Royals Report Card, 2010: Part Three.

Continuing our report card with the starting rotation…

Bruce Chen – Expectations: None; Grade: A-

Chen was sort of the Wilson Betemit of the pitching staff. The difference is that while there are no obvious red flags around Betemit’s performance that suggest it was unsustainable (other than the fact that he’d never done it before), there is good reason to believe that Chen’s 2010 represents the upper limit of his ability, and he’s far more likely to fall back than to take even a small step forward.

Chen’s 4.17 ERA was his best since 2005, and a full point and a half better than last year’s mark of 5.68 ERA. But his improvement was mostly illusory. He actually struck out fewer batters (6.3 Ks vs. 6.5 Ks per nine) and walked more batters (3.7 vs. 3.6) this year than last. His home run rate dropped significantly, but his flyball rate – Chen is one of the most extreme flyball pitchers in the majors – barely budged, going from 51% to 48%. In 2009, about 12% of his flyballs turned into Big Flies; in 2010, that percentage was only 8%. And his batting average on balls in play, which was .325 in 2009 (read: unlucky), was .279 in 2010 (read: lucky).

That’s not to say Chen didn’t improve at all. If nothing else, Chen certainly was a different pitcher in 2010. For one thing, Chen – like evidently every single pitcher in the major leagues – has learned to throw a cut fastball. The emergence of the cutter over the past decade has easily been the biggest difference in the pitcher/batter dynamic to emerge since at least the split-finger fastball arrived in the 1980s; the difference is that the cutter is probably here to stay. (The splitter was blamed for a rash of pitcher injuries almost from the beginning; it was up to each pitcher to decide whether to make the Faustian bargain of trading tomorrow’s health for today’s success. The cutter, by comparison, has not been linked to an increased risk of injury to the best of my knowledge.)

Fangraphs doesn’t list Chen as throwing a cutter in 2010, but the percentage of sliders he threw increased from 10.2% in 2009 (and a career high of 12.3% in 2004) all the way to 21.2% this season. That’s almost certainly just a classification error; the cutter works as sort of a mini-slider, and my guess is that half of those “sliders” were his new pitch.

I’m sure the cutter was a useful addition to his repertoire, but there’s no evidence that it was a game-changer for him. If it was, we would see it in his peripherals – his strikeouts would have gone up, or he would have induced more groundballs. (For evidence of the kind of transformation the cutter can cause, look at Esteban Loaiza’s 2003.) We did not. Chen was the same pitcher he’s always been, just slightly better on the margins. And with a fastball that averages 86.2 mph, it’s unlikely that Chen can pitch any better than he did in 2010.

I’d still like to have him back on a one-year contract, because one year should be the operative word for any free agent contract the Royals hand out this winter, and better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. But if teams take his improvement at face value and he gets a multi-year offer, the Royals are best off cashing in their winnings and walking away.

Luke Hochevar – Expectations: Moderate; Grade: C+

Hochevar missed nearly half the season with an elbow injury – apparently suffered while taking batting practice at Fenway Park and swinging for the Green Monster – which disguised the fact that he did make considerable progress as a pitcher. It’s an open question whether “considerable progress” is simply a euphemism for “wasn’t so God-awful unlucky”.

Much as with Chen, in terms of what a pitcher has most control over, very little changed between 2009 and 2010. Hochevar’s strikeout rate dipped imperceptibly (from 6.7 to 6.6 per nine), and his walk rate crept up slightly (from 2.9 to 3.2). His groundball rate dropped from 47% all the way to 46%. His batting average on balls in play dropped slightly, from .326 to .320; he was still giving up an unusual number of hits.

But the rate at which flyballs turned into homers dropped by nearly 50%, and he stranded 65% of the runners he allowed to reach base, up from 59%. That’s how Hochevar’s ERA could drop from 6.55 to 4.81 without a change in his peripherals.

I’m not going to chalk all of that up to a change in luck, though. To some degree, we make our own fortune, and Hochevar seemed to have a knack for making his own misfortune in years past. As I wrote about earlier, after Ned Yost gave him his Sermon on the Mound, Hochevar seemed to pitch with more confidence, and completely eliminated his proclivities for the big inning – he didn’t allow more than 2 runs in any inning the rest of the season. From May 20th on, Hochevar also had a K/BB ratio of better than 3 to 1, and posted a 4.05 ERA.

Hochevar isn’t an ace. But he’s a perfectly acceptable #3 starter, perhaps stretched a little bit to be the Royals #2 starter at the moment. He just turned 27, and I suspect his best years are still ahead of him.

Kyle Davies – Expectations: Low to Moderate; Grade: C-

After riding the Kyle Davies Experience for the better part of three seasons, the Royals and their fans adjusted their expectations accordingly, and he still found a way to fail to live up to them.

Give Davies some credit. He made 32 starts and threw 184 innings, both accomplishments in themselves as well as career highs. He cut his walk rate by nearly a full walk per nine innings (from 4.8 to 3.9) while maintaining his strikeout rate (it dropped from 6.3 to 6.2). Control has been Davies’ biggest weakness, and his progress in that area should not be discounted.

But ultimately he wound up with a 5.34 ERA, seven points higher than his ERA in 2009, even as the league ERA in the Year of the Pitcher dropped 31 points. You can make excuses for Davies – his BABIP jumped from .288 to .317, again suggesting he was the victim of bad luck (and/or bad defense). But after making excuses for Davies for the last three years, I completely understand anyone who’s fresh out of them.

Davies will be a free agent next winter, so with the Royals in the market for inexpensive innings munchers to tide the rotation over for a year until the Left-Handed Cavalry* arrive, it’s important to remember that that’s essentially what the Royals have in Davies. There is value in a starter who can take the ball every fifth day and keep you in the game most of the time. There’s a lot more value when he’s your #5 starter than when he’s your #3 starter, but at least for 2011, that’s the hand we’ve been dealt.

*: We need a good nickname for all the good lefties coming – something better than “The Fantastic Four” or “The Fab Four” to describe Mike Montgomery, John Lamb, Danny Duffy, and Chris Dwyer. Since the root meaning of “Sinister” is left-handed, how about The Sinister Six to describe those four, plus Tim Collins, plus…um…Everett Teaford? He’s not in the same class as the other guys, but he’s also likely to get to the majors first. If Noel Arguelles pitches like the guy in the catalog next spring, we can upgrade the group to The Sinister Seven.

I can’t help but think – even after all the years of disappointment – that there’s more to Davies than this. He has four quality pitches; none of them are great, but they’re all serviceable, including a fastball that runs 91-92 most nights. He wouldn’t be the first pitcher with a large repertoire of average-plus stuff who frustrates his team to no end in his mid-20s, before beginning to fulfill his potential in his late 20s.

Look at this comparison of Davies and Pitcher X, over a three-year span from ages 24 to 26:

Davies: 75 GS, 420 IP, 4.98 ERA, 4.1 BB/9, 6.1 K/9, 1.0 HR/9, 9.6 H/9.

X: 81 GS, 457 IP, 4.86 ERA, 3.6 BB/9, 6.1 K/9, 1.4 HR/9, 9.4 H/9.

There are some subtle differences here – Davies gave up fewer homers, but had worse control. But both pitchers, while lauded for having good stuff, were considered underachievers because the results never matched the talent.

Pitcher X is Gil Meche. At age 27 – his last year before free agency – he started to figure things out, lowering his ERA to 4.48 and setting career highs with 156 Ks and 7.5 Ks per nine innings. And then Meche signed with the Royals and was an excellent and durable starting pitcher for the next 2½ seasons until…well, you know.

While I don’t think Davies is setting himself up perfectly for a $55 million payday next winter, I do think he could follow a similar trendline – he could have the best season of his career in 2011, then leave for greener pastures and finally turn into the pitcher that both the Braves and Royals thought he was going to be all along.

Given how much credit Bob McClure (deservedly) received for fixing what ailed Meche essentially overnight, his failure to do the same with Davies after nearly four years has to be held against him. He has one more chance to get it right. I don’t expect miracles in 2011, but I do expect improvement.

Zack Greinke – Expectations: Insanely High; Grade: D+

Maybe it wasn’t fair to expect Greinke to pitch like he did in 2009, or even come anywhere close. Maybe, in retrospect, it looks kind of ridiculous that most forecasting systems spit out a projection for Greinke in 2010 that predicted an ERA in the low 3s, and almost to a man, Royals fans scoffed at those projections as absurdly pessimistic.

On the other hand, was it really too much to expect that Greinke would remain, at the very least, a Cy Young contender in 2010? He didn’t just win the Cy Young Award in 2009 – he had one of the most dominant seasons by any pitcher, in either league, in recent memory. Only two pitchers since 1997 – Pedro Martinez and Roger Clemens – have posted a lower seasonal ERA. In the American League, only Martinez and Clemens have bested Greinke’s ERA going all the way back to 1982.

So yeah, I do think it’s fair that we expected Greinke to pitch, not just well, but very well. He wasn’t simply great in 2009; he was transcendent. In 2010, he was ordinary.

I’ve heard some comments from Royals fans that it’s unfair to be disappointed with Greinke given that he pitched almost exactly as well as he did in 2008 – and indeed he did, as his xFIP in both seasons is identical (3.76). But I think that misses the point. Yes, the 2010 Greinke and 2008 Greinke are bosom buddies, and the 2009 Greinke was an outlier. But that’s just it – we didn’t think that Greinke was having a career season in 2009. Oh sure, we thought he might never have a season quite that good again – but it seemed like he took a very real step forward, a level that no pitcher had reached since Pedro Martinez a decade before. Martinez reached that level of transcendence in 1997, and stayed there more or less through 2003 – he won 5 ERA titles in a seven-year span. Greinke touched the heavens, then came hurtling back to earth.

The most concerning part of Grienke’s season, to me, was his lack of strikeouts. His K rates from 2007 to 2009 read 7.82, 8.14, and 9.50 – the highest K/9 rate in the history of the franchise. Last year he broke the franchise record with a 15-strikeout game, and recorded five double-digit strikeout games.

In 2010, the bite was gone. His strikeout rate dropped to 7.40 per 9 innings, and just once all season did he strike out 10 or more batters. In part, he traded some of those strikeouts for groundballs – his groundball percentage jumped from 40 to 46%. But it wasn’t a fair trade.

The elephant in the room is the one with the tattoo stamped “CONCENTRATION” on its hide. No one knows for sure how much of Greinke’s struggles in 2010 were less the fault of his than of the team around him – and his general disinterest in playing for that team. And no one knows for sure whether it speaks well of Greinke if that’s the case. On the one hand, if it’s just a lack of concentration on his part, then presumably he can get back to his 2009 performance level whenever he feels like it. On the other, you’d rather not build your franchise around a pitcher who is only great when he feels like it.

