Dayton, More?

To: David Glass, Owner, Kansas City Royals

From: Rany Jazayerli, Fan, Kansas City Royals

Dear Mr. Glass,

Hi. We’ve never met, though I imagine our paths have crossed on more than one occasion. I know who you are, obviously; you might know who I am, but only because of that little stink I caused in your front office earlier this summer when I had the audacity to be critical of certain members of the organization.

So I guess I should start off by making it clear that you were not one of the targets of my criticism, and in fact, you might be the one member of the front office that I have not been at all critical of in the last three years.

I must admit, that wasn’t always the case – certainly not during the Allard Baird era in Kansas City, not after multiple sources laid bare what was happening behind the scenes. If you’re honest with yourself, I think even you’ll admit that you and your son interfered with baseball operations on many an occasion, and with an almost uniformly bad outcome.

Whether it was nixing a trade of Mike Sweeney to the Angels which would have brought the Royals several top prospects; or cutting the draft budget at the last minute, which forced your team to draft a bunch of college seniors and then offer them $1000 to sign; or whether it was famously giving Baird 36 hours to move Jermaine Dye, resulting in the disastrous Neifi Perez trade, just a few months after you vetoed a trade of Dye to the Blue Jays for a rookie named Vernon Wells – let’s be honest, much of the blame of the Allard Baird era can be laid at your feet. (And the three incidents above are just a sampling; there are other, even more egregious examples of meddling that I have multiple sources for.)

But since you hired Dayton Moore over three years ago, you have been, dare I say it, a model owner. You have opened your checkbook repeatedly, not just to sign major league free agents, but to sign high-priced amateur talent, both in the draft and on the international market. You have given Moore the financial flexibility to hire as much front office talent as he felt he needed, a luxury that was on full display when Moore hired the well-respected Mike Arbuckle, who had been in the running to replace Pat Gillick as the GM in Philadelphia, to a job position that didn’t even exist – Arbuckle’s scouting eye was deemed valuable enough that he was worth creating a job for.

And most importantly, you have empowered your GM to run the organization without interference. They say that in business, success has two ingredients: hire the right people, and then stay the hell out of their way. For whatever reason, too many businessmen – and we’re talking about businessmen successful enough to be able to afford a baseball team – seem to forget this simple rule when it comes to building a major league organization. But for the last three years, you have followed this rule to the letter. Two years ago, when I first started this blog, I wrote a positive review of your new approach to ownership. Despite the team’s struggles since, I stand by my conclusion that you have become a net positive force in the owner’s box, and I hold you essentially blameless for the disaster that the 2009 season has become. This isn’t a popular position to take among the fan base, trust me.

So I hope that in reading the following, you keep in mind that this isn’t just another critical screed from a disgruntled fan who’s had it in for you for a long time. I truly – and some might say naively – believe that you are committed to building the Royals into a winning organization again, and that you are as frustrated by what’s happened this season as the rest of us.

Which is why I think it’s important for you to get another fan’s viewpoint to the unexpected news that you have granted Dayton Moore a contract extension. I believe I speak for virtually all Royals fans, and virtually all national baseball writers, whether they are Royals fans or not, when I say: Why?

Why on earth do you feel compelled to give Moore a contract extension in the midst of what has become, if not the worst, then certainly the most disappointing season in the history of the franchise?

Now, let me make it clear: I am not advocating that you fire Dayton Moore. On the contrary, I feel – and once again, I am taking a position that is not popular with Royals fans today – that Moore should be allowed to keep his job for another season.

It’s undeniable that virtually every personnel decision that Moore has made since the end of last season has backfired, and while a few of those decisions looked good on paper, the majority of them were panned at the time, both by myself and by the general baseball establishment. Now, a general manager is going to make controversial moves – and as long as some of those moves work out, you can forgive the ones that don’t. In Moore’s case, every controversial move (I use “controversial” as a euphemism for “other baseball teams were openly mocking him”) has has failed miserably, and in some cases spectacularly. It’s been a bad, bad year for your front office.

