Problems and (Potential) Solutions in Center Field.

I fully expected to hate the Scott Podsednik deal.

For one thing, any time your fan base can predict, months ahead of time, which player you will pursue in free agency – not based on the fact that said player fits the team’s needs, but simply because he’s exactly the type of player that you vastly overvalue – that may be a sign that you’ve become a parody of a GM. Here are a couple of links from early October, where perceptive, if cynical (is that a redundancy?) Royals fans predicted that Dayton Moore would sign Podsednik.

The moment word filtered in early December that the Royals were talking with him, there wasn’t a doubt in the collective mind of the Royals blogosphere that this deal would get done. And it did. The current front office, which has long been terrible at working the free-agent market, is now predictably terrible. That’s some feat.

It’s not that Scott Podsednik is a bad player. Let me rephrase that: it’s not that Scott Podsednik was a bad player last year. He hit .304/.353/.412, a perfectly respectable performance, and also stole 30 bases. He was very durable, playing in 132 games even though he wasn’t called up to the majors until May 1^st. If Podsednik has the same performance in 2010 that he had in 2009, he will prove to have been an excellent signing.

You know where I’m going with this. In 2009, Podsednik was a quality everyday outfielder, because he hit .304, and if you can hit .300 and take the occasional walk you have value even if you don’t hit for any power. The problem is that Podsednik’s lack of power is a chronic condition, but hitting for average has proven to be an intermittent ability. In 2008, Podsednik hit .253, playing in the game’s best hitters’ park in Colorado. (This is why he started last season in the minors in the first place.) In 2007, he hit .243/.299/.369 for the White Sox, and lost his everyday job. In 2006, he hit .261/.330/.353 for the Sox.

Yes, in 2005 he hit .290/.351/.349, he stole 59 bases, and after not hitting a single home run during the regular season, he popped two of them in the playoffs while hitting .286/.397/.551, helping the Sox to a world championship. (While several players have hit homers in the playoffs after not hitting one during the regular season, I believe Podsednik is the only player in history to hit two.)

In 2004, Podsednik hit .244/.313/.364 for the Brewers, though to be fair he did lead the league with 70 steals. In 2003, he hit .314/.379/.443 and finished second in Rookie of the Year voting.

Podsednik’s value is almost entirely driven by his batting average: he doesn’t hit for any power, and he doesn’t walk a lot. Three times in his career – 2003, 2005, and 2009 – Podsednik has hit .290 or better. He was a reasonably valuable player in each season. Four times in his career – 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2008 – he hit .261 or less, and he was essentially worthless in each of those seasons. Such are the vagaries of batting average, which is highly dependent on good luck. Cue Crash Davis’ drunken soliloquy about groundballs with eyes and dying quails.

The Royals are betting that 2010 will be a good year, even though Podsednik turns 34 before Opening Day, even though three of his last four seasons were terrible, and even though a year ago his stock had fallen so low that he signed with the White Sox on a minor-league contract.

That optimism is not shared by any projection system on the market. Bill James projects Podsednik at .275/.340/.367; his ZIPS projection comes in at .279/.336/.384. Those aren’t terrible numbers, mind you – it’s just that they don’t represent any kind of improvement over what we could have expected from the guy he replaces in centerfield, Mitch Maier. Bill James projects Maier at .266/.328/.389; ZIPS has him at .268/.323/.378.

“Wait”, the Royals say, “you’re neglecting Podsednik’s best skill, his speed.” True, Pods has speed to burn, something Maier – and, for that matter, the rest of the roster – lacks. And I would be more than happy to give him credit for his speed, if there was any evidence that Podsednik’s speed actually translated into more runs on the scoreboard.

Podsednik stole 30 bases last year. This would have led the Royals last year – and every year going back to 2003, when Carlos Beltran swiped 41 bags. The flip side is that Podsednik was caught stealing 13 times last year – no Royal has 13 CS in one season since Tom Goodwin was nailed 22 times way back in 1996.

This is nothing new for Podsednik, who throughout his career has been known more for the quantity than for the efficiency of his stolen bases. Yes, he led his league in steals once. He’s also led his league in caught stealings. Twice.

The sabermetric conventional wisdom states that the break-even point for stolen bases is around 70% - if you’re not successful more than 70% of the time, you’re better off not stealing at all, because you’re costing your team more runs by getting thrown out than you’re adding with your steals. Podsednik’s success rate last year was…69.8%. For his career, his success rate is a more impressive 75.3%, but over the last five seasons he’s been just over the break-even point at 70.5%. His ability to steal bases isn’t a detriment to his team, but neither is it a significant help.

But actually, it’s worse than that. One of the great unrecognized flaws in conventional statistics is that while baserunners are penalized when they are out trying to steal a base, no record is made of the instances when a baserunner is picked off. The end result is the same – a baserunner is lost, and an out is recorded – but one event is a permanent red mark on their stat profile, while the other is whited out.

Thankfully, in today’s world no baseball event goes truly unrecorded. On Podsednik’s baseball-reference page, the number of times he’s picked off is listed in his baserunning profile. And the numbers are disturbing.

Last season, Podsednik was caught stealing 13 times. He was also picked off 11 more times. That seems like an incredibly high total for me – although we have no point of reference, as I don’t know of any way to bring up the league leaders in this category – but it’s just the third-highest season total of his career. Podsednik was picked off 12 times in 2006, and 14 times in 2005. For his career, he’s been picked off 53 times.

Now, if a player is picked off while trying to get back to the bag, no caught stealing is recorded. But if a player, knowing he’s dead meat, lights out for second base instead and gets thrown out – this is recorded as a caught stealing. Yes, it’s a dumb distinction. In theory, a player who is working on a long consecutive stolen-base streak would have that streak preserved if he dives back into first, but if he heads the other way and gets thrown out, that streak is over. It offers the perverse incentive for a player to not head for second and hope the opposition screws up the rundown, even though it may be his only shot at staying alive.

Anyway, of Podsednik’s 53 pickoffs, 17 were “pickoff caught stealings”, leaving 36 additional pickoffs – nine of those came last year. Add those 36 pickoffs to his 87 official caught stealings, and he’s actually made an out 123 times on the basepaths before the ball has even been put in play. If you count his pickoffs, his career 75.3% success rate on the bases drops to 68.4%; his 69.8% mark last season drops to 57.7%. That’s almost Buddy Bell territory.

By comparison, Carlos Beltran, in a career twice as long as Podsednik’s, has been picked off (not counting the pickoff caught stealings) just 17 times in his career. Pods got picked off more times last year (9) than Beltran has in the last seven seasons (8). (And just for fun, I looked up Chase Utley. Utley has been picked off twice in his entire career.)

My former colleague Dan Fox – now Director of Baseball Systems Development for the Pittsburgh Pirates – created a series of statistics to measure a player’s overall baserunning value. His statistic for basestealing, called (helpfully enough) Equivalent Stolen Base Runs, estimates that Podsednik cost the White Sox 2.1 runs relative to what would have happened if he had just kept his foot on the base on each pitch.

Granted, his speed helps in other ways, by allowing him to advance an extra base on singles and doubles, or to tag up and move up a base on medium-depth fly outs. Fox’s statistic to measure a player’s overall baserunning value – what we call Equivalent Baserunning Runs – credits Podsednik with 3.6 runs above the average baserunner in non-stolen base situations. So overall, he was worth 1.5 runs above average on the basepaths, ranking Podsednik 90^th in the majors, right behind speedsters like Matt Tolbert and Omar Infante.

As a baserunner, Podsednik has more speed than wisdom, which limits the value of his legs. This is equally true on defense, where despite his speed, Podsednik ranks as an average outfielder at best. Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) pegs Podsednik as being a slightly below-average outfielder last season, a well-below average outfielder in 2008, and an above-average outfielder in 2007; over the last three years he’s a total of 2.6 runs below average. For his career, not surprisingly, he’s more effective in left field (career UZR of +2.1) than in center field (UZR of -12.7).

Does Podsednik bring intangibles to the ballpark? I have no doubt that he does; it’s just that you have to sit near the players’ wives section to appreciate them. At least this time, unlike when the Royals signed Willie Bloomquist, Moore wasn’t kidding when he called Podsednik a proven winner.

Essentially, what the Royals have done is replace their incumbent centerfielder, who is comfortably below-average with the bat and slightly below-average with the glove, with a guy who is…comfortably below-average with the bat and slightly below-average with the glove. This isn’t progress; this is a hamster wheel.

