Pressure on Sabean to produce

Ray Ratto - San Francisco Chronicle (SFGate)
The Giants did their bit for suicide prevention Thursday by showing Tim Lincecum and Matt Cain that they would not be pitching in front of an all-rookie infield in 2009. If you look at it that way, Edgar Renteria makes perfect sense.

But Renteria represents something different for the Giants, and no, lowering the age of the shortstop by almost a decade doesn't count.

The tip was in general manager Brain Sabean's use of the phrase "scouting and statistical analysis" in explaining the Renteria signing. That Renteria, at age 33, coming off a year in which he played like he was 53, and costing Randy Winn money, cleared all the Giants' newfound analytical hurdles makes him the test case for the Neukom World Order.

Unless there was discord among the brains in the front office - Neukom (who is already showing more hands-on than his predecessor), Sabean, Dick Tidrow, John Barr, Bobby Evans, Ron Scheuler and Jeremy Shelley - Renteria was regarded as a good idea by all the Giants. As Knuckles Schulman points out, the market was all to the seller: Emmanuel Burriss looks more second-base-ish after the fall league, and the Giants need every bat they can scare up.

Renteria is a risk, though, because he is coming off a year in which he was both thick of body and thin of stats. The argument that he was just a National League player lost in Boston and Detroit remains to be re-proven in a more spacious ballyard. He is at an age where one bad year more often than not leads to another. Plus, there is the perception that he is standing in the way of youth, glorious youth, even though it is more than fair to infer that Renteria is standing in front of nobody in the Giants' system.

He is indeed a roll of the dice, and the fact that more people were involved in the debate only puts more people at risk if Neukom decides to change the front-office roster in October.

True, with the winter meetings upon us, we may very well forget about Renteria if the Giants find that power hitter to spare Bengie Molina another year in the four-hole. We would certainly forget about it if they out-Zito themselves and win the CC Sabathia money-put.

But in the greater likelihood that neither of those things happen (and yes, cynical old poops that we are, we are discounting the notion of Randy Johnson), Renteria will be the team's signature signing in Neukom's first year. If he doesn't work out as expected and, worse, cannot be re-gifted at the trade deadline, Neukom is unlikely to call a staff meeting and blame himself.

So what we have here is Brian Sabean's biggest roll of the dice. It wasn't Barry Bonds or Barry Zito, because both of those were handled above his pay grade. It wasn't Jeff Kent, although that made his reputation. It won't be Tim Lincecum or Matt Cain, although he gets as much credit for those as he gets points off for Dave Roberts.

No, this is Sabean's big signing to date for his new boss, Neukom, a boss redistricting the organization of a team whose best years are now six years behind it.

There has always been a myth that Sabean didn't believe in baseball's more involved numbers, when in fact he wasn't a difficult sell on them at all. The flaw had always been the lack of position players in the system, and Renteria is both an acknowledgement of and a temporary fix for that. It is not, as is often portrayed, another retreat to the AARP Era, but an admission that while the problem has been addressed, it has not yet fully been repaired.

But when your contract is down to months rather than years, everything is magnified, and there are no mulligans, let alone Hillenbrands or Tuckers. Edgar Renteria is not a classic new-age signing, but he's a short-term necessity on a team that has no shortstop near the top end of the minor-league pipeline. He has to anchor a young and uncertain infield the way Omar Vizquel could have had his bat not died. And he has to rediscover his passion for the game at a time when many players start to lose theirs, or have it taken from them.

So this really is Brian Sabean's biggest signing, at least in terms of job security. Renteria is playing for Neukom's heart and mind, and the shape of the front office for years to come. Other than that, there's no pressure at all.