The 1984 Cubs, Binomial Distributions, and Orlando Hudson.

“If I have ever seen a dead giveaway set-up for a miracle, this is it.” – Bill James, in the Chicago Cubs essay, in the 1984 Baseball Abstract.

In the history of sabermetrics, there has probably never been a more gutsy, anti-conventional-wisdom, and bullseye-accurate prediction than that one. Or at least, there wasn’t until Nate Silver wrote this last spring. It’s appropriate that James and Silver, the man who literally coined the term “sabermetrics” and the man who applied the process to another field of study with equally seismic impact, also share a history of transmuting their analytical iron into prognosticative gold.

(My own best effort in this category came back in the 1997 Baseball Prospectus, when I wrote at the conclusion of my essay on the Marlins – for whom the consensus opinion was that they’d finish under .500 once again – “Last year in these pages, I wrote the Marlins ‘have everything in place to battle the Braves for dominance of the NL East for the rest of the decade.’ I believe that even more strongly this year. The Marlins went through growing pains last year, but they have too much talent to lie dormant any longer. This is the year the Marlins should reap the benefits of their patience, and prove that they had the right blueprint for success from the beginning”. The problem was that BP had not registered even a blip on the publishing radar at that point, which limited my ability to gloat. That, and the fact that Wayne Huizenga then turned the franchise from World Champions to a laughingstock in one off-season.)

But back to James’ original statement. In his essay, James went on to give a number of reasons why he felt like the Cubs had a much better chance to win the division than almost anyone realized. One of those reasons has a lot of relevance for the 2009 Royals.

“3) Miracles usually happen in compressed leagues, in leagues where the difference between the best teams and the worst teams is not too wide…there have been many moments in the history of baseball when there was no great team, no dominant team. It is in those times that miracle teams come forward. The National League in 1968, the year before the Miracle of Flushing Meadow, was only 25 games from top to bottom and had a standard deviation of 7.56 wins; the expansion spread that out artificially in 1969. The American League in 1966 was 26 ½ games top to bottom; the 1966 Red Sox finished ninth at 72-90, and the standard deviation was 8.96 wins…I certainly don’t see the Cubs as having the potential to be a great team, a dominant team over a period of time. But that’s not really germane; miracle teams are never great teams. They’re teams that have a moment, teams that slip through a window of dominance.”

I don’t think this revelation is going to astound anyone – compressed divisions, divisions which lack any obvious doormats but also lack any clearly dominant teams – are divisions that are open for anyone to win. And I don’t think anyone would argue with the notion that the AL Central is a compressed division. But what I think is being missed by the national media is that for the first time in a while, when we say “anyone in the AL Central”, we don’t mean “anyone but the Royals.” Tim Kurkjian didn’t get the memo. “Four teams, none of them great, have a legitimate chance to win the division in 2009. And a fifth team, the Royals, who didn't even finish fifth in 2008, “could have our best club since 1994 [their last season as a contender],” Kansas City general manager Dayton Moore said.” There is still this perception, and not an unfair one, that the Royals are still a cut below the other four teams in the division.

We can rebut this pretty easily by pointing out that last year it was the Tigers, not the Royals, who brought up the rear of the division. Better still, we can point to the (preliminary) PECOTA projections for 2009, which predict the Royals to finish with their exact same record, 75-87, and to once again finish in fourth place, two games out of the cellar – only this time, PECOTA projects the White Sox to finish last with 89 losses.

(It’s beyond the scope of this article to address the long-simmering feud between Kenny Williams and a computer algorithm. Even Silver will tell you not to hold too much water to the fact that PECOTA holds no love for the Pale Hose; while sometimes PECOTA is dead on about the Sox (see 2007), sometimes it’s dead wrong (2005, and to a lesser extent 2008). Williams is an unconventional GM, but I have a lot of respect for his fearlessness, and wouldn’t want to bet against him making a Commodore 64 out of PECOTA once again.)

What really stands out about the PECOTA projections is that PECOTA has confirmed my two main suspicions about the division: 1) the Indians are the best team in the division on paper; and 2) that says less about the Indians than it does about the rest of the division. PECOTA has Cleveland at 83-79, and the other four teams with between 73 and 79 wins. From top to bottom, that’s a ten-game swing. Now a computer projection is, by its nature, going to regress teams towards .500 and possibly make a division look more compressed than it is. But still, no other division in baseball has a ten-game swing from first to worst. The AL West is 14 wins top to bottom (but there are only four teams in the division), while every other division has a spread of 19 wins or more.

So don’t look at this projection and say to yourself, “man, the Royals are projected for fourth place again?” or “75 wins again?” Look at the standings and say to yourself, “wow, the Royals are projected to finish just eight games out of first!” Eight games is nothing. Eight games is almost statistically insignificant.

If you flipped a perfectly fair coin 162 times, you’d expect to flip heads 81 times, obviously. But you won’t get exactly 81 heads each time – you might get 77, or 83, or occasionally even 69 or 92. If I remember my binomial theory correctly, the standard deviation on 162 coin flips is the square root of (162 * 50% * 50%) – about 6.36.

By definition, the odds that an outcome will fall within one standard deviation of its mean is 68%. So while a perfectly fair coin – or a .500 team – would be expected to win 81 games on average, the odds that such a team would win more than 87 games – one standard deviation above the mean – simply by chance is about 16%.

Using the binomial calculator I found here, we can say that if the Royals are truly a 75-win team, the chances that they’ll win 83 or more games is about 12%. The odds that they’ll win the division are less than that, because while PECOTA predicts that no team will more than 83 games, odds are that at least one of the five AL Central teams will outperform their projections by a significant margin. Once Clay Davenport has his Postseason Odds updated for 2009, we’ll have a more accurate answer to this question. But for now, let’s say that 87 wins takes the division.

If that’s what it takes, there’s about a 3.5% chance that a 75-win team will in fact win 87 games based purely on the way the coin – or ball – bounces. Those aren’t very good odds, but keep in mind, those are the odds that the Royals would win the division even though the team is fundamentally no better than last year. Those are the odds that a team that by all rights should be well under .500 – a team that is outscored by its opponents by 60 runs – still goes to the playoffs.

We saw this story play out with the 2003 Royals, who were outscored by 31 runs – and were lucky to have a run differential even that close – yet won 83 games. That year the Royals were in the hunt all season because they were lucky – but the underlying talent was poor enough that they needed to be really lucky to win the division.

But here’s the thing – what if the 2009 Royals aren’t really a 75 win team? What if Alex Gordon goes all .300/.400/.500 on the league? Or what if Billy Butler does the same? Or what if Zack Greinke is a Cy Young contender? By being just eight games out of first place on paper, the Royals are in a tipping point of sorts, where even a marginal improvement can lead to a dramatically higher probability of a playoff spot. If we knew for certain that Gordon was going to have a breakout season – and I still stubbornly believe he will – we could probably tack on two or three wins to the Royals’ projection.

The odds that a 75-win team will win 87 games or more is 3.5%. Add an additional three wins, and you’ve got a 78-win team – and the odds a 78-win team will actually win 87+ games is 9.1%. Three more wins on paper nearly triples the Royals’ odds of winning the division.

