Reasons For Optimism.

If you want to frame Dayton Moore’s career-defining gamble in a positive way, it might be best to start with who Dayton Moore is not. He’s not Scott Pioli. Those of you who follow me on Twitter know this already, but I do not like Scott Pioli. I haven’t liked him since I began hearing stories of his incredible paranoia and self-defeating focus on minutia as general manager of the Chiefs – not from Kent Babb’s seminal column, but a full two years earlier, from a friend of a friend who was a part of the Chiefs’ front office when Carl Peterson was fired and kept his job through the transition. (He got out while he could, accepting a lateral transfer to another football organization before the ugliness in Kansas City got out of hand.)

I’m fairly certain that I have not despised anyone in Kansas City sports history the way I despised Scott Pioli at the end. You can be an insufferable tyrant and fans will still respect you, if you win. You can be an incompetent fool and fans will still like you, if you’re a nice guy. But Lord have mercy, you can not be both. Pioli terrorized players and employees alike, while drafting Tyson Jackson with the #3 overall pick and sticking with Matt Cassel as his quarterback to the bitter end.

And I’ve never been happier to see one of my teams crap the bed than to see the Chiefs go 2-14 in 2012. I’m not an NFL expert, so I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other on whether the Andy Reid-John Dorsey combination will work. As a fan, I’m happy to give them the benefit of the doubt. Even if I did the same thing with Pioli four years ago.

There are certainly similarities between Pioli and Moore. Both were widely considered to be the most promising GM candidate in their sport when they were brought to Kansas City in the span of little more than two years, and given a mandate by ownership to do whatever it took to build a winner. For the first time in my lifetime, there was a sense that both the Chiefs and the Royals were pointed in the right direction.

Not so much. On the field, Moore has had even less success than Pioli, who managed to squeak the Chiefs into the playoffs one year thanks to a weak AFC West. But the difference is this: when Pioli axed, he left the Chiefs in as poor a condition as he inherited them, if not more so. They still don’t have a quarterback. Virtually every one of their most talented players today was already in the organization when he was hired. Four years after Pioli was hired to build an organization from scratch, his successors have to do the same thing.

If nothing else, in nearly seven years on the job Dayton Moore has completed one of the most time-consuming tasks in sports: he’s turned one of the weakest farm systems in baseball into one of its perennially strongest. The Royals had essentially no footprint in Latin America whatsoever when he was hired; they have one of the most fertile Latin American pipelines in the game today. Even if Moore’s gamble backfires, and he gets fired sometime in 2013, he will have left the organization in substantially better shape than he found it. The mere fact that a .500 season would put his job on the hot seat is testament to that.

(It’s also worth pointing out that unlike Pioli, I’ve heard only good things about Moore as a person. It’s probably not a coincidence that while the Chiefs were a revolving door of personnel for the last four years, very few members of the Royals’ player development staff have left the organization since Moore was hired. And Trey Hillman never showed up for work looking like a hobo.)

If you want to frame Moore’s career-defining gamble in a positive way, it would also be smart to point out that he’s already made such a gamble, one that was also widely panned, and that worked out brilliantly. I speak of his decision, six years ago, to offer Gil Meche a five-year, $55 million contract.

The Gil Meche contract remains misunderstood by many people, including some in the media, that characterize it as one of Moore’s biggest mistakes. So I want to make something very clear: signing Gil Meche to a five-year deal is one of the best decisions Dayton Moore has made since he was hired. If I ever got around to ranking his best transactions, Meche’s signing would pretty clearly be in the top five.

The 2006-07 off-season was Moore’s first as general manager of the Royals, and so was our first real glimpse at how he was going to operate. His signature move was to give a starting pitcher the most lucrative contract (technically, tied with Mike Sweeney) in franchise history. This pitcher was coming off a season with a 4.48 ERA. The year before, his ERA was 5.09, the year before that it was 5.01, the year before that it was 4.59. The two years before that he didn’t have an ERA – because he was injured and missed both seasons. This, despite pitching in one of the game’s better pitching parks in Seattle.

The last time Gil Meche had been an above-average pitcher was 2000 – and in only 15 starts. That was six full seasons ago. Since returning from injury, his track record was essentially a slightly better version of Luke Hochevar.

Gil Meche, 2003-06: 644 IP, 662 H, 93 HR, 261 UIBB, 468 K, 4.75 ERA

Luke Hochevar, 2009-12: 629 IP, 671 H, 82 HR, 198 UIBB, 454 K, 5.43 ERA

Meche had the better ERA, but Hochevar gave up fewer home runs and had substantially better control; their strikeout rates are about the same.

There are subtle differences, of course; Meche was a year younger than Hochevar is right now, and he was coming off his best full season, which included a substantial improvement in his strikeout rate. (Hochevar is also coming off a career high in strikeout rate and strikeouts.) But still: the Royals are bringing Hochevar back on a one-year commitment for $4.56 million, and everyone – myself included – thinks they’re nuts. Six years ago, they gave Gil Meche a five-year commitment for 12 times as much money, and nearly everyone – myself included – thought they were nuts. (Joe Posnanski, I should point out, liked the Meche contract.)

The Royals signed Meche in large part because they thought they could “fix” him – they thought he had a reparable flaw in his delivery. He landed on his heel instead of his toes, which made his release point erratic and hampered his control.

And they were absolutely right. Meche was a dramatically better pitcher from the first time he took the mound for the Royals – an Opening Day win against Curt Schilling. He had a 2.18 ERA in his first month with the Royals, and finished the season with a 3.67 ERA while leading the AL in starts. He led the AL in starts again in 2008, with a 3.98 ERA. If over the next two years James Shields gives the Royals exactly what Gil Meche gave them in his first two years, they ought to be pleased.

It fell apart from there, because while signing Meche was one of Moore’s best decisions as GM, letting Trey Hillman abuse Meche’s arm after he had already complained of soreness is – hands-down, no debate whatsoever – the worst decision Moore has made. After throwing 132 pitches in a shutout on June 16th, 2009, Meche’s ERA dropped to 3.31 and he was on pace for his best year yet. He complained of a tired arm after the start, but the Royals sent him out there – to give up nine runs in 3.1 innings on June 21st, four runs in five innings on June 26th, and then, most inexplicably of all, to gut out 121 pitches on July 1st. It was utterly indefensible, and analysts said so at the time – Posnanski wrote one of the most vicious articles he’s ever written the very night that it happened. Posnanski’s tirade has, unfortunately, been scrubbed from the internet – though he refers to it here, and I make references to it here and here.

After he first complained of a tired arm, Meche made nine more starts in 2009, and gave up 45 runs in 44.2 innings. He made nine starts in 2010, allowing 39 runs in 48.2 innings and more walks than strikeouts. He came off the DL in September and pitched well out of the bullpen, and then retired. It’s rare in the annals of sports history for a manager to make a decision that was so clearly, in-the-moment wrong AND that so clearly, directly, and immediately resulted in harm. This was the Royals’ Grady Little moment.

We’ll never know what would have happened had the Royals recognized that you probably should take a tired arm seriously. But for the first half of his contract, Meche was everything the Royals had paid him to be and then some. Their mind-boggling stupidity in 2009 doesn’t change the fact that in December, 2006, Dayton Moore gave analysts both middle fingers, and was dead on point.

The Royals signed Meche six days after they took Joakim Soria in the Rule 5 draft (which everyone loved), and seven days after they traded Ambiorix Burgos to the Mets for Brian Bannister (which almost everyone hated). That same week they also signed Octavio Dotel as a free agent. In 2007, Meche became a bonafide #2 starter, Soria was one of the best relievers in the majors, Dotel stayed healthy just long enough to get traded at the deadline for Kyle Davies, and Bannister finished third in the AL Rookie of the Year vote (while Burgos’ career was self-destructing in New York).

The 2006 Royals that Dayton Moore inherited allowed an astonishing 971 runs – almost exactly six runs a game. The starting rotation on the day Moore was hired was Scott Elarton, Bobby Keppel, Seth Etherton, Mark Redman, and Mike Wood. In 2007, the Royals shaved 193 runs off their pitching staff, going from dead last to 8th in the AL in runs allowed. Their starting rotation when the season ended was Bannister, Zack Greinke, Billy Buckner (about to be traded for Alberto Callaspo), Davies, and Meche. For the last game of the season, they gave former #1 overall pick Luke Hochevar his first start.

There’s a reason why, when I started this blog, I wrote this. Hell, there’s a reason why I started this blog. Once upon a time, Dayton Moore knew how to completely rebuild a starting rotation in the span of a single off-season. Maybe he knows how to do it again. Especially since the he did it the last time without surrendering a single prospect, and while spending a fraction of the money he spent this winter.

A cynic will point out that this is exactly the point, that Dayton Moore could have simply followed his own blueprint from six years ago, and gambled with money instead of prospects to acquire an underachieving but still young veteran right-hander (like, say, Edwin Jackson). But this column is not the place for cynicism; I have written lots of other columns to handle that job. So here are some legitimate reasons to be optimistic about the trade:

1) James Shields is a really, really good pitcher.

I have been guilty myself of talking up the weaknesses in his game and perhaps overlooking his strengths, and that’s not entirely fair to Shields. He is not an ace, but he is the quintessential #2 starter, who has thrown over 200 innings for six years running, has made exactly 33 starts five years running, and has shown slow but steady improvement over time, an improvement best seen in his strikeout ratios:

2006-2007: 288 Ks out of 1414 batters faced (20.4%)

2008-2009: 327 Ks out of 1807 BF (18.1%)

2010: 187 Ks out of 899 BF (20.8%)

2011: 225 Ks out of 975 BF (23.1%)

2012: 223 Ks out of 944 BF (23.6%)

As well as Shields has pitched in the majors, his career 3.89 ERA actually seems like a bit of a disappointment when compared to his terrific strikeout-to-walk ratios. If you eliminate intentional walks, Shields has had a strikeout-to-walk ratio of better than 3-to-1 in every season of his career. In many ways, the pitcher he most resembles is Javier Vazquez, whose career K/BB ratio is 3.6, but has a 4.22 career ERA and a won-loss record barely over .500. Like Vazquez, Shields has two problems: he’s a little too home run-prone to be an elite starter, and unlike most elite starters, he seems to have no ability (if not a negative ability) to tamp down on hits on balls in play.