I think we’ll see a refreshed Greinke in 2011, because he knows that either the team will play well, or he’ll be traded in July to a team that is playing well. Much like Martinez had a bit of an off-year in 1998 after his breakthrough 1997, and then ran roughshod over baseball for the next five years, it’s possible that 2010 will be Greinke’s worst season in a long time. If 2011 turns out to be as disappointing as 2010, well, in that case by the time 2011 ends he’ll almost certainly be some other team’s problem.

(The question of whether the Royals should trade him, and for how much, needs its own column, which I hopefully will get to before the winter meetings.)

Sean O’Sullivan – Expectations: Low to Moderate; Grade: D+

O’Sullivan is a big, beefy guy, and he’s young, and he throws reasonably hard. But he just…doesn’t…miss…bats. He now has a career rate of 4.8 strikeouts per 9 innings, and that’s just not survivable – certainly not when you’re also a flyball pitcher. And certainly not when you can’t compensate with pinpoint control. O’Sullivan isn’t wild by any stretch – he average about one walk every three innings – but he would need to cut that walk rate in half to survive without a change in his other peripherals.

I concede that Dayton Moore traded Alberto Callaspo at the right time – Callaspo’s power evaporated after the deal, he’s stopped hitting .300, and I doubt he would bring much of anything in a trade today. But I was skeptical that O’Sullivan was worth much of anything at the time, and I remain skeptical today. Maybe he’ll prove me wrong; he’s almost certain to be in the rotation to start 2011, and he’ll still be just 23. Or maybe Will Smith will win the deal for the Royals.  But right now, that trade looks like a whole lot of nothing.

Brian Bannister – Expectations: Low to Moderate; Grade: D-

You know how much it hurts me to write this, but it would hurt me more to lie about it. Brian Bannister did not resemble a major league pitcher in any way, shape, or form in 2010. Of the 134 pitchers who threw 110 or more innings in the majors last year, Bannister’s 6.34 ERA ranked dead last – 40 points worse than his closest competitor, Scott Kazmir.

The only reason Bannister doesn’t get an F is that he was pitching hurt all season. It didn’t really register with me when I spoke to Bannister at the trading deadline, partly because of all the chaos going on around me, and partly because of the casual way in which he said it. But in retrospect, when Bannister told me that he wasn’t able to throw his cutter at all because it hurt his shoulder, well, that should have set off all kinds of alarms.

Remember, prior to the 2009 season, Bannister realized that his entire approach to pitching – which after a delightfully fluky rookie season, had a led to a 5.76 ERA in 2008 – had to be revamped. He basically invented a cut fastball over the winter, and he didn’t just add it to his repertoire – he made it his primary pitch. In 2009, according to Fangraphs, Bannister threw his cutter 52.3% of the time. His “normal” fastball, which he threw 59.6% of the time in 2008, was thrown just 16.8% of the time in 2009.

And it worked. Dramatically. His groundball percentage jumped from 37.5% in 2008 to 49.5% in 2009. His home run rate dropped by almost a third. In his first 20 starts, through August 2nd, Bannister had a 3.59 ERA, and in 123 innings had allowed just 39 walks and 11 homers.

And then his shoulder began to ache.

The Royals lost his next six starts, in which he surrendered 34 runs in 31 innings, before he was shut down for the season in early September. Evidently the rest didn’t do him a lot of good. I don’t know whether the cut fastball was the cause of his shoulder pain, or if throwing the pitch simply aggravated the pain, but either way, his new toy pitch, the one that was going to make him an above-average starter, was taken away from him after he got to play with it for only a few months.

Since his arm started to hurt, in his last 30 games, Bannister has a 6.92 ERA, and has allowed 27 homers in 159 innings. He’s had to go back to being the flyball pitcher with marginal stuff he used to be, and that simply won’t work anymore.

He’s almost certain to be released this winter, and you can’t blame the Royals for doing so. At this point, Bannister’s future is almost entirely dependent on whether his shoulder heals up. He strikes me as the perfect kind of pickup for the Padres, a team that plays in a pitcher’s park, in a division with a lot of pitcher’s parks, in an inferior league. Bannister is a good hitter, which makes an NL destination an added bonus. If he gets healthy, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if he winds up a key starter for yet another surprise contending team in San Diego next year.

If he doesn’t get healthy, well, I don’t expect him to stick around the majors much longer – at least as a pitcher. As a coach, or (please, Brian!) as a broadcaster, he’ll hopefully be around forever.

Gil Meche – Expectations: Minimal; Grade: TBD

I really don’t know how to come up with a grade for Meche, both because I’m not sure how to define the expectations for him coming into the season, and because I’m still not sure whether his conversion from broken-down starter into quality reliever is for real or not.

In spring training, the Royals’ expectations for him – at least publicly – were that he’d be back to his 2007-08 form as if 2009 never happened. That was ridiculous on its face, and I said so at the time. That he then went out and posted a 6.66 ERA in nine starts, walking more batters than he struck out, sandwiched between two more DL stints…well, only someone who had been drinking the Royals’ Kool-Aid ought to have been surprised. (Sadly, this included the Royals themselves.)

At that point, it appeared a foregone conclusion that the last two-and-a-half years – fully half of Meche’s contract – were dead money. That conclusion was only strengthened when a trip to the doctor revealed enough damage to sideline Meche for over a season when he went under the knife. When Meche then had a sudden change of heart and decided he could make it as a reliever without any surgery at all, well, forgive me, but I was a cynic. On Twitter, I estimated the chance of this working at approximately 0.0001%.

Either Meche hit the Powerball, or I grossly underestimated his chances, because he not only made it back in September, he was…good. He pitched 13 innings, and while you can’t tell hardly anything about a pitcher in 13 innings, it’s notable that he struck out 11 batters and walked just four. That’s a positive sign for a pitcher who, since throwing his 132-pitch shutout last June 16th, had walked 61 batters and struck out just 58. Meche wasn’t allowed to pitch on back-to-back days, although twice he threw two innings in an appearance (although he gave up a run each time).

Fangraphs actually lists the average velocity on Meche’s fastball (92.6) as his highest since 2003. There are some caveats there – the Kauffman Stadium radar gun ran hot all season, and pitchers typically gain velocity in relief. But there’s no reason to think that this conversion can’t work. I’m not comparing the two in the slightest, but Dennis Eckersley was considered a broken-down starter in 1987.

The expectations have obviously dropped from the days when he was a 210-inning pitcher, but I think it’s reasonable to hope for 70-80 innings of very solid middle relief from Meche in 2011, perhaps even work as the 8th inning guy. If that’s the case, then the Royals might get fair value from Meche’s contract in spite of themselves. The value of 2.5 years of a #2 starter, along with a season-plus of quality middle relief, isn’t worth $55 million – but it’s closer than you think.

Incomplete Grades:

Bryan Bullington – Rick and Ilsa will always have Paris, and Bullington will always have August 15th, 2010 against the Yankees, an eight-inning, two-hit-shutout performance closed out by Joakim Soria in a 1-0 win. In his other 35 innings with the Royals, Bullington allowed 29 runs. What makes baseball such a beautiful game is that, on any given day, a pitcher like Bryan Bullington can pitch a masterpiece. Unfortunately for Bullington, that means that his masterpiece can’t change the fact that he’s still Bryan Bullington. For his sake, I hope he gets more chances. For the Royals’ sake, I hope they’re with another team.

Royals Report Card, 2010: Part Two.

Continuing with our end-of-season grades, I’ve taken a suggestion from a reader to include an “Expectations” score for each player along with their grade, so you’ll have some perspective for why some bad players get a better grade than some good ones.

David DeJesus – Expectations: Moderate to High; Grade: B+

Among his other virtues, David DeJesus is a remarkably consistent player. He’s a career .289 hitter, and prior to 2010, only once had he finished a season with an average more than 20 points away from that career mark (he hit .260 in 2007). And keep in mind that batting average is much more dependent on luck than other offensive skills. His isolated power (slugging average – batting average) from 2005 to 2009 read like this: .152, .151, .112, .145, .153. His “isolated walk rate” (on-base percentage minus batting average) from 2004 to 2010, read like this: .073, .065, .069, .091, .059, .066, .066.

Aside from 2007, when he stopped hitting for average or power but set a career high for walks and led the league with 23 HBPs (he hasn’t been hit by more than 12 pitches in any other season) – DeJesus has been positively metronomic. He’s going to hit .290; he’s going to end up with an OBP around .360; he’s going to slug around .440. Every single year.

(You want a weird stat? DeJesus has grounded into exactly 10 double plays in each of the last five seasons. Even Adam Dunn’s exactly-40-homers-a-year stretch only lasted four seasons.)

This season, DeJesus had the best numbers of his career, at least until he broke his thumb – he batted .318/.384/.443 with an OPS+ of 127. But he really didn’t hit for more power or draw more walks than usual – his improvement was almost entirely batting average-driven. Which is to say, he probably won’t hit .318 next year.

DeJesus did strike out less in 2010 than in previous seasons, but not by an enormous margin – he whiffed in 13.4% of his at-bats in 2010, compared to a previous career rate of 14.7%. That’s the equivalent of making contact in about 7 extra at-bats over a full season. That might lead to two extra hits, not 15.

So at least on a per-game basis, it’s likely that 2010 was a career year for DeJesus, making it doubly unfortunate that he got hurt right as the Royals were poised to trade him. It’s unlikely his trade value will be any higher than it was this July 22nd.

Even if his batting average returns to its usual place in the high .280s, DeJesus is a heck of a ballplayer. He’s an excellent defensive player who has now proven he can handle all three outfield positions; he runs the bases well, albeit not as well as he did two or three years ago; he hangs in there just fine against left-handed pitching.

DeJesus is likely to be traded by next year’s deadline, if not over the winter, and much like Mike Sweeney, he’s liable to remembered less for his play than for the quality of the teams he played on. Consider this: if he stays, then by May DeJesus will likely crack the all-time Royals top ten in games played. He already ranks in the Royals’ top ten in at-bats, hits, doubles, triples, and runs scored, and should crack the top ten in RBIs and walks by mid-season.

I doubt it will ever happen, but in a truly fair world DeJesus would one day be enshrined in the Royals’ Hall of Fame. Based on the standards already set – with guys like Freddie Patek and Cookie Rojas already in the Hall – DeJesus is clearly worthy. According to Baseball-Reference, DeJesus has been worth 21.7 Wins Above Replacement for his career – the 8th-highest mark of any Royals hitter ever, and just a fraction of a win behind Mike Sweeney.

DeJesus is almost certain to be wearing another team’s uniform in 2012, and quite likely much sooner than that. It will be the right move to let him go. But that doesn’t mean I won’t miss him. Or that I won’t continue to feel that he’s one of the most underappreciated Royals of all time.

Scott Podsednik – Expectations: Low to Moderate; Grade: B+

Maybe Pods wasn’t a great player with the Royals, but he did exactly what the Royals expected of him – which is to say, he was far better than they really should have expected.