So, to sum up: the Royals signed a free agent whose impact on the team’s win total is roughly the equivalent of a rounding error. Dayton Moore once again satisfies his fetish for players who are more one-dimensional than a character in a Dan Brown novel. Having already obtained the all-or-nothing slugger (Mike Jacobs), the firethrowing reliever (Kyle Farnsworth), and the gritty play-anywhere utility guy (Willie Bloomquist), he finally quenches his need for the speedy centerfielder. Cut the man some slack – it’s been over three years since he traded for Joey Gathright.

So yeah, I thought I’d really hate this deal. But in the end, I find it hard to get too worked up about this move, for the simple reason of cost. Maybe Moore is more devious than we give him credit for, but by giving out contracts like the ones he has for Jose Guillen, or Farnsworth, or Jason Kendall, he has raised the bar of expectations for Royals fans so high that when he guarantees Scott Podsednik 1.75 million dollars, my immediate reaction was, “That’s it? That’s less than I thought. Party!”

Counting his 2011 buyout, Podsednik will make $1.75 million in 2010, plus $250,000 in incentives. His 2011 club option calls for a base salary of $1.9 million with $300,000 in incentives. The option becomes a mutual one if Podsednik gets 525 plate appearances this year. This “mutual option” thing seems to be an idiosyncrasy of the Moore administration; I don’t mind them, but it does make the contracts a little confusing to the outsider. Based on what we know about Miguel Olivo’s contract, a mutual option means that either side can walk away from it, and given that by definition, any contract is likely to be unfavorable to one side or another, a mutual option is basically the same as no contract at all.

The key point, though, is that under no circumstances are the Royals obligated to bring Podsednik back in 2011 if they don’t want to. If he plays as I expect him to play in 2010, they won’t want to – but in that case, they’re out $2 million, tops. That’s one-third the guaranteed money given to Jason Kendall. Podsednik is guaranteed less money than Moore gave to HORACIO RAMIREZ last winter.

I agree with the consensus that the Royals should not have signed Podsednik, that they would be better off with Maier in center field and the money spent elsewhere. But the degree of vitriol over this move is surprising to me. There wasn’t a fraction of this much anger over the Ramirez signing. And while Podsednik is not significantly better than what the Royals already have, he does have value to a major league roster; if the Royals didn’t sign him, some other team would have given him a seven-figure contract. Ramirez was staring at a minor-league contract before the Royals rode to his rescue.

I understand that, particularly after the Kendall contract, we’ve all had enough of Moore’s free agent forays. I just think that we need to keep some perspective here. This wasn’t a good signing, but it’s not worth getting worked up over either.

The best case against the signing, I think, was made by Will McDonald, who makes the persuasive case that the signing of Podsednik represents a failure of imagination by the Royals’ front office, and ultimately is an indictment of the whole notion that the team excels at scouting.

When Moore was first hired, his first big free agent signing was Gil Meche, who the moment he donned a Royals’ uniform transformed from underachieving #3/#4 starter to solid #2 starter. A few days later the Royals plucked Joakim Soria out of the Rule 5 draft. The standard was set then: that the Royals were going to build a winning roster by finding players whose talent had yet to be unearthed.

But since that first winter, Moore and the Royals have completely abandoned this philosophy of grabbing players before their talent emerges, and instead paying for players after they’ve proven themselves, and hoping that their performance doesn’t decline. They threw $36 million at Jose Guillen at the very moment his bat started to slow down – Guillen’s the bizarro version of Meche. They’ve signed or traded for players on the wrong side of 27, like Jacobs and Coco Crisp and Farnsworth and Bloomquist, rather than trying to find younger, cheaper versions of those same players. They just gave $6 million to a player who was washed up three years ago. And now they’ve signed Podsednik.

I completely agree with Will that the Royals have become increasingly unimaginative and risk-averse during the Moore administration. But I don’t think the specific detail of signing Scott Podsednik to play center field fits this narrative. That’s because I think the Royals already have tried to use their scouting acumen to find an out-of-the-box solution to their center field issue. His name is Brian Anderson.

I’m probably even more surprised at the negativity surrounding the Anderson signing than the Podsednik one. Anderson signed a major-league contract for $700,000, or about 10 days’ worth of Jose Guillen, but a lot of Royals fans are furious about this. True, Anderson hasn’t hit a lick in the majors – his career line is .227/.290/.370. His defensive numbers suggest he’s an average centerfielder at best. And he turns 28 in March. Nevertheless, there’s a case to be made that there’s still a decent player trapped inside Anderson’s body, if only because so many teams seem interested in giving him another shot.

He has tools – he was first-round pick out of college by the White Sox – and he has a history of performance in the minors. In 2005, at age 23, Anderson hit .295/.360/.469 in Triple-A, numbers that projected him to become at least an average major league centerfielder in the years to come. For whatever reason, that hasn’t happened, and maybe it never will. But a player with present tools and past performance is a player worth taking a flyer on.

It’s a cliché to say that if the Red Sox trade for a player, then he must be worth acquiring – but, well, the Red Sox did trade for Anderson last summer. He played well for them in a very small sample size (21 plate appearances). They let him go this winter, but that’s because they’re the Red Sox – they can afford to pay for real solutions in the free agent market, and sure enough they signed Mike Cameron to play center field and moved Jacoby Ellsbury to left.

In a fair world, Anderson would have gotten an NRI instead of a major-league contract. But Royals fans, more than anyone else, should know this ain’t a fair world. If the Royals had to give him a guaranteed roster spot to avoid losing him to a more appealing team, so be it. He’s making $300,000 above the league minimum. We’ll get through it somehow.

This offseason started with the Royals trading Mark Teahen for Josh Fields and Chris Getz, and while I liked the deal at the time, I wanted to see how all the pieces fit together first. It’s January now, and the pieces are more jumbled than ever. Podsednik might play center field, or they might play him in left and move David DeJesus back to center field. Brian Anderson probably makes the roster, but what of Mitch Maier, who is out of options? Jose Guillen might play right field, or he might DH. If he plays DH, the defense improves dramatically, but Kila Ka’aihue won’t get a chance to play. On the other hand, we all know that Ka’aihue won’t play for the Royals if he’s the last hitter on Earth.

Does Callaspo play second base? Does Getz go back to Triple-A? Are the Royals really hinting that Alex Gordon might not play third base every day? Right now, only three position players have guaranteed jobs at a specific position – and two of them are named Jason Kendall and Yuniesky Betancourt.

The Royals have a bunch of questions to settle between now and Opening Day. Podsednik might be the answer to one of them, but he might also might raise more questions than he answers. But focusing on Podsednik distracts from what should be the real focus of Royals fans as much as the Royals’ front office – making the farm system the envy of baseball. Ultimately the only reason to be livid about his signing is if the money spent on Podsednik limits the money the Royals are spending on the farm system.

In the middle of writing this, I learned that the Royals are expected to sign Paul Carlixte, a Dominican shortstop with a questionable birth certificate but unquestioned tools, for about $1 million. For all of my many, many beefs with Dayton Moore, so long as he continues to make moves like this, I continue to have faith in the long-term direction of the Royals. No matter how muddled their short-term situation may be.

Kendall, Dayton, and Common Sense.

It looks like I owe all of you an apology.

In my last column, I argued that “I’m okay with” the Royals downgrading from John Buck to Jason Kendall. My argument was predicated on the notion that the Royals wanted Kendall for financial reasons more than performance reasons – that signing Kendall would save money, money that could be spent on signing young talent like Noel Arguelles.

Once again, my naïveté has shown through. Once again, I have given Dayton Moore and the Royals entirely too much credit by assuming they have mastered simple mathematics.

If Kendall had signed a 1-year, $2 million contract, I would have, if not praised the move, at least been indifferent towards it. Kendall is a barely replacement-level catcher and has been for years, but he’s a reasonable one-year stopgap as the Royals continue to evaluate Brayan Pena and look for more permanent options behind the plate.

The Royals gave Kendall a two-year deal, and after being led to believe that the contract was for $2 million a year, we learned that Kendall was actually guaranteed $3 million a year (with incentives!), essentially the same contract Ivan Rodriguez received from the Washington Nationals a few days before.

This is just so wrong, on so many levels, that I don’t know how to sum up my thoughts. I can’t keep writing five-thousand-word screeds every time Moore makes the Royals the laughingstock of baseball, and besides, I’m at the point where I’m repeating myself every time I write about a player acquisition. It’s hard not to repeat myself when the Royals keep repeating themselves.

Still, as a general rule of thumb, any time the Royals make a move that inspires friends to send emails of condolences and #royalsfail to become a trending topic on Twitter, I have to write something.

“The bottom line for me in my career is I want to win.” – Jason Kendall.

Let’s start with the basics. Jason Kendall hit .241/.331/.305 this season. This was not an aberration. He hit .246/.327/.324 last year, .242/.301/.309 the year before that. You have to go back to 2006 to find something remotely approaching a decent season, when Kendall hit .295/.367/.342 for the A’s.