Shields’ BABIP is .300, which is actually higher than league-average, particularly when you factor in the Rays’ defense and ballpark. His 2010 season was a disaster (5.18 ERA, led the AL in hits, runs, and homers) almost entirely because he allowed a .344 batting average on balls in play. The Tampa Bay Rays, as a team, had a .280 BABIP that year. Nine of Shields’ teammates faced at least 200 batters that year, and none of them had a BABIP higher than .296.

Was that a sign of something inherently wrong with Shields’ pitching approach, or just a stone-cold fluke? As this article points out, Shields was one of the “unluckiest” pitchers in baseball history in 2010…just three years after he was one of the luckiest pitchers in history for the 2007 Rays, back when they still had a wretched defense. And in the two seasons since, Shields’ BABIPs have been .260 and .294, and he’s had two excellent seasons.

It seems incongruous for a pitcher who is otherwise so well above-average to be below-average on balls in play, so it’s possible that Shields’ “true” BABIP is better than he has shown, in which case regression to the mean may play to the Royals favor. Certainly, if his BABIP falls somewhere in the range it’s been the last two seasons, the Royals are likely to get a performance in the range of Shields’ last two seasons, which were excellent.

Another reason for optimism is that the velocity on Shields’ fastball, according to Pitch f/x data, ticked up significantly last year. His fastball averaged 92.0 mph in 2012, an increase of more than 1 mph from 2011, when he averaged 90.9. His fastball ranged anywhere from 90.5 to 91.5 from 2007 to 2010. This velocity was seen in his secondary pitches as well; his curveball jumped more than one mph, his changeup more than two mph, and his slider nearly three mph from any prior season in Shields’ career.

I’m not a Pitch f/x expert, so I can only speculate on what this means, but I’d speculate that it’s extremely rare for a 30-year-old starting pitcher to set career highs in velocity across the board. Moreover, Shields’ velocity increased as the season progressed; he was throwing his fastball at its established speed for the first 12 starts of the season, and then it jumped into the 92-93 mph range for almost every start he made the rest of the season.

Shields is 31 years old, and you have to at least think about decline in a pitcher at that age, but the quality of his stuff has shown no evidence of decline, and in fact the exact opposite. If there’s any concern here, it’s that there are some suggestions in the emerging research on Pitch f/x data that a sudden spike in a pitcher’s velocity may be the sign of an elbow that’s about to blow – witness Danny Duffy, whose fastball jumped from 93.3 to 95.3 last year before he underwent Tommy John. I think it’s reasonable to be concerned about whether Shields will stay healthy for the next two seasons, although his health record is certainly reassuring. But health permitting, there is no reason, looking at the data, to be worried about a sudden decline in his performance.

Finally, since I made a big deal about how getting Jeremy Guthrie out of the AL East should improve his performance going forward, I should account for the fact that Shields is doing the same thing. However, there’s a big difference between pitching for the Orioles and pitching for the Rays. While Shields has struggled against the Red Sox and Yankees (he has a 4.56 career ERA against each team), he excelled against Baltimore (3.55 ERA) and was even better against Toronto (3.24 ERA). In total, Shields has a 3.98 career ERA against AL East teams, in 621 innings; against everyone else, he has a 3.82 ERA. Moving to the AL Central will probably cut Shields ERA by about 5 points. It doesn’t hurt; it just doesn’t help that much.

Which is fine, because Shields doesn’t need the help. Shields has struck out 220 batters each of the last two years. The only other pitchers who can make that claim are Clayton Kershaw, Justin Verlander, and Felix Hernandez (three years running). More impressively, in the last 10 years, the only other pitchers with that on their resume are Johan Santana (2004-2007), Tim Lincecum (2008-2011), and Jon Lester (2009-2010). Shields’ durability and his ability to miss bats are a rare combination. That doesn’t make him an ace, but it does make him more than worthy of being the Royals’ Opening Day starter this year.

2) If the Royals had to surrender another top prospect in the trade, I’m glad that it was Jake Odorizzi.

While Wil Myers was the marquis talent the Royals traded, it was the inclusion of Odorizzi that really tipped this deal from “the Royals gave up too much” to “the Royals got hosed”. And I’d certainly hate the deal less if it was only Myers, Montgomery, and Leonard. But given that a second top prospect was a necessary sacrifice, Odorizzi was the right one for the Royals to include.

The Royals had four pitching prospects of rough overall quality: Kyle Zimmer, Jake Odorizzi, John Lamb, and Yordano Ventura. That’s the order I ranked them in, but you could make a case for any order and I wouldn’t protest too much. Of the four, Odorizzi is clearly the safest bet – he’s already conquered Double-A and Triple-A and debuted in the majors.

But of the four, he also has the lowest ceiling. He could be a #3 starter, and if he adds a little more oomph to his fastball or tightens up his secondary pitches, you could squint and see maybe a #2. More likely, he’s a #4. Which is nothing to sneeze at. But at the same time, precisely because the Royals made this trade, they have less need for depth and more need for top-of-the-rotation starters. While it’s unlikely, Ventura could be an ace, or at least a #1/#2 starter. Same with Zimmer. Before Lamb got hurt, he looked like a #2 starter. Individually, it’s unlikely any of them will get there; collectively, at least one of them should pan out, and give the Royals an above-average starting pitcher. If it happens reasonably quickly (i.e. by 2014), they can pair that guy up with Shields, and a healthy Danny Duffy (who projects the same way) to give the Royals three above-average starters.

While Odorizzi is a reasonable bet to pitch well, the odds that he pitches significantly better than the Royals’ back-end options (Jeremy Guthrie, Ervin Santana, and now Wade Davis) are pretty small. You’d still like to have him, because of his youth, his price, and the years of club control. But if the Royals have improved their pitching staff as much as they think they have, they’ll have five starting pitchers as good if not better than Odorizzi.

Or to put it another way: if, at any point in the next three years, we can say “man, the Royals would be so much better if they had Jake Odorizzi right now”, the Royals will have much bigger problems than not having Jake Odorizzi.

3) I’m happier that the Royals acquired both Shields and Wade Davis than if they had acquired Shields alone.

The reports from people like Bob Dutton, who was on this trade even while people like me had their heads in the sand in denial that the Royals could give up their best prospect for a short-term fix, was that all along the Royals were willing to trade Wil Myers for James Shields straight up, but that the Rays wanted more. Given that the trade went down, I have no reason not to believe that was, in fact, the case. The Royals weren’t willing to trade additional prospects with Myers without expanding the parameters of the trade, and that’s what happened.

Let’s say that the Rays were willing to trade Shields for Myers and Mike Montgomery. The Royals, then, agreed to that trade on the condition that they could also trade Odorizzi and Patrick Leonard for Wade Davis. If that’s the case, the Royals got depantsed on the Myers/Shields trade, but actually did fairly well for themselves on the second trade. I might even argue that they won the second deal.

Wade Davis has been described – I’m guilty of this too – as essentially the pitcher that Odorizzi is going to be, only older and more expensive. That’s probably true of the Wade Davis that started in 2010 and 2011 – when he made 29 starts each year and had a combined 4.27 ERA, while striking out just 14.4% of batters. Don’t be fooled by that ERA – given his ballpark, and his defense, Davis was a below-average starting pitcher each season (his ERA+ was 90). That’s a #4/#5 starter, and that has value, but not a ton of value.

If that’s the Davis the Royals got, they would have been better off keeping Odorizzi. The Royals are gambling that it’s not. Davis spent all of 2012 in the bullpen, and improved by so much that it’s reasonable to ask whether he was a fundamentally different pitcher, and not just a guy who benefited from getting to air it out an inning at a time. His strikeout rate more than doubled, to 30.6%. His home run rate dropped in half. He was fantastic – admittedly, in just 70 innings of work.

Almost every starting pitcher improves when used in relief, and their strikeout rate will climb. But they usually increase by about 20% – Davis’ rate jumped 112%. Davis might have figured something out in 2012, and he might be able to take that with him back to the rotation.

According to Fangraphs, Davis’ average fastball climbed from 91.8 mph in 2011 to 93.7 mph in 2012. An increase of 2 mph is pretty typical when moving from the rotation to the bullpen. What I find interesting, though, is that the value of his fastball didn’t change much – it was actually less effective in 2012 than in any other year. But his slider, which was mediocre, was above-average (from -0.4 to 4.9 runs); his changeup went from awful to mediocre (from -6.3 to -0.2), and his curveball went from awful to excellent (-8.1 to 6.8). Was that because the extra juice on his fastball kept hitters honest? Or was it because he was throwing his off-speed stuff more effectively?

I don’t know. Davis threw his slider and curveball harder in 2012, so maybe their effectiveness drops again when he has to pace himself. On the other hand, he threw his changeup slower even as his fastball came in faster. The difference in velocity between the two pitches was just 5.8 mph in 2011, but was 8.8 mph in 2012. (The consensus is that the ideal difference between fastball and changeup is 10-12 mph.) Keep in mind that Davis rarely throws a changeup, so that may just be noise.

I wrote at the time of the trade that if the Royals do win this trade, it’s more likely to be due to Davis than Shields. If Davis is a new-and-improved starting pitcher, the Royals have him under contract for up to five years at a reasonable salary. They could have had Odorizzi for six or seven years at an even more reasonable salary, but there’s value in having done it in the majors already. The combination of his track record as a back-end starter, and the potential for improvement, makes this part of the trade much more palatable than the main course.

The other reason I really like the inclusion of Wade Davis is because of what this does to the Royals’ Win Curve. The Win Curve is an oft-discussed concept – here’s Jonah Keri just the other day – that basically states that making improvements to your roster when you’ve got a 100-loss team (or a 100-win team) are not as useful as making improvements when you’re in the 85-93 win range, where a single win might be the difference between a playoff berth and an early end to the season. If the 2006 Royals had traded away their farm system* for Alex Rodriguez, instead of finishing 62-100, they would have gone 68-94 or something. Big effing deal.

