Ned.

Six days into the Ned Yost era, and I’m convinced that he is the managerial equivalent of a Rorschach Blot. What you see in him says less about him than it does about you. So I’ll do my best to break down his track record as dispassionately as possible.

The Case For Ned

Ned Yost was hired by the Milwaukee Brewers after the 2002 season. The Brewers went 56-106 in 2002, the worst of 10 consecutive losing seasons. (By comparison, the Royals went 59-109 in the last 168 games of Trey Hillman’s career, and last year was their 14th losing season in the last 15 years.)

The Brewers lost 94 games in each of his first two seasons – then reached .500 in 2005. By 2007, they were over .500 again at 83-79. They would win 90 games in his final season, and went to the playoffs for the first time in 26 years.

Yost won 83 games twice in his career before he was hired by the Royals. Not one manager the Royals have employed since Dick Howser – Mike Ferraro, Billy Gardner, John Wathan, Hal McRae, Bob Boone, Tony Muser, Tony Pena, Buddy Bell, and Trey Hillman (phew!) – had ever won 83 games as a manager even once prior to joining the Royals.

The Case Against Ned

While the Brewers won 90 games in his final season, Yost wasn’t their manager in the playoffs. At the end of August, the Brewers were 80-56, which was the second-best record in the National League; they had a 5.5 game lead on the wild card. They then lost 11 of their next 14 games, a streak which was punctuated by a four-game sweep by the Phillies. They went into that series with a 4-game lead on Philly, and came out of it tied. Yost was fired the next day. It was an almost unprecedented move in baseball history: a manager being fired, in September, with his team in the midst of a pennant race.

This was the second straight year that the Brewers had faded from the pennant race down the stretch. In 2007, the Brewers went into the All-Star Break 49-39, leading the NL Central by 4.5 games. As late as September 18th, they were tied with the Cubs for first place. But they stumbled over the final two weeks, finishing 5-7 and losing the division by two games.

Yost was replaced by his third-base coach, Dale Sveum. After losing four of his first five games, Sveum skippered Milwaukee to five straight wins. After losing the penultimate game of the season, the Brewers found themselves tied with the Mets with one game to go. The Brewers turned to their ace, C.C. Sabathia, who on three days’ rest threw a complete game and won, 3-1. The Mets lost at home to Florida, 4-2, and Milwaukee was in the playoffs. But without Sabathia available to start twice in the NLDS, they were dispatched by the Phillies in four games.

The Case For Ned

As manager of the Brewers, Yost presided over an impressive resurgence of the team’s farm system – a farm system directed by Jack Zduriencik, now the GM of the Seattle Mariners – and to his credit, Yost was quite successful at turning young hitting prospects into good major-league hitters. They include:

- Scott Podsednik, who was picked up off waivers from the Mariners after the 2002 season. Pods, at that point, was a Triple-A journeyman who had all of 26 major-league at-bats and had hit just .279/.347/.425 in Triple-A, at the age of 26. Yost broke him in slowly in 2003, using him off the bench for the first month of the season before installing him at the top of the lineup in mid-May. Podsednik would hit .314/.379/.443 and score 100 runs, finishing second in Rookie of the Year voting. The following year he hit just .244, but smacked 12 homers and led the league with 70 steals. He was traded after the season to the White Sox, and was the leadoff hitter for the World Champions.

- Rickie Weeks, the #2 overall pick in the 2003 draft, came up as a 22-year-old rookie in 2005. Weeks, like another college hitter drafted #2 overall, has yet to reach the promise of his draft position; he developed considerable patience to go along with good power for a second baseman, but his defense has never been stellar and he has battled injuries and a chronically-low batting average. He’s still a good player.

- Bill Hall, who was a minor league player of little note when Yost arrived – in 2002, Hall hit .228 with 4 homers in Triple-A, and in 2003 he improved to .282 but still with only 5 homers. He came up late in 2003 and hit 5 more homers in just 52 games, batting .261/.298/.458 overall. As a utility infielder in 2004, he hit .238/.276/.374 with 9 homers; in 2005, he continued to play all over the infield, and hit .291/.342/.495 with 17 homers.