Look at those numbers again. Kendall has not been able to slug .330 for three straight years. Joey Gathright has slugged .330 more recently than Kendall. Kendall has not slugged .350 since 2004, his final year with the Pirates.

The last player to qualify for the batting title while slugging under .330 for three straight seasons is Walt Weiss, who did so between 1993 and 1995. During those three seasons, Weiss’ OBP was .370. Kendall’s OBP the last three years is .320.

Granted, Kendall was an OBP fiend in his younger days. In his nine years with the Pirates he had a .387 OBP, and even now he’s good for a walk every 10 at-bats or so, plus he sweetens his OBP each year with 10 or 15 hit-by-pitches. (He’s just 40 HBPs away from the all-time record.) Kendall drew more walks (46) last season than Miguel Olivo drew (40) in the last three seasons combined.

I spend a lot of time talking about the importance of walks and plate discipline, and with good reason, given that the Royals have been the most impatient team in baseball by a wide margin over the past quarter-century. But as important as walks are, they are not the most important offensive skill, not even close. Power is. And Kendall is as powerless as any everyday player in the majors. As Joe Posnanski tweeted, Olivo hit more homers last year (23) than Kendall has hit in the last EIGHT seasons (20).

Also keep in mind that Kendall’s walk rate is larded with walks of the intentional-unintentional variety. Last year he started 94 games in the 8^th spot in the lineup, batting directly ahead of the pitcher, and undoubtedly some of his walks came in situations where the opposing pitcher was willing to nibble and take his chances with his counterpart at the plate if Kendall didn’t bite. In the American League, pitchers are going to go right after him. (I don’t want to overstate this effect. Kendall’s unintentional walk rate when batting eighth the last three seasons is 7.8 BB/100 AB – the same as his overall rate.)

Look, Kendall was a great player once upon a time. Ten years ago he was one of the best catchers, and one of my favorite players, in all of baseball. As a catcher with ideal leadoff skills – a .400 OBP and good speed – he was one of the game’s most unique players. But that player is long, long gone. Kendall doesn’t have a fork sticking out of him – he has an entire cutlery set.

Yuniesky Betancourt had the lowest OBP (.274) of any qualifying major leaguer last season. Jason Kendall had the lowest SLG (.305) of any qualifying major leaguer. The Royals are planning to use both players in everyday roles in 2010. And they’re paying each of them millions for the privilege.

On top of everything else, as the quote above proves, Kendall is clearly delusional.

“He’s still going very strong. He caught 134 games last year.” – Dayton Moore.

If Kendall’s playing time had diminished with his skills, his performance record wouldn’t look all that unusual – formerly great catcher worn down in his early 30s and reduced to backup status. Really, the most interesting thing about Kendall may be the fact that even as he’s been reduced to the worst-hitting regular in baseball, he hasn’t lost a bit of playing time. On the contrary – he’s caught at least 132 games for 10 straight seasons. Last year, he ranked 5^th in the majors in games caught. In 2008, he caught 149 games, and started every one. No catcher has started more games in a season since Gary Carter started behind the plate 151 times in 1982.

You can't spell durability without ability, but apparently you can have durability without ability. Kendall is an exceedingly durable catcher – but his performance is so bad that his durability is more a liability than an asset. And not only does his performance discount his durability, but his durability is probably hindering his performance. In 2007, Kendall hit .183/.279/.233 from September 1^st on. In 2008, he hit .202/.295/.298; last year, he hit .214/.298/.321.

Catching 130+ games is hard enough on a young catcher – witness Russell Martin’s second-half fades the last few years – but it seems like madness to expect, or even want, a catcher in his mid-30s to play so often. Particularly when he’s not exactly Mike Piazza with the stick.

If there’s one reason to think Kendall could bounce back and hit roughly as well as he did earlier in his career, it would be based on the idea that if Kendall’s workload were cut back to 100-110 games caught, he might be fresher and hit better. Unfortunately, the Royals seem as eager to run Kendall into the ground as his last two teams were. God forbid the Royals should give Brayan Pena an extended chance to show if he can be more than just a backup catcher in the majors.

“There were other offers, but one thing about Dayton and the Royals is they called me the first day I became a free agent. That’s something that kind of speaks for itself.” – Jason Kendall.

Everything I wrote above I could have written a few days ago, when I was ambivalent about signing Kendall. What’s changed are the economics, which are driving me up a wall.

Jason Kendall is going to make $6 million over the next two years. In baseball terms, this isn’t a lot of money. That’s the same amount of money the Royals paid Yasuhiko Yabuta the last two seasons, and as bad as that contract was, it merited hardly a footnote in the disaster that was the 2009 season.

But in terms of what it says about the Royals front office, it speaks volumes. Jason Kendall is the very definition of a replacement-level talent. According to Baseball Prospectus, he was worth 0.5 wins more than the mythical emergency Triple-A player in 2009. For an everyday player, that’s atrocious, and a sign that he really shouldn’t be an everyday player anymore.

That didn’t stop the Royals from contacting Kendall as soon as they were allowed to, pursuing him throughout the winter meetings, and upping their offer from $2 million to $3 million a year once Ivan Rodriguez had signed with the Nationals. (Because you should always allow your contract offers to be influenced by peer pressure. Especially peers who don’t know what they’re doing either.)

Let’s consider the options the Royals had at the catching position in 2010:

1) Pick up Miguel Olivo’s $3.3 million option for 2010. Yes, Olivo might have declined his end of it, but at least you can try.

2) Go to arbitration with John Buck, at an estimated cost of $3.5 million for 2010.

3) Release Buck, then try to re-sign him for less than he would have earned in arbitration.

4) Trade for a stopgap-solution catcher, whether it be someone with upside like Dioner Navarro or a failed prospect like J.R. Towles or a catch-and-throw type like Jeff Mathis.

5) Sign a low-end free-agent catcher (Mike Redmond? Ramon Castro?) to a one-year deal for peanuts.

6) Guarantee $6 million to Jason Kendall.

The Royals, with their usual deadly accuracy, honed in on the worst option of the six.

Over the last three years, here’s the breakdown of Olivo, Buck, and Kendall:

Olivo: .246/.276/.444

Buck: .228/.305/.414

Kendall: .243/.320/.313

Kendall defenders will point out that he has the highest OBP of the trio, and OBP is the most important offensive stat. These are both technically true. But there is a big difference between “most important” and “only”. OBP is more important than slugging average on a point-for-point basis. The general consensus is that one point of OBP is worth about 1.8 points of SLG. On that basis, even though Olivo has a higher OPS than Buck (720 to 719), Buck’s 29-point edge in OBP is worth more than Olivo’s 30-point edge in SLG.

But is Kendall’s 15-point edge in OBP enough to make up for Buck’s 101-point edge in SLG? Not even close. I’ve been preaching the gospel of OBP to the Royals for 20 years, and even I don’t think that Kendall’s going to put as many runs on the scoreboard as Buck.

Defense? Yeah, Buck only threw out 16% of attempted basestealers last season. Kendall threw out 20%. He was much better in 2008, nailing 43% of wannabe thieves, but in 2007 Kendall was down at 15%.

Think Kendall does a better job at preventing wild pitches and blocking the plate? Our own Matt Klaassen compiled the definitive rankings on overall catcher defense for 2009. Using his methods, Olivo was the second-worst catcher (out of 114) in all of baseball last season. Buck was ninth-worst.

Kendall was tenth-worst. He was exactly 0.3 runs – not wins, runs – better than Buck.

Think Kendall is better at calling a game? We’ve been through this before. As Keith Woolner – you know, the guy the Indians hired to be their Manager of Baseball Research and Analysis – proved 10 years ago, “if there is a true game-calling ability, it lies below the threshold of detection.” There’s no evidence that any catcher – let alone Jason Kendall – has the ability to get a better performance from his pitchers than another.

Kendall is 35 years old. Olivo is 31. Buck is 29.

The only reason to prefer Kendall would have been for financial reasons. By signing Kendall for $3 million a year, the Royals either didn’t understand the finances involved, or honestly thought Kendall was the best player of the three.

Now, there’s a line of reasoning I’ve heard expressed – by Sam Mellinger on Twitter, but I heard this from other people at the Winter Meetings – that teams can’t non-tender a player and then expect to re-sign him for less money. Once you release a player, the conventional wisdom states, you’ve made it clear what you think of that player, and he’s likely to sign elsewhere even if the money is the same, in order to get a fresh start. Historically, players that were non-tendered almost never re-signed with their old team.

