Definite:

Posey C

Sanchez 2B

Probably:

Torres CF

Ross RF

Huff 1B

Questions:

DeRosa LF or 3B?

Sandoval 3B?

Burrell LF?

Uribe 3B/SS?

The breakdown: the first two are under contract. The probables are my guesses that Ross and Torres will be offered arbitration and will stay, and that Huff will decide that there is no greener grass than the vast expanses of AT&T. If we lose him, I hope we go hard after Adam LaRoche again.

DeRosa will be back, healthy and proven, in every sense except that he wasn’t a factor on the team this year due to injury. But given management’s preference for proven vets, you can figure he is penciled in for one of those slots. Hopefully he is the second-coming of Freddy Sanchez.

The fate of the next two are somewhat intertwined. The Panda will obviously be welcomed back if he has a Chris Mullin-like awakening and saves his career. If the Panda can come back strong, then DeRosa goes to left and there’s no need or room for Burrell. But if the Panda appears to be stalled or regressing, and Burrell is still on the market when this is determined, I can see him coming back, assuming he will take something around $3 million for a year and does not expect more in terms of dollars or years.

Uribe is probably the biggest question mark, though he was no more sought-after than Huff last season and had a worse season statistically than Huff. The speculation just seems to be that he will be offered more dollars/years than the Giants are going to be willing to offer. If he gets snatched by another team, the Giants will have at least one brand-new player in the starting lineup next year, unless Manny Burriss or Conor Gillaspie makes some incredible progress in the next three months.

Bench:

Rowand – will be expected to learn other OF positions to get playing time; hopefully we can trade him (assuming we eat some of his contract)

Schierholtz – OF – going to be harder to break in to the lineup than last year

Ishikawa – 1B – ditto

Whiteside – C – or some other backup. Unclear if he is in the Giants’ future, and unclear what you do to backup a player like Buster

I don’t see the Giants offering arbitration to Mike Fontenot, so they may need another utility infielder. I’m guessing that once he gets some rest and is able to reflect, Edgar Renteria will retire.

What this team SHOULD be known for is its amazing young pitching staff. The four starters who pitched in the playoffs include three first-round draft choices (Lincecum, Cain and Bumgarner) and a true “homegrown” success story, 27th rounder Jonathan Sanchez. The homegrown pitchers also include closer Brian Wilson (24th round) and prime setup man Sergio Romo (28th round). The rest of the pitching staff (with the notable exception of gold-plated free agent Barry Zito) are the typical journeymen every team has.

The real story is that good things were going to happen once the team acquired enough offense to let these studs actually win some games.

In that sense, they remind me more of the 1985 Chicago Bears, who built a ferocious defense around Mike Singletary in the early 80s but didn’t have a very good offense. By 1985, they had acquired enough offense to put up the necessary points to win some football games, and the Bears won the Super Bowl.

Hopefully, the comparison lasts for only one year, because the Bears quickly faded from contention.

The other important storyline was the call-up of Buster Posey. There’s no way this team wins the Series without his offensive contributions and all-around leadership. They took off shortly after he became the everyday catcher and they never looked back.

One hopes that the 2010 Giants are more analogous to the 1996 Yankees of Derek Jeter, who burst on the scene as a rookie that year and led a core of “homegrown” players like Andy Pettite, Bernie Williams and Mariano Rivera to the Yankees’ first World Series win in almost two decades.

BTW — the 1996 Yankees went 92-70 that year and beat the heavily favored Atlanta Braves. Sound familiar?

To get back in the starting lineup, I believe he’s going to have to convince management some time before Opening Day 2011 that he has a) lost weight and improved his fitness all around, b) gotten a bit more mature in his approach and c) fixed his swing.

But what to do with him? He is still under club control and I believe has minor league options left. Despite his high profile the past two seasons, there’s no reason the club can’t ship him out to try to shape him back up. He may simply have been rushed to the bigs too fast and may need more seasoning. It has been done before.

If you don’t think you want to start next season with the Panda at third, then it becomes even more critical that the Giants sign Juan Uribe. If they don’t, they will need to fill both left-side slots before next year.

Here is info gleaned from Cot’s Baseball Contracts:

Free Agents (meaning they are free to sign with any club):

Aubrey Huff
Pat Burrell
Jose Guillen
Guillermo Mota
Juan Uribe

Arbitration Eligibles (meaning the Giants still control their rights but the player can seek binding arbitration to set their 2011 salary. If the Giants decline arbitration they become free agents and can sign with anyone.)