In 2006, Yost installed Hall as his everyday shortstop, and Hall hit .270/.345/.553 with 35 home runs. He fell off quickly after that; by 2008, Yost’s last season in Milwaukee, Hall hit .225/.293/.396. But for two seasons he was one of the best-hitting middle infielders in the National League, not bad for a guy who projected as a bench guy at best.

- Despite his terrific 2006 season as a shortstop, Hall was moved to center field for the 2007 season to make way for J.J. Hardy, who unlike Hall was considered a top prospect in the minors. Hardy actually hit .246/.319/.388 in 159 games for the Brewers in 2005-06, but was lost for the season with an injury on May 16th, when Hall took over. Healthy in 2007, at age 24 Hardy hit .277/.323/.463 with 26 homers, and hit .283/.343/.478 with 24 homers in 2008, with excellent defense both years.

Coincidentally or not, after Yost was fired Hardy struggled. Battling injuries last season, he hit just .229/.302/.357, and he was traded to Minnesota after the season for Carlos Gomez.

- Corey Hart was a well-regarded minor-leaguer but not a top prospect; he cracked the bottom of Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospect list at #91 before the 2003 season. That year he hit .302/.340/.467 as a 21-year-old in Double-A, and fell off the list the next year. He spent all of 2004 and 2005 in Triple-A, hitting .281/.342/.485 and .308/.377/.536. In 2006 he hit .320/.391/.560 in 26 games in Nashville, finally earning a call up. He hit .283/.328/.468 in 87 games as a rookie.

In 2007, he became a full-time starter and hit .295/.353/.539; in 2008 he regressed to .268/.300/.459, but made his first All-Star team. He was a 20-20 player both seasons.

- Prince Fielder, selected #7 overall in the 2002 draft (one pick after Zack Greinke; rumor has it the Royals were deliberating between both players), was a monster in the minor leagues – he ranked among Baseball America’s #15 prospects three straight seasons. In 2005, he hit .291/.388/.569 in Triple-A at age 21, hitting 28 homers in just 103 games.

Like another big left-handed hitting first baseman, Fielder languished on the bench for much of that season, getting just 59 at-bats despite sending the better part of two months on the major-league roster. The next season he was installed as the Brewers’ everyday first baseman, and hit .271/.347/.483 with 28 homers. It was a stacked year for rookies, and he got just two third-place votes in Rookie of the Year voting. But as a sophomore he was even better, leading the NL with a Brewers-record 50 homers. He’s been one of the best hitters in baseball ever since.

- Fielder, though, isn’t even the best hitter on his team, because of Ryan Braun, the #5 pick in the 2005 draft (two picks after Alex Gordon). Braun crushed the ball in the minors, hitting .313/.375/.572 in 199 minor league games, and was called up to the majors on May 25th, 2007, less than 2 years after he was drafted (and just six weeks after Gordon debuted).

Braun doubled in his first game, homered in his second, and he was off: he hit .324/.370/.634 as a rookie, won Rookie of the Year honors despite playing in just 113 games, and led the league in slugging, which is even more remarkable when you consider he fell slightly short of the 502 plate appearances required to be eligible. Braun was a miserable defensive third baseman, though, so – sound familiar? – he was moved to left field the next season, where his glove is still bad but not nearly as costly. He hit .288/.335/.553 in a solid sophomore season, and has been even better since.

That’s an impressive group of talent. In 2008, Yost’s final year with the team, six of his eight lineup spots were filled with home-grown players that he had personally developed – the guys above minus Podsednik, who had been traded for Carlos Lee. The only veterans in the lineup that year were Jason Kendall (surprise!) and shrewd free-agent signing Mike Cameron.

Yost proved he could work with different kinds of hitters; the pure take-and-rake approach of Fielder, the rake-and-rake-some-more stylings of Braun and Hart; the waterbug leadoff hitter approach of Podsednik. The only player of the seven that you could argue didn’t reach his potential with Yost was Weeks, who continues to tantalize and frustrate the Brewers long after Yost left. Meanwhile, there doesn’t appear to be any outright failures among Brewers prospects to develop. The biggest miss was Nelson Cruz, who got all of five at-bats with Milwaukee before he was packaged with Carlos Lee to Texas in 2005, where three years later he blossomed into one of the game’s most underrated hitters.

But that’s hard to pin on Yost. He was asked to turn seven players – six prospects from the farm system and one minor league veteran – into major leaguers, and he succeeded seven times.

