RamRam for Coco.

Okay, I guess you’re getting three columns this week.

In some ways, trading Ramon Ramirez for Coco Crisp is similar to trading Leo Nunez for Mike Jacobs. In both cases, it’s temptingly easy to take one look at the trade and say, “Wow! The Royals traded a middle reliever for a starting everyday player!” And in both cases, once you actually look at the details of the trade, the question of whether this actually makes the Royals better becomes a lot more complicated.

The difference is that Nunez for Jacobs didn’t help the Royals all that much, relative to a stand-pat move. Trading Ramirez for Crisp does.

Let’s start with what the Royals gave up. Ramirez was nearly as effective in his role as Joakim Soria was in his – Ramirez threw 71.2 innings, allowed just 57 hits, and struck out 70 against just 25 (unintentional) walks. Most impressively of all, he allowed just two home runs. Other than nitpicking his control, there’s really no way to fault those numbers. If he can sustain this kind of performance, then he’s got a closer’s job waiting in his future.

There’s reason to think he can’t. For one, he has a very significant platoon split – RHB hit just .153 against him this year, while LHB hit .300. For his career, RHB bat .198/.275/.311, and LHB are at .283/.355/.403. He’s been so successful in large part because he’s been used to face more RHB than LHB, both in 2008 and for his career as a whole, but this would make him somewhat vulnerable in the late innings (at least in a world where teams don’t carry eight relievers and three bench players.)

That doesn’t make Ramirez’s performance less valuable – after all, we do live in a world where teams carry eight relievers and three bench players. But it makes his performance more easily replaced than a right-handed pitcher who is equally effective against LHB and RHB. Right-handed specialists aren’t terribly hard to find. (This is as good a time as any to make mention of the name Chris Hayes, a sidearming non-drafted free agent out of Northwestern who had a 1.64 ERA in Double-A last year. Hopefully this won’t be the last time his name appears on this blog.)

The other reason for concern with Ramirez is that home run total. When you surrender just two homers in 72 innings, there’s some luck involved. When you surrender two homers in 72 innings and you’re not a groundball pitcher, there’s a lot of luck involved. Ramirez isn’t; his G/F ratio last year was 1.26, which is about league average, and for his career it’s just 1.06.

In Ramon’s defense, if this was a fluke, it’s a long-standing one. With the Rockies, he surrendered just 7 homers in 85 innings, and all but one of them was at Coors Field. In 105 career innings outside the Mountain time zone, he’s allowed just three homers. I don’t think there’s any way he can sustain that, but he may have a real ability to avoid gopher balls not typically seen in a pitcher of his type.

I think the Red Sox have made a fine acquisition. Ramirez is an excellent middle reliever, and there’s no reason to think, absent injury, he’s going to suddenly lose his effectiveness. But injury is not an abstract concern; Ramirez just missed almost an entire season with one, and the churn rate of relief pitchers – even good relief pitchers – is enormous.

In return, the Royals got an everyday hitter, an established major leaguer in his late 20s, a player with some plus skills which do not include command of the strike zone. That describes Crisp, but it also describes Jacobs, whose weaknesses I have already dissected. I think Crisp has considerably more value, for a few reasons:

1) While both Jacobs and Crisp don’t walk very much, Crisp hits for a better average, and so has the higher OBP – .331 for his career to Jacobs’ .318.

2) Crisp plays a key defensive position; Jacobs does not.

3) Crisp, at his best, is one of the best defensive centerfielders in baseball. Jacobs, at his best, is a DH.

4) Crisp plays a position where the Royals didn’t have viable in-house options (assuming they couldn’t live with DeJesus out there anymore, which the Royals felt they couldn’t.) Jacobs plays a position where the Royals already had too many in-house options.

5) Crisp is a switch-hitter with a miniscule platoon split; he has the same career OBP against LHP and RHP, but hits LHP for a touch more power. Jacobs is a glorified platoon player.

I think that these five advantages make up for Jacobs' massive edge in power, and then some.

As I discussed in my last column when it appeared the Royals might trade for Felix Pie – obviously that seems less likely today – by getting a top-flight defender in center field, the Royals can move DeJesus to left and upgrade their outfield defense at two positions. Make no mistake: the defensive upgrade is the only reason to think this trade makes the Royals better, and it is reason enough to make the trade.

Defensive metrics show that Crisp was just average in 2008, but those same numbers suggest he was the best defensive centerfielder in the majors in 2007, numbers which are borne out by some observers (I believe Bill James was quoted in 2007 as saying that he had never seen someone play defense in center better than the way Crisp was playing it.) Split the difference: Crisp is a significantly above-average centerfielder. DeJesus is overqualified to play left field. Jose Guillen is…ably assisted by Coco Crisp and David DeJesus.

My sometimes colleague at BP, Dayn Perry, wrote a book a while back (“Winners”) in which he broke down many of the championship teams of the last generation to see what they had in common. I think his most interesting point was that he found a preponderance of teams that went to the playoffs had essentially two centerfielders: one of their corner outfielders (generally the leftfielder) was a former centerfielder who still had good range at the position. The most vivid recent example would be the 2005 White Sox, who played Aaron Rowand in center, then went out and got Scott Podsednik to play left - which seemed like a waste of resources, to use a scrappy power-free scutterbug in left field, but it worked pretty well for them.

Correlation does not mean causation, but I think there’s a potential synergy in play here, between a DeJesus-Crisp outfield and a rotation that has four fly-ball pitchers in Greinke, Bannister, Meche, and Davies. Even Soria has a low G/F ratio, although in his case it may be because he gets a lot of popouts. If nothing else, this trade gives Bannister a stronger case to get another shot in the rotation, and it raises the odds of a full-fledged, Cy Young-worthy breakout from The Baseball Jonah.

What this does for the Royals on offense is less clear, because it’s less than clear which version of Coco Crisp we’re getting. Are we getting the barely replacement-level bat of 2006-07? The .300-hitter with double-digit homer power of 2004-05? Or the 2008 version, which was somewhere in between?

Three years ago, Crisp hit .300/.345/.465 with 16 homers and 42 doubles, and was just 25 years old. The Red Sox then traded one of the game’s best prospects (Andy Marte - honestly, he was!) to get Crisp. (It wasn’t all bad for Cleveland – they also got Kelly Shoppach in the deal.) Crisp was useless with the stick for the next two-plus years; .264/.317/.385 in 2006, .268/.330/.382 in 2007, .259/.309/.410 through the All-Star break in 2008. Crisp broke a finger early in the 2006 season, and after the trade Sox’ GM Theo Epstein blamed some of his hitting struggles on the finger.

It’s a bit of a stretch to blame a broken bone in 2006 for his inability to hit in 2007, but if that’s the case, you’d expect his bat to come around eventually, and after the All-Star break this year (keep in mind, in just 47 games), Crisp hit .315/.392/.403. To me, more exciting than the jump in his batting average is the spike in his walk rate – he drew 20 walks in just 175 plate appearances (149 AB) after the Break. It might be a fluke, but he had never before walked in even 10% of his plate appearances in any pre- or post-break stretch in his career.

It’s not unheard of for veteran players to add walks to their repertoire as they get older. Let’s hope that working with Kevin Seitzer can help Crisp maintain his newly-discovered penchant for walks, because I suspect Crisp will be leading off in 2009, regardless of whether or not his skill set is truly right for the job. He fits the part – fast guy, steals some bases, hits the ball into the gap – well enough that I suspect Hillman will overlook his questionable plate discipline.

And honestly, having discussed this issue with Kevin Kietzman and Danny Clinkscale earlier today, I’m not entirely sure where Crisp fits best in the lineup. The reality is that the Royals don’t have any ideal leadoff candidates except for DeJesus, who may also be the Royals’ best candidate to bat third. When building lineups, you want to build from the center out, not from the top down – if DeJesus is your best #3 hitter, then you bat him third, even if he’s also your best leadoff hitter. If that’s the case, then your best leadoff candidates are either Crisp or Alberto Callaspo (assuming Callaspo even starts). Callaspo had a .361 OBP last year, but he had a .265 OBP in 2007; he’s far from a proven commodity. The Royals could do worse than to lead Crisp off and tell him to work the count.

I think that the sum of Crisp’s offensive contributions will approximate those of the man he is replacing, likely Mark Teahen. So it’s a wash on offense, and a pickup of maybe 20 runs on defense. If Crisp hits more like he did in the second half of the year, and Joey Gathright doesn’t bat 300 times again, there’s a potential for another 10 or 20 runs of offense to pick up. So overall Crisp might be worth about 3 additional wins. The loss of Ramirez might cost a win-and-a-half.