Santiago Casilla rhp
Mike Fontenot inf
Javier Lopez lhp
Ramon Ramirez rhp
Chris Ray rhp
Cody Ross rf
Jonathan Sanchez lhp
Andres Torres of

Everyone else is either a veteran under contract (e.g., Barry Zito, Aaron Rowand) or have less than three years of service and are therefore still controlled by the Giants. Here’s a list of the whole team with a lot of details about their status at Cot’s Baseball Contracts.

Here’s a definition of the contract rules if you are interested.

WS hero Edgar Renteria has club option in his contract or a $500,000 buyout. They will buy him out and then he will be a free agent. He was leaning toward retirement until his monster WS.

Bottom line: the Giants are well positioned for next year. Huff is obviously priority #1 but I think he may have had too good a WS and year for us to keep him, to be honest. He’s somebody’s wet-dream DH/utility man, I believe. He only stays if we offer him good money and the other options are all losing/crappy teams.

Next priority is Uribe. I think we bring him back for another year if he doesn’t get a better offer elsewhere. He’s still youngish (31) and in great shape and we could still use him on the left side. In fact, I’m not sure why we wouldn’t offer him a two-year deal.

Burrell is an interesting question. He obviously revived his career with us and told the world he doesn’t want to DH. But is there anyone who will offer him a big contract to play the outfield? And if there isn’t much of a market, why wouldn’t we offer him decent money to come back? He’s 34 but obviously in great shape, gives us a major power threat and is really not the defensive liability he was made out to be. Update: because we have DeRosa coming off the DL to play left. Nevermind. Pat won’t be back.

Of the arb-eligibles, Sanchez is a lock, Ross is obviously a blue-chipper who I think we must sign, and you have to wonder what more Torres has to do to get a multi-year deal. The relievers are all an open question, depending on how management wants to structure the ‘pen.

Go Giants!

We all live with disappointment too. It’s just like mortality. It’s not that life isn’t great, especially compared to the alternative, but on a day-to-day basis, we must make our peace with disappointment. We don’t have enough money. We don’t have enough friends. We don’t have a good job, or any job. But we have no choice but to make our peace with these disappointments and move on.

Being a sports fan also means making peace with disappointment. Every team but one is going to end its season being eliminated from title contention. Fans of every team have to balance their enjoyment of the experience, and the highs of the season, with the inevitable disappointment that this year, it was not our year.

San Francisco Giants fans have certainly had their share of disappointment, though thankfully, it has not been as painful as the disappointment of being, say, a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The World Series loss of 2002 will always sting, and has stung every day since the Angels came back in Game 6 and stunned the Giants, forcing a Game 7 that the Giants would go on to lose. But it’s just one of those disappointments, like so many in life, that you just learn to live with. There’s really no other choice.

Then a day like today happens. November 2, 2010. The day San Francisco Giants fans woke up and could say, after 52 years of coming to terms with season-ending disappointment, not this year! We are the only team not eliminated from title contention, which means, we won!

It’s a great, but strangely odd, feeling. I think it’s just different. It’s not disappointment. It’s joy. It’s relief. It’s so different from the feeling at the end of every other season.

In a few weeks, when this all sinks in and our 2010 World Series championship is slowly starting to settle into history, it will likely all feel inevitable, and easier to understand. But not today. Today is just a day unlike any other in the history of the San Francisco Giants and their fans, the day we woke up and could say with a big, big smile, Not This Year!

Charlene Li of Altimeter Group

Charlene Li, one of my favorite social media pundits, gave a speech at the PRSA International Conference this week and then gave a “press conference” to those of us (including me) who were designated “press” for the conference.

Li said that like most analysts, she is in the midst of developing her “outlook” report for 2011, and she gave us a preview in the press conference.

The two big trends Li is watching as the year winds down are:

1. the rise of “social data” and “social search” and
2. our evolving feelings regarding privacy and permissions in social media

On social data, Li is watching to see how all the volumes of data we are generating in social media are used. Marketers and others are quickly realizing that social media users are providing reams of valuabe information about brands, trends, likes and dislikes, but are just now starting to figure out how to gather and analyze it.

On privacy and permissions, Li sees us moving away from protecting our privacy and toward managing the permissions we give web sites and our contacts. She likened the transition to what happened when Caller ID was first introduced. Peoples’ first reaction was that it was an invasion of privacy, but after awhile, as they realized that it had value, it became more about giving people useful information that reduced life’s friction.

