Grudzielanek.

In my last column, I openly wondered whether Miguel Olivo would have earned the Royals a draft pick as a type B free agent had they let him move on to another team. My friend Keith Law set the record straight: Olivo would not have entitled the Royals to any compensation. This makes the decision to bring him back more palatable, though still not particularly appetizing.

But it turns out that Dayton Moore had his eye on an extra draft pick after all. Yesterday, after it was long assumed that the Royals would not offer Mark Grudzielanek arbitration, the Royals caught everyone off guard by offering arbitration just hours before the deadline. And this evening, Grudzielanek responded by saying “I’m probably 95 percent, 98 percent sure I'm going to pass on it.”

Let’s take this one by one. The Royals offered Grudzielanek arbitration, even though they can’t really afford him, and even though they appear to have moved on from him. Grudzielanek made $4.5 million last year; even if he had hit like the love child of Tony Pena Jr. and Andruw Jones last year, he’d be looking at an arbitration award comfortably in seven figures. Grudzielanek didn’t hit like Pena or Jones; he hit like, well, Mark Grudzielanek, batting .299 and playing his typical heady defense at second base. He’d be looking at an arbitration award in the range of about $5 million or so.

And yet Grudzielanek, who is unlikely to get anywhere close to $5 million a year on the open market, is at least 95% sure he won’t take the offer. Trying to guess the market for Grudzielanek is difficult, because it only takes one outlier to alter it. But the market isn’t exactly lacking in second baseman; Cot lists Alex Cora, Ray Durham, Jerry Hairston, Orlando Hudson, Felipe Lopez, Mark Loretta, Nick Punto, and Juan Uribe as free agents at the position, and simply by virtue of age, most of those guys are going to be more desirable than Grudz.

I could see this going one of two ways: either Grudzielanek finds a team that thinks he still has enough left in the tank to be an everyday player, and gets a 2 year, $8 million deal – or he doesn’t, and he’s forced to sign a 1 year, $1 million contract and fight for playing time in spring training. There isn’t much go-between, because a second baseman only has value if he’s playing every day – you can’t be a utility player if you can’t play shortstop.

So why would the Royals offer Grudzielanek more money than he’s worth, and why would Grudzielanek decline it? I’m the last guy to believe in a conspiracy theory – I’m the guy who checks every forwarded email with Snopes.com, then embarrasses the sender by hitting “Reply all” and replying (with proof!) that the United States is not actually minting the “Amero” coin and discarding the dollar. But this time, well, call me Mel Gibson.

I think – and this is only an educated guess, not predicated on any kind of insider knowledge – that Moore and Grudzielanek have reached some sort of gentlemen’s agreement, in which Moore has offered Grudzielanek arbitration with the understanding that it won’t be accepted.

Why? Well, it’s a win-win situation, or at the very least, it’s a win-no lose situation. The Royals get themselves a supplemental first round draft pick, which is a very valuable commodity. The Royals got one of those last year when David Riske left, and used it to select Mike Montgomery, a high school left-hander who was named the #1 prospect in the Arizona League and the Royals #4 prospect overall by Baseball America.

But because Grudzielanek is a Type B free agent, this supplemental pick would not be taken away from his new team; this is an extra pick created solely for the purpose of compensating the Royals. A Type A free agent would cost his new team their first or second round pick, but a Type B free agent is free to his new team from a draft standpoint. Therefore, Grudzielanek’s Type B designation is irrelevant to any team interested in his services, which means his price tag should not be affected at all.

So the Royals get themselves a very valuable commodity, and Grudzielanek does his old team a favor with no skin off his back. To the best of my knowledge, there’s no way for the Royals to compensate Grudzielanek for his participation in this charade with anything more than their gratitude, but that might be enough.

The reason I'm so certain that the Royals can frame this in a way that makes it worthwhile for Grudzielanek is that this has almost certainly been done before. After the 2006 season, the San Diego Padres hit upon a bonanza of extra draft picks, as no fewer than five of their free agents signed with other teams, earning the Padres compensation. One of them, Woody Williams, was a Type A free agent, earning them a supplemental first rounder as well as the Astros’ second-round pick. (How’s that working out for you, Drayton?) Then Type A free agent Dave Roberts signed with the Giants, earning another supplemental first rounder and a fourth-rounder (because the Giants were busy giving up all their higher draft picks to other teams.) Then things got interesting.