Podsednik had just hit .304 with the White Sox in 2009, but prior to that season had not hit even .270 since 2005. With a lack of secondary skills other than speed, a .270 batting average would have been worthless.  Instead, Podsednik hit .310 with the Royals, and had a 107 OPS+, both figures the highest of his career since his rookie season in 2003.

He didn’t walk much, and while he occasionally can pull a ball into the seats down the line, he has absolutely no gap power. (In 390 at-bats with the Royals, he hit just eight doubles. No Royal has ever batted so many times in a season with fewer two-base hits.) He showed off great speed as usual (30 steals), but as usual didn’t translate that speed into great defense. His range was about average, and his arm was useless – literally, as he didn’t have an outfield assist all season.

But still – he hit .310. He brought in a couple of low-level prospects at the trading deadline. He then went on to hit just .262 for the Dodgers, which just goes to show how ephemeral success can be when you’re a singles machine. But the Royals went looking for lightning in a bottle when they signed Pods, and for four months they trapped it.

Mitch Maier – Expectations: Low; Grade: B

In some ways, Maier is a low-rent version of DeJesus. Much as you can pencil in DeJesus’ performance before the season, it appears you can do the same with Maier. After his rookie season, we expected a player who would hit .260 with little power, but draw some walks and play good defense at whichever outfield spot he was assigned. And that’s pretty much what we got. Maier showed a little more power than he did as a rookie, slugging .375, and his OPS+ was a just-slightly-below-average 94.

On a team that seems to have a fourth outfielder stashed in every corner of the clubhouse, Maier has the advantage of certainty. We know he’s not an everyday outfielder, not unless he more consistently shows the kind of power he hinted at with that bomb in Seattle. But we also know that he’s perfectly capable of filling in anywhere in the outfield for a week at a time if need be. At least for one more season, he’ll be making close to the league minimum. The Royals could do a lot worse than Maier for their fourth outfielder spot. They certainly have in the past.

Gregor Blanco – Expectations: Low; Grade: B

Blanco had a surprisingly competent season after he came over at the trade deadline, and yet it’s not entirely clear that it matters. Blanco, in essence, was free money in the Rick Ankiel/Kyle Farnsworth trade – the Royals made the trade to get Tim Collins. But the Braves evidently had no use for Blanco, which is puzzling given that they were so desperate for outfielders that they wanted Ankiel in the first place.

Then Blanco went out and hit .274/.348/.369 with the Royals; Ankiel, by comparison, hit just .210/.324/.328 with Atlanta (but with one very important McCovey Cove splashdown.) Blanco’s on-base skills weren’t surprising, but his impression of a major league hitter’s slugging average was. As a rookie, Blanco had a .366 OBP but slugged just .309. (Only four qualifying players in the last 30 years have had an OBP north of .360 and a slugging average south of .310: Blanco in 2008, Rickey Henderson in 2000, Walt Weiss in 1993, and Gary Pettis* in 1989.)

But with the Royals, Blanco had 12 extra-base hits in 179 at-bats, which is nothing to brag about but was enough power to keep pitchers somewhat honest. He’s a doppleganger for Mitch Maier, which makes him both valuable and superfluous. The Royals have two left-handed hitting outfielders who can play all three outfield positions, hit .270, and draw walks. Both players make fine fourth outfielders; both players are stretched to play everyday. Maier has more power, Blanco has more speed, but otherwise they’re completely interchangeable. And it really makes no sense to keep both of them, particularly when the Royals also have Jarrod Dyson, who is really just a more extreme form of this prototype.

Blanco has too much value to just throw him away like the Braves did. The need to divest themselves of one of these two players is yet another reason why I think Dayton Moore needs to be highly active on the trade market this winter.

Jose Guillen – Expectations: Low; Grade: B

I was almost tempted to measure Guillen’s expectations as “undefined”, because really, we had no idea what to expect from him at the beginning of spring training. Frankly, the Royals had no idea either. What they got from Guillen was a mix of the expected (a player who refused to come out of the lineup for any reason, irrespective of whether a day off might help the team or even himself) and the unexpected (he wasn’t a complete cipher at the plate.)

Guillen played in every one of the Royals’ first 84 games – starting all but one of those games – and had missed just two of the Royals’ 108 games when he was designated for assignment. Not coincidentally, he was completely unable to maintain his early-season pace. Guillen was hitting .351/.372/.716 with 7 homers in the Royals’ first 18 games; from that point on, he hit .233/.301/.363.

Still, those April homers count the same as ones hit in July. Guillen’s overall line of .255/.314/.429 with the Royals calculates out to a 102 OPS+, which means he was just ever-so-slightly above-average as a hitter. For the season, the cumulative line of the Royals’ DHs ranked a respectable seventh in the league in OPS. Guillen wasn’t worth even a quarter of what the Royals were paying him, but – this might sound familiar – he was considerably less of a disaster than he was expected to be.

(And while we’re here, let’s talk about Kevin Pucetas, who the Giants just sent to Kansas City to complete the Guillen trade. Pucetas, as the press release reminds us, was Minor League Baseball’s Outstanding A-Ball Pitcher in 2007, when he 15-4 with a 1.87 ERA. But even then, he wasn’t considered a top prospect – I believe he never ranked higher than 15th in the Giants organization according to Baseball America. He’s a right-handed pitcher who throws strikes but tops out around 90, and over the last two years, pitching in Triple-A, he has a 5.34 ERA and has allowed 345 hits and 111 walks in just 295 innings.

I’m not disappointed with the trade – we weren’t sure that Guillen would fetch even this much – but by placing Pucetas on the 40-man roster, the Royals might regret exposing one of their talented young players in the Rule 5 draft. My feeling about Pucetas is that the Royals will probably start him in Omaha next year, hoping that some tinkering with his delivery and/or repertoire might restore some of his luster. But if it doesn’t, he needs to be moved to the bullpen quickly to see if there’s something salvageable here.)

Brayan Pena – Expectations: Low to Moderate; Grade: B-

Pena wound up with numbers awfully similar to his numbers in 2009, which hides the fact that his book was A Tale of Two Seasons. He started just 12 of the Royals’ first 125 games, and in that time was 9-for-61 with two doubles and five walks, for a line of .148/.221/.180. He would start 25 of the last 37 games, over which he hit .320/.362/.433.

He wound up with just 7 fewer at-bats than he had in 2009, and with exactly the same number of singles (29), doubles (10), triples (0), and walks (12). The big difference is that he hit six homers in 2009, and just one this season. I’m inclined to cut him some slack, given that his bats withered from atrophy for the season’s first four months. (Seriously. He was swinging a 16-ounce stick in September. Looked like a tree branch.)

Defensively, Pena’s numbers continued to rate him as roughly league-average; he threw out 29% of basestealers after throwing out 35% in 2009, and allowed just one passed ball all year. The difference is that this season, his defensive reputation started to catch up to the numbers. I’m not sure he’s an asset behind the plate, but he’s not a liability, and that’s a tremendous credit to Pena and his willingness to work hard at his craft.

He’s not a star, but Pena is a switch-hitter, an average receiver, and in sporadic playing time over the last two years, has hit .263/.313/.390. The average AL catcher has hit .252/.320/.389 in that span. In other words, Pena is the quintessential league-average player, at a distinctly below-average price. (Pena will be arbitration-eligible for the first time this winter, but given how limited his playing time has been the last two years, I doubt he’ll earn more than $1 million next year.)

The fact that Pena switch-hits is particularly useful for a catcher because most backup catchers (including Lucas May) bat right-handed. Pena has also hit slightly better from the left side in his career, which sets up the perfect platoon.

The Royals will undoubtedly be tempted to go out and get some veteran savvy behind the plate this winter, because after all that worked so well the last time. If they want a caddy for Pena and don’t think May is up to it, that’s one thing, but if Pena isn’t the first-string catcher next year, they’re making a mistake. As far as I’m concerned, he’s the perfect place-holder until one of the Royals’ stud catching prospects – either Wil Myers or the highly-underrated Salvador Perez – is ready.

Alex Gordon – Expectations: Moderate; Grade: D

Six months ago, Gordon had a track record that included a disappointing rookie season, a promising sophomore season in which he was an above-average hitter at third base, and a third season that was completely ruined by injury. There was still every reason to think that he would be an above-average hitter and an adequate defensive third baseman going forward.

Today, he’s a left fielder, and he’s batted .222 over the last two years combined. But hey, he’s promised to “dominate” next season, so that’s something. (Although it raises the question as to why he decided to wait until next season to unleash his can of whoop-ass.)

I’ve been defending Gordon pretty much from the moment he struck out against Curt Schilling on Opening Day, 2007. And I’ll still defend the notion that he should be the starting left fielder for the Royals on Opening Day, 2011. But my patience is wearing thin. He seems to be almost looking for new areas of his game to regress. Coming into 2010, he was at least an effective runner on the bases; he had stolen 28 bases in 34 attempts in his career. In 2010, he was thrown out five times in six attempts.

The dream of Alex Gordon, Superstar is dead – maybe just “mostly dead” in a Miracle Max sort of way, but still dead. And I’m fine with that. Gordon doesn’t have to be a superstar to help the Royals. The problem is that he’s having trouble living up to the Alex Gordon, Solid Contributor Like He Was In 2008 expectations I have for him.

Every year we say this is a critical year for Gordon, but next year isn’t just a critical year. It’s a matter of career life-and-death. If he can close the hole in his swing on inside fastballs, and lay off the pitch low and away, he can still carve out a nice career as a poor man’s J.D. Drew. But he’ll be 27 in February. If he’s going to turn things around, now’s the time. He doesn’t need to dominate in 2011. But he does need to hit the way he’s already shown himself capable of hitting.

Jason Kendall – Expectations: Minimal; Grade: F

In 2009, the Royals got 31 homers from the catching position. Braves’ catchers combined for 28 homers; no other team hit more than 23.

In 2010, the Royals got 1 homer from their catchers, when Brayan Pena went deep on September 12th. Every other team in baseball got at least 9 homers from their catchers.

I’ve made no secret that I’m a big fan of what Dayton Moore and his front office are doing in terms of the long-term picture for the franchise. But I’ve made it equally clear that some of their major-league decisions are utterly ridiculous. And none of them have been so ridiculous as the decision to sign Kendall.

Every other decision, no matter how poorly conceived, could at least be justified if you were some hard-core apologist for the team. Even the trade for Betancourt could be justified under the pretext that he was an improvement on the alternatives, which at the time were Tony Pena Jr, Willie Bloomquist, and asking Onix Concepcion to come out of retirement.

But the Royals didn’t just sign Kendall. They first declined Miguel Olivo’s option. Then, the moment Kendall signed, they flat-out released John Buck, who signed with a new team 24 hours later.