So yes, the trade makes the Royals better, but at considerable cost. Crisp will be paid $6.25 million in 2009 (counting his buyout), with an option for 2010 at $7.5 million. Ramirez isn’t arbitration-eligible for another year, and the Red Sox control his services for four years to come. In terms of return on the dollar, the Royals could have found a more efficient way to spend an additional $6 million a year.

Or is it? If you share the Royals’ belief that they needed a new centerfielder, then you have to acknowledge that Crisp is a better player than any centerfielder on the free agent market this winter, unless you think 38-year-old Jim Edmonds can play forever, or unless you want to gamble that Rocco Baldelli’s mitochondria will start functioning normally. The other centerfielders out there include guys like Podsednik and Willie Bloomquist. The only way for the Royals to upgrade in center field was by trade, and Grady Sizemore wasn’t available.

Plus, the Royals are now in a position where they can trade Teahen, but they don’t have to trade him, and they can trade him for the best collection of talent and not simply to fill a specific need. (Maybe the Royals don’t need Pie now, although I’d still like to have him. But if the Cubs are willing to move Fontenot instead, well, I suppose we can live with a second baseman that hit .305/.395/.514 last year.)

But the main reason I like this trade is because Moore proves once again he understands one of the key principles to building a winning baseball team: relievers are fungible. Unless you have a truly transcendental reliever, you should never get too attached to them – and if you do have a truly transcendental reliever, you definitely should not be too attached to the guys that set up for him.

The Braves won for years with guys like Greg McMichael and Kerry Ligtenberg as their closers, never mind their middle relievers. More than any other position on the field, relievers are made, not born. Allard Baird thought otherwise, and kept spending money on born relievers like Roberto Hernandez and Ricky Bottalico and Doug Henry, and with that approach the Royals had the worst bullpen in major league history from 1998 to 2006.

Moore came in and, from scraps and discards, built a better bullpen than Baird ever did. Soria was a Rule 5 pick. Nunez was a minor league starter who Baird had rushed to the majors. Ramirez was inexplicably going to be left off the Rockies’ roster after he missed most of 2007, and Moore grabbed him for Jorge de la Rosa. Robinson Tejeda was waived by the Rangers after washing out as a starter; he had a 3.20 ERA in the pen last year. Horacio Ramirez was released by the Mariners; Moore picked him and he had a 2.59 ERA in 24 innings. Last season, Moore fashioned the Royals’ best bullpen in almost 15 years, with only two guys (Ron Mahay and Yasuhiko Yabuta) earning a seven-figure salary.

Just as impressively as the bullpen he’s put together on the cheap is the talent he’s obtained by trading away relievers. He dismantled the bullpen he inherited, turning Mike MacDougal into Daniel Cortes and the just-released Tyler Lumsden; Andy Sisco for Ross Gload; and Ambiorix Burgos for Brian Bannister. He traded Elmer Dessens for Odalis Perez, and in returned for taking on some salary he picked up Blake Johnson and Julio Pimental. He traded Jeremy Affeldt and Danny Bautista for Ryan Shealy and Scott Dohmann. And that’s just 2006.

He signed Octavio Dotel to a one-year deal, then cashed him for Kyle Davies just in time. He signed David Riske to a one-year deal with a player option; Riske walked away and the Royals got supplemental first-round pick Mike Montgomery for their troubles. This year he picked up Ramon Ramirez for Jorge de la Rosa; picked up Horacio Ramirez and then cashed him in for Paulo Orlando after six weeks; and now moved Ramirez and Nunez for two everyday players.

In the summer of 2006, the Royals had one of the game’s worst bullpens. Within two years, Moore fashioned a very good bullpen, and neither spent a ton of money nor traded away any talent to do so – de la Rosa is the only player the Royals gave up to assemble their 2008 pen. And at the same time, Moore used his existing relief talent to acquire his best pitching prospect (Cortes), two mid-range starting pitchers (Bannister and Davies), a pair of usable 1B/OF types (Gload and Shealy), a first-round draft pick (Montgomery), and some minor league depth (Lumsden, Johnson, Pimental, Orlando.)

That is, in a word, astonishing. Especially since not one trade involving a reliever has come back to haunt Moore – the closest might be the Shealy deal, as Affeldt had a good year for the 2007 Rockies, but he was a free agent at the end of the season.

Moore did err when he traded J.P. Howell for Joey Gathright, but the difference is that Howell was still a starting pitcher and had not been tried in relief. I’ve mentioned this rule of thumb before: never give up on a starter until you’ve tried him as a reliever, because you might be leaving value on the table. But in the case of a pitcher who’s already a reliever, there nowhere left to find untapped ability. (And Moore partly made up for that deal by trading Billy Buckner for Callaspo.)

So I don’t know about you, but if Moore wants to trade another reliever – a reliever he had just acquired for a failed starter eight months ago – for an everyday centerfielder, I have faith he’s going to be able to replenish the well.

I’ve known Christina Kahrl since we started Baseball Prospectus 13 Novembers ago. In that time the Royals have made a lot of trades, some good, some bad, some criminally awful. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard her say “I love this deal for the Royals” for any of them before.

On Monday, Nate Silver wrote this in our Hot Stove Preview for the Royals, under the question “What Should They Do?”:

“There are two somewhat radical moves that the Royals could consider:

1. Recognize that most closers have short lifespans, that the bullpen is fairly deep behind him, and that his trade value will never be higher, and move Joakim Soria for a premium corner outfield talent.
2. Decide that they're actually fairly close to contention, and increase payroll by $20 million, hopefully using more discernment in the free-agent market than the sort that brought them Jose Guillen.

Absent doing one of those two things, the Royals are going to be in a holding pattern of some kind or another, with an outside chance of contention if things break just perfectly, but more likely to finish once again with a win total somewhere in the seventies. Sometimes there are no magic bullets and a holding pattern is the best that a team can do, particularly if they have limited financial resources—Kansas City may well be one of those cases. However, Dayton Moore ought to at least be contemplating these sorts of alternatives.”

Moore isn’t going to trade Soria, and he’s not going to try Soria to the rotation. But he’s done the next best thing: knowing he has the security blanket of having the Mexicutioner in the ninth, he’s willing to gamble that he can find pitchers capable of pitching the 7^th and 8^th. And after this trade, crazy as it sounds, I wonder if he’s setting the Royals up to compete in 2009 if no one runs away with the division.

In fact, I’m pretty sure he is. Because while Crisp makes the Royals a better team, he also makes them more expensive, and he's only under contract through 2010. Setting aside my reservations about Jacobs, I don’t think anyone can argue that replacing Gathright and Gload with Crisp and Jacobs is going to help the team significantly. The problem is that they also raise the team’s payroll significantly, to the tune of over $8 million. The Royals are already bumping up on a $70 million payroll, which they’ve suggested is close to their limit.

I hope that David Glass is willing to show some flexibility in that regard, because the money spent on Jacobs and Crisp will be invested most wisely if it’s accompanied by an additional investment. The addition of Jacobs and Crisp is worth on the order of 5 wins over the course of a year, more if the Royals can turn Teahen into something with present value. Is that enough to make the Royals a contender? No. Even if Gordon or Butler has a breakout season, probably not. If they both have breakout seasons, it’s still a maybe.

But if the Royals add one more bat to the lineup, the calculus changes. The off-season is still young. The Royals have yet to be ruled out of the Rafael Furcal sweepstakes; Furcal, like Crisp, would allow the Royals to upgrade defensively at two positions at once, as Aviles could move to second base. Or perhaps they pony up the dough to sign a big-name starting pitcher, a Ben Sheets or someone of that caliber. Who knows what else Moore has up his sleeve – but unless there’s some money tucked away in his shirt, he’s going to be hard-pressed to make enough moves to propel the Royals into the postseason in the next year or two.

For now, though, the Royals have the luxury of having no more obvious holes to fill in their lineup, and they still have Teahen to dangle out there for whatever suits their fancy. Making this trade in November sets the Royals up to explore every possible trade and free agent option out there in December, without feeling pressured to make a move.

This is not a risk-free trade, but for the Royals, the upside trumps the downside. I think that the Red Sox are more likely to win this trade by a little. But I think that the Royals are more likely to win this trade by a lot.

A Teahen Rumor I (Want To) Believe.