Yost also turned Keith Ginter, who had been acquired in a deadline dump for Mark Loretta in 2002, into a useful player for two seasons. Ginter was then traded to Oakland for Nelson Cruz, and 51 games later was out of the majors. After Yost’s first season, the Brewers traded Richie Sexson to Arizona for a package of talent, including his successor, Lyle Overbay, who had played just 87 games as a rookie. Yost made him his everyday first baseman and Overbay hit .301, leading the league with 53 doubles. Overbay was traded to Toronto two years later to make room for Prince Fielder; the hitter acquired in the deal, Gabe Gross, had the best year of his career for Yost in 2006.

Really, about the only blemish I can find on Yost’s record with developing hitters is that he had Russ Branyan on his team – twice! – and like every other manager before him, didn’t see fit to give him an everyday job. On the other hand, with Overbay playing first base in Branyan’s first go-round with the team, and Prince Fielder entrenched there the second time, it’s not clear where Branyan could have played every day.

Yost’s track record for developing hitters is truly impressive, and much better than I thought it would be when I started this analysis. For a team that is down to its last chance with Alex Gordon, a team that is just starting to realize that Kila Ka’aihue is one of the four best hitters in the organization right now, a team that has Mike Moustakas and Eric Hosmer and Derrick Robinson coming down the pike between now and the end of next season – as a Royals fan, I don’t have the slightest hesitation in trusting Yost with the future of our offense.

The Case Against Ned

That’s great that he developed all those hitters, but how much credit does he really deserve? He was the beneficiary of a ridiculous amount of hitting talent that the Brewers drafted and developed – it’s no surprise that the guy who was really responsible for landing all those guys got hired as the GM of the Seattle Mariners.

And if you didn’t see any pitchers on the list above, that’s not an oversight. Under Yost, the Brewers produced almost no starting pitchers of any note. Ben Sheets had already established himself in the rotation before Yost got there.

In Yost’s six seasons as manager of the Brewers, the only starting pitcher developed by the franchise to last even a full season in a rotation is Yovani Gallardo.

The Case For Ned

You can’t wave away all the hitters that Yost developed as a product of the farm system, and then blame him for all the pitchers that the farm system didn’t develop. During his time with the Brewers, the top pitching prospects on the farm were Mike Jones and Mark Rogers, who both blew their arms out before they ever touched foot on a major-league mound. Former top prospect Nick Neugebauer, who was one of the hardest throwers in baseball and who made 12 starts for the Brewers in 2002 at the age of 21, had already blown out his arm before Yost arrived and was never heard from again. Other top prospects like Jose Capellan profiled best as relievers.

Meanwhile, Yost did the best he could with the players he was given. Doug Davis was a 27-year-old southpaw who had washed out of the Rangers and Blue Jays organizations when the Brewers claimed him off waivers in 2003. He made 118 starts with Milwaukee over the next three-plus years, with an impressive 107 ERA+. A year later, the Brewers promoted Chris Capuano, a Grade B prospect who had been obtained in the Richie Sexson deal. Capuano gave the Brewers three-plus seasons of league-average pitching before his arm gave out. Yost also got two decent seasons as a starter out of Victor Santos, when no other team could get even one.

The only top starting prospect to reach the majors under Yost who didn’t pan out was Jorge de la Rosa, who only made 8 starts with Milwaukee before he was traded to the Royals for Tony Graffanino – and it took de la Rosa 3 more years and another organization before he finally started to fulfill his promise last season with the Rockies.

It’s true that the Brewers under Yost didn’t develop very many starting pitchers. But 1) that’s a reflection of the farm system more than the manager, and 2) Yost had enough success with recycled pitchers from other teams to win anyway.

The Case Against Ned

If there’s one complaint that both Yost’s critics and defenders agree upon, it’s that he did a terrible job of running a bullpen. He was very by-the-numbers with his relievers, assigning specific roles to his pitchers and then not deviating from those roles even when the need called for it. In particular, he used his closers seemingly to generate saves more than to win games.

In his first season, his closer went 2 innings for a save twice; Mike DeJean did it on July 29th, and Danny Kolb did it on July 19th. But as you can see, the Brewers were sort of transitioning between closers at the time, so neither one of them was the undisputed #1 guy at the time. In the five years after that, not once did Yost allow his closer to pitch 2 full innings for a save, and only nine times did his closer get a save of more than 3 outs.

