Live From The Winter Meetings.

Hello from Indianapolis. Between the sub-zero temperatures, biting wind, and multiple forms of precipitation we’ve had today, this convention puts the Winter in the Winter Meetings.

It seems like every year we read that this year’s meetings are the slowest yet. Well, since I’ve been down here I’ve heard three different people tell me that this is the slowest…Winter Meetings…ever. We have one massive trade that was just made official (great for Yankees, okay for Tigers, bad for Diamondbacks), and a whole lot of waiting. From the Royals’ perspective, this is almost certainly a good thing.

As the bitter taste of the 2009 season slowly gets washed out, it’s time to face the reality that, miracles aside, the Royals are not going to be a contender in 2010. As such, it’s time to acknowledge that whether the Royals can be deemed to have a successful season next year has next-to-nothing to do with their win-loss record.

This is not an easy thing to accept. After 15+ years of almost ceaseless irrelevance, it’s not easy to swallow the notion that we’ll have to wait at least one more season to dream again. It’s not easy, but it’s necessary. The alternative is to delude ourselves into thinking that adding the right mix of players this winter might be the difference between success and failure in 2010.

The Royals deluded themselves into thinking that two years ago, when they signed Jose Guillen. They deluded themselves last winter when they signed Kyle Farnsworth and Willie Bloomquist and traded for Mike Jacobs and Coco Crisp. (Granted, if they also deluded Zack Greinke, then it was all worth it in the end.)

This winter, there are no illusions. And that’s a blessing if it means that the Royals can get back to doing what they should have been doing exclusively since Dayton Moore was hired: building towards a future that, if you squint, has finally started to move from the distant horizon to a spot on the landscape two or three years away. So the fact that the Royals haven’t made any moves during these meetings is almost certainly good news. As my friend Joe Sheehan put it, this free-agent pool calls to mind WOPR's line from WarGames that "the only winning move is not to play."

Granted, the Royals have had a lot of discussion with the bargain basement of the free agent market, particularly with catchers. They were in hard on Ivan Rodriguez before the Nationals swooped in with their 2-year, $6 million deal, graciously keeping the Royals from re-living the Chuck Knoblauch era. But they’ve been linked to Jason Kendall, Rod Barajas, even Jose Molina, all guys who share two characteristics: 1) they’d all come fairly cheaply, and 2) they’re all worse players than the incumbent they’d be replacing, John Buck.

Now’s the time where I’d ordinarily foam at the mouth about the fact that the Royals want to release Buck, who hit .247/.299/.484 last year (his OPS+ was 103, meaning he was an above-average hitter despite playing a premium defensive position) and is just 29 years old, and replace him with someone like Kendall, who hit .241/.331/.305 in the inferior league last year and is 35. But it’s not that simple.

If the Royals really think Kendall or Barajas will help the Royals in 2010 more than Buck, then we would once again have to seriously question their ability to make even the most basic baseball decisions. But I’ve become increasingly convinced that the desire to replace Buck is rooted in finances more than anything else. Buck made $2.9 million last year, and would probably be due close to $3.5 million in arbitration for next year. The Royals seem to have a cap of about $2 million they’d like to pay to whoever Brayan Pena backs up in 2010.

While the Royals do have some issues with Buck’s defense – deservedly, as he’s thrown out exactly one-sixth (20 of 120) basestealers the last two years – I get the impression that the biggest issue they have with him is simply his price tag. If they could sign him to a $2 million contract, we probably wouldn’t be hearing anything about Kendall et al. But that can’t happen – literally, as a player can not have his salary cut by more than 20% in arbitration.

Having said that, if the Royals are convinced that they can’t afford Buck’s salary in arbitration, I don’t understand why they haven’t released him already. My thinking is that once Buck is a free agent, he has a chance to find out what the market for him is. If it turns out that the market is not that strong, then the Royals might be able to sign him for a better price than he would have earned in arbitration – particularly since the Royals would be able to offer Buck the same carrot they offered Kendall and Ivan Rodriguez, regular playing time, that a lot of other – better – organizations aren’t in a position to offer. The way the Royals are playing this game, they might well sign Kendall for $2 million, release Buck, and then find out that they could have signed Buck at a price similar to what they paid for Kendall.

But I’m working on the assumption that the Royals are going to downgrade behind the plate from Buck to someone like Jason Kendall, and I’m okay with that. Why? Because at the same time that the Royals can’t find enough coins under their cushions to keep Buck, they could find enough money to sign one of the most intriguing Cuban players to defect in recent memory. The Royals have guaranteed $7 million to Noel Arguelles over the next five years – the contract seems to be official pending only things like visas granted and physicals administered. On the one hand, it’s not a lot of money – it’s less money than the Royals guaranteed Farnsworth last winter. On the other hand, it’s the largest amateur contract the Royals have ever handed out, domestically or internationally.

So on the one hand we have a team that can’t afford spending an extra 1-1.5 million dollars for their starting catcher in 2010, and on the other hand we have a team willing to spend $1.4 million a year for the next five years for a player that might not reach Kansas City until 2012. There’s one inescapable conclusion to draw from this: the Royals, finally, have placed a higher priority on amateur talent than on free agent talent. And not just rhetorically, but financially: they're putting their money where their mouth has long been.

This is such a no-brainer for a small-market team that it really shouldn’t even warrant a mention – except that, all around baseball, you’ll find that even small-market teams will spend millions on immediate help at the major league level but then pinch pennies when it comes to signing prospects. To pick another small-market team at random, the Cincinnati Reds – like two dozen other teams – passed over Rick Porcello in the amateur draft in 2007 to save a few million dollars, signing a high school catcher named Devin Mesoraco instead. (Mesoraco looks like a future backup at best.) The following winter, they gave Francisco Cordero a 4-year, $46 million contract to be their closer. The Padres took Matt Bush with the #1 overall pick in 2004 to save money, then turned around and plowed that savings into one year of 38-year-old innings sponge Woody Williams. And so on.

The Royals are certainly guilty of this – just look at the names listed above. But for all the money that Dayton Moore has wasted on bad free agents, that money never came at the expense of the amateur budget. The Royals shied away from Porcello like everyone else, a debatable decision at the time which looks much worse now, but Mike Moustakas was not a signability pick. Eric Hosmer certainly wasn’t – he signed for $6 million up front, a better contract than #1 overall pick Tim Beckham got (Beckham signed for $6.15 million, but spread out over time.) Aaron Crow was drafted because the Royals thought he was the best player available. Tim Melville, Wil Myers, and Chris Dwyer all got seven-figure bonuses after dropping because other teams shied away from their demands. The Royals spent $600,000 on Korean catcher Shin-Jin Ho, and $1.35 million on Nicaraguan third baseman Cheslor Cuthbert.

And now that the purse-strings have been tightened a little, it’s notable that the first budget to get slashed is not the amateur budget, but the professional one. It’s never a good thing when budgets get slashed, but by slashing the free agent budget first, Moore has done an excellent job of mitigating the damage. It's okay if the Royals can’t afford John Buck, as long as they can afford Arguelles, a young (19 or 20 in Cuban years, could be 23 or 24 for all we know) athletic left-hander with a strong build, who throws in the low-to-mid 90s with an excellent changeup and a promising curveball. Arguelles would almost certainly be a first-round pick if he were subject to the amateur draft, with Keith Law describing him as a probable top-ten pick overall. Along with Mike Montgomery, Danny Duffy, and Chris Dwyer, Arguelles gives the Royals what has to be the strongest collection of left-handed pitchers in any team’s farm system.

The up-to-the-minute buzz is that the Royals might give Jason Kendall a two-year contract to get this thing done. This would be not just dumb but pointless: the point of keeping Kendall over Buck is to save money, but if you give Kendall a two-year deal, you run a very high risk that by Kendall plays so poorly in 2010 that the second year of his contract is dead money that needs to be eaten, and Kendall will probably make more in a two-year deal than Buck would make next season.

But if the worst thing that Moore does this off-season is give Jason Kendall a two-year deal…well, I’ve seen a lot worse than that. And there’s a good chance that will be the case, if for no other reason than the Royals simply don’t have the money to make a more expensive mistake. They might not have 7 million dollars lying around to sign Rich Harden or Mike Cameron or someone who could make a real impact, but they also don’t have 7 million dollars lying around to give to Hank Blalock or Xavier Nady or some other waste of payroll.

But they do have 7 million dollars lying around to give to Noel Arguelles. And for that, I am grateful, and more than a little surprised.

Kevin Appier: A Retrospective.

This article transcends my issues with the Royals. Kevin Appier deserves better than to have his Hall of Fame candidacy ignored because the organization he spent a decade with remains as moribund as the day he left them.

Robert Kevin Appier (like another Royals pitcher of note, Appier goes by his middle name) was the Royals’ first-round pick in 1987. Thanks to their 76-86 record in 1986, the Royals drafted 9^th the following year, the highest selection the team had since they selected Clint Hurdle from the same slot in 1975. The Royals drafted Appier out of Antelope Valley Junior College in California. With the pick immediately before Appier, the Dodgers selected a high school pitcher named Dan Opperman. Legend has it that the Royals had scouted Opperman, who was the subject of a lot of pre-draft hype, and then they saw Appier, and even though Appier was just a year older, the Royals’ scouts thought it was the difference between watching a man and a boy throw.

(Opperman was the first in a series of huge first-round flops by the Dodgers. The next year, they took Bill Bene with the 5^th overall pick; Bene is one of the most famously wild pro pitchers of my lifetime, up there with Jacob Shumate and Jason Neighborgall – Bene walked 543 batters in 516 pro innings. Two years later, they took high school pitcher Kiki Jones with the 15^th pick; the year after that they took Ron Walden, another prep pitcher, with the 9^th pick overall. None of the four pitchers made the major leagues.)

Appier was not a phenom in the minors, but he found immediate success. Assigned to Eugene in the Northwest League after signing, he had a 3.04 ERA in 15 starts and struck out 72 batters in 77 innings. The following year, he was promoted to Baseball City in the high-A Florida State League, and in 147 innings he had a 2.75 ERA, walked 39 batters against 112 strikeouts, and notably surrendered just one home run. He was promoted to Double-A Memphis in time to make three starts and had a 1.83 ERA.