Chan Ho Park, who gave the Padres a 4.81 ERA in 2006 (and had a 5.74 ERA in 2005), was mysteriously offered arbitration – and declined. Alan Embree, who had a 3.27 ERA as a LOOGY in 2006 – but a 7.62 ERA the year before – was offered arbitration. He signed with Oakland instead. And finally, Ryan Klesko, who was injured almost all season and had nine plate appearances all season, was offered arbitration. He signed with the Giants.

Park, Embree, and Klesko were all Type B free agents. Embree and Klesko were the two lowest-rated Type B free agents to sign with another team. Yet the Padres got extra draft picks for all of them, and wound up with six of the first 64 picks, and eight of the first 87 picks, in the 2007 draft.

Park signed with the Mets, for one year and $600,000. In 2006, he earned $15 million in the final year of the ridiculous contract the Rangers gave him in the 2001-02 off-season. I find it…hmm…odd that Park would decline arbitration, and then accept what amounted to a 96% pay cut with another team. (It’s extremely rare to see a player awarded an arbitration salary lower than the previous year, and almost unheard of for their salary to decline more than 20 or 30%.)

In 2006, the Padres paid Klesko $10 million, then another $500,000 to buy out his 2007 option. In 2007, Klesko declined the team’s offer of arbitration in order to sign with the Giants for $1.75 million – a pay cut of more than 82%.

Like I said: odd. Even, dare I say it, suspicious.

It’s possible that Grudzielanek could stab Moore in the back (I believe the technical term for this is that he might “Boozer” the Royals), but Moore has an out. As Bob Dutton reported, “The Royals retain some financial wiggle room if Grudzielanek accepts arbitration because arbitration-determined salaries are not guaranteed. Teams must pay only one-sixth of a salary if they release a player with 45 or more days remaining before opening day.”

If that were to happen, Grudzielanek could respond with one final salvo of his own: he could file a grievance. Once again, we have the Padres to thank for the precedent here. It seems that after 2006, one of their players didn’t get the memo: Todd Walker, who was offered arbitration along with all of his friends, gleefully accepted, and won his arbitration case to the tune of $3.95 million. A month later, the Padres released him. “This is strictly a baseball decision,” general manager Kevin Towers said, adding that Walker's salary “didn't factor into the decision. We're two-time NL West champions and want to win again. For us it's putting the right 25 guys on the field to start the year and we felt there were people that were ahead of him.”

While I have found evidence that Walker and the MLBPA were considering a grievance, I can’t find any confirmation that it was officially filed, and certainly there’s no evidence that he won.

I’m not anticipating any of this with Grudzielanek, mind you; I’m simply pointing out what options each side has if this deal were to sour. I have no reason to think either Moore or Grudzielanek are anything other than honorable, so the odds are slim that this will blow up in the Royals’ face. Assuming it doesn’t, this is a huge under-the-radar win for Moore and the Royals: they basically acquired a top prospect for nothing.

In fact, even if Grudzielanek were somewhat likely to accept arbitration, the potential reward of an extra draft pick would make this a worthy gamble. We can’t say just how worthy a gamble this is until we calculate the value of a draft pick. Fortunately, my colleague Nate Silver already did this in a column from back in 2005.

What he found was that late first-round and supplemental picks (basically any pick from #26 through the end of the supplemental round) returned an average of $4.24 million in value, above and beyond a player’s salary (but not his signing bonus) over the course of his career. The average signing bonus for these players was about $1 million – so after accounting for the cost of signing the player, earning an extra draft pick was worth $3.24 million. Accounting for salary inflation over the past three years, we can revise that number upwards to about $4 million.

On the other hand, if Grudzielanek decides to accept arbitration after all, then he’ll cost the Royals about $5 million, and is unlikely to deliver that much value in return. Let’s say that he’s worth about $2 million, which seems reasonable for a second baseman with declining range and no secondary skills, but someone who can still punch the ball to right field.