His inability to work matchups is most brilliantly – and painfully – illustrated in Joe Sheehan’s column here. In the midst of the Brewers’ September collapse that got Yost fired, in the middle of being swept by the Phillies, the Brewers found themselves in a 3-3 tie in the 8th inning. Jayson Werth led off with a single, and Yost replaced Guillermo Mota with lefty specialist Brian Shouse to face Chase Utley and Ryan Howard. Utley sacrificed Werth to second…whereupon Yost ordered Shouse to intentionally walk Ryan Howard. To face Pat Burrell. And left Shouse in.

Royals fans fondly remember the time John Gibbons, then the manager of the Blue Jays, intentionally walked Tony Pena Jr. There really is nothing more to say, except that once Gibbons was hired as the Royals’ bench coach, fans were immediately worried that he would one day take over as manager when Trey Hillman was fired.

Yost’s decision to intentionally walk Ryan Howard, who has one of the most pronounced platoon splits in baseball, in order to pitch to Pat Burrell, who crushes lefties, WITH A LEFTY SPECIALIST ON THE MOUND, is orders of magnitude dumber than walking Pena to set up a double play. This was in September, in a pennant race, in the 8th inning of a tie game. Burrell hit a tie-breaking single, Shane Victoring hit a game-breaking single, the Brewers were swept in a doubleheader, and Yost was fired the next day.

The Case For Ned

One decision – admittedly, one horrible, indefensible decision – should not undo all the good work that Yost did in six years as the Brewers’ manager. Besides, at least in one regard Yost was a revolutionary thinker when it came to his bullpen. I am speaking of The Brooks Kieschnick Experiment, which Yost presided over.

Kieschnick, a star two-way player in college who had stuck to hitting – with meager success – as a pro, took up pitching again as a way to help his team on both sides of the game. Kieschnick actually resumed his pitching career with the White Sox in 2002, at the age of 30, but then joined the Brewers organization in 2003, Yost’s first season. He quickly earned the 25th spot on the roster, and over two seasons, he performed with admirable mediocrity as both a pitcher and a hitter. In 96 innings, he posted a 4.59 ERA; in 133 at-bats, he hit .286/.340/.496. In 2003, he played the outfield 3 times and DH’ed 4 more times, but in 2004 he didn’t play the field at all. But he was used as a pinch-hitter 71 times over those two seasons.

He was released the following spring, and never appeared in the majors again. But for two seasons, Kieschnick was the most perfect 25th roster man I’ve ever seen. The man who gave him that opportunity was Ned Yost.

The Case Against Ned

He was aloof and standoffish with the media in his time with Milwaukee, and his reaction to the Brewers’ second-half fades in 2007 and 2008 were so hyperanimated that within the clubhouse he earned the moniker “Nervous Ned”.

The Case For Ned

It’s possible – perhaps even probable – that Yost learned from his mistakes in Milwaukee. Many years ago, in his Guide to Baseball Managers, Bill James studied the performance record of managers based on whether it was their first job as a manager, second, third, etc. If I recall correctly, what James found was that there was a small but real trend towards managers doing their best in their second and third jobs. This makes sense – a first-time manager has a lot to learn, while a fourth-time manager is either old enough that he’s starting to slip, or was never that good in the first place, otherwise he wouldn’t have been fired three times.

This is Yost’s second job as a manager. He’s only 55. If he continues the good things he did in Milwaukee, and shows a willingness to learn from the mistakes that he made, he could be very successful in Kansas City.

The Case Against Ned

Since he was hired by the Royals, he has already made it clear that the one truly bold idea that Hillman had – to use Joakim Soria for more than three outs – is going to be put back on the shelf.

“I don’t think I would hesitate to use Soria in a four-out situation,” Yost said, “but I don’t generally like to do it. I think a closer is at his best when he comes in, gets his work done and goes into the locker room. I don’t like to see a closer come in, have to get an out, go sit down and then have to go back out and get three more outs.”

And later: “I like my closers to get every save that they can get.” Like I said: save-generating machines.

The Case For Ned

Whereas his predecessor had fallen so deeply under the spell of Little Ball that he was sacrifice bunting in the first inning, Yost seems to have a more enlightened view. In his first game, the Royals were mounting a rally with two singles to start the seventh inning, bringing Jose Guillen to the plate.