I’ve said all winter that the Royals need two of those three guys to have All-Star caliber seasons to have a realistic shot at a playoff spot. So let’s say we get two breakout seasons, each worth three wins, vaulting the Royals into a .500 team on paper. Now their odds of winning 87+ games is 19.4%. (This number is a little different from the number above because of fractional wins – the standard deviation is 6.36, but you can’t win 87.36 games.)

A 19.4% chance of winning the division basically means the Royals have the same shot as every other team in the division. That’s a crapshoot, and any Royals fan would be happy to have the season come down to a crapshoot.

So there’s reason for Royals fans to be, if not excited, at least guardedly optimistic about this season. It’s not likely that the Royals will win the division, but it’s a legitimate possibility – something that we could not have said about the team ever since the hangover that was the 2004 season.

This is what makes this off-season so frustrating. The Royals were not a good team last season, but they were approaching mediocrity – and playing in a division in which mediocrity is no impediment to being competitive. It would have only taken one significant addition to the roster to elevate the team to legitimate .500 status, just a breakout season away from true contender status in the division. Instead, Dayton Moore treaded water this winter, adding a whole lot of Kyle Farnsworths and Horacio Ramirezes but no Adam Dunns or Bobby Abreus.

And this is what makes the recent flirtations with Orlando Hudson so intriguing. There are some real downsides to signing O-Dog – if I have time I hope to write a column about him in the next few days – but on the whole, Hudson would undoubtedly help the Royals. He’s just 31, he’s had an OPS+ of over 100 for three straight years, his defense may not be the Gold Glove caliber it used to be but is still good, and – this is key – he’s a switch-hitter who is much better against right-handed pitchers, which would make him a terrific addition to a lineup that was 36-24 when facing a lefty starter last year, but just 39-63 against right-handers. On a one or two-year deal for $5 million a year, Hudson would make a fine addition to the roster.

But the best case for Hudson is this: the Royals can not be considered realistic contenders at this point, because even if they do get a couple of unexpected breakout seasons, they’ll still need some luck to stay in contention. But they’re close enough to that gray zone of quasi-competitiveness that just one significant acquisition could change that calculus completely. Manny Ramirez aside, Hudson is probably the most significant acquisition out there just waiting for someone to acquire him.

I guess if Moore had used his pennies on Dunn or Abreu instead of The Professor, the Royals would have been taken more seriously by the Tim Kurkjians of the world as a possible contender, and we would have lost the element of surprise. But when they hand out postseason spots, they don’t factor in degree of difficulty. You don’t get to hang a postseason flag any higher on the pole because it was so unexpected. Any permutation of events that result in the 2009 Royals going to the playoffs is going to have the word “Miracle” attached it to somewhere. Adding Hudson would make those events a little less miraculous, but a lot more likely. That’s a tradeoff we’ll take any day.

The Future of Disco.

So, is Chris Hayes a prospect? The experts have spoken.

Chris Hayes is nowhere to appear in Kevin Goldstein’s rankings of the Top 11 Royals prospects released today ($$), not that this is surprising at all. What might be surprising is that he is nowhere to be found in Baseball America’s listing of the Royals’ Top 30 Prospects, and in fact, his name has never appeared in the pages of that august publication.

One minor league expert who has not completely ignored Hayes is my friend John Sickels, whose The Baseball Prospect Book 2009 is now on sale. Hayes warranted an entry in this year’s book:

Chris Hayes went to Northwestern University in Illinois and was quite successful during his junior and senior seasons. But scouts don’t like him very much, as he is a submarine pitcher with below average velocity. He signed up with Windy City in the Frontier League in 2005, pitched well, then signed with the Royals as a free agent in 2006. He continued to pitch well in Double-A last year, throwing strikes and getting ground balls. I don’t like the low strikeout rate, but the other numbers are sharp. If he keeps this up in Triple-A, he could sneak into the major league pen. Stranger things have happened. Grade C.

Grade C is the lowest grade that Sickels gives out to a player worthy of mentioning in his book. Saying “he could sneak into the major league pen” and “stranger things have happened” is not exactly an unqualified endorsement.

So the experts have spoken, and what they’re saying is that Chris Hayes is, at best, a marginal prospect, a future 11^th man if he’s lucky.

I am not a minor league expert, though I played one in the pages of Baseball Prospectus for several years. Nonetheless, I can say with some confidence that I think the experts are wrong and that Hayes is very much a prospect, and that he has a very real chance to enjoy a long and successful career in the major leagues.

I believe the reason why my evaluation of Hayes’ potential differs so much stems from the fact that I don’t think you can evaluate Hayes the same way you evaluate overhand pitchers. Much like the rules that apply to traditional pitchers don’t necessarily work when discussing a knuckleball pitcher, I think that we ought to think of low-arm-angle pitchers as their own breed as well.

Many years ago – I think in one of the “Baseball Books” he published from 1993 to 1995 – Bill James made the point that the sidearm pitchers in the major leagues almost all had the same two characteristics: 1) they came from very humble origins and 2) they were almost universally effective pitchers. This was after the heyday of sidearm/submarine pitchers like Tekulve and Quisenberry, but you still had pitchers like Mark Eichhorn, who had a career ERA of 3.00 on the nose, and in 1986 had one of the most underrated rookie seasons of all time, with a 1.72 ERA in 157 innings. He famously declined the Blue Jays’ offer to let him start on the final day of the season so that he could get the five innings he needed to qualify for the ERA title. If he had taken them up on the offer, not only would he have wrested the title from Roger Clemens, he would have posted the lowest ERA of any AL pitcher in the last 40 years. Going to college in Baltimore in the early 90s, I watched up close as Todd Frohwirth gave the O’s three terrific seasons after he was let go by the Phillies.

There always seems to be a half-dozen guys in the majors who throw from a low arm slot, and they’re almost invariably overlooked because they’re slotted in middle relief, but they almost all do good work. Chad Bradford, obviously, was made famous in Moneyball precisely because of his lack of recognition. Cla Meredith was a throw-in to the Padres from Boston in the Doug Mirabelli trade. Brian Shouse briefly pitched for the Royals in 2002, then – naturally – came into his own with the Rangers as soon as he left, at age 34. I had never heard of Pat Neshek before he was called up to Minnesota. I only knew about Brad Ziegler because he was one of Goldstein’s favorite minor leaguers – all he did was set a major league record with 39 consecutive scoreless innings to start his career.

None of these guys was well-regarded as an amateur (none were drafted in the first five rounds). None of them were well-regarded in the minor leagues – I am almost 100% certain that none of them ever appeared on Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospects list. And yet all of them have been excellent relief pitchers in the majors – sometimes, like Neshek and Ziegler, immediately, but in each case in their first extended opportunity.

(Baseball teams may finally be wising up to the market inefficiency regarding sidearm pitchers – Joe Smith was a 3^rd-round pick out of college by the Mets, and immediately put on the fast track, throwing just 42 innings in the minors before getting called up.)

The biggest knock against Hayes – and I say “biggest knock” in the way that you might say that the biggest knock against Muggsy Bogues was his height – is that he doesn’t throw hard. While we don’t have any Pitch f/x data, the best estimation is that his fastball runs about 79 mph. And if Hayes was a conventional pitcher, the discussion would end there. The list of conventional pitchers who have succeeded in the majors with a fastball under 80 is pretty much zero. (The closest I can think of would be John Tudor, who in his final season (1990) threw maybe 81-82 mph, if memory serves. He had a 2.40 ERA in 146 innings.)