Even so, I think Moore has earned the right to keep his job for another season, if only to prove whether or not he can learn from his mistakes this season, and to give him the opportunity to make amends. A year ago, Moore had earned the faith of most of the Royals’ fan base, and the respect of most of the other 29 major league teams, with a few bold and savvy moves (signing Gil Meche to a five-year deal, trading Ambiorix Burgos for Brian Bannister, grabbing Joakim Soria in the Rule 5 draft) that had helped the Royals to a 75-87 record in 2008. He made a few mistakes along the way, like trading J.P. Howell for Joey Gathright, and surrendering actual baseball talent for Tony Pena Jr. But no GM is perfect; as Moore himself said (quoting Arbuckle), “If we’re not making any mistakes, we’re probably not being very aggressive.”

No one would argue that Moore hasn’t been aggressive. And up until about a year ago, his aggressiveness had done more good than bad for the franchise. Now, it so happens that over the past year Moore’s best-laid plans have blown up in his face like they were designed by the Acme corporation, but I submit that no single season – not even a season as bad as this one has been – ought to wipe out the impression that Moore had made in his first two full seasons as GM. I believe he deserves another chance.

But there’s a hell of a difference between “he deserves to keep his job” and “he deserves an extension.” Particularly a four-year extension. There are three more Olympic Games scheduled between now and the end of Moore’s new contract.

I asked the question “why?” above, and that was meant to be a rhetorical question, but maybe it shouldn’t. There must be a legitimate reason why you would decide, in the midst of one of the worst 100-plus-game stretches in team history, that the man who put this team together ought to be rewarded for his efforts. Particularly since, according to Moore himself, you were the one who initiated the contract talks. Here’s what I came up with:

1) You were afraid that if you didn’t extend Moore’s contract, that he would bolt to another team after next season. I refuse to believe that a man smart enough to run one of the world’s largest corporations would actually be worried about this contingency. Once upon a time, Dayton Moore was the most sought-after GM candidate in the country. Now is not that time. Once upon a time, Moore was respected by most of his peers. After the train wreck of the 2009 season, here’s what one front office person had to say about Moore to my colleague Kevin Goldstein:

“It’s not like they were going to suddenly contend, so I have no idea why they rushed him to the big leagues,” commented another team executive, as far as the Royals’ decision making with Gordon’s development. “But I also have no idea why they traded Ramon Ramirez and Leo Nunez for non-tenders, or why they signed Jose Guillen, Horacio Ramirez, Sidney Ponson, and on and on and on.”

Mind you, Goldstein hadn’t asked about Moore – he had asked about Alex Gordon. The criticisms of the Royals’ front office came unbidden. Three years ago, Moore commanded respect. Today, if this quote is any indication, he commands only derision.

I’m sure you know this, which is why I’m sure you had other reasons to extend Moore’s contract. Like:

2) You felt it was necessary to issue a public vote of confidence for your GM, in order to quell the growing groundswell of sentiment in favor of his firing. You wanted to eliminate any distractions.

This might be part of your motivation, but I don’t really buy it either. Sometimes an organization will need to do this for an embattled manager, to make it clear that the manager has the full support of his superiors, in order to head off a potential mutiny – a mutiny of the players, not a mutiny of the fans.

A manager needs to command the respect of his players above all else, and nothing is more damaging to a manager’s reputation than the sense that he doesn’t have the backing of his bosses. But for a general manager, who doesn’t interact with his players on a day-to-day basis, that respect is much less meaningful. If I’ve got a good relationship with my boss, I don’t really care what my relationship with my boss’s boss is like.

So I don’t really buy this rationale either. Which leaves:

3) You want to make it clear that, by extending Dayton Moore’s contract through 2014, you are committed to building a premier organization in the long term, and you want to make sure that the spectacular failure of the 2009 season does not distract your front office from that long-term goal.

Now we’re getting somewhere. If this is indeed your purpose, it’s a defensible one.

For one, I concede that it would be risky for you to let Moore go into the off-season with just one more season remaining on his contract. Few things are more potentially destructive to a rebuilding franchise than a GM who’s worried about his job security. When your general manager’s interest don’t align with your franchise’s interests, you run the risk that your GM will make bizarre short-term decisions that can hamstring the franchise for years to come.