So if the Royals offer arbitration to Grudzielanek and he leaves, the team earns a draft pick worth $4 million. If he accepts, the team flushes $3 million down the drain. If these numbers are accurate, the Royals should offer Grudzielanek arbitration whether he’s 100% certain to decline, or 95% certain, or even 50% certain. The break-even point is 42.9% - if Grudzielanek is more than 42.9% likely to decline, they should offer him the deal. That number is obviously approximate, and based on a number of assumptions, but if it's not 42.9%, it's 37.1% or 57.3% - not 95% or 98%. This is a low-risk, high-reward move.

Since I started this blog, I’ve written fewer words about Grudzielanek than almost anyone else on the roster, even though he was an everyday player. Like a good umpire, I suppose the mark of a good veteran player is that no one ever talks about him. Grudzielanek joined the Royals in 2006, and for three years did exactly what he was expected to do: hit about .300, rope some doubles, and turn the pivot as fast as any second baseman in the game. And he did so with eerie consistency: in his three years he hit .297, .302, and .299, and finishes his Royal career with a batting average of .29955 – which conveniently rounds up to .300. (Only two other players have hit .300 or higher as a member of the Royals, with at least 1000 plate appearances: Jose Offerman and George Brett.)

Grudzielanek won a surprise Gold Glove in 2006; while his range isn’t what it used to be, he still turns double plays very well. He goes down as one of the better free agents the Royals have ever signed, along the lines of Greg Gagne, who was an exceptional defender at shortstop for the Royals from 1993 to 1995, hit with better-than-expected pop, and (this isn’t something I say very often) did all the little things right.

So Grudzielanek, if this is goodbye – and nothing personal, but I hope it is – then thank you for all you’ve done for this team. Playing for a team that was usually remembered only for its gaffes, thanks for being the forgotten man. Thanks for proving those of us wrong who thought you were too old and too average to help the Royals when they signed you in 2006, and when they picked up your option in 2007, and when they picked up your option in 2008.

And thanks for the parting gift. Dayton Moore might have thought it up, but it was very thoughtful of you to deliver it.

Olivo.

In anticipation of what I hope will be a news-worthy month, and with the Winter Meetings just a week away, let’s start cleaning house on the smaller-print news items of the past two months.

The mystery over whether Miguel Olivo would be classified a Type B free agent (and snare a supplemental first round pick upon his departure) turned out to be a moot point when he and the Royals papered over their differences and mutually agreed on his 2009 option, adding a 2010 option in return.

The calculus of this deal partly depends on whether the Royals could have swapped his services for a draft pick. Unfortunately, I still don’t know if he was a Type B free agent or not; two different source have given two different results.

Just evaluating him as a player, it’s hard to get past Olivo’s .278 OBP last year, or the fact that this performance actually raised his career mark to .275. Olivo was as responsible as anyone for the team’s historic reluctance to draw walks last year; he took a free pass just seven times all year, which is to say, he was as likely to steal a base (a perfect 7-for-7 in attempts) as he was to accept one as charity.

In his defense, Olivo is pretty damn valuable for someone with a .278 OBP. He hit 22 doubles and 12 homers in half a season’s work; on defense, he threw out 14 of 33 attempted basestealers, proving that John Buck’s difficulties (12-for-71) were not the fault of the pitching staff. (Buck was Meche’s personal catcher for most of the season, and with Buck behind the plate, opponents stole 12 bases in 13 attempts. In eight games with Olivo back there, only one player attempted a steal – and he was gunned down.)

Olivo had a better year than Buck, both offensively and defensively, but that alone is hardly justification for bringing him back. Olivo remains a terrible fit for the lineup, as his lack of OBP exacerbates a team-wide problem, and precisely because the rest of the team struggles to get on base, Olivo’s power (with him batting low in the lineup, behind out factories like Jose Guillen) is less valuable than it might otherwise be.

There’s no question he’s deserving a roster spot – it’s a big question whether it’s worth paying a couple of million for a platoon player. Olivo once again played wallball against left-handed pitchers, hitting .262/.296/.534 against them, but just .251/.268/.399 against more traditional folk. This extends a career-long tendency for pronounced platoon splits; his career numbers are .286/.315/.526 vs. LHP, .224/.260/.367 vs. RHP.

Because his platoon splits are so massive, Olivo’s worth is very much tied up with his usage. Unfortunately, I see no reason to think that the Royals are going to maximize his value by using him in a way that utilizes his strengths and avoids exposing his weaknesses. He agreed to return largely because he was promised the role of #1 catcher, and anyway, the Royals are in no position to spend millions of dollars on a platoon catcher, which means they have no intention of using him in that role even if they should.

