If you’re a Giants fan and you’re eating while reading this, stop immediately. For those general baseball fans checking this post out, you might find this extremely interesting and damn near hilarious.
ESPN’s Buster Olney conducted a poll recently where he asked “a dozen general managers” about making trades with other GMs. Below are the five poll questions.
1. Who is the easiest GM for you to make a trade with?
2. Who is the toughest GM for you to make a trade with?
3. Who is the most open, as you go through the process of making a trade?
4. Who is the biggest poker player, as you go through the process of making a trade?
5. Of the other 29 general managers, who would you hire to be your GM?
As Olney points out, the results were fascinating – or nauseating for Giants fans.
The point of the exercise was not to rip anybody; rather, it was merely to get some sense of the style of various general managers. Without a doubt, however, the GM who got hammered in a way I never expected was the Giants’ Brian Sabean, for one simple reason — rival executives say they cannot get him on the phone. They cannot get him to return messages. In a couple of cases, some GMs say they don’t even bother calling Sabean, they just go straight to assistant Bobby Evans.
The feeling of the other GMs is that beyond the issue of simple etiquette — “It’s just flat-out disrespectful to not return a call,” said one GM — Sabean isn’t putting himself in position to hear trade ideas that could benefit the Giants. “What happens if somebody calls to offer Brock for Broglio?” said one GM. “That’s what I get nervous about — what if the other team is shopping a really good player and he gets traded without me getting involved? That’s why I return all calls.”
In 14 years (dear Lord, has it been that long?), a general manager is going to have some ups and downs. It’s not realistic for a GM to have never been burned by a signing or a trade. But Sabean’s resume reads more like a horror script than someone who has kept his job longer than any other current GM in Major League Baseball.
You want bad trades? Try Jeremy Accardo for Shea Hillenbrand and Vinnie Chulk, or Russ Ortiz (in his prime) for Damian Moss and Merkin Valdez, or of course, the mother of all bad trades: Joe Nathan, Fransisco Liriano and Boof Bonser for one miserable year of A.J. Pierzynski (and cash!).
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