So, I have this column Zack Greinke all but wrapped up, was planning to post it after work today…and then Bob Dutton had to do his job and ruin everything. The bad news for me is that I now need to come up with instantaneous comment on the Mark Teahen rumors. The good news for you is that you might actually get two columns from me this week. Wonder of wonders.

You may or may not recall this, but back at the end of May, I proposed a trade between the Royals and the Cubs. In that column, I suggested that the Royals trade David DeJesus, Esteban German, and a prospect to the Cubs in exchange for Felix Pie and Ronny Cedeno.

Naturally, almost every rationale I used to justify this trade proved to be wrong.

I proposed the Royals trade DeJesus because, hitting .284/.339/.374 at the time (and just .260/.351/.372 in 2007), he wasn’t pushing the Royals towards a championship any. The next day he went 2-for-4 with a homer, and his OPS never again went as low as it was that day; he hit .317/.378/.485 from May 31^st on, and today he looks like he may be a part of the solution after all.

I proposed that the Royals acquire Ronny Cedeno to play shortstop, because Tony Pena hit like a pitcher and because “We're all excited about Mike Aviles and his .338/.369/.634 line in Omaha, but 1) he's never hit this well before; 2) most people feel he can't handle shortstop in the majors; 3) he's 27 years old.” Hey, I was right about Pena.

And I proposed that the Cubs acquire DeJesus because “they've got a great lineup - but they have one massive, gaping, festering, chest wound of a hole. They have no centerfielder.” I was even more specific than that. “So now, they have Jim Edmonds, which is great except this is 2008, not 1998, and Edmonds is evoking the memory of Willie Mays in 1973 right now - a once-great player reduced to such a degree that he's almost painful to watch.” At the moment I posted the column, Edmonds was 19-for-114 on the year – that’s .167 – with one homer. He went 3-for-4 with a homer and double that night, and for the balance of the season hit .270/.388/.615. Apparently, the tonic to a prolonged slump is to have me insult your skills.

Yet with all that, as badly as I messed up the specific rationale for such a trade, today’s rumors suggest that I got the general reasons correct. The Royals would, as I suggested, benefit from trading one of their “solid” players to a contender with a specific need for a tweener – it just turns out that the player was Teahen, not DeJesus.

The Cubs did, as I pointed out in May, have a potentially fatal weakness on an otherwise excellent squad:

“The Cubs also have a problem which may not hurt them now, but will almost certainly haunt them come playoff time - even their longtime fan George Will thinks they lean too far to the right. Eight Cubs have batted 100 times or more this season - and seven of them (all but Fukudome) bat right-handed.” This lack of balance in their lineup persisted into October, and more than any other reason, the inability to stack their lineup with left-handed hitters against the Dodgers’ power right-handers led to the team being swept in the NLDS.

This problem is actually more acute for the Cubs now than ever, because that one left-handed starter – Fukudome – was completely worthless the second half of the season, and was so lost at the plate during the first two games of the NLCS that Lou Piniella had no choice but to bench him in Game 3. Fukudome’s future in Chicago is in question, which only makes their need for a left-handed bat more acute.

We know that the Royals have been shopping Teahen – never mind what Dayton Moore says – and the Cubs are a good fit; the only negative in having them as a trade partner is that they do not see Teahen as a third baseman (or at least not primarily as third baseman – his versatility is seen as an asset.) But what were the odds that two of the three players Dutton mentions as guys the Royals might be interested in were…Pie and Cedeno?

Pie is pretty much the same player he was when I talked about him back in May – a tools goof who was promoted aggressively through the minors when he probably shouldn’t, who reached the majors before he was ready (and it shows: his career line is .223/.284/.331 in almost 300 plate appearances), but whose upside is still considerable. Pie would only add to the Royals’ problems with plate discipline, and after the Mike Jacobs acquisition, it would be only too easy to rip into Moore for acquiring yet another player who doesn’t know the strike zone from a map of Alaska. The circumstances here are entirely different. Plate discipline is a problem for Jacobs, but it’s far from his only one – he has no defensive value whatsoever, he has no speed, he doesn’t hit for average. Pie, on the other hand, has shown flashes of pretty much every skill except plate discipline.

In 2007, at age 22, Pie hit .362/.410/.563 in half a season in Triple-A. Maybe that was just a hot stretch, but anyone who can hit that well at that age for that long has to be taken seriously as a prospect. He hit just .287/.336/.466 in Iowa this year, but add the two lines together, and you get a player who, in 140 games in Triple-A, hit .317 with 29 doubles, 10 triples, 19 homers, 20 steals (in 33 attempts), and even 42 walks. He’ll be 24 in February. He’s a raw lump of clay, to be sure – but I’d sure like to see if the Royals can mold that clay into an All-Star centerfielder.

Two years ago, Baseball America ranked Pie the #1 prospect in the Cubs system, and that was before he hit .352 in Triple-A. They also called him “the system’s best defensive outfielder.” That part is key – acquiring Pie would allow the Royals to move DeJesus to left field, as they’d like to, which would upgrade their defense at two positions. Using Defensive Efficiency, the Royals were middle-of-the-pack defensively last year – 16^th among the 30 teams – but I’ve seen other metrics that rank the Royals much, much lower.

The Royals have a fairly fly-ball oriented pitching staff, which makes their outfield defense particularly important. They can’t do much about Jose Guillen, except to make sure that he can actually walk before they put him in the field, but if DeJesus and Pie are patrolling the other two-thirds of the outfield, they’ll be alright.

And then there’s Cedeno, who hit an empty .237 after I proposed the trade, and finished at .269/.328/.352. Cedeno now has nearly 1000 plate appearances in the majors, and his career line is .252/.289/.350. That makes him a decent utility player at best. If I thought that truly represented his talent level, I wouldn’t be the slightest bit interested in acquiring him.

Fortunately, I don’t. Cedeno will be 26 in February, close to his prime, but still at an age where sudden breakouts occur. And Cedeno, like Pie, has already proven he can hammer Triple-A pitching. He crushed the PCL in 2005, which earned him an everyday job with the Cubs in 2006. He bombed that audition, so it was back to Triple-A in 2007, and once again he hit like a guy who belonged in the majors.

Between 2005 and 2007, Cedeno played in 140 games in Triple-A (the same number that Pie played in between 2007 and 2008.) In those 140 games, he hit .357 with 29 doubles, 4 triples, 18 homers, 17 steals in 24 attempts, and 50 walks. Basically, Pie with an additional 40 points of batting average.

Is he just a Quadruple-A hitter? I have no idea. But while I wouldn’t go out of my way to acquire him, if he’s available as a throw-in, wouldn’t you love to take a flyer on him? If nothing else, he makes for a better utility player than Pena. If the Royals are concerned about Alberto Callaspo’s defense (and they are), they can either start Cedeno at 2B or start him at SS and move Aviles to 2B; either way they can get another defensive upgrade without surrendering more on offense. I could easily see Hillman using Cedeno and Callaspo in a sort of platoon at the beginning of the year, with Cedeno starting against LHP and Callaspo against RHP, and letting their performances dictate who gets more playing time as the season progresses.

But the Royals shouldn’t trade Teahen to get Cedeno. They should trade Teahen to get Pie, and if they can get Cedeno as well, that’s a heck of a coup. Six months ago, my colleague Kevin Goldstein thought I was vastly overrating DeJesus if I thought he would fetch Pie and Cedeno. If, six months later, the Royals can turn Teahen into the same package of talent…well, color me impressed.

Why would the Cubs make this trade? Ever since the NLDS sweep, there’s been an aura of desperation surrounding the team – it’s hard to overstate just how disgusted the fan base was with the team afterwards. The Cubs are in serious win-now mode, and last week traded Jose Ceda – who Goldstein ranked as their #3 prospect, and who is one of the best closer prospects anywhere in the minors – for Kevin Gregg, who got a lot of save opportunities for the Marlins last year but who would have been, like, the fourth-best reliever in the Royals’ bullpen. So they’re clearly willing to overpay in future currency for cold hard performance in the present. And as exasperating as Teahen can be at times, would it surprise anyone if he hit .280/.360/.500 in a Cubs’ uniform next year?

(Dutton also mentioned Mike Fontenot as a possible pickup instead of Cedeno. Maybe Dutton knows something we don’t, but given that Fontenot hit .305/.395/.514 last season, if they needed a corner outfielder that badly wouldn’t they just move Fontenot out there? A second baseman who just posted a 900 OPS shouldn’t be talked about as a throw-in, should he? But hey, we’ll take him too.)