My reply when I heard this at the Winter Meetings is this: the conventional wisdom also states that Type A free agents don’t accept arbitration – except that Rafael Soriano did, forcing the Braves to trade him to Tampa Bay. The economics of baseball are changing and changing rapidly, and to expect that the rules that applied five years ago will apply today is naïve. Players understand the economics of the game as well the owners do – if the Royals told Buck that “we can’t afford you at $3.5 million, but we can afford you at $2.5 million”, he would understand it’s business, not personal, and evaluate the merits of the offer in that light.

My reply today is much more succinct. Just read this.

What bothers me most is that the Royals didn’t even try to re-sign Buck for less. They kept him on their active roster right up until the deadline to tender contracts, even though they knew they were going to release him. I am utterly baffled why, knowing they were unwilling to pay his arbitration, they didn’t release him before or during the winter meetings. If they had, they would have 1) found out what Buck’s market value was, and if – as I suspected – it was less than the $3.5 million figure, they could have reconsidered signing him; 2) by putting Buck in the talent pool, they would have increased the supply of catchers, possibly lowering the price of all the other catchers on the market.

Instead, the Royals signed Kendall, then released Buck.

Remember Dioner Navarro, who the Rays were rumored to consider non-tendering because he would cost too much in arbitration? Navarro made $2.1 million last year, and this article implies that he was expected to get $2.5 to $3 million in arbitration this year. Before the deadline, using the non-tender threat as leverage, the Rays re-signed Navarro for $2.15 million – less than he would have gotten in arbitration, but more than he might have gotten as a free agent. There is no evidence that the Royals even tried this gambit.

When I started writing this piece, I intended to say that Buck wasn’t going to last long on the market, because a catcher who just slugged .484 is a valuable commodity. As you know, before I could even post this column the Blue Jays swooped in and signed Buck – less than 24 hours after he was released. Buck signed for one year, and $2 millon. (Late add: Toronto just inked Ramon Castro to a one-year deal for $1 million. The Blue Jays just put together a job-sharing arrangement much like the Royals had last year - Castro is sort of like Olivo without the hype - for the same money that the Royals will be paying Kendall alone. Remember, Royals catchers hit 31 homers last season. Next year...not so many.)

Would Buck have signed with Toronto if the Royals offered $2 million? Probably, if he wanted a fresh start with a team that doesn’t lose 95 games every year. Would he have signed with Toronto if the Royals offered $2.5 million? Unless there’s some serious bad blood between him and the team, I doubt it. Money talks; wins just sort of whisper.

So in the end, the Royals guaranteed a 35-year-old catcher who can’t hit three times more money than their 29-year-old incumbent, who is demonstrably a better player, signed for just days later.

It’s the second year on this contract that kills me. I love how the Royals have backloaded it – Kendall gets paid $2.25 million in 2010, $3.75 million in 2011 – in order to fit their budget for next season. It’s reminiscent of the blue-collar worker taking out a payday loan at 140% interest to tide him through until his next paycheck. Sure, Kendall fits into the Royals’ payroll for now. But next year, when $20 million comes off the budget in the form of Guillen, Farnsworth, Cruz, and Bloomquist – well, Moore’s already blown 20% of that flexibility on a replacement-level catcher.

Next year’s free agent market looks much stronger than this year’s, and some teams are already getting ready. Between Magglio Ordonez, Carlos Guillen, Jeremy Bonderman, Dontrelle Willis, and Nate Robertson, the Tigers have about $55 million in payroll relief they can look to use next off-season. The Tigers are still looking to further pare down payroll – they traded Curtis Granderson for financial reasons, without significantly hurting their team’s long-term future. The Tigers are like the neighbor that uses its tax rebate to pay down credit-card debt. The Royals are like the neighbor that spends their rebate check in one afternoon of watching QVC.

I’ve learned that if I’m going to continue this blog going forward, I’m going to have to detach myself emotionally from the Royals. I have to think like an analyst first and a fan second. As fan, I hate this move, but as an analyst…well, I still hate this move. Kevin Goldstein hates this move. Keith Law hates this move. Joe Posnanski ha…okay, dislikes this move, because Poz doesn’t hate. Any baseball analyst worth his salt hates this move, because we hate it when teams make dumb moves. This is a dumb move. More than that, it is a move that defies logic.

I write this with as little emotion as possible: Dayton Moore, you’re in over your head. You’d make a fine Scouting Director; your ability to acquire minor league talent is admirable. Whether it’s signing Arguelles or drafting Edgar Osuna in the Rule 5 draft, you continue to do well on that front. (Osuna is a worthwhile gamble – he’s just 22 years old, and as long as the Royals don’t slot him as a LOOGY – his best pitches are a changeup and a curveball, so not surprisingly he actually gets RHB out better than LHB – he’ll be useful in relief, with the upside to start one day.)

But you simply aren’t hacking it as a GM, and you won’t until you stop needlessly provoking the most powerful force in all of sports: Common Sense. (I capitalize it out of respect for its power.) You insist on battling Common Sense every few months, and each time you get plastered like Glass Joe taking on Manny Pacquiao. It doesn’t matter how good you are at player development, or at building the framework of a farm system – if you continue to take shots at Common Sense, it will destroy you. It isn’t something to trifle with.

Common Sense is so powerful that, with little more than it on his side, a Chicago dermatologist with no access to the inside workings of your front office has taken you on half-a-dozen times, and hasn’t been wrong yet. I (and everyone else) was right about Kyle Farnsworth. I (and everyone else) was right about Mike Jacobs. I (and everyone else) was right about Yuniesky Betancourt. (Okay, it’s still early. We can revisit that one later if you want.) I was right about Horacio Ramirez. I was right about Jose Guillen, although I can’t link to anything because you signed him before I started this blog.

Yes, you were right about Gil Meche, at least at first – evidently it emboldened you to take on Common Sense on a regular basis ever since. But I (and everyone else) was right about the insanity of letting Gil Meche throw 121 pitches coming off a tired arm.

I think that’s what so disappointing about this move. It’s not the money. It’s not the fact that nearly four years after Moore took over this team, the Royals have a projected starting lineup for next season which includes Jason Kendall, Yuniesky Betancourt, Mitch Maier, and Jose Guillen, and we’re still told to trust The Process. It’s not the fact that we’re supposed to cut the Royals slack for signing Kendall because after all these years, the Royals still haven’t developed a catcher in their farm system, and we’re also not supposed to notice that the Royals passed on two of the greatest collegiate catchers of all time in Matt Wieters and Buster Posey, either of whom would be starting for the Royals on Opening Day.

It’s the fact that after getting his head handed to him by Common Sense last winter, after every head-scratching move turned out as bad, if not worse, than Moore’s fiercest critics predicted they would – Moore is determined to pick another fight. I’m sure the Royals have all their internal reasons for preferring Kendall over Buck, and I’m sure they’re all valid reasons. They’re just not that important, not nearly as important as Buck’s 100-plus point edge in slugging average.

The Royals always have valid reasons for the ridiculous moves they make – they’re just not important reasons. Yes, Farnsworth was a strikeout pitcher and throws really, really hard – but those facts couldn’t overcome his history of 4-plus ERAs. Yes, Mike Jacobs has light-tower power when he hits the ball just right – but that fact couldn’t overcome his .299 OBP. Yes, Yuniesky Betancourt looks great in a uniform – but that fact couldn’t overcome the fact that he sucks.

And yes, Jason Kendall might be a gamer and gritty and hard-nosed and never begs out of the lineup and gives 110%. But those facts won’t overcome the fact that he’s cooked.

If Moore wants to challenge Common Sense one more time, well, it’s not my job on the line. And maybe after Kendall hits so poorly in 2010 that the Royals have to eat the $3.75 million he’s due in 2011, and after Buck has the best season of his career in 2010 (call it a hunch), Moore will learn his lesson.

Or maybe next winter he’ll just replace Kendall with Jason Varitek. Now there’s a guy who knows how to win.

XXX

Barring any more major moves from the Royals this month – we can all hope – this is likely my last post of the year. Please allow me to wish all of you a safe, happy, and altogether wonderful holiday season.

Live From The Winter Meetings.

Hello from Indianapolis. Between the sub-zero temperatures, biting wind, and multiple forms of precipitation we’ve had today, this convention puts the Winter in the Winter Meetings.

It seems like every year we read that this year’s meetings are the slowest yet. Well, since I’ve been down here I’ve heard three different people tell me that this is the slowest…Winter Meetings…ever. We have one massive trade that was just made official (great for Yankees, okay for Tigers, bad for Diamondbacks), and a whole lot of waiting. From the Royals’ perspective, this is almost certainly a good thing.

As the bitter taste of the 2009 season slowly gets washed out, it’s time to face the reality that, miracles aside, the Royals are not going to be a contender in 2010. As such, it’s time to acknowledge that whether the Royals can be deemed to have a successful season next year has next-to-nothing to do with their win-loss record.