(The classic example of this – a little history lesson here, if you don’t mind – is Dave Littlefield’s notorious trade-deadline acquisition of Matt Morris. On July 31^st, 2007, the Pirates were 42-62 and 14.5 games out of first place, but Littlefield – whose job was on the line – made the inexplicable last-second decision to trade for Morris, a 32-year-old starting pitcher under contract through the 2008 season (at over $10 million a year). Morris had a 4.35 ERA at the time, but was operating on fumes – opponents were hitting .302 against him at the time. The Giants were just looking for a team that was willing to pick up a portion of his salary, and were as surprised as anyone when Littlefield not only agreed to pick up the entire contract, but gave up two prospects – including Rajai Davis, who’s turning into a fine outfielder for the A’s – for the privilege. [Two prospects for a declining major leaguer that no one else wanted. Sound familiar?] Morris would go 3-8 with a 7.04 ERA for the Pirates before he was released the following April; by that time the man doing the releasing was new GM Neal Huntington, as Littlefield was fired on September 7, 2007, in no small part because just six weeks prior he had made a deal which cost his organization close to $15 million for a below-replacement value pitcher.)

While Dayton Moore has made a ton of mistakes this year, the overriding theme that drove his worst errors was the mistaken assumption that the Royals could contend in 2009. I’m not blaming him for that assumption (I shared it to some extent) so much as the execution of his plan, but the point is that if Moore didn’t have job security past 2010, the temptation would be there for him to operate this winter under the short-term goal of building a contender for 2010. We’ve seen that movie before, and it sucked.

So if you decided to extend Moore’s contract because you wanted to make sure that the front office kept its eye on the prize – the prize being a winning team in 2011 and beyond – then I support the decision. And certainly, as a fan I would much rather that you maintain a strong commitment to someone who has convinced you to spend big money on amateur talent, than to clean house and bring in a new GM who has fresh ideas but who doesn’t have access to your checkbook.

But this is a very qualified endorsement. It’s great that you want to insure continuity and a long-term perspective in your front office. But keeping the same general manager personnel in place only makes sense when your general manager knows what the hell he is doing. Frankly, the evidence of that is still lacking. We know that your general manager can spend your cash; we don’t know that he can spend it wisely. I can’t imagine that you look at the millions of dollars Moore convinced you to give Kyle Farnsworth, or Horacio Ramirez, or especially Jose Guillen, and think that you got your money’s worth. I’m sure that you see those transactions as mistakes that should not be repeated.

Unfortunately, Moore’s public comments have yielded no evidence that he feels that way. To question Moore’s decisions is to doubt The Process, and if someone in the media dares to criticize any of his decisions, he risks getting shut out from the organization completely. (I’m not referring to my own situation with ballclub – I’ve heard from national media members who have had similar experiences with the team.)

In all honesty, what I find more concerning than the mistakes made by the Moore administration this year is the sense of arrogance that has accompanied these decisions – an arrogance clothed in insecurity. Virtually every person who has covered the Royals regularly this season – print, radio, TV, whatever – has been struck by just how ridiculously thin-skinned the front office is. Which is a problem. Not because it makes it harder for the media to do their job (it is, but that’s not a problem for anyone but us), but because a front office that can’t handle criticism is a front office that doesn’t broker dissent. It’s a front office that’s unwilling to admit when it’s made a mistake. It’s certainly a front office that’s incapable of learning from its mistakes.

This should trouble you greatly, because you’ve just promised to pay Dayton Moore a lot of money on the notion that he will learn from the mistakes he’s made this season. And my greatest worry about this extension is that Moore will regard this endorsement from his owner as a validation of The Process. Moore has defended the Royals’ performance this year as the consequence of unexpected injuries and unexpectedly poor performances, rather than as an indictment of whatever Process cooked up the idea of Mike Jacobs as an everyday first baseman or Kyle Farnsworth as a highly-compensated set-up man. Moore’s public defense of his actions is understandable; it’s not easy for a GM to admit when he’s wrong, and it’s even harder to do so without offending some of those very players he acquired. But it’s one thing to say it, and it’s another thing to believe it. I worry that, having been rewarded with a contract extension despite his track record, Moore will start to believe his own words, and assume that he earned a contract extension because of his track record.