The wild card here is Fukudome, who the Cubs would love to pawn off on someone else. I actually think Fukudome would be a worthwhile gamble for the Royals – he’s left-handed, and especially if the Royals trade Teahen, they’re in danger of leaning too far to the right side themselves. If nothing else, Fukudome knows the strike zone; early last year, he was widely credited for spurning the Cubs to appreciate the value of the base on balls. (The Cubs, who finished dead last in the NL in walks in 2005 and 2006, and next-to-last in 2007, led the league in walks in 2008. They drew 395 walks just two seasons ago, but this year they took 636 of them. That kind of jump may be unprecedented.) He’s a solid defensive outfielder as well.

The problem with Fukudome is his contract, which guarantees him $38 million over the next three years. I’ve been long meaning to put together a list of far-fetched trade ideas for the Royals this winter, and my favorite was to suggest trading Guillen to Chicago for Fukudome. Guillen has more power, but Fukudome does pretty much everything else better. The Cubs are desperate enough to rid themselves of Fukudome that they’d probably be willing to make the deal, and never mind what it does to their lineup balance or clubhouse chemistry. The fly in the ointment is that Fukudome’s contract runs one year longer than Guillen’s; if there’s some way around that – perhaps the Cubs pick up half of his contract in 2011 – this is a trade idea that could actually work.

That’s a trade for another day, but I thought I’d put it out there, if only because the last Royals-Cubs trade I proposed may be coming close to reality.

Nothing may come of this rumor, but there are a lot of reasons to think that Teahen-for-Pie-and-Cedeno is more than just your garden-variety trade gossip. (Not the least of which is the fact that Moore has yet to dismiss it, as he did the last Teahen rumor.) And there are a lot of reasons to think this would be a hell of a move for Moore to make.

More on Jacobs.

One thing that characterizes Dayton Moore’s tenure as GM is that he’s not afraid of controversial moves. By “controversial”, I don’t mean that as a euphemism for “everyone disagrees with them” – that would the Allard Baird era – but that there is a legitimate lack of consensus about them. Some people think his moves are brilliant; others think they are terrible.

Gil Meche’s five-year contract was felt by some (Rob Neyer and, to a somewhat lesser extent, myself) to be a criminally risky move, and others (Joe Posnanski) as a bold and inspired decision. Jose Guillen’s three year deal was panned by all three of us as a move that was pointless at best and actively destructive at worst, but there were certainly a lot of Royals fans in the blogosphere who loved Guillen’s power and felt that he would help to fire up the clubhouse.

And now comes the Mike Jacobs trade, and judging from the comments on this site and other Royals sites on the web, most Royals fans seem to have very strong opinions about this trade. It’s just that those opinions run the gamut: many fans share my view that Jacobs’ horrible OBP makes him a borderline everyday player to begin with, and a terrible fit for the Royals; others see Jacobs’ power and feel that Leo Nunez is a small price to play for a player who might be the first Royal in five years to hit 30 homers in a season. There seems to be no in-between.

While there’s extensive disagreement among Royals fans about the trade, I must inform you that there’s almost no disagreement among baseball analysts: they think it was a bad move for Kansas City. From Posnanski to Christina Kahrl to Keith Law, to private emails I’ve received, no one understands why the Royals would trade for Jacobs.

There are many reasons why people have lined up into two disparate camps over the move, but from my standpoint (as someone who thinks the trade was a waste of resources), I think the most significant reason why many Royals fans like the trade is that they’re evaluating Jacobs from the perspective of recent Royals history. Ross Gload was the team’s primary first baseman in 2008 and 2007. In 2006, Doug Mientkiewicz logged a plurality of innings at the position.

In 2005, Matt Stairs and Mike Sweeney got most of the plate appearances, but the Royals also got over 200 at-bats from the combination of Justin Huber, Tony Graffanino, Joe McEwing, Eli Marrero, and Ken Harvey. In 2003 and 2004, Harvey was your primary first baseman, although Mike Sweeney played some first base and was a monster when he did, bringing the overall numbers up. You have to go back to 2002, when Sweeney was ably backed up by Raul Ibanez, to find a year when the Royals had a real asset at first base. Courtesy of baseball-reference.com, here’s a list of the combined numbers from the team’s first basemen going back to 2002:

2002: .320/.390/.588, 44 D, 38 HR, 132 RBI, 67 BB, 21-26 SB

2003: .307/.374/.478, 37 D, 22 HR, 105 RBI, 65 BB, 19-22 SB

2004: .270/.331/.424, 27 D, 24 HR, 86 RBI, 50 BB, 12-17 SB

2005: .285/.333/.414, 39 D, 13 HR, 87 RBI, 44 BB, 6-10 SB

2006: .281/.351/.423, 42 D, 13 HR, 96 RBI, 60 BB, 7-10 SB

2007: .276/.326/.415, 38 D, 12 HR, 80 RBI, 43 BB, 8-9 SB

2008: .277/.324/.396, 26 D, 14 HR, 70 RBI, 38 BB, 6-11 SB

Keep in mind, those numbers represent the totals for the first basemen of every inning of every game all year – so the counting numbers are going to be inflated by the fact that you’re looking at a mythical 162-game first baseman. Even with that inflation, these numbers are terrible for the past five years. The Royals haven’t had a .425 slugging average from first base since 2003, and forget 30 homers – they haven’t had 15 homers from all of their first baseman combined since 2004. And it’s not like they made up for their lack of power with a great command of the strike zone.

So I think many of you look at Jacobs and are mentally comparing him, not to what the Royals could have at first base, but what they have had at first base. There’s no question that Jacobs should be an overall upgrade at the position compared to recent efforts. But that gives the Royals a pass for being foolish enough to rely on guys like Gload, Mientkiewicz, and Harvey to begin with. We’ve been so abused as Royals fans that we start to sympathize with our assailant – we’ve been brainwashed to thinking that it’s normal to play a .280 hitter with 10 homers and 40 walks at first base, so now that we’ve got a guy who will hit .270 with only 30 walks, but might hit 25 homers, we’re somehow impressed.

But if you compare Jacobs, not to what the Royals’ past but to their options in the present, he’s just not that good. Ryan Shealy has had an up-and-down career, but if you look at his overall numbers in 164 career games – basically a full season – he’s hit .271/.335/.429 with 19 homers, 96 RBIs, and 46 BB. Hardly great numbers, but a better performance than the Royals received in four of the last five years. Billy Butler’s career line is almost identical (.282/.334/.420) and he is, of course, just 22 years old. Kila Ka’aihue’s numbers in Northwest Arkansas translate to a .252/.391/.512 performance; his Omaha numbers translate to .284/.403/.569.

The bottom line is that it’s not that hard to find a first baseman who can hit, it’s just that the Royals make it seem that way. The average AL first baseman hit .266/.346/.447 last year, numbers that would be even higher if you took the Royals’ performance out.

So I stand by my position that the Jacobs trade was a mistake. But there are mistakes, and there are Mistakes. This trade was the former. One ex-colleague emailed me after the trade, expressing condolences and urging me to register firedaytonmoore.com. To which I replied, “Oh please, it's not that bad. I suffered through Dye-for-Neifi; I can certainly handle this one. I mean, if the Royals turn around tomorrow and release Jacobs, they're out Leo Nunez. I love Nunez, but he's a middle reliever. We'll get through it.”

Several analysts have made the argument that Jacobs is on the border of being a non-tender candidate, because while he has value, he may not have enough value to justify a $3.5 million (approximate) arbitration figure. But again, even if that’s true and the Royals come to their senses and release Jacobs tomorrow, all they’ve done is throw away a useful middle reliever. That’s not the end of the world.

This trade isn’t remotely as bad as the Jose Guillen signing, for instance. In one instant, they committed $36 million to a hitter who’s barely above replacement level. This time, all they’ve committed is $3.5 million and a useful pre-arbitration reliever. There’s no comparison.

Rich Lederer makes a good case that the Jacobs trade was no worse than the Rangers’ decision to exercise their option on Hank Blalock, a decision that attracted no controversy to speak of. Blalock is no longer a third baseman, he’s making $6.2 million next year, he’s the same age as Jacobs, and when you take the Arlington air out of his numbers, his performance the last few years is no better than Jacobs. I’d rather have Blalock, because his overall numbers are weighed down by his 2005-06 performances that were injury-plagued, but if it’s worth paying $6.2 million to Blalock, then at the very least, paying $3.5 million and a middle reliever to Jacobs isn’t the end of the world. Especially since you’re also getting the option to keep Jacobs at below market value in 2010 and 2011 on the off chance that he has a breakout season next year.

