More (and Moore) on Betancourt.

If there’s one silver lining to the Betancourt trade, it’s the reaction from the local media. I have to think that Dayton Moore was taken aback by just how uniformly angry the response has been – heck, I was – which may have prompted his appearance on The Border Patrol Monday morning to defend the trade.

It’s been said many times before, but a sidebar to the mess that Kansas City baseball has been for the last 20 years is the fact that there probably isn’t a media environment in any major league city that would have been as accommodating and respectful of a front office that embraced sabermetric analysis as there is in Kansas City. I mean, look at Boston. Everyone in New England trusts in the stat guys now – but it’s hard to distrust them after they broke an 86-year streak and won two World Series in four years. (Not that Dan Shaughnessy doesn’t try.)

But do you recall the mocking and the outrage that descended on the Red Sox front office when they tried the bullpen by committee back in 2003? “Bill James” became an epithet for most of that summer. It’s a testament to the quality of the front office – from owner John Henry on down – that they stuck with their analytical approach despite tremendous media pressure to dumb it down.

That media pressure never would have happened in Kansas City. And it certainly wouldn’t happen now. For a quarter century the Royals have obstinately refused to acknowledge the efforts, if not the existence, of statistical analysis – and for a quarter century the team has inexorably slid down from the peak of a world championship to the lowly depths of one of the most embarrassing franchises in American sports. You don’t have to be Pavlov to deduce that the first half of that sentence may have contributed to the second.

And I think that this fact is part of the reason why we – me specifically and the Kansas City media generally – responded as viscerally and vehemently as we did against the Betancourt trade. It’s not just the nuts and bolts of the trade that set us off – it’s what the trade represents.

I do think that there’s something to the idea, as Joe Posnanski put it, that “one of the more frustrating things about being a fan is when you root for a team that so clearly has a different philosophy about sports than you have about sports.” Since the time I picked up Bill James’ final Abstract when I was 13, my philosophy about baseball has been to use statistical analysis as one of the ingredients – not the only ingredient, but one of the most important ones – to build a winning franchise. But my frustration runs deeper than that. Let’s face it: we’d all rather that our favorite teams win with a style we don’t favor than to lose with a style we do. There are a lot of things the New England Patriots do that make their fans uncomfortable…but I’m sure none of them care so long as the team does well. That same style has been imported to Arrowhead Stadium, and as disgusted as I am by the Chiefs’ astonishing arrogance and secrecy*, the cold reality is that if they go to the AFC Championship Game in the next two or three years, I won’t care less what goes on behind the wall.

*: You know how some NFL coaches will talk about preparing their team as if they’re literally going to war? The Chiefs have gone one better: they’re acting like the NFL is MORE important than war. Seriously – our military was more forthcoming with the press during the Iraq war than the Chiefs are today.

So it’s more than just that the Royals aren’t doing things the way I’d do them. For one thing, they’re doing things their way and it’s not working. The Royals have had four different GM’s over the last four years, but just one offensive philosophy: swing away. For over 25 years – really, since Whitey Herzog was fired in 1979 and Darryl Porter joined him in St. Louis a year later – the Royals have deprioritized plate discipline. It took a few years for the results to kick in, but since then they’ve been kicking the team on a consistent basis – usually in the ass.

But it’s not just that the Royals continue to use a different baseball philosophy despite the lack of results; that was the case under Allard Baird as well. The difference is that the current administration gives off a sense of smugness about their approach. It’s not just that they think their method is superior – it’s that they’re so certain that they know what they’re doing that they can’t even be bothered to acknowledge that other approaches exist.

The culmination of this attitude was, as has been widely reported, Moore’s frank acknowledgment during his interview that “The defensive statistics – I still really don’t understand how some of those statistics are evaluated, I really don’t. When you watch baseball games every single day, it’s very apparent who can play defensively and who can’t.”

Look, I really don’t enjoy picking on Dayton Moore. I’m still trying to figure out how everything went so wrong this season – barely two months ago I was groveling at the foot of Dean Taylor on our radio show, and now I’m at the top of the Royals’ most-wanted list. In the middle of Moore’s interview he took an unprovoked shot at some – okay, one – of his critics. “And I know that because of our injuries, some of our medical team has taken some hits on that – and very unfairly…we’ve improved out medical team in waves of waves…and I feel bad that some of them have taken some heat because of that.”

Those words need no translation, particularly since I was slated to come on the show half an hour later: “Rany Jazayerli is a schmuck.”

I used to be one of this administration’s biggest cheerleaders, and I feel like I’ve accidentally become the leader of the resistance movement. You’d think I surreptitiously saw Moore swallow a live rat whole, then on my way out of Kauffman Stadium got into a fight with J.J. Picollo and ripped off his protective skin, exposing the green scales underneath. Maybe I should go by “Mike Donovan” from now on. (Kudos to the seven of you who get the TV reference. For those who don’t: rest assured I’m not saying the front office is made up of a bunch of lizards or snakes. I’m saying they’re a bunch of aliens.)

But really, this quote is just incredible in its hubris. If Moore had said he didn’t agree with the statistics, well, that’s fair – defensive statistics are still not fully mature, although they’ve certainly reached the adolescent stage.

But he didn’t say he didn’t agree with them – he said he didn’t understand them. And then he threw in the usual boilerplate about how you can only evaluate players if you watch baseball games every single day (because, you know, only people who work in the Royals front office watch games every single day.) That’s the team’s attitude in a nutshell: we know how to build a winning baseball team, and we’re so certain in our knowledge that we can’t be bothered to look at opposing points of view, even if only to refute them.

This attitude – of being proudly incurious – sums up what’s wrong with the Royals. It’s not that they can’t learn – they don’t want to learn. It’s not a matter of intelligence – as the poster Devil Fingers at royalsreview.com has pointed out, Moore has a master’s degree, while Billy Beane never went to college. It’s a matter of having a commitment to learning new things. The Royals appear to be afraid of having their horizons broadened. No one’s saying they have to agree with the defensive statistics that unanimously identify Betancourt as a terrible defensive player. But dammit, don’t they have an obligation to at least understand them?

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of baseball fans on the internet who understand not just the general premise of Ultimate Zone Rating, or John Dewan’s plus/minus, or David Pinto’s Probabilistic Model of Range, or Dan Fox’s Simple Fielding Runs, or a half-dozen other advanced fielding metrics – they also understand the nuances that distinguish between each of them. And they do it for no greater incentive than their own desire to better understand the game of baseball. Meanwhile, there are only 30 GM positions in the world – is it really too much to expect all 30 of the guys who hold that position to learn this stuff as part of their job?

The dichotomy between scouts and stats is a false one, because scouting reports and statistical analysis are simply two sides of the same coin. That coin is information. It’s a GM’s job to have the best, most complete information available when making decisions. Not all information is equally valuable – but there’s no way to sift out the nuggets of useful stuff from the chaff of data if you don’t have the data in the first place. Instead of looking at defensive statistics as information – as one piece of the puzzle – the Royals have made a prior decision that nothing of value could possibly be contained therein.

The most brilliant people can make the most terrible decisions – and this is true in all walks of life, from business to politics – when they’re afraid to challenge their preconceived notions, and ignore anything that might sway them from what they want to do. We know for a fact that Moore has pined after Betancourt for years, and it appears to me that, having long ago decided that Betancourt was a player he wanted, he found a way to make the information at hand today justify that decision.

When Moore was hired, his lack of a statistical background didn’t bother me at all. I figured that, he was obviously a brilliant guy (and he is), and would be smart enough to learn the statistical side as part of his job. It’s a lot easier to understand the numbers (or hire someone who does) than it is to learn how to scout, and I’d rather start with a GM who has proven he knows how to scout ballplayers and trust that he’d learn the other stuff. The guy I frequently compared Moore to was Dave Dombrowski, who I’ve long had the greatest respect for even though he’s a scout first and foremost.

The difference is that Dombrowski, as confident as he is in his own abilities (and believe me, he’s a confident guy), has never been too arrogant – or too intimidated – to factor in statistics when the need arises. A great example of this would be this off-season, when the Tigers decided to revamp the defense on their aging roster. The lynchpin of this renovation was to bring in a new everyday shortstop in the form of Adam Everett.

Now, Everett is a terrible hitter; always has been, always will be. He’s hitting .262/.318/.354, which are his best numbers in five years. But Everett has arguably the best defensive statistics of any shortstop this decade – which is to say, since advanced fielding metrics came into existence. He’s long been a cause celebre among stats guys, sort of the anti-Derek Jeter. (John Dewan and Bill James did a fascinating comparison between the two in the first edition of the Fielding Bible.)