That she had wifi access deep in the recesses of the Washington Hilton was remarkable enough, since none of the rest of us in the room had it. She apparently had an access code from one of the people in the room [I'm not making this up].

At the Washington Hilton, the only place with free wifi access is the lobby. As we were waiting for Sandra’s presentation to get on track as she dealt with a frozen computer and balky Internet access, an attendee behind me grumbled, “We paid $1,000 to attend this conference, and they couldn’t give us wifi?”

I bolted from the room [sorry, Sandra] and came up here, logged on and pulled up Sandra’s presentation on SlideShare. I’ll review it when I have a chance and can always ping her if I have a question. I was just getting ready to blast PRSA for not offering free wifi when I saw PRSA CEO William Murray across the room. So I went up to Bill and shared my complaint, and his response was simple: the Hilton wanted $200,000 for free wifi for the four-day conference.

Whaaaat??

It’s true. Bill pointed out the contract with the Hilton had been signed years ago, before ubiquitous wifi became the norm. And the Hilton, for reasons I don’t care to explore, apparently wouldn’t budge given the new realities. So PRSA is between a rock and a hard place. He said that starting next year in Orlando, they were able to negotiate free wifi into the contract and that it should be the norm in future years as well.

Why is this important? Because with the likes of Starbuck and McDonald’s providing free wifi, along with countless other locations, people have come to expect that they will be able to log-on when they want to. They don’t want to have to run to the lobby bar as I did. They don’t want to be offline in a room while someone is talking about Internet tools.

This is not a trend. This is already present reality and a given for the future. I give PRSA a pass on it this year given Murray’s explanation, but going forward, it’s a no-brainer.

Unfortunately for PRSA, this vote told me that the association is even more entrenched in its business-as-usual way of doing things than I thought. Further, it told me that a broad cross-section of the association isn’t prepared to embrace the present and future of communications and engagement.

PRSA formally created the “Leadership Assembly” last year as an acknowledgement of the need for broader input into the association’s future role in PR and communications. The Board is supposed to seek advice and counsel from the assembly, as opposed to its prior role of simply doing the legal business of a membership organization. Along those lines, the formal business of the assembly was limited to the first half of the day today, followed by a discussion of the near-term future of the PR industry in the afternoon.

As noted by the advocates of the resolution, the electronic discussion group gives the Board the ability to consult the Leadership Assembly throughout the year, but it didn’t do so. The authors, tech-savvy PR people from Boston and the Bay Area, hoped that the resolution would help move the association in that direction. It didn’t happen.

[2010 PRSA International Conference]

The voted ended a passionate and looong debate this year for and against this change. To summarize, those for the amendment felt that removing the requirement would open board leadership to a much larger pool of candidates, while those against argued that holding an APR demonstrates the necessary commitment to the profession and the society.

I voted for the change, twice actually, as I held a proxy for our chapter’s other vote. I did so at the direction of the PRSA Silicon Valley board, which voted to support the amendment.

What made this debate interesting to me is that it encapsulated many wider issues in the transformation and evolution of the PR industry. From my point of view, those arguing against the amendment (at least those who spoke or wrote publicly) were largely motivated by a desire to slow change, to affirm their support for “the way things are” and to support the APR accreditation as a symbol of PR expertise.

On the other side, those supporting the amendment seemed to be crying out for the organization to modernize, to open its leadership to a wider pool of candidates, and to recognize that “public relations” as a profession and marketing function is rapidly evolving.

In the end, I think the amendment lost because it addressed a narrow issue, the APR requirement, rather than rewriting the entire “minimum requirements” bylaw altogether. In addition to the APR requirement, the minimum requirements still call for potential Board members to have served as a chapter or section board member or, at a minimum, to have been in the profession for 20 years.

As a membership organization, the only *minimum* requirement for board service should be that the person be a PRSA member for a minimum of 2-3 years. Such a low threshold would allow anyone with a demonstrated commitment to the organization to run for office, only barring insurgents seeking for some reason to take over the organization.

Why the bare minimum? Because the nomination and election process is the proper place to vet qualifications for leadership, not the bylaws. The pool should be as wide as possible, thus hopefully turning the election itself into an opportunity to debate and discuss the future of the organization and the profession.

If there’s anyone out there worrying about the business efficacy of this organization, I recommend that you take this vote as a warning sign of a hidebound association that may be too slow to change to meet the needs of tomorrow’s PR and marketing professionals.

[2010 PRSA International Conference]