Olivo hit .269/.315/.449 this season; granted, it was with the Rockies. He led the league in passed balls allowed with 10 – the fourth time in five years he’s done that – but also snuffed out 42% of attempted steals.

Buck hit .281/.314/.489 for the Blue Jays and made the All-Star Team for the first time. He threw out 28% of basestealers, and allowed four passed balls.

Kendall hit .256/.318/.297. He became just the third player since World War II to play a full season without hitting a triple or homer. He threw out 29% of basestealers, and allowed six passed balls.

Kendall made the most money out of the three. Kendall is the only one who has a guaranteed contract for 2011.

If the Royals want fans like me to get fully on-board, is it too much to ask that they stop doing stupid sh*t like this? I mean, really. That contract was the laughingstock of baseball the moment it was signed. It remains a laughingstock today.

But not in the Royals’ front office. I have seen nothing that would make me believe that the Royals regret signing Kendall. Oh sure, they regret the fact that he got hurt – but there still isn’t any sign that they understand that Kendall’s injury was the only thing that kept his season from being a total loss.

Veteran influence? I have no doubt that having a warrior behind the plate in Kendall, a guy who played through pain (he played for a month with two of his rotator cuff muscles torn completely off the bone!), a guy who refused to take a day off no matter what, was inspiring to his teammates. It was a good example to his teammates. I just see no evidence that all that inspiration actually helped his teammates play better.

If a catcher is going to have an influence on his teammates, you’d expect to see it in the pitching staff first, wouldn’t you? You’d expect a catcher with 15 years of experience to guide his young batterymates to success, right?

Well, the Royals surrendered the most runs and had the highest ERA in the American League. They were third-worst in 2009, and regressed anyway.

Yeah, but maybe he had nothing to work with, and the pitching staff would have been even worse without his steady hand behind the plate.

Well, with Kendall behind the plate, the Royals had a 5.13 ERA and allowed opponents to hit .281/.348/.443. With Pena behind the plate, the Royals had a 4.75 ERA and opponents hit .270/.334/.430. (And in the 81 innings May caught, their ERA was 4.00 and opponents hit .233/.305/.343.)

Kendall’s season was really a statistical tour de force. The numbers are there to refute essentially any claim the Royals can make that Kendall somehow helped the team. And for that reason, no matter how low my expectations were for him to begin with, he earns a failing grade.

Incomplete Grades:

Rick Ankiel – For their $3.25 million, the Royals got 101 plate appearances and an indifferent attitude. They also got Tim Collins. I’d re-sign Ankiel in a heartbeat if that’s the end result.

Jarrod Dyson – I’ve already written about him extensively, but I should point out that I had a Eureka moment a week ago. I had been trying to come up with a comparable player to Dyson and had failed miserably – Dyson’s combination of speed, Gold Glove-caliber defense, utter lack of power, good on-base skills, and tendency to strike out despite his lack of power was rather unique. And then it hit me.

*: Gary Pettis. Pettis batted just .236 in his major league career, and hit just 21 homers in 11 seasons in the bigs. He struck out over 100 times in six different seasons. He didn’t start regularly in the majors until he was 26. But he drew a ton of walks, leading to a career .332 OBP, stole 354 bases, and won five Gold Gloves. In his best season, listed above, he had a .375 OBP for the Tigers in 1989. He was the centerfielder for the Angels when they came within a strike of the World Series in 1986.

It’s not clear whether Gary Pettis himself could survive in today’s offensive environment, which simply doesn’t allow for a player with a career .310 slugging average to play every day. But in his own time, Pettis was a useful little player, and I wonder if Dyson can be the same thing today.

Luke May – He was just 7-for-37 in his debut, with no walks and 10 strikeouts. I remain unconvinced he can be even a serviceable backup catcher in the majors. He’s out of options, so the Royals may have no choice but to find out.

Jai Miller – I’m thrilled for Miller that he spent almost seven weeks in the majors and made over $100,000. It’s always good to see a long-time minor league player get rewarded for his efforts. But that doesn’t mean I want the Royals to continue to dispense charity on the guy. In 1122 career at-bats in Triple-A, Miller has struck out 371 times – almost exactly one-third of the time. In 55 at-bats with the Royals, he whiffed 23 times. Unless he learns to make more contact, he simply won’t survive in the majors, and if he hasn’t learned to make more contact by now, it’s unlikely he ever will.

Starting pitchers to come.

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Housekeeping note: as you may have noticed, I have changed the settings for the blog to prevent people from leaving comments anonymously. It’s a change I’ve thought about making for some time, simply because it’s very confusing when half the comments are made by “Anonymous” and when someone would like to respond it’s impossible to address the other person by name.

But it’s a change that was accelerated by the inability of a single poster to adhere to the norms of social behavior, or even the less strict norms of internet behavior. Going forward, I certainly hope that all of you will continue to leave comments, and those of you who have not assigned yourself a username will not find the process too onerous. I enjoy the feedback. I just don’t suffer trolls gladly.

Royals Report Card, 2010: Part One.

Jason Whitlock wrote at the Kansas City Star for nearly 15 years, and while other columns had more impact, few if any columns were as anticipated as his end-of-season report cards that graded every member of the Kansas City Chiefs, from the GM to the backup offensive tackle who was on the field for three plays all season. His methods were inscrutable, but even so – or maybe precisely because they were – Whitlock’s grades were dissected by fans all over Chiefs nation.

Whitlock has departed the Kansas City sports scene, leaving a void that I am happy to fill. Not evaluating the Chiefs – I love my football, but I couldn’t tell you if the defense was in a Cover Two or a Cover Zero – but in using the end-of-season report card gimmick. It’s the perfect way to generate column inches and inspire reader arguments all at once. I should have thought of this years ago.

So prepare to disagree as Dr. Jazayerli Grades the Royals. It’s important to note: each player’s grade is relative to expectations (my expectations) before the season. Yuniesky Betancourt will get a better grade than Zack Greinke; this does not mean that Yuni is better than The Baseball Jonah. It simply means that Yuni was a somewhat pleasant surprise, while Zack was somewhat of a disappointment.

Also note that I’m grading on a C+ curve; a grade of a C+ means the player exactly met expectations for the season.

We’ll begin with the infielders:

Wilson Betemit: A

Let’s see: a player gets signed to a minor-league contract, starts the season in Omaha, gets called up at the end of May – and goes on to post the highest OPS (889) of any Royal with at least 250 plate appearances since Carlos Beltran in 2004. Yeah, I’d say he was a pleasant surprise.

Betemit cooled off quite a bit in September – after I wrote such glowing things about him, of course – and his OPS dropped over 100 points, but he still narrowly edged out Tony Solaita’s 1975 (884) and Esteban German’s 2006 (880) as the highest OPS by a part-time player in Royals history.

That said, I’m not nearly as confident about my argument that the Royals should offer him a long-term deal today as I was a month ago. My loss in confidence has little to do with his hitting slump, though. I have two main concerns:

- His defense, which was never good, was downright awful in September. It’s appropriate that the game-winning run in the final game of the season scored on a ground ball that went right through Betemit’s legs.

My argument for a long-term deal was predicated on the idea of moving Betemit to the outfield. Granted, we still don’t know if that’s a viable idea since the Royals chose not to do so, but Betemit was so bad at third base that I would imagine if the Royals thought there was any chance he could play the outfield, they would have tried him by now. If he can’t play the outfield, there’s no viable place to put him once Moustakas is ready.

- The other reason not to give him an extension is that Betemit’s season was so strong that there’s a good chance, if he plays fairly regularly next season, that he’ll be a Type B free agent next winter and earn the Royals a draft pick if he signs elsewhere. (If he has a monstrous season, he could be a Type A free agent and bring back two picks.) The ranking of free agents depends on their performance from the past two seasons only, so his lack of performance prior to 2010 would not count against him.

At this point, I can see the Royals starting 2011 with Betemit in a sort of super-utility role, playing third base some, maybe a little outfield, the occasional start at first base or DH – but in the lineup most every day, at least until he proves that this season was a fluke. If it isn’t, then they can either ride him all year if they’re in contention, or dangle him to a contender early in the season, knowing that the likelihood he’ll earn draft pick compensation should raise his price.

If the Royals aren’t in contention, then they’re better off trading Betemit than playing out the season to get the pick, because by mid-season they’re going to need his lineup spot for some of their young talent. But if Betemit hits in 2011 like he did in 2010, the Royals figure to get some benefit from him whether they sign him to a long-term deal or not.

Mike Aviles: A-

Aviles certainly had an eventful season. He was on the Opening Day roster barely nine months after Tommy John surgery. He returned to Omaha for a couple of weeks to get his swing back and hit an unimpressive .271/.320/.386. He was called up on May 4th, had three hits including a homer in his first game, and was a fixture in the lineup going forward; through July 2nd he was hitting .326, albeit with minimal secondary skills. From July 2nd until September 12th he provided a steady single a day and nothing else, hitting .243/.280/.276, and his defense was at times almost Conrad-esque – it got to the point where I was genuinely nervous on even the most routine groundball hit right at him.

But in the span of three weeks he saved his season. On September 13th he had three hits, including a homer. He repeated that feat on the 14th, and on the 17th, and again on the 18th – going 13-for 21 with four homers in five games. Over the season’s last three weeks he hit .364/.398/.648. When asked to explain his homer binge, his simple explanation was that he just decided to start swinging hard again.

That might have been a subtle dig at Kevin Seitzer. But it also might have been a reflection of the simple reality that as fast as Aviles may have returned from surgery, he wasn’t fully healed when he stepped on the field on Opening Day, nor even months later. I think it’s easy to forget how pleasantly surprising Aviles’ season was, not just because he wasn’t expected to return from surgery until mid-season, but simply because even if healthy, there was plenty of reason to think his rookie season was a stone-cold fluke.

As it turns out, it wasn’t. Aviles isn’t any kind of a star, and he swings at too many pitches, and while he had some tremendous defensive numbers as a rookie, his glove isn’t all that. (Although I think it’s fair to wonder if his defensive struggles were also influenced by an elbow that wasn’t 100% there yet.) But Aviles has had two healthy seasons in the majors and hit .300 both years. Batting average is overrated, but if you can play the middle infield and hit .300, you almost can’t help but have value.

The Royals are talking about moving Aviles over to third to start next year. Assuming his arm strength continues to improve, that’s not a bad place to put him in the short-term. That is, unless the Royals muster up the courage to start him at shortstop again.

Billy Butler: B

If all you look for in your first baseman is the ability to hit for power and drive in runners, you were probably disappointed in Butler’s season. After all, his homers dropped from 21 to 15; his doubles from 51 to 45; and his RBIs from 93 to 78. But if you take a more comprehensive perspective, you have to come to the conclusion that Bam Bam (eventually I’m going to get that name to stick, dammit) took a step forward in 2010.