*: And by “farm system”, I basically mean “Alex Gordon and Billy Butler”, because that’s pretty much all they had.

There’s just no way that a 62-win team on paper could, in the span of one winter, add the 30 or so wins it would need to make the playoffs. Which is why you don’t see the Houston Astros trading for established talent. There’s basically no way that a 72-win team could do it either – if you’ve got a 72-win team, your best hope is to just hope that your players play beyond their talent and they get fabulously lucky all season long, in which case you could be the 2012 Orioles.

The Royals won 72 games last season, but realistically, going into the off-season they projected a little better than that for 2013. They had the youngest offense in the majors, which generally leads to improvement. A healthy Salvador Perez and a repaired Eric Hosmer could lead to massive improvements at those two positions. Jeff Francoeur would either play better or be replaced by someone who was. Luke Hochevar would either pitch better or be replaced by someone who was.

When the season ended, I put the Royals at a 77 win team for 2013 with the roster they had on hand. You can’t turn a 77 win team into a playoff contender with a single move – although the Blue Jays came close. But you can get there by making a series of transactions, if they all improve your team by 2-3 wins each.

That’s why I wasn’t so down on trading for Ervin Santana, or re-signing Jeremy Guthrie. (Well, at the time – seeing Shaun Marcum sign for one year and a base salary of $4 million has made me re-evaluate the wisdom of the Santana acquisition.) Individually, those moves didn’t move the needle much, but together, they brought the Royals that much closer to contention. As an exercise, let’s say each pitcher will be worth two wins to the Royals in 2013.

Adding Santana moves KC from 77 wins to 79 wins.

Re-signing Guthrie moves KC from 79 wins to 81 wins.

They’re still not a contender – but they’re close enough now that the value of each additional win starts to go up significantly. Which makes it financially sensible at that point for them to spend big money on a free-agent pitcher who moves them further up the win curve. Add Edwin Jackson, who’s worth 3 wins, and now you’re at 84 wins – and at 84 wins, you’re close enough that it’s reasonable to hope that some of your young players break out, put you into contention, and you can dip into your farm system to fill some holes before the trading deadline. And if not, given the youth of the roster as a whole the team will almost certainly be better a year from now, and you’ll have more opportunities to improve it.

That would have been my strategy. Instead, the Royals traded Wil Myers for James Shields. Adding Shields could be worth four wins – he’s only reached 4 WAR twice in his career, but let’s be charitable here – but the loss of Myers might cost the Royals two wins in 2013 alone. So let’s say this swap is worth another two wins. That moves the Royals to 83 wins. Closer, but not close enough.

Swapping Jake Odorizzi for Wade Davis, in 2013, might be worth as much as swapping Myers for Shields. It’s hard to peg Davis’ value; he was below replacement level in 2011, but was worth 1.1 WAR as a starter in 2010, and 1.4 WAR as a reliever in 2012. If you assume that he’s a fundamentally better pitcher now than he was during his first iteration as a starter – and the Royals wouldn’t have traded for him if they didn’t think so – then it’s not unreasonable to peg him as a two-win pitcher. Given Odorizzi’s low strikeout rate in Triple-A, it’s not unreasonable to say that he still needs time in the minors, that he’s not much more than a replacement-level starter at this point.

So that’s another two wins. In isolation, adding Wade Davis isn’t a big deal, any more than adding Guthrie or Santana was. But adding him after adding all the other guys moves the Royals from 83 to 85 wins. His addition moves the playoff needle significantly more than the initial moves. Going from 77 to 79 wins on paper might increase your playoff odds from 2% to 5% or something. Going from 83 to 85 wins on paper increases your odds from 15% to 25% - remember, those odds include both the chance that you play above your talent level as well as the odds that 85 wins is all it takes to steal the second wild card.

If you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound. Having traded Wil Myers, the Royals were already in for the whole damn exchequer in 2013. Davis might not be a huge upgrade over Odorizzi – but he is an upgrade, at least in 2013, and if the Royals are legitimately going for it in 2013, then every little bit helps.

(This is a good time to point out that I really, really like the waiver claim of George Kottaras, who is WAY too good a player to be on the waiver wire in the first place. I understand why the A’s would deem him expendable, now that they have both John Jaso and Derek Norris, but I’m stumped as to why they wouldn’t look to make a trade first. Kottaras is basically the guy that I kept hoping Brayan Pena would become, but didn’t – a bat-first catcher from the left side whose defense won’t kill you. He was a career .273/.370/.450 hitter in the minors, and even made the Honorable Mention list of my Top 50 back when I was doing prospect rankings for Baseball Prospectus in 2006.

In his major league career, he has 694 plate appearances – basically a full season for an everyday player – and while he’s hit just .220, he has 91 walks, 24 homers, and 36 doubles. He’s under contract for just $1 million in 2013, and isn’t eligible for free agency for three years. Given that the only catcher on the 40-man roster other than Salvador Perez was Brett Hayes, Kottaras represents a significant upgrade, maybe worth a full win even in the abbreviated playing time anyone backing up Perez is expected to get. He could be this generation’s version of Gregg Zaun, The Practically Perfect Backup Catcher, who hit .290/.386/.454 as a Royal from 2000 to 2001. The difference is that back then, Zaun was the only good catcher on the roster. The Royals now have one of the best starting catchers and one of the best backup catchers in the major leagues. Kudos.)

4) The Royals might have given up Wil Myers, but a player development operation that acquired him in the first place is well-poised to replace him.

If you still want to be optimistic about the Royals going forward, this is really the rub. Under Moore, the Royals have put together one of the very best player development operations in the major leagues today. If I’m going to crush them for trading Myers, I have to give them credit for turning a third-round pick into Wil Myers in the first place. If that’s a skill and not just blind luck, they’ll bounce back from his loss soon enough.

I wrote earlier that destroying Gil Meche’s arm was the absolute worst mistake of the Dayton Moore administration. But if you wanted to be heartless, you could argue that their worst mistake was selecting Christian Colon with the #4 overall pick in the 2010 draft. We’ll probably never know who the Royals were planning to take until 30 minutes before the draft, but the player we thought the Royals were planning to take 30 minutes before the draft was Chris Sale. If the Royals had taken Sale, they would have had no need to make this trade. If they had taken Yasmani Grandal, another player they were linked to, they might have been able to trade him for pitching instead of Myers (complicated, of course, by his recent PED suspension).

A quick, painful tangent: in 2009, the Royals won 65 games, and the Orioles won 64. If the Royals had lost one more game to Baltimore, they would have drafted third instead of fourth. Going into the draft, the industry knew there were three premier talents available: Bryce Harper, Jameson Taillon, and Manny Machado. They were drafted in that order. The Royals took Colon.

In 2010, the Royals won 67 games, and the Orioles won 66. They beat the Orioles on July 30th that year on a two-out, three-run home run by Alex Gordon that I somehow called on Twitter. Because of that hit, the Orioles drafted fourth in 2011, and took Dylan Bundy. The Royals, who had already agreed on dollar figures with Bundy, drafted fifth, and took Bubba Starling instead. If the Royals had Bundy, they might not make this trade.

Just kill me now. The home run that I called is the reason the Royals traded Wil Myers? I feel like Dr. Hans Zarkov learning from Emperor Ming that he’s responsible for the destruction of Earth.

Change a single game in 2009 and 2010, and the Royals would have three of the top six or seven prospects in all of baseball. (I assume Machado wouldn’t have had his rookie eligibility exhausted.) And don’t even get me started on David Price vs. Mike Moustakas…

But of course it’s ridiculous to claim that drafting Colon was the franchise’s worst decision, because every team screws up in the draft. There are 30 teams; comparing your one team’s efforts to the best efforts of the other 29 teams is lunacy. No one says the Royals screwed up by taking Colon over Drew Pomeranz, who was the very next pick, or Barret Loux, who was the pick after that. Sale wasn’t taken until #13 overall.

If any team were able to make the absolute best choice with each draft pick for even a single draft, they’d guarantee themselves five division titles in a row. It’s impossible. All you can hope is that a team grabs more than its fair share of talent. And by and large, the Royals have. What makes the loss of Sale painful is that, in the moment, he was thought to be the Royals’ preference. But that’s a testament to the Royals under Moore, that they’ve done a much better job of identifying draft talent than most.

They correctly evaluated Moustakas over Josh Vitters in 2007, drafted Duffy in the third round, and Greg Holland in the tenth. Their 2008 draft doesn’t look as good today as it did two years ago, but aside from Eric Hosmer at #3 overall, they drafted Montgomery, Johnny Giavotella, and John Lamb. Lacking a second-round pick in 2009 (thanks, Juan Cruz!), they took Aaron Crow with the #12 pick overall, gave Wil Myers $2 million in the third round, gave Chris Dwyer $1.5 million in the fourth round, and even got Louis Coleman as a cheap senior sign in the fifth.

The 2010 draft class was considered unusually weak, and the Royals’ class is no exception, but at least they got Jason Adam in the fifth round. It’s too early to evaluate the others, but their first five picks in 2011 – Starling, Cameron Gallagher, Bryan Brickhouse, Kyle Smith, and the departed Leonard – are all legitimate prospects.

And the Royals’ draft success pales to their international success. Salvador Perez. Kelvin Herrera. Yordano Ventura. Adalberto Mondesi. Cheslor Cuthbert. Orlando Calixte. The newest intriguing name, Miguel Almonte. Because players sign out of Latin America when they’re just 16, it takes a lot longer for the development process to bear fruit – but even so, the Royals have a franchise catcher and a future closer already on their roster, with more to come.

