim Lincecum and Matt Cain): “It’s our strength. It doesn’t make any sense to trade something that is so coveted by other teams.”
Of course, you can’t make a trade unless you trade something that other teams want. They aren’t just going to give you their players because you have a nice smile. My take on Cain is that the Giants should not trade him this season because they are in the race. Over the winter, though, if they still look like they have a lot of holes, they should certainly listen and see if they can’t bring back the type of boatload the Orioles got for Erik Bedard or the Rangers got for Mark Teixiera.
Back to Sabean, I asked him how “urgent” (my word) it was for Jonathan Sanchez to start pitching better: “It’s urgent in that we want him to be the fifth starter and to be successful, but we also know if it doesn’t work out, he’d be a helluva an addition to the bullpen, which he’s done in the past.”
Sabean said he thinks Sanchez’s problem is that he was rushed to the big leagues to fill a short-term need as a reliever.
“He was moved fast and he’s paying the price for that,” Sabean said. “He’s still learning on the job. He hasn’t had his growing pains in the minor leagues like most guys.”
[...] Speaking of Sanchez, might Madison Bumgarner be on his way to the bigs? We’re ready for the MadBum. Bay Bridge Baseball [...]
After watching Sanchez last night he looks better suited for middle relief than starting. He could easily have given up 8 or 9 runs yesterday if he was facing a good team actually capable of delivering clutch hits with some regularity. He was pretty much lights out for 3 innings and then the wheels fall off. My buddy who is a big Giants fan pretty much called it and said he usually runs into problems in the 4th and 5th.
If he moves to the bullpen, who do you think is the odd man out?
Jeff, if the reason why Sanchez has been inconsistent and under fire now was because he was rushed thru the minors to be a relief pitcher with the parent club, an admission by Sabean that he is the one who screwed this up too? His double talk about getting any kind of batting support is really getting stale. He should have signed someone at the Winter Meetings, now is he waiting for next years Winter Meetings??
I understand your frustration with Sabean’s double-talk, but he’s really no different from any GM. Believe me, I’ve talked to a lot of them, and they are almost all the same. They obviously aren’t going to come right out and tell you what they are trying to, so they speak in vagaries.
I did think his admission that the Giants rushed Sanchez was interesting. I think it shows that they never really thought he was going to be that good, or they wouldn’t have stunted his development that way. You think they’d have moved Cain up that quickly to make him a reliever?
Yes, that was a heck of an interesting admission by Sabean – and almost makes Sanchez’s complaining about not learning how to hold runners on (which Krukow properly castigated him about) more sympathetic.
Following your logic about him never being that good, though, what’s that say about all the hitters they’ve rushed through the minors that have been utter washouts? I’m not sure they’d put Burris in that category yet for instance, but no one in the organization denies that he’s been crazily rushed.
I think Sanchez has fallen into the trap so many power pitchers do of trying to just blow everyone away, and until he figures out that changing speeds and sightlines is the only way to get out major league hitters consistently, right now his upside is looking a lot like Felix Rodriguez. Best place for him to learn if he wants to be a starter is AAA – he can blow guys away easier, which means if he’s experimenting with actually pitching, he can recover.