The biggest change in Butler’s stat line from 2009 to 2010 was that he simultaneously cut his strikeouts by a quarter (from 103 to 78) while increasing his walk rate (from 55 to 61, once you take IBBs out). That’s no small feat, and in a player who will still be just 24 years old when next season begins, there’s an excellent chance that his improved strike zone discipline is a leading indicator for more power to come next year.

On top of that, I felt that his defense noticeably improved, an impression that is backed up by the defensive stats. Butler is an awkward defensive first baseman, but he’s not an incompetent one – the consensus of the stats is that he’s just slightly below-average at first base. Butler may have had the most awesomely bad defensive reputation of any Royals’ prospect ever, so the fact that he’s made himself into a serviceable first baseman is notable. He may still be immature at times, but if you look at his performance on both offense and defense, you can’t help but come to the conclusion that this is a player who’s worked his ass off to get better over the last 2 years.

The miniature elephant in the room is that Butler smashed the all-time Royals record by grounding into 32 double plays, which is remarkable since he batted only 135 times with a man on first and less than two out. Maybe you have to take the good with the bad – Butler also batted .382/.407/.545 in those situations – but you can’t deny that he has to find a way to elevate the ball more. Yes, his batting average may drop, but the cost in singles will be more than made up by an increase in homers and a decrease in 6-4-3s. I’m a big fan of Seitzer’s work overall, but he needs to accept that one size doesn’t fit all.

Yuniesky Betancourt: B

Naturally, the minute I concede I might have been a wee bit too critical of Betancourt, he goes about trying to prove me right in the first place. When I wrote this, on the morning of August 22nd, Betancourt had an OPS of 723. His OPS would never be that high again the rest of the season. Yuni hit .225/.279/.324 from that point on, albeit with uncharacteristic patience; he walked 11 times in his last 38 games, setting a career high with 23.

While Betancourt tied for the team lead with 16 homers, and tied for the team lead with 78 RBIs, he provided little offensively other than his homers. He was a better hitter in 2007, when he hit only 9 homers but also banged 38 doubles and batted .289. More to the point, of the 10 Royal hitters who batted 300 times this year, only Jason Kendall had a lower OPS than Yuni’s .259/.288/.405 line. His defense was better, but only in the sense that “really bad” is better than “indescribably awful”.

That’s not to say he had no value. American League shortstops combined to hit just .258/.312/.357 this year, a line straight out of the 1970s; Royals shortstops actually ranked fifth in the league in OPS. According to baseball-reference.com, Betancourt was worth 1.3 Wins Above Replacement. (Last year, in just 71 games with the Royals, Betancourt was worth 1.2 Wins Below Replacement.)

Does that make Betancourt a good player, or even an average one? No. Does that make him worth the $2 million the Royals paid him, with the Mariners picking up the tab for the other $1.3 million? Actually, yes.

In all likelihood, the Royals will get the short end of the stick in this trade, if the rave reviews of Daniel Cortes’ fastball in Seattle are any indication. But in all likelihood this trade will be remembered as a nuisance or as a minor roadblock in the Royals’ rebuilding project as opposed to some Ed Hearn- or Neifi Perez-grade disaster. Teams have won world championships with a shortstop hardly better than Yuni was this season.

(A good comp for Yuni’s 2010, only with better defense, would be Alex Gonzalez in 2003 – either Alex Gonzalez. One of them (.256/.313/.443) won the World Series with the Marlins; the other (.228/.295/.409) made the key non-Bartman error in Game 6 of the NLCS that cost the Cubs a World Series berth.)

The Royals are on the hook for about $3 million to Yuni next season, and barring some miracle breakout season that makes his $6 million option for 2012 a steal, he’s due a $2 million buyout. This time next year, Christian Colon might be ready, and the Royals will be able to move away from the Betancourt era far more painlessly than I ever thought possible.

Kila Ka’aihue: B-

Ka’aihue really deserves two grades, one for his minor-league performance, and one for his performance in the majors.

Remember, coming off a season when he hit just .252/.392/.433 in Omaha, it was far from a foregone conclusion that Ka’aihue’s 2008 was anything more than a fluke season. Ka’aihue quickly laid those concerns to waste, earning an A for his .319/.463/.598 line in Omaha. But he deserves a C- in the majors for flubbing his audition so badly, at least at first. At the end of August, he was hitting .170/.240/.273, despite striking out just 13 times in 88 at-bats.

He rebounded in Septemer, hitting .261/.367/.511 the rest of the way – a reasonable expectation for what he can hit in the majors. Interestingly, his strikeouts increased significantly – he whiffed 26 times in 92 at-bats. But he also drew more walks (8 before September 1st, 16 after) and hit more homers (2 before, 6 after). His batting average on balls in play, which was an abysmal .178 through the end of August, was still just .295 afterwards – meaning that while he was miserably unlucky early on, he wasn’t benefitting from unusually good fortune in September. That’s a really good sign that what we saw from Ka’aihue is sustainable.

Still, I’d feel a lot better about Ka’aihue if he had hit like a prototypical Three True Outcomes slugger for two months instead of just one. I think he’s earned a full shot as a starter next spring, and I think the Royals will give it to him – in large part because they know that if he flops, Eric Hosmer will be ready to step in soon enough. But if he doesn’t flop…well, the Royals ought to have an awfully interesting commodity to trade. It’s particularly interesting in that we don’t even know which commodity – the established young star, the Johnny-Come-Lately slugger, or the hot-shot prospect – it will be.

Willie Bloomquist: C+

Willie Bloomquist, as expected, was an essentially pointless signing who did nothing to push the Royals towards contention.

That said, he has his uses. The fact that he was ultimately so irrelevant in Kansas City says more about the Royals than about him.

For one thing, in 2009 Bloomquist came to the plate 468 times. I feel fairly confident in saying that if Bloomquist ever bats 468 times in a season again, that team will have lost 95+ games as well. He batted .265/.308/.355.

In 2010, Bloomquist batted 187 times – 170 times for the Royals, and 17 times for the Reds as an emergency replacement in September. He batted .267/.299/.380.

He was essentially the same player each year, a roughly replacement-level hitter who contributed with his speed and his defensive versatility. You can’t win with a guy like that in your everyday lineup. But it’s rare that a team wins without a player with a similar skill set somewhere on their roster.

As an intrepid commenter on Craig Calcaterra’s blog noted earlier today, if the Braves had insisted on Bloomquist as part of the Ankiel/Farnsworth trade, they might have won Game 3 of the NLDS. Bloomquist is never a Plan A, and he’s not even really a Plan B, but he’s the perfect Plan C at just about every position – the guy who keeps you from having to play Brooks Conrad at second base in the ninth inning of a one-run game.

On top of that, I have to concede that for a guy with limited batting skill, Bloomquist had an uncanny sense of timing. Consider these games:

May 5, 2009. Tie game, bottom of the 11th. Mitch Maier on first base with one out. Trey Hillman orders the hit-and-run…and Bloomquist hits a textbook grounder through the vacated hole. Maier scampers to third and scores the winning run three batters later.

May 19, 2009. The Royals, down 5-2 to start the bottom of the 9th against Kerry Wood, tie the game on a pair of homers, a walk, and a triple that puts the winning run at third base with one out. Needing only a deep flyball to win the game…Bloomquist, not known for hitting deep flyballs, skies one to right field sufficiently distant from the plate to score David DeJesus fairly easily.

May 24, 2009. After losing the first two games in St. Louis without so much as scoring a run, the Royals are tied at 2 in the seventh inning. With two outs and no one on, Bloomquist hits a groundball single up the middle…and when Colby Rasmus takes his sweet time fielding the grounder, Bloomquist lights for second and gets in just under the tag for the hustle double. Mike Jacobs follows with a deep single to score Bloomquist, and the Royals hold on to win, 3-2.

August 25, 2010. Willie Bloomquist bats third. Willie Bloomquist hits a game-winning homer in the 11th inning. You may have read about it here.

August 31, 2010. Game tied at 9, bottom of the 9th, Wilson Betemit leads off with a double. Bloomquist pinch-runs. Brayan Pena walks with one out – then, on a 2-2 count to Alex Gordon, Bloomquist goes for the steal of third on his own (Pena wasn’t trailing, which would have taken away the double play). He is safely – barely – but the gambit appears to have failed when Gordon strikes out. Only with two out and Betancourt at the plate, Alexi Ogando can’t find the strike zone. The 3-0 pitch is not only ball four, but it gets away from catcher Matt Treanor – not very far, but just far enough for an attentive Bloomquist to come flying across the plate just ahead of the throw.

That’s five games where Bloomquist, without doing anything that is going to pop out of a box score (well, except for the homer), played an integral part in scoring the winning run in a one-run game. Yeah, I expect all players will have occasional moments like these – but it seems to me that Bloomquist had a lot more moments than you’d expect from someone of his talents. Maybe it was just serendipity, but they counted as wins just the same.

The Bloomquist era is over in Kansas City, and I’m not sad about that. But neither am I about to blame Bloomquist for the failures of the past two seasons. I think Bloomquist is going to sign with a National League team this winter, and I expect him to have more moments like the ones I listed above. And I can only hope that the worst player on the Royals’ bench next season is as valuable a player as Bloomquist was.

Alberto Callaspo: C-

I’d like to know what happened to Callaspo this year, but perhaps the better question is what happened to Callaspo in 2009. He entered the season as one of the game’s great contact hitters, but at the expense of power – he had never hit a major-league home run. In 2009, he not only batted .300, he hit 11 homers, 41 doubles, and eight triples – he was the first Royal since Mike Sweeney in 2004 to have more extra-base hits (60) than strikeouts (51).

Heading into 2010, just 27 years old, there was every reason to think that Callaspo’s new-found power was real. It was, sort of – he hit 10 homers, albeit with just 27 doubles and two triples – but his batting average plunged to .265.

Callaspo might bounce back, but at the moment it appears that Dayton Moore had an impeccable sense of timing with Callaspo, both coming and going. He was hitting just .275/.308/.410 at the time of the trade; Callaspo was basically missing about 30 points of batting average from the year before. But whereas the 2009 Callaspo was a terrible defensive second baseman, the 2010 Callaspo was a surprisingly agile third baseman – game for game, Callaspo was slightly more valuable to the Royals in 2010 (1.3 WAR in 88 games) than in 2009 (1.8 WAR in 155 games).

Moore traded him at the end of August for Sean O’Sullivan and Will Smith, which I thought was a slightly disappointing haul, but was certainly more than the Royals were offered last winter. And while I expected Callaspo’s batting average to rebound after the trade, he was instead pretty useless, hitting an empty .249/.291/.315 for the Angels.