That includes Jorge Bonifacio, who with Myers’ departure becomes the Royals’ chief long-term hope for right field. He’s not the prospect Myers is; Bonifacio hit .282/.336/.432 as a 19-year-old in low-A ball, and at the same age Myers hit .289/.408/.500 and was promoted to Wilmington mid-season, where he hit even better. And Bonifacio won’t be ready for at least two years, meaning the Royals will have to find a short-term solution even after Jeff Francoeur leaves as a free agent/gets benched/retires to pursue a career as a motivational speaker.

But in a perfect world, by the time Shields leaves as a free agent in 2015 and the cost of trading Myers shoots up, Bonifacio will be ready to ease the sting a little. And in a perfect world, the same development machine that found Myers will continue to outperform their competitors in identifying and signing amateur talent. Myers may be gone, but the men who made Myers a Royal in the first place are still here.

So there you go. There are four legitimate silver linings to The Trade. Are they enough to justify it? Hell no. But if it turns out I’m wrong about The Trade, the reason why is probably listed somewhere in this column. And I like I said last time: I hope I’m wrong. Even if I don’t think I am.

Myers, Moral Hazard, and Moving On.

If you were waiting for my actual analysis of the Myers/Shields trade, I wrote this for Grantland just hours after the deal was consummated. Perhaps it would have been better if I had not written angry. I was not kind to the Royals.

The week after the trade was probably the most difficult week I’ve ever had as a Royals fan. It was a kind of psychic torment that I had never experienced before; I literally had trouble falling asleep at night. (Yeah, yeah, it’s just baseball. I’m aware of how whiny and self-indulgent that sounds.) But here’s the thing: my angst had nothing to do with the trade itself, at least not directly. It actually took me a while to figure out exactly why I felt the way I did.

In my Grantland column, I wrote about moral hazard, about the danger that lurks when a person in a position of influence finds that their own self-interest diverges from the interest of the organization they work for. If you believe that another disappointing season in 2013 was going to get people fired – and all the evidence points that way – then you have to believe that Dayton Moore found himself in a position of moral hazard.

And let me be clear here: it’s not his fault that he’s in a position of moral hazard. Most of us, were we in his position, would also place a higher priority on winning a few more games in 2013 than on potentially winning a lot more games in 2015. It’s been reported that David Glass made it clear to his front office that they either win more games next season or else – so the only rational decision for a GM to make in that situation is to place a higher priority on winning in the short term than in the long term. Almost every GM faces some level on moral hazard on the job – though it’s telling that Andrew Friedman, thanks to his success on the job and an owner who fully buys in to the Rays’ methods, is one of the few who does not.

And to be even more clear: while I think this trade hurts the Royals in the long term more than it helps in the short term, this is not a case of a GM completely sabotaging a franchise in a pointless attempt to save his job. We’ve seen that before. It was barely five years ago that Dave Littlefield, who after six years as general manager of the Pirates had moved the team no closer to respectability than when he took the job in 2001, traded for Matt Morris. Everyone in the industry knew that the Giants were desperate to dump Morris, who had nothing left (he had struck out just 73 batters in 137 innings), and was getting paid about $10 million in both 2007 and 2008. The expectation was that they would have had to – and were willing to – eat at least half his contract.

But minutes before the trading deadline, Littlefield traded for Morris – and picked up his entire contract. At the time, the Pirates were 42-62 and in last place, and of course they had a restricted payroll owing to the fact that they were the Pirates. No team in baseball had less need than the Pirates did for a vastly overpriced, aging, slightly above replacement-level starter. Littlefield even gave the Giants two players, one of them Rajai Davis, for the privilege of trying to pull the fork out of Morris’ arm. Morris had a 6.10 ERA in 11 starts for Pittsburgh in 2007. In 2008, he made five starts, gave up 31 runs in 22 innings, and was released, ending his major league career.

Morris outlasted Littlefield in Pittsburgh; Littlefield was fired less than six weeks after the trade. In a just world he would have been fired on the spot, but presumably it took ownership some time to appreciate the enormity of what he had done.

Dayton Moore made, in my opinion, a bad trade. I think he hurt his team’s chances of winning in the long term for a modest short-term gain. But he did not make a transaction whose sole purpose seemed to be to save his job, the way Littlefield did. There’s no comparison between the two.

But anyway, I was thinking about the implications of moral hazard when I finally realized what was the source of my disquieting feeling: I was in a position of moral hazard as well.

Having gone on record with my feelings about the trade, my self-interest as a baseball analyst is completely, utterly in conflict with my self-interest as a Royals fan. The outcome that will make me happiest as a fan is the same outcome that will make me look like a complete schmuck. A bitter schmuck at that.

And to be clear, most of the Kansas City media is already doing their best to make me look like one. The radio stations in town lined up to smack me around like I’m the hysterical chick in “Airplane”. No one likes the turd in the punchbowl, and in being the local media guy who was most vehemently against the trade, I am the turd in the punchbowl.

Here’s the thing: I hope they’re right. I don’t want to be the turd in the punchbowl. I hope that, years from now, my analysis of this trade will be one of the most embarrassing mistakes I’ve ever made. I have, without exaggeration, never wanted to be wrong about a baseball transaction more than this one.

I have disparaged moves the Royals have made before, and in most cases I’d rather be proven right than to see the Royals win a few more games because I was wrong, not because I didn’t want them to win, but because a few more wins didn’t mean a whole heck of a lot in the grand scheme of things. If I had been wrong about Mike Jacobs and he had hit 32 home runs in 2009, like he had for the Marlins in 2008, what would it have mattered? The Royals might have won 68 games instead of 65?

I wasn’t wrong about Jacobs, of course. You could argue that I was sorta wrong about Yuniesky Betancourt in 2010, although I would argue right back, given that his defense was so atrocious that Baseball-Reference rates him as a full 1.3 wins below replacement level that year. (I definitely wasn’t wrong about Yuni in 2009, and I definitely wasn’t wrong about Yuni in 2012.)

But even if he had done his best Troy Tulowitzki impression in 2010, the Royals would have won, what, 73 games? Whoop-de-do. Given the stakes, there was no upside in being wrong. I could only hope that I was right, that the outcome proved that the process (as opposed to The Process) the Royals had used to make their decision was wrong, and that they would learn from it for the future.

But this time, if I’m wrong, then – by definition – it means playoffs. Because – barring something wacky happening with Wade Davis down the line – the only way this trade works out for the Royals is if they make the playoffs in one of the next two years. That’s what Dayton Moore is betting on here, and I respect the gamble he’s made even if I think he made a terrible one.

I only resolved the crisis in my mind when I decided that, once again, I’m a fan first and an analyst second. I don’t know how much longer I can continue to write about baseball, frankly, not with a growing family and medical practice and everything that goes with them. But I can be a fan for life.

And if I’m wrong, well, I’m used to making mistakes as an analyst; it’s the nature of the job. (Just limiting myself to times I condemned a Missouri team for a trade, it hasn’t even been 18 months since I thought the Cardinals were lunatics to trade Colby Rasmus for, basically, two months of Edwin Jackson and a couple of middle relievers. Oops.) But I’m not used to the Royals playing games on national TV in October. I literally have no memory of them ever doing so.

And if I'm wrong, that doesn't completely invalidate the process of what I do, any more than Mitt Romney winning the election would have completely invalidated Nate Silver's work. We deal in probabilities, not certainties, and Silver gave Romney about a 9% chance of winning on the eve of the election. The Royals have far more than a 9% chance of winning this trade. I just think it's far less than 50%, and I think they are vastly more likely to lose big than they are to win big.

So I’ve cast my decision. If I’m wrong, I fully expect and welcome those of you who disagree with me now to rub it in my face. (After all, I’m sure I’ll do the same in reverse if I’m right.) Just know that if I’m wrong, no one will be happier to bear those criticisms and eat some crow as I will be.

I’ll even write these words right now, in the hopes that I can cut-and-paste them in ten months and say them with conviction:

“Dear Dayton Moore: I was wrong. You were right. You made the biggest gamble of your career last December, and I savaged you at the time, and it turns out your decision was brilliant. I was a fool. Please forgive me.

- Rany Jazayerli.

P.S. In case anyone ever asks, your ass tastes minty.”

Mind you, it will be hard to argue convincingly that the Royals won this trade ten months from now, because the talent they gave up will take years to identify itself one way or the other. (On the other hand, if James Shields tears something in his elbow in spring training, we could pronounce a verdict in the other direction much sooner.) But Craig Calcaterra made a lot of sense when he wrote that, essentially, whether this trades works out for the Royals depends almost entirely on whether it takes them to the Promised Land. Even if Myers turns into a superstar, if the Royals can lay claim to one playoff spot that they wouldn’t have otherwise earned, it will be justifiable. They wouldn’t necessarily win the trade, but they could not be said to have lost it.

So I won’t bother trying. If the Royals make the playoffs in 2013, no one is going to want to hear me make the case against the trade anyway.

You: WE MADE THE PLAYOFFS! JAMES SHIELDS STARTS GAME ONE AGAINST THE YANKEES!

Me: Yeah, well, the Royals still shouldn’t have traded for him.

You: What the hell are you talking about? He threw 216 innings, won 17 games, was the unquestioned leader of the staff, and we won the division!

Me: Yeah, but Wil Myers hit .272/.346/.462 for the Rays, and Jeff Francoeur was so bad that the Royals had to swing a trade in June for David Dejesus to play right field. If the Royals kept Myers they would have won nearly as many games as they did with Shields.

You: That’s crazy talk! And what about Wade Davis, huh? He transitioned back to the rotation, gave the Royals 185 quality innings with an ERA of 4.40. Do they make the playoffs without him? They only won the division by three games!

Me: Well, Jake Odorizzi came up for the Rays in August and had a 4.40 ERA in twelve starts, so I’m not sure Davis was that much of an upgrade.

You: Sure he was! He gave the Royals quality innings when they needed them the first half of the season, while guys like Danny Duffy and Felipe Paulino were still on the DL. Are you honestly saying you think the Royals would have won the division without Shields and Davis?