So while the decision to re-sign Olivo could work, I am doubtful that it will, and I think the Royals would have done better to let Olivo go and keep the money (and – possibly – the draft pick.) But now that they’ve kept Olivo, they have to figure out what to do with Buck.

Having both Olivo and Buck didn’t make a lot of sense in 2008, and I don’t see how it makes any more sense in 2009. You’d be hard-pressed to find two more similar players at the same position – low-average hitters with OBP issues and mid-range power. Olivo’s a lifetime .241 hitter; Buck’s at .234. If you compress their career numbers into a 162-game season, then Buck has 29 doubles, 1 triple, 19 homers; Olivo has 28, 3, and 18. Buck would strike out 137 times over a 162-game season, Olivo 141 times. Buck has figured out the strike zone the last two years and draws walks at about a league-average rate, but his ability to throw out baserunners has deteriorated badly over the same timeframe. Olivo’s a little faster, but he’s also two years older.

Really, the most significant difference between them is that Olivo has a much more pronounced platoon split – Olivo has much better numbers against LHP, but Buck has better numbers against RHP. This makes Olivo the more useful player in a part-time role, and Buck the more useful player in a full-time role. Naturally, the Royals have re-signed the former to a position more appropriate for the latter.

Everyone’s talking about Mark Teahen and David DeJesus on the trade market, but I’m really curious to see if Dayton Moore can move Buck this month, and if so, what he can get in return. I’d rather keep Buck and toss Olivo back, but if you’re going to go with Olivo, then it makes no sense to back him up with the exact same player. Especially since Moore shrewdly snagged Brayan Pena off waivers from his former employer.

Pena has hit just .228/.252/.315 in 127 career at-bats over four different seasons, but in the minors he has been a consistent .300 hitter. Literally: going backwards from 2008, his minor league averages are .303, .301, .302, .326, and .314. His career high in home runs is six, but over the last four years he’s hit 76 doubles in just under 1200 at-bats, so he’s not a complete punch-and-judy hitter. He’s an extreme contact hitter who could give Alberto Callaspo a run for his money: over those same four years he has whiffed just 102 times, but also has walked just 94 times. He turns 27 in January, and if he gets regular playing time I could see him approximating what Johnny Estrada did for the Braves in his late 20s.

Perhaps most importantly from a roster management standpoint, Pena’s a switch-hitter. As I’ve written before, he’s kind of like Gregg Zaun, The Practically Perfect Backup Catcher himself, without the walks. Pena would make the perfect backup to Buck, and given Olivo’s struggles against right-handed pitching, I’d argue that Pena should really be in a job-sharing arrangement, getting the start against any right-hander with a good slider or a three-quarters motion. According to Clay Davenport, Pena’s numbers with Omaha this year translate to a line of .246/.313/.375 in the majors. Not great, but not bad, and if the Royals can combine that line against RHP with Olivo’s typical line against LHP, they’d have themselves a pretty nice combination behind the plate.

The Royals could just go with Olivo and Buck again and play the hot hand like they did last year, but I doubt it. Pena’s out of options, and was added to the 40-man roster after the season. I don’t think Moore has spent this much time trying to snatch Pena from the Braves, and keep him around, just so that he can waive him next March. Plus, the Royals just signed J.R. House to do the catching in Omaha next year.

House is a very nice minor-league pickup. He’s already 29 and has just 60 major-league at-bats, but he was once a very-well regarded prospect in the Pirates’ chain, and put up numbers to match. He hit .306/.378/.480 in Triple-A last year, a doppelganger of his career numbers of .310/.372/.496, and just two years ago he hit .345/.392/.521 between Double-A and Triple-A. He’s never gotten a real shot at the majors because 1) he’s considered rough defensively; 2) he was in an organization that didn’t know what the hell it was doing; and 3) I’m guessing that his heart was never 100% in baseball, given that he was a prized quarterback recruit out of high school, and finally gave into temptation after the Pirates released him in 2004, returning to West Virginia and playing as the third-string QB for a year.

