SAN FRANCISCO — Brian Sabean lives across the street from AT&T Park, where he works as the general manager of the San Francisco Giants. He has had the job since 1996, before any of his contemporaries had theirs. It is hard to get away.
Sabean, 58, copes by walking every day, sometimes along the Embarcadero, sometimes at the ballpark, usually for an hour or so. He carries his cellphone but tries to take calls only from his family. He thinks about baseball but mostly wants to escape.
At the World Series, detaching is not so easy. Four hours before Saturday’s game, Sabean could still feel the sting of the Giants’ Game 3 loss. As he walked the lower concourse at the ballpark, past the foghorn and the garlic fries stand and the whiffle ball field, he spotted a reporter and marveled aloud, without breaking stride, about the strength of the Kansas City Royals’ bullpen. The job, as usual, was all-consuming.
“I never really understood, till you do this a while — and this is my 18th year — that when you think it’s getting easier, it’s actually getting harder to do the job,” Sabean had said before Game 2 in Kansas City. “Because you’re always trying to do something bigger and better. You’re always trying to reinvent yourself, reinvent the organization. It keeps you fresh.”
Sabean started in baseball with the Yankees, in high-ranking scouting positions from 1986 to 1992, the years when the team found Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera and other pillars of a dynasty.
Labels can be hard to shake in the industry, and Sabean has long been cast as an eyes-over-numbers guy, a simplistic caricature. The Giants’ proximity to the Oakland Athletics, who have an unabashed faith in metrics, makes for an easy contrast. But Sabean said the Giants had been building statistical models for more than 20 years, constantly refining and updating them.
“When they hear ‘old school,’ they don’t understand that ‘old school’ is trying to get any and every edge,” Sabean said, referring to people who misunderstand him.
He added: “We’re all looking for the misfit toys. We’re all looking for the guys we can plug in that were overlooked because sometimes, you know what, that’s what you’re down to because your payroll’s your payroll. There’s not enough players to go around, so you better be creative.”
Bobby Evans, an assistant general manager with the Giants, said Sabean had always emphasized the importance of both analytics and traditional scouting and had been eager to keep up with technology without veering to either extreme.
Larry Baer, the Giants’ chief executive, said the team had made a conscious effort to be vague, in public, about its use of statistics. The idea, he said, is to make sure players are invested in their performance and not make them feel as if their success is preordained by a front-office strategy.
“If you push it off on the players, meaning you give them the credit and the adulation and it’s not because some stat guy said this, that’s a better culture for them — because, ultimately, they do have to execute,” Baer said. “We’re not out there saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got this analytics template,’ the message being that’s the reason we’re successful.
“I think the players like that — it empowers them — and plus you want them to be able to kind of react to situations because there will be some that have never been analyzed.”
With a certain measure of pride, Sabean pointed to the efficiency of the club’s in-game methods. The Giants rank among the bottom half of teams in total infield shifts but near the top in defensive runs saved. They have little team speed but rarely run into outs on the bases.
Bruce Bochy, the major leagues’ active leader in games managed, generally makes moves that align with the statistical community’s preferences. His team ranked last in the National League in stolen bases and sacrifice bunts.
“I believe in going for the bigger inning,” he said.
Bochy and Sabean are close; they socialize often along with their wives, and each asks the other for input while also understanding boundaries. In many modern arrangements, the general manager all but dictates lineups and player usage. With the Giants, who have had just three managers in 22 seasons, the jobs are distinct.
“Brian will give Bochy input in player acquisitions, knowing that Brian has the final vote,” Baer said. “Same thing on the lineup card. Sometimes Brian will say, ‘What about this guy up top, or what about this guy down low?’ Boch will consider it, but Brian says, ‘That lineup card is yours,’ just like Boch understands that the waiver wire is Brian’s.
“But if you don’t ask, you don’t get his knowledge. The other side is just going in and telling people what to do, and that’s not good.”
Sabean said he wanted Evans to be a general manager, and he delegates a lot of responsibility to him. He also trusts another assistant, Dick Tidrow, a former pitcher who worked with him in the Yankees’ organization, on many pitching evaluations.
In an eight-year span in the last decade, the Giants drafted Matt Cain, Tim Lincecum, Madison Bumgarner and Zack Wheeler (who was traded to the Mets for Carlos Beltran in 2011) in the first round. Other first-round picks have included catcher Buster Posey and second baseman Joe Panik.
“Nobody has panic attacks when the publications don’t list us in the top 10 or 15 for prospects,” Evans said. “That’s not our ultimate goal, to be known for that. Our ultimate goal is to be known for having success at the major league level, and that’s what our fans expect.”
The Giants’ front office, largely intact for almost two decades, built playoff teams in 1997, 2000, 2002 and 2003 without winning a title. The team failed to make the playoffs in Barry Bonds’s last four seasons, through 2007, but reinvented itself as the game evolved.
“As we went into ’10, all of a sudden the game changed where it was pitching-centric, starting with the core of the staff, which is your rotation,” Sabean said. “If you get as much length as you can out of your starters — like Kansas City — you shorten the game, and if you have a competent bullpen, you should win the games you’re supposed to win.
“So all of a sudden, if you’re able to have an offense where it’s not too much to ask to score four runs a game — because you’re probably going to give up less than that — you can win. But having said that, no matter how the season turns out, good or bad, your roster’s always a work in progress. Some years it morphs into great things. Other years you can’t figure it out.”
Every other year lately, the Giants have figured it out. They won championships in 2010 and 2012, acquiring critical pieces along the way. In 2010, Sabean and his staff added Pat Burrell, Javier Lopez and Cody Ross. Two years later, they picked up Marco Scutaro and Hunter Pence.
This season, after Cain’s season-ending elbow injury, the Giants traded for Jake Peavy, who had been 1-9 for Boston. With Scutaro injured, they resisted trading for a second baseman and turned to Panik, whose strike zone discipline in the minors predicted success in the majors.
It has all worked out, again, as the Giants won Game 5 on Sunday, 5-0, putting them one win from another ring. The success has created a kind of halo over Sabean, whose first major move was so derided that he felt the need to say, publicly, “I’m not an idiot.”
In that deal, in November 1996, Sabean traded the popular slugger Matt Williams to Cleveland because the Giants could not afford to keep both Williams and Bonds. In return the Giants got four players, including a second baseman who seemed ordinary.
His name was Jeff Kent, and he went on to win a Most Valuable Player award and set the career record for home runs by a second baseman. Sabean did not expect all that, but he knew more than the critics, who have mostly gone away.
“I’ve never worried about the noise,” Sabean said, but just to be sure, he takes time every day to block it all out.
Or, at least, he tries.