How Sabean and the Giants go to WAR

Just over a week ago, Chris Quick at Bay City Ball put together a nice post on the Sabean Years. It was pretty interesting, and certainly worth reading through. In a nutshell, Chris was taking a look at how Brian Sabean has constructed his rosters over his tenure, beginning in 1997. The idea was simply to group them in three year intervals -- he used groups of 3 years apiece, starting with 21-23, 24-27, and so forth, going up to 42+ -- and compare each age group by Wins Above Replacement (WAR).

I probably don't have to tell you that it was no great revelation that Sabean's rosters were shaped as such that they were leaning heavily on older players. His best group was those players aged 33-35. If you didn't know the Giants, and you didn't have an idea how Sabean prefers to operate, this maybe would have come as a surprise. But, assuming you're a Giants fan, which many of my readers are, I don't think it's a stretch to say this conclusion was expected. The performances of Stan Javier, Ellis Burks, Ray Durham, Randy Winn, and most recently Aubrey Huff have really paid off for Sabean -- let's hope Andres Torres continues this wonderful trend in 2011, his age 33 season.

To illustrate that this type of roster construction isn't typical, that it is in fact unique to Sabes, I'm going to show you some WAR Grids (created by Joshua Marciel) from Fangraphs. WAR Grids are the latest tool at Fangraphs, officially introduced today by David Appleman.