Even though he’s lost a step this season, he has still been a huge upgrade for the Tigers in the field. The Tigers’ defensive efficiency has improved significantly since last year – and after giving up the third-most runs in the AL last year, they currently have given up the third-fewest runs in the league this year.

Essentially, Everett’s performance this year is what the Royals expect from Betancourt. The difference is that Adam Everett was signed to a one-year, $1 million contract. (And he didn’t cost anything in the way of prospects.)

As one friend put it to me, “this is worse than the Neifi Perez trade, because this time the GM didn’t have a gun to his head.” It’s hard to argue with that. Ownership gave Allard Baird 36 hours to trade Dye; it was Baird’s fault that he traded for Perez – the Royals would have been better off just releasing Dye – but there were extenuating circumstances. (The story just keeps getting worse. While ownership’s complicity in the Dye trade has long been well-known, I was informed me on the radio on Monday that a few months prior to the Neifi trade, Baird had agreed to trade Dye to the Blue Jays for Vernon Wells. Ownership nixed it.)

But you can’t blame the Glasses for this one. This one is all on Moore.

To respond to some of the criticisms in the comments section from my last post:

1) A few people have felt that my criticism of this deal is hypocritical given that I was advocating that the Royals trade for Jeff Francoeur, who has many of the same weaknesses that Betancourt does.

Sorry, but I don’t see it. I advocated that the Royals take a flyer on Francoeur, because his trade value had dwindled to the point that he could be acquired for almost nothing. (The Mets got him for Ryan Church, who wasn’t hitting all that well and had worn out his welcome in New York for off-the-field reasons – and the Mets are still being killed for giving up too much of the deal.)

I liked the idea of grabbing Francoeur because I thought he could be acquired without giving up a top prospect – if the Royals had traded Cortes for Francoeur, I would have argued that they gave up too much. But even so, I would have been a lot less upset than I am with this trade.

- Francoeur is 25. Betancourt is 27.

- Francoeur has a history of above-average performances at the major-league level. He had an OPS+ of 126 as a 21-year-old rookie, and an OPS+ of 103 just two years ago. Betancourt’s career-high in OPS+ is 93.

- Francoeur walked 42 times in 2007, and 39 times last year. Betancourt has never walked 18 times in a season.

- While Francoeur’s recent defensive numbers aren’t so hot, just two years ago he was 17 runs above-average in right field according to UZR; he’s +35 for his career. By contrast, the defensive numbers have always hated Betancourt. He topped out at 1.1 runs above average as a rookie, and his numbers have declined literally every year since: +1.1, +0.7, -1.1, -12.6, and -8.2 (in half a season this year). His career performance is -20.

- And most importantly by far, Francoeur is only under contract for the rest of this season. He’s making $3.375 million this year, meaning that if the Royals had traded for him, they would only be on the hook for about $1.6 million or so. If they liked what they saw, they could keep him for another season at the same price or less (it’s highly unlikely that he would have earned a raise in arbitration) – but if after an 80-game audition they didn’t like what they saw, they could cut him without repercussions. Betancourt, on the other hand, is guaranteed $7 million by the Royals even if they cut him tomorrow.

I can’t stress this enough: the problem with trading for Betancourt isn’t that the Royals got Betancourt – it’s that they got Betancourt’s contract. Dayton Moore claimed in the radio interview that if Betancourt had been a free agent, and the Royals had signed him to a 2-year, $5 million contract, they would have been applauded for it.

First off, he’s not counting the $2 million buyout of his $6 million option for 2012. The $2 million is a sunk cost, so really this is a $7 million contract with a $4 million option. Secondly: are you freaking kidding me? There isn’t a team in baseball – outside of Kansas City – that would have made that offer.

Forget Moore’s ignorance of statistics for a moment – an equally big problem here seems to be Moore’s ignorance of Betancourt’s reputation. The Mariners were DESPERATE to unload him. While the front office is a little too dignified to be publicly high-fiving themselves, everyone else in Seattle is. It’s not just the fans that are throwing parades – the sportswriters who cover the Mariners have been openly stupefied by how the Mariners were not only able to unload Betancourt, but how they could do so while 1) picking up just a quarter of his contract and 2) getting prospects in return. NO ONE in Seattle thought this was possible, for good reason.

Before Moore pats himself on the back for getting Betancourt signed to such a small contract, he might want to ask himself why, if Betancourt’s contract was so favorable to the Royals, no other team had any interest in acquiring him. And why the Mariners were so willing to oblige him.

2) A lot of commenters have defended this trade using the argument that even if Betancourt isn’t a great player, he is such an upgrade over Tony Pena that there’s no question the trade makes the Royals better, and you can’t fault Moore for a move that improves the team in the here and now.

I hate, hate, hate this line of reasoning, if for no other reason than the core of the argument is that the ROYALS HAVE TONY PENA ON THEIR ROSTER. Tony Pena isn’t just the worst quasi-regular player in the major leagues today – he’s perhaps the worst quasi-regular hitter in the majors in at least a generation. Since the start of last season, over the course of 276 at-bats, Pena is hitting .156/.178/.192. Read that again: .156/.178/.192. His OPS+ is exactly 0.

Since the time my dad bought me my first Baseball Encyclopedia when I was 6 years old, I have been fascinated with Ray Oyler, the shortstop for the 1968 Tigers, who hit a remarkable .135/.213/.186 that season in 215 at-bats. Oyler’s 1968 is generally considered to be the worst season by a hitter in the expansion era – he was so bad that after the Tigers clinched the pennant, manager Mayo Smith decided to bench Oyler in favor of fourth outfielder Mickey Stanley, who had never played shortstop before in the majors. Stanley took over as the starting shortstop the last week of the season, and was the starting shortstop in every game of the World Series – which the Tigers won in seven. Stanley would never start another game at shortstop in his career.

Amazingly, Oyler had a higher OPS in 1968 (399) than Pena has over the last two seasons (370). And that’s not even accounting for league environment – 1968 was the year of the pitcher, when the AL as a whole hit .230/.297/.339.

Tony Pena Jr. has supplanted Ray Oyler as the worst hitter to garner significant playing time in the last 50 years. If the best argument you can make for Betancourt is that he’s better than Pena…well, you’ve just proved my point.

The irony is that this was the same argument that was used when the Royals acquired Pena in the first place. Remember how desperate we were for a shortstop at the end of spring training in 2007? It was clear that Angel Berroa was not about to come out of his seasons-long tailspin, and the Royals needed a better alternative. The Royals stretched the meaning of “better alternative” to the breaking point, trading a decent prospect in Eric Cordier to Atlanta in exchange for Pena, who was out of options and was not a lock for the Braves’ roster.

A lot of Royals fans were just thrilled that the team had upgraded from a no-hit, no-field shortstop to a no-hit, good-field shortstop. The rest of us thought it was rather ridiculous that the Royals felt they had to give up a prospect in order to acquire a player who was about to be released – and who was no better than half-a-dozen other no-hit, good-field shortstops in Triple-A.

Here we are two years later, and the same shortstop that so many fans were thrilled to acquire has become such a piñata that many of the same fans are thrilled that the Royals overpaid for Yuniesky Betancourt – who, again, was in danger of being released at some point, and who is no better than a lot of league-minimum alternatives. The circle of life is complete.

Haven’t we learned from the Mike Jacobs debacle? When I ripped the Royals for trading Leo Nunez for Jacobs, one of the comments I received was, “Mike Jacobs gives us the lefty power bat that we lacked. He’s certainly an upgrade over last year’s starting 1B Ross Gload.” There were many others that delivered the same message: Jacobs > Gload, therefore Jacobs was worth acquiring. Really, guys? Was it really worth acquiring the guy hitting .222/.296/.412 as a DH, at the cost of a good reliever and millions of dollars? Or would it have been worth looking at the many, many other players out there who were better than Ross Gload, and trying to see if one of them was a better fit for the Royals than Jacobs?

Yuniesky Betancourt is better than Tony Pena. If that’s a reason to acquire Betancourt, then it’s also a reason to acquire half the starting shortstops in Triple-A. Hell, it’s a reason to acquire Angel Berroa, who the Mets just claimed on waivers. Does anyone doubt that Berroa can hit better than .156/.178/.192? Would you have been happy if the Royals acquired him?