Now that Jacobs is here, the key is to figure out how to extract the most value from him. He’s a terrible defensive player, by many metrics the worst defensive first baseman in the majors, another reason why so many of my analyst friends are down on him. And he can’t hit lefties. The obvious solution here is to platoon him with Ryan Shealy, and to also make liberal use of Shealy – an underrated fielder – as a defensive replacement. Play Butler at DH every day, and let Ka’aihue go to Omaha and prove that 2008 wasn’t a fluke.

The problem with this is that while Jacobs hasn’t shown he can hit left-handed pitching, neither has Shealy. Here are their career splits:

Against LHP:

Jacobs: .235/.275/.414

Shealy: .179/.266/.298

Against RHP:

Jacobs: .269/.329/.521

Shealy: .307/.363/.481

Looking at those numbers, you’d be hard-pressed to figure out who was the left-handed hitter. Shealy’s splits defy explanation. Even last year, when he finally hit LHP (9-for-33 with 3 homers), he still performed worse than he did against RHP (13-for-40 with 4 homers).

There is a strong body of evidence which suggests that platoon splits are fixed; that is to say, over the long run all right-handed hitters will have roughly the same advantage when facing southpaws over right-handers. (With left-handed hitters there is some evidence that a pronounced platoon split may be meaningful.) Shealy has just 169 career plate appearances against left-handers, so it’s possible that his struggles against them are just a fluke. (In Omaha last year, Shealy hit .250/.393/.511 against LHP, .292/.371/.500 against RHP.)

The problem is that even given the small sample size, Ryan Shealy has the most pronounced reverse platoon split of any right-handed hitter in recent history. With the kind of assistance of my BP colleague Bil Burke, here is a list of the right-handed hitters in our database (going back to the mid-1950s) with the biggest reverse platoon split, and a minimum of 150 plate appearances against LHP:

   
Player              LHP       OPS        RHP       OPS Diff.
Ryan Shealy   .179/.266/.298  564  .307/.363/.481  843  279  
Johnny Goryl  .163/.250/.233  483  .248/.323/.426  749  266
Earl Wilson   .138/.193/.257  450  .219/.294/.417  710  260
Donnie Sadler .155/.214/.202  416  .222/.283/.320  603  187
Steve Renko   .170/.205/.214  419  .240/.275/.327  602  182

The fact that two of the five players on this list are pitchers, and they were both better hitters than Donnie Sadler (ex-Royal Donnie Sadler) tells you that the inability to hit left-handed pitching is not a hallmark of a good hitter. Having said that, there is likely a selection bias here: of the top 16 hitters on this list, none of them had so much as 400 career plate appearances against LHP, probably because it’s hard to sustain this kind of a fluke for more than 400 plate appearances. But the only players with so few career plate appearances are either 1) pitchers or 2) really bad hitters. Or 3) active players who haven’t had time for their splits to even out.

I’m still optimistic that Shealy’s performance against lefties has been just a fluke to this point, and that the law of averages is on his side. Frankly, I don’t think the Royals have any choice but to find out, because Mike Jacobs has had a lot more time to prove that he can’t hit them. The bigger question is whether Jacobs should play first base at all, or whether the Royals should just stick him at DH and let Butler play first. Butler hasn’t proven he can play first base, but Jacobs has proven rather definitively that he can’t play first base. If I were the Royals, I’d start Jacobs at DH and Butler at 1B against RHP, using Shealy as a d-rep. Against LHP I’d start Shealy at 1B and Butler at DH. This way, Butler gets reps at 1B, but doesn’t kill the team by playing there every day. Shealy gets a fair amount of playing time, both on the field and at the plate. And Jacobs can concentrate on what he does best – hit baseballs thrown by right-handed pitchers a long way.

Oh, and the city council passes an ordinance banning Ross Gload from coming within 300 feet of Kauffman Stadium. That would be nice.

(Sorry for the delay, guys. Now that the election is over, I’m hoping I can concentrate on other things long enough to write the occasional column. God knows there are a bunch of other topics to write about.)

Memo to DMGM: WTF?

So I guess Mark Teahen isn’t moving anywhere after all. It’s not often that a rumor that was reported at the highest levels gets shot down with such authority, but that’s what happened here. Even as Bob Dutton himself reported that “Sources from both clubs said Teahen could be dealt for one of three outfielders: Franklin Gutierrez, Ben Francisco or Trevor Crowe,” Dayton Moore begged to differ. “It’s unbelievable. I don’t doubt that somebody said that, but that somebody lied. Mark Shapiro will tell you the same thing.” If that wasn’t a strong enough denial for you, here’s another one: “That's an absolute lie,” Royals general manager Dayton Moore told MLB.com, “an absolute lie. It's a lie.”

O-kay then. Fortunately, I adhere to the Blogger Code of Conduct, which frowns upon reporting or commenting on unconfirmed trade rumors. The fact that I was in LA all weekend for my brother’s wedding and unavailable to wildly speculate is purely coincidental.

Teahen is still a Royal, but if nothing else, what we can take from the rumor is that, much to the surprise of many Royals fans, Teahen has actual trade value. He may be a below-average hitter (though just barely; his career OPS+ is 98), but he compensates with his baserunning instincts, broad base of skills, prime-of-career age, and his defensive versatility. The last one is key; the rumor was that the Indians wanted Teahen to play third base, which makes a lot of sense when you consider that a few months ago I described Teahen as “a left-handed Casey Blake.” By re-establishing that Teahen can still play third base, the Royals have made him a viable trade target for half-a-dozen teams. If they want to trade him this winter, they probably can.

In the meantime, let’s talk about the trade rumor that Moore won’t deny. That rumor has the Royals working hard to dislodge Mike Jacobs from the Marlins’ loose grip. The initial rumor stated that the teams were discussing a trade of Jacobs for Carlos Rosa; we are now being told that the Marlins are concerned about Rosa’s health (he was shut down in August with a forearm strain), and given that they’re looking for a major league-ready reliever, a bullpen arm – perhaps Leo Nunez, who was almost traded 15 months ago for Milton Bradley – might be substituted instead.

Now, the Royals need offense, no one questions that. And given the fungibility of relievers, and Moore’s proven ability to put together strong bullpens with low-cost talent, trading from the Royals’ excess of relievers in order to upgrade elsewhere makes perfect sense. But let me be clear about this: trading for Mike Jacobs is a terrible idea.

Three years ago, the Marlins traded for Jacobs, when he was 25 years old and still had his rookie eligibility, and was coming off one of the more impressive pre-rookie campaigns you’ll ever see: 11 homers and a .710 slugging average in 100 at-bats for the Mets in 2005. In return, the Marlins got three league-average seasons from Jacobs (OPS+ of 106, 100, 109) at close to a league-minimum salary.

Jacobs turns 28 today. He is eligible for arbitration, and his salary is likely to jump to around $3 million for 2009. He will be a free agent in three years, which isn’t all that relevant, because in three years it’s unlikely that he’ll be worth paying millions of dollars to. He’s unlikely to get any better than he’s been the last three years, and given the difference in league quality, and the fact that Kauffman Stadium is openly hostile to his primary skill, it’s likely he’ll be a little worse in 2009 than in 2008. This is what happens to unathletic hitters who reach the majors at a fairly advanced age: they are very valuable commodities in Year One, and perilously close to becoming liabilities by Year Four. Which is, in part, why the Marlins are so willing to move him.

Jacobs wasn’t even all that good in 2008. He certainly had his uses; he hit 32 homers in just 141 games, and slugged .514 for the Marlins. But he drew just 36 walks, and his OBP was .299. Two-ninety-nine.

The mere fact that Moore is talking to the Marlins about Jacobs tells me he still doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get that what really ails his offense isn’t the lack of power, it’s the lack of walks. The Royals finished next-to-last in the AL in homers last season. The one team they out-homered? The Twins, who finished third in the league in runs scored and came within a game of the playoffs. But the Royals didn’t just finish last in the league with 392 walks, they had one of the lowest walk totals in a non-strike season in recent American League history. Since 1931, here are the only four AL teams to finish with fewer than 395 walks in a full season:

Year  Team          BB
1957  Kansas City   364
2002  Detroit       363 
2005  Detroit       384
2008  Kansas City   392 

So what’s Moore’s solution? To trade for a first baseman with a .299 OBP. There were 29 players this season who batted at least 300 times and played at least half their games at first base. Only two of them had a lower OBP than Ross Gload’s .317. One was John Bowker, rookie first baseman for the Giants, who had a .300 OBP. The other – with the lowest OBP of any first baseman in the game – was Jacobs. That’s right: Moore has managed to find a first baseman that actually reached base less often than Ross Gload. And he’s willing to give up talent to get him.