House would appear to have football out of his system now, and has had three good seasons in a row in the high minors. He only got the briefest of opportunities at the major league level, despite playing for the Orioles and Astros – check that, because he played for the Orioles (who gave the backup job to Paul Bako in 2007) and Astros (who will probably enshrine Brad Ausmus in the team’s Hall of Fame one day). He’s 29 and his teams have yet to deem him worthy of a regular roster spot in the majors – but then, he has yet to play for a team that knew what the hell it was doing. If you want to take a long-shot gamble on a player who might be the surprise of baseball next season, the Mike Aviles of 2009, put your money on the House.

But for Opening Day, it looks like the Royals’ optimal solution would be to go with a combination of Olivo and Pena, with Moore hopefully turning Buck into some useful talent elsewhere. (Buck, at the very least, would be one of the better backup catchers in the game, and the upside that he has a late-career emergency a la Mike Stanley or something is still there.) I just feel that the optimal solution for the Royals was to avoid the path with Olivo that they’ve already ventured down.

Greinke.

When I wrote about the impact of the Mike Jacobs trade, I planned to include a sentence about how the trade was really just window dressing for this off-season, that it was just a distraction from the really important things that might or might not happen. “The Jacobs trade has nothing to do with whether this off-season will prove to be successful or not,” I wanted to write. “All that really matters is whether Zack Greinke signs a long-term contract.”

And then, before I published, Bob Dutton reported that Greinke is in no rush to sign a long-term deal anytime soon, if at all.

There are a couple of possibilities as to what Zack really means when he says “I don’t need to get a long-term deal because I feel I’ll be able to pitch (well) and earn a long-term deal when I become a free agent.” As I see it, he could have made this comment for one of three reasons:

1) He’s posturing.

2) He sincerely wants to see if the Royals can build a winner before committing to a long term deal.

3) He’s just saying a bunch of legal boilerplate to hide the fact that he's already planning to leave town at the first opportunity.

Greinke may simply be posturing in an effort to get the most money in a long-term deal, which is certainly his right. For all of Zack’s personal issues, he’s never lacked for confidence in a baseball sense – one of the reasons he was so successful at such a young age was because he pitched fearlessly, changing speeds and throwing strikes like a seasoned veteran. He knows he’s good, and he may be willing to play chicken with the Royals to get the offer he feels he deserves.

It’s also quite possible that Greinke wants to see tangible evidence that the Royals are going to be a competitive team before he commits to them. This is the same guy who claimed he would rather spend the year on a competitive team in Double-A then play with the last-place Royals. The team’s incessant losing has sucked the life out of me at times, but at least I can just tune them out when things get really bad. I can only imagine how painful it would be to actually be a member of the team, to be one of the most talented pitchers in all of baseball, and have to suffer through the 2005 season like Greinke did.

It’s easy for you or I to say that he should feel lucky to get paid millions to play a kid’s game, but the choice here isn’t whether Greinke plays baseball for the Royals or for the Wichita Wranglers, like he did in 2006. The choice here is whether Greinke gets paid millions of dollars to play baseball for the Royals in 2011…or whether he gets paid millions of dollars to play baseball for another team that, by default, has a better chance of making the playoffs.

Reasons (1) and (2) are not mutually exclusive, and I think they’re both a factor here: I think Greinke isn’t willing to sign for under market value, and I think that he’s reluctant to commit to a franchise that hasn’t definitively proven that it’s committed to winning.

If there’s a silver lining here, I think that reason (3) is unlikely. The first parallel that came to mind when I read Greinke’s comments was to Carlos Beltran. Beltran, like Greinke, was someone I had long advocated the Royals needed to sign to a long-term contract, and like Greinke, the Royals dithered for so long that by the time they woke up to the reality that free agency was approaching, it was already too late. Beltran was similarly non-committal about a long-term deal after the 2002 season, and while everyone ignored the elephant in the room when the Royals were contending in 2003, after the season it was clear that Beltran was leaving one way or the other.

I think that Greinke might be different, if for no other reason than that his agent isn’t Scott Boras. The player controls the agent and not the other way around – or at least it shouldn’t be the other way around – but who a player chooses to represent him is usually a clue as to where his priorities are. If Greinke switches agents this winter, I might as well put my Greinke jersey on eBay right then and there. But for now, I’m prepared to take his comments at face value.