The way to judge any acquisition is not simply to compare the acquired player to the guy he’s replacing. The way to judge the acquisition is to compare him to all the potential acquisitions out there. Whether it’s patching up the defense with another marginal hitter with a great glove, like Chin-Lung Hu, or trying to reclaim another player that has fallen out of his team’s good graces, like Julio Lugo, or taking a truly creative and ballsy gamble (Mike Moustakas for Alcides Escobar?) – the Royals had a lot of options to consider. All of them were better than sticking with Tony Pena – including just sticking with Willie Bloomquist for the rest of the season, then trying Mike Aviles again next year. (What happens when Aviles is ready to play next April? I’ll tell you what happens – the Royals will bury him, even though he has been a better player than Betancourt. They won’t bench the guy making seven figures for the guy making six figures.)

Trading for Yuniesky Betancourt didn’t have to be such a disaster. I see the Royals’ line of thinking here: Betancourt is a phenomenally talented player who might benefit from a change of scenery, and his price has never been lower. The fundamental mistake the Royals made was that they didn’t appreciate just how low Betancourt’s stock had fallen. If they had traded Saito alone – and made the Mariners pick up $6 million instead of just $3 million – this would have been a perfectly reasonable trade. And judging from the condolences I received after the team from front office types – no, not anyone who used to work at Baseball Prospectus – they still would have had the best offer on the table.

Instead, the Royals gave up Cortes and Saito, and are on the hook for $7 million. This is like buying Citigroup stock at $10 a share, and then when critics have the audacity to point out that the stock is only worth $3 a share today, defending yourself by saying that the stock was worth $50 just two years ago. Yeah, the Royals bought low. But they didn’t buy low enough.

3) Finally, I should address the criticisms that I’m bailing on the team as a fan, criticisms succinctly summed up by one commenter who called me “a pissy little bitch.” Fair enough. But I defy anyone to show me where I have ever expressed such a sentiment before. I didn’t bail on the team when they trade for Neifi, but this time it feels different.

Part of the difference isn’t with the Royals, it’s with me. When they traded for Neifi, I was 26 years old. Now I’m 34 years old and have three young children. It used to be that when the Royals would blow late-inning leads night after night, or make an incomprehensible trade that set the franchise back for years, I’d be in a funk for days, but that was my problem. Now there are innocent bystanders involved. I wasn’t pleasant company for my family to be around on Friday or Saturday, and that wasn’t fair to them. Frankly, I haven’t been great company for most of the last two months.

I gave a lot of thought to this over the weekend, about whether I could ever free myself of being a Royals fan. My old friend Jonah Keri has tried to tempt me, arguing that “It is so liberating not to have a favorite team. Your life will improve immeasurably.” But Jonah’s situation is different – he was a Montreal Expos fan. He didn’t abandon his team, his team abandoned him. Because of that, he never has to worry that one day his team might win without him. The reality is that however remote the odds are that the Royals might win, the notion that they might one day head to the playoffs without me is just too painful to consider.

So no, I can’t imagine rooting for any other team; if that makes me a flip-flopper, so be it. But I realized something else while I was out of town for the weekend – that I didn’t care how the Royals played in Boston, and more than that, the fact that I didn’t care was, as Jonah put it, liberating. Instead of sneaking peeks at my iPhone every few minutes, I could enjoy being with my family and friends all day, and then just check the box score at the end of the night. “The Royals scored nine runs and lost? Miguel Olivo was forced out at home plate by an outfielder? How funny!”

So that’s where I am now. For years, I’ve defended Rob Neyer from people who claim he’s no longer a Royals fan. You don’t have to be optimistic about your team to be a fan. You don’t have to live and die with every game to be a fan. If and when the Royals are in a legitimate pennant race in August, I have no doubt that Rob will be glued to his set. And I will be too. But like Rob, I think I’ll be a lot happier if I don’t show a greater commitment to the Royals than they show to me.

I can’t believe I’m about to paraphrase a line from Fever Pitch, but in all the years I’ve loved the Royals, they’ve never loved me back. And right now, they completely hate me – literally and figuratively. So maybe it’s time I stand up for myself and say, love can’t be a one-way street. We’ll still be friends, we’ll still keep in touch, I’ll call every now and again. But I can’t keep putting myself out there every night and keep getting rejected.

That “About Me” section has listed me as “pathetic Royals fan all the time” for the last two years. Maybe it’s time I stop being a pathetic Royals fan, and just be a Royals fan. When they’re good, I’ll care about them. When they’re not, I won’t. We’ll both be happier this way.

(If you want to tell me in person that I’ve become a fair-weather fan and a bandwagon jumper, make sure to come out to the park this Saturday at 5 PM. I hope to have a formal announcement up sometime tomorrow.)

The Breaking Point.

1…2…3…4…

Oh, how I long for the halcyon days when Nick Swartz was my greatest concern.

5…6…7…

When the Royals were mad at me instead of the other way around.

8…9…10…

Look, I could count all the stars in the sky and all the fish in the sea, and I still don’t think I will have calmed down. Sorry, mom. I actually finished writing this last night at midnight, but decided to sleep on it and read through it again in the morning. I’m afraid the sleep didn’t do me any good.

Eight years ago this July, the day the Royals traded Jermaine Dye for Neifi Perez, I came on Kevin Kietzman’s show and the first words out of my mouth were, “I have never been more embarrassed to be a Royals fan than I am right now.”

I wouldn’t say I feel as embarrassed at this very moment as I did that day. But in every other way, this moment is perhaps the lowest point I have ever reached as a Royals fan. I have never been more disheartened than I am right now. I have never been more disillusioned as than I am right now. I have never been more angry than I am right now.

It's almost like the Royals are openly mocking me. I might have been the one analyst in the world who was curious to see what Jeff Francoeur would look like in a Royals uniform, but on the day that Francoeur was traded – to the Mets for Ryan Church in a my-garbage-for-your-trash deal – the Royals found a way to trade for one of the few starting players in baseball who is worse than Francoeur is. According to Fangraphs, only eight players with at least 200 plate appearances have a lower Wins Above Replacement rating than Francoeur's -0.6 (yes, negative). One of those, naturally, is Yuniesky Betancourt.

Betancourt, in fact, ranks fourth-worst, ahead of only Brian Giles (whose career is, if not dead, then cryogenically frozen), the overmatched Emmanuel Burriss…and – I have to laugh – Jose Guillen.

For the privilege of acquiring one of the worst everyday players in the major leagues – and a contract that runs at least through 2011 – the Royals surrendered one of their top prospects in Danny Cortes, and an intriguing if low-upside arm in Derrick Saito.

There are some trades that look lopsided at first glance, but then you look at it from different angles, you start talking to people inside the game, and you start to think, okay, it’s a bad deal, but I can understand the team’s rationale. This is not one of those trades. This is a trade that makes you more and more dumbfounded the more you contemplate it. It’s like a defective Magic Eye poster.

Yuniesky Betancourt is a terrible baseball player. He hits for a decent average, yes. That sums up his baseball skills. He doesn’t hit for much power – he has never reached double digits in home runs. He doesn’t have much speed – he has 24 stolen bases in 44 attempts in his career. His plate discipline is positive Olivo-esque – his career high in walks is 17. And he plays terrible defense – according to Ultimate Zone Rating, he ranks dead last among all major league shortstops, an evaluation shared by essentially every advanced fielding metric.

Oh, and he’s 27 years old – the age when most players peak – only he’s actually had the worst year of his career so far, hitting just .250/.278/.330 and putting up the worst defensive numbers of his career.

Betancourt should not be starting at shortstop for any team in the major leagues. It’s questionable whether he should be a backup player in the majors. If Betancourt had been released by the Mariners (and there’s a possibility they might have done that this off-season), it would have been a tough call as to whether the Royals should have even signed him for the major league minimum.

The Royals will not be paying Betancourt the league minimum. While the Mariners have kicked in about $3 million over the remainder of his contract, Betancourt is due about $1 million the rest of this season, $3 million in 2010, $4 million in 2011, and a $2 million buyout in 2012 (unless they’d like to pick up his $6 million option). The Royals are on the hook for $7 million guaranteed to Betancourt over the next two-and-a-half seasons.

Oh, but it gets better. Cortes, who was the surprise breakout prospect acquired in the Mike MacDougal deal, entered the season ranked by Baseball America as the Royals’ #3 prospect overall. He has struggled this season, primarily with his command – he has walked 50 batters in 80 innings, with only 57 strikeouts, in a repeat performance in Double-A. On the other hand, he has allowed just three homers, and actually has a respectable 3.92 ERA. More importantly, he’s still just 22 years old – he’s four months younger than Aaron Crow. He might not have been the Royals’ #3 prospect anymore, but he still had a promising future, if not as a starter than certainly as a power reliever.