That earned Appier a promotion to Omaha in 1989. He pitched well but not that well, going 8-8 with a 3.95 ERA. He allowed 141 hits in 139 innings, but surrendered just 6 homers with a solid K/BB ratio of 109/42. He was called up to make his major league debut on June 4^th, and stayed in the rotation for a month before getting demoted with cause. He was awful; he had a 9.14 ERA in 22 innings, allowing 34 hits and 12 walks. In his fourth start he was knocked out in the first inning having allowed 6 runs, and in his next and final start he allowed 6 runs in three innings.

That winter, Baseball America released their first-ever Top 100 Prospects list. Appier was ranked #86, sandwiched between a couple of southpaws named Eric Gunderson and Mike Milchin. It’s safe to say that no one thought that Appier was about to start an eight-year run as one of the best pitchers in the game.

Appier returned to Omaha to start the 1990 season, but was quickly promoted after he had a 1.50 ERA in his first three starts. He was mostly used in middle relief at first, and not all that effectively, as he allowed 28 hits in his first 19 innings. On May 27^th he entered the rotation, and pitched quite well, with a 3.12 ERA in his next eight games, though this being the Royals he went just 3-3 in that span.

On July 7^th, 1990, I went out to a movie with some friends. The Royals were on TV that night, and just before leaving the house, I saw Appier give up a single to Lou Whitaker leading off the bottom of the first. I came home to learn that Whitaker’s single was the last hit for the Tigers that night, as Appier had thrown a one-hit shutout in the first complete game of his career. (The night before, the Royals were the victims of a one-hit shutout at the hands of Jack Morris*. It was the first time in decades that teams had swapped one-hitters in consecutive games.)

*: I don’t know about you guys, but personally, I don’t hear enough about Morris’ Hall of Fame chances.

From that moment, Appier was one of the best starting pitchers in baseball. He would throw a three-hit shutout against the Red Sox two starts later, a four-hit shutout against the A’s at the end of August, and another four-hit shutout against the Twins in September – except, heralding the chronic lack of run support he would receive with the Royals, the Royals didn’t score against the Twins either, and the Royals lost 1-0 when Jeff Montgomery gave up a walk-off single in the 11^th.

From July 7^th through the end of the season, Appier was 9-5 with a 2.45 ERA. For the season he was 12-8 with a 2.76 ERA in 186 innings. If that ERA doesn’t impress you, it should: it remains the lowest ERA by an AL rookie who qualified for the ERA title since 1976, when The Bird was The Word: Mark Fidrych led the league with a 2.34 ERA.

For his efforts, Appier finished a distant third in Rookie of the Year voting, behind Sandy Alomar and Kevin Maas. Alomar hit a modest .290/.326/.418, but so bewitched reporters with his intangibles that he won the Rookie of the Year award unanimously. Not to say the award was a joke, but Alomar’s season was worth 2.1 Wins Above Replacement, according to BP’s WARP1 value. Appier was worth 5.5 WARP. It wouldn’t be the last time that Appier finished third for an award he deserved to win easily.

Appier’s sophomore season was a consolidation year; his ERA rose to 3.42 even though his peripherals improved. His walk (2.6 per nine innings) and homer (0.6 per nine) rates were identical, and his strikeout rate actually rose from 6.2 to 6.8 Ks per nine. His statistical profile looked for all the world like that of a pitcher who was about to break out, and somewhere in Baltimore, a 16-year-old Royals fan who was starting a keeper Strat-o-matic league with his college buddies made sure to snag Appier in the inaugural draft.

Liftoff came in 1992, when Appier had a 2.46 ERA, missing the league ERA title by just five points (Roger Clemens led with a 2.41 mark). Appier also finished third in the league in hits per nine innings, fourth in WHIP, fifth in homers per nine, seventh in strikeouts per nine…and thanks to a typically anemic Royals offense, 16^th in wins with just 15. Appier ended the season with a bit of a scare, as the Royals shut him down after September 9^th with a tired arm as a precaution. This led a 17-year-old Royals fan to yell at pitching coach Guy Hansen before a late-September game at Camden Yards, inquiring about Appier’s health while using some choice words to describe Hal McRae’s handling of his pitch counts. (To his credit, Hansen responded, “his arm is fine.” Even more to his credit, Hansen was right.)

Appier wasn’t the best pitcher in the league, but he was close – he ranked third in the AL in VORP behind Clemens and league-leader Mike Mussina. He didn’t receive a single Cy Young vote. Dennis Eckersley won the Cy Young (and the MVP!) in a sort of delayed reaction to Eck’s 0.61 ERA the year before. Finishing second in the vote, despite a 3.18 ERA, was Jack McDowell. It was a bad omen.

In 1993, there was no debate: Kevin Appier was the best pitcher in the American League. He led the circuit with a 2.56 ERA, a figure made more impressive by the fact that 1993 proved to be the first year of the juiced ball/bat/body era – the league ERA jumped from 3.95 in 1992 to 4.34 in 1993, and has stayed above 4.34 ever since. Appier got stronger as the season went on – from June 19^th until the end of the season, he had a 1.94 ERA and allowed just 90 hits in 139 innings. On August 28^th, he began a stretch of consecutive scoreless innings that wouldn’t come to an end until September 23^rd, 33 innings later, a franchise record that was only broken by Zack Greinke this season (and Greinke’s streak of 38 innings spans two seasons, so Appier’s single-season mark is still the official record.)

Appier led the league in ERA by 38 points over Wilson Alvarez, which to put in perspective, is larger than the margin by which Greinke won this year’s ERA title over Felix Hernandez (33 points). Since 1993, six times has an AL pitcher won the ERA title by more than 38 points, and five times they won the Cy Young (four times unanimously). The only outlier was in 2003, when Pedro Martinez lost the award to Roy Halladay in large part because Martinez threw just 187 innings that year, compared to Halladay’s 266.

But in 1993, Appier received exactly one first-place vote. He finished third in the voting, behind Jack McDowell and Randy Johnson.

Johnson, at least, had the eye-popping strikeout total of 308 on his side, although his 3.24 ERA was a distant fleck in Appier’s rear-view window. McDowell, though, had a 3.37 ERA, and fewer strikeouts (158) than Appier (186). He had only one thing in his favor: he won 22 games, while Appier won only 18.

Mind you, when McDowell started, his team went 23-11, and when Appier started, the Royals also went 23-11. But because of the way baseball’s arcane, century-old scoring rules work, McDowell was credited with four more wins. A trick of accounting seemingly concocted by the wizards at Arthur Andersen gave 28 sportswriters the perception that Jack McDowell was the better pitcher, and gave Appier the shaft. Appier was already used to getting the shaft from his teammates, so it was only fair that their inability to support him offensively would screw him one more time.

The quintessential Appier start came on July 27^th that year, when he threw a complete-game one-hitter against the Rangers, the second one-hitter of his career. Unfortunately, that one hit was a home run by Royal-killer Rafael Palmeiro, and meanwhile the Royals were finding a way to scatter nine hits against Kenny Rogers without scoring a run. This remains the only game in the last 25 years in which a starting pitcher threw a nine-inning complete game, allowed just one hit, and took the loss.

(For you game score junkies, Appier took the loss in a game when he had a game score of 91. That is the highest game score by a losing pitcher in a regulation game since Ken Johnson took the loss in his no-hitter in 1964.)

In 1994, Appier’s ERA rose to 3.83, but then the league ERA rose to 4.81, and his ERA+ was still an outstanding 130. Teammate David Cone got the run support that Appier had been asking for, went 16-5 and won the Cy Young Award.

1995 looked like the year Appier would finally get the recognition he deserved. With Cone having been traded to the Blue Jays in a post-strike salary dump, manager Bob Boone elected to use a four-man rotation consisting of Appier, Tom Gordon, Mark Gubicza, and a traveling circus of fourth starters. Taking advantage of off-days, Boone didn’t even use a fourth starter until the eighth game of the season. Gordon and Gubicza were occasionally skipped as the season went on, but Appier pitched every fourth game. He started 12 of the team’s first 43 games, and 17 of the team’s first 63 games, a pace that would have led to 44 starts over a full season.

Appier didn’t respond to this workload by pitching well. He responded by pitching brilliantly. His brilliance was evident on Opening Day, when he threw 6.2 no-hit innings before he was pulled from the game, as the strike which had come to a sudden end at the hands of future Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had necessitated a shortened spring training, and pitchers’ arms were not fully stretched out by the start of the season.

In his first 14 starts – which only took him until June 23^rd, despite the late start to the season – Appier was 11-2 with a 2.04 ERA, and for the first time in his career was getting publicity as the best pitcher in the league, if not all of baseball. He was named to the All-Star team for the first time in his career. Boone’s four-man rotation was getting a lot of positive publicity. And then the dark side of Boone’s handling of pitchers became manifest.

From May 13^th through June 23^rd, here are Appier’s pitch count totals: 132, 127, 112, 123, 124, 109, 122, 141, 133, 98. Even for a veteran pitcher, those numbers were absurdly dangerous, even on four days’ rest – for a pitcher working on three days’ rest for the first time in his career, they were suicidal. On June 28^th, Appier surrendered five runs in eight innings – and threw 119 pitches. On July 3^rd, he allowed 10 runs in 3.2 innings. After losing his third straight start on July 7^th, Boone decided that after the All-Star Break he would revert to a five-man rotation.

It was too late; after three more starts (and 14 runs allowed in 12 innings), Appier went on the DL for the first time in his career. He returned three weeks later, but wasn’t the same, with a 4.24 ERA the rest of the season, and finished 15-10 with a 3.89 ERA. Appier would recover the following season, but the four-man rotation never would. Boone's experiment was actually a qualified success – Mark Gubicza, who hadn’t thrown 140 innings since he tore his rotator cuff in 1990, stayed in the rotation all year in 1995, led the league with 33 starts, and had a 3.75 ERA. But the point that baseball people took away from the Royals’ experiment is that Appier broke down, and the fact that he was throwing a ridiculous number of pitches was lost in the shuffle. No team has made a serious attempt at the four-man rotation since.

