In relation to previous comments: I do not see how we are better defensively in centerfield this year. Beltran had a hand injury. Trying to play with a hand injury is almost an assured spiralling downward into serious injury. I wish he were not injured, but it seems to me he did the right thing for the team and his career. When he came back with his hand at 80 plus percent he was effective. Although one would like to have the team have a big say in a players medical decisions, the final decision needs to be between the player and his doctor. Look what happened to Noah Lowry while listening to the giants associated physicians. Some excellent points have been made in the original post and in the resultant comments.

Lastly, Giants fans worry about the LOOGY is just misplaced worry. You are not really worried about spending money on a LOOGY, you are worried only because the offense is not to your standards. As I've been showing for years now, when you have a great pitching staff and good fielding, that is, great defense, you don't need a great offense to win enough games to get into the playoffs regularly. You know how to use Pythagorean, input the Giants RA then input the RS for the NL average then for teams below average. See how many wins a below average offense can win with our defense. Now plug in ZIPS for our projected lineup (without Belt) and see how good the lineup is. It is not league worse, as it basically was last season. People seem to forget what a huge drop in offense it was to lose Posey and suddenly need to start Whiteside and Stewart. The Giants lost around 6-7 wins, based on Runs Created. And even though the projections for Melky and Pagan are not that great, the lineup, as is, should produce enough to win 90-95 games with our defense, because both should be huge improvements over what we got in LF and CF last season. The offense is fine. Could it be better? Of course. But at some point you have to make hard choices over what is more important. As is, the team should win 90+ games. Had they given up Lopez to get a better hitter, the starting pitchers will lose wins that they had before because, say, Okajima is leaking runs that Lopez would not have. And would the hitter necessarily improve the team? Is that hitter more likely to perform for the Giants than Lopez would have? People are crying about losing Beltran, but they have conveniently forgot that he went missing for many weeks when we needed him. He refused to come back and be less than 100% when the team could have used even an 80% Beltran. He was holding out to the end too, the Giants, from the impression I got from the media, finally got him to go out and play at less than 100%, but by then, it was too late, the D-backs had their surge to take the lead that they coasted into the playoffs with. People also forgot that Beltran went ahead and had surgery on his knee, without Mets team approval, that took him out of the early part of the next season, in fact, he ended up missing almost 100 games. Out of the last 6 seasons, he only has one where he played more than 150 games, 2008. He missed 240 games, averaging 122 games played during that stretch. His knees are not going to get better, they can only get worse, so he would have been a huge risk to not be there when we need him. For that, we would have lost a key component of our bullpen. No thank you.

Baseball is a game of playing the percentages, which is where sabermetrics has provided a lot of insight on. What sabermetrics don't seem to understand yet is reality. magowanite hit on that with his post about sure thing. I saw similar posts and comments like this when the Giants traded Joe Nathan. The sabermetric principle on that is that relievers are fungible and easily replaceable. It took a long while for the Giants to find his replacements in Brian Wilson and Sergio Romo. I don't see how Okajima is an object lesson in not paying $4M for a proven reliever like Lopez. Okajima is being paid that little because he did that little the past two seasons. What happens when it is May and Okajima is still performing poorly? Or mid-season? You can't just go out and buy yourself a usable LOOGY, you have to trade prospects to try to find one. And as we all know, not all trades work out, so you might have to burn through at least a couple of semi-prospects in order to find your LOOGY. Meanwhile, most contending teams have more problems than just their LOOGY, they have other needs. So you can't just be burning semi-prospects in search of a LOOGY, you have to make hard choices of what you will improve and what you will let fester. People forget but in 2008, both Lincecum and Cain lost a lot of games because the relievers could not hold the game and blown wins that the two had. Shankbone reminded people that the two of them lost up to 10 wins that season, which is what drove the Giant to acquire Affeldt. The reality is that while LOOGYs and relievers can be found relatively easily, whether from other teams or your own farm system, the clock is ticking on your team's capability of making the playoffs that season. Can you spare the 2-4-6 weeks it takes (and the prospects it may take) to find your replacement reliever? You may find that reliever easily but in the meanwhile, your current bullpen has blown 3-4 wins for you and you are no longer competing. That is what the $4M is buying. This saber-logic that replacing failures is easy is very prevalent, and it affects proper prospect handling as well. Top prospects are never sure things. Installing them as the starter when you are trying to win is playing Russian Roulette with your chances of winning that season. If they fail (like Andy Marte and that SD sure thing, Sean Burroughs, did), then you suddenly is short one starter and need to trade for one, which is very expensive early in the season. Which means you just blown that season. Baseball is like an ocean liner. It is not like you can turn it around immediately. By the time do you, you are miles away from where you are hoping to get to, with the change of direction. Once the season is trashed, you have to wait another year to try to do something, it is not like simulation baseball where you can run your 1,000,000 seasons and see how a strategy plays out. The reality is that as a GM, you must try to mitigate your risk of problems for that season by planning for it pre-season, not in-season where you can only react. Lastly, Giants fans worry about the LOOGY is just misplaced worry. You are not really worried about spending money on a LOOGY, you are worried only because the offense is not to your standards. As I've been showing for years now, when you have a great pitching staff and good fielding, that is, great defense, you don't need a great offense to win enough games to get into the playoffs regularly. You know how to use Pythagorean, input the Giants RA then input the RS for the NL average then for teams below average. See how many wins a below average offense can win with our defense. Now plug in ZIPS for our projected lineup (without Belt) and see how good the lineup is. It is not league worse, as it basically was last season. People seem to forget what a huge drop in offense it was to lose Posey and suddenly need to start Whiteside and Stewart. The Giants lost around 6-7 wins, based on Runs Created. And even though the projections for Melky and Pagan are not that great, the lineup, as is, should produce enough to win 90-95 games with our defense, because both should be huge improvements over what we got in LF and CF last season. The offense is fine. Could it be better? Of course. But at some point you have to make hard choices over what is more important. As is, the team should win 90+ games. Had they given up Lopez to get a better hitter, the starting pitchers will lose wins that they had before because, say, Okajima is leaking runs that Lopez would not have. And would the hitter necessarily improve the team? Is that hitter more likely to perform for the Giants than Lopez would have?

I'm not so quick to judge the contract so negatively (I am much more frustrated by the Affeldt signing) and here's why... If you want to go on the going rate for WAR, Lopez' contract seems about right. Except for a 2009 campaign in which he logged only 11 innings, Lopez has averaged about one WAR for the last four seasons he's pitched, and if the going rate for WAR is about $4.5-5MM, then the contract is fair. Okajima himself was making nearly $3MM after three impressive seasons averaging about 2WAR/season, and was most likely in line for the big bucks before his numbers dipped sharply in 2010 and then (I'm assuming) he got hurt in 2011. Of course, someone who has followed his career more closely than I have might have a better understanding of why he's a good comparison to Lopez. But as WAR goes, the contract is not ridiculous, though considering its $4.25MM for a guy who will give us maybe 50-60 innings, on a team strapped for cash because of bad contracts, this is definitely a risk.

Good for the Yanks, finally getting somebody to keep poor Boone Logan company.

You pay the big money for a sure thing.