Saito was a minor steal out of the 16^th round last season; the Royals signed him to a six-figure bonus because despite standing just 5’9”, he threw in the low 90s with a funky arm angle. In 52 innings for Burlington, he had 53 strikeouts against just 15 walks, and lefties were hitting .196 against him. He has LOOGY possibilities if nothing else.

So, to recap: the Royals traded for one of the worst starting players in baseball; they agree to pick up most of his incredibly over-priced contract that runs for at least two more full seasons; they surrendered a very good prospect and another decent arm for the privilege.

I promised last time that I would try not to make my criticisms personal, so I’m not going to say that Dayton Moore is a moron, a pinhead, or an intellectual cripple. I have no doubt that Dayton Moore is a very smart man. So what I will say instead is that yesterday, a very smart man made one of the dumbest moves in the history of the Kansas City Royals. And that’s saying something.

The Royals will defend this move by saying that they had a huge hole to fill at shortstop. To which I would reply, yes, you had a huge hole at shortstop, and guess what? You still have a huge hole at shortstop.

Seventeen years ago the Royals protected David Howard in the expansion draft over Jeff Conine because, in their words, without him they wouldn’t have a shortstop. Well, Howard would go on to prove that even with him they didn’t have a shortstop.

Eight years ago, when the Royals traded for Neifi Perez, they argued that with Rey Sanchez about to leave for free agency – Sanchez had already refused the Royals’ offer of a long-term deal, which turned out to be a really dumb idea on his part – they risked being left without a shortstop. Well, the Royals spent the next season-and-a-half playing Neifi Perez, but they still didn’t have a shortstop.

And today, the Royals traded prospects in order to acquire a major-league shortstop. Well, yes, technically Betancourt is a major-league shortstop – he is stationed on that part of the field where the shortstop usually stands, and he does play in the major leagues. But in terms of whether he ought to be a major-league shortstop, he’s no more a major-league shortstop than any of a dozen guys subsisting on clubhouse cold cuts and Taco Bell in Triple-A.

You would think that the Royals, of all teams, would know enough to stay away from Betancourt, because it wasn’t that long ago that they gave a long-term contract to his doppelganger and suffered the consequences. That’s right: Yuniesky Betancourt is the Cuban Angel Berroa.

Betancourt is 27 years old, the same age that Berroa was in 2005, when it was already clear that his long-term contract was a huge mistake. Compare Betancourt’s career numbers to Berroa’s career numbers through 2005. Betancourt had a slightly higher career average (.279 to .272). But Berroa had more power – he had reached double digits in homers twice, while Betancourt’s career high is nine, and Berroa had the higher career slugging average (.399 to .393). Berroa also had the higher OBP (.317 to .302), because – as hard as it is to believe – he was by far the more patient of the two. Berroa drew 29 walks his rookie season, and even in 2005 he drew 18 walks – Betancourt, playing in over 150 games each year from 2006 to 2008, never drew more than 17 walks. Berroa had speed early in his career, stealing 21 bases as a rooke, while Betancourt has never had more than 11 steals in a season.

(You don’t think that it’s fair to compare Betancourt to Berroa? Fine, let’s try another comparison. Betancourt’s career numbers: .279/.302/.393. Neifi Perez’s career numbers through age 27: .279/.311/.405. We can do this all day, people.)

Betancourt and Berroa share another similarity, in that they both came into the league with very strong defensive reputations, but after their rookie seasons they started to put on weight and lost lateral mobility, and their defensive numbers went south along with the scouting reports.

I’m not prepared to argue definitively as to whether Betancourt today is a better player than Angel Berroa was in 2005. I don’t have to – all that matters is that I’m actually debating whether Betancourt is a better player than Angel Berroa was. If the Royals could have found a team willing to take Berroa’s contract – which, like Betancourt’s, ran for two more seasons – they would have jumped at it, prospects be damned. But four years later, Dayton Moore is so eager to reprise the Angel Berroa era that he gave up real talent to do so.

The biggest difference between Betancourt and Berroa, frankly, is that while Berroa (to his credit) maintained a positive disposition to the end, Betancourt was benched just a month ago for lack of hustle. Look at these quotes:

Betancourt, who has had meetings with his manager and coaches all season, insists he's doing nothing different now than ever.

“I’ve been doing the same routine for years,” Betancourt said. “I can’t control the lineup. I’m doing whatever I’ve done in the past.”

That, of course, may well be the issue. Betancourt has never been a hard worker, and the past four days have not served him well.

and my favorite:

Monday, when 12 position players showed up for early batting practice, Betancourt was not among them.

“I was asleep on the plane when they announced that,” Betancourt said.

The guy can’t hit, he can’t field, his performance has been going backwards for the past two years – and it turns out that he can’t be bothered to get better. Just remember that in case anyone brings up the fact that Dan Cortes was arrested for drunken disorderliness in Arkansas last week.

(Maybe part of the rationale for this trade is that the Royals are trying to send a message to their minor league players: don’t embarrass the organization. That’s the front office’s job.)

I suppose this day was inevitable, ever since we learned that early in his tenure, Moore offered the Mariners Billy Butler for Betancourt straight up. Mariners GM Bill Bavasi, bless his heart, turned the trade down. Today Moore defended the trade with this quote:

“Two years ago,” Moore said, “it looked like (Betancourt) was going to be a star. He was regarded as one of the up-and-coming great shortstops in the game. He just hasn’t reached that potential yet.”

No offense, Dayton, but outside of Seattle and Kansas City, exactly who regarded him as one of the up-and-coming great shortstops in the game? He had a .308 OBP and walked 15 times all season. And did it ever occur to you that the reason “he just hasn’t reached that potential yet” is precisely because he doesn’t know the strike zone from The Twilight Zone?

(Mind you, Dayton sounds like a genius compared to Trey Hillman: “This is an upgrade for us,” Royals manager Trey Hillman said of Betancourt. “I like it because it gives us a good shortstop with decent offensive stats.”)

Unfortunately for the Royals, last year Bavasi was fired – and remember, this was the same genius who, before the axe fell, cited the departure of Jose Guillen as one of his biggest regrets – and the Mariners hired the talented Jack Zduriencik as their new GM. Zduriencik had been the scouting director for the Milwaukee Brewers, but unlike certain scout-oriented GMs he quickly proved that he was not intimidated by statistical analysis. He created a Department of Statistical Research and hired his former assistant Tony Blengino to run it. The Mariners also hired the brilliant Tom Tango as a consultant.

This winter, the Mariners and Royals were both looking for first basemen. The Mariners decided to gamble on a player who, despite a .485 career slugging average and being a perennial stathead favorite, had never batted even 450 times in a season and had gone over 300 plate appearances just twice. They signed Russ Branyan to a $1.4 million contract, and Branyan currently is hitting .284/.383/.575 and ranks second in the league with 21 homers despite playing in one of the AL’s best pitchers’ parks. The Royals, despite having one of the best first base prospects in baseball in Kila Ka’aihue, instead sacrificed a quality reliever in Leo Nunez for the opportunity to pay Mike Jacobs over $3 million. Jacobs had a career .498 slugging average, but his plate discipline was terrible and he was coming off his best season at age 27 – a strong statistical sign that he was likely to fall back. You may recall that the stats community hated the trade. He’s hitting .218/.294/.401.

And now, even though Betancourt’s stock has dropped so steeply over the last two years that he’s now eligible for TARP funds, the Mariners were able to get out from most of that contract and grab some nice arms to boot – because the Royals were willing to serve as their victim.

But hey, at least the players are happy. Because if there’s one set of people who really know how to build a winning team, it’s the players. “For two minor-league pitchers?” said outfielder José Guillen, who spent 2007 with the Mariners. “Are you serious? How weird is that? I’m totally surprised. That’s all I can tell you. I’m shocked. That kid is pretty darn good.” Of course Guillen’s going to love this trade. Dan Cortes could turn into the second coming of Roger Clemens in 2012, and Guillen’s not going to care – he won’t be a Royal in 2012, so why should he care if the team mortgages their future for a few meaningless wins today?

(You want to know who's probably not happy? Kevin Seitzer. Once again the Royals have given him an impossible reclamation project. It's like that old Life commercial. "Give it to Kevin. He'll fix anything!" I set the over/under on when Seitzer gets scapegoated at about four months.)