Appier remained one of the league’s best starters the next two years; he ranked 5^th in the league with a 3.62 ERA in 1996, and struck out a career-high 207 batters, and in 1997 he had a 3.40 ERA, good enough for 7^th place. That season his run support went from bad to worse; the Royals scored two runs or fewer in 15 of his 34 starts, and Appier went 9-13 despite an ERA+ of 137. In the last 20 years, the only other pitcher to throw 200 innings with an ERA+ of more than 130, and finish with a record at least four games under .500, was Jim Abbott in 1992, when he famously went 7-15 despite a 2.77 ERA.

From 1990 to 1997, Kevin Appier threw 1644 innings – an average of 205 per season, despite missing time due to the strike – and posted a terrific 3.22 ERA. His ERA+ was 140, a figure which generally puts you in the discussion for the Cy Young Award - that was his average ERA+ for eight years. (Justin Verlander, C.C. Sabathia, and Roy Halladay, who finished 3-4-5 in Cy Young voting this year, had ERA+ values of 133, 127, and 155.)

But Appier had the misfortune to pitch for an organization that was unworthy of his talents, so his record in that span was just 103-74 – an average of 13-9 per season.

Here’s a list of the five best pitchers in baseball from 1990 to 1997, as ranked by ERA+, with a minimum of 1200 innings pitched:

Greg Maddux: 165 ERA+, 139-70

Roger Clemens: 157 ERA+, 118-73

Kevin Appier: 140 ERA+, 103-74

David Cone, 136 ERA+, 109-69

Randy Johnson, 135 ERA+, 114-55

Of the five pitchers, Appier has by far the worst win-loss record – and it’s telling that the pitcher who comes closest, Cone, spent two years with the Royals. The other four pitchers all won a Cy Young Award in that span, while Appier was denied his.

Ask the average hard-core baseball fan who the best starting pitchers of the 1990s were, and you will probably get a list much like the one above. Their list will probably include Pedro Martinez, who had a 140 ERA+ from 1990 to 1997 but not enough innings to qualify. It will likely include Mike Mussina (130 ERA+) and Tom Glavine (128 ERA+).

But it won’t include Kevin Appier. He is the forgotten starter of the 1990s.

Appier’s success, for those of you who are too young to have watched him pitch, was based on four things: 1) a good, hard fastball, generally in the 92-94 mph range; 2) a dive-bombing split-finger fastball that was never a strike, but it was tough to lay off and impossible to hit; 3) a terrific slider with good tilt, which was particularly effective against right-handed batters, leading to a fairly pronounced platoon split (Appier’s career numbers against RHB were .234/.290/.349; against LHB they were .260/.339/.405).

The fourth and most underrated key to Appier’s success was his delivery, which had a herky-jerky motion and ended with Appier falling way off to his left side. It put him in terrible position to field the ball, but it was also invariably distracting for the hitter, and his stuff played up a notch as a result. His delivery was so unconventional that for most of his career, the conventional wisdom was that he was an arm injury waiting to happen. However, when biomechanics experts evaluated his delivery, they came to the conclusion that however unconventional it was, Appier’s delivery was actually quite efficient and did not put him at undue risk for injury.

Appier’s shoulder did come apart after the 1997 season, ending the opening act of his career, but the injury occurred in an off-field incident, reportedly when he slipped and fell of the porch while carrying some of his sister’s wedding presents. (Yeah, I know.) His return in 1998 was further delayed by a bizarre bout with colitis that briefly put him in the hospital. He returned to Kansas City for three starts in September, and it was clear he wasn’t the same pitcher – he had a 7.80 ERA and struck out just nine batters in 15 innings. In 1999, he was fully healthy, but a shell of his former self. At the end of July, he had a 4.87 ERA and had struck out just 78 batters in 140 innings. (Thanks to an offense that was suddenly clicking with guys like Mike Sweeney, Jermaine Dye, Johnny Damon, and Carlos Beltran, Appier was 9-9 despite the high ERA.)

With 1.5 years left on his contract – the ironic upside to Appier being massively underrated was that it allowed the Royals to sign him to a four-year contract extension in 1996 – it was time for Appier to go the way of most every other star player the Royals had developed. The A’s came calling with a package of Blake Stein, Jeff D’Amico, and Brad Rigby, and on July 31^st, Appier’s tenure with the Royals came to an end.

None of the three pitchers the Royals got for Appier amounted to much – Blake Stein had his moments – but Appier was a disappointment in Oakland as well. He went 7-5 despite a 5.77 ERA the rest of the 1999 season, and the A’s missed the playoffs by seven games.

The following year, Appier had a 4.52 ERA and led the league with 102 walks, but with a real offense behind him he went 15-11 as the A’s won the AL West. He made his postseason debut as the Game 2 in the ALDS against the Yankees, giving up three runs in 6.1 innings and taking the loss. In the decisive Game 5, he relieved in the second inning after Gil Heredia gave up six runs in the first, and pitched well, allowing just one run in four innings as the A’s pulled to within two runs. But their rally fell short, and they were eliminated.

Whatever bad luck Appier had endured through the 90s was largely mitigated by his good fortune to be a free agent during the craziest baseball market ever, the 2000-01 offseason. In the same winter that Alex Rodriguez got his $252 million contract, where Darren Dreifort signed for 5 years, $55 million, where the Rockies gave Mike Hampton $121 million for 8 years and Denny Neagle $51 million for 5 years, it was only fair that Appier cash in as well. He did, signing a 4-year, $42 million contract with the Mets.

Unlike most free agents signed that winter, Appier earned his money, at least at first. In his first and only season in the NL, Appier’s fastball came back, or at least his strikeout rate did: he whiffed 172 batters in 207 innings and finished with a 3.57 ERA. (His low run support came back as well; he went just 11-10.) The Mets then decided to trade their slightly overpriced player straight-up for a massively overpriced player, sending Appier the following winter to the Angels for Mo Vaughn. Both players had three years left on their contracts, but Vaughn had just missed the entire 2001 season, and was due $46.5 million over the next three years. Vaughn would hit a modest .259/.349/.456 in his first year in New York. The second year, he hit .190/.323/.329 in 27 games, got hurt, and never played in the majors again.

Back in the American League, Appier continued to pitch well, going 14-12 with a 3.92 ERA for an Angels team that won 99 games and the Wild Card. The Angels then stormed their way to a world championship, though no thanks to Appier, who in five playoff starts allowed 15 runs in 22 innings. The Angels won four of his five starts, scoring six runs or more in each of the four. Appier was on pace to be the goat of the World Series when he gave up three runs in the fifth inning of Game 6, but Scott Spiezio’s three-run homer in the seventh sparked a 6-run comeback from 5-0 down, and the Angels would win behind rookie John Lackey the next day.

With a World Champion ring in hand, it seemed like the only thing Appier had left to do was to return home – and amazingly, he did. When 2003 rolled around, Appier looked like the 35-year-old with too many miles and stitches on his arm he was. Halfway through the season, he had a 5.63 ERA and lousy peripherals, his velocity was way down, and after a July in which he had a 10.91 ERA in five starts, the Angels cut him loose even with another year to go on his contract. The stage was set for him to return to Kansas City – to a team that, for the first time since his major league debut 14 years earlier, was actually in a pennant race.

Appier’s return to the Royals came on August 8^th in Tampa, and though he pitched well, the Royals welcomed his return the traditional way: they got shut out. But then Appier returned to Kansas City, pitching against the mighty Yankees on a Wednesday night. The Royals entered play that day with a ½ game lead over the White Sox in the division. A crowd of 35,000-plus was in attendance that night, and they were treated to one final night of magic.

The Royals jumped on Jeff Weaver for three runs in the first, a run in the fourth, and two more in the fifth. Appier, meanwhile, had broken out the smoke and mirrors. His fastball barely hit 87 on the gun, his once-biting slider was missing more teeth than an NHL veteran, but the Yankees couldn’t do anything with him. Appier worked around a leadoff walk in the first, and a pair of singles in the second. He retired 11 in a row between the second and the sixth inning, before Derek Jeter punched a one-out single to center.

Jason Giambi batted next. Appier worked the count to 1-2, then Giambi fouled off two pitches. Sitting in front of the TV, I thought to myself at that moment, “the one thing Appier can’t do here – he can’t blow a high fastball by a guy like Giambi anymore.”

The next pitch came in. It was a fastball up in the zone, measured at 87 on the gun. Giambi took a mighty rip at the meatball.

And whiffed.

I’m not going to say that it got a little misty in the Jazayerli household. I will say that I don’t even remember Bernie Williams grounding out on the next pitch, probably because it’s hard to see through tears.

Appier’s night was done, although the Royals would tack on five more runs to render a historically pleasing final score of 11-0. The White Sox lost that night, extending the Royals’ lead in the division to 1.5 games with six weeks to go.

We could not have known at the time that this game would represent the absolute last high point in the Royals history to date. The Royals opened a three-game series against Minnesota that weekend, and with Rob Neyer and I in attendance, they got hammered in the first two games before squeaking out a 5-4 win on Sunday – after which we learned that Runelvys Hernandez had been demoted to Double-A (which finally convinced Hernandez to come clean about his arm pain, which in turn led to a diagnosis of a torn elbow ligament and Tommy John surgery).

Thanks to a White Sox sweep that weekend, the Royals had actually increased their division lead to three games with the Sunday win – but four days later, after a sweep in Yankee Stadium and a loss to the Twins in the Metrodome, the Royals had gone from 3 games up to 1 game back. They would not hold first place to themselves again all season.

But while we could not have known that Appier’s defeat of the Yankees would be one of the last meaningful victories of the decade, it would not have been surprising in the least to know that it was the last victory of his career. Which it was. In his next start, the Yankees got their revenge with six runs in six innings, and Appier didn’t strike out a single batter. On August 24^th, Appier allowed one run in two messy innings, and complaining of a sore elbow, he didn’t come out for the third. He was diagnosed with a torn flexor tendon, which was essentially career-ending.