My optimistic side – some of you would call it my naïve side – thinks that, given Greinke’s documented battle with social anxiety disorder, he would be inclined to stay in a comfortable setting rather than risk moving to an unfamiliar and unforgiving milieu. Kansas City has treated him well, by and large. Both the organization and the fan base were very supportive of him when he broke down and left the team for a spell. The local media market is smaller and less intrusive than pretty much every other major league city, and the cracks about his love for Chipotle aside*, the media attention he does get is quite positive. I’d honestly be fearful for Greinke’s psychological well-being if he ended up in New York.

*: I eat at Chipotle at least once a week, so far be it from me to criticize his dietary habits. If anything, I think his fine taste in fast food cuisine should be commended. I did not, however, cry when Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston broke up.**

**: Does anyone really think Zack was being serious when he said he cried upon hearing the news? I think Zack has a wicked and sarcastic sense of humor, and I think he is so good at saying things deadpan that people don’t realize when he’s joking. He comes across as a simpleton at times, but I wonder if the joke’s really on us.

No one thought Beltran was a good fit for New York either, given that he’s a very introverted and quiet player for a superstar, and he ended up with the Mets. But again, Beltran’s agent is Scott Boras. And Beltran has been quoted at least once as second-guessing his decision to take the highest offer on the table and move to New York.

So I do think that despite these comments, Greinke may still be amenable to signing a long-term deal, and that the suggestions from fans that the Royals should look to cash him now are waaaaay premature.

There remains a fourth possibility, which I really don’t want to acknowledge, but I have no choice:

4) The Royals already made a long-term contract offer to Greinke, but they low-balled him so egregiously that Greinke decided to go public with his displeasure.

I’d like to discount this possibility, but with the Royals you can never be sure. As I’ve indicated before, and as Dutton also pointed out in his column, the parameters of an acceptable Greinke contract are already largely in place, thanks to the four-year deal that Scott Kazmir signed during the season.

On May 14^th, Kazmir inked a 3-year, $28.5 million contract extension with the Rays, effective from 2009 to 2011, which bought out his first year of free agency; the Rays also have an option for 2012 at $11 million. (Technically the contract is 3/26 with a $13.5 million option and a $2.5 million buyout, but it’s equivalent and simpler to list it as 3/28.5 with an $11 million option.)

Kazmir and Greinke are very different pitchers, but they’re also very comparable. They’re about the same age (Greinke is about 3 months older), and more germane to our discussion, they have equivalent service time, both being four-plus players this winter. Kazmir is a power lefthander with control issues and Greinke is a power righthander with homer issues, but in terms of overall value they’re very similar. Kazmir had a 3.49 ERA this season; Greinke had a 3.47 ERA.

Kazmir has the better overall career numbers, as he doesn’t have a season like 2005 on his resume and didn’t miss almost all of 2006, but Greinke had the better 2008 – in large part because he threw over 200 innings while Kazmir missed the start of the year with an elbow strain and was limited to 27 starts and 152 innings. They both have relatively fresh arms, Greinke because he missed much of 2006 for non-arm-related issues, Kazmir because the Rays have been extremely cautious with his pitch counts. (He has never thrown more than 121 pitches in a game, and with his command issues this year, the Rays limited him to 5.64 innings a start to keep his pitch counts down.

If you polled 100 baseball men as to who they’d rather have over the next four years, I doubt you’d get a split wider than 60/40 in either pitcher’s direction. I’d rather have Greinke, because his recent performance is better (and coincided with an increase in velocity) and because I’m more certain that he will stay healthy, but I’m hardly an unbiased observer.

So is Greinke asking for more than Kazmir money? If he is, I can’t imagine it’s all that much more. On the one hand, Kazmir signed in the middle of his fourth season, more than 2 ½ years from free agency, while Greinke now stands just two years away. (Mind you, I’ve been advocating that the Royals sign Greinke to a Kazmir-like contract pretty much since the ink dried.) On the other hand, with the economy cratering, the usual hyperinflation that characterizes the free-agent market is unlikely to manifest itself this year.

If Kazmir got 4/39.5, I’d think that Greinke would hope for something in the range of 4/44, or basically the last four years of Gil Meche’s contract. If he’s willing to sign for that, the Royals should have a contract on his agent’s desk by the time this paragraph is over.