There are two types of pitchers that can survive, and even thrive, in the majors with a fastball in the 70s: knuckleballers and submariners. Among pitchers who threw even 10 innings last season, the slowest fastball (with an average speed of 72.9 mph) was thrown by Tim Wakefield (he only threw his FB 13% of the time; his knuckler averaged 65.1 mph, and his curveball – his curveball? – averaged 59.5.) The second-slowest fastball, at 79.6 mph, was Chad Bradford’s. Third was Brian Shouse, at 80.5 mph.

Interesting, all the other sidearmers came in at 85 or higher – Meredith at 85.1, Ziegler at 85.3, Neshek at 89.0, Joe Smith at 89.4. This goes with a theory I have that the ability for a pitcher to succeed at lower velocities correlates with just how low his arm angle is. Whether it’s the deception that comes with the fact that the ball looks like it’s shooting out of the pitcher’s mound, or the bizarro movement on the pitches, or simply the novelty of facing an underhand pitcher, it appears that throwing submarine-style is worth about 5 mph compared to a sidearm pitcher, and throwing sidearm is worth about 5 mph compared to an overhand pitcher. As Hayes pointed out in his interview, Bradford is really the only true submarine pitcher in the majors. (Shouse throws only slightly harder than Bradford, but he’s a lefty, and lefties always seem to thrive with fastballs a few mph slower than their right-handed counterparts.)

I’m old enough to remember Quisenberry on the mound, but not old enough to remember what the consensus was on how hard he threw. Some of you older hands help out – how hard did Quisenberry throw? I want to say around 80 mph, but it could have been slightly faster – or slightly slower.

The point is, no one seems to take Hayes seriously as a prospect because of his velocity, when in fact we have a lot of evidence that throwing 79 mph is not an impediment to success for a submarine pitcher. On the contrary – 79 mph is exactly in the range of what the best submarine pitchers in recent memory have thrown.

So the scout-based objections to Hayes’ prospect status appear overblown. That leaves us with his performance record. The biggest black mark on Hayes’ stat sheet is his strikeout rate – 137 whiffs in 203 career innings (6.06 K/9) is not particularly impressive for a minor league pitcher, and last season his K rate was just 5.35 per nine. Once again, though, it’s not entirely fair to evaluate Hayes’ strikeout rate as if he’s a conventional pitcher. The whole point of throwing underneath is that, if you do it well, you don’t need to strike batters out in order to be successful. Quisenberry struck out 3.27 men per nine innings in his career. (Read that sentence again.) Bradford’s career K rate is 5.47 per nine.

The reason why strikeouts hardly matter for a submariner is that it seems to be a near-universal law that submarine pitchers keep the ball on the ground. That’s not necessarily the case for sidearmers – while Meredith and Ziegler have great sinkers, Neshek is a flyball pitcher who has given up 15 homers in 121 career innings. Byung-Hyun Kim was a sidearmer who threw exceptionally hard, and his penchant for fly balls led to some of the most dramatic baseball moments of this decade. But submarine pitchers, even in the high-offense era we’re in, are relatively immune to the home run.

They also tend to have well above-average control. And if you can limit walks and home runs enough, it takes three hits in an inning to score a run. Even if you don’t strike anyone out, the odds are slim that the opponent will turn five groundballs into three hits. (And even if they do, they still might not score if you can mix in a GIDP.) Quisenberry walked the unfathomably low total of 0.79 batters per nine innings when you strip out the IBB, which as Hayes remarked is the lowest figure since 1926 (and I think he was including the IBB’s – take them out and Quiz might have the best control of any major league pitcher since four balls became a walk.) He gave up just 59 homers in 1043 career innings. I’m not exaggerating when I say that he would have been a successful pitcher if every one of his strikeout victims was given a mulligan and allowed to bat until they made fair contact.

Bradford isn’t Quisenberry – no one is – but his career rates of 1.73 unintentional walks per 9 innings, and 0.48 HR per 9, are both outstanding, and the reason why he has a career 3.24 ERA even though he’s allowed exactly one hit per inning in his career.

A lot has been made of the fact that Hayes’ terrific season in 2008 was the result of a BABIP of just .241, which is not likely to be sustained. That’s certainly true, but Hayes was so successful last year that he could easily regress to .300 and still be effective. Keep in mind, not only did he have a 1.64 ERA last season, but given his peripherals (less than a baserunner an inning, just four homers allowed in 66 innings), his expected ERA was probably even less than that. In 2006 and 2007, his BABIP was in the normal range, he gave up about a hit an inning – and he still had ERAs of 2.78 and 3.10, because he did everything else so well.

For his career, Hayes has walked 43 batters (at least 6 intentionally; I don’t have data for 2006) in 203 innings, a UIBB rate of 1.64 per nine. He’s allowed just 7 homers, for a HR rate of 0.31 per nine. Those numbers are even better than Bradford’s minor league rates: Bradford walked 2.31 per nine (although I don’t have any IBB data for him), and allowed 0.37 HR per nine. I expect Hayes’ HR rates to go up as he spends more time in the high minors, but even so his performance record is every bit as impressive as Bradford’s was.

(For the record, Quiz walked 1.74 batters per nine in his minor league career, and struck out 4.39 per nine. I only have homer data for 1978 and 1979; in those two seasons he allowed just 2 homers in 99 innings.)

There’s one other reason why I think that Hayes can maintain his success in the major leagues. Allow me to quote him directly here:

My advantage in an at-bat is how different I am from your average pitcher. I have yet to see a professional hitter taking batting practice off a batting practice pitcher throwing submarine-style. An experienced hitter has taken a swing at a “normal” back-spinning fastball thousands of times. It's been a while since I've hit, maybe it's more like millions.

They see thousands of 90 mph-plus fastballs per season. Then, enter the “weirdo” stage right, and I throw that all upside down (literally and figuratively). A guy just out of college in A-ball may be used to guys throwing 85 mph on average, and they haven't honed their swing as much as a more salty veteran. The higher up the levels I go, I believe the bigger advantage I have, because I'm that much different from the norm.

For years I’ve made essentially this argument with knuckleball pitchers: that the typical decline in performance that all players endure when they go from Triple-A to the majors is not completely applicable to knucklers. If the typical pitcher with a 4.00 ERA in Triple-A (assume a neutral park, etc.) can be expected to post a 5.50 ERA in the majors, a typical knuckleball pitcher with a 4.00 ERA might expect his ERA to be 4.75 in the majors. Why? In a nutshell – because major league hitters are not selected for their ability to hit the knuckleball.

Sports are the ultimate Darwinian process – at every level, the players who show the most ability advance, and at each higher level they then face players with more ability, and so on. If you can hit an 80 mph fastball in high school, you’ll get the chance to hit 85 mph fastballs in college, then 90 mph fastballs in the minors, then 95 mph fastballs in the majors – provided you succeed at each level. And therefore hitters at each higher level have been selected for their proven ability to succeed against inferior pitchers.