Appier rehabbed hard all winter, and was impressive enough in spring training that he was ready to be activated when the Royals first needed a fifth starter in mid-April. In his first start, he allowed 7 runs in three innings. In his second start, he pulled himself from the game after one inning with renewed elbow pain. Frustrated with the slow pace of his rehab, Appier went home in July, officially retiring so that the Royals would not have to pay him the league minimum the rest of the season (as the Angels were still on the hook for $12 million.) He unretired over the winter, came back for spring training in 2005, had nothing, refused a minor league assignment, and was released. A year later he signed with the Mariners and even made 10 appearances with Tacoma before he was released on June 2^nd, and his career was finally over.

For his career, Appier went 169-137 with a 3.74 ERA and a 121 ERA+. He was an All-Star (albeit just once) and has a World Series ring. He is arguably the greatest pitcher in the history of the Kansas City Royals, who just had the misfortune to pitch for the Royals at the beginning of their long, slow, inexorable, and ongoing descent towards oblivion. He deserves to be remembered, and not just by Royals fans, as one of the game’s very best pitchers for most of the 1990s.

I can not, in good faith, make a case that he deserves enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. But I hope that at least one of the several readers of this blog who have a Hall of Fame vote will check the box next to his name anyway. The nature of Hall of Fame voting is inherently broken, as Bill James brilliantly laid out in his opus “The Politics of Glory” (later published under the name “Whatever Happened To The Hall of Fame?”)

The binary, up-or-down nature of Hall of Fame voting allows no room for nuance, and provides no mechanism for voters to distinguish between shades of Hall of Famers. This leads to a situation whereby a player who everyone agrees is just shy of being Hall-worthy gets no votes, whereas a player that has the support of a vocal minority of voters stays on the ballot year after year. This is how Lou Whitaker gets tossed off the ballot after one year, while Jack Morris sticks around year after year, gaining enough momentum each season to make his election a worrisome possibility.

So unfortunately there’s no way for a voter to show support for Appier other than by actually giving him a vote. So those of you who have a ballot – you know who you are – here’s all the justification you need to throw a vote Appier’s way: he is better than several pitchers already in the Hall. Appier’s career WARP1 total, which is a fancy way of calculating his total career value, was 48.4 wins. This is higher than the total of Hall of Famers Jesse Haines (47.5) and Rube Marquard (42.9). If you don’t want to count Haines and Marquard because they were Veterans Committee selections (and widely considered to be mistake picks), consider that Appier was also more valuable than Catfish Hunter (42.6), who was elected by the BBWAA in 1987.

Eight years ago, Jim Deshaies began a tongue-in-cheek campaign to get one Hall of Fame vote, and succeeded, getting a vote from Houston Chronicle writer John Lopez. The world didn’t end, and Lopez wasn’t censured for his vote, even though Deshaies had a lifetime 84-95 record and an ERA+ of 91 (meaning he was a below-average pitcher over the course of his career). If Jim Deshaies can get a vote, Kevin Appier sure as hell better get one too.

This isn’t like giving an undeserving player a vote on an MVP ballot, where a vote for an undeserving player is a vote not given to a deserving one. With a Hall of Fame ballot, in which 10 players can be listed but most voters rank no more than six or seven, a courtesy vote for Appier would have no impact on the voting totals for anyone else. So if you’ve got space at the end of your ballot, I’d sure appreciate it if you give a nod to Kevin Appier.

(And while we’re here, let me also urge the Royals to stop dithering and induct Appier into the team’s Hall of Fame next summer. It’s been four years since a Royals player was inducted – scout Art Stewart was enshrined in 2008. Appier should absolutely, positively be the team’s 2010 inductee.)

Appier might not get a single vote when the results are released next month, or he might receive enough votes to stay on the ballot another year. Neither result will have any impact on his place in my experience as a baseball fan. Kevin Appier was the shining beacon of light in my journey from hard-core baseball fan to insanely obsessive baseball fan to burgeoning baseball writer in the 1990s. He was a reason for me to turn on the TV or the radio or follow the play-by-play on the proto-web every fifth day. He was the inner wall of defense against the rising tide of despair that lapped at the shores of the Royals throughout the 1990s, and it’s no coincidence that the bottom fell out on the organization soon after he got hurt.

I can’t imagine my history as a Royals fan without the eight years I spent watching and rooting for Kevin Appier. No matter whether the Hall of Fame chooses to give him some small measure of remembrance next month, he’ll be remembered by the fans that had the pleasure to watch him pitch for a long time to come.

XXX

Quick administrative note: Major League Baseball is holding its winter meetings this week, and instead of holding them in Phoenix or Las Vegas or Orlando or some other warm-weather clime, this time they’re holding them in…Indianapolis. I can’t fathom why, but I also can’t complain, as it’s a four-hour drive from my house. I’ve never been to the winter meetings before, but I’m planning to drive down Tuesday evening and stay through Wednesday night, and thanks to WHB I have my press credentials. So I’m lifting my blog silence while I’m down there; be sure to check in here if the Royals make any big moves at the meeting.

(And they may be starting early, if the rumored five-year, $7 million deal with Noel Arguelles is true. If it is: me like. Me like very much.)

This Stove Gets Hot Quickly.

As I wrote last time, “If the Royals make some significant moves over the winter…I might show up here with some brief commentary.” Well, they made a significant move, so here’s some brief commentary. Okay, maybe not brief. If it was brief, you ought to be concerned that an imposter hacked into my blog. It may be while before I post again, so I figured I'd get all my thoughts down at one time.

Dayton Moore likes to get started early. For the second year in a row, Moore made a trade on the first day of the off-season – or at least the trade leaked the day after the World Series. You can’t talk about the particulars of the deal without discussing the rather bizarre way that the trade unfolded.

Bill Madden of the New York Daily News broke the story just hours after the World Series ended. On Thursday morning, Buster Olney reported that trade talks were “not that far along”. An hour later, the Chicago Sun-Times confirmed the deal, even though both Chris Getz and Mark Teahen had denied that they had heard anything about a deal.

Thursday afternoon, Dick Kaegel reported that neither team had confirmed anything, and Teahen tweeted that night that “After a long day of rumors & questions, I haven't heard anything official. Heading 2 bed comfortable in knowing I'm a Royal 4 another day.”

Just past noon on Friday, the Royals finally issued a press release confirming the trade as initially reported; the only difference being that the Royals were including “cash considerations” (reported to be around $1 million) in the deal. (Many thanks to mlbtraderumors.com for helping with the timeline.)

Now in the grand scheme of things, the fact that a trade that wasn’t confirmed until Friday afternoon leaked Thursday morning isn’t a big deal. What is a big deal is that this continues a very troubling trend for the Royals, which is that despite – or perhaps because – they have instituted an almost-paranoid level of secrecy on all the team’s dealings, their trade talks continue to leak out before all the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed. Remember, it was just over a year ago when multiple newspapers reported that the Royals and Indians were close to a deal that would send Teahen to Cleveland in exchange for an outfielder, one of Trevor Crowe, Ben Francisco, or Franklin Gutierrez*. Publicly, Dayton Moore denied the rumors vociferously; privately, he went ballistic, going so far as to threaten to obtain cell phone records from employees to discover (and fire) the person responsible for the leak.

*: I don’t like to play what-if scenarios too often…but what if the Royals had traded Teahen for Gutierrez? The Indians wound up trading Gutierrez to Seattle in a 3-team, 11-player deal with the Mets, and Gutierrez hit .283/.339/.425 with 18 homers and 16 steals for the Mariners – and also had the most impressive defensive statistics of any outfielder in baseball. It’s not clear that the Royals were ever close to getting Gutierrez specifically, but if they had, they probably never trade for Coco Crisp, meaning they would have kept Ramon Ramirez, they might not have needed to sign Kyle Farnsworth and/or Juan Cruz…the debacle of last winter might well have been avoided. On the other hand, without Teahen, the Royals would have been caught flat-footed when Alex Gordon went down with his hip injury.

This time, there was fire to go along with the smoke, which led to yet another embarrassing situation for the Royals, as once again one of their players learned he had been traded away from a reporter instead of from the front office.

A few years back I formulated Jazayerli’s Law of Fundamentals, which states that “A team's ability to execute the “fundamentals” is inversely correlated to the time spent discussing the importance of executing them.” In the same vein, here’s a new rule I’ve made – call it Jazayerli’s Law of Public Relations: “The less forthcoming an organization is regarding personnel decisions that are made, the more likely it is that those personnel decisions will come to light in a messy and embarrassing way.”

Information yearns to be free, and it’s madness to think that in today’s 24-hour-news-cycle, mobile-internet, Twitter-and-Facebook world, that you can expect trade negotations to be kept secret indefinitely. The Royals’ attempts to do so of late have been laughably pathetic, but what’s more pathetic is that the Royals actually waste time looking for scapegoats when their private dealings inevitably become public. Moore’s tantrum last winter when the Teahen trade talks leaked is well known. More recently, the Royals berated members of the local media this September for telling prospect Danny Gutierrez that he had been traded to Texas before they had the chance to do so. This was ridiculous on so many levels: 1) it’s not the media’s fault when the Royals drop the ball and let their players hear from someone else that they’ve been traded; 2) Gutierrez had already been tipped off – he had already announced on his Facebook account that he was traded; 3) IT’S THE MEDIA’S JOB TO TALK TO PEOPLE.

The Royals aren’t wasting as much effort try to run down the leak this time, probably because even they can figure out that Bill Madden probably got his information from sources with the White Sox. Regardless, once again they’ve allowed what should be a quick, cut-and-dried trade announcement to turn into a drawn-out, confusing, will-they-or-won’t-they drama. It’s a small thing, but it’s a revealing thing.

Enough about the presentation – let’s talk about the substance of the deal. My initial reaction to the news that the Royals were trading Teahen for Chris Getz and Josh Fields was positive. In blunt terms, the Royals were trading two years of a league-average (and highly-paid) hitter for two players who could be league-average players as soon as 2010, and who are both under contract for five more years. My seven-second reaction was very favorable.