Dayton Moore has made a lot of moves over the last two years that I have disagreed with, some vehemently so. But in every case I have at least understood the rationale behind his decisions. Nothing is more exasperating as a sports fan than when your team makes a decision that defies any rationale. It’s better to make a decision for a bad reason than for no reason at all. When your team does something that can not possibly be explained using the accepted standards of logic – like trading Jermaine Dye for Neifi Perez, or announcing to the world that you have begun a rebuilding phase by trading your best young player – you just want to rip your hair out.

While admittedly I’m not privy to the personal discussions between Moore and Greinke, his decision to not make signing Greinke to a long-term deal a top priority until now is utterly inexplicable. Maybe he’s trying to sign Greinke as we speak, and maybe he isn’t. But there’s little question that Moore did not make a serious effort until after this season was over. Greinke himself was quoted during the season as saying that the Royals had yet to approach him about a long-term deal, and I have heard nothing through the grapevine to contradict this. This nonchalance, this laissez-faire attitude towards the best young player the Royals have developed since Beltran is just mystifying.

There’s been some talk that Moore has a policy against negotiating long-term contracts in mid-season, a policy that was apparently waived for Joakim Soria because Soria himself approached the team. But if that’s a policy, Dayton, it’s a silly one. And even if it’s not, some players are so talented that they warrant exceptions to any policy. Zack Greinke has exceptional command of exceptional stuff – the last six words apply to maybe a dozen pitchers in the world today, certainly no more than a dozen under the age of 30. There’s a very real possibility that, a decade from now, Greinke will be considered the greatest pitcher ever developed by the Royals. (Sounds like a topic for a future column.)

But if that happens, right now it looks like there’s a good chance that the best years of the greatest pitcher ever developed by the Royals will be for the benefit of another team. And there’s no excuse for this. Baird didn’t get Beltran signed to a long-term deal, but as it happens, it wasn’t for lack of trying, or even for lack of succeeding – negotiations with Beltran were proceeding well until factors outside of Baird’s control intervened. (The more I learn about the Allard Baird Era, the more I’m convinced that the Allard Baird Era was not the fault of Allard Baird.) But Moore doesn’t appear to be even trying.

We strive to avoid hoary clichés here at Rany on the Royals, but George Santayana’s statement holds true here: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. You’d think the Royals would have remembered what happened when they didn’t sign Beltran to a long-term deal, or Dye, or Johnny Damon. You’d think they could look around the league and notice that this year, four years after Beltran was traded, seven after Dye was traded, eight after Damon was traded, all three of them are still playing at an All-Star caliber. Damon hit .303/.375/.461 with 29 steals; Dye hit .292/.344/.541 and got some MVP votes; Beltran hit .284/.376/.500 with 25 steals and also got a few votes.

Not that it’s realistic to think the Royals could have kept all three, but if they had, the 2000s Royals would have had one of the greatest outfields in the history of baseball. Instead, they traded all three, and all they have to show for them right now is Mark Teahen and John Buck.

So yeah, you’d think that the Royals would have learned that when you have a star player in his mid-20s, you need to do everything you can to lock him up long-term before it’s too late. But I guess what happened on Baird’s watch is no concern of Moore’s. To borrow an expression once said about my people, the Royals never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

(Feel free to bring up Mike Sweeney if you want. Just remember that Sweeney, as a first baseman and a right-handed line-drive hitter, had a much riskier profile than any of the outfielders. And even so, I still would argue that his contract was a good idea at the time; no one could have predicted that Sweeney’s back would give out like it did.)

Again, I don’t have the best viewpoint for what’s going on, and for all I know the Royals are putting the finishing touches on a contract that will keep Greinke in Kansas City well into the next decade. And it may well be that one of the primary reasons that Moore traded for Crisp and (especially) Jacobs – rather than going with an unproven hitter like Ka’aihue – was to show Greinke that the Royals are committed to surrounding him with enough talent to win, not in 2011 or 2012, but next year.

If that’s the case, let me be the first to toast Moore for completing the single most important transaction he could have made this offseason. Because no matter how many Mike Jacobs trades Moore botches this winter, if he signs Greinke to a long-term deal, this off-season will have been a success.

And no matter how many Coco Crisp trades he wins, if Moore doesn’t sign Greinke to a long-term deal, this off-season will have been a failure.

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.)