But the knuckleball is such a unique pitch, a pitch that works not because of its velocity but because of its unpredictable and late movement, that the best knuckleball hitters in the world may not be in the majors at all. There might be a guy down in A-ball who can’t catch up to the fastball and can’t lay off the slider, but can follow a 69-mph floater right up until the last moment. And there might be guys in the majors who could hit Sidd Finch if his fastball was straight enough, but are helpless against the mystical powers of the butterfly pitch.

(I’ll pause here to tip my hat to Dave Nilsson, who might have been the greatest hitter of my lifetime against the knuckleball. The Australian catcher was 16-for-25 lifetime against Tim Wakefield, with a slash line of .640/.719/.960. He was just 2-for-10 against Dennis Springer, but with a homer and three walks.)

I made this argument on the internal BP mailing list years ago, and Clay Davenport looked into my theory a little. What he found was that after a promotion to the majors, knuckleball pitchers did appear to require less of a translation to their numbers than the average pitcher. The sample size was small and not necessarily significant, but the theory had promise.

Just as submariners can be lumped in with knuckleballers in the sense that they can survive without velocity, I think that like knuckleballers, their pitching style is so far from the norm (and there are so few of them to practice against) that major league hitters are not much likelier to hit them than their minor league counterparts.

Does that mean Hayes is the next Bradford, or even Quisenberry Jr? Not necessarily. But the Royals owe it to themselves to give him every opportunity to prove otherwise. Some team is going to get lucky and find the next great submarine pitcher. The Royals were lucky enough to sign Hayes out of a tryout camp, but if luck is the residue of design, it’s the team that has designs on Hayes as a major league pitcher that’s going to really get lucky. The White Sox didn’t know what they had with Bradford; the Red Sox didn’t know what they had with Meredith. Let’s hope the Royals know what they might have with Hayes.

My Interview With Chris "Disco" Hayes.

Some of you have already noticed, but for those who haven’t – I conducted a very long interview with my new favorite Royals minor leaguer, Chris Hayes, over at Baseball Prospectus. Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here, and thanks to my bosses over at BP, both parts are free to the public – you don’t have to be a subscriber to read them.

If you’re not familiar with Hayes already, I suggest you start here. Before I read this blog entry, all I knew about Hayes was his stat line, that he was a sidearmer, and that he was not drafted out of college. After I read his AFL blog – and stopped laughing – I knew that this was a guy I needed to talk to. (Here’s another interview he gave, with Lisa Winston at mlb.com.)

As it turns out, the interview went better than I could have possibly expected. I knew this was going to be something special when, after he said he preferred “Angels and Demons” to “The Da Vinci Code” (a sentiment I agree with, not that anyone asked), I practically dared him to come up with an ambigram in his response – then nearly coughed up a lung when he did. (Although a little internet sleuthing reveals that his ambigram is suspiciously similar to the one you can create on this website. I’m on to you, Chris.)

If you’re not rooting for Hayes to make it, you don’t have a heart. It’s not just that he’s a Royal (though that helps) and that he’s a funny guy – it’s that he’s so normal. The guy is one of us.

Hayes had to walk on to make his college team – the not-exactly-CWS-bound Northwestern Wildcats. He served as the last man on the bench for two years, and didn’t get any regular playing time until he was a senior. He has a degree in computer science. He never got drafted. He has trouble breaking 80 on a radar gun. I’m willing to bet that a few readers here have a more distinguished amateur career than Hayes did, and I imagine that more than a few of you had more velocity on your fastball once upon a time.

Part of what has allowed baseball to maintain its grip on American culture for nearly a century and a half is that by its very nature, the game seems accessible to the average person. Even at its highest level, the game is played by people who, to the untrained eye, look no different than you or I. Basketball players are freakishly tall, football players are freakishly big. Baseball players can win MVP awards when they’re listed at 5’9”, 180 pounds, like Dustin Pedroia, and in reality he’s probably shorter than that.

Hayes takes that everyman image one step further. Pedroia may look normal, but obviously he has extraordinary skills lurking under the surface, the skills which allow him to swat 95-mph fastballs for home runs despite his small frame. Hayes looks normal – 6’1”, 195 pounds, nothing special for a pitcher – and he complements that normal appearance with commonplace ability. He doesn’t look like he throws hard because he can’t throw hard. We all have a brother or a friend or a high school classmate who could have done what Hayes did - or at least it's tantalizingly easy to think they could have.

Dan Quisenberry famously said, “I found a delivery in my flaw,” and like Quiz, Hayes owes his path to the majors to the very ordinariness of his talents. If he threw 88 mph overhand, he might have fashioned a decent college career, been a late-round draft pick, and endured a brief and painful minor league career. Instead, he threw 79, and that forced him to get creative. Necessity is the mother of inventive deliveries.

Hayes isn’t just one of us, he’s One Of Us: he’s a baseball stat geek too. A year ago Brian Bannister became an internet sensation for speaking about DIPS theory and about how he tried to use his knowledge to overcome it. (Of course, a year ago Bannister was coming off a season where his BABIP was .262; in 2008 his BABIP was .310 – ten points higher than the pitching staff as a whole – and it’s clear that he’s going to have to work with DIPS theory – by, say, increasing his strikeout rate, which he did last year – to sustain major league success.) Hayes shows the same awareness of sabermetric analysis and the same determination to use it to his advantage.

Bannister’s intelligence contributes to his success, but you’re still talking about a guy who touches 90, a guy was a seventh-round draft pick out of USC. Hayes is Bannister minus 10 mph, but with better minor league numbers (granted, as a reliever). You have to respect that.

But does that makes Hayes a prospect? More on that in my next column. Mind you, I wouldn’t have wasted this much time talking to (and about) him if I didn’t think he was.

Now Playing Second Base...Seriously?

So I guess I need to be the last Royals observer to comment on the news that the Royals are seriously considering – I can’t believe I’m writing this – the idea of moving Mark Teahen to second base.

I’ll happily confess to laughing off the idea at first. Teahen has played 256 games in his career at third base, 229 games in right field, 31 in left, and 23 at first base. These positions all have something in common – they tend towards the bottom of the defensive spectrum. Teahen’s athleticism has helped him to carve out a nice role as a four-corners utility player even though he has only one above-average season with the stick on his resume. But playing the four corners – or even center field, which Teahen has done six times – is one thing. Playing the middle infield is quite another.

Bill Simmons has argued that sports teams would benefit greatly if they created a job for a “Vice President of Common Sense”, someone whose job it was to keep the front office from clearly self-destructive decisions. A VPoCS would have kept the Royals from trading Jermaine Dye for Neifi Perez, and would have earned the Mets a pair of division titles in 2007-08 by blocking the trade of Scott Kazmir for Victor Zambrano.

You’d have to think that a VPoCS would veto this idea, on the simple grounds that second base isn’t a position you can learn at the major league level. I love outside-the-box thinking as much as anyone, but moving a 27-year-old player to a position he hasn’t played since his freshman year of high school isn’t outside-the-box, it’s outside the boundaries of common sense. Especially when that position is second base, which after catcher is the most dangerous position on the field.

So no, when Sam Mellinger first reported this, I didn’t take it seriously at all.