The consensus of the sabermetric community is…well, there is no consensus, really. Keith Law, oftentimes the Royals’ harshest critic, wrote “Love the trade for Kansas City. They will have traded a 45/50, who is close to free agency for two 45's with several more years of control.” (50 being scout-speak for a league-average player.) Over at fangraphs.com, Dave Cameron called this “a fantastic deal” for the Royals. On the other hand, Christina Kahrl’s transaction analysis was not nearly as sanguine, as she wrote, “It might be more appropriate to wonder what the point was, since this doesn't advance the Royals in any particular direction beyond ‘staffed’”. (If you read Kahrl’s analysis regularly, you know how inadequate any single sentence of hers is in conveying her complete thoughts.) Joe Sheehan’s analysis was even more negative, and much more terse, conveyed in a five-word text message Thursday morning: “Your GM is an idiot.”

I love it when a trade is evaluated objectively by two of the most capable analysts I know and they reach completely different opinions. If nothing else, this means that no matter what conclusion we reach about this trade, it’s important to hold that conclusion with all due humility, realizing that smart people are holding the other end of our position.

In Mark Teahen, the Royals gave up a player with a great attitude, who started at six different positions with the team without complaint – even when moving from third base to right field and back on a daily basis – and who was arguably the funniest Royal of his generation. (Teahen might have been the most consistently funny Royal since Dan Quisenberry.) What they didn’t give up was a great hitter. Teahen hit .271/.325/.408 last year, and his career numbers are an almost identical .269/.331/.419. The memory of his 2006 power surge is a distant one now. He’s a league-average hitter, one who just turned 28, and is more likely to stagnate than to take a big step forward.

While he has tremendous versatility, he’s never shown much proficiency at any specific position. According to UZR, he’s about 10 runs below average per season and third base, and while he’s been an average outfielder over his career, his numbers last year were terrible – he was 5 runs below average in right field despite playing just 32 games out there.

Teahen has value, particularly at third base, where the White Sox have wisely indicated will be his full-time position (with phenom Gordon Beckham moving over to second base). It’s quite possible, even likely, that his glove will improve with an off-season to prepare – remember, Teahen spent most of last spring training working at second base. It’s possible that a new organization and a much more favorable home park will be a tonic to Teahen’s homer numbers. But it’s very clear to me that none of that improvement was likely had the Royals kept him. Last Monday I was on radio with Soren Petro, and when Petro asked me what I thought was the most likely move of the Royals’ off-season, my answer was a Mark Teahen trade. As much as I like Mark, he had considerably less value on the Royals’ roster than he did on the trade market. Credit Moore for realizing that the obvious move is usually the right move – otherwise it wouldn’t be so obvious.

The key player the Royals received in return is supposed to be Chris Getz, who as a rookie second baseman last season hit .261/.324/.347. Those numbers are pretty lousy, but they’re mitigated somewhat by his 25 steals in 27 attempts. Most defensive metrics rated his defense as below-average, but he has a good reputation and no metric is ultra-reliable over a sample size of just one season – let’s call his defense average. In 2008, he hit .302/.366/.448 with 11 homers in Triple-A (he’s hit just eight homers in his other four pro seasons combined), and in 2007 he had a .382 in an injury-marred Double-A campaign. So there is some upside here, but by “upside” I mean he could into, I don’t know, Mickey Morandini or someone like that. A second baseman who makes up for a lack of power by being a tough out, stealing the occasional base, and playing a workman-like second base. The kind of guy who makes the opposing starter work hard out of the #8 spot in the lineup.

Even after giving Getz bonus points for coming out of the University of Michigan (I believe he’s the first Wolverine to suit up for the Royals since Hal Morris in 1998), it’s hard to credit him with being more than a utility player at this point. That has value, but not typically enough value to actually trade for. Which is why I think that Josh Fields is the key to the deal, or at least that the Royals hope he’s the key to the deal.

Fields has a lot of the traits of the perfect buy-low trade candidate. He has an excellent pedigree – he was a first-round pick in 2004 out of Oklahoma State, where he was also the starting quarterback (and still holds the university record for touchdowns thrown). By 2006 he was in Triple-A and hit .305/.379/.515; the following year he hit 23 homers as a rookie for the White Sox in just 100 games, slugging .480. No one would have thought that he’d be reduced to being a throw-in in a relatively minor trade two years later.

Even as a rookie Fields had a .308 OBP, and his career mark is just .302, which makes it easy to label this as just another low-OBP grab by clueless Royals management. I think the reality is a little more complicated. Fields’ problem isn’t that he doesn’t draw walks – he actually has 68 career walks in 664 at-bats, and a ratio of more than one walk per 10 at-bats is pretty good. The reason his OBP is so low is pretty obvious – it’s because his lifetime batting average is .229. And the reason his batting average is just .229 is also pretty obvious – it’s because he’s struck out 226 times in those 664 at-bats.

Fields, basically, is a poor man’s Mark Reynolds. Only one guy in the majors can succeed while striking out 200 times a season, and Fields isn’t him. But if Fields can cut his strikeout rate by 20-25% - which still works out to 150 strikeouts a season – he’s a breakout candidate. That’s a tall order for Kevin Seitzer, but after sticking Seitzer with the likes of Mike Jacobs, Miguel Olivo, and Yuniesky Betancourt over the past year, a project like Fields must feel like a remedial assignment. It’s a lot easier to teach a major league hitter to cut his strikeouts than it is to get him to raise his walks. Fields is a project, but one worth taking on. He’s already shown he can hit lefties – he has a career .285/.356/.580 line against southpaws – so the Royals have a base of success with which to build. I’ll predict right now that Fields, not Getz, proves to be the more successful of the pair with Kansas City. (Even though Getz was a rookie last year, he’s already 26 – he’s just eight months younger than Fields.)

You can’t talk about this deal without touching on the finances of it, and certainly that played a big part in the trade. Even with the $1 million the Royals sent to Chicago, they saved millions, given that Teahen will likely command close to $5 million in arbitration this winter, and that both Getz and Fields are pre-arbitration players who will make just over the league minimum of $400,000. Counting the extra roster spot, the Royals save roughly $3.5 million on the deal.

But I think the financial implications of the deal are less important than the service time implications. Teahen will be a free agent after the 2011 season. Both Getz and Fields have between one and two years of service time – neither would be a free agent until after the 2014 season. Getz won’t even be arbitration-eligible next year. The Royals acquired two players who are ready to contribute right away, but whose free agent horizons are well into the future. As Moore said, “Our motivation behind this deal – and any deal that we make this winter – is to acquire as many zero-to-three service-time players as we can. That was certainly what we did here.”

If for no other reason than that quote, this trade makes sense, because in making this trade Moore finally acknowledged something he should have last season: that while the Royals might be ready to contend in the near future, “the near future” does not mean “next year”. The Royals, barring divine intervention, are not going to win anything in 2010. Teams just don’t go from 97 losses one season to the playoffs the next. (Although I’m sure Moore knows all about the 1991 Braves.)

But the Royals can realistically think about contention in 2011, so long as they use 2010 wisely. That means jettisoning league-average guys like Teahen for lottery tickets like Fields, and using 2010 to see which of the new guys can play and which can’t. It might mean a few more losses next year while the Royals sort through their options – but I’d gladly sacrifice a few wins in 2010, when the Royals won’t need them, for a few wins in 2011, when they just might.

Or to put it another way, as Moore said, “The bottom line is it hasn’t worked here. It hasn’t worked. We have to do what we have to do to shake up our team and generate as much competition as we can. We have to put the pressure on (players) to go out and perform.”

It. Hasn’t. Worked. Here.

It. Hasn’t. Worked.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say that Moore almost sounds contrite. That he’s almost admitting that he’s made mistakes.

So if that’s what this trade is about – admitting that The Process^TM is in need of refinement, and that the Royals need to rethink how they put together a team – then I’m all in favor of it.

I’m just not sure it’s that simple. Taken in isolation, trading Teahen for Getz and Fields makes sense. But this trade can’t be fully evaluated until we see the other moves it triggers, because as it stands Getz and Fields are both without positions to play. Getz’s primary position is second base, where the Royals have Alberto Callaspo. Fields’s primary position is third base, where they have Alex Gordon. Taking playing time away from Callaspo and/or Gordon for the sake of Getz and/or Fields is so dumb that not even the Royals would consider it. Which means more moves are afoot.

The dilemma with Fields is, to my mind, an easy one to fix. Fields’s defensive reputation at third base is pretty lousy, and he has a fair amount of experience in the corner outfield. I could see him moving directly into the Teahen role, rotating between third base and the corner outfield, but my hope is that the Royals see him, in a best-case scenario, as their future right fielder.

Getz is a trickier problem to solve, because like most second basemen, he doesn’t have the skills to be a utility player – he played a little third base and left field in the minors, but he really should only be moved off the keystone in an emergency situation.

Now, I’ve been advocating for months now that the Royals should seriously explore the possibilities of an Alberto Callaspo trade. His bat ought to make him a highly-prized commodity on the trade market, while his glove is likely to be better-tolerated on a team that doesn’t have defensive liabilities at multiple other positions like the Royals have.

But it’s one thing to trade Callaspo if the right offer comes along, and it’s quite another to trade him simply because you can’t stomach his defense and you’ve finally found a decent replacement in Getz. Getz allows the Royals to trade Callaspo. He does not force the Royals to trade Callaspo, particularly since Getz (unlike Fields) actually has an option left, so he can be sent to Omaha to start the year if a suitor for Callaspo has not materialized.

Ultimately, this trade is going to be judged by the moves that it emboldens the Royals to make. I honestly think that Moore didn’t have any grand plan in mind for how to resolve the logjam of talent at third base and second base when he made this move. I think he made this move precisely because he doesn’t know where this off-season will lead, and so by bringing Fields and Getz into the fold, he puts the Royals in a position where they can pull the trigger if the right deal for someone like Callaspo comes along, but they don’t feel obligated to make a deal just for the sake of making one. At least I hope that’s true. When the Royals have made a deal just for the sake of making one, the casualties have been hard to bear.