This is the difference between an organization that understands that there is value in listening to both sides of the stats-vs-scouts debate, and one that doesn’t. No one would ever accuse Zduriencik of not knowing the value of good scouting – he drafted Prince Fielder, J.J. Hardy, Ryan Braun, Yovani Gallardo, Matt LaPorta, and Mat Gamel while with the Brewers – but he has complemented his ability to evaluate what a player may be worth in the future with input from people who can properly evaluate was a player is worth today.

Dayton Moore, on the other hand, doesn’t give a damn about all that. He and his manager talk about the importance of plate discipline – remember Hillman’s quote that “OBP is a no-brainer”? – even while every significant player acquired since Moore was hired, from Jose Guillen to Jacobs to Alberto Callaspo to Miguel Olivo to Coco Crisp to Betancourt, has had plate discipline that ranged from below-average to poor to dear-God-I-can’t-believe-he-swung-at-that.

In the abstract, this trade doesn’t cripple the franchise. Betancourt will be no better, but no worse, than the dreck the Royals have been putting at shortstop for the last 10 years. (Remember, as good as Mike Aviles was last year, Tony Pena was so bad that the overall numbers at SS were still below average.) Losing Cortes hurts, and Saito may turn into a useful reliever, but the Royals can recover from this.

But in practice, I think that years from now we will look at the Betancourt trade the way we look at the Neifi Perez trade. Just as the trade for Perez signaled the death knell for the Allard Baird era – even though it would take years for the Royals to finally put the era out of its misery and make a change at the top – I think that the trade for Betancourt signals the point at which Dayton Moore’s tenure as GM becomes untenable. It will probably be at least a few years before the Glass family sends Moore packing, but I no longer have any expectation that the Royals will ever win anything under the current administration.

If you’ve been a long-time reader of this blog, you’ve probably heard me talk about “signature significance” a lot, the notion that sometimes things can happen in a small sample size that are so extraordinary that you learn a lot about the quality of a player from that small sample. The example I use a lot is the pitcher with the 15-strikeout game; it’s just one game, and the pitcher might not even win the game, but the performance is so extraordinary that it’s almost impossible that a mediocre pitcher could duplicate it.

The Betancourt trade reaches the level of signature significance in my eyes, but in reverse. It’s just one trade, and if Cortes doesn’t pan out it’s possible that the only thing this trade will cost the Royals is some money and some opportunity. But this trade is so utterly indefensible, and the thought process that led to this trade is so utterly diseased, that I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this one trade is prima facie evidence that Dayton Moore can not be a successful GM.

In today’s game, you simply can’t be successful as a general manager if you ignore half the information that’s available to you. A GM that fired all of his scouts and relied on an army of MIT grads to evaluate his players would be mocked – and rightfully so – as someone leading his team down the fast track to hell. I see no reason why a GM that ignores every shred of statistical evidence when making baseball decisions shouldn’t be treated in a similar fashion.

And make no mistake: this trade closes the argument that the Royals have even a superficial understanding of statistics. The Royals don’t understand the first rule of offensive statistics: that the most important offensive skill is the ability to reach base. They don’t pay any attention to defensive statistics, even though the sabermetric community has made huge strides in the evaluation of defense over the last 5-10 years: the Royals still persist in the delusion that Betancourt is a fine defensive player, even though the numbers (and a growing segment of scouts) agree that he is a liability in the field.

The Royals don’t understand statistics as they apply to the economics of baseball – if they did, they would have understood that Betancourt’s contract was so onerous that he actually had negative value to the Mariners – Seattle should have been the one kicking in prospects in order for the Royals to take the contract, much as Dayton Moore once got the Dodgers to do when he took on Odalis Perez’s contract. They don’t understand the concept of replacement level: they made this trade in part out of desperation for a shortstop, not understanding that Betancourt’s performance is so bad that they could call up a team at random, offer to send them a PTBNL for that team’s starting shortstop in Triple-A, and do nearly as well. They don’t understand how a player’s age impacts his performance, because they think that Betancourt still has room to improve, even though he’s 27 years old and at the age where most players have peaked.

And finally, the Royals have no appreciation for their place in the success cycle. What bothers me the most about the trade is this: why now? The Mariners were sick to death of Betancourt, and his value was only going to go down as he crawled deeper into their doghouse. Why did a team that’s 11 games under .500 and 9.5 games out of first place feel compelled to sacrifice future talent for a stopgap?

I wasn’t a Willie Bloomquist fan by any stretch of the imagination before the season began, but he’s won me over. He’s not a terrific defensive shortstop, but he’s not terrible, and he’s hitting .285/.335/.393. I don’t understand why you couldn’t finish out the season with him at shortstop, all the while exploring low-level trade options for a underappreciated gloveman in Triple-A. I guess it’s okay to be a terrible hitter and a decent fielder, like Tony Pena was in 2007, but if you’re a decent hitter and a below-average but acceptable fielder, like Bloomquist is, that necessitates a panic move.

In short, the Royals don’t seem to understand all the different ways that statistics can be used to enhance the information that they are getting from a scout’s perspective. And worse than that, they don’t seem to care. They seem to be more concerned about quashing leaks and keeping a tight rein on information flowing out of the organization than they are concerned about the flow of information into the organization. They seem to be perfectly satisfied that their 20^th-century model for building a franchise doesn’t need a 21^st-century upgrade.

I wrote last time that so long as this administration kept pumping money and resources into player development, they’d eventually turn things around no matter what decisions they make at the major league level. I stand corrected. Dan Cortes was a tremendous scouting find, a seventh-round pick the year before that the Royals got the White Sox to throw into the MacDougal trade, and almost immediately after the trade he added 5 mph to his fastball. Saito’s development from late-round pick to fringe prospect was the result of a nice combination of scouting, a willingness to overlook his height, and the willingness to shell out a six-figure bonus to a 16^th-rounder. But if this is how the Royals plan to utilize their scouting acumen – by cashing those players in for someone who actually has negative value – then they might as well go back to the days of drafting college seniors in the fifth round and offering them $1000, take it or leave it.

Dayton Moore is a fine judge of prospects. But – this is critical – someone needs to tell him that Yuniesky Betancourt IS NOT A PROSPECT ANYMORE. He’s not a 21-year-old kid that can be judged solely on his tools. He’s a 27-year-old with a long track record in the major leagues. At his age, that track record is at least as important as his skill set when it comes to projecting his future. You can’t judge established major leaguers the way you do prospects, and every time Moore has acquired an established major league hitter on the basis of his tools, he has been burned. Every. Single. Time.

And frankly, I’m not sure if I can take it any more. I’ve been a die-hard fan for 20 years now, and I’m not closer to seeing my allegiance rewarded today than I was 20 years ago. I’ll continue to blog and host my radio show through the end of the season, and – because I bought my plane tickets and non-refundable hotel reservations on Thursday – I’m still planning to be at the ballpark next weekend. (Exact details to follow, but if you’re interested in watching a ballgame with me, plan to be at Kauffman Stadium at 5 o’clock sharp next Saturday, July 18^th. We’ll all buy tickets together. B.Y.O.P.B. (Bring Your Own Paper Bag.))

But next weekend may well be a farewell tour of the stadium for me, because at this point I can’t commit to anything after October. I’ve spent my entire adolescent and adult life rooting for and writing about this team, and it’s been two decades of unrequited love. I’ve got too much to be thankful for in my life to let it be spoiled by the imperious decisions of a front office that looks down upon the very idea of the statistical analysis that I’ve advocated for so many years, and that has contributed to the success of so many other teams.

To the Royals: sorry if I came off as unfairly critical yet again. Look at the bright side – pretty soon you may have one less critical fan to worry about. You may have one less fan to worry about, period.

Moving On.

Before we move on from last week’s drama – and believe me, I want to move on – I think it’s only fair to conduct a final post-mortem. I spent much of the weekend replaying what happened and trying to figure out if and how I could have handled things better. I wrote last week that “The defining hallmark of good organizations is that they are more critical of themselves than any outsider would be.” Well, that doesn’t just apply to organizations. I neither wanted nor anticipated that the situation would mushroom to the size that it did, and if I didn’t engage in some self-reflecton to see how this could have been avoided, I’d be a hypocrite. I don’t want to be a hypocrite.