I think it’s way premature to write off Callaspo’s chances of bouncing back – it’s hard to believe he’ll hit just .265 while striking out just 42 times in a full season again. But look at what Moore did:

- He traded the utterly useless Billy Buckner for Callaspo;

- Got two-plus seasons out of Callaspo at essentially the major-league minimum, during which time Callaspo hit .293/.343/.426 in 317 games;

- He traded Callaspo just before his trade value cratered – and just months before Callaspo’s salary would skyrocket – for two pitchers who both have higher upside than Buckner had three years ago.

That is one hell of a series of transactions. Those people who argue we should ignore Moore’s work in developing minor league talent because he’s done absolutely nothing right at the major-league level – Alberto Callaspo says otherwise.

Chris Getz: D

If anyone needs a mulligan on 2010, it’s Getz. After being hailed as the key to the Mark Teahen trade, and expected to be the everyday second baseman, Getz 1) hit just .193/.276/.205 through the middle of June; 2) lost his job to Mike Aviles; and 3) suffered a season-ending concussion in mid-September just when he was poised to play every day. The injury enabled Aviles to go nuts over the last three weeks, but it left the Royals as unsure of what they had in Getz as they were before the season.

Getz was an excellent percentage basestealer for the second straight season, and plays a decent second base, but you can’t slug .277 on the season and expect to keep the starting job. If memory serves, Getz still has an option, and frankly I think he and the Royals might be better off if he’s sent to Omaha to start the season and see if he can get his swing back. The problem is that I’m not sure there’s any place for him to play in Omaha – Johnny Giavotella should have the starting job at second base, and Moustakas will be at third.

My guess is that the Royals, in moving Aviles to third, will give Getz first crack at the second base job, with Betemit relegated to backup duty. In my world, hitting .297/.378/.511 earns you an everyday job, but the Royals operate in their own world. We’ll see what happens.

Incomplete Grades:

Josh Fields – The other half of the Teahen trade had an equally unfulfilling season, albeit with a happier ending than Getz’s. About all we learned in Fields’ 13 games in the majors was that he crushes lefties (8-for-22 with 3 homers) and can’t play third base (5 errors in 12 games) – which is to say, we learned nothing about Fields that we didn’t already know. I still think he’s the perfect platoon partner for Alex Gordon in left field, but we just don’t know.

Back soon with grades for outfielders and catchers.

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A couple of housekeeping notes:

- I was going into withdrawal after my radio show came to an end, which made me an easy mark when Jonah Keri seduced me into appearing on the first-ever Jonah Keri Podcast. You can hear Jonah and I talk about baseball and other subjects here.

- Speaking of the radio show, apparently it’s the fashion inside the hallowed halls of the Kansas City Pitch to listen to my show while under the influence of hallucinogens. At least that’s the only explanation I can think of for why the Pitch named “Rany on the Radio” the Best Sports Radio Show in Kansas City. Seriously, it’s a wonderful honor, one I’m quite certain I didn’t earn. All due credit must go to my co-host, Jason Anderson, who spent years learning the nuances of broadcasting with the sole intention of being ready to make me look good when the time came.

Dyson: Does He Suck Up Everything, Or Just Suck?

With another season having come to another merciful end, there’s a lot we can take away from the last six months. What looked in March like a promising up-and-coming farm system is now generally accepted to be the best in the game. Zack Greinke declined; Joakim Soria didn’t. Kila Ka’aihue restored his luster; Alex Gordon didn’t. Mike Aviles impressed, then he didn’t, then he did again. Wilson Betemit exploded out of nowhere; Brian Bannister shriveled into irrelevance. Yuniesky Betancourt improved from being an all-out disaster to…well…something less than an all-out disaster.

And most importantly, the Royals finally, belatedly started clearing house; by the end of the season Kyle Farnsworth was blowing leads and Rick Ankiel was striking out in Atlanta, Willie Bloomquist was dispensing his winning attitude on an actual winning team in Cincinnati, and Jose Guillen was hitting into rally-killing double plays in San Francisco. The future looks brighter today than it did in March, and frankly looks brighter than it has in seven years.

But the present is as grim as always. The Royals won 67 games this year, compared to 65 last year, and even that overstates their progress. The Royals have scored fewer runs this year (676) than last (684), and allowed more runs (845) than last (842). Soria’s superhuman season helped the Royals convert a slightly worse run differential into a slightly better record.

There’s a lot to ponder about the Royals’ performance this season. But over the last few weeks, I’ve spent more and more of my time thinking about a specific player, a player who until he was called up four weeks ago I had hardly thought about at all.

The first time I gave Jarrod Dyson serious consideration for even a moment was last winter, when I asked Trey Hillman at the Winter Meetings manager press conference whether there were any minor league players he was looking forward to having contribute at the major league level in 2010. Granted that none of them were quite ready yet, but I figured he’d mouth a few platitudes about Mike Moustakas or Eric Hosmer or Mike Montgomery. Instead he mentioned just one player – Jarrod Dyson, who was coming off of a season in which, at the ripe age of 24, he had hit .258/.331/.319 in Double-A.

That seemed…odd. I could make a cheap crack at Hillman’s expense here, but it’s not like Hillman was scouting Northwest Arkansas games while managing the team in 2009. (Although if he was, that would explain a lot of things…) No, it was clear that as an organization, the Royals were enamored with this speedy old outfield prospect with absolutely no power. The question was why.

Fast-forward through 2010, when Dyson missed the first half of the season with various injuries. He then returned and sped through some rehab stints – hitting .520 in rookie ball, .327 in Wilmington, .240 in NW Arkansas, with a lot of steals and not much else in the way of secondary skills. He made it to Omaha in late July – just a few weeks before he turned 26 years old, mind you – and hit .278/.327/.349. He did steal 13 bases in 46 games, and he did hit the first home run of his five-year professional career. (It hit off the top of the wall, and bounced over, for a grand slam.)

He was promoted to the majors on September 6th, and over the next two weeks played sparingly. In his debut, he pinch-hit and walked; in his second game, he pinch-ran and immediately stole second base. He did start on the 18th and get three hits, making him 5-for-14 in his brief career.

On September 21st, I got an email from a long-time contact of mine, a long-time Royals fan with a scouting background – let’s just call him Amateur Scout Guy, or ASG. ASG used to correspond with me years ago, primarily to let me know that I was vastly overrating Prospect X and that Pitcher Y was an arm injury waiting to happen. He didn’t impress easily. He was also usually correct.

I hadn’t heard from ASG in years, but something mildly disparaging I had written about Dyson caused him to reach out to me. “I saw Dyson in NW Arkansas and also in Omaha this year, and I gotta tell you... he is legit. I like him decidedly more than [Derrick] Robinson, and I will bet you Dyson plays a lot more for the MLB club than Robinson ever does. I thought he was fantastic - espec. his CF defense. His arm, speed, and CF defense ALL were clearly better than Robinson for me, and I think he'll hit and walk as much or more than Robinson as well.”

ASG was making a presentation for the defense in the case of Sabermetrics v. Jarrod Martel Dyson. The defense was helped when, that night, Dyson went 3-for-4 with two doubles. Four games later – he hit his first major-league home run, and this once cleared the right-field fence cleanly.

Of course, in the three games in between, Dyson went 0-for-14. I felt compelled to respond on behalf of the prosecution. “So please, if you can, explain to me this: why I should believe that Dyson can be the Royals' everyday centerfielder next year, given that he has no power (last night notwithstanding), he doesn't hit for much average, and he's too old to improve much more?

“I'm not saying you're wrong - on the contrary, he's opened my eyes with his speed and defense to the point where I'm willing to have my mind changed. But you can't just explain away a five-year track record.”

ASG conceded nothing. “Dyson will be a top-15, maybe a top-10 (he would be in my top-10) prospect in a loaded Royals system, the best in the game. Top-100 for BA? No, but he’ll play more MLB games than 20-30% of the top-100 will. Sure, if he was 22 or 23, BA and everyone else would be all over him. But he’s not, and yet that’s got nothing to do with his ability and tools. I am telling you, at this point, I am convinced the organization believes much more strongly in Dyson than they do in Robinson. No doubt in my mind whatsoever. Robinson is 22 years old, so… get my point?

“…I really believe in the CONCEPT that there are some ultra-athletic – but raw – position players who can come very quickly, put it together very fast.”

Obviously, we have a disconnect here. The stats say Jarrod Dyson is a poor man’s Joey Gathright, or (as I compared him to before the season) Endy Chavez: a player with top-of-the-line speed and defense, but below-replacement-level hitting skills. The scouts – or at least one scout – thinks that Dyson’s numbers are a reflection of his inexperience playing the game, and that – even at age 26 – he is poised to take a giant step forward and become a quality everyday centerfielder in the majors.

I don’t doubt ASG when he says that “the organization believes much more strongly in Dyson than they do in Robinson.” This is, after all, the same organization that believed much more strongly in Jason Kendall than in John Buck, and in Mike Jacobs over Kila Ka’aihue. You’ll have to forgive me for not putting much stock in the organization’s opinion.

That said, I made it a point to watch Dyson as much as possible in the season’s final weeks. And I saw enough to understand why a scout would believe his eyes over a lyin’ stat sheet.

It’s not just that Dyson has speed to burn, though he certainly does. I don’t have the scouting bonafides to throw an “80 speed” label on a player, but if he’s not an 80, he’s at least a 75. He’s clearly the fastest Royal since Gathright. In 305 minor league games – basically two full seasons – Dyson stole 131 bases, at an 80% success rate. In just 14 starts and a handful of late-inning appearances with the Royals, Dyson stole 9 bases, and was caught once. The dude is fast.

But it’s not just his speed on the bases that is so enticing. It’s that he makes such good use of his speed in the outfield – he gets a quick first step, and accelerates rapidly. Again, I’m not comfortable calling him an “80 glove”, but I think it’s fair to say he’s a 70 – a plus-plus centerfielder. The only Royal outfielder in the last 15 years who put his speed to such good use defensively was Carlos Beltran.

On Monday, September 27th, in just his eighth start in the majors, Dyson recorded 10 putouts in centerfield – tying the Royals’ franchise record for putouts by an outfielder. Granted, there’s some luck in having that many flyballs in your vicinity in one game, but it says something that the record he tied was shared by Amos Otis and Beltran, two of the four elite defensive centerfielders in Royals history. (The other two would be Willie Wilson for a stretch in the early 80s, and Brian McRae for a stretch in the early 90s.)

In 129 innings in center field, Dyson had a range factor of 3.49, meaning he recorded 3.49 outs per nine innings. I’m fairly certain that no centerfielder in history has ever had a range factor of 3.49 for a full season. (Anything over 3 is Richie Ashburn/Willie Mays/Andruw Jones territory.) The advanced metrics are similarly gushing about Dyson’s defense; Total Zone ranks Dyson as 3 runs above average, and Baseball Info Solutions’ plus/minus system ranks him at 4 runs above average – in the equivalent of less than 15 games in the field.