If Moore decides to give away Gordon for whatever he can get and install Fields at third base, and then makes room for Getz by moving Callaspo to DH (which would be a waste of his talents), we’ll rue the day that Kenny Williams picked up the phone. But if Fields winds up taking playing time away from Jose Guillen in right field, and if the Royals get a bushel of prospects for Callaspo, this trade may be looked back at as the day the Royals started to rebuild the right way. The trade looks good in isolation. But I want to see the next few dominoes before I pronounce judgment.

---

We may have gotten a glimpse of the next domino the other day, when Bob Dutton reported ahead of the GM Meetings that “One rumor to watch: A deal sending second baseman Alberto Callaspo to the Los Angeles Dodgers for catcher A.J. Ellis, a 28-year-old rookie who currently projects as a backup to Russell Martin following the anticipated free-agent departure of veteran Brad Ausmus.”

If I were to draw up a list of teams that Moore should be talking to regarding Callaspo, the Dodgers would be very, very high up. The Dodgers are the perfect storm for a potentially lopsided trade:

- Thanks to their scouting director, Logan White, the Dodgers perennially have one of the most bountiful farm systems in baseball. It’s not as strong as it used to be, but there’s still plenty of talent there.

- Thanks to their highly overrated GM, Ned Colletti, the Dodgers have no problem with overpaying in prospects for a player who can help them today.

- As you may have heard, the owners of the Dodgers (Frank and Jamie McCourt) are in the opening stages of a messy, nasty, tabloid-filling divorce. The financial pressures on the team are likely to be as strong as the financial pressures were on the Padres when their owner was getting divorced a few years ago. Given those pressures, an everyday player like Callaspo who makes close to the league minimum (Callaspo figures to miss arbitration by just a few days of service time) ought to be particularly enticing.

Add it all up, and Moore should be putting the full-court press on the Dodgers. Look at some of the talent that LA has given up recently:

- Traded Tony Abreu for one month of Jon Garland

- Traded Josh Bell and Steve Johnson for 2+ years of George Sherrill

- Traded Carlos Santana and Jonathan Meloan for 2 months of Casey Blake (!)

- Traded Willy Aybar and Danys Baez for Wilson Betemit

- Traded Dioner Navarro and other prospects for Toby Hall and Mark Hendrickson

The Santana trade kills me. The Indians turned a mediocre free agent-to-be into Santana, who’s now one of the best catching prospects in baseball. (Say what you want about the Indians, but no team does a better job of trading for prospects. They also turned Eduardo Perez into Asdrubal Cabrera, and Ben Broussard into Shin-Soo Choo. And let’s not even recount the Bartolo Colon trade, or how they turned Einar Diaz into Travis Hafner.)

So absolutely, the Dodgers are a perfect destination for Callaspo. But…A.J. Ellis?

The same A.J. Ellis who slugged .375 last season – in Albuquerque, one of the best hitters’ parks in the game?

The same Ellis who is 28 years old – more than two years older than Callaspo?

I’m sorry, but I can’t take this trade rumor seriously. Maybe Ellis is a throw-in to a larger package of prospects that the Dodgers and Royals are talking about. But there’s no way that even Dayton Moore would consider trading a 26-year-old second baseman who hit .300 with 60 extra-base hits last season, who’s under contract for four more seasons, for a 28-year-old slow, singles-hitting backup catcher wannabe.

There’s no way.

No way.

---

If the Royals are interested in Ellis at all, it’s because they’ve decided to overhaul their catching corps. The Royals spent 100 grand on a buyout to Miguel Olivo, despite his 23 homers and .490 slugging average, just to keep him from activating the $3.3 million option on his contract. You could make a persuasive case that the Royals should have kept him at that price – and it will be interesting to see if they can work out a deal to offer him arbitration (and for him to decline)* in order to grab a compensation pick, as Olivo qualified as a Type B free agent – but ultimately it was the right move for two reasons. One, he had a .292 OBP in his career season, and two, he’s probably the worst everyday defensive catcher in baseball.

*: It just occurred to me: is it possible the Royals and Olivo have already worked out a handshake agreement for him to decline arbitration? Olivo was widely expected to forgo his player option, because he’s likely to earn more than $3.3 million on the open market. So why would the Royals pay him $100,000 to go away when they didn’t have to? Is it possible that they gave him a free 100 grand with the understanding that when they offer him arbitration, he’ll decline, netting the Royals a compensation pick? Stay tuned. It’s just a conspiracy theory, but everyone loves a good conspiracy theory.

But I don’t think Ellis is the answer, even if he’s just a throw-in in a Callaspo deal. Ellis is the exact opposite of Olivo offensively, in that he has no power but is an on-base machine, with a .438 OBP this season and a .436 OBP last season. On the surface, that sounds great. But I worry that Ellis’ on-base skills won’t translate to the majors for a couple of reasons.

First, he has no power to speak of – he didn’t hit a home run in all of 2009, and just four in 2008. The ability to draw walks at the major league level depends at least in part on the threat of power – one difference between major and minor league pitchers is that major leaguers can throw strikes when they have to, and without the threat of power, Ellis won’t be able to keep pitchers from just pounding him in the zone. Secondly, his high batting averages the past two years (.321 and .314) are almost certainly a ballpark illusion. Right-handed hitters without power are not going to hit .300 in the majors unless they have speed. Ellis doesn’t. It’s almost impossible to maintain a high OBP in the majors as a right-handed hitter with neither speed nor power.

Ellis’ OBP numbers in the minors look like those of a young Jason Kendall. But the young Kendall had a lot of speed and a fair amount of power, and he had a .402 OBP his first five years in the majors. The old Jason Kendall has neither speed nor power, and also has a .336 OBP the last five years. I fear that Ellis’ numbers in the majors will look a lot like Old Jason Kendall, and that’s not worth playing, let alone trading for.

I worry that the Royals, having finally seen up-close what ignoring OBP can do to your offense, have swung the pendulum clear the other way, and are suddenly interested in players whose OBP represents their only true skill. Ellis’ .438 OBP looks beautiful on paper. I just think he won’t come close to replicating that in the majors.

I particularly don’t see the appeal of Ellis since the Royals still have a better option in-house. I speak of John Buck, whose fan club has dwindled down to...(looks around)...just me, I guess. Take a look at these two lines from 2009:

Player A: .249/.292/.490, 103 OPS+

Player B: .247/.299/.484, 103 OPS+

Player A is the aforementioned Olivo. Player B is Buck. At-bat for at-bat, you could not construct two more similar hitters than these two. But because Olivo got more than twice as many at-bats last season, he has the counting numbers (23 homers, 65 RBIs) that impress people, while Buck doesn’t. But frankly, I’d rather have Buck. He’s two years younger, has a better idea of the strike zone, and while he has a much weaker arm, he’s much more sure-handed at blocking pitches in the dirt than Olivo. He makes a perfect complement to Brayan Pena, given that Pena is a switch-hitter and a contact guy, and he’s already on the roster. There may be better catchers than Buck on the market, but why the Royals would want to replace him with Ellis – who, again, is already 28 years old and has all of 10 at-bats in the majors – is beyond me.

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Finally, I can’t write about the Royals for the first time in two months without mentioning the fact that they completely turned over their training staff.

I take no particular joy in the fact that three men are out of a job. But as you know, I think this was absolutely the right move to make. I confess to being quite surprised at the news; if anything, I was concerned that the snit I had with the Royals this summer would have discouraged the Royals from making a move even if they wanted to, if only to avoid accusations that they were letting the inmates (i.e. the media) run the asylum. I felt like Professor Zarkov in Flash Gordon, in that by speaking out I had insured that the very thing I warned against would come to pass from Dayton Moore/Emperor Ming. (And you guys thought my “V” references were geeky.)

But the Royals made the right move anyway, and they deserve credit for that. Yes, officially Swartz retired, and for his sake I hope the move was voluntary. At the same time, you know the old adage about issuing bad news on a Friday afternoon? The press release announcing Swartz’ retirement entered my mailbox on a Friday at 5:59 PM.

To replace Swartz, the Royals hired Nick Kenney, who was the assistant head trainer for the Indians. (The Royals then cleaned house by letting assistant trainers Frank Kyte and Jeff Stevenson go, and replacing them with Kyle Turner, who was previously the Royals’ Minor League Medical Coordinator.) The Indians’ training staff has an excellent reputation, and in fact two years ago they won Baseball Prospectus’ Dick Martin Award that is given out to the best training staff in the majors. I have nothing but praise for this decision.

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At over 4900 words, this might be my longest column ever. So now that the Royals have a training staff that might be able to keep injury-prone players healthy, I’ll leave you with two final words as the free-agent season gets underway.

Rich Harden.

I'm Done.

So the Royals have improbably swept the Tigers, as the trio of Bruce Chen, Robinson Tejeda, and Lenny DiNardo led the Royals to victory over Rick Porcello, Justin Verlander, and Jarrod Washburn. After eking out a win tonight in Cleveland, the Royals have won five games in a row for the first time since they were, yes, 18-11. Seems like a good time for some positivity.

If that’s what you’re thinking, I’m afraid I have to disappoint you.

I’ve let this column stew in my head for a few days now, in the hope that time would dull the sharp edges a little bit. As harsh as this column might read, trust me, if I had written it two days ago it would have been much, much worse.

On Tuesday the Royals announced their final September callups of the year. Two days after the Royals rushed reinforcements to Kansas City in the arms of Dusty Hughes, Victor Marte, and Carlos Rosa (and the glove – certainly not the bat – of Luis Hernandez), the team brought back Alex Gordon after he had served penance for his sins at the plate, and brought up Lenny DiNardo in order to fill out a rotation that is suddenly down Gil Meche and Brian Bannister.

But it was the player the Royals didn’t call up that has exposed this organization once again as having blinders on to any kind of objective analysis of what the issues are with this team. Much as the acquisition of Yuniesky Betancourt spoke volumes about how clueless the Royals are when it comes to a rational evaluation of a player’s worth, the decision not to promote this player from Triple-A is damning evidence of the same thing.