This is not an easy thing to accept. After 15+ years of almost ceaseless irrelevance, it’s not easy to swallow the notion that we’ll have to wait at least one more season to dream again. It’s not easy, but it’s necessary. The alternative is to delude ourselves into thinking that adding the right mix of players this winter might be the difference between success and failure in 2010.

The Royals deluded themselves into thinking that two years ago, when they signed Jose Guillen. They deluded themselves last winter when they signed Kyle Farnsworth and Willie Bloomquist and traded for Mike Jacobs and Coco Crisp. (Granted, if they also deluded Zack Greinke, then it was all worth it in the end.)

This winter, there are no illusions. And that’s a blessing if it means that the Royals can get back to doing what they should have been doing exclusively since Dayton Moore was hired: building towards a future that, if you squint, has finally started to move from the distant horizon to a spot on the landscape two or three years away. So the fact that the Royals haven’t made any moves during these meetings is almost certainly good news. As my friend Joe Sheehan put it, this free-agent pool calls to mind WOPR's line from WarGames that "the only winning move is not to play."

Granted, the Royals have had a lot of discussion with the bargain basement of the free agent market, particularly with catchers. They were in hard on Ivan Rodriguez before the Nationals swooped in with their 2-year, $6 million deal, graciously keeping the Royals from re-living the Chuck Knoblauch era. But they’ve been linked to Jason Kendall, Rod Barajas, even Jose Molina, all guys who share two characteristics: 1) they’d all come fairly cheaply, and 2) they’re all worse players than the incumbent they’d be replacing, John Buck.

Now’s the time where I’d ordinarily foam at the mouth about the fact that the Royals want to release Buck, who hit .247/.299/.484 last year (his OPS+ was 103, meaning he was an above-average hitter despite playing a premium defensive position) and is just 29 years old, and replace him with someone like Kendall, who hit .241/.331/.305 in the inferior league last year and is 35. But it’s not that simple.

If the Royals really think Kendall or Barajas will help the Royals in 2010 more than Buck, then we would once again have to seriously question their ability to make even the most basic baseball decisions. But I’ve become increasingly convinced that the desire to replace Buck is rooted in finances more than anything else. Buck made $2.9 million last year, and would probably be due close to $3.5 million in arbitration for next year. The Royals seem to have a cap of about $2 million they’d like to pay to whoever Brayan Pena backs up in 2010.

While the Royals do have some issues with Buck’s defense – deservedly, as he’s thrown out exactly one-sixth (20 of 120) basestealers the last two years – I get the impression that the biggest issue they have with him is simply his price tag. If they could sign him to a $2 million contract, we probably wouldn’t be hearing anything about Kendall et al. But that can’t happen – literally, as a player can not have his salary cut by more than 20% in arbitration.

Having said that, if the Royals are convinced that they can’t afford Buck’s salary in arbitration, I don’t understand why they haven’t released him already. My thinking is that once Buck is a free agent, he has a chance to find out what the market for him is. If it turns out that the market is not that strong, then the Royals might be able to sign him for a better price than he would have earned in arbitration – particularly since the Royals would be able to offer Buck the same carrot they offered Kendall and Ivan Rodriguez, regular playing time, that a lot of other – better – organizations aren’t in a position to offer. The way the Royals are playing this game, they might well sign Kendall for $2 million, release Buck, and then find out that they could have signed Buck at a price similar to what they paid for Kendall.

But I’m working on the assumption that the Royals are going to downgrade behind the plate from Buck to someone like Jason Kendall, and I’m okay with that. Why? Because at the same time that the Royals can’t find enough coins under their cushions to keep Buck, they could find enough money to sign one of the most intriguing Cuban players to defect in recent memory. The Royals have guaranteed $7 million to Noel Arguelles over the next five years – the contract seems to be official pending only things like visas granted and physicals administered. On the one hand, it’s not a lot of money – it’s less money than the Royals guaranteed Farnsworth last winter. On the other hand, it’s the largest amateur contract the Royals have ever handed out, domestically or internationally.

So on the one hand we have a team that can’t afford spending an extra 1-1.5 million dollars for their starting catcher in 2010, and on the other hand we have a team willing to spend $1.4 million a year for the next five years for a player that might not reach Kansas City until 2012. There’s one inescapable conclusion to draw from this: the Royals, finally, have placed a higher priority on amateur talent than on free agent talent. And not just rhetorically, but financially: they're putting their money where their mouth has long been.

This is such a no-brainer for a small-market team that it really shouldn’t even warrant a mention – except that, all around baseball, you’ll find that even small-market teams will spend millions on immediate help at the major league level but then pinch pennies when it comes to signing prospects. To pick another small-market team at random, the Cincinnati Reds – like two dozen other teams – passed over Rick Porcello in the amateur draft in 2007 to save a few million dollars, signing a high school catcher named Devin Mesoraco instead. (Mesoraco looks like a future backup at best.) The following winter, they gave Francisco Cordero a 4-year, $46 million contract to be their closer. The Padres took Matt Bush with the #1 overall pick in 2004 to save money, then turned around and plowed that savings into one year of 38-year-old innings sponge Woody Williams. And so on.

The Royals are certainly guilty of this – just look at the names listed above. But for all the money that Dayton Moore has wasted on bad free agents, that money never came at the expense of the amateur budget. The Royals shied away from Porcello like everyone else, a debatable decision at the time which looks much worse now, but Mike Moustakas was not a signability pick. Eric Hosmer certainly wasn’t – he signed for $6 million up front, a better contract than #1 overall pick Tim Beckham got (Beckham signed for $6.15 million, but spread out over time.) Aaron Crow was drafted because the Royals thought he was the best player available. Tim Melville, Wil Myers, and Chris Dwyer all got seven-figure bonuses after dropping because other teams shied away from their demands. The Royals spent $600,000 on Korean catcher Shin-Jin Ho, and $1.35 million on Nicaraguan third baseman Cheslor Cuthbert.

And now that the purse-strings have been tightened a little, it’s notable that the first budget to get slashed is not the amateur budget, but the professional one. It’s never a good thing when budgets get slashed, but by slashing the free agent budget first, Moore has done an excellent job of mitigating the damage. It's okay if the Royals can’t afford John Buck, as long as they can afford Arguelles, a young (19 or 20 in Cuban years, could be 23 or 24 for all we know) athletic left-hander with a strong build, who throws in the low-to-mid 90s with an excellent changeup and a promising curveball. Arguelles would almost certainly be a first-round pick if he were subject to the amateur draft, with Keith Law describing him as a probable top-ten pick overall. Along with Mike Montgomery, Danny Duffy, and Chris Dwyer, Arguelles gives the Royals what has to be the strongest collection of left-handed pitchers in any team’s farm system.

The up-to-the-minute buzz is that the Royals might give Jason Kendall a two-year contract to get this thing done. This would be not just dumb but pointless: the point of keeping Kendall over Buck is to save money, but if you give Kendall a two-year deal, you run a very high risk that by Kendall plays so poorly in 2010 that the second year of his contract is dead money that needs to be eaten, and Kendall will probably make more in a two-year deal than Buck would make next season.

But if the worst thing that Moore does this off-season is give Jason Kendall a two-year deal…well, I’ve seen a lot worse than that. And there’s a good chance that will be the case, if for no other reason than the Royals simply don’t have the money to make a more expensive mistake. They might not have 7 million dollars lying around to sign Rich Harden or Mike Cameron or someone who could make a real impact, but they also don’t have 7 million dollars lying around to give to Hank Blalock or Xavier Nady or some other waste of payroll.

But they do have 7 million dollars lying around to give to Noel Arguelles. And for that, I am grateful, and more than a little surprised.

Kevin Appier: A Retrospective.

This article transcends my issues with the Royals. Kevin Appier deserves better than to have his Hall of Fame candidacy ignored because the organization he spent a decade with remains as moribund as the day he left them.

Robert Kevin Appier (like another Royals pitcher of note, Appier goes by his middle name) was the Royals’ first-round pick in 1987. Thanks to their 76-86 record in 1986, the Royals drafted 9^th the following year, the highest selection the team had since they selected Clint Hurdle from the same slot in 1975. The Royals drafted Appier out of Antelope Valley Junior College in California. With the pick immediately before Appier, the Dodgers selected a high school pitcher named Dan Opperman. Legend has it that the Royals had scouted Opperman, who was the subject of a lot of pre-draft hype, and then they saw Appier, and even though Appier was just a year older, the Royals’ scouts thought it was the difference between watching a man and a boy throw.