“We had first and second with nobody out and I thought about bunting for about half a second and I thought, ‘You know we’ve been struggling to score runs, let’s try to put a big one on the board,’ ” Yost said. “And we did.”

And later:

“I don’t like to play for one run,” he said, “unless it means we’re going to win the game. So early in the game, very seldom will you see me playing for one run.

“It doesn’t mean we’re going to bomb home runs to win ballgames, (but) we can drive the gaps and hit little bloop singles and put a big number on the board.”

The Case Against Ned

Yost managed Jason Kendall in 2008, when Kendall started a ridiculous 149 games behind the plate – no catcher has started more games in a season since Gary Carter in 1982.

Judging from his comments that Brayan Pena might get a start “every two weeks or so”, we’re in for more of the same.

The Case For Ned

He didn’t even wait 24 hours before he fired Dave Owen as his third-base coach. Some managers might have decided to evaluate things with their own eyes before making any big moves. Yost, this one time, understood that this was not the time for patience.

The Case Against Ned

On Tuesday, after Blake Wood had coughed up a win for Zack Greinke as he is contractually obligated to do, the Royals went into extra innings. In the bottom of the tenth, in a tie game, rather than reach for Soria to pitch an inning in the hopes of getting the game into the 11th, or any of the other options in his bullpen that were not making their season debut, Yost called on Brian Bullington.

Brian Bullington had just been called up from the minors. Bullington had all of 39 major league innings (and a 5.08 ERA) to his ledger. A single, a walk, a missed-first-base-error, and a drive over a drawn-in outfield later, the game was over.

The Case For Ned

In Gil Meche’s first start with Yost, Meche had thrown exactly 100 pitches after six innings. Coming back to the dugout, Meche held up one finger to his manager across the dugout, asking for one more inning. Yost simply shook his head, and that was that. The days of Meche actually being able to convince his manager to stay in the game even when it’s counterproductive seem to be over.

The Case Against Ned

Yesterday, Meche had grinded through 109 pitches in just 5 innings, yet Yost inexplicably let him start the sixth with a one-run lead. Two batters and two baserunners later, Meche was out having thrown 122 pitches, and the Indians were able to tie the game.

The Case For Ned

Yost’s comments after Ka’aihue was sent down were probably the biggest vote of confidence I’ve ever seen from the Royals regarding Kila.

“It just kills me to see Kila sitting on the bench and not playing,” said Yost, who replaced Trey Hillman as Royals manager following Thursday’s win against Cleveland. “I think he’s a huge part of our future, and for me I’d much rather have him down there right now, getting his at-bats, playing first base and if something happened he could come back here.”

“(Kila) is getting close to not having to go through this anymore, you know the up-and-down swing where you (get called) up and you (get sent) down,” Yost said. “He’s getting real close to becoming a major-league fixture.”

From an organization that went out of its way to pretend that Ka’aihue didn’t even exist last season, this is a welcome sign.

The Case Against Ned

He let Kila Ka’aihue get sent down. Words are good; actions are better.

The Case For Ned

He seems to understand, in a way that his general manager sometimes doesn’t, that the Royals aren’t really playing for 2010, and that sometimes you have to make decisions which may cause short-term pain for long-term gain. In Luke Hochevar’s first outing under Yost, he blew a 4-1 lead in the seventh inning, and Yost left him out there even as Hochevar gave up five hits and a walk to the first seven batters. Hochevar’s pitch count wasn’t high, but the Royals lost the game by a run, and a quicker hook might well have saved the game. Afterwards, Yost said:

“I told him, `Look, in those types of situations,’” Yost said, “`I’m going to let you pitch yourself out of trouble. You need to learn how. When you get yourself into those situations when you’re rolling, you need to learn how to get yourself out of those situations.’”

A pitcher like Hochevar, who has been underperforming to his talents for years now, needs some tough love, but he also needs the confidence of his manager. With one quote, Yost gave him both.

(If I ever stop writing this blog, it might be because the Royals finally suck away my will to go on. Or, it might be because of columns like this from Joe Posnanski. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother. In one column, Poz sums up everything I’ve spent the better part of 15 years trying to get teams like the Royals to do.)