And no, I’m not talking about Chris Hayes. I think Disco was deserving of a September callup, and could have helped the team down the stretch, but he stumbled down the stretch, allowing a 6.39 ERA after the All-Star Break thanks mostly to ridiculously bad luck in the BABIP category, as Hayes himself documented here. In 25 innings since the Break, Hayes walked just five batters and allowed just one homer, but gave up 42 hits on a BABIP of .410. For a pitcher who is never going to be taken seriously until he starts retiring major league hitters – and maybe not even then – Hayes’ stumble gave the Royals the excuse they were looking for to keep him down on the farm.

I’m obviously disappointed that Hayes won’t get the chance to see the Show this year, but I still think he had a good year overall, and is closer to the majors now than he was in March. For the season, he had a 3.05 ERA, and despite allowing 100 hits in 86 innings, he surrendered just 13 walks and three home runs. That’s positively Quisenberry-esque, as are the 41 strikeouts. (I mean that literally. In 1986, Quiz threw 81 innings, allowed 92 hits, 12 unintentional walks, 2 homers, and had 36 Ks. He had a 2.77 ERA. Not identical, but damn close.) I think Hayes has put himself in a position where, at worst, he’ll start next season in Triple-A, and if his luck evens out he’s in position to put pressure on the Royals to call him up all season long.

(Hayes isn’t exactly hurting in the publicity department either. After he was the subject of Joe Posnanski’s last official column for the Star, he’s been the subject of tweets by Ken Tremendous and Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers. I dare say that he’s now the most famous minor league middle reliever with a 78-mph fastball in the country.)

I’m not concerned about Hayes’ long-term future, but I am concerned about his future with the Royals. Hayes becomes Rule 5-eligible this winter if he’s not put on the team’s 40-man roster, and let’s be honest: does anyone here think the Royals believe he’s worthy of a roster spot? So I’ll call it now: the Royals will leave Disco off their 40-man roster, and there’s about a 50/50 chance that another team will take a $50,000 flyer on the kid who throws 78 but still gets people out. The odds would be a lot higher if the A’s didn’t already have Brad Ziegler, or if the Red Sox didn’t have so many resources that they don’t need to take a gamble on the soft-tossing submarine guy.

I’m not referring to Cory Aldridge either, although Aldridge certainly has the right to be upset about not getting called up. Aldridge isn’t a prospect – he turns 30 later this year – but he was Omaha’s Player of the Year after hitting .316/.361/.582 with 22 homers in 98 games. Calling Aldridge up to the majors wouldn’t hurt the team – any outfield that’s playing both Mitch Maier and Josh Anderson regularly needs all the help it can get – and would have been a nice way to honor a career minor leaguer who had the best season of his 13-year pro career. A small-market team like the Royals needs to be aggressive about recruiting minor league free agents, and it’s going to be that much harder to entice them to sign with Kansas City when a guy like Aldridge, who did everything he possibly could to earn a promotion, gets shut out of a month in the major leagues. Not to mention the $50,000 or so he would have made this month, which likely would have doubled his income for the year.

But no, I’m not that upset about those two decisions. It’s the decision to leave Kila Ka’aihue in Omaha that opens a window into the soul of the Royals’ front office. And what we’re seeing is not pretty.

I’ll be the first to admit that Ka’aihue has had a disappointing season. After hitting .314 last season, he hit just .252 this year. His home runs plummeted from 37 to 17, his slugging average dropped nearly 200 points from .628 to .433. But the one part of Ka’aihue’s game that didn’t deteriorate this season was his plate discipline. He drew 104 walks last season, and 102 more this year. Despite his low batting average, Ka’aihue had a .392 OBP.

I’ve said this before, but let me say it again: the single biggest failing of the Royals as a franchise over the last quarter-century hasn’t been their pitching, or their bullpen, or their lack of power or speed or defense. It has been a lack of ability or effort to get on base; specifically, an inability to take a walk. The Royals have ranked in the bottom half of the AL in walks drawn for TWENTY CONSECUTIVE SEASONS, and 28 of the last 29 years. After finishing dead last in walks last season, with one of the lowest walk totals by any team since World War II, they’ve improved all the way to next-to-last this season.

Dayton Moore and Trey Hillman have both paid lip service to the importance of plate discipline and OBP since the day they were hired…and then sabotaged that mission with seemingly every move. After tossing us a bone by hiring Kevin Seitzer as the team’s hitting coach last winter, Moore proceeded to crank up the degree of difficulty on Seitzer’s job, trading for Mike Jacobs (career OBP: .318), and Miguel Olivo (career high in walks: 20) over the winter, and then making Betancourt (career high in walks: 17) the cherry on top this summer.

Meanwhile, down in Triple-A, the Royals have a player who has now drawn over 100 walks in back-to-back seasons. (And remember, minor league seasons run only 140 games.) This player is a left-handed hitting 1B/DH, coincidentally the same role that Jacobs plays on the team. Jacobs has had the season that some of us expected him to, hitting just .235/.301/.417 with no speed or defensive value. As disappointing as Ka’aihue’s season was in Triple-A, it was essentially the equivalent of Jacobs’ season. According to Baseball Prospectus’ Davenport Translations, if you project what Ka’aihue’s numbers would have been had he played against major league competition this year, he would have hit .237 with a .408 slugging average – virtually identical to Jacobs’ performance this year.

Oh, except that thanks to all those walks, Ka’aihue’s OBP would be .368 – more than 60 points higher than Jacobs’.

I won’t mention that if the Royals had picked Ka’aihue over Jacobs last winter, they would still have Leo Nunez, whose 4.11 ERA this season would look awfully good compared to the scrubs that have been coughing up runs in middle relief all season. And I won’t mention that they also would have saved about 3 million dollars. That’s water under the bridge at this point. But just looking to 2010, it’s piercingly clear that Ka’aihue is a better hitter than Jacobs. He can’t possibly be worse defensively; he’s a lot cheaper; and he’s younger (and thus is more likely to improve on his 2009 season, particularly given how he hit in 2008). And did I mention he’s better?

Sure, it’s possible that Ka’aihue could be that mythical AAAA-player, the guy who lights up Triple-A pitching but can’t hit his way out of a paper bag in double-decker stadiums. That’s what September is for: to take advantage of the fact that you’re miles away from a pennant race by giving your young players some at-bats to evaluate them against major league competition.

Or, you know, you could send just send them home and continue to play veterans who have already proven they can’t hit.

Much like the acquisition of Betancourt, the direct damage of keeping Ka’aihue down on the farm pales to the indirect damage of what this decision says about the front office. The trade for Betancourt hurt the team, but it wasn’t a fatal blow – Jose Guillen makes as much in four months as the Royals will pay Betancourt over the life of his contract. But it was the thought process that led to the Betancourt trade that was so damning. Same thing here – while keeping Ka’aihue in the minors denies the team a chance to upgrade their offense and simultaneously cut payroll, what hurts more than Ka’aihue’s absence is that we have a front office that so little values his talents.

I have tried to come up with a plausible explanation for why Ka’aihue was left in the minors. The 40-man roster is full? Not only is that easily remedied – the Royals could easily open up space by putting Jose Guillen or John Bale or Julio Pimentel on the 60-day DL, or they could cut non-prospects like Devon Lowery and Mario Lisson – it’s irrelevant, since Ka’aihue is already on the 40-man roster. Financial considerations? Maybe in the Allard Baird era I would believe this, but I refuse to believe that Moore left Ka’aihue behind in order to save $50,000 – which is about what Gil Meche makes in one day. They don’t want to rush him? Ka’aihue has played 164 games in Triple-A, and 264 more in Double-A – the equivalent of over three full seasons in the high minors.

I have learned, from years of painful experience, to never assume that the Royals will allow common sense to creep into their decision-making process. This is the same organization, after all, that kept Jose Lima in their starting rotation for a full season – earning him incentives of over $1 million – while Lima was fashioning one of the worst seasons by a starting pitcher in major league history.

But I still didn’t see this coming. I still could not have fathomed that the Royals would rather continue to play out the string with a failed acquisition than so much as look at their best hitter in the high minors over the last two years. Even if you think Ka’aihue isn’t a legitimate prospect, even if (as I have heard) the Royals think Ka’aihue has slider bat-speed and won’t catch up to major league heat, what’s the harm in letting him prove it? Maybe Ka’aihue isn’t the answer to your DH hole – but since Jacobs has already proven that he’s not the answer, why not give Ka’aihue the chance to sink or swim?

Because…because…the Royals don’t think that Jacobs has proven to be a failure. And that’s the most frightening fact of all. Against all odds, against all the evidence, all the signs (the decision to leave Ka’aihue in the minors is just the latest one) point to the fact that the Royals want to bring Jacobs back. While the rest of us have watched a one-trick pony who can’t hit for average, can’t work a walk, can’t run, and can’t play defense to save his life, the Royals still see a solution. It’s as if, having acquired Jacobs last winter, the front office has decided that Jacobs is a fine player – they traded for him, after all! – and any evidence to the contrary is simply inaccurate. If the numbers say that Jacobs is actually a pretty useless player, well then, reality must have an anti-Royals bias.

Moore should run for political office one day, because he has already mastered the most important skill of any politician: when confronted with bad news, deny, deny, deny. Moore is still looking for the WMDs in Iraq. He did not have sexual relations with that woman*.

*: If it’s not a rule, it should be: if you insult both political parties back-to-back, no one can claim that you were being political. Fair?

The Royals traded for Jacobs, and while the rest of us see his .235 average and .301 OBP, the Royals see a guy who has given the team the power threat they really needed. And besides, he’s hitting .294 since August 2^nd! Never mind that from May 20^th to August 1^st, Jacobs – who’s a DH, remember – hit .171/.247/.304. Deny, deny, deny.

(The combined totals for the Royals’ cleanup slot this year – which has been mostly manned by Jacobs and Guillen – are .211/.278/.301. More amazing than that: when Jacobs went deep on September 2^nd, it was the first time the Royals’ cleanup hitter had hit a home run since JUNE 10^TH.)

The rest of us see that Roman Colon never did anything in Triple-A to justify a callup in the first place, and that he’s got a 5.31 ERA this year. The Royals see an excellent middle reliever. In fact, Colon has had four scoreless appearances in a row - he’s proven he’s ready for a more important role! Deny, deny, deny.