But the Royals apparently are. Trey Hillman is serious about it: “We are definitely going to take a look at it.” Weeks before the news was made official, Mark Teahen was game: “[I]t’s something that I’d be willing to try, definitely if it assures me of being in the lineup every day.” Even Joe Posnanski thinks it’s a winning idea: “I think this is precisely the sort of risk-reward thinking the Royals should be doing right about now.”

And having looked into the idea a little more, I’ll admit that there’s some genuine merit to it. Dave Cameron wrote an interesting series of articles back in December that argued, in essence, that there is no evidence to suggest that second base is any more difficult to play defensively than third base, and that players who switch from one position to the other generally handle either position equally well.

Moreover, Cameron makes the point – one I agree with – that teams seem to separate players into “second basemen” and “third basemen” based as much on body type (specifically height) as on the skills needed to play the position. If you’re 6’3”, you’re a third baseman; if you’re 5’10”, you’re a second baseman. And because height correlates with power, this explains to a large degree why third basemen are better hitters than second baseman overall, even though the defensive demands at the two positions are similar.

A lot has been made of the fact that Teahen, at 6’3”, 210, would be one of the tallest second basemen in history. That’s certainly true, but I don’t think that you can take the leap and assume that Teahen is too tall to play the position. Teahen would be an unconventional second baseman, but “unconventional” does not equate to “bad”. Cal Ripken (6’4”) was an unconventional shortstop, but was so far removed from “bad” that he helped establish a new convention at the position – a convention that paved the way for Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, and Hanley Ramirez (all 6’3”) to play shortstop as well. I see no reason why a 6’3” player can handle shortstop but is too tall to play second base, so the fact that 6’3” second basemen are so rare strikes me as more of an historic anomaly as anything else.

Okay, I can see one potential reason why height might be more of a concern for a second baseman than for a shortstop. It’s the same reason why second basemen tend to develop more poorly than shortstops – what we call Brent Gates Syndrome. Second basemen turn the double-play pivot with their backs to the runner, which makes them susceptible to injuries, and in theory may also make them susceptible to minor but repeated leg traumas that over time may sap a player of his abilities. (I suspect this is what happened to Carlos Febles, for instance.)

Would a tall player be more susceptible to leg injuries? Possibly. There’s a good deal of evidence that catchers beyond a certain height – 6’1” or 6’2” – are more susceptible to injuries and tend to move out from behind the plate at a young age, probably because the constant squatting and standing is not good on the knees, and that stress on the knees is accentuated in tall players. (The original study for this was done by Bill James in, if memory serves, the 1987 Baseball Abstract. Since then, Mike Piazza showed no ill effects from being 6’3”, and Joe Mauer has raised the bar all the way to 6’5”. On the other hand, Mauer is 25 and has already dealt with knee injuries for years.)

This is a long stretch of an analogy to make, but I want to present both sides of the story here. In any case, I’m not really worried about the injury risk at second base for Teahen, both because he has shown himself to be a durable player throughout his career, and – not to be heartless – the fact is, he’s not so valuable that an injury would be all that crippling to the Royals.

Third base to second base transitions have worked in the past, most recently last year, when Akinori Iwamura moved from third to second to accommodate Evan Longoria. Iwamura handled second base surprisingly well – he was probably better there than at third – and the defensive upgrade at two positions was a big part of the Rays’ historic improvement defensively. As best as I can tell, Iwamura had never before played second base regularly as a pro, either in the US or in Japan. Then again, he did win six Golden Gloves in Japan at third base. And Iwamura is 5’9”.

Among the players that Cameron points out as playing both third base and second base last year, a pair of Rockies stands out. Jeff Baker (6’2”, 210) had never played second base in the majors before last season, and was a third baseman throughout his minor league career. With Garrett Atkins entrenched at third, Baker spent most of 2006 and 2007 rotating between first base and the corner outfield spots, but last year, at age 27, Baker played 49 games at second base. Judging from the fact that he made his first two starts at second, this was a transition that was likely planned during spring training or before. He wasn’t very good at second base, but then he wasn’t very good at third base either.

Baker’s teammate, Ian Stewart (6’3”, 205) was also tried at second base last season, after coming up through the minors exclusively as a third baseman. Stewart was a rookie and just 23, so he’s not directly comparable to Teahen, but the fact is that his body size did not dissuade the Rockies from trying him there.

So I guess this can work, but pardon me for remaining skeptical. It’s true that third basemen can adjust to second base more easily than is commonly recognized, and it’s true that getting a third baseman’s bat at second base is an upgrade. The problem is that it’s not clear how this pertains to Teahen, because Teahen really isn’t a third baseman any more. He hasn’t played third base regularly since 2006, and his only time spent there over the last two years came when he filled in for 19 games when Alex Gordon went on the DL. In those 19 games Teahen’s work only served to remind us why he had been the one to move to the outfield in the first place: he’s not a very good defensive player at third. Moving Teahen to second base is less reminiscent of Akinori Iwamura than it is of Gregg Jefferies, who was a butcher at both positions but slightly less destructive at the hot corner.

Even if Teahen manages to handle second base with some level of adequacy, it’s not clear whether his bat justifies the defensive hit. We’re talking about a player who has one above-average offensive season in his four-year career, a guy who hit .255/.313/.402 last year. Alberto Callaspo, the incumbent at the position, hit .305/.361/.371 last year. The fact that the Royals are even talking about moving Teahen to second tells you how confident they are that Callaspo can repeat those numbers.

I share those concerns – Callaspo has neither power nor speed, and his entire skill set revolves around his uncanny ability to make contact. (Callaspo has struck out just 34 times in 399 career at-bats.) You can hit .300 with that kind of contact ability, but Callaspo has to hit .300 to justify a starting job, because he’s not contributing in any other way. And without the speed to leg out an infield single a couple times a month, it’s going to be hard to sustain that average. The difference between a player like this with speed and a player like this without speed is the difference between Luis Castillo five years ago and Luis Castillo today.

Throw in the DUI and domestic violence issues with Castillo Callaspo, and it’s good that the Royals are looking for a Plan B that’s more threatening than The Spork. At the same time, I think Callaspo has earned the right to play every day and prove that last year isn’t a fluke. Power, speed, and defense aside, he did hit .305 last year, he will take a walk, he switch-hits, and he’s still just 25. Having definitively proved last year that he can’t play shortstop, he has negligible value as a bench player, so if he’s not playing every day he’s useless. Callaspo has too much potential for the Royals to bury him without giving him the opportunity to play himself out of a job.

So that’s one problem I have with this idea – as low as the odds are that Teahen learns to play a passable second base, the odds are even lower that the mix of offense and defense that he brings to the position proves more valuable than what the Royals can already get from Callaspo.

If the Royals were a Strat-o-matic team and the players were cards that could be swapped in and out whimsically, there would be a way to get everyone some playing time. Teahen starts in good home run parks and when Greinke is on the mound. Bloomquist starts occasionally against left-handers or when Hochevar pitches; Callaspo gets the rest of the playing time. Teahen supplements his at-bats by starting a couple times a month at third, left, right, and first base, and is the first left-handed pinch-hitter off the bench.