Me: No, I’m saying that if instead of trading for Shields and Davis, they had signed Shaun Marcum, who made 26 starts with an ERA just 15 points higher than Shields, or if they had signed Edwin Jackson, who threw 208 innings with an ERA just 25 points higher than Shields, and they had Myers in right field instead of Francoeur, they would probably have won as many games as

You: TURD IN THE PUNCH BOWL! TURD IN THE PUNCH BOWL!

So, yeah. The 2013 season will be a referendum on this trade; if the Royals go the playoffs, and Shields and/or Davis are a big part of that accomplishment, then everyone will be too busy reveling in what happened to reflect on the long-term implications of the deal. Myself included.

But come 2015, it’s going to hurt. I had this dream, a dream I’m sure many of you shared, that in two years the Royals would go into the season with this projected lineup:

Alex Gordon, in the last guaranteed year of his contract, still just 31, aging as well as you would expect from the fitness freak.

Billy Butler, also in his contract year, 29 years old.

Eric Hosmer, who would play the entire season at 25.

Mike Moustakas, who would be 26 years old, turn 27 late in the season.

Salvador Perez, who would turn 25 in May.

Alcides Escobar, who would be 28.

And yes, Wil Myers, the youngest of the bunch, at 24 years old.

Ignore Escobar, who’s on that list because of his glove. The other six hitters on that list would all be capable of garnering MVP votes, and they would all be right in their prime – except for Gordon, the others would all be between 24 and 29 years old.

Mind you, we wouldn’t even need to wait until 2015 to see that lineup – we would have probably seen it this coming May. But in 2013, you could argue that the lineup was just too inexperienced to take flight – Myers, Perez, Moustakas, and Hosmer will  all be 24 or younger. By 2015, they would be approaching the peak of their powers, and Gordon and Butler would still be close to theirs.

In center field, the Royals might have Lorenzo Cain (29 years old), or they might even have Bubba Starling (22 years old) ready by mid-season. Come up with a second baseman that doesn’t totally suck, and that might be the best offense in team history. Oh, and they’d still have everyone in their current bullpen. All they would need is a rotation that’s even mediocre, and they’d be giving off a distinct mid-1990s Cleveland Indians vibe.

Instead, in 2015 they won’t have Myers, and they won’t have Shields either. Maybe this trade moves up the Royals’ timetable a little. But taking Myers out of the equation puts a serious hurt on my dream of an AL Central dynasty. I got greedy; sue me. (It doesn’t help that Sports Illustrated decided to troll Royals fans by publishing this in their current issue.)

It’s time for me to put this trade behind me, and focus on where the Royals stand today. I’m fond of using Shakespeare’s line about how “What’s past is prologue”; as a Royals fan, if you always focused on what’s past, you’d drive yourself crazy. Instead of dwelling on how we got here, better to focus on where we are, and where we’re headed. The fact that Wil Myers was once a Royal no longer matters. What matters is whether a rotation headlined by James Shields, Ervin Santana, Jeremy Guthrie, and Wade Davis – and a lineup that now features Jeff Francoeur, for good or ill – is good enough to reach the playoffs.

So I’m going to – calmly, I hope – distill my criticisms of the trade one last time, and then I’m done. If things go sour later, believe me, you will hear from me – but I’ll at least wait for that to happen before reopening the wound. And I hope the only times I discuss my criticism of the trade in the future are when I laugh at myself for being so stupid as to lose my head over the very move that ended a quarter-century of suffering.

My objections to the trade boil down to the fact that he people who support the trade from the Royals’ perspective are, I believe, making four mistakes:

1) They highlight the risks inherent in Wil Myers because he’s a prospect, but ignore the risks inherent in James Shields because he’s a pitcher.

I thought David Cameron did an excellent job of expanding on this point. It is, in fact, true that Wil Myers is not a sure thing. He could be a disappointment, or a flat-out bust. He could be Delmon Young. He could be Brandon Wood. While my quick-and-dirty look at previous Baseball America Minor League Players of the Year pointed out that 12 of the last 14 hitters so named went on to become excellent major-leaguers*, given the small sample size that may overstate his success rate a little.

*: On 810 WHB, I shorthanded that to say “12 of the 14 hitters went on to become stars”, which led to extensive analysis from my friends on The Program on whether guys like Alex Gordon and Matt Wieters are “stars”. I’d argue that this is a discussion over semantics that is missing the bigger point, but to be clear: yes, they are stars in my book.

Gordon ranked in the top 10 in the AL in bWAR each of the last two years – yes, even in 2012, thanks to his Gold Glove defense, his league-leading 51 doubles, and his .368 OBP. It took him a while, but he’s become a fantastic ballplayer. Wieters is a little more debatable, because he hasn’t met the (admittedly insane) offensive expectations that were placed on him. He’s a slightly above-average hitter – who has also won back-to-back Gold Gloves behind the plate. He’s also very durable; he’s been first or second in the AL in starts behind the plate for three years running. He was named an All-Star each of the last two years. Baseball-Reference says he’s averaged 4 WAR over the last two years, which is right about where I draw the line for “star”.

But again: we’re missing the point. Whether Wieters is just beyond that line, or just in front of it, I hope we can all agree that he’s a hell of a ballplayer that most every team would be thrilled to call their own.

Two years ago, Scott McKinney tried to restrain our irrational exuberance over the Royals’ farm system by looking at the success rates of top prospects, and found that the success rate of Top 100 Prospects as a whole was quite low (about 31% overall). But even he found that the success rate of a specific subset of prospects – Top 20 hitting prospects – was 61%, about double that. Given that prospect analysis has improved over time (in my opinion), and that Myers is clearly a Top 10 prospect if not Top 5, and it’s safe to say his success rate is probably a little higher than that.

But yes, he absolutely could fail to live up to expectations in the future. But you know what? So could James Shields. So could every player in the major leagues. There is no such thing as a sure thing. This notion that “sure Myers is a great prospect, but he hasn’t proven a thing in the majors – Shields has” is inexplicable to me. You don’t trade for a guy’s past – you trade for his future. And one of the best things that analytics has brought to baseball – and that analytic-driven teams excel at – is the understanding that every player has risk, and the key is quantifying it and valuing players accordingly.

For every Delmon Young, there’s a Dan Haren, who a year ago was the same age Shields was this season (30), and a better pitcher – from 2007 through 2011 he averaged 228 innings and a 3.33 ERA. In 2012 he suffered back and hip ailments, his performance suffered, and the Angels didn’t even pick up his $12 million option for next year (granted, I thought they were fools to do so, and the Nationals actually paid him more than $12 million on a one-year deal).

For every Brandon Wood, there’s a Jon Garland, who was 30 years old in 2010, and threw 200 innings with a 3.47 ERA for the Padres; it was his ninth straight year with 32 starts. He made all of nine starts in 2011 before undergoing surgery on his labrum and rotator cuff – he hasn’t pitched since.

Jon Garland was no James Shields, you say. Fine – how about Chris Carpenter? At age 30, in 2005, Carpenter won the NL Cy Young Award. In 2006 he repeated with another excellent season, finishing third in the Cy Young race. After that season he signed a five-year, $63.5 million extension with the Cardinals, even though he wasn’t a free agent for another year. He made one start in 2007 before his elbow came up lame, he required Tommy John surgery, his rehab was slowed by some shoulder issues, and he pitched just 15 innings in 2008 – two completely lost seasons, basically. He was brilliant again from 2009 on – but if Shields blows out his elbow in April, it doesn’t matter what he does in 2015, because he’ll be gone by then.

The Royals traded for Shields because over the past two seasons he has averaged 238 innings with a 3.15 ERA. If you could guarantee me right now that Shields will average 238 innings with a 3.15 ERA over the next two years, I would withdraw my objections to the trade. If you could guarantee me 210 innings with a 3.40 ERA, I would withdraw my objections. But you can’t. Shields is a 31-year-old starting pitcher, and 31-year-old starting pitchers, as a group, are no less risky than 22-year-old outfielders. Even ones who haven’t yet played in the major leagues yet.

Hedging that risk a little is the chance that Wade Davis might be an improved pitcher in his second crack at being a starting pitcher. But in return, the Royals also accepted the risk that any of three other prospects might come back to haunt them. The risk that Myers fails is probably not much higher than the risk that Odorizzi, Montgomery, or Leonard succeeds in becoming an impact player in the major leagues.

2) They overstate how much the trade improves the Royals in 2013.

This trade was all about moving up the Royals’ window of contention, yes? This trade was about winning in 2013, right? And in terms of upgrading the Royals’ rotation, it certainly does that. But the Royals give back a good deal of that improvement by locking themselves in to Jeff Francoeur in right field.

I don’t expect Francoeur to hit .235/.287/.378 again, and if he does, I don’t expect him to come to the plate 603 times again. Bob Dutton – who has nobly suffered shots at the messenger for repeatedly stating things like “the Royals absolutely plan to bring Luke Hochevar back”, has nonetheless clearly stated that Francoeur is on a quick hook in 2013. I believe that, and I believe that the Royals are perfectly aware of just how bad he was this season (at least offensively – they may still believe his arm outweighs his poor range in the field).

Royals right fielders as a whole hit .241/.290/.377 in 2012, counting the occasional non-Francoeur start. That will probably be better in 2013, either owing to improvement from Francoeur, or because they’ll search out a replacement in May if he doesn’t. But it might not be a lot better. The difference in what we can expect from right field today, and what we could expect from right field three weeks ago, is probably worth 1-2 wins in the standings.

The Royals are still a better team for 2013 than they were before the trade. But they’re not improved enough to justify trading a potential star player. Especially given my next point:

3) They overlook the fact that the Royals could have improved their rotation without making this trade.

One of the lesser storylines from this trade is that after whipsawing back and forth all off-season, we can once again re-direct our ire away from David Glass. The payroll isn’t at $85 million, as I think it should be, but it’s somewhere around $79 million, close enough that I’m not going to harp too much on the owner at the moment. It’s the highest payroll in the team’s history.