Conclusion

I tried to present the case for and against Ned as impartially as possible. But in the end, I have to say: the case for Ned Yost is a lot stronger than I thought, and the case against him isn’t.

The biggest problem I had with his hiring was that it was so predictable. I don’t mean predictable in the sense that he was hired as an adviser to the GM this off-season, and that as a former major-league manager he would make a perfect interim manager choice if and when Hillman was fired. I mean predictable in that some Royals fans successfully predicted that Yost would be our next manager the day he was fired by the Brewers, almost two years ago.

Yost, of course, was a coach for the Braves for over a decade before he was hired by the Brewers, and we know how much Dayton like his ex-Braves. So in that sense, the hiring was disappointing, because it seems to me that Yost was hired not for what he’s done, but simply for who he’s worked for in the past.

But maybe it’s both, because the deeper I looked into Yost’s time with the Brewers, the more I was impressed. His .477 winning percentage with the Brewers isn’t anything to write home about, until you remember that in the decade before he was hired, they had a .444 winning percentage. He took a team that had just lost 106 games to .500 in three years, and to the brink of the playoffs three years after that. The man who ultimately replaced him, Ken Macha, is already on the hot seat barely more than a season into his tenure.

As fans we focus so much on a manager’s tactical moves, simply because those are the decisions he makes that are most accessible to us. But there are thousands of smaller decisions that are made on a daily basis – do I give a pep talk to this struggling young player here, do I show confidence in this young pitcher by letting him work through this jam, how do I light a fire under this young player who’s not getting the most out of his talents. And we’re simply not privy to these conversations. All we can see are the results, which play out not in a game, or in a week or a month or even a season, but over multiple seasons.

Yost’s tactical mistakes are easy to see. His strategic victories are not. But it’s those victories – the ability to develop Fielder and Braun and Hardy and Weeks and Hart and Hall into quality ballplayers with relatively few bumps along the road – that made Yost’s tenure in Milwaukee the most successful of any manager since arguably Harvey Kuenn.

And that, in the end, is why he’s been hired by the Royals. Not because of his adeptness with his bullpen, but because the Royals can still salvage Alex Gordon and Ka’aihue, and Mike Moustakas is almost ready, and Derrick Robinson and Eric Hosmer and Johnny Giavotella are on their way. And while Yost wasn’t nearly as successful with his starting pitchers, that really seems to be more a reflection of the talent he had to work with. What works for young hitters may work for young pitchers as well, in which case Yost is the right man to bring along Mike Montgomery and Aaron Crow and John Lamb and half a dozen other promising arms.

I found this remarkably prescient piece written by a Brewers fan immediately after Yost was fired. Money quote: "I do think Yost deserves another chance at manager. He has many positive qualities as a patient developer of talent and preserver of starting arms. A team like Kansas City with an established closer and a lot of young talent that needs patience and structure could do a lot worse than hiring Yost if they get tired of Trey Hillman. Moving over to the AL would probably cover up a lot of his tactical and bench construction weaknesses as well. That's the type of situation where Yost is likely to maximize his value to a franchise at present."

Yost still needs to work to eliminate the “interim” label off his title, but at this point I think the job is his to lose, not his to win. We can only hope that along the way he learns to manage his bullpen a little better. I whined on Twitter after Yost brought in Bullington to pitch the tenth the other day. Joe Sheehan replied, “Just wait for 2013, when Yost is doing that with a potential postseason team.”

Well you know what? If the Royals are a potential postseason team under Yost in 2013, he’ll be the first manager since Dick Howser who could make that claim. I certainly hope that one day I’m not writing 5000-word screeds about how Yost’s bullpen shenanigans cost the Royals a game with a playoff spot on the line. But it sure beats the alternative. I know – I’ve been living the alternative for the last 25 years.

xxx

Joe Sheehan has been my colleague at Baseball Prospectus since we started in 1996, and my friend since 1993. Watching as the words that were sent to me by email in the early 90s became sharper, and more incisive, and just plain better over the years until he had become one of the very best baseball writers on the planet, is one of the great fringe benefits of my writing career.

Joe left Baseball Prospectus this winter to strike out on his own. While his work appears in a variety of places, from SI.com to Rotowire, he hasn't had a forum to write the long, unfiltered columns that he became famous for at BP. Now, though, he's announced his new project here. It's no exaggeration for me to say that after Bill James, I've learned more about baseball, and more about baseball writing, from Joe Sheehan than from anyone else.