Players are not Strat-o-matic cards, but it’s a good exercise for a manager to think of his players purely in terms of their skill sets, their strengths and weaknesses, before figuring out how to deploy them. When he was hired, one of Trey Hillman’s strengths was supposed to be his willingness to use his entire roster in just such a fashion. We saw glimpses of that last season, but if Teahen handles his second base audition well enough, Hillman has the opportunity to prove his chops by the way he apportions out playing time at second base.

But my biggest issue with Teahen at second base is simply that I think the Royals are floating this idea out there for all the wrong reasons. I don’t think the Royals want to try Teahen at second base because they’ve suddenly become willing to sacrifice defense for offense, or that think he could be the second coming of Jeff Kent over there. I think the Royals want to try Teahen at second base because they don’t have any idea what to do with Teahen. Well, they did have an idea – they wanted to trade him, and don’t believe Moore’s denials – but that didn’t work out. The way the market has cratered for league-average talent, I can’t say I’m surprised. Why trade anything for Mark Teahen and his $3 million salary when you can sign Eric Hinske, as the Pirates did, for half that?

You could argue that the Royals should just cut Teahen rather than pay him the salary he’s going to make in arbitration. If Teahen hits like he did last year, he’s not worth $3 million. The argument for keeping him isn’t simply that he might approach his 2006 form again, but that if he does, you then get to keep him at below-market value for 2010 and 2011 as well.

But he can’t justify his salary if he’s not getting at-bats. I suppose this is one way of getting Teahen those at-bats. I think it’s worth a try, and I credit the Royals for entertaining the idea. I also think that come Opening Day, we’ll have already long forgotten the idea that the Royals ever thought Mark Teahen could play second base.

Jonah and the Whale of a Contract.

Clearly, I need to withdraw my support for Dayton Moore more often.

Twenty-four hours later, judging from the reaction in every part of Royals Nation, I think my incessant drumbeat for this contract to get done – going back to May of last year – has been vindicated. Rarely does a baseball transaction meet with such unanimous support. The only people unhappy with this contract are covetous Yankee fans (which is to say, all of them).

So with the acknowledgment that this is a tremendous coup for the Royals, let’s take a step back for a second and peruse this contract with cold, beady, analytical, little eyes. Greinke signed a 4-year, $38 million contract, which breaks down as:

2009: $3.75 million

2010: $7.25 million

2011: $13.5 million

2012: $13.5 million

The contract evenly splits into two parts: Greinke gets paid $11 million for his two arbitration years, and $27 million to surrender two years of free agency.

Between this year and next, Greinke was almost certain to make at least $11 million in arbitration awards – the midpoint between his offer and the team’s for 2009 was $3.9 million, and as a five-year player next winter he would have been able to use contracts signed by free agents as comparables when arguing before the arbitrator. Assuming he stayed healthy enough to make 30 starts in 2009, he almost certainly would have been awarded $7.1 million in 2010; if he had another year like 2008 in 2009, he probably would have made $8-9 million, and if he had a breakthrough season this year, he could have made a case for eight figures.

The $27 million guaranteed in 2011-12 also seems to be a reasonable discount any way you slice it. Put it this way: if Greinke were a free agent today, even in this economy, does anyone doubt that he’d get at least $13.5 million a year? Derek Lowe just got a four-year, $60 million contract from the Braves, and if you asked 30 GMs who they’d rather have under contract for the next four years, I’d have to think the majority would pick Greinke. Greinke’s ERA+ the last two years are 123 and 127, Lowe’s are 118 and 131. Lowe has proven durability and groundball tendencies, but then, he’s also 11 years older than Zack.

I think 4/$60 is a good ballpark for what Greinke would earn in a free market today, and that’s a baseline – if even two teams think he’s about to blossom as a Cy Young contender, that could easily get pushed into the $18-20 million range. The Royals signed Greinke to, conservatively speaking, a 15% discount for the next four years even factoring in the arbitration awards. That seems a reasonable tradeoff from Greinke in exchange for guaranteeing him enough money to ensure that he’s never forced to work outside of baseball a day in his life.

The only sour note in the contract is the lack of an option year. Even one additional season of potential club control would dramatically alter my perception of the contract, but I don’t think it’s fair to harp on this omission for too much, for the simple reason that I think that Moore and the Royals understood how valuable that option would have been and would have found a way to insert one if they could have. Moore gave a telling quote in the press conference when he said, “It was important for us to be very aggressive and do what we can to sign Zack for as many years as he felt comfortable with.” The key words are, “he felt comfortable with.”

Greinke deserves credit for committing to the Royals into his free agency years, but let’s be frank: this is still a franchise that has one winning season in the last 14 years, and it would neither surprise nor disappoint me if Greinke put his foot down and said, look, I want to stick around, but if we’re still the laughingstock of the league in 2012, I’m out of here, and there’s no way you’re getting me to give up that option. Under those circumstances, Moore did the best he could do, and that was still more than good enough.

The best way to evaluate this contract is to compare it with the ones signed by comparable pitchers, starting with Scott Kazmir, who we’ve used as Greinke’s best comp since Kazmir signed his contract last May. Here’s the two contracts side-by-side:

Year Kazmir Greinke

2009 $6 M $3.75 M

2010 $8 M $7.25 M

2011 $12 M $13.5 M

2012 $13.5 M* $13.5 M

Total $39.5 M $38 M

*: or $2.5 million buyout

Greinke and Kazmir are extremely comparable pitchers not just because of their track records and the fact that both were 2002 first-round picks who are the same age (Greinke is three months older), but also that their service time is almost identical: Greinke has 4 years, 57 days of service, Kazmir is at 4 and 42. Their contracts are structured differently – Greinke’s is more backloaded, and the total compensation is less, but his fourth year is guaranteed, whereas the Rays can walk away from $11 million in the event of a serious injury.

From a team standpoint, Greinke’s contract saves you about $2 million over four years, but Kazmir’s contract comes with an $11 million insurance policy. I’m not an actuary, so I have no idea which contract is worth more in the abstract, but I’m sure it’s pretty close. The difference is that Kazmir signed his deal with nearly three years until free agency, whereas Greinke signed his just two years away. For a small-market team trying to get a player to give up years of free agency, time is money – but it would appear that waiting an extra eight months to get this deal done didn’t cost the Royals a dime. Certainly the economy plays a role in that – David Glass continues to weather the recession as well as anyone – but regardless of the economy, the Royals did very well for themselves.

A player that I’ve never used as a comp before, but probably should have, is the Tigers’ Jeremy Bonderman, who two years ago (when, like Greinke, he was two years away from free agency) signed a four-year contract. Bonderman had just come off a 14-8, 4.02 season, 214 innings, 214 hits, 64 walks, 202 Ks – very similar to Greinke’s 202 innings, 202 hits, 56 walks, 183 Ks. Bonderman was actually a year younger than Greinke is today. He got $38 million, exactly what Greinke got, and it was a little more frontloaded ($4.5, $8.5, $12.5, $12.5).

Looking at these numbers, I have to think that Bonderman’s contract was prominently used in these contract negotiations as a standard. The market value for a budding ace in his early 20s had been set, and Greinke was willing to accept that market value without inflation. This tells me that, as much as I would have liked this deal to have been done a lot sooner, the holdup had nothing to do with the money.