So forgive me for reiterating the obvious yet again: given that Dayton Moore could raise the payroll to this range, he could have signed a free agent starting pitcher without giving up a single player (or even draft pick) in return. Anibal Sanchez, who was supposed to be out of range for the Royals, got $16 million a year from the Tigers. The Royals are paying $14.9 million for Shields and Luke Hochevar combined. Factor in that the Royals might go fishing for a cheap outfield option as Francoeur insurance – that they wouldn’t need if they kept Myers – and it’s basically a wash.

After getting outbid by the Tigers on Sanchez, the Cubs gave Edwin Jackson, long a target of mine, 4 years, and $52 million. Even if the Royals wanted to keep Hochevar, Jackson is making less in 2013 than Shields and Davis combined will make. Yeah, the Royals acquired two starting pitchers instead of one – but right now, they don’t have room for both Bruce Chen and Hochevar, meaning that Chen might wind up getting paid $4.5 million to pitch long relief. And if they don’t make this trade, they still have Odorizzi.

One of the most common defenses I’ve seen about the Royals is that they had to trade for good starting pitching, because no free agent worth his salt would ever come to Kansas City unless they vastly overpaid. To which I reply: THE CHICAGO CUBS LOST ONE HUNDRED AND ONE GAMES LAST YEAR. They thought they had Anibal Sanchez signed, until he let the Tigers get last crack at him – but in the end, he didn’t sign with the Tigers because they’re a winner, but because they offered him the most money. The Cubs offered him 5/$75 million; the Tigers matched. The Cubs then offered him 5/$77.5; Detroit raised to 5/$80, and the Cubs folded.

They then turned around and made Edwin Jackson a better offer than the other 29 teams, and guess what? He signed with the team that gave him the most money. Imagine that.

It’s certainly true that, all things equal, free agents would prefer to sign with a team who they feel has made a commitment to being a winner. But you know the best way a team can show that commitment to a free agent? By offering him more money to sign than anyone else.

If the Royals would have had a tough time convincing a free agent that they were serious about winning next year, that time would have been in November, before they had made any off-season moves. You might remember that I was, on the whole, positive about the Ervin Santana trade and the Jeremy Guthrie signing, even though both pitchers were probably overpaid a little on a pure market basis. One of the main reasons for my positivity was that, in acquiring those pitchers early in the off-season, it ought to have made it easier to convince a truly premier free agent pitcher to sign, knowing that the Royals had already made over their starting rotation, and that his signing would have completed, not begun, that process.

It’s not exactly a secret in the industry that the Royals have a young, exciting offense and a bullpen filled with flamethrowers. It wouldn’t have been hard to convince a Sanchez or a Jackson that signing with Kansas City would complete an above-average rotation, and an above-average roster, in a very winnable division. The downside to signing someone like Jackson is that, the longer the contract, the more risk there is that he gets hurt or loses effectiveness, and you’re paying $13 million for a useless pitcher. But even in the worst-case scenario, the fact that you’re overpaying a starting pitcher is mitigated by the fact that your above-average right fielder – the one you didn’t trade to acquire a starting pitcher – is vastly underpaid.

But let’s say that the Royals already knew that Sanchez and Jackson had, for whatever reason, crossed Kansas City off their list. So what? There are plenty of fish in the sea. Brandon McCarthy just signed with the Diamondbacks for 2 years and $15.5 million. His ERA the last two years (3.29) is almost as good as Shields’ is. Sure, he’s not durable at all, but he’s 60% of the price and he doesn’t cost you Wil Myers! (Besides, you really just need him to hold up until July, when Danny Duffy and Felipe Paulino return.)

Don’t like McCarthy? Shaun Marcum is still out there. Ryan Dempster settled for 2 years and $26.5 million from the Red Sox, just a hair more than the Royals reportedly offered him. Dan Haren was out there. Francisco Liriano was out there. Kyle Lohse is still out there, not that I think he’s worth the money. Carlos Villanueva would have been a decent fit, and he signed with the Cubs, who are putting on a clinic on how to makeover your rotation through free agency without overpaying.

Are the Royals a better team in 2013 with James Shields and Wade Davis? Yes. Are they a better team with Shields and Davis but without Myers and Odorizzi? Yes, but not as much. But are they a better team with Shields and Davis but without Myers, Odorizzi, and the starting pitcher they could have signed with the money they’ve added to the payroll? Honestly, I’m not sure.

And that’s the tragedy in all this. If the Royals had not been so fixated on the idea of adding an “ace”, they might have realized that adding a #2/3 starter and replacing their broken right fielder would have improved their team in 2013 as much as acquiring the fabled Division Series Game One Starter. Jonah Keri wrote about this angle – the Royals trade was, ultimately, a failure to think outside the box, because the Royals could only see their options in terms of “acquire an ace” or “lose again in 2013”.

Which leads to my last point:

4) They assume that this trade makes the Royals a contender in 2013.

If the Royals make the playoffs in 2013 – assuming they do so because of, not despite, Shields and Davis – then the ultimate price may be worth it. So the value of making this trade comes down to how much it increases the Royals’ chances of winning the division. (They could earn a Wild Card spot, but the addition of the woeful Astros to the AL West gives that division a leg up on at least one, if not both, of those berths.)

In my opinion, this trade doesn’t improve the Royals’ chances enough to justify the deal. If the goal was simply to have a winning record, then this trade increases those odds significantly. But I’m sorry, I know how starved we are as Royals fans for a team that’s even respectable, but you don’t trade Wil Myers so that you can win 82 games in 2013.

Most simulations have the Royals as around an 85-win team now; this one has the Royals at 84-78. I’m predicting the Royals at 86-76 at the moment, because I’m still an optimist. And I don’t want to downplay the significance of that. The Royals haven’t outscored their opponents since 1994. They haven’t won 85 games since 1989.

But you don’t trade one of the game’s best prospects to get to 85 wins. That simulation above had the Tigers at 91-71, and that’s before Anibal Sanchez signed. There’s a lot of variance in projections, of course, and even if the Royals’ true talent level is pegged, sometimes you just get lucky. If the Royals play as much above their talent level in 2013 as the Orioles did in 2012, they’ll win the division – but if they get that lucky, they would have won the division with or without the Shields trade.

The Royals have a shot of winning the division in 2013, because their offense is so young and talented that it could improve dramatically in one off-season. Eric Hosmer, who was terrible in 2012, could be an All-Star caliber first baseman in 2013. Mike Moustakas could learn to stop popping up that inside high fastball and his offense could take as dramatic a step forward next year as his glove did this year. Salvador Perez could stay healthy and play 140 games. If all three of those things happen, the Royals will be 10 games better instantly, and now they're a contender.

But if you agree with me that the Royals' wealth of young hitters gives them a chance to improve dramatically, then you have to agree that letting Wil Myers play right field might also have improved them dramatically. You can't claim Hosmer and Moustakas and Perez are the biggest reasons why the Royals could go from 72 wins to the playoffs, without acknowledging that Myers was another big reason as well. Either you believe in young hitters or you don't. If the Royals were smart to trade Myers because he's not likely to pan out, then they were wrong for trading him because the young hitters they kept probably won't pan out either and they'll miss the playoffs anyway.

I’d say the Royals have about a 25% chance of winning the AL Central right now. Before the trade, I’d have pegged their chances at around 15%. (But mind you, that’s without signing any free agent pitchers with the Shields money.) You don’t trade Wil Myers for an extra 10% chance of winning the division.

Contrast that to the Blue Jays trading for R.A. Dickey. I will admit – the Blue Jays gave up a ton of talent for Dickey, more than I thought it would take, and reinforces the opinion that elite starting pitching is very, very expensive. But let’s look at the differences in the two trades:

1) Travis D’Arnaud is an excellent prospect, but he’s not quite as excellent as Wil Myers. He’s nearly two years older than Myers, and he missed half of last season with knee problems, and his numbers in 2012 were inflated by playing in a terrific hitters’ environment in Las Vegas.

2) Noah Syndergaard looks like a better prospect than Jake Odorizzi, and certainly has a higher upside. But this is where the historical performance of prospects – pitching prospects – is useful. The reality is that the vast majority of pitchers who look like potential front-of-the-rotation guys when they’re in A-ball fall by the wayside. Trading an A-ball stud while he’s at the peak of his value is almost always the smart play. When the Top Prospects lists come out, I expect Syndergaard and Odorizzi to be very close in the rankings.

3) Mike Montgomery and Patrick Leonard, combined, are worth more than Wuilmer Becerra, and not just because I know how to pronounce their names.

4) The Blue Jays turned John Buck into Josh Thole, a not-insignificant upgrade behind the plate, both in terms of cost and performance.

5) Dickey, as I wrote about here, and again at Grantland last week, is a legitimate #1 starter who suffers from the bias against knuckleball pitchers. He was a better pitcher than Shields this past season. He’s been a better pitcher than Shields over the past two seasons. He’s been better over the past three seasons. Before that Shields was better, but Dickey hadn’t mastered the knuckleball yet. And despite his age, I think Dickey’s going to be the better pitcher for the next several years to come.

6) One of the reasons the Blue Jays were willing to give up so much for Dickey was that he was willing to sign an extension – an extension, it turned out, that included a club option. So while the Royals have Shields for just two years, the Jays have Dickey for four.

7) Dickey makes less money ($5 million) in 2013 than Shields ($10.25 million). He’ll make less ($12 million) in 2014 than Shields ($13 million). And he’s signed for 2015 for $12 million with another $12 million option in 2016. The Blue Jays have the reigning NL Cy Young winner for four years without ever having to pay him more than $12 million.

The Royals’ one advantage in the deal is that they also got Wade Davis. If Davis becomes an above-average starter, that’s a big advantage. If he has to return to the bullpen and be Aaron Crow, not so much.

But the biggest reason why the Jays’ trade makes sense and the Royals’ trade doesn’t has nothing to do with trading for Dickey. It’s everything the Blue Jays had already done this off-season. Their acquisition of Dickey was set up by signing Melky Cabrera, and Maicer Izturis, and above all, by acquiring Josh Johnson and Mark Buehrle and Jose Reyes and Emilio Bonifacio from the Marlins.