I think Sam Mellinger’s take on the situation was spot-on, and that includes his criticisms of me: “Rany can write whatever he wants on his blog. But he changed his situation when he took on the radio show, and if he wants to be taken seriously and especially if he wants the Royals to help him with his show, he needs to at least make a phone call when calling for someone’s job.”

If you define a “blogger” as someone who delivers opinionated commentary over the internet from an informed but access-free perspective, then I’ve been a blogger since the founding of Baseball Prospectus over 13 years ago, which is to say for longer since the word “blogger” has existed. The part about “access-free” is critical, because that really is they lynchpin of the whole blogger/journalist dichotomy. Joe Posnanski has one of the most well-read blogs on the internet, but he’s not a blogger: he’s a journalist with a blog.

For all the criticisms that the mainstream media heap upon the blogosphere, most of them are just variations on a single theme: that bloggers neither have nor need access to the subjects they are covering, and because they don’t have access, they also don’t have accountability. It’s a simple fact of human nature that it’s a lot harder to criticize someone when you have to see them face-to-face on a regular basis.

What some members of the mainstream media – and certainly some sports franchises – fail to understand is that the lack of accountability is precisely what makes some bloggers so popular. Baseball Prospectus would never have existed if we had felt compelled to tone down our criticisms because we saw the targets of our criticism on a daily basis. When we started in 1996, the majority of major league teams were making demonstrably dumb decisions on a regular basis, and we called it like we saw it. Maybe we could have shown people like Chuck LaMar and Dave Littlefield more respect, but to do so would have been to disrespect our readers, who came to us to read the unvarnished truth instead of having smoke blown up their ass.

Blogs have evolved to serve as a set of checks and balances for traditional journalism, and while I find some of them needlessly vulgar and trashy, I make no apologies for the fact that blogs serve an invaluable purpose in the sports landscape. And not only can blogs and mainstream media coexist, they have to coexist – they can’t exist in today’s world without the other side. It would be almost impossible to blog about the Royals without the work of people like Mellinger and Bob Dutton, who go into the clubhouse on a daily basis and let us know what the Royals are doing and thinking. Flip the coin over, and without the passion and awareness of the local teams that bloggers cultivate, the Kansas City Star would have a lot fewer readers. The Star also benefits when bloggers occasionally break the taboo against speaking about uncomfortable topics – like, say, the team’s rash of injuries – that then opens the door for the newspaper to discuss the subject without risking open confrontation.

Bringing this back to the situation at hand, after 13 years of being a blogger – an unjournalist – I’ve put one foot through the doorway. And now I have to decide how far I want to take this transition from outsider to quasi-insider. I’d rather stop writing than surrender my objectivity, but at the same time, in all the years I’ve spent writing about the Royals, I’ve tried to aim my words in the direction of the team as much as to my readers. I’m not just writing to attract an audience – I’m writing to effect change in the organization. The ultimate goal of this blog is for the Royals to win.

So having spent all these years building a bridge to the Royals, it makes no sense to burn that bridge as soon as it’s been finished. I don’t want to tilt at windmills. If that means behaving a little more like a journalist and a little less like a blogger, than so be it.

Re-reading my original piece that set all of this in motion, I have no regrets about my argument and about the facts that I used to defend it. And I’d hate for this controversy to overshadow what provoked it: the Royals’ medical system is light-years behind the industry standard. That’s just a simple fact. If you don’t believe me, read this. The vanguard of major-league teams are trying to use statistics to further their understanding of injury risk – the Royals are still not convinced they should use statistics at all.

But I do think I could have made it a little less personal. While I still strongly feel that Nick Swartz is a part of the problem, the tone of my attacks presupposed a degree of certainty that I don’t have. More to the point, I could have written the exact same column, replaced “Nick Swartz” with “the medical and training staff”, and gotten the same point across.

I’d like to think that I do a good job of criticizing the Royals without crossing the line of making things personal. I’m not sure that I crossed that line this time, but I probably came closer than I should have. So going forward, I’ll try to keep this incident in mind the next time I decide to bring the hammer down. (Which won’t be long, I’m sure.) It’s not going to have an impact on 95% of my columns, honestly. But the other 5% of the time, when I’m so mad about something that I have trouble seeing straight, maybe I’ll wait until the morning before posting and sleep on it first.

Every crisis is also an opportunity, and I’ve tried to use this crisis as an opportunity to see how to handle things better in the future. I hope the Royals are doing the same thing. I think they handled things a lot worse than I did, but that’s not an excuse for me to not try to learn something from this. I mean, "better than the Royals" hasn't been a compliment since the early 1990s.

And with that, let’s move on. If I gaze any deeper into my navel I’m going to start seeing my intestines.

xxx

So how did we get into this mess? Even with their modest three-game winning streak, the Royals have won 18 of their last 54 games – they’ve won exactly one-third of their games over one-third of the season. As I write this, the best pitcher in baseball is losing to someone named Luke French, 3-0. Billy Butler has doubled three times – and has neither scored nor driven in a run, because the 1, 2, 4, and 5 hitters have yet to reach base.

If you break down all the transactions that Dayton Moore has made since taking over in Kansas City, you find some very interesting trends. I think the most compelling is this: Moore has done a very good job – maybe even an outstanding job – of acquiring players based on a perception of their future value. He has done an absolutely horrendous job of acquiring players based on a perception of their present value.

By that, I mean that when Moore has acquired a player who has yet to establish himself in the major leagues, or a player who is established but who the Royals feel is capable of making a leap forward, he has done well. When Moore has acquired an established major league player based on what that player has already done, he has done terribly.

Just look at a list of the significant acquisitions on the current roster:

Acquired based on future value:

Gil Meche

Joakim Soria

Brian Bannister

Alberto Callaspo

Acquired based on present value:

Jose Guillen

Tony Pena

Miguel Olivo

Mike Jacobs

Kyle Farnsworth

Horacio Ramirez*

Willie Bloomquist

Juan Cruz

*: Okay, I’m cheating. But he was such a terrible signing I get to count him anyway.

Let’s break this down.

Soria was an obscure Mexican pitcher when he was plucked out of the Rule 5 draft. Bannister had made all of eight major league appearances and his minor league track record suggested he was a #4 or 5 starter at best; most observers thought the Royals were nuts for trading Ambiorix Burgos and his 100-mph fastball for him. Callaspo had a great minor-league track record – a career .317 minor league average – but had hit just .220 in two trials with the Diamondbacks, and was trailed by whispers about his character after a domestic violence incident with his wife – Moore bought low by getting him for Bill Buckner, who now has a 6.50 career ERA.

Meche, unlike the three guys above, was an established major league pitcher when the Royals outbid everyone with a 5-year, $55-million contract. But as with Soria, Bannister, and Callaspo, Meche was targeted because of what the Royals thought he could become, not who he was.

At the time, he was a chronic underachiever with a 4.65 career ERA, who drove the Mariners and their fans crazy because the results never matched his stuff. The Royals’ front office thought that they knew how to fix him, and had the balls to gamble $55 million that they could. That gamble has paid off better than almost anyone outside the organization expected: Meche has a 3.88 ERA in a Royals uniform, and has never missed a start. The acquisition of Soria may have been Moore’s best move, but in terms of gambling on a player to do something he’s never done before and have that gamble pay off, nothing comes close to the Meche signing.

All four players have exceeded expectations since joining the Royals. All four have exceeded expectations largely because the Royals correctly predicted that they would become better players than they were at the moment they were acquired. There’s a word for that: scouting.

Now look at the other list. Moore gave Jose Guillen a 3-year, $36 million contract not because he thought Guillen was going to get better, but because of what Guillen had already done: in his three previous healthy seasons before signing, Guillen had hit between .283 and .294, with between 23 and 27 homers each year. He signed Miguel Olivo because Olivo had hit 16 homers each of the last two years, and had a strong arm behind the plate. He traded for Mike Jacobs because Jacobs had hit 32 homers the year before and the Royals needed some power. He signed Kyle Farnsworth because the Professor threw 100 miles an hour. He signed Willie Bloomquist because of his versatility, intangibles, and ability to perform magic spells. He signed Horacio Ramirez because Ramirez, at some point in this millennium, had briefly been an effective starting pitcher. He signed Juan Cruz because Cruz was the best reliever left on the market.

I’ll dispense with Cruz because there was near-unanimous agreement that it was a savvy move at the time, given the cost and Cruz’s pedigree. Cruz’s overall numbers are down – particularly his strikeouts – but it’s not yet clear whether he’s lost his stuff or just going through a prolonged slump. And Bloomquist has been everything the Royals advertised he’d be: capable of playing everywhere on the field, fast, heady, and a better hitter than we expected.

