The Giants kicked off free agency by extending qualifying offers to Madison Bumgarner and Will Smith. But on day two, they did what they spent a great deal of last year doing: adding players to the 40-man roster who had been discarded by other organizations.
The new Moneyball isn’t about exploiting the market’s inefficiencies to collect overlooked players and skills, it’s about self improvement and internal discipline. Can the Giants renovate their development pipeline to make good players great and former fodder-types good? That’s the gambit they and most of the top teams employ and it’s the path the Giants have taken in order to catch up.