The Blue Jays and Royals had virtually identical records in 2012; Toronto won one more game than Kansas City, and had a run differential two runs better. But before acquiring Dickey, they had already improved their roster by at least 10 wins – easily the most of any team in baseball. Adding Dickey tips them into being a legitimate 90-win team; adding Shields and Davis did nothing of the sort for the Royals.

It’s still December, and a lot can change, and the pundits can be wrong. But most pundits agree that the Blue Jays are the favorites to win the AL East in 2013.

Those same pundits agree that the Tigers are the team to beat in the AL Central. In order for the Royals to prove the pundits wrong on the Myers trade, they need to prove them wrong on the AL Central standings next year.

They certainly could do that. But I don’t think they will; I’m one of those pundits, after all. And I’m hardly the only one. I’ve heard the divide between people who think the Royals did well in the trade and the people who think the Royals got snookered being described as a divide between mainstream media and “bloggers”, whatever a “blogger” is at this point. (The word should be retired at this point. It is useless at best, and misleading at worst.)

But that’s not the case. The divide is simply between industry insiders and outside, objective, dare I say sabermetric analysts. Keith Law was so critical of the Royals that Bob Nightengale at USA TODAY contacted Dayton Moore and got a testy reply. Joe Sheehan, in his Newsletter, compared Moore to the newbie in your fantasy league that gets his roster picked apart by the experienced players. Rob Neyer debated whether this trade ranks among the worst in Royals history. Jonah Keri criticized the deal, but nicely, because he’s Canadian. Joe Posnanski criticized the deal, but nicely, because he’s Joe Posnanski.

The most positive remarks I saw from analysts were those who praised the Royals for recognizing the time had come to switch from simply amassing future talent to trying to win in the here and now. But even those analysts were much less optimistic about the details of the trade itself. John Sickels made a cool Civil War reference which I liked, and he’s right – you can’t be George McClellan all the time. At some point, you have to stop preparing for battle and actually engage the enemy. But even when the time for battle has come, discretion is still the better part of valor. I mean, Pickett’s Charge was bold and decisive. It was also reckless and foolish, and man, it sure was decisive.

Over at Baseball Prospectus, Ben Lindbergh made a really interesting comparison of this trade to another one – to the time that the Rays traded away the star young outfielder, Delmon Young, in order to improve their pitching by adding a starter (Matt Garza) and upgrading their defense (Jason Bartlett). He quoted a writer who said, the day after the trade was made, that:

“With this deal, the Rays have shifted from collecting talent to forming it into a baseball team, and this trade shows how seriously they take the process. Trading a player with the perceived value of Young is never easy, but with it they’ve leveraged a gap between that perceived value and what he actually is to make their team better.”

That’s exactly how the Delmon Young trade worked out, and it set the Rays on a path towards an AL pennant and three playoff appearances in five years. The problem is this: the person who wrote those words, Joe Sheehan, is the same person who keeps texting me at random times just to remind me how stupid this trade was for Kansas City. (Seriously, stop it, Joe. I get it.)

And that’s it. I’ve said my piece. What’s past is prologue. This trade is done, it’s over, it’s a fait accompli. (Or as distinguished reader Gershon Marx put it, a fail accompli.) I will speak no more ill of this trade until the season begins and we have a chance to see how it works out. In my next column, in fact, I’ll talk about the things I do like about this trade, because that’s just who I am.

And I really, truly, honestly hope that, come next October, I’m eating crow and singing Dayton Moore’s praises and asking myself how I could have possibly been so critical and mean about a trade that has worked out so well. Honestly.

I’d love to be proven wrong. I just don’t think I will. But maybe this is the time the Royals surprise me. In a good way, I mean.

Complete Analysis of the Myers-Shields Trade.

This sucks.

For Want Of A Pitcher: R.A. Dickey.

I’d like to set the stage for this post with a brief review of the history of Dayton Moore at the Winter Meetings over the years, his successes (Joakim Soria, Gil Meche), his failures (pretty much everything else), and take my usual sweet time getting to the point.

But you know what? We don’t have time for that. The meetings are underway, the Royals could make a franchise-altering transaction – good or bad – at any moment, and I need to get this out there right now.

Four days ago, Jon Heyman reported that in addition to Jon Lester and James Shields, the Royals were looking at one other top starting pitcher in a trade – R.A. Dickey. Specifically, he wrote that “Kansas City has no interest in trading young catcher Salvador Perez and isn’t looking to trade top outfield prospect Wil Myers. The Royals would prefer to send the Mets a package of younger prospects in any Dickey deal.”

Dickey is only under contract for one more season, albeit at the bargain price of $5 million. He has reportedly been asking the Mets for an extension, and would settle for a two-year deal, but the two sides have been unable to agree on his asking price.

I want to make this clear to everyone: if the Royals are able to trade prospects (within reason) for Dickey, without surrendering Myers, and if they were able to work out a two-year extension for Dickey as part of the trade, it would be an absolutely effing coup. It would rank as one of the finest moves of Moore’s career, and one of the finest transactions any team will make this winter.

It would be such an astonishingly good move that I can’t believe there’s actually a chance – however slim – that it could happen.

Let’s review the reasons why:

1) R.A. Dickey is a #1 starter.

Dickey doesn’t fit the classic mold of a #1 starter, because he doesn’t fit the classic mold of any starter – he’s a knuckleball pitcher. But for God’s sake, he won the Cy Young Award this year. Maybe he wasn’t the best pitcher in the National League – Clayton Kershaw was probably a hair better – but (along with Johnny Cueto) he was clearly in the top three. That’s an ace.

I appreciate a good scouting discussion of what constitutes a true “ace” pitcher as much as anyone, but it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees. Dickey’s fastball averaged 83 mph on the rare occasions he threw it. He’s 38 years old, and when he turned 35 years old he had 22 career wins and a 5.43 ERA in 443 innings as a conventional pitcher. And all of that is irrelevant, because he throws a knuckleball now, and (as I’ll get to later) even by the unique standards of that pitch, Dickey throws it in a way that’s unprecedented.

And the results are fantastic. He made 33 starts and threw 234 innings this year, struck out 230 batters (all three figures led the NL), allowed just 192 hits and 54 walks. He was a little homer-prone, with 24 homers allowed, an issue that goes with the territory of throwing a knuckleball. But Dickey finished with a 2.73 ERA in a league-leading number of innings. He combines quantity with tremendous quality. At his peak this summer, he was doing things no pitcher has done since, I dunno, Pedro Martinez at his very best. From May 22nd to June 18th, a span of six starts, Dickey threw 48.2 innings (over 8 innings a start), allowed 21 hits and 5 walks, allowed two runs (one unearned), and struck out 63 batters.

While Dickey has never been this good before, this wasn’t completely out of the blue; this wasn’t Esteban Loaiza’s 2003 season or something. In 2010, Dickey threw 174 innings for the Mets with a 2.84 ERA, and in 2011 he threw 209 innings with a  3.28 ERA. The biggest difference in 2012 was that his strikeout rate skyrocketed – he averaged 5.4 K/9 in 2010, 5.8 K/9 in 2011, and 8.9 K/9 in 2012. As a result, his hit rate dropped significantly – but his walk and home run rates were basically unchanged.

His BABIP the last three years goes .280, .285, and .280. Given that we know knuckleball pitcher historically are better than average in this regard, there’s nothing about his statistical record that screams fluke. Or even whispers it.

2) R.A. Dickey is a knuckleball pitcher.

This may seem obvious, but it has very important implications. The primary criticism I’ve heard about Dickey going forward is “he’s 38 years old!”, as if that means something.

My response to that is, “YES! EXACTLY! HE’S 38 YEARS OLD! THAT’S PERFECT!”

Honestly, sometimes I wonder if there’s some sort of force field that fogs people’s minds and causes them to downplay knuckleball pitchers. (Sort of like the force field that does the same thing with Salvador Perez, at least outside of Kansas City.) I’m not just referring to fans and analysts, but to people in the industry itself. The Mets, who just committed to David Wright for the next seven years, are apparently inclined to trade Dickey because they’re building for the future.

I’d like to tell them that they are apparently ignorant about the 100-year history of knuckleball pitchers in the major leagues, but if I did that they might change their minds, so I’ll just tell you instead.

Most knuckleball pitchers PEAK in their late 30s. The most successful knuckleball pitcher of the last 25 years was Tim Wakefield. Wakefield had his best season when he was 28, his first season with the Red Sox, when he had a 2.95 ERA in 195 innings – he accumulated 4.7 bWAR. His second-best season? In 2005…when he was 38 years old.

From ages 33 to 37, Wakefield was worth 10.5 bWAR. From ages 38 to 42, Wakefield was worth 12.4 bWAR. He was better at ages 41-42 than he was at ages 32-33.

Tom Candiotti is the other prominent knuckleball pitcher of the last quarter-century, but he wasn’t a strict knuckler, as he also threw a curveball a decent amount of the time. Candiotti had a pretty broad peak from ages 28 to 35, going over 4 bWAR six times in eight years, but was still effective until age 40, when he threw 201 innings with a 4.84 ERA in the height of the Juiced Era.

If we go back to the 1970s and 1980s, we see a lot more knuckleballers, and we see a lot more guys pitch well into their 40s. From age 38 to age 41, Phil Niekro led the NL in losses four years in a row.

That doesn’t sound good – until you realize he led the league in starts all four years, innings and complete games three times, and one year led the league in wins and losses. In 1978, age 39, Niekro went 19-18 with a 2.88 ERA in 334 innings. In 1979, he went 21-20 with a 3.39 ERA in 342 innings. It was a different era, of course, but even then his insane durability (averaging 43 starts and 335 innings a year from 1977 to 1979) stood out. In 1978, he was worth 8.6 bWAR, and in 1979 he was worth 9.6 bWAR.

Niekro would remain effective into his mid-40s. In 1985, he went 16-12 with a 4.09 ERA in 220 innings for the Yankees. He was 46 that year.