But look at the other guys. The Royals committed $36 million to Guillen in the hopes that he would continue to hit the way he had hit the last few years – ignoring the fact that 1) he was at an age where players of his ilk tend to drop off a cliff, and 2) owing to his shoddy plate discipline, he wasn’t nearly as good a hitter as they thought he was in the first place. Olivo did hit 16 homers in both 2006 and 2007 – unfortunately, he didn’t draw 16 walks in either 2006 or 2007. The Royals can’t claim to be disappointed in how Olivo has played because he has played exactly as well – if not better – than he did before he was acquired. Olivo’s line with the Marlins was .249/.275/.422, and with Kansas City it is .252/.276/.466.

Olivo is responsible for two of the most amazing stats of the year. As one brilliant commenter on Royals Review pointed out, Olivo has reached base on a wild pitch following a strikeout three times – and has also walked three times. Olivo has reached base on a strikeout as often as he has reached base on a walk. Just as impressively, for the season Olivo has 71 strikeouts to go along with those 3 walks. No one in the history of baseball has ever struck out that many times with so few walks. The previous record holder, Rob Picciolo (with 63 Ks and 2 BBs in 1980) is probably the most infamous hacker in major league history.

The Royals wanted Jacobs because he hit 32 homers last season – not only did they neglect the fact that he had never hit more than 20 homers before, they didn’t understand that even with those 32 homers, Jacobs was not that good. He only hit .247; he only walked 36 times; he played horrible defense at the game’s easiest position. There was a reason the Marlins were so eager to trade him, and a reason that no other team was particularly eager to acquire him. The Royals also talked up the fact that Jacobs would hit for more power away from the Marlins’ spacious stadium, while ignoring the fact that Kauffman Stadium is one of the toughest home run parks in baseball.

They signed Farnsworth because Moore had a notion that the bullpen was like a jigsaw puzzle: it was simply missing a piece to complete it, and that piece was a pitcher with a big fastball. Somehow Farnsworth’s career 4.47 ERA got overlooked in the process.

And finally there is Tony Pena, who unlike the other guys on the second list was not an established major leaguer. I would still venture that he belongs here, because when Moore sent the Braves a prospect to acquire Pena, he wasn’t doing so because he felt that Pena was about to have a breakout season. He did so because he thought that what Pena was at that moment – a career .252/.285/.332 hitter in the minor leagues – was playable at shortstop. Pena was better than expected as a rookie, and has hit like a pitcher ever since – but his overall line with the Royals, .228/.248/.299, is almost identical to his minor league translations. Pena is who we thought he was – and who the Royals thought he was, or at least what they should have thought he was. The problem is that the player he was – the player they should have expected – was such an execrable hitter that no amount of defense could redeem him.

In all of these cases, the Royals acquired a player not based on their expectation of his future potential, but based on their understanding of his current value. And just as the former can be defined as “scouting”, the latter can be defined as “statistical analysis.”

This is the Braves Way that we were all promised when Moore was hired. Moore has done a solid job of scouting, both in terms of picking up young talent but also in terms of picking the right talent to trade away. (The best example of the latter is the fact that he traded Burgos, Andy Sisco, and Mike MacDougal all shortly after he was hired – all three threw extremely hard, and all three have since proven that all the velocity in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to pitch.)

But under Moore, the Royals have shown a willful disregard for any kind of serious statistical analysis. Oh, they’ve paid lip service to it at times, publicly talking about the importance of plate discipline from time to time. But the Royals seem to regard plate discipline as something that can be taught – they hired Kevin Seitzer largely for that reason – as opposed to something which is intrinsic to the player. This is ironic, since the Braves Way is to obsess over tools, innate abilities which can not be acquired, and yet they don’t seem to regard plate discipline as a tool despite overwhelming evidence that it functions the same way.

The Braves Way still might work. The bottom line about building a franchise is that if you do a good job of signing and developing young talent, you’ll succeed; if you don’t, you won’t. Everything else is just details. The Royals have devoted more resources to their minor league system over the last 3 years than they had at any point in my lifetime, and if that continues eventually that focus should bear fruit.

The Royals spent a major league-record $11 million in the draft last year; this year, they’ve already spent $2 million on a pair of international free agents (Korean catcher Jin-Ho Shin and Panamanian third baseman Cheslor Cuthbert), who are the two most expensive international amateur talents the team has ever signed. Post-game host Greg Schaum has tweeted that the Royals have an agreement with third-round pick Wil Myers which is being delayed only for the sake of Bud Selig’s delicate ears. If that’s the case, then for the second straight year (after fourth-rounder Tim Melville last year) the Royals will have signed a borderline first-round talent later in the draft because they were willing to spend money where others weren’t.

All that is well and good. There’s certainly nothing wrong with the Braves Way, which (along with the services of three Hall of Fame pitchers) helped Atlanta to 14 division titles. But someone needs to tell Dayton Moore, Dean Taylor, J.J. Picollo, and all the other guys that came over from Atlanta: it’s not 1995 anymore, fellas. The bar has been raised – major league organizations are much, much better run today than they were 15 years ago, and the greatest source of that improvement is in the way that teams use statistical analysis to augment the rest of their operations.

But while the rest of baseball is moving forward, the Braves Way seems bent on proving that you can still win with scouts alone. It’s not a coincidence that the Braves themselves have fallen on hard times the last few years, or that the purest distillation of the Braves Way in a single player, Jeff Francoeur, has turned into, well, Jeff Francoeur.

The greatest mistakes of Dayton Moore’s tenure have been, almost without exception, when he ignored statistical analysis. He ignored the analysis that said that Jose Guillen was an overrated hitter and was at an age where he would likely become an albatross quickly. He ignored OBP entirely when he signed Olivo and traded for Jacobs. He ignored every offensive statistic ever devised when he acquired Tony Pena. He ignored every pitching statistic other than strikeouts when he gave Farnsworth nine million dollars. He ignored the fact that analysts like myself hated every one of these moves.

This disregard for statistics goes beyond the numbers that get created on the field and extends to things like contract analysis – the Royals had trouble understanding that it would have been a bad idea to trade anything for Mike Jacobs, because for the money he was going to be awarded in arbitration, he actually had negative value. That’s how you wind up spending more money on payroll than you ever have before without improving the team one whit.

Despite what Moneyball may have you believe, stats aren’t everything. But despite what Scout’s Honor might have you believe, scouts aren’t everything either. Until the Royals acknowledge that both approaches are necessary in order to build a winning team, they’re going to continue to finish near the bottom of the league in walks, they’re going to continue to spend millions on mediocre veterans, and they’re going to continue to disappoint.

Back to Normal.

Well, it’s sure been an interesting day. I’ve fielded interview requests from national media and inspired a Twitterati revolution, all while seeing 20 patients and conducting a staff meeting at the office. Thank God it’s a holiday weekend.

Thanks to my friends at 810 WHB, it appears that cooler heads have prevailed. The Royals have admitted that their threats to force other radio shows to choose between having me on and having access to the team were made in the heat of the moment.

I freely admit that the Royals are well within their rights to snub my radio show if they don’t like what I’m saying. But there’s a big difference between passively resisting my show and actively trying to sabotage my career. Now that the latter possibility is off the table, we’re cool. I don’t think I’ll be dining with Dayton Moore anytime soon, but I’ll get over my disappointment eventually.

And while the Baseball Prospectus event at the ballpark is probably dead – although you never know – I’m still planning to come to Kansas City that weekend. So those of you who are interested, keep the evening of July 18^th open, and hopefully I can meet all of you then – even if it’s something as casual as telling people to meet in front of one of the gates and then we all buy seats in the cheapest section of the ballpark.

So let us hope there will be no need to speak of this again. I’m going to take the long weekend to recover, and look forward to making my usual Monday morning appearance on the Border Patrol. And hopefully I’ll be back here next week with a new post that calls for someone other than Nick Swartz to lose their job. I’m thinking of going after the PA announcer next. Or maybe the guys who set off the fireworks on Friday nights. They suck.

Many thanks to everyone for their support. You never know how many friends you have until you need them, and it turns out I have more than I deserve. And to the Royals: it will take a lot more than this to break my fandom. I wish I knew how to quit you. But I don’t.

Banned!

Whew.

As those of you who follow me on twitter (@jazayerli) know, the Royals are PISSED OFF at me right now. Let’s just say you won’t hear anyone from the front office on my radio show anytime soon.

