Who Else's Fifth Starter Has A Cy?

Ring in Boxing Day by celebrating the arrival of Randy Johnson to your San Francisco Giants. The Big Ugly (can I still call him that?) gets $8 million for one year.

The lanky lefty will ensure the Giants rotation is 60% Cy Young winners.

Maybe we can melt a couple down and fashion a Silver Slugger or two.

Fool's Gold Crappy Substitute For Real Kind

As those weirdos across the pond say, Happy Christmas. Accept this early bounty of gifts, in the form of links, from your friends at OBnB. While the Yanks ponder offering a long-term deal to Danny Almonte, us fans of mere mortal (okay, incompetent) franchises are left to review lists of mythical prospects that we may or may not ever actually see on the television.

Okay, so I'm a little bit bitter about the Mark Texeira deal. (So is this guy, and he actually matters.)

The good news is that there are a couple of nice recently published breakdowns of the Giants minor league system.

Alex Eisenberg at Baseball-Intellect has a Giants top 15 prospect list, found here and here, that includes fantastic videos of the team's top prospects.

Meanwhile, the great John Sickels at Minor League Ball released his top 20 Giants prospects list this morning, complete with the snarkiness of SportsNation commenters.

And speaking of SportsNation, the fans continue to rank the prospects at McCovey Chronicles. They're all the way down to 22, but it looks like those crazed McCoven are going to keep voting until they get to J.R. Phillips.

Go ahead and enjoy those. I think I'm going to go start a Manny Ramirez rumor.

(By the way, Giants propagandist Chris Haft posits that the logjam the Teixeira signing creates in the Yanks lineup may bear some dredges in a trade possibility.)

FU Fine Reaction to WBC (and Jeff Passan)

In a column today, Yahoo's Jeff Passan opines that American players simply don't have as much national pride and that is why talented player after talented player is turning down Team USA manager Davey Johnson's desperate recruiting pleas.

Among those expected to decline an invitation is our own Tim Lincecum, otherwise known, quite literally, as The Franchise.

It would seem that Passan's assertion that Lincecum, Cole Hamels, Josh Beckett and other WBC party poopers are just un-American is a bit simplistic. I mean, those guys all seem decent enough, right? Guys who gave it all for championships and are pretty much beyond reproach in the effort department. They don't have a Bondsian, Cobb-esque stigma that would make it seem like they're all about themselves, others be damned.

Well, Jeff has an interesting perspective. Here's another perspective, which I'd like to dub "The Right One." If you were one of the 18 to 24 solid major league pitchers in 2005 and you pitched for your respective country during the '06 WBC, well, chances are you weren't as good in 2006. And, perhaps most importantly, many didn't recover at all.

In a completely unscientific sample, I present...

"Good Pitchers Who Were Not So Good After the 2006 WBC" (Catchy, huh?)

Jake Peavy: Which one of these seasons is not like the other? Peavy remains the poster boy for post-WBC traumatic suck syndrome. His meteoric rise into this generation's Kevin Brown (no knock on your personality, Jake) was severely curtailed by his workload for Team USA in 2006.

Although he pitched over 200 innings in 2006, his ERA shot up from 2.88 in '05 to 4.09 that year, and he pitched with shoulder discomfort the entire season. Peavy's sublime talent and overall build won the war of attrition, eventually, and he came back in 2007 to win the Cy Young. Some, however, weren't as lucky...

Chad Cordero: Cordero was coming off a stellar season as a full-time closer for the Nationals, posting a 1.82 ERA and racking up 47 saves. His 2006 saw that ERA shoot up into the 3s and his decline continued into 2007, when he battled injuries. Cordero tore a labrum in early 2008 after struggling with his velocity, and is currently a a free agent.

Bartolo Colón: Here's a good example of a patriotic foreigner who gave it all for his country. The 2005 Cy Young winner (seriously, look), Colón has been completely awful since his stint for the Dominican Republic. He's compiled a 5.50 ERA in just 194.6 innings combined over the last three seasons after throwing for 200 in seven of the eight seasons prior.

After pitching on an incentive-laden deal with the Red Sox, Colón is hoping to land another Missouri contract for 2009.

Freddy García: García had been prone to lapses in consistency, but overall, was a horse of a pitcher, amassing 200 innings pitched in five of his first six seasons through 2005, to go along with a 3.93 ERA in that timeframe, including a 3.87 in '05 with the White Sox. After? 4.79 in the 289.3 innings he's managed to pitch over the last three campaigns with three different teams while struggling with shoulder injuries.

The 33 year-old García is currently seeking work.

Dontrelle Willis: Permanent WBCitis doesn't just afflict 30 somethings negatively. Coming off a brilliant 2005 in which he finished second in Cy balloting, the 24 year-old Willis manned up for the Jeff Passans of the world and participated in the WBC. The herky-jerky lefty has never been the same.

The Bay Area native is working to get his career back on track with the Tigers after spending a bulk of the season in the minors...

A couple of pitchers from the WBC came back fine, namely Carlos Zambrano and Johan Santana. But the list is no longer than those who regressed considerably from 2005, many (Estaban Loaiza, J.C. Romero, Huston Street) of whom I didn't list above.