So if you can spare the $20, I can't recommend his newsletter highly enough.

Hillman's Post-Mortem.

Wow.

When I wrote my last article, I had no expectation that Trey Hillman would actually be fired before my next post. Feel free to insert your own joke about the frequency of my postings if you want, but this move happened faster than even the most optimistic Royals fan could have expected.

In retrospect, it’s pretty clear that the straw that broke Hillman’s back came on Sunday, just hours after my last article posted, when Josh Hamilton failed to tag up from first base on a routine fly ball…and the entire team missed it. No one on the team was even aware that they missed a chance to call Hamilton out on appeal until after the game was over. Instead, the Rangers scored two more runs in the inning. They won the game by two runs. You do the math – I have no doubt that David Glass did.

It’s easy to say that the decision to fire Hillman came from ownership. It’s easy because it’s probably accurate. Sam Mellinger writes that much to his own surprise, this decision came entirely from Dayton Moore. I have no doubt that Mellinger’s intel is solid, but I think that the mechanics of a move this big are too complicated to be a simple either-or proposition. The ultimate decision rested in Moore’s hands, but the idea that Moore made the decision to fire Hillman entirely on his own – barely 48 hours after he said “He’s exactly what our organization needs at this point in time” – is frankly far more worrisome than the idea that ownership imposed this decision on him.

It’s no secret that Moore was close with Hillman on a personal as well as a professional level, and if there was any doubt, Moore removed them when he broke down briefly at the start of his press conference. As he said, this was the most difficult decision he has made in his career. Credit to him for making it, then, but credit also to ownership for forcing some accountability here.

As a rule, meddling from ownership is never a good thing. But if there’s an exception, this would be it. It’s not clear if Moore was going to let his personal relationship with Hillman cloud his judgment, but if David Glass stepped in and helped make the decision for him, he not only saved Moore from himself, he might have saved Hillman from having his reputation further damaged.

I speak from experience: eight years ago this month, the general manager of the Royals finally fired his long-time manager, a manager that he had grown so fond of that he could not bring himself to let him go until well after it was clear that a change needed to be made. The general manager was Allard Baird, and his manager was Tony Muser. In 2001, Muser’s fourth full season as manager, the Royals lost 97 games, tying a team record for losses set…under Muser’s watch two years earlier. Rob and I were calling for Muser’s head all season, and we weren’t the only ones. Instead, Baird’s big move that season was to trade Jermaine Dye for Neifi Perez.

Muser came back in 2002 as a dead man walking, even if he and his GM didn’t realize it. The Royals started 8-15, and late in the night on May 1st in Detroit, Muser learned he was fired – from a member of the media, as the news leaked before Baird could tell him himself. Baird let his friend down that night, but really, he let his friend down much more by not cutting the cord with him a year earlier, when Muser’s reputation might have been salvageable. Afterwards, I wrote this piece for Baseball Prospectus. Eight years later, Muser has yet to get a second chance as a manager in the major leagues.

Muser’s successor, Tony Pena, resigned in the middle of the night in Toronto, choosing to abandon his ballclub rather than come back to Kansas City and possibly testify in a divorce case in which he had been implicated. Pena’s successor, Buddy Bell, announced he would be “retiring” at the end of the 2007 season, ostensibly to take a position with the Royals that would require less travel. Approximately 18 minutes after the season, Bell announced that he was 1) hired by the White Sox 2) as their Director of Minor League Instruction, a position which requires a tremendous amount of travel. It wasn’t hard to read between the lines.

By the standards of recent Royals history, then, the timeline for the firing of Hillman was nice and clean. In his third full season, the Royals were not only not getting better, they were getting worse. That’s a pretty good rule-of-thumb to fire a manager with no previous record of success. Maybe it’s a brutal standard to uphold, but it’s a fair one.

In the aftermath of his firing, there’s a rather spirited debate going on about what Hillman did wrong. Joe Posnanski makes the case here that Hillman lost the respect of the players early, and never gained it back. I think he has a very valid point; this isn’t the first time someone has compared Hillman to Vern Rapp, and after the Hillman experience, I think it should be a hard-and-fast rule in baseball: NEVER hire a manager who hasn’t spent time IN SOME CAPACITY with a major league baseball team. I don’t care if he’s managed, played, coached, served as a trainer, batboy, whatever. The culture of a major league clubhouse is unique, and no amount of managing in the minors or in Japan can substitute for it.

