Your evaluation of Sanchez's worth is right-on. This evaluation shows what a really bad mistake it was to trade Francisco Liriano in a deal, to get a starting catcher who was good, but not so much as a giant, and did not mesh with his Sanfrancisco teammates. Instead of having Liriano, (essentially another Sanchez) we have Barry "the nibbler" Zito. That one trade jetisoned both Nathan and Liriano in one swoop, and has turned out to have years of after effects that have hurt the giants both on the field and in the pocketbook. The cascading deals made necessary because of that one awful deal have yet to be fully measured. Indeed Liriano had serious downtime due to injuries, but he also always had that strikeout potential. If you look at Sanchez's career path, vs. Zito's they have been moving in the opposite direction. Zito was very good young, and has been backsliding. Sanchez on the other hand continues to improve, ie; more like the Koufax/Randy Johnson model. It is interesting to note that many of the great alltime lefty pitchers did not have high K/9IP ratios. A rotation of Lincecum, Cain, Bumgarner, Sanchez and Liriano, appeals to me more than one that has Zito penciled in.

True, mostly. But when you play Jose Guillen everyday, and let Rowand swing a bat, clearly you're lacking in position player evaluation.

It is not a matter of just evaluating pitchers, it is a matter of the Giants putting most of their eggs in the pitching basket and not in the position player basket during most of the drafts. Because the draft is a total crapshoot, needle in the hay after the first round pick, and just gets exponentially worse after the first round pick. Plus, they had Tidrow handling the pitchers expertise, then only recently added Barr to bring in position player expertise, which is why the recent drafts have been more position player heavy, relatively, in the early rounds (the Giants still is pitching-heavy overall, I believe). And to your point, I think it is easier to spot pitching excellence than hitting. If the pitcher has great repertoire, he will absolutely dominant in the minors and be able to bring that to majors, just scaled down because of better hitters. Hitters however, are mostly facing much lousier pitchers in the minors. They don't face the pitchers with all the good to great pitches because if they have that, they will be in the majors already or soon. So there is no way to detect if the hitter has that ability to hit the better pitches until he is brought up to the majors. That leads to all those AAAA hitters, you rarely hear about AAAA pitchers, either they got it or they don't.

I think this also begs the question, how Can one team be so good at evaluating pitching, and yet so poor at evaluating offense? Perhaps it's easier. Perhaps non-sabermetric pitching measures ate more valuable than non-saber offensive measures. Take K's versus RBI, for example

That start was absolutely awesome, and frankly, proof that Sanchez's upside is ACE. At 77 pitches, he was at 60 strikes IIRC, which is among the best rates I've ever heard of in my baseball fandom life. He was about as economical as a strikethrower can be. Ironic, that this happened right after a post at McC about him not being "dominant". Take that!