I confess to being surprised that after years of being critical of the Royals when criticism was warranted – which, as their win-loss record shows, is most of the time – my last post should have set them off like that. I must have overlooked the rules of decorum that go with evaluating the record of Supreme Court Justice Nick Swartz. Criticize a player, liken the manager’s intelligence with that of a farm animal, call for the GM’s head: these are all acceptable things. But suggest that the trainer might need to be upgraded after 19 years – well, that’s beyond the pale.

I empathize with the team’s frustration at the fact that I’m not present at the stadium to be held accountable for what I write. I’m as surprised as anyone that 13 years after I started writing professionally, and six years after I settled in Chicago with my family, I’ve suddenly become an established part of the Kansas City sports media scene. I’d be more than happy to show my face at the stadium regularly if it were at all practical – believe me, I have no intention of becoming the (Jay) Mariotti on the Missouri. (Fortunately, I’ve got a long way to go on that front. By now Mariotti – from the comfort of his home – would have accused Bob Dutton of being spineless for not asking the tough questions in the clubhouse.)

But just because I’m not at Kauffman Stadium is no reason to take your frustrations out on other people – in front of half the local media, no less. If you’ve got a problem with something I wrote, by all means, contact me – I’m not hard to get ahold of. I’m a big boy; I can handle it.

I was, in fact, planning to show my face at the ballpark in two weeks. We had been working behind the scenes for the past several weeks to put together a Baseball Prospectus night at Kauffman Stadium – an event that we have held with much success at a number of major league parks around the country. We even had the date tentatively set for July 17^th, we were lining up guests from Kansas City and around the country, and I was just a few days away from announcing the details to all of you fine readers. Unfortunately, that event is now on indefinite hiatus. I guess the Royals have no interest in selling 100+ tickets to their Hall of Fame Suites at $80 a pop.

Having already cleared the weekend on my schedule, I’m still planning to come to town that weekend, so maybe I’ll get the chance to face the heat. Or maybe not: I was just informed last night that I’ve been blacklisted by the team. That’s right: I’ve been banned by the Royals! The way this team is playing, I’m not sure if the Royals are trying to punish me or reward me.

(EDITED FOR CLARIFICATION: Just to be clear here, since I think everyone's taking my words a little too literally: I don't think I've been "banned" in the sense that they're going to have security guards outside the stadium making sure that I don't buy a ticket. It does mean that the Royals have cut off any access I may have from the team for my radio show, and - this is critical - have intimated that any other radio show which has me on as a guest faces the same penalty.

I see this as the equivalent of having my media credentials taken away, except of course that I don't have media credentials, and the Royals have made it clear they don't give media credentials to bloggers.)

But enough about me. That’s one of the regrettable things about all this: that I’ve become part of the story, which is something I never wanted. The sad reality, though, is that there was no way to avoid becoming part of this story without reporting on the story in the first place. And I wouldn’t have been doing my job if I didn’t comment on an issue that was on the minds of Royals fans everywhere.

The post – and the Royals’ reaction to it – has earned me a ton of feedback from people who are much closer to the situation than I am. That feedback has been pretty unanimous: the training/medical staff, as a whole, is an embarrassment, and a significant detriment to the Royals when compared to that of other teams. There has been considerably less unanimity on the subject of Nick Swartz: some people feel he is the problem, some people feel he is merely the face of a much larger problem. No one, I should stress, feels he is part of the solution.

If there’s one thing I wish I had done differently with my last column, it’s that I wish I had taken out a shotgun instead of a laser-guided sniper rifle. It seemed to me – and still seems to me – that when 1) the medical care of your players has been substandard for close to two decades and 2) you’ve had the same trainer for those same two decades, that you ought to replace the trainer. But I was wrong when I said that “EVERY SINGLE person involved with baseball operations has been replaced in that span – why should Swartz be the exception?” It turns out that there is one other exception. I’m hesitant to even mention this, so here – I’ll just quote directly from the Royals’ website:

“Dr. Steve Joyce begins his 31st year as a Team Physician and 23rd as the Head Team Physician for the Royals. Dr. Joyce is an orthopedic surgeon at Dickson-Dively Midwest Orthopedic Clinic and Kansas City Orthopedic Institute, which was established in 1999. He was the President of the Major League Baseball Physicians Association in 1994 and 1995.”

Yeah, it’s probably best that I leave it at that.

Contrary to what the Royals might think, I don’t have a vendetta against Swartz. I don’t have an agenda here – unless you count “I want to see the Royals win” as an agenda. But sports is the ultimate results-based industry. In the short run, excuses are fine. In the long run, well, it doesn’t matter how good your reasons are for missing the playoffs year after year – all that matters is that you miss the playoffs year after year. If you’re not successful, you lose your job and someone else gets the opportunity to see if they can be successful. If they’re not, the wheel turns yet again. Such is life.

In the short run, maybe no one’s to blame for the fact that Coco Crisp tried to play through an injury that ultimately ended his season. In the long run, when there are stories like Coco Crisp’s year after year after 19 freaking years – someone needs to be held accountable. It is astonishing to me that not only do the Royals not see that, but that they would take offense at anyone who might dare to suggest that the same rules that apply to players and coaches and managers should also apply to trainers.

Look, if the Royals want me to concede that I’m not completely sure that Swartz is the problem: fine, I’ll happily concede that. Without access to medical records - which I will not and should not have access to - I can't be completely sure. Just as I wasn’t completely sure that Buddy Bell was a bad hire, or that Tony Pena couldn’t hit, or that spending $1.8 million on Horacio Ramirez was a waste of money.

But I am certain – as certain as I’ve been of anything related to the Royals since the day they traded Jermaine Dye for Neifi Perez – that THERE IS A PROBLEM. If the Royals don’t think that Swartz is the problem, then by all means, keep him – but figure out what the problem is.

If it means firing Swartz, then fire Swartz. If it means keeping Swartz but firing the rest of your training staff, or finding new team doctors, or conducting full-body MRIs of every player on a weekly basis – then do it. The only thing the Royals can’t do is deny reality. They can’t hide from the fact that, for a time period that stretches well into the last century, the team has lost way too many players to injuries that, if not preventable, were at least manageable.

There have been too many Crisps, too many Affeldts, too many Rosados, too many Jim Pittsleys. (Even more than Rosado, Pittsley – one of the best pitching prospects the team ever had before he hurt his elbow – was poorly-served by the team’s medical staff.) There’s just too much damn evidence. It’s time to fix the problem, but the Royals can’t fix the problem if they don’t identify the problem. And they can’t identify the problem if they won’t admit there’s a problem.

Or, hey, they can just circle the wagons and ban some blogger in Chicago for having the temerity to write on-the-record what everyone in the KC media has been saying off-the-record for years. (A blogger, mind you, who is notorious for being stupidly optimistic about the Royals. I mean, I wrote this less than two months ago.)

Better still, they can have the chutzpah to do that the day after Trey Hillman goes out of his way during his pre-game comments to complement “Nick and his crew” for the work they’ve been doing – and then THE VERY NEXT DAY announce that another everyday player who was allowed to play after being diagnosed with an injury is now out for the season. (By the way, gotta love this quote from Mike Aviles yesterday (emphasis mine): “It’s definitely disappointing,” Aviles said, “but I know something’s wrong there because it wasn’t getting any better. When I got a second opinion, that’s when we found the tear.”)

It’s your choice, guys. Just know that the hallmark of good organizations is that they don’t shoot the messenger.

That’s what has upset me most about all this. Ever since Dayton Moore was hired, I have largely taken the position that the Royals – while not yet a good team – were a good organization. That is very much in question now. Good organizations don’t make excuses for injuries at the same time that they’re using those injuries as an excuse. Good organizations don’t whine about the media in one of the smallest and most accommodating media markets in the country. Good organizations realize that when they’ve won 15 of their last 48 games, they have more important things to worry about than what the media is saying. Good organizations don’t use Luis Hernandez as a pinch-hitter. And God Almighty, good organizations don’t treat one of their most valuable players the way the Royals treated Gil Meche yesterday.

You’re better than this, guys. Stop trying to match the arrogance and the secrecy of the Pioli family across the street. (Trust me: you can’t. No one can. It’s not possible.) Stop worrying about the criticism that you’re getting from people like me – what, are you guys going to ban Posnanski now too? – and start looking at your organization with a critical eye yourselves. The defining hallmark of good organizations is that they are more critical of themselves than any outsider would be. And God knows there’s an awful lot to be critical about.