Jacobs’ .299 OBP was a career low, but it’s not that far off his career line of .318. In three seasons as a major-league first baseman, his career high in walks is 45, and unless you’re Ichiro Suzuki, you simply can’t run up a respectable OBP without drawing some walks. Out of 23 first basemen with at least 450 plate appearances this season, all but two – Jacobs and Casey Kotchman, who has had better years – drew at least 45 walks. And that’s Jacobs’ career high. It’s fair to say that Jacobs is the least patient everyday first baseman in the majors today. If the Royals aren’t going to get walks from their first baseman, where are they going to get them from?

Maybe Moore has been watching a little too much of the Royals’ 1985 highlight tapes. Look at this comparison:

Mike Jacobs, 2008: .247/.299/.514, 32 HR, 36 BB

Steve Balboni, 1984: .244/.320/.498, 28 HR, 45 BB

Steve Balboni, 1985: .243/.307/.477, 36 HR, 52 BB

Yeah, the Royals won the World Series with Balboni as their first baseman. But as I’ve written in many places, the Royals learned all the wrong things from their world championship team. They learned that offense doesn’t matter (they finished with the second-fewest runs in the league), and they learned that walks are optional (they had the third-fewest walks in the league). They learned those lessons so well that they haven’t been to the playoffs since.

Interestingly enough, Balboni was also acquired for a tenured reliever, in his case Mike Armstrong. But Balboni was actually a better player in 1984-85 than Jacobs has been, because the offensive standards of the time were so much lower. And Balboni was valuable because he helped to fill a position of real need for the Royals. Today, by comparison, the Royals have too many options to play first base. They need to whittle down those options, not make things more complicated.

Trading for Jacobs all but insures that Kila Ka’aihue spends all of next year in Triple-A. Trading for Jacobs leaves Ryan Shealy fighting for a platoon position next year. Trading for Jacobs might force Gload off the roster…oh, who am I kidding, we all know that Gload is guaranteed a spot come hell or high water. If Moore found a way to rid himself of Gload in this trade, it might actually make sense, but Gload is under contract for another year and close to $2 million, and you know the Royals will find a way to justify keeping him around.

Most importantly, though, trading for Jacobs makes it more likely than not that Billy Butler has already played his last game for the Royals.

We know that Moore is not a fan of Butler; we’ve known that since Sam Mellinger wrote this summer that Moore had offered Butler to the Mariners for Yuniesky Betancourt two winters ago. (The Mariners, bless their hearts, declined. Betancourt’s defensive reputation is massively overrated, and he hits like a late-model Angel Berroa.)

If Jacobs plays first base, he will likely require Gload to serve as his defensive caddy, which gives the Royals the option to use Shealy at DH, or possibly even Ka’aihue, or simply rotate an extra outfielder through the position. If Jacobs is moved to DH, then Shealy and Gload will likely share first base. Either way, it will be easy for the Royals to deem Butler expendable, and trade him for the best package of talent they can get.

I don’t get the overt hostility towards Butler, I really don’t. I understand that he’s immature, and that he’s had it so easy through the minor leagues that he’s hot-dogged it in the majors and acted like he has nothing to prove. I realize that he’s a defensive liability and a baserunning nightmare and all that. But good God, he’s 22 years old. He’ll still be 22 on Opening Day next year. And he’s got a world of talent. In an ostensibly disappointing season, he hit .275 with 11 homers, and after the All-Star Break he hit .305/.341/.476. You want someone who was a real hot dog this year? The Rays benched B.J. Upton repeatedly this year when he failed to run out groundballs, costing his team an out on more than one occasion. Upton, who hit just nine homers during the regular season, hit seven in the playoffs and is as responsible as anyone for their World Series appearance.

The Rays took it easy on Upton, deciding that he wasn’t a bad kid so much as young and entitled. And he is just a kid: he’s just 24. Butler’s 22. We won’t have Butler’s PECOTA comparables for a few more weeks, but according to Baseball-Reference.com, the most similar player to Billy Butler at the same age in baseball history is…Keith Hernandez. John Olerud is third. George “Not the Comedian” Burns, who played in the majors for 16 years, is eighth. Kent Hrbek is tenth. (Among his other top comps are 19^th-century hurlers Pink Hawley and Bob Caruthers, which I suppose means that if Butler doesn’t turn himself into a Gold Glove-caliber first baseman, he has a future as a pitcher.) And remember: those comps are calculated using Butler’s major league stats only, and Butler’s major league performance has been a disappointment given his minor league numbers.

There are a lot of teams that would love to have Butler, and a lot of teams that would be willing to pay for him. But until he has a year commensurate with his ability, those teams will expect a discount on his potential.

I’m sure that, if the Royals trade for Jacobs, they’ll find a way to spin this as a positive. They got a guy with real power (which may evaporate in Kauffman Stadium.) They are sending a message that they’re not going to keep playing kids that aren’t ready for the majors yet (even if that means burying a guy like Ka’aihue, who probably is ready for the majors).

They’ll also tell you that Jacobs adds some much-needed balance to the lineup, which is true. Jacobs has a pretty massive platoon split – his career line vs. LHP is just .235/.275/.414, but against RHP he’s hit .269/.329/.521 – and the Royals were much weaker against right-handed pitchers than left-handers last year. The only left-handed hitters in the lineup are Gordon, DeJesus, and Teahen, and while Callaspo also adds balance as a switch-hitter, Teahen may not even be a starter next year. I think it’s reasonable to say that Jacobs will help the team win more games in 2009.

But the Royals aren’t playing for 2009. If they are, they shouldn’t be. This team should be focusing on 2010, and by 2010, Ka’aihue is likely to be a better hitter than Jacobs. Ka’aihue will unquestionably be cheaper, and he unquestionably won’t force the Royals to give up talent to acquire him. Ka’aihue, like Jacobs, will provide left-handed pop to the lineup, and unlike Jacobs he doesn’t need a Kevin Seitzer Miracle to learn the strike zone.

There’s nothing wrong with the Royals exploring trade options with the Marlins, who have a ton of arbitration-eligible players they want to move; they’re just focusing on the wrong guy. Jeremy Hermida hasn’t been quite as successful as Jacobs has been in the majors (career line of .267/.342/.436), but he’s three years younger, he plays the outfield (where the Royals have far more need for an everyday player), his minor-league track record suggests there’s still untapped potential in his bat, and he has a much better command of the strike zone. (Actually, Hermida hasn’t been all that patient in the major leagues – about one walk per 10 at-bats – but in the minors he was a walking fool, including a remarkable 111 walks in just 118 games as a 21-year-old in Double-A in 2005. Now there’s a guy that Seitzer should be able to fix.)

If Moore makes this move, he’ll be helping the Royals win in 2009. But he’ll deny the Royals the opportunity to evaluate some very legitimate options at first base, and he very well might be inclined to sell one of the most promising hitters the Royals have ever developed for pennies on the dollar. He’ll add to the payroll, and he’ll trade away a reliever who might have fetched more useful talent in another trade. If he does make the move, I’m sure it will just be the first of many moves he makes this winter. But this winter will be off to a very inauspicious start.

Thoughts On Our New Coaches.

I have to give Dayton Moore credit: he makes the right decisions more often than not – it’s just that sometimes it takes him an interminably long time to do so. I’ve been agitating for Mike Barnett to be fired as hitting coach since back in May, and finally got my wish in October.

As satisfying as it can be as a fan to see heads roll when we want them to roll, I have to respect Moore’s approach. From Day One, Moore has been exceedingly deliberate in making big-picture decisions. He took a year and a half to decide that Buddy Bell was not the right man to manage his team. He took two full drafts to decide that he needed a new scouting director. And even though it was clear his team needed a hitting coach all year, he waited until the season ended to make his move.

A more impatient GM would have made those moves in-season, and would have reaped the gains of their replacements more quickly. But by waiting, Moore got something much more valuable in the long-run: he got the ability to hire the best available replacement, at a time when the pool of replacements was at its deepest.