As for the notion of mandatory pitch limits in the WBC, I'll leave you this comparison: 65 pitches in Scottsdale against the A's split-squad team in close quarters with the trainers and coaches that know you well is slightly different than the same number of heaves in a high-pressure competition. I'd hope the body of evidence above proves that.

So, sorry, Jeff, Davey Johnson can't have Timmy. And, while I'm at it, he can't have Matt Cain.

None of them, however, are unpatriotic. They're smart.

P.S. We'll gladly donate Randy Winn again.

Where Are They Now? (Hint: It Rhymes with Fatlanta)

Remember Lance Niekro, the Travis Ishikawa of a few years back? The kid with the famous surname bucked the family business and got into hitting. The first base prospect that never really developed but got a big league shot anyway because, hey, we can't sign a 63 year-old Andres Galarraga to another contract, right?

Anyway, after a brief retirement, he's back. As a knuckleballer.

Niekro, who as recently as 2006 was vying to become the Giants' everyday first baseman, is exiting a brief retirement from baseball and will attempt a comeback at age 30 as a right-handed knuckleball pitcher for the Atlanta Braves.

The Braves have signed Niekro to a minor-league contract and will bring him to spring training to see if he can extend the legacy of his late father, Joe, and his uncle Phil and make his living floating baseballs to major-league hitters.

As for all players trying to make a mid-career position switch, I'll be rooting hard for the guy. The fact that he's a former Giant and a knuckleballer makes it way cooler.

Dirty Is Filthy; Giants In On Wiggin...ton

With fantasy season around the corner, fake GMs are emerging from various fake winter meetings in the far recesses of basements everywhere to find a whole new round of 2009 statistical projections. Among the most discussed of these projections are those of our very own Jonathan Sanchez. Bill James, the Godfather of Sabermetrics himself, pegs Sanchez as a 3.90 ERA / 1.40 WHIP pitcher next year. And while James's prognostications tend to be the most optimistic, all the systems peg Sanchez as a particularly unlucky pitcher in 2008 and who stands to improve as chance factors such as BABIP (batted average of balls in play) normalize and as the 26 year-old improves with experience.

Last month, FanGraphs put together an even wonkier breakdown of Sanchez's 2008 season for the die-hard statheads. Among the highlights:

On the bright side, Sanchez struck out almost a batter per inning over 158 innings – not an easy feat. Despite not throwing terribly hard (his fastball averaged 91 MPH), he showed a remarkable ability to induce swings-and-misses – in fact, batters swung and missed at 10.9% of his Sanchez’s pitches, the 9th highest total in baseball. Pitchers who induced higher rates of swings-and-misses were a who’s who of major league baseball’s best pitchers: CC Sabathia, Scott Kazmir, Ryan Dempster, Johan Santana, Cole Hamels, Edinson Volquez, and John Danks. That’s some elite company.

It seems that other GMs are certainly on to something as they continue to try to bamboozle and hoodwink Sabes into giving the kid up. Last season may turn out to be, on the surface level, the worst Dirty ever has.

Wigginton Update: The tireless Tom Dierkes has the Giants in on the bidding for Ty Wigginton's services, according to a number of sources. It seems that Sabean was kicking some said tires on Wigginton via trade ahead of last week's non-tender deadline, as well.

Extreme Utility Player Makeover

As I mentioned a couple days back, last night's non-tender deadline bore some potentially intriguing fruit, including a very attractive option in Ty Pennington, er, or Ty Wigginton, rather.

The 'Stros attribute the move solely to the financial crunch, and, given that there's no reason not to believe them, this pickup would be a step up from your run of the mill reclamation project.

Did I mention that Wigginton plays third, second, first and even outfield in a pinch? Did I also mention that he can hit for power? And he's even from the right (left) coast, so in the first time he explores free agency as a player of stature, there's presumably an interest to come out West.

Please Santa Sabes, don't sign Rich Aurilia, God bless him. Tell ole' Billy Boy to pony up a few mill more and get this guy. Two years. It's a good thing.

Other non-tender names that would intrigue me: Takashi Saito, Chris Burke, and Daniel Cabrera. Find the full list of non-tenders here.

Unit and Giants May Be Ugly Enough For One Another

Randy Johnson is zeroing in on the Giants as his preferred landing spot, according to John Shea.

Randy Johnson is being wooed by both Bay Area teams. He seems to prefer the Giants.

"Randy's really interested," one of his agents, Barry Meister, said Thursday, the final day of the winter meetings. "We made a check list of everything that's important, and San Francisco checks off on every box. They're in the National League. They'll be competitive. They train in Arizona.

"San Francisco has a lot of appeal."

Brian Sabean seems to be biting, saying he'd consider a one year deal.

With Noah Lowry a massive question mark and the back-end of the rotation being in less than stellar shape, a one-year deal may not be a bad idea.

Plus, it gives the marketing department, long since upset with the lack of milestones to celebrate with the departure of Barry Bonds, something to look forward to. Best of luck on the "It's 300 Wins, Who Cares If Most Of Them Came With Teams You Hate?" mini-season ticket package.