Major League Baseball

FARM SYSTEM'S BOUNTIFUL YIELD

Published Oct. 16, 2010 10:59 a.m. ET

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For all the talk surrounding pitcher Mat Latos' accusations that the Giants had employed late-season mercenaries to challenge his Padres for the division title, San Francisco's team wears the unmistakable aroma of home-baked bread. Seven of the Giants' major contributors have never worked for another franchise.

For all the talk of Barry Zito and his $126 million contract being left off the roster for the first round of the playoffs, favoring rookie Madison Bumgarner constituted substantial baseball news on its own. The decision made the Giants the first team in 24 years to enter the postseason with a four-man starting rotation consisting entirely of homegrown talent.

The Boston Red Sox of 1986 had Roger Clemens, Bruce Hurst, Al Nipper and Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd - ranging in age from 24 to 28. The Giants' Big Four Tim Lincecum, Jonathan Sanchez, Matt Cain and Bumgarner are 21 to 27.

By comparison, their opponents in the National League Championship Series have just one farm-raised starting pitcher, lefty Cole Hamels. Critics have accused the Phillies of being the Yankees Lite for grabbing pitching talent from less fortunate teams.

They did, in fact, take Cliff Lee for a spectacularly successful, three-month test drive last year, before trading him off to get Roy Halladay, an even higher-end model, for this season. Roy Oswalt came over from Houston at the trade deadline.

But the Phillies' everyday lineup is tribute to their scouting department. Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley all came to the franchise via the draft, and the team plucked .302-hitting catcher Carlos Ruiz - the city's beloved "Chooch" - from relative obscurity in Panama.

The Giants' homegrown core includes just two position players, rookie catcher Buster Posey and Pablo Sandoval. Closer Brian Wilson finishes off the group of seven, representing hidden treasure unearthed by the Giants' scouts. "Are you talking about your favorite 24th-round pick?" Wilson asked Bobby Evans as he spotted the team's vice president of baseball operations in mid-interview at a workout Wednesday.

Evans explained the franchise's shift in strategy over the last few years, as the Barry Bonds era receded. When Bonds was in town, the team chose to surround him with proven veterans from other clubs. Signing them as free agents, Evans said, meant surrendering draft picks to the teams that lost the talent.

When the team did well, Evans said, it either gave up critical draft picks to pay for its major-league transactions or ended up picking too low in the draft to assure an extraordinary farm system.

In an odd way, the failures of the team in Bonds' last few years, as he alternately nursed a bad knee and pursued Hank Aaron's home-run record, both reinforced the need to build through the farm system and empowered the Giants to follow the strategy.

From 2005 through 2007, Bonds' last three seasons in the game, the team scored poorly on the field and then hit a mother lode for the following year's amateur draft - No. 10 picks in 2006 and 2007, and No. 5 in 2008. Lincecum, Bumgarner and Posey all came out of those drafts.

Bonds' patron, Peter Magowan, had already started to emphasize the shift in priorities in his final two years as the team's managing partner. When Bill Neukom moved into Magowan's job last year, building on the farm system became gospel for the franchise.

Aside from being the wisest way to ensure long-term success, a strong minor-league system constitutes a smart business model. If fans invest emotionally in a club's present and future, the bond between a team and its audience can only grow.

"One of the biggest changes we've seen in the last five years is the attention that the minor leagues get," Evans said. "It's changed so much. People can watch games on the Internet. There are blogs on the teams. ... Five years ago, if a minor-league player got hurt, you could go a whole month before everyone knew. Now, people will know what's happening as soon as a player isn't in the lineup."

The Giants still have a reputation for bringing along mostly pitchers. Even before this crop, their most prominent prospects were hurlers such as Jesse Foppert, Jerome Williams, Noah Lowry and Kurt Ainsworth. The current group, however, is extraordinary.

Several great young staffs have gone to the playoffs with a Big 3 of homegrown talent, but not a fourth. Early in this decade, the A's had Zito, Mark Mulder and Tim Hudson. But their playoff rotation was always rounded out with a transplant such as Ted Lilly, Gil Heredia or Cory Lidle.

MLB officials looked through their archives and discovered that the last entirely homegrown pitching staff in an NLCS belonged to the 1976 Reds with Don Gullett, Pat Zachry and Gary Nolan. Back then, the series was only a best-of-five, and the Reds didn't need a fourth starter because they swept their opponent - the Phillies.