So while it’s easy for me to whine that the contract is for “only” four years, the fact is that there is very little precedent for a team going beyond four years with a young pitcher, and in every other way Greinke’s contract compares favorably with those doled out to his peers over the last few seasons. It’s not an A+ move from Moore without an option, but it’s definitely an A.

I can see the argument, as cogently expressed here by Will McDonald, that the Greinke contract is a solid move but not a tour de force by any means. All that the Royals accomplished, in a sense, was the rights to a single player for two additional years, and in return they awarded that player the two largest single-season salaries in franchise history. And in two years, we’ll be right back where we were last week, with Greinke two years away from free agency and another deadline looming.

But I disagree with this assessment, because to me the Royals didn’t just get Zack Greinke to commit to the franchise for the next four years. They got Greinke to commit to the franchise for the next four years and kept open the possibility for an even longer commitment. The sense of urgency that I’ve had this past year to get Greinke signed wasn’t simply out of concern that Greinke’s price tag might increase beyond the Royals’ ability to pay. I wasn’t worried that Greinke would leave in two years because he was too expensive; I was worried that Greinke would leave in two years because he wanted to leave. Period.

We’ve seen this pattern before, and I was becoming increasingly worried that we were seeing it again. The Royals had started to get sorta kinda serious about signing Carlos Beltran to a long-term deal by 2003, but by then Beltran had already made his mind up that he was testing the market come hell or high water. I don’t blame Beltran for this, because there was a time when he was willing to sign an extension that might have bought out a year or two of free agency, and the Royals botched that window badly. But the reality is that once that window had closed, there was no way the Royals could re-open it.

I’ve been saying all along that, on paper, Greinke seems like the kind of player and person that might just be willing to stay in Kansas City for the long term. He is, obviously, a unique person. He may have learned to live with his social anxiety disorder, but it is still a part of who he is, and it’s unlikely that the seductive charms of New York or LA or Boston would appeal to him as much as they do so many other ballplayers. As Greinke said, “Kansas City is actually a great town for me. It’s pretty small, but it’s big, too.” Kansas City isn’t big enough for a lot of players; it’s big enough for Greinke. His personality would suggest that he would be happy to trade a little fame and fortune to stay in a comfortable and familiar environment for the rest of his career, and in Kansas City he has that: an organization that has nurtured him since high school, a friendly and small local media contingent, an adoring fan base. On paper, I thought Greinke was a candidate not to just sign a long-term deal with the Royals, but if all went well, to sign several of them.

Until yesterday, that was all a theory. I thought Greinke would be comfortable playing in a medium-sized city where he can have all the anonymity he wants, that he didn’t have a case of wanderlust, that he appreciated how the Royals stood with him in his darkest hours. I thought all that, but I didn’t know. Now I know, and that’s what makes this contract particularly sweet. At the risk of coming off as a naïve and sentimental sap, I believe (and have been told this by other sources) what Sam Mellinger said in his column: that this deal got done at least in part because Greinke saw the way that he was received by Royals fans on the caravan, and the way that David Glass treated him in a heart-to-heart, and decided that maybe the grass under his feet was green enough.

My inner fan says that between the Royals Caravan and the FanFest, Greinke felt the love from Royals fans, and decided to reciprocate. (My inner analyst was about to respond, but my inner fan decked him before he could talk, then stomped on his glasses and pocket protector for good measure.)

Now, having signed him once, it ought to be easier to sign Greinke again. For a player about to reach free agency for the first time, two years away seems to be the cutoff – once a player gets into the penultimate year before free agency, he’s too close to the finish line to surrender a taste of the free agent market. But with Zack having already established that he’s willing to re-sign, I don’t think the urgency that we had this winter will be there two years from now. The Royals can probably go into the 2011 season before they need to re-visit the issue of another extension, and possibly even until the 2011-12 off-season, when Greinke enters the final year of his contract.

That gives Moore three seasons to get things right, to put the Royals into contention and persuade Greinke to stick around a while longer. That’s crucial, because while I have very little conviction one way or the other as to how good the Royals will be in 2009, I have a good deal of faith that by 2010 and especially 2011, they should be an above-average major league team.

This is going to be a very interesting season, because the error bars on so many players are just so darn high. From Mike Aviles to Alex Gordon to Billy Butler to Kyle Davies to even Jose Guillen, there are an inordinate number of key Royals who could make the All-Star team or be on the bench by July, and right now you could tell me the Royals will win anywhere from 69 to 89 games and I wouldn’t flinch.

With Greinke unsigned, a season closer to the lower end of that range would have likely spelled the end of his tenure in Kansas City. Instead, the Royals have a built-in margin for error; if 2009 goes poorly, they can regroup next year, without having to worry that they may have lost a part of their future in the process. With Greinke signed, every key member of the Royals is under club control for the next three years. Zack’s signed through 2012; Gil Meche through 2011; David DeJesus has a club option through 2011. Soria is ours through 2014. Should either Davies or Mark Teahen have a breakout year, the Royals can keep them through 2011. Gordon can’t leave until after 2012, Butler until after 2013, Aviles until after 2014.

The year 2011 has long stuck out for me as the year the Royals could really make a statement – not only is every player above under contract, but Mike Moustakas might be ready to join the lineup somewhere, and with a ton of money being freed up after the 2010 season when Guillen’s contract expires (to which we can now add Coco Crisp’s, Kyle Farnsworth’s, and Willie Bloomquist’s), there’s a ripe opportunity for Moore to augment a built-to-win roster with a premium free agent or two.

But that calculus didn’t work so long as Greinke could walk after the 2010 season. With that loophole closed, Moore & Company can focus on building a long-term winner without having to worry that short-term considerations might impede their ability to keep their young nucleus of talent together.

Not that the Royals should stop trying to bind that young core to the team. Since Moore is evidently taking my requests, let me throw the gauntlet down: if you don’t want me to withdraw my support again, Dayton, then you’ll start laying the groundwork for a long-term deal (say, 2010-2013, with a 2014 option) with Alex Gordon now. But first you’ll have to sign Ben Sheets to a contract. Oh, and I want to throw out the first pitch at a game this summer. And my daughters want a pony…

Boo. Effing. Yah.

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" - John Maynard Keynes.

I hope to have a longer post later, once we have the full details of the contract. For now, suffice it to say that I withdraw the withdrawal of my support for Dayton Moore. Well played, sir. We'll just call Willie Bloomquist the price of doing business.

And if it so happens that there's an option year or two tucked in at the end of the four-year contract, well, it's probably a good thing I already named my daughter.

Introducing...

…Amira Rayanne Jazayerli, who was born on Sunday, January 18^th, at 6:50 am. Despite being born a few weeks early, she weighed in at a healthy 7 pounds, 6 ounces, and she and her mother are doing very well, thank God – they left the hospital yesterday. Grandmothers are in town to help with the baby and – equally importantly – with her older sisters, allowing me to go back to my usual routine of goofing off on the internet all evening.

Things are slowly returning to normal, although I fear that my standards for what constitute “normal” will once again slip a little bit. But between the baby, my first experience with sciatica (mild, thankfully – I can’t imagine how bad a severe case would be) courtesy of an 11-year-old snowboarder who plowed into my back while I was sitting on the snow adjusting my board, and a computer crash which necessitated a complete reformatting of my hard drive – there’s been a lot of distractions going on around here. I appreciate your patience.