On top of that, Dyson actually has a pretty strong arm – maybe a 60 or 65 on the scouting scale. Most waterbug-type centerfielders who can run like the wind but can’t hit for power have noodle arms – think Juan Pierre, or Coco Crisp, or even Johnny Damon. Dyson doesn’t fit that mold at all.

So you’ve got a player with three above-average to outstanding tools in his speed, glove, and arm. I can see how that might get the scouts salivating. That still doesn’t make him a valuable player. He has no power, and while he might have the speed to beat out a bunch of groundballs Ichiro-style, he doesn’t make good enough contact to hit for a good average. His strikeout rate in the minors is about 108 per season, and in his major-league cup of coffee, he struck out 16 times in just 57 at-bats.

Dyson’s final start of the season was a microcosm of his talents. His first time up, he reached base when the third baseman bobbled his groundball. Does Dan Johnson make an error if he wasn’t rushing to throw out the speedy Dyson? Maybe not. In the third inning, he caught up to Carl Crawford’s fly ball deep in the right-centerfield gap and made the catch look almost routine. In the bottom of the fifth, he laid down a textbook sacrifice bunt to move Mitch Maier from first to second.

But in his other three at-bats, he made outs, twice on a strikeout.

As he stands now, Dyson is certainly an intriguing player – a fantastic late-inning defensive replacement/pinch-runner, but someone who simply doesn’t hit enough to start. There’s no way to spin the stats to make him out to be anything more than a fourth outfielder, and at age 26, there’s no way to spin a projection system to suggest that he’s going to improve much upon who he already is.

The argument for Dyson, then, is that even though he’s already 26, he’s so inexperienced at playing baseball that he has an uncommon amount of room to improve. Dyson hardly played baseball before he was signed by the Royals as a 50th-round pick, and while he’s been in the system for five years, he’s played in just 323 games as a pro.

I’m sympathetic to the argument that an exceedingly athletic player with not a lot of experience can be expected to improve, even if he’s already in his mid-20s. The classic case of this would be Kenny Lofton, who was more of a basketball player than a baseball player in college (he was the sixth man on some great University of Arizona teams). Lofton was also a late pick; he was selected by the Astros in the 17th round in 1988. Three years later, in a good hitter’s park in Triple-A, Lofton hit .308/.367/.417 with just two home runs, struggled in a September call-up, and the Astros were so unimpressed they traded him to Cleveland that winter for Eddie Taubensee.

The next year, Lofton hit .285/.362/.365 for the Indians, led the league with 66 steals, and finished second in Rookie of the Year voting. The year after that, Lofton began a seven-year stretch (1993 to 1999) where he was arguably the best leadoff hitter in baseball.

So yeah, I’ve seen athletic hitters figure it all out and become late bloomers. But look, Dyson is no Lofton. Lofton was old for an elite prospect, but he was 24 when he was Triple-A; Dyson was nearly 26. Lofton struck out a lot less, and hit for much better batting averages. And even though the Astros didn’t respect his talent, the rest of baseball did – Baseball America ranked Lofton as the #28 prospect in baseball after the 1991 season. Dyson’s not going to sniff their top 100.

Of course, Dyson doesn’t have to be nearly as good as Lofton to still be an asset for the Royals. He needs to cut his strikeouts, and he needs to hit lefties (he batted just .203/.242/.271 against LHP in Omaha; against RHP he hit .301/.362/.382.) But if he can hit .270 and draw the occasional walk, his speed and defense will make him a valuable player.

Dyson’s statistical track record would make you believe that even that modest ambition is unrealistic. The Royals, and ASG, will make you believe that it is. I don’t have a strong position either way. That, in itself, is progress, because a month ago I thought that Jarrod Dyson was a complete distraction from the minor league players who actually have a real future. Now, I’m willing to keep an open mind.

While Derrick Robinson might be the future in centerfield, he’s certainly far from ready. Next year is likely to be a transitional year, a year where the makeup of the roster in September is likely to be dramatically different than it was in April. It’s a year for the Royals to experiment a little, and see what they have with some of their young players, as opposed to wasting time with more short-term veteran solutions.

Given that, what do the Royals have to lose by letting Dyson play centerfield next season? If nothing else, his stellar defense may help in the development of some of the team’s many young pitchers. I do think Dyson will benefit from another half-season in Omaha, while Mitch Maier and Gregor Blanco get to showcase themselves in the majors.

But the thought of Dyson starting in centerfield next July, or even next April, no longer fills me with dread. On the contrary, I think it will be quite fascinating to watch. The all-out war between Scouts and Stats has simmered down to a low-level guerrilla battle. Dyson remains one of the few remaining flashpoints in this conflict. Regardless of which side wins, we’ll learn something from the outcome. We’ll get to watch an exciting rookie try to establish in the majors instead of watching another thirtysomething veteran cash a paycheck. And who knows? The Royals might have a found a viable everyday player in the 50th round.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The GM.

Every year my motivation to write about the Royals dwindles with the remaining games on the schedule, and this year is no different. No matter how optimistic I might be about the future, there’s only so much I can write about the present club before I lose my will to go on.

I’ve got a number of half-finished articles waiting to be finished in Word, and hopefully I’ll get them out to you over the next few days. But yesterday, something happened that made me passionate enough to bang out an article, so here it is.

Last year, you may recall that I snapped at the end of the season, and walked away from writing for a couple of months. The straw that broke my back was the Royals’ decision to leave Kila Ka’aihue down on the farm in September. Ka’aihue spent all of this September in the Royals’ starting lineup, so that’s something.

But my first step on the path that brought me back to the Royals, and brought me back to the belief that Dayton Moore was salvageable, actually had nothing to do with the Royals. My road back began watching, with some manner of disbelief, the way the Giants handled Buster Posey last September.

Posey, after nearly going #1 overall in the 2008 draft, was taken by the Giants with the #5 pick, and signed too late to get into more than 10 minor leagues that summer (though he did hit .351/.467/.622). He started 2009 in the California League and was probably the best hitter in the circuit, with a .326/.428/.540 line in 80 games before he was promoted all the way to Triple-A. There, he hit .321/.391/.511 in 47 games. Despite a reputation as a raw defensive player, he threw out 46% of potential basestealers between the two stops. He was clearly one of the best prospects in baseball – ranked #7 overall before this season by Baseball America.

The Giants’ starting catcher in 2009 was Bengie Molina, who actually had a decent season, at least by his standards. Molina hit .265/.285/.442, with solid defense and his usual glacial speed. Their backup catcher was Eli Whiteside, a 29-year-old rookie who hit .228/.268/.339 on the season. With perhaps the best catching prospect in baseball ripping through Triple-A, you would think the Giants would have given Posey some playing time in September.

You would think so particularly because the Giants entered September in the thick of the wild-card race. When the sun came up on September 1st, the Giants were 72-59, six games behind the Dodgers in the NL West – but tied with the Colorado Rockies for the wild-card lead. I don’t know about you, but if my backup catcher is struggling to keep his OPS above .600, and I’ve got the best catcher in the minors destroying Triple-A, I’d find a way to get my catching prospect some playing time.

The Giants, on the other hand, did everything in their power to block Posey’s path. He didn’t make his major league debut until the 11th, at which point the Giants had already fallen 4.5 games behind the Rockies. He entered the game in the eighth inning of a 10-3 loss and struck out. He didn’t play again until eight days later, on September 19th, by which point the Giants had closed the gap on Colorado to 2.5 games. Posey came into the game in the seventh inning, with the Dodgers leading 9-1; he would go 1-for-2 at the plate. Three days later, with the Giants down 10-5, Posey would enter as a defensive replacement in the eighth after both Molina and Whiteside were removed.

Only on September 25th, with the Giants four games back with 10 to play, did Posey make his first major-league start. He would start two games in a row, then two games in the final weekend of the season after the Giants were eliminated. From September 1st to the 24th, as the Giants slid out of contention with Posey on the bench, Whiteside started behind the plate six times, going 2-for-24 at the plate.

I’m trying to think of a comparable situation for the Royals. Imagine if, next season, Christian Colon came out of the gate batting like Honus Wagner, crushing everything in sight, moving to Triple-A at mid-season and not missing a beat, becoming generally accepted as the best shortstop in the minors. Imagine if Yuniesky Betancourt was playing sub-par defense and struggling to get his OBP to .300. (Granted, one of these things is easier to imagine than the other.) And imagine if once a week the Royals were starting, I dunno, Tony Pena Jr. at shortstop for his defense.

Then imagine that the Royals entered September tied for the wild-card race. Omaha’s season ended, Colon was promoted to the majors, and…and…he sat on the bench for the next three weeks while Betancourt continued his display of mediocrity. Imagine if, down the stretch, Tony Pena Jr. started six times at shortstop while the best shortstop prospect in baseball watched from the dugout.

How would you respond? What vile, unprintable things would you have to say about Dayton Moore? They would likely be the same vile, unprintable things Giants fans were saying about Brian Sabean.

Watching this unfold last September was the first step I needed to rehabilitate my impression of Dayton Moore. It reminded me that, while it’s okay to criticize Moore for every mistake he makes, it’s unrealistic of me to compare his actions in a vacuum. I have to compare him to his peers, and some of his peers make decisions that are a lot dumber than anything Dayton Moore has done. And some of those peers win anyway.

Like Brian Sabean.

Brian Sabean has been the General Manager of the San Francisco Giants since 1997. He is – I’m writing these words and don’t believe them myself – the longest-tenured GM in baseball. In that time the Giants have had a good deal of success – they’ve now been to the playoffs five times in those 14 years, including a World Series berth. But I remain reluctant to apportion much of the credit for that to the man running the front office.

For one thing, this is the first time in Sabean’s tenure that the Giants have qualified for the postseason without Barry Bonds. Say whatever you want about the methods Bonds may or may not have used, but he was a force of nature unlike anything you or I have ever seen in baseball. He broke the game. With Bonds at his peak, the Giants never finished lower than second from 1997 through 2004. Bonds missed most of 2005, and the Giants finished under .500 for the first time in nine years. Without Bonds’ reflected glory, Dusty Baker isn’t a genius in San Francisco, and Sabean doesn’t survive 14 years.

A quick look at Sabean’s track record explains why most analysts have trouble taking him seriously as a GM. This is the man who traded Joe Nathan, Boof Bonser, and Francisco Liriano to the Twins for A.J. Pierzynski – almost certainly the worst trade of the last decade. This is the man who didn’t want his first-round picks – he didn’t think they were worth the money spent on them – and so deliberately signed Michael Tucker before the arbitration deadline. This allowed the Royals to offer Tucker arbitration after he had already signed – they had no intention of doing so because they thought he might accept – and get a pair of first-round picks in the following draft. (One of those picks was used on J.P. Howell.)

Both the Pierzynski trade and the decision to give up their first-round pick for Michael Tucker happened within three weeks of each other in the winter of 2003-04. And you thought Dayton Moore had a bad off-season last year.