From 1998 to 2002, the Royals fired their pitching coach mid-season four times. Do you know how hard it is to find a new pitching coach mid-season? You’ve got to arrange interviews with guys working in other organizations; you have to get permission from their parent teams; you have to convince those guys to uproot themselves and move to Kansas City in the middle of the season, when they may already be on the road and living out of a suitcase. So you wind up replacing Bruce Kison with Mark Wiley, or Al Nipper with John Cumberland.

Forget pitching coaches – how about managers? The Royals fired Bob Boone mid-season – the best guy they could find to replace him was Tony Muser. They fired Muser mid-season, interviewed four guys of varying credentials, then somehow decided that Tony Pena was their guy. They fired Pena mid-season, interviewed a bunch of retreads with bad resumes, then locked in with laser-like precision on the guy with the worst of them, Buddy Bell.

Or consider the Blue Jays, who fired Buck Martinez mid-season in 2002 and replaced him with Carlos Tosca; fired Tosca in the middle of the 2006 season and replaced him with John Gibbons; and fired Gibbons this May and replaced him with Cito Gaston. In all three instances, the new manager was hired on an interim basis, and all three times the interim label was removed after the season. Gaston, at least, has a couple world championships on his resume. But neither Tosca nor Gibbons had any prior managerial experience, neither was considered a hot manager prospect when the Blue Jays gave them an ostensibly interim position, and neither did much after getting the full-time position to justify Toronto’s faith in them.

It was clear before Moore was even hired that Bell had to go, and he probably should have been fired after the 2006 season. But once Moore went into the 2007 season with Bell at the helm, firing him mid-season would once again complicated the Royals’ efforts to find the perfect guy to run their team. The jury is still out on Trey Hillman, certainly, but there’s no arguing this: if Hillman was the best candidate for the job, then the Royals would have missed out on the best candidate had they fired Bell mid-season. Letting Bell go at the end of the year gave Moore many luxuries: the luxury of time, the luxury to travel to Japan if need be to find the right manager, the luxury to let his new manager pick his coaching staff without firing even more guys mid-season and causing even more upheaval.

One of the coaches that Hillman retained last season was Luis Silverio, for reasons that were never entirely clear. I mean, when the most prominent thing on your resume is that you’re Angel Berroa’s father-in-law…anyway, Silverio wasn’t a very good third-base coach, and now he’s been given a newly created position as Special Assistant to Player Development in charge of helping Latin American prospects adjust to professional baseball, a role he would seem far more suited for.

Dave Owen moves from bench coach to the third-base coaches’ box, and John Gibbons will be joining Hillman in the dugout. I don’t have the highest opinion of Gibbons’ tenure as the Blue Jays’ manager – though admittedly my opinion may be unduly influenced by the dumbest intentional walk of all time – but he certainly makes for a better bench coach than Owen, if only because he’s a former manager, and one of the most important roles of the bench coach is to serve as a sort of consigliore to his boss. Hillman made a lot of rookie mistakes last season, mistakes that might have been avoided if he had an experienced hand in the dugout to nudge him the right way.

Then again, I’m not sure how valuable Gibbons’ experience is, given that his tenure as manager is most notable for confrontations with his players. I’ll take May 17^th in the pool for the day that he and Jose Guillen have it out. (This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, by the way. Someone willing to stand up to Guillen in the clubhouse was one of the Royals’ bigger needs last season.)

Anyway, it’s hard to know what, if any, impact the auxiliary coaches make. The big news – well, the first piece of big news – is that Barnett is no longer the hitting coach. If there was one dark lining to the silver cloud that was September, it was the worry that the team’s strong finish might predispose Moore towards keeping Barnett on as hitting coach. That he didn’t means that Moore had made up his mind to fire Barnett well before September. Deliberate, yes; not demented.

The second piece of big news is that, with plenty of options to choose from, and plenty of time to sort through them, Moore offered the job to Kevin Seitzer. I’m surprised, and a little excited. I have three reactions to his hiring, in chronological order:

1) As a fan, I’m excited, because Seitzer was one of my favorite players during my awakening as a Royals fan in the late 80s and early 90s, and I never got over the way the Royals just tossed him aside. After the game on July 6^th, 1991, John Wathan decided that the Royals needed to upgrade the defense on the left side of the infield, and immediately benched Seitzer and Kurt Stillwell in favor of Bill Pecota and David Howard.

Pecota, who was and is one of my favorite Royals, played well in Seitzer’s stead. Howard did not play well in Stillwell’s place, but he did play…and play…and play. Howard batted at least 100 times in six of the next seven seasons, and never had an OPS+ over 66 in any of them. (On the bright side, I owe my writing career to Howard more than any other person, other than perhaps Herk Robinson. The latter’s confounding decisions, frequently involving the former, compelled me to write extensively about the Royals on rec.sport.baseball in the Usenet years.)

One of Herk’s aforementioned decisions was to summarily release Seitzer the following spring, just prior to Kevin’s 30^th birthday. Seitzer would latch on with the Brewers, and over the next five years he would improve his OBP and SLG almost every season, culminating in a terrific season with the Indians in 1996, when at age 34 he hit .326/.416/.466. He would retire just one year later, and has been running his Mac-N-Seitz Academy with Mike Macfarlane ever since.

Even though Seitzer went to two postseasons with the Indians and had most of his best years with Milwaukee, I’ve never stopped thinking of him as a Royal. Almost seventeen years later, I’m tickled to learn that he never stopped thinking of himself as a Royal either.

2) As a critic, I’m worried, because pretty much the worst reason to hire someone as a coach or manager is because you liked them as a player. I remember during my freshman year of college as our RA fairly bounded out of his room with excitement on the news that the Red Sox had just hired Butch Hobson as their new manager. “He was my favorite player growing up!” he told me. That’s all well and good, but the traits that made Hobson the favorite of a lot of eight-year-olds in New England in the late 1970s – his willingness to go all-out on every play, his refusal to come out of the lineup – were traits that active sabotaged the team’s chances to win.

Hobson played almost the entire 1978 season with bone chips in his throwing elbow that he would re-adjust after every throw. (Seriously.) He gutted it out enough to play 147 games despite missing the first three weeks of July, and never mind that he committed 43 errors (the most by any player, at any position, in the last 30 years) and became the first player since 1916 to finish with a fielding percentage under .900, or that he hit just .245/.298/.342 after returning from injury on July 19^th. At least his poor play didn’t cost the Red Sox a postseason berth or anything. (Yes, manager Don Zimmer deserves far more of the blame for that than Hobson.)

I elected against arguing with my RA that Hobson seemed to have the requisite passion for the job but not the requisite wisdom, in part because my RA had about five years and 100 pounds on me. But when it came to the imaginary argument in my head, I totally pwned him. Hobson was a complete disaster as a manager.

This isn’t to say that Seitzer’s tenure as a hitting coach will be equally unsuccessful, or that Seitzer is going to be arrested with a little blow in his pocket in a few years. But the mere fact that Seitzer was a good hitter and a fan favorite doesn’t mean that he’s going to make a great hitting coach. Seitzer is something of a legend around Kansas City for his ability to teach hitting, but instructing a high school kid on the finer points of hitting is not quite the same as unlocking the mystery that is Alex Gordon. And let’s not forget that Seitzer has already served as a major league hitting coach, with the Diamondbacks in 2007 – and was canned at the All-Star Break.

3) As an analyst, I’m intrigued. No, Seitzer didn’t work out in Arizona, but he also got a bit of a raw deal; half a season isn’t long enough to evaluate anybody in that role. Raul Ibanez, possessor of one of the ten most remarkable mid-career breakouts by a hitter in the last generation, credits Seitzer for his turnaround. That’s a hell of an endorsement right there.

Ibanez is just one data point, of course. What really appeals to me about Seitzer is simply his philosophy as a hitting coach, which is best appreciated by looking at his record as a hitter. The man understands the value of plate discipline, not simply as lip service or a talking point, but in terms of tangible outcomes. Kevin Seitzer is the most patient hitter the Royals have had since 1980.

In 1989 Seitzer drew 102 walks – no Royal has drawn even 90 in a season since. Since 1980, the only other 90-walk season by a Royal was George Brett’s 103 in 1985. Brett was intentionally walked 31 times, and given his 30 homers and .585 slugging average, was semi-intentionally walked equally often. Seitzer, on the other hand, hit four homers and slugged .337 in 1989, and still managed to coax over 100 walks from opposing pitchers.