The rest of us scratched our heads when the Royals gave $9 million to sign a pitcher whose ERAs the previous three years read 4.48, 4.80, and 4.36. The Royals denied that was a problem – Kyle Farnsworth throws 100! We need strikeout pitchers in the bullpen!

Trust us: Sidney Ponson gives the team the veteran presence in the rotation that we’re missing. You can't win without a left-handed starter in your rotation, and never mind if Horacio Ramirez hasn't been a decent starter since 2005.

What’s that? How dare you suggest that the team might have mishandled Coco Crisp’s shoulder issues! (Just this morning I was told that another ex-Royal had privately bashed the team’s training staff as one of the worst in the industry.)

And you, Keith Law: how dare you write an unflattering column about my contract extension! (Here’s what Law wrote in his chat session yesterday: “Someone I know well with KC told me after I wrote that the Royals shouldn't give Dayton an extension that we're not friends any more. The entire organization has gone mad - you are simply not allowed to criticize them.” And while Law didn’t mention it in his chat, I’ve also learned that after publishing his criticism of Dayton Moore’s extension, Law received a phone call…from Dayton Moore.

Yuniesky Betancourt has been a tremendous pickup for us, and we’re thrilled to have him under contract for the next two or three years. Never mind that he’s hitting .222/.263/.361, or that his defensive numbers say that he’s cost the team 8 runs compared to an average defensive shortstop in just 50 games since he joined the team. I really don’t know how some of those statistics are evaluated. Which means they must not mean anything.

(Anyone remember how, in the midst of the firestorm of criticism that accompanied the Betancourt trade, Moore defended the move in part by pointing out how so many people in the media panned the signing of Willie Bloomquist signing? Yeah, he actually used Willie Bloomquist to defend himself. Bloomquist is hitting .257/.300/.345 this year, and the majority of his playing time has come in the outfield. That’s right: an outfielder with a .300 OBP and no power is a feather in Moore’s cap. But hey, at least Bloomquist was totally right about Betancourt! “He could be the best defensive shortstop in the game hands down. And offensively, he can swing it…It makes me smile that we got him. He’s going to help.”)

There’s no way we could have made this trade without including Daniel Cortes. Just because people in the Mariners’ own front office have said they would have done the trade for Derrick Saito alone doesn’t mean anything. Don’t believe everything you’re told by someone who works in a team’s front office. Well, unless it’s our front office.

Besides, it’s not like Cortes is a great prospect. I mean, sure, he was our #1 pitching prospect just six months ago, and he’s only 22 years old, and we sold at the absolute nadir of his trade value. But trust us – Cortes is nothing special. (Ben Badler of Baseball America wrote this in a chat session today: “late in the season [Cortes] was sitting in the low-90s with a plus curve and much better command than he had shown earlier in the year, and the numbers from his last three starts bear that out.” In his last three starts, Cortes whiffed 24 batters in 17 innings.)

Gil Meche’s back is fine. Okay, it’s not fine, but he can pitch through it. There’s nothing wrong with letting him throw 132 pitches in order to finish off a 5-0 game. It’s just a coincidence that he gave up 9 runs in his next start. And it’s another coincidence that he complained of a tired arm two starts after that. And just because he was complaining of a tired arm two days ago, there’s nothing wrong with letting him throw 121 pitches in his next start, working against the heart of the Twins’ lineup in the sixth inning. The fact that he has an 8.01 ERA since that start, and that he’s now out for the season with a tired shoulder? Pure coincidence. We’ve done nothing wrong.

(The best part of the link above is that Posnanski finishes with this line: 'Were [Hillman and Nick Swartz] thinking, “Boy, I hope this works and doctors don’t find out tomorrow that Gil has a serious injury because that would mean both our butts?”' They didn't find out tomorrow - it took two months - but now that Meche's arm has come up lame, I'm sure that Hillman and Swartz are worried about their job security. Oh, who am I kidding?)

Call up some new relievers? Why would we want to do that? Just because we blew 8^th-inning leads in three straight games coming out of the All-Star Break? Just because the bullpen – even including Joakim Soria – has an ERA over six since the Break? Our bullpen is fine. Besides, there isn’t anyone down in Omaha that can help. It doesn’t prove anything that Dusty Hughes, Victor Marte, and Carlos Rosa have thrown 7.2 scoreless innings since they were called up.

And most important of all: never mind the fact that the Royals are 37-74 in their last 111 games. Everyone knows that only the first 29 games of the season matter, and we won 18 of them! Besides, what really ruined the season was injuries, and never mind that many of them were self-inflicted. All that matters is that the team was 18-11 before Alex Gordon got hurt…okay, Gordon actually got hurt a week into the season and had only two hits before he went on the DL…before Mike Aviles got hurt…okay, Aviles hit .183/.208/.250 before he went on the DL…before Coco Crisp got hurt! Yeah, that’s it! If Crisp had just stayed healthy, we would have continued to play .621 ball all season!

Deny, deny, deny.

And then, when someone has the temerity to ask why, if the front office hasn’t made any mistakes this year, the team has the worst record in the American League – by all means, blame your first baseman (who’s the best hitter on your team, and the best young hitter your organization has developed in at least 15 years) for not turning 3-6-3 double plays. No, really, say that.

The Royals under Dayton Moore have been engaging in magical thinking all year long: if they believe something strongly enough, it will come true. Mike Jacobs is a good hitter. Mike Jacobs is a good hitter. Mike Jacobs is a good hitter. If we call up Kila Ka’aihue and give him a chance to play, that would mean Mike Jacobs is not a good hitter. Mike Jacobs is a good hitter. Does not compute.

Maybe if the Royals weren’t so focused on uncovering and stamping out criticism of the organization, they might have uncovered the fact that Luke Hochevar has been tipping his pitches for the last two years. Hochevar just learned that at least half a dozen major league teams have been sitting on his every pitch – and I can tell you that the people who finally let him in on the secret last week weren’t part of the Royals’ organization.

But again: the Royals are far more concerned with keeping information from leaking out of the organization then with bringing new information into the organization. They have all the answers. If only I had known they had all the answers two years ago, I wouldn’t have started this blog in the first place.

But now I know. So now’s the time for me to put this blog on hiatus.

I think it’s pretty clear that I need a break from the Royals. The fact that they’re on a modest little winning streak right now (though, predictably, they’ve done everything they could to screw Greinke out of wins in his last two starts) and all I can think about are all the things they’re doing wrong, suggests that I need to get away for a while. Anger has turned into bitterness, and it’s not healthy for me to write while I’m bitter. I’m sure many of you will be very critical of this column, and that’s your prerogative. The Royals have just won five in a row, and I spend over 4000 words ripping the team for not bringing up a minor leaguer for a few weeks? But that’s just it: I’ve reached the point where seemingly minor decisions are sending me off the deep end. So it’s probably best for everyone – you, me, and the Royals – if I stop writing for a while.

Over the last few days I talked to some close contacts who follow the team, hoping that they might reassure me that things aren’t as bad as they seem, and that they might talk me out of writing this column. The opposite occurred; they agreed that the organization is even more dysfunctional than it appears on the surface.

I started this blog two seasons ago with two main goals in mind: to influence the discourse about the Royals in the hopes that I might influence the team’s decisions in some small fashion, and to have fun. With regards to the first goal, I’ve obviously been a complete failure: judging from their moves, you’d think the Royals were doing the exact opposite of what I’ve preached purely out of spite. (I mean, seriously, I was the only stats guy in the universe that advocated the Royals should trade for Jeff Francoeur, who might be Dayton Moore’s favorite player in the world. They didn’t, and Francoeur was dumped on the Mets. Oh, and since being traded he’s hitting .296/.327/.481. That would look nice in our outfield.)

But up until recently I was having fun. I’ve had a blast establishing a rapport with all of you, building the kind of community that brought things like “The Mexicutioner” to a national audience. That sense of camaraderie has made all the losses tolerable, because at least we were all losing together.

The last three months have been, well, not fun. It’s not the losing; it’s the sense that the Royals’ front office operates in a different reality than the rest of us. Joe Posnanski wrote back in July 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.” As a Royals fan, I don’t know anything else. For 20 years – since the first time I cracked open a Bill James’ Baseball Abstract – my philosophy about baseball has been to use the power of sabermetrics to your advantage. And for 20 years, the Royals have been farther behind the curve when it comes to objective analysis than any team in baseball.

It’s one thing to have a philosophical disagreement with your team. It’s quite another when your team digs in its heels and refuses to change its philosophy…for 20 years...despite one of the losingest stretches in the history of the game. The Pittsburgh Pirates just got a lot of attention for setting a major league record with their 17^th consecutive losing season. Over the last 17 years, the Royals have more losses than the Pirates.

And still, the Royals live in this alternate reality, where night is day, up is down, Yuniesky Betancourt is a good ballplayer and Kila Ka’aihue can’t hold Mike Jacobs’ jock. Where losing is part of The Process. Where there is no such thing as legitimate criticism.

It’s not fun anymore. You know things are bad when the Royals win five in a row, and the two things running through my head are, "great, there goes our draft position" and "yeah, because that 18-8 record last September was such a strong omen." So I’m going to take a few months to recharge and see if the fun returns. I’ll still watch the Royals whenever Greinke starts, I’ll still root for Bam Bam to hit more doubles and for Alex Gordon to revive his career. I’ll still try to fit essay-length commentary into 140 characters on Twitter (@jazayerli). But between now and spring training, don’t expect any posts to show up here. If the Royals make some significant moves over the winter – they sign a free agent, they make a trade, they fire Trey Hillman (a man can dream) – I might show up here with some brief commentary. Other than that, I’m done for 2009.

If, over the winter, Dayton Moore decides to rejoin this plane of existence and acknowledge that The Process – the process that put together the 2009 Royals – is fatally flawed, then I look forward to being back next spring. If the upcoming off-season is a rehash of last off-season, well, I can find other things to occupy my evenings in the spring and summer.

Thanks to everyone for reading, and if the Royals cooperate this winter I hope to meet you all back here next February. Letting Mike Jacobs go over the off-season would be a nice start.