Giants GM Brian Sabean brings stability, championships
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- San Francisco Giants general manager Brian Sabean looked out onto the field, and, suddenly like an oncoming tidal wave, it crashed into him.
He burst into tears, covering his eyes with his fists, and finally raising his left hand in the air. He was looking back toward the field again, and still he wasn't ready.
"There's a lot of stuff that gets bottled up," Sabean told Paste BN Sports on Wednesday before Game 2 of the World Series at Kauffman Stadium, "and a lot of times you don't know what reason the cork pops."
This time, watching his team win the National League pennant last week and reach the World Series for the third time in five years, it was the emotional roller coaster of this turbulent season slamming into his heart at once.
"It's been a tough year, really challenging, when you look back," Sabean says. "It seems like crisis management ruled the day more than ever.''
The Giants' success again defies logic.
Matt Cain, their ace, won two games before having season-ending to bone chips. Their starting center fielder, Angel Pagan, missed 66 games before having back surgery. And Brandon Belt, their starting first baseman, missed 96 games with three disabled list stints.
Tim Lincecum, their two-time Cy Young Award winner, was demoted to the bullpen and entered Wednesday without a postseason appearance. And All-Star reliever Sergio Romo was stripped of his closer's duties.
They went through seven second basemen before turning to rookie Joe Panik in July.
Travis Ishikawa, started three games in the field before being installed as the Giants' everyday left fielder in the playoffs.
Yet here they are, possibly becoming the first National League team in nearly 70 years to win three Series titles in five years.
There's nothing lucky about this. It's no coincidence. They didn't buy elite free agents during the winter or mortgage their future at the trade deadline.
Their only pickup was starter Jake Peavy, acquiring him from the Boston Red Sox for two middle-tier pitching prospects.
Any team in baseball could have had Peavy, who was 1-9 with a 4.72 ERA.
The Giants were the only team bold enough to get him.
While the Detroit Tigers went after David Price and the Oakland Athletics grabbed Jon Lester, no one paid greater dividends than Peavy. He invigorated the Giants clubhouse, went 6-4 with a 2.17 ERA in 12 starts and was on the mound Wednesday.
"We knew Cain was going to be tough to replace," Sabean says. "Our reports (on Peavy) were very strong, even though he wasn't pitching up to par and the team he was on wasn't going nowhere. Quite frankly, we thought getting him here in our pitchers' park, in a pitchers' division, with one less hitter and no DH, it's got a chance to reinvigorate him."
The rest, of course, is history.
The Giants, with a slew of magnificent talent evaluators, led by former New York Yankees pitcher Dick Tidrow, and sharp executives such as Bobby Evans, John Barr, Jeremy Shelley, Yeshayah Goldfarb and Tony Siegle, have the most talented staff in the land.
Certainly, it is the most stable.
While the four teams in the National League West have fired or changed general managers since August, one team hasn't done a thing since 1996, except win, of course.
Sabean, hired 18 years ago and baseball's longest-tenured GM, has led his franchise to seven postseason berths, four National League pennants and two World Series titles.
Yet while everyone else is winning different organization of the year awards and top executive honors, the Giants win the only one they really care about.
"We win World Series," says Evans, the Giants' assistant GM and Sabean's right-hand man, who has been with the organization for 22 years. "That's the award we want to win every year."
Sabean, who has peanut vendors at AT&T Park with bigger egos than him, cringes at any notion of attention. He laughs when you ask whether he's on the banquet circuit during the winter. He can't even remember his last real vacation. The only links he knows are the sausage links he downs with a glass of red wine. Sorry, golf is not part of his repertoire.
He happens to be an architect of one of the finest franchises in sports. He has a brilliant baseball mind, understands the clubhouse culture perhaps better than any other executive in the game and knows what it takes to win.
The Giants don't have the best talent year after year, but they sure find a way of having the best team.
"We do as much work, if not more, on guys' background and how they fit into the clubhouse than all of the other analysis," Sabean says. "We think it's very important from a professional standpoint, a coaching standpoint and a team standpoint.
"We don't have a star system here. Everybody has got to be a link in the chain. And they have to accept that responsibility and pull that weight every day."
The days of Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent are over.
This team belongs to Hunter Pence. And Buster Posey. And Ishikawa. And Brandon Crawford. And there are all of the homegrown players, with 13 on the World Series roster.
Yes, as Giants manager Bruce Bochy lovingly calls them, his "cockroaches."
"It starts with Brian Sabean," Bochy says. "He's the guy who puts this club together. He's the one that goes out and fills holes when we need it."
And he was the one who hired Bochy, who one day will be inducted into the Hall of Fame.
"It's just amazing what (Sabean) has done here," says Barr, who says he has the least amount of seniority in the front office despite being hired seven years ago. "He's on top of everything. The funny thing is that everyone always calls us 'old school.' I guess it's because of the white hair on top of everybody's head."
Sabean, Evans and other front office members quietly imparted the opportunity at hand, wearing their 2010 or 2012 championship rings to Games 1 and 2. Otherwise, the Giants don't flaunt their success.
And maybe they don't want you to know it, but the truth is they are one of the most technically savvy front offices in the game. They don't just have prized scouts such as Steve Balboni, Keith Champion, Pat Burrell and Brian Johnson sitting in the stands with radar guns. They have an entire staff of analytical personnel.
"People are so naive," Sabean says. "We were here in the cradle of technology. We created all of our systems with our IT department. We have nine people working on analytics.
"Really, we think our (analytical) department is the best in sports."
Shush ... don't spread it around, but the Giants also have the best darn front office in the game, too.
They just won't tell you.
"We let our players do the talking with their play on the field," Evans says. "Brian wouldn't have it any other way."
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