There are essentially four ingredients to an offense: hitting for average, extra-base power, steals/baserunning speed, and walks. We can evaluate how important a player’s plate discipline is to his overall approach by weighing his walk rate with his performance in the other three categories. Granted that this is an incredibly simplistic formula, we can estimate a player’s propensity to walk with what I call the “Blankenship Number”, after the legendary Lance Blankenship, a man of whom Gary Huckabay wrote after his 1993 season, “he’s an asset to his team if he hits .200. Oops.”

The Blankenship Number is (Walks)/(Total Bases + Steals). Since 1980, 49 Royals players have batted at least 1000 times. Seitzer’s Blankenship Number leaves everyone else in the dust:

Kevin Seitzer: .325

Matt Stairs: .296

Jeff King: .281

Wally Joyner: .280

Jose Offerman: .274

The difference between Seitzer and 3^rd-place Jeff King is greater than the difference between 3^rd place and 15^th place. (Mark Quinn ranks dead last, in case you were wondering.)

Over the last five years the Royals have talked a good game about plate discipline. Allard Baird talked about it non-stop, and even made a few moves (like hiring Jeff Pentland as hitting coach) to back up the talk. But Baird, for whatever reason, was never able to impart his zeal for plate discipline on the rest of the organization. Moore appears much more able to impose his will, but until recently his commitment to plate discipline appeared shaky at best. The Braves do many things well, but teaching the strike zone to their hitters is not one of them. (Just ask Jeff Francoeur.)

But maybe 2008 helped Moore see the light. Maybe seeing his team draw just 392 walks, the fewest in history for a team that already ranked dead-last in the majors in walks drawn over the last 25 years, had an effect. But whatever the reason, this one action by Moore – hiring Seitzer – says more than any number of words possibly could. Even though he lives in Kansas City, Seitzer wasn’t considered a favorite for the job; it’s not like Moore has shown a preference for ex-Royals before. Moore didn’t hire him for reasons of sentimentality; he hired him because he thought Seitzer was the best man for the job.

Among other complaints about Mike Barnett, I never knew what his philosophy as a hitting coach was. There’s no doubt what Seitzer’s philosophy is.

“We don’t have enough time to go through all the things I want to try to emphasize with these guys,” he said. “It really comes down to having a consistent approach. Have a purpose up there rather than just a ‘see-ball-hit-ball’ approach.

“You have to have that purpose up there if you’re going to improve your on-base percentage. And that’s the key to offense. Getting guys on and moving them around and driving them in. That’s what wins ballgames.”

Music to my ears.

It’s easy to over-estimate the impact of hitting coaches, because unlike pitching coaches, precious few of them seem to really have a sustained impact on their charges. It’s not that a good hitting coach can’t make a difference, it’s just that they’re as likely to screw up a hitter as they are to make a breakthrough with him. A laissez-faire coach can be just as effective as a chronic tinkerer. Hitters are politically diverse; some thrive in a libertarian environment, while others require constant government intervention.

When it comes to hitting, Seitzer definitely leans to the left. One of the biggest criticisms that did surface in Arizona was that he was trying to do too much – he was trying to completely revamp his hitters’ approaches, and he was trying to make one size fit all. It’s not a surprise that Ibanez is his greatest success story – Ibanez is by all accounts a great guy, and he was at a desperate point in his career. Seitzer may have been the perfect teacher for him, because he was working with the perfect student. Not every hitter on the Royals is going to be a perfect student, and Seitzer’s ability to adjust to that, and to serve different strokes to different folks, is going to determine whether he’s successful in his new job.

As an analyst, having a guy like Seitzer around is going to be fun, because good or bad, he’s going to be interesting. And I’m thinking he won’t just be an interesting hitting coach, he just might be a damn good one as well.

Feeling Soria For The Rays.

For those of you who still hold out hope that the Royals will one day see the light and move Joakim Soria to the rotation…I have bad news.

Game 5 of the 2008 ALCS almost certainly eliminated whatever fleeting chance there was that the Mexicutioner will become a starter one day. The Tampa Bay Rays were seven outs away from the World Series, with a seven run lead. They were then victimized by the greatest postseason comeback since 1929 (gee, like we haven’t seen enough references to 1929 this fall.)

Before my friend Nate Silver became the world’s most famous pollster, he used to write about baseball. One of his most-cited articles, in “Baseball Between The Numbers”, was an analysis of which teams are likeliest to win the crapshoot that we call the baseball playoffs.

What Nate found was that there were three things that were most correlated with a team’s ability to win in the playoffs. Those three things are:

1) Team defense, as measured by Fielding Runs Above Average (FRAA);
2) The strikeout rate of the team’s pitching staff;
3) The quality of the team’s closer, as measured by WXRL.

To rephrase this: over the last 40 years (i.e. the divisional era), it is in fact true that good pitching beats good hitting in October. And the best way to beat good hitting in the playoffs is to keep your opponent’s batting average down. The way you do that is to prevent them from making contact (K rate), and when they do make contact, prevent them from getting a hit on balls in play (FRAA).

If good pitching beats good hitting, one pitcher matters above all: your closer. With more at stake in each game, managers are inclined to use their closers more aggressively, and all the extra off-days make it easier to run your closer out there. Plus, since every team is a playoff team, blowouts are rare and close games the norm, and the cool October weather also dampens scoring and increases the likelihood of a tie game.

Mariano Rivera has never appeared in more than 74 games in a season, and his career high in innings as a closer is 80.2 (he did throw 107.2 innings as a set-up man for John Wetteland in 1996). But since joining the Yankees in 1995, the team has played a total of 128 postseason games, and in just 128 games he’s made 76 appearances and thrown 117.1 innings. Game for game, Rivera has had twice as much impact in the postseason as he's made in the regular season.

These three aspects of a team are known as the “Secret Sauce”, and this year the Red Sox had the best Secret Sauce in the majors. L’Anaheim was 2nd, the Cubs 3rd, the White Sox 5th, the Rays 6th, the Phillies 12th, the Brewers 13th, and the Dodgers 19th.

The Rays had just the fifth-best Secret Sauce of any playoff team, even though they had the best defense in the majors, and the 10th-best strikeout rate. Why? Because their closer (Troy Percival, who’s not even on their active roster) ranked just 21st in the majors, the worst of any playoff team. The Rays have a deep bullpen; Grant Balfour, Dan Wheeler, and J.P. Howell were all among the best set-up guys in the game this year. But they don’t have a go-to guy, the kind of pitcher that you can call on when you’re in danger of losing a seven-run lead in the biggest game of your franchise’s career. The kind of guy who, protecting a three-run lead with six outs to go, won’t walk the leadoff batter on four pitches and then groove a fat fastball to the next hitter, as Wheeler did last night.

They don’t have a guy with nerves of steel. They don’t have the only sane man in an insane world. They don’t have the Mexicutioner. We do. And because of Soria, the Royals actually ranked 7th in the majors in Secret Sauce; the only non-playoff team to rank higher were the Blue Jays. The Royals didn’t have a good defense (18th in FRAA), and their strikeout rate was good but not great (11th in K rate). But Soria ranked 4th in the majors in WXRL, and probably would have ranked higher if the Royals hadn’t been forced to waste him to protect a bunch of four-run leads because tight games were tough to come by at certain points in the year.

I’ve said all season that the Royals are mis-using Soria, and I haven’t changed my mind. But I’m not nearly as convinced that the solution is to move him to the rotation. Between the loss of velocity and the injury risk (remember, he’s already had Tommy John surgery), I think there are real risks to asking him to throw 200 innings a year. But 90 innings a year? That he can handle.

I don’t want the Royals to transplant the Mexicutioner so much as I just want them to unshackle him. Let him pitch the eighth inning once in a while. Let him come in with men on base every now and then. A more liberal approach to using Soria is going to lead to more wins, and equally important, when the Royals are seven outs away from a playoff series win, they won’t have second thoughts about calling on Soria in the 7th inning and asking him to deliver us across the Red Sea into the Promised Land.

Two years ago the Rays were still the Devil Rays, which meant that instead of using the first pick in the Rule 5 draft for themselves, they sold the pick to Oakland (and Billy Beane, bless his heart, used the pick to select an outfielder named Ryan Goleski.) The Royals, picking second, took Soria. Over the last few years the Rays have made countless better decisions than the Royals have (including their one head-to-head trade of J.P. Howell for Joey Gathright). But on December 7th, 2006, the Royals got the better of them. After seeing how much the Rays missed having Soria at the back of their bullpen last night, and imagining how much agony their fans are going through this morning – I mean, is there any wonder why Dayton Moore is looking to leave his closer well enough alone?