I’ll try to return to my Time Capsule on the 1995-96 Royals shortly, and I’m excited about the first RotR player interview, which hopefully will be ready soon. The interview has gone so well that we might run it over at Baseball Prospectus; if it does, it should be a non-premium article so that everyone can read it.

In the meantime, I owe you guys some Royals stuff to chew on…let’s talk about the arbitration cases, some that have settled, some that haven’t. Among the ones that did, there’s Jimmy Gobble, who will make almost exactly what he made last year ($1.35 million) in the hopes that he won’t pitch like he did in 2008 (8.81 ERA). Even in his worst season, Gobble held lefties to a line of .200/.246/.323; his one disastrous ten-run outing raised his ERA about two-and-a-half points. Between Ron Mahay, John Bale, and possibly Horacio Ramirez, the Royals have neither reason nor temptation to use Gobble except in the strictest of LOOGY roles. I’d argue that such a role isn’t a valuable use of a roster spot, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Gobble can be effective enough in that role to justify his salary.

Joel Peralta got $640,000. As a general rule, if you’re eligible for arbitration and settle for a six-figure salary, it’s tantamount to admitting that you’re lucky you’re still on the roster in the first place. Peralta’s salary is barely over the league minimum; a greater concern for the Royals is that he’s a good bet to be left off the roster completely, and I believe he’s out of options. Arbitration salaries are only one-sixth guaranteed, so while I’d advocate the Royals do the merciful thing and put Peralta out of his misery now, it’s hard to get worked up over 100 grand.

John Buck got $2.9 million, which just makes him and Miguel Olivo ($2.7 million) that much more indistinguishable. Every day I wait for Dayton Moore to realize how superfluous it is to have two low-OBP, moderate-power right-handed catchers in their late 20s on the roster, let alone to pay each of them close to $3 million, especially when you have a switch-hitting contact-oriented catcher in Brayan Pena who’s ready for a backup role (and out of options) and will get paid around the league minimum. So far, a trade is not forthcoming. I’m sure there is a plan here, but like a lot of Moore’s decisions this winter, I haven’t been able to pierce the shroud that covers it.

Four players have exchanged figures with the Royals. Three of them – Mark Teahen ($3.85/$3.05), Mike Jacobs ($3.8/$2.75), and Brian Bannister ($2.025/$1.45) are relatively inconsequential. The disparities in dollars are not enormous, none of the numbers appear out of whack, and there’s no reason for the Royals to sign any of the three to a long-term deal at this point. The Royals have not gone to an arbitration hearing with any player in the Moore era, and I don’t see that changing with these three guys – expect all three to settle near the midpoint.

The fourth player is Zack Greinke, who is asking for $4.4 million, and whom the Royals offered $3.4 million. Granted that I’m not any kind of expert in the arbitration process, but I must say that I found both of these numbers kind of low. I mean, Prince Fielder just signed a two-year deal with Milwaukee, but before signing he had submitted an arbitration figure of $8 million and the Brewers had countered with $6 million. Yes, Fielder has certainly had a better 2007-08 than Greinke did, but then, he’s just a three-year player, whereas Grienke is a four-year player.

I don’t mean to suggest that either side made a mistake. I’m just saying that the arbitration process does not assess the future value of a player so much as his past value, and in Greinke’s case – largely because he was not a full-time starter until 2008 – this has the effect of depressing his earning potential. Which, of course, helps the Royals.

But that help is likely to be fleeting if Moore doesn’t use this as an opening to get a long-term deal done. Greinke is going to make $4 million in 2009, more or less; if he has another season in 2009 as he did in 2008, I imagine his arbitration award in 2010 would be in the 8-10 million range. So let’s say $13 million over the next two years. I have previously advocated that the Royals offer Greinke a 4-year, $44 million deal – if anything, that might be generous, as it would be pegging his value in 2011-2012 at $31 million over two years. If Greinke continues to pitch like an ace, $15.5 million a year might well prove to be a bargain; on the other hand, in this economy that might prove to be his upside. More importantly, the cost certainty of having that contract in hand today instead of two years from now is worth a discount.

Cole Hamels just signed a 3-year, $20.5 million deal. Hamels, like Greinke and Scott Kazmir, is a product of the 2002 draft (nice first round for high school pitchers there), but is a super-two player who’s eligible for arbitration for the first time, so his salary is not exactly comparable. But keep in mind that his track record is significantly better than Greinke’s as well.

When you look at all the contract precedents out there, you can’t help but conclude that the Royals should be able to get a deal done for 4/44, or maybe even 4/40. (Or, better still, 4/40 with an option year or two in the $12-16 million range.) The Royals can absolutely afford such a contract, particularly since the contract can easily be backloaded – just transfer the money that Jose Guillen is stealing from the team to Greinke once JoGui’s contract is up.

I know I can’t go more than a few weeks without bringing up Greinke’s contract status and suggesting some new contract permutation that will work for both sides. But this is important, dammit. Everything else this winter is just window dressing. If Moore wants my support back, there’s no quicker way to get it.

Call me the incorrigible optimist that I am, but I think this could still happen. Greinke’s recent comments to Sam Mellinger left the door open to a long-term deal. There’s nothing in these arbitration numbers that send up a red flag. And while all the motion this winter hasn’t produced a lot of movement, it has at least produced the perception of movement in the minds of a lot of people – and people who happen to play for the Kansas City Royals are likely to perceive the acquisitions of established major league players a lot more positively than you or I. I’m not sure the Royals are any better than they were at the end of last season, but if they look better to Zack Greinke, and that factors into his decision to sign a long-term deal, then suddenly you have to look at the acquisitions of Jacobs, Farnsworth, Bloomquist et al in a much different light.

There’s a good chance that on Opening Day, for the second straight year, the Royals will not have any rookies on their roster. (Technically, Yasuhiko Yabuta was last year, but you get the idea.) That’s not ordinarily the sign of a young and improving team, but of course the Royals have tons of second- and third-year players. The difference is that jobs are not simply being handed to minor leaguers; they have to earn them. It’s very easy to take that philosophy too far and deprive deserving minor leaguers of a chance to perform in the majors – but the alternative, as we saw in the Allard Baird years, is that a team promotes every Tom, Ambiorix, and Leo who has a few hot weeks in Double-A. That philosophy didn’t simply stunt the development of some talented players – it also fed the perception that the Royals were a Mickey Mouse operation, that they weren’t a creditable major league organization. It’s no wonder that Greinke said, in his imitable way:

“The main way I look at it,” he says, “four years ago, when they asked me to accept the pitcher’s award, I was like, ‘Do I really have to? Do I have to go and say a bunch of stuff I don’t really mean? Whatever.’

“But now, when you look at how the team’s run, the team’s looking better, everything’s going in the right direction instead of at a standstill, you’re proud to do it. I don’t mind doing it. If it helps the team, I’ll be more than happy to do it.”

I don’t agree that everything is going in the right direction. But I can’t deny that if Greinke thinks that, well, perception drives reality. If Moore gets Greinke signed to a long-term deal between now and Opening Day, we’ll have to give him credit for being craftier than we thought.

That’s a big if. And the clock is ticking.