As fans, we are not privy to the conversations that you had with Moore before this contract was signed. It’s quite possible that Moore bared his soul to you, that he took full responsibility for the disastrous product he put on display this season. It’s possible that he admitted to you that he hasn’t put enough emphasis on statistical analysis, that he underestimated the importance of plate discipline, that he made a mistake in putting together an expensive bullpen full of hard throwers who don’t actually get anyone out. I can only hope he said those things to you, because he certainly won’t say those things to us. It’s not reassuring at all that in his most recent interview, he once again repeats the canard that “I know things would have been drastically different if we would have stayed healthy.” Unless Coco Crisp is the most valuable player in the history of baseball, this is simply untrue.

It’s telling that, on the day the contract extension was announced, we saw the very best and the very worst of the Dayton Moore administration on display. At the major league level, the Royals lost a howler to the A’s, 8-5, in a game which featured two of the dumbest moments by a Royals player in a decade full of them. Three years after he was hired, the major league team Moore has assembled is not just as bad as any roster Allard Baird assembled, it’s also just as embarrassing.

But that night, in Wilmington, 20-year-old southpaw Mike Montgomery, the Royals’ supplemental first-round pick last season, faced 22 hitters, only one of whom reached base safely, and 12 of whom struck out. It was the finest outing in the pro career of arguably the Royals’ #1 prospect. As promising as Montgomery is, he’s unlikely to make any kind of impact at the major league level until 2011, if not later. Moore has been committed to building the franchise with high school talent, preferring to take the long road to the top. Your decision to let Moore finish what he started, to at least see the fruits of his farm system fully ripen before making a final decision on him, is laudable.

Or at least, it’s laudable so long as you don’t wait until 2014 to make that final decision. If the Royals haven’t made substantial improvement at the major league level within two years – and by “substantial improvement” I mean at least a .500 team – then it won’t matter if Moore’s contract extends to 3014, he needs to go. Sticking with a failing GM out of a false sense of loyalty is nearly as bad as not providing your GM with adequate support from the start.

If you don’t believe me, just look across the Truman Sports Complex, where Lamar Hunt stayed loyal to Jack Steadman even as the Chiefs had just two winning seasons from 1974 to 1988. When Hunt finally let Steadman go and hired Carl Peterson to run his franchise, the team’s fortunes turned around immediately. The Chiefs would make the playoffs seven times in eight seasons from 1990 to 1997, but after 1997 the talent dried up, and after treading .500 for the next nine years the Chiefs cratered in 2007 – but Hunt stuck with Peterson up until the day he passed away, and while his son Clark finally brought in a new GM to clean house, the mess Peterson left behind may take years to clean up.

Sam Mellinger points out that by granting Moore this extension, you have made it clear that this is Moore’s show to run – either into the playoffs or into the ground – and that the results going forward are entirely on your GM. I agree, to a point. If the Royals continue to flail and Moore gets canned in 2011, then you can argue persuasively that you gave Moore every opportunity, and every resource, to get the job done. But if the Royals continue to flail and Moore still gets to keep his job for the next five years, then you must share in the blame for failing to hold your GM to the standard of excellence that you profess to have.

I guess what it boils down to is this: I’m fine with Dayton Moore getting a four-year contract extension…as long as it’s really a one-year extension with three option years. The money is guaranteed either way, but let’s be honest: you could fire Moore tomorrow and you’d only be out about $5 million, or about what you’re paying Farnsworth this year alone.

And that’s the point: the financial commitment to Moore is less important than the commitment you’ve made to let Moore spend far more of your money on other personnel. As long as you understand that the contract only obligates you to pay Moore through 2014, and not actually to employ him, then the downside is limited.

Like so many other Royals moves, if handled correctly this transaction has the potential to be a shrewd gamble, and if handled incorrectly this transaction could be an enormous albatross on the organization. Given the team’s history, sad to say, I know which one I’m betting on. But I also know which one I’m hoping for. For a Royals fan, hope always trumps reason. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be Royals fans.

Thanks for reading,

Rany Jazayerli.