Sabean has struggled to put together a winning team in the post-Bonds era, a task made more difficult by the 7-year, $126 million contract he gave to Barry Zito, a signing deemed one of the worst in baseball history before the ink dried.

Even after having Buster Posey fall into his lap, Sabean still refused to accept his good fortune. After refusing to see whether Posey could help the team last September, Sabean decided that Posey couldn’t help the Giants this April. Even after Posey hit .338/.426/.450 for Fresno in April, and even after enough service time had passed to guarantee Posey wouldn’t be a free agent a year early, Sabean left Posey for another month. After Posey hit .359/.456/.641 in May, and threw out 44% of attempted basestealers, he was granted parole.

But he still wasn’t allowed to catch. Posey was promoted on May 29th – he had three hits in his first game, another three hits in his second – but from that date through the end of June, he only started two games behind the plate. Instead, the Giants put him at first base, a position he played 12 times in Triple-A in anticipation of his call-up. Sabean simply couldn’t bring himself to bench Molina, even as the eldest Molina’s offense completely cratered. Only on July 1st, when Molina was traded to the Rangers, did Posey assume the full-time catching job.

Posey then spent the next three months reminding folks of how stupid it was that he had to wait so long for his opportunity in the first place. Posey was hitting .289/.314/.381 at the end of June; after becoming the full-time catcher he hit .311/.370/.544. He threw out 37% of attempted basestealers, and allowed just one passed ball in 76 games behind the plate. If Posey doesn’t win the Rookie of the Year award, it’s only because Jason Heyward had one of the all-time great seasons from a 20-year-old.

If the Giants had missed the playoffs – something they came perilously close to doing – Sabean’s refusal to give Posey a job sooner would have been the undeniable culprit. The fact is that the Giants made the playoffs despite, not because of, Sabean’s handling of his organization’s best prospect.

But the fact remains that the Giants, sans Barry Bonds, nevertheless won the NL West and are in the playoffs. Sabean and the Giants must have done something right.

They have. They’ve drafted well.

Take a look at the Giants’ roster, and what you’ll see is a team that’s succeeded mostly on the backs of homegrown players. Sabean did make a few savvy moves to bring in talent, most prominently the decision to give a one-year deal to Aubrey Huff, who was the team’s best hitter and will get some down-ballot MVP votes. He signed Pat Burrell off the scrap heap and Burrell rebounded better than anyone could have expected. Andres Torres, brought in last year as a 31-year-old outfielder with less than 300 career at-bats in the majors, had an out-of-body campaign. And Juan Uribe, signed to a modest two-year contract before the 2009 season, hit well while playing all over the infield.

I’m reluctant to give Sabean much credit for these moves, and not just because aside from Torres, every one of those players benefitted dramatically by moving from the AL to the inferior league. Sabean may have hit on those moves, but it doesn’t come close to making up for Barry Zito’s contract; for the ridiculous 5-year deal he gave Aaron Rowand after Rowand had a career year in the bandbox in Philadelphia; or the two-year deal he gave to Edgar Renteria’s corpse. Or the fact that the Giants traded Fred Lewis to the Blue Jays for future considerations in April, then spent the rest of the year so desperate for outfield help that they actually traded for Jose Guillen.

The reason the Giants are in the playoffs isn’t because their GM spent money wisely. It’s because, simply, they’ve done a pretty good job of drafting and developing talent.

Posey, we’ve already covered, although it’s worth noting how close the Giants came to not getting him. The Rays, with the #1 overall pick, narrowed their decision to between Posey and high school shortstop Tim Beckham. In one of the Rays’ few draft misfires, they went with Beckham, who is currently struggling to get out of A-ball. Sometimes you need a little luck in the draft, which is a nice segue to the fact that the Giants grabbed Tim Lincecum with the #10 pick in 2006.

There is simply nothing more important for the long-term health of a franchise than to hit it big with their first-round picks. A team that comes up with a Lincecum or a Posey in the first round every three years is going to be competitive no matter how bad they screw up everything else. And those two aren’t the only first-round picks that propelled the Giants to the playoffs this year. Matt Cain was selected with the #25 overall pick in 2002, and Madison Bumgarner was taken with the #10 pick in 2007.

The starting catcher and three-fifths of their rotation was drafted in the first round – and Sabean still deliberately surrendered his first-round pick for no reason at all. Look at the success the Giants had with their first-round picks in 2002, 2006, 2007, and 2008, and you can only wonder who the Giants might have drafted in 2004 or 2005 – if they hadn’t surrendered their first-round picks in both years.

Virtually every other significant contributor to the Giants was developed internally. Pablo Sandoval was signed as an teenager out of Venezuela in 2003, when Kung Fu Panda – the player and the movie – was still a distant dream. Jonathan Sanchez was a 27th-round find in 2004. The Giants had an astonishing run of finding quality pitchers deep in the draft; in addition to Sanchez, they drafted closer Brian Wilson in the 24th round in 2003, and set-up man Sergio Romo in the 28th round in 2005.

This all works its way back to the Royals, and Dayton Moore, and it’s the reason why I jumped back on the bandwagon this year. The Giants are proof that to build a playoff team, you don’t need to trade well, and you don’t need to spend money well. You simply have to draft well. The fact is that Brian Sabean, despite his many, many blunders over the years, cannot be considered a failure as a GM, because the Giants have done such a good job of drafting over the past decade that it covers over his mistakes.

I’m not close enough to the Giants’ situation to know whether it’s Sabean who deserves credit for that, or his scouting director, or someone else. But from my perspective, who gets that credit is irrelevant. The point is that the Giants, as an organization, have drafted well. And the Giants are in the playoffs. The point isn’t that Dayton Moore has done a terrific job of making trades or signing free agents. The point is that if the Royals draft well, then he can afford to make the occasional mistake in those other areas. Brian Sabean is proof positive that a GM doesn’t have to be perfect to be successful.

Some of you will point out that the Royals are handicapped by their payroll limitations, and have to do a better job with their money than the Giants do. That’s true, but that’s an overstated limitation. The Giants’ opening day payroll was a little north of $96 million. Simply take out Barry Zito and Aaron Rowand – as I’m sure most Giants fans would like to do – and you’re down to a little under $66 million. The Royals’ Opening Day payroll this year was about $75 million. Moore may have less margin for error than Sabean does – but Sabean has made some huge effing errors. With Guillen coming off the books this year, and Meche next year, Moore once again has payroll flexibility so long as he can avoid repeating his instant-gratification free agent contracts.

If Brian Sabean can lead his team to the postseason simply by drafting well, you can’t convince me that Dayton Moore can’t do the same thing. Particularly since nothing Moore has done can compare with the Pierzynski trade, or the Zito signing.

Going through this exercise just hit the point home even harder for me: if you want to know the single biggest reason why the Royals have sucked so bad, for so long, it’s not the financial limitations. It’s not the stupid trades for Neifi Perez and Roberto Hernandez. It’s this list:

Jeff Granger

Matt Smith

Juan LeBron

Dee Brown

Dan Reichert

Jeff Austin

Matt Burch

Chris George

Kyle Snyder

Mike MacDougal

Jay Gehrke

Jimmy Gobble

Mike Stodolka

Colt Griffin

From 1993 to 2001, the Royals drafted 14 players in the first or supplemental first round, including six guys in the Top 10. Every single player was a disappointment. Every. Single. Player.

From 2002 to 2005, the situation improves some:

Zack Greinke

Chris Lubanski

Mitch Maier

Billy Butler

Matt Campbell

J.P. Howell

Alex Gordon

Some big busts in there – and I’m this close to including Alex Gordon among them – but also some undeniable successes.

And then, starting in 2006 (sort of), the Dayton Moore era.

Luke Hochevar

Mike Moustakas

Mike Montgomery

Eric Hosmer

Aaron Crow

Christian Colon

It’s too soon to know whether this group will turn out to be a complete disaster like the first group, or a mixed bag like the second group. But there’s every reason to think that this group of players is different. It helps, of course, that most of these guys were taken at the very top of the draft. (Remarkably, the Royals drafted #1 overall in 2006 (Hochevar), #2 in 2007 (Moustakas), #3 in 2008 (Hosmer), #4 in 2010 (Colon)…and will be drafting #5 in 2011. At this rate, they should be drafting among the playoff teams in 2029 or so.)

But the presence of Montgomery, who was a supplemental first-rounder, on that list is a reminder that the Royals are finding talent everywhere, whether it’s in the second round (Johnny Giavotella), or the third (Danny Duffy and Wil Myers), or the fourth (Chris Dwyer) or the fifth (John Lamb), or the 11th (David Lough), or the 20th (Patrick Keating), or hell, the 50th round (Jarrod Dyson). Or even in Latin America, where they’ve signed Salvador Perez and Cheslor Cuthbert, among others.

This was – again – a trying season, and I’m as tired of looking to the future as everyone else. But as the chill rains come, and baseball stops and leaves you to face the fall alone, it’s important that one more time we stop and remember what this season was all about. It wasn’t about wins and losses. It was about prospects succeeding and failing. On that score, this season was a spectacular success.

A few months ago, I asked this rhetorical question: “Can you really call Dayton Moore the worst GM in baseball, or even one of the worst GMs in baseball, when he’s built the #1 farm system in the game in three years?” Some of you had a lot of fun with this question. Some of you answered, in all seriousness, that yes, you can still call Dayton Moore one of the worst GMs in baseball.

I think that’s wrong. I think that Dayton Moore has done the most important part of his job as well as we could have hoped. I think that we will start to taste the fruits of that success next year. Most of all, I think the lesson I’ve learned from Brian Sabean is that if Moore gets player development right, the Royals will be successful even if he makes the occasional mistake in the other parts of his job.

I’m not excusing the Guillen signing, or the Meche arm-shredding, or even the Yuni trade. What I’m saying is that when Moore blunders, as Royals fans we forget that all GMs make blunders. GMs can make mistakes – even horrendous mistakes – and still lead their team to the playoffs. As Royals fans, it’s been so long since we’ve seen a playoff team that we’ve lost all perspective of what it takes to build one. We’ve grown into this mindset that if our GM isn’t perfect, if he ever gets the short end of a trade, or if he ever spends millions of dollars on a free-agent flop, then we’re doomed.

As Brian Sabean has shown this year, we’re not doomed. So long as the system churns out talent.

Next year, the excuses end. Next year, the bill of goods comes due, and we have every right to expect to see the tangible results of this youth movement. If the Royals have a 2011 in which everything goes wrong – much like the Mariners’ 2010 – then you have my permission to jump off the bandwagon, because I’ll be jumping off with you.

But right now, I’m feeling pretty good about the future. The chill rains may have come – and for the 25th straight season, they’ve come early – but I’m not facing the fall alone. I’ve got the promise of the game’s #1 farm system to keep me company.