His younger brother Joe was never as good a pitcher as Phil, but Joe also was effective into his 40s. Joe had the best season of his career in 1982 (2.47 ERA in 270 innings, 6.5 bWAR), when he was 37, and from 1983 to 1985 averaged 37 starts, 246 innings, and a 3.44 ERA. In 1986, at age 41, he started to lose it.

Charlie Hough was a reliever for the first decade of his career, and didn’t start regularly until 1982, when he was 34. From 1982 through 1988, when he turned 40, Hough threw at least 228 innings with an ERA under 4 every year – pitching in Texas, no less. He was worth at least 2.6 bWAR every year. He began a slow decline in 1989, at age 41, but as late as 1993 he was the Marlins’ first-ever starting pitcher, and at age 45 threw 204 innings with a 4.27 ERA.

With the exception of Candiotti, who wasn’t a pure knuckleball pitcher, every one of these guys was a well-above-average starting pitcher at least through his age 40 season. (And Dickey, keep in mind, just had his best season at 37 – Candiotti was already in decline at that point.) Dickey wants a two-year extension that would cover him from ages 38 to 40? That’s perfect.

3) The price tag on Dickey is affordable.

Admittedly, the evidence for this point is not quite as rock-solid as the first two, because we don’t know exactly what it will take to get Dickey, both in terms of prospects in trade, and in terms of dollars in an extension.

But the mere fact that Dickey could be in play without having trade Wil Myers, and without having to trade any established player already on the Royals’ roster, means that his price tag is less than that of Lester or Shields. There’s good reason for that – he’s only under contract for one year, not two. But on the other hand, if he comes close to replicating his 2012 performance, Dickey would provide nearly as much value in one season as the other two might provide in two seasons.

Shields, 2011-2012: 6.9 bWAR

Dickey, 2012 only: 5.6 bWAR

Lester, 2011-2012: 4.5 bWAR

Dickey probably won’t pitch quite as well next year as he did this year, but the point is that he’s a better pitcher right now than the other two. Factor in that he only makes $5 million, and it’s a very legitimate question as to whether Lester at 2/$24 million or Shields at 2/$21 million should be worth any more on the trade market than Dickey at 1/$5 million.

But they do, for one simple reason: Dickey throws a knuckleball. As much progress as the industry has made over the last 10 years, it still has a blind spot when it comes to pitchers who throw unconventionally, and none more so than knuckleballers.

Furthermore, Dickey appears inclined to sign an extension, which makes sense for a pitcher who is 38 years old and has never had a huge payday in his career. (Even his signing bonus as a first-round pick was slashed after a pre-signing physical revealed he was born without an ulnar collateral ligament in his elbow.)

I’ve done my best to research what kind of money Dickey is looking for in an extension. On the high end, I’ve read that he would be willing to sign for “slightly less” than Jake Peavy’s contract (2 years, $29 million). On the low end, I’ve read suggestions he would settle for $10 million a year for the additional two years.

Let’s split the difference and say Dickey would sign for 2 years, $25 million. This is on top of the one-year, $5 million he’s already under contract for, making this a 3-year, $30 million contract that would be paid $5 million/$11 million/$14 million.

Look familiar? That’s the exact structure of Jeremy Guthrie’s contract, except with a $5 million higher payout in 2015. I’ve already made the case that Guthrie’s contract, while a little overpriced towards the end, is a reasonable deal for the Royals. If Guthrie’s deal is a C+ contract, what grade would you give to signing the defending NL Cy Young winner for about 20% more?

Dickey’s contract in 2013 is so affordable that it wouldn’t even preclude the Royals from signing another pitcher in free agency. If it’s true (as Danny Knobler reports) that the Royals are actually willing to make a competitive offer for Anibal Sanchez, then how about instead trading for Dickey and signing Shaun Marcum as well? Suddenly, you have a rotation of Dickey, Marcum, Guthrie, Santana, and Bruce Chen or Luis Mendoza. That would be an absolutely phenomenal revamping of the Royals’ rotation in a single off-season. Though tragically, it would mean that they’d have to let Luke Hochevar go.

(I don’t want to spend too much time on Luke, but just to reiterate what I’ve been saying all year: bringing him back is a mistake. Bringing him back at $4.4 million, or whatever he’ll get in arbitration, is a huge mistake. The Royals not only brought him back, but judging from their most recent comments, still have yet to acknowledge the essence of his flaw: that he can’t pitch with men on base. “I’ve never really had a player,” [Ned Yost] said, “who I couldn’t figure out why he hasn’t been successful. Again, you can, generally, identify one thing for why a player isn’t successful. With Hoch, I can’t.”

Luke Hochevar, bases empty: .252/.313/.425

Luke Hochevar, men on base: .304/.372/.480

Luke Hochevar, runners in scoring position: .315/.388/.504

Any questions?)

Acquiring R.A. Dickey while simultaneously signing him to an extension would be an absolutely franchise-changing move for the Royals. It would dramatically impact their chances of contending in 2013, and still leave them with an above-average starting pitcher signed to a favorable contract in 2014 and 2015.

Is there risk with Dickey? Of course; he’s a pitcher. He might get hurt, although knuckleball pitchers are almost immune to the sorts of injuries that befell pitchers. (And Dickey doesn’t have an ulnar collateral ligament, so he can’t tear it! No Tommy John for him!) Also, Dickey’s knuckleball is quite possibly unique in the annals of major league baseball. Rob Neyer wrote an absolutely fantastic piece on Dickey in June, making a very strong case that Dickey throws his knuckleball harder than any previous knuckleball pitcher ever. It’s possible that, since his knuckleball relies on velocity more than Wakefield’s or Niekro’s, that Dickey might lose his effectiveness more quickly with age.

On the other hand, the fact that Dickey’s knuckleball is different than theirs would explain why it’s also better than theirs. Inning for inning, Dickey was as effective in 2012 as any knuckleballer in history. (Niekro had better seasons, but that’s because he was throwing more than 300 innings a year.) Also, Dickey threw the knuckleball harder in 2012 than he had in 2011 or 2010, which might also explain why he was better this year than ever before. (His knuckler averaged 77.2 mph this year, compared to 76.0 and 75.8 the last two years.) If that’s the case, than it’s possible that he unlocked the key to a pitching talisman this season, and that 2012 might represent just the first year of a long, extended run as one of the best pitchers in the game.

Also, trading for Dickey would mean that either Salvador Perez has to learn to catch the knuckleball, or the Royals will need a devoted catcher for him. Given that Perez tore his knee last spring training reaching for an errant pitch, I vote for the latter – which would also give Perez the benefit of only having to catch about 130 games, keeping Yost from the temptation of running his star catcher into the ground.

But really, these are nitpicks. Dickey is one of the best starting pitchers in baseball, and the fact that he’s not perceived to be that way creates an enormous market inefficiency that the Royals should do their damndest to exploit.

The Mets are reportedly looking for catching and outfield help, preferably close at hand. The problem is that, if Myers isn’t on the table, there’s not a great fit here. The Royals ain’t trading Salvador Perez, and they don’t have any top catching prospects in the organization. In the outfield, after Myers their best prospect is Jorge Bonifacio, who will probably start the year in high-A and is at least 18 months away from the majors.

If that’s not a dealbreaker, I’d be willing to offer Bonifacio, Yordano Ventura, and the requisite minor league relief prospect in exchange for Dickey. That would give the Mets two of the top eight prospects from a deep farm system for one year of Dickey. From the Royals’ standpoint, losing both players hurts, but Ventura might end up in the bullpen one day, and Bonifacio probably wouldn’t join the team until 2016 anyway.

If the Mets can’t wait that long for an outfielder, then I’d be willing to float the idea of trading Lorenzo Cain. Cain is under contract for five more years, and is a league-average centerfielder right now – what he lacks in upside, he gains in certainty. If Cain’s in the deal, you probably wouldn’t have to give up a Ventura-level second prospect. Let’s say Cain, Kyle Smith, and a minor league reliever. A major-league ready centerfielder and a potential #3 starter is a nice return for Dickey, but one the Royals could absorb. The dropoff from Cain to Jarrod Dyson in center is manageable, although the Royals would have to get a platoon partner for him in free agency.

But this is a deal that absolutely needs to get done. The amazing thing is that, unlike just about every bold move that I propose for the Royals, there’s actually a chance that it might. The Royals are talking to the Mets, and appear to be one of the front-runners to get Dickey – if the Mets decide to trade him.

This is doubly astonishing because trading for a knuckleball pitcher represents pretty much the antithesis of the Royals’ approach for the last 25 years. The knuckleball is the victory of results over form, of statistics over scouting. The knuckleball is almost impossible to scout – scouts themselves will tell you that the only way they can tell the quality of a knuckleball is by how awkward the swings are from the batters. The knuckleball thumbs its nose at everything a baseball organization is taught to value in a pitcher – velocity, command, predictable movement. The only thing a knuckleball does is get results.

Through three GMs and countless managers, the one thread that has tied together the failure of the Royals to win over the last 25 years has been their unwillingness to accept that style doesn’t equate to substance. Big athletic guys that swing at pitches in the dirt will lose to smaller, slower hitters who know the strike zone. The Dayton Moore front office has been no more willing to embrace unconventional baseball paradigms than its predecessors. Acquiring R.A. Dickey would go against pretty much everything they stand for. Which is why it’s especially intriguing that they’re considering it anyway.

Back when the Royals were winning, back in the 1980s, they had a pitcher who, like Dickey, threw his fastball in the low 80s. He didn’t throw a knuckleball, but he threw from a submarine position, and he threw with insane precision, and he got people out, and so the Royals kept letting Dan Quisenberry pitch, and he was one of the greatest relief pitchers of all time. The organization lost its way around the time they stopped seeing guys like Quisenberry for what they were and started caring about what they looked like.

Dickey looks like a batting practice pitcher on the mound – and Cy Young in the box score. His pitches look like meatballs for 58 feet – and then perform magic for the last two. So I’m excited that the Royals, in their desperation for starting pitching, are willing to overlook what Dickey doesn’t do in favor of what he does.

But not nearly as excited as I’ll be if they actually acquire him.