But ultimately I don’t think that Hillman’s time in Kansas City would have been much longer or more successful even if he had spent a year coaching in the majors first. To Hillman’s credit, he seemed to correct a lot of the mistakes he made in his first season, when he almost lost the clubhouse in September. The price of fixing those mistakes may have been substantial; I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Jose Guillen has played almost every day this season, even as his production has cratered, or that Gil Meche seemed to have final say over when he came out of the ballgame. But I think that Hillman’s biggest mistake with the Royals is far more fundamental. I think his mistake was in accepting the job in the first place.

No matter how impressive a manager might be when it comes to things that don’t show up in the standings, he’s going to lose his job if the things that do show up in the standings – wins and losses – don’t show progress after 2 or 3 seasons. And given the overall state of the Royals’ organization after the 2007 season, when Hillman was hired, he was facing an uphill battle to keep his job from day one.

He inherited a team that had lost 93 games, that had started Ross Gload at first base, and for whom Odalis Perez was the #3 starter. More than that, he inherited a team that after the season was ranked by Baseball America as having the #24 farm system in baseball. A small-market team with no talent on the field or in the minor leagues: this was close to mission impossible. The job wasn’t made any easier by his general manager’s decision to focus on high school talent in his first two drafts. I’m not faulting Moore for that decision at all; it may in fact prove to be the right move in the long run. But Hillman didn’t have a long run. He had to know that his GM wasn’t doing him any favors by drafting guys who wouldn’t be ready to help the team until well into the future – a future that Hillman might not have.

Or to put it another way, as recently as this spring training many Royals fans – myself included – lamented the Royals’ decision to draft Mike Moustakas and Eric Hosmer over Matt Wieters and Gordon Beckham. It’s now a lot less clear whether the Royals made the wrong decision. But having Wieters and Beckham might have made Hillman a more successful manager in 2010, even if they didn’t make him a better manager. Ultimately a manager is only as good as his players, and the Royals still don’t have the horses.

I think I made this case to a friend back when Hillman was hired: I’d hate to be Hillman, but I’d love to be the guy who replaces Hillman. By 2010 or 2011, my thinking went, the organization ought to have a lot more talent in place, making it possible for the Royals to be a contender by 2012 or 2013. Hillman just chose the wrong window of time to be the manager for the Kansas City Royals. He’s now paying the price for it.

That’s not to absolve him of his failings or to argue that his firing was unjustified. He earned this decision. But it’s only fair to point out that he was dealt a losing hand from day one.

The most important consequence of this move is that it places the progress of the team squarely on the shoulders of Moore, as they should be. Losing franchises have a natural sort of progression. After a team underachieves for long enough, the general manager fires the manager; if the underachievement continues for a few more years, then the owner fires the general manager. The new general manager then gets to fire the manager he inherits at a time of his choosing, and then the cycle repeats itself.

The Royals just finished the first stage. Moore inherited Buddy Bell, and was not beholden to him at all, so letting Bell go after the 2007 season was a free move. But Hillman was his guy, and by nudging Moore to fire him, Glass also sends a very strong message that the next time the pressure builds to axe someone in the front office, it probably won’t be the manager who gets scapegoated.

This is a good thing, and I say that even though I am not one of the chorus of Royals fans calling for Moore to get fired right now. While Moore has made some egregious errors in constructing this roster, it simply can not be stressed enough: the reason why the Royals suck year after year isn’t because they sign guys like Kyle Farnsworth and trade for guys like Yuniesky Betancourt. The reason the Royals are on schedule for their 15th losing record in the last 16 years is because they have done a terrible job of scouting and developing talent for a long, long time.

It’s too early to say whether Moore has fixed that fundamental weakness. But it’s not too early to say that the early results are promising. I hope to get to the minor leagues soon – I intended to spend today writing about them before Hillman was fired – but even casual Royals fans have heard about the exploits of Moustakas, Hosmer, Michael Montgomery et al. this season.

Hillman leaves behind a team that is not only not good, it’s not young. Incredibly, Billy Butler was the only player on the entire roster who was under the