(Opperman was the first in a series of huge first-round flops by the Dodgers. The next year, they took Bill Bene with the 5^th overall pick; Bene is one of the most famously wild pro pitchers of my lifetime, up there with Jacob Shumate and Jason Neighborgall – Bene walked 543 batters in 516 pro innings. Two years later, they took high school pitcher Kiki Jones with the 15^th pick; the year after that they took Ron Walden, another prep pitcher, with the 9^th pick overall. None of the four pitchers made the major leagues.)

Appier was not a phenom in the minors, but he found immediate success. Assigned to Eugene in the Northwest League after signing, he had a 3.04 ERA in 15 starts and struck out 72 batters in 77 innings. The following year, he was promoted to Baseball City in the high-A Florida State League, and in 147 innings he had a 2.75 ERA, walked 39 batters against 112 strikeouts, and notably surrendered just one home run. He was promoted to Double-A Memphis in time to make three starts and had a 1.83 ERA.

That earned Appier a promotion to Omaha in 1989. He pitched well but not that well, going 8-8 with a 3.95 ERA. He allowed 141 hits in 139 innings, but surrendered just 6 homers with a solid K/BB ratio of 109/42. He was called up to make his major league debut on June 4^th, and stayed in the rotation for a month before getting demoted with cause. He was awful; he had a 9.14 ERA in 22 innings, allowing 34 hits and 12 walks. In his fourth start he was knocked out in the first inning having allowed 6 runs, and in his next and final start he allowed 6 runs in three innings.

That winter, Baseball America released their first-ever Top 100 Prospects list. Appier was ranked #86, sandwiched between a couple of southpaws named Eric Gunderson and Mike Milchin. It’s safe to say that no one thought that Appier was about to start an eight-year run as one of the best pitchers in the game.

Appier returned to Omaha to start the 1990 season, but was quickly promoted after he had a 1.50 ERA in his first three starts. He was mostly used in middle relief at first, and not all that effectively, as he allowed 28 hits in his first 19 innings. On May 27^th he entered the rotation, and pitched quite well, with a 3.12 ERA in his next eight games, though this being the Royals he went just 3-3 in that span.

On July 7^th, 1990, I went out to a movie with some friends. The Royals were on TV that night, and just before leaving the house, I saw Appier give up a single to Lou Whitaker leading off the bottom of the first. I came home to learn that Whitaker’s single was the last hit for the Tigers that night, as Appier had thrown a one-hit shutout in the first complete game of his career. (The night before, the Royals were the victims of a one-hit shutout at the hands of Jack Morris*. It was the first time in decades that teams had swapped one-hitters in consecutive games.)

*: I don’t know about you guys, but personally, I don’t hear enough about Morris’ Hall of Fame chances.

From that moment, Appier was one of the best starting pitchers in baseball. He would throw a three-hit shutout against the Red Sox two starts later, a four-hit shutout against the A’s at the end of August, and another four-hit shutout against the Twins in September – except, heralding the chronic lack of run support he would receive with the Royals, the Royals didn’t score against the Twins either, and the Royals lost 1-0 when Jeff Montgomery gave up a walk-off single in the 11^th.

From July 7^th through the end of the season, Appier was 9-5 with a 2.45 ERA. For the season he was 12-8 with a 2.76 ERA in 186 innings. If that ERA doesn’t impress you, it should: it remains the lowest ERA by an AL rookie who qualified for the ERA title since 1976, when The Bird was The Word: Mark Fidrych led the league with a 2.34 ERA.

For his efforts, Appier finished a distant third in Rookie of the Year voting, behind Sandy Alomar and Kevin Maas. Alomar hit a modest .290/.326/.418, but so bewitched reporters with his intangibles that he won the Rookie of the Year award unanimously. Not to say the award was a joke, but Alomar’s season was worth 2.1 Wins Above Replacement, according to BP’s WARP1 value. Appier was worth 5.5 WARP. It wouldn’t be the last time that Appier finished third for an award he deserved to win easily.

Appier’s sophomore season was a consolidation year; his ERA rose to 3.42 even though his peripherals improved. His walk (2.6 per nine innings) and homer (0.6 per nine) rates were identical, and his strikeout rate actually rose from 6.2 to 6.8 Ks per nine. His statistical profile looked for all the world like that of a pitcher who was about to break out, and somewhere in Baltimore, a 16-year-old Royals fan who was starting a keeper Strat-o-matic league with his college buddies made sure to snag Appier in the inaugural draft.

Liftoff came in 1992, when Appier had a 2.46 ERA, missing the league ERA title by just five points (Roger Clemens led with a 2.41 mark). Appier also finished third in the league in hits per nine innings, fourth in WHIP, fifth in homers per nine, seventh in strikeouts per nine…and thanks to a typically anemic Royals offense, 16^th in wins with just 15. Appier ended the season with a bit of a scare, as the Royals shut him down after September 9^th with a tired arm as a precaution. This led a 17-year-old Royals fan to yell at pitching coach Guy Hansen before a late-September game at Camden Yards, inquiring about Appier’s health while using some choice words to describe Hal McRae’s handling of his pitch counts. (To his credit, Hansen responded, “his arm is fine.” Even more to his credit, Hansen was right.)

Appier wasn’t the best pitcher in the league, but he was close – he ranked third in the AL in VORP behind Clemens and league-leader Mike Mussina. He didn’t receive a single Cy Young vote. Dennis Eckersley won the Cy Young (and the MVP!) in a sort of delayed reaction to Eck’s 0.61 ERA the year before. Finishing second in the vote, despite a 3.18 ERA, was Jack McDowell. It was a bad omen.

In 1993, there was no debate: Kevin Appier was the best pitcher in the American League. He led the circuit with a 2.56 ERA, a figure made more impressive by the fact that 1993 proved to be the first year of the juiced ball/bat/body era – the league ERA jumped from 3.95 in 1992 to 4.34 in 1993, and has stayed above 4.34 ever since. Appier got stronger as the season went on – from June 19^th until the end of the season, he had a 1.94 ERA and allowed just 90 hits in 139 innings. On August 28^th, he began a stretch of consecutive scoreless innings that wouldn’t come to an end until September 23^rd, 33 innings later, a franchise record that was only broken by Zack Greinke this season (and Greinke’s streak of 38 innings spans two seasons, so Appier’s single-season mark is still the official record.)

Appier led the league in ERA by 38 points over Wilson Alvarez, which to put in perspective, is larger than the margin by which Greinke won this year’s ERA title over Felix Hernandez (33 points). Since 1993, six times has an AL pitcher won the ERA title by more than 38 points, and five times they won the Cy Young (four times unanimously). The only outlier was in 2003, when Pedro Martinez lost the award to Roy Halladay in large part because Martinez threw just 187 innings that year, compared to Halladay’s 266.

But in 1993, Appier received exactly one first-place vote. He finished third in the voting, behind Jack McDowell and Randy Johnson.

Johnson, at least, had the eye-popping strikeout total of 308 on his side, although his 3.24 ERA was a distant fleck in Appier’s rear-view window. McDowell, though, had a 3.37 ERA, and fewer strikeouts (158) than Appier (186). He had only one thing in his favor: he won 22 games, while Appier won only 18.

Mind you, when McDowell started, his team went 23-11, and when Appier started, the Royals also went 23-11. But because of the way baseball’s arcane, century-old scoring rules work, McDowell was credited with four more wins. A trick of accounting seemingly concocted by the wizards at Arthur Andersen gave 28 sportswriters the perception that Jack McDowell was the better pitcher, and gave Appier the shaft. Appier was already used to getting the shaft from his teammates, so it was only fair that their inability to support him offensively would screw him one more time.

The quintessential Appier start came on July 27^th that year, when he threw a complete-game one-hitter against the Rangers, the second one-hitter of his career. Unfortunately, that one hit was a home run by Royal-killer Rafael Palmeiro, and meanwhile the Royals were finding a way to scatter nine hits against Kenny Rogers without scoring a run. This remains the only game in the last 25 years in which a starting pitcher threw a nine-inning complete game, allowed just one hit, and took the loss.

(For you game score junkies, Appier took the loss in a game when he had a game score of 91. That is the highest game score by a losing pitcher in a regulation game since Ken Johnson took the loss in his no-hitter in 1964.)

In 1994, Appier’s ERA rose to 3.83, but then the league ERA rose to 4.81, and his ERA+ was still an outstanding 130. Teammate David Cone got the run support that Appier had been asking for, went 16-5 and won the Cy Young Award.

1995 looked like the year Appier would finally get the recognition he deserved. With Cone having been traded to the Blue Jays in a post-strike salary dump, manager Bob Boone elected to use a four-man rotation consisting of Appier, Tom Gordon, Mark Gubicza, and a traveling circus of fourth starters. Taking advantage of off-days, Boone didn’t even use a fourth starter until the eighth game of the season. Gordon and Gubicza were occasionally skipped as the season went on, but Appier pitched every fourth game. He started 12 of the team’s first 43 games, and 17 of the team’s first 63 games, a pace that would have led to 44 starts over a full season.

Appier didn’t respond to this workload by pitching well. He responded by pitching brilliantly. His brilliance was evident on Opening Day, when he threw 6.2 no-hit innings before he was pulled from the game, as the strike which had come to a sudden end at the hands of future Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had necessitated a shortened spring training, and pitchers’ arms were not fully stretched out by the start of the season.

In his first 14 starts – which only took him until June 23^rd, despite the late start to the season – Appier was 11-2 with a 2.04 ERA, and for the first time in his career was getting publicity as the best pitcher in the league, if not all of baseball. He was named to the All-Star team for the first time in his career. Boone’s four-man rotation was getting a lot of positive publicity. And then the dark side of Boone’s handling of pitchers became manifest.

From May 13^th through June 23^rd, here are Appier’s pitch count totals: 132, 127, 112, 123, 124, 109, 122, 141, 133, 98. Even for a veteran pitcher, those numbers were absurdly dangerous, even on four days’ rest – for a pitcher working on three days’ rest for the first time in his career, they were suicidal. On June 28^th, Appier surrendered five runs in eight innings – and threw 119 pitches. On July 3^rd, he allowed 10 runs in 3.2 innings. After losing his third straight start on July 7^th, Boone decided that after the All-Star Break he would revert to a five-man rotation.

It was too late; after three more starts (and 14 runs allowed in 12 innings), Appier went on the DL for the first time in his career. He returned three weeks later, but wasn’t the same, with a 4.24 ERA the rest of the season, and finished 15-10 with a 3.89 ERA. Appier would recover the following season, but the four-man rotation never would. Boone's experiment was actually a qualified success – Mark Gubicza, who hadn’t thrown 140 innings since he tore his rotator cuff in 1990, stayed in the rotation all year in 1995, led the league with 33 starts, and had a 3.75 ERA. But the point that baseball people took away from the Royals’ experiment is that Appier broke down, and the fact that he was throwing a ridiculous number of pitches was lost in the shuffle. No team has made a serious attempt at the four-man rotation since.

Appier remained one of the league’s best starters the next two years; he ranked 5^th in the league with a 3.62 ERA in 1996, and struck out a career-high 207 batters, and in 1997 he had a 3.40 ERA, good enough for 7^th place. That season his run support went from bad to worse; the Royals scored two runs or fewer in 15 of his 34 starts, and Appier went 9-13 despite an ERA+ of 137. In the last 20 years, the only other pitcher to throw 200 innings with an ERA+ of more than 130, and finish with a record at least four games under .500, was Jim Abbott in 1992, when he famously went 7-15 despite a 2.77 ERA.

From 1990 to 1997, Kevin Appier threw 1644 innings – an average of 205 per season, despite missing time due to the strike – and posted a terrific 3.22 ERA. His ERA+ was 140, a figure which generally puts you in the discussion for the Cy Young Award - that was his average ERA+ for eight years. (Justin Verlander, C.C. Sabathia, and Roy Halladay, who finished 3-4-5 in Cy Young voting this year, had ERA+ values of 133, 127, and 155.)

But Appier had the misfortune to pitch for an organization that was unworthy of his talents, so his record in that span was just 103-74 – an average of 13-9 per season.

Here’s a list of the five best pitchers in baseball from 1990 to 1997, as ranked by ERA+, with a minimum of 1200 innings pitched:

Greg Maddux: 165 ERA+, 139-70

Roger Clemens: 157 ERA+, 118-73

Kevin Appier: 140 ERA+, 103-74

David Cone, 136 ERA+, 109-69

Randy Johnson, 135 ERA+, 114-55

Of the five pitchers, Appier has by far the worst win-loss record – and it’s telling that the pitcher who comes closest, Cone, spent two years with the Royals. The other four pitchers all won a Cy Young Award in that span, while Appier was denied his.

Ask the average hard-core baseball fan who the best starting pitchers of the 1990s were, and you will probably get a list much like the one above. Their list will probably include Pedro Martinez, who had a 140 ERA+ from 1990 to 1997 but not enough innings to qualify. It will likely include Mike Mussina (130 ERA+) and Tom Glavine (128 ERA+).

But it won’t include Kevin Appier. He is the forgotten starter of the 1990s.

Appier’s success, for those of you who are too young to have watched him pitch, was based on four things: 1) a good, hard fastball, generally in the 92-94 mph range; 2) a dive-bombing split-finger fastball that was never a strike, but it was tough to lay off and impossible to hit; 3) a terrific slider with good tilt, which was particularly effective against right-handed batters, leading to a fairly pronounced platoon split (Appier’s career numbers against RHB were .234/.290/.349; against LHB they were .260/.339/.405).

The fourth and most underrated key to Appier’s success was his delivery, which had a herky-jerky motion and ended with Appier falling way off to his left side. It put him in terrible position to field the ball, but it was also invariably distracting for the hitter, and his stuff played up a notch as a result. His delivery was so unconventional that for most of his career, the conventional wisdom was that he was an arm injury waiting to happen. However, when biomechanics experts evaluated his delivery, they came to the conclusion that however unconventional it was, Appier’s delivery was actually quite efficient and did not put him at undue risk for injury.

Appier’s shoulder did come apart after the 1997 season, ending the opening act of his career, but the injury occurred in an off-field incident, reportedly when he slipped and fell of the porch while carrying some of his sister’s wedding presents. (Yeah, I know.) His return in 1998 was further delayed by a bizarre bout with colitis that briefly put him in the hospital. He returned to Kansas City for three starts in September, and it was clear he wasn’t the same pitcher – he had a 7.80 ERA and struck out just nine batters in 15 innings. In 1999, he was fully healthy, but a shell of his former self. At the end of July, he had a 4.87 ERA and had struck out just 78 batters in 140 innings. (Thanks to an offense that was suddenly clicking with guys like Mike Sweeney, Jermaine Dye, Johnny Damon, and Carlos Beltran, Appier was 9-9 despite the high ERA.)

With 1.5 years left on his contract – the ironic upside to Appier being massively underrated was that it allowed the Royals to sign him to a four-year contract extension in 1996 – it was time for Appier to go the way of most every other star player the Royals had developed. The A’s came calling with a package of Blake Stein, Jeff D’Amico, and Brad Rigby, and on July 31^st, Appier’s tenure with the Royals came to an end.

None of the three pitchers the Royals got for Appier amounted to much – Blake Stein had his moments – but Appier was a disappointment in Oakland as well. He went 7-5 despite a 5.77 ERA the rest of the 1999 season, and the A’s missed the playoffs by seven games.

The following year, Appier had a 4.52 ERA and led the league with 102 walks, but with a real offense behind him he went 15-11 as the A’s won the AL West. He made his postseason debut as the Game 2 in the ALDS against the Yankees, giving up three runs in 6.1 innings and taking the loss. In the decisive Game 5, he relieved in the second inning after Gil Heredia gave up six runs in the first, and pitched well, allowing just one run in four innings as the A’s pulled to within two runs. But their rally fell short, and they were eliminated.

Whatever bad luck Appier had endured through the 90s was largely mitigated by his good fortune to be a free agent during the craziest baseball market ever, the 2000-01 offseason. In the same winter that Alex Rodriguez got his $252 million contract, where Darren Dreifort signed for 5 years, $55 million, where the Rockies gave Mike Hampton $121 million for 8 years and Denny Neagle $51 million for 5 years, it was only fair that Appier cash in as well. He did, signing a 4-year, $42 million contract with the Mets.

Unlike most free agents signed that winter, Appier earned his money, at least at first. In his first and only season in the NL, Appier’s fastball came back, or at least his strikeout rate did: he whiffed 172 batters in 207 innings and finished with a 3.57 ERA. (His low run support came back as well; he went just 11-10.) The Mets then decided to trade their slightly overpriced player straight-up for a massively overpriced player, sending Appier the following winter to the Angels for Mo Vaughn. Both players had three years left on their contracts, but Vaughn had just missed the entire 2001 season, and was due $46.5 million over the next three years. Vaughn would hit a modest .259/.349/.456 in his first year in New York. The second year, he hit .190/.323/.329 in 27 games, got hurt, and never played in the majors again.

Back in the American League, Appier continued to pitch well, going 14-12 with a 3.92 ERA for an Angels team that won 99 games and the Wild Card. The Angels then stormed their way to a world championship, though no thanks to Appier, who in five playoff starts allowed 15 runs in 22 innings. The Angels won four of his five starts, scoring six runs or more in each of the four. Appier was on pace to be the goat of the World Series when he gave up three runs in the fifth inning of Game 6, but Scott Spiezio’s three-run homer in the seventh sparked a 6-run comeback from 5-0 down, and the Angels would win behind rookie John Lackey the next day.

With a World Champion ring in hand, it seemed like the only thing Appier had left to do was to return home – and amazingly, he did. When 2003 rolled around, Appier looked like the 35-year-old with too many miles and stitches on his arm he was. Halfway through the season, he had a 5.63 ERA and lousy peripherals, his velocity was way down, and after a July in which he had a 10.91 ERA in five starts, the Angels cut him loose even with another year to go on his contract. The stage was set for him to return to Kansas City – to a team that, for the first time since his major league debut 14 years earlier, was actually in a pennant race.

Appier’s return to the Royals came on August 8^th in Tampa, and though he pitched well, the Royals welcomed his return the traditional way: they got shut out. But then Appier returned to Kansas City, pitching against the mighty Yankees on a Wednesday night. The Royals entered play that day with a ½ game lead over the White Sox in the division. A crowd of 35,000-plus was in attendance that night, and they were treated to one final night of magic.

The Royals jumped on Jeff Weaver for three runs in the first, a run in the fourth, and two more in the fifth. Appier, meanwhile, had broken out the smoke and mirrors. His fastball barely hit 87 on the gun, his once-biting slider was missing more teeth than an NHL veteran, but the Yankees couldn’t do anything with him. Appier worked around a leadoff walk in the first, and a pair of singles in the second. He retired 11 in a row between the second and the sixth inning, before Derek Jeter punched a one-out single to center.

Jason Giambi batted next. Appier worked the count to 1-2, then Giambi fouled off two pitches. Sitting in front of the TV, I thought to myself at that moment, “the one thing Appier can’t do here – he can’t blow a high fastball by a guy like Giambi anymore.”

The next pitch came in. It was a fastball up in the zone, measured at 87 on the gun. Giambi took a mighty rip at the meatball.

And whiffed.

I’m not going to say that it got a little misty in the Jazayerli household. I will say that I don’t even remember Bernie Williams grounding out on the next pitch, probably because it’s hard to see through tears.

Appier’s night was done, although the Royals would tack on five more runs to render a historically pleasing final score of 11-0. The White Sox lost that night, extending the Royals’ lead in the division to 1.5 games with six weeks to go.

We could not have known at the time that this game would represent the absolute last high point in the Royals history to date. The Royals opened a three-game series against Minnesota that weekend, and with Rob Neyer and I in attendance, they got hammered in the first two games before squeaking out a 5-4 win on Sunday – after which we learned that Runelvys Hernandez had been demoted to Double-A (which finally convinced Hernandez to come clean about his arm pain, which in turn led to a diagnosis of a torn elbow ligament and Tommy John surgery).

Thanks to a White Sox sweep that weekend, the Royals had actually increased their division lead to three games with the Sunday win – but four days later, after a sweep in Yankee Stadium and a loss to the Twins in the Metrodome, the Royals had gone from 3 games up to 1 game back. They would not hold first place to themselves again all season.

But while we could not have known that Appier’s defeat of the Yankees would be one of the last meaningful victories of the decade, it would not have been surprising in the least to know that it was the last victory of his career. Which it was. In his next start, the Yankees got their revenge with six runs in six innings, and Appier didn’t strike out a single batter. On August 24^th, Appier allowed one run in two messy innings, and complaining of a sore elbow, he didn’t come out for the third. He was diagnosed with a torn flexor tendon, which was essentially career-ending.

Appier rehabbed hard all winter, and was impressive enough in spring training that he was ready to be activated when the Royals first needed a fifth starter in mid-April. In his first start, he allowed 7 runs in three innings. In his second start, he pulled himself from the game after one inning with renewed elbow pain. Frustrated with the slow pace of his rehab, Appier went home in July, officially retiring so that the Royals would not have to pay him the league minimum the rest of the season (as the Angels were still on the hook for $12 million.) He unretired over the winter, came back for spring training in 2005, had nothing, refused a minor league assignment, and was released. A year later he signed with the Mariners and even made 10 appearances with Tacoma before he was released on June 2^nd, and his career was finally over.

For his career, Appier went 169-137 with a 3.74 ERA and a 121 ERA+. He was an All-Star (albeit just once) and has a World Series ring. He is arguably the greatest pitcher in the history of the Kansas City Royals, who just had the misfortune to pitch for the Royals at the beginning of their long, slow, inexorable, and ongoing descent towards oblivion. He deserves to be remembered, and not just by Royals fans, as one of the game’s very best pitchers for most of the 1990s.

I can not, in good faith, make a case that he deserves enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. But I hope that at least one of the several readers of this blog who have a Hall of Fame vote will check the box next to his name anyway. The nature of Hall of Fame voting is inherently broken, as Bill James brilliantly laid out in his opus “The Politics of Glory” (later published under the name “Whatever Happened To The Hall of Fame?”)

The binary, up-or-down nature of Hall of Fame voting allows no room for nuance, and provides no mechanism for voters to distinguish between shades of Hall of Famers. This leads to a situation whereby a player who everyone agrees is just shy of being Hall-worthy gets no votes, whereas a player that has the support of a vocal minority of voters stays on the ballot year after year. This is how Lou Whitaker gets tossed off the ballot after one year, while Jack Morris sticks around year after year, gaining enough momentum each season to make his election a worrisome possibility.

So unfortunately there’s no way for a voter to show support for Appier other than by actually giving him a vote. So those of you who have a ballot – you know who you are – here’s all the justification you need to throw a vote Appier’s way: he is better than several pitchers already in the Hall. Appier’s career WARP1 total, which is a fancy way of calculating his total career value, was 48.4 wins. This is higher than the total of Hall of Famers Jesse Haines (47.5) and Rube Marquard (42.9). If you don’t want to count Haines and Marquard because they were Veterans Committee selections (and widely considered to be mistake picks), consider that Appier was also more valuable than Catfish Hunter (42.6), who was elected by the BBWAA in 1987.

Eight years ago, Jim Deshaies began a tongue-in-cheek campaign to get one Hall of Fame vote, and succeeded, getting a vote from Houston Chronicle writer John Lopez. The world didn’t end, and Lopez wasn’t censured for his vote, even though Deshaies had a lifetime 84-95 record and an ERA+ of 91 (meaning he was a below-average pitcher over the course of his career). If Jim Deshaies can get a vote, Kevin Appier sure as hell better get one too.

This isn’t like giving an undeserving player a vote on an MVP ballot, where a vote for an undeserving player is a vote not given to a deserving one. With a Hall of Fame ballot, in which 10 players can be listed but most voters rank no more than six or seven, a courtesy vote for Appier would have no impact on the voting totals for anyone else. So if you’ve got space at the end of your ballot, I’d sure appreciate it if you give a nod to Kevin Appier.

(And while we’re here, let me also urge the Royals to stop dithering and induct Appier into the team’s Hall of Fame next summer. It’s been four years since a Royals player was inducted – scout Art Stewart was enshrined in 2008. Appier should absolutely, positively be the team’s 2010 inductee.)

Appier might not get a single vote when the results are released next month, or he might receive enough votes to stay on the ballot another year. Neither result will have any impact on his place in my experience as a baseball fan. Kevin Appier was the shining beacon of light in my journey from hard-core baseball fan to insanely obsessive baseball fan to burgeoning baseball writer in the 1990s. He was a reason for me to turn on the TV or the radio or follow the play-by-play on the proto-web every fifth day. He was the inner wall of defense against the rising tide of despair that lapped at the shores of the Royals throughout the 1990s, and it’s no coincidence that the bottom fell out on the organization soon after he got hurt.

I can’t imagine my history as a Royals fan without the eight years I spent watching and rooting for Kevin Appier. No matter whether the Hall of Fame chooses to give him some small measure of remembrance next month, he’ll be remembered by the fans that had the pleasure to watch him pitch for a long time to come.

XXX

Quick administrative note: Major League Baseball is holding its winter meetings this week, and instead of holding them in Phoenix or Las Vegas or Orlando or some other warm-weather clime, this time they’re holding them in…Indianapolis. I can’t fathom why, but I also can’t complain, as it’s a four-hour drive from my house. I’ve never been to the winter meetings before, but I’m planning to drive down Tuesday evening and stay through Wednesday night, and thanks to WHB I have my press credentials. So I’m lifting my blog silence while I’m down there; be sure to check in here if the Royals make any big moves at the meeting.

(And they may be starting early, if the rumored five-year, $7 million deal with Noel Arguelles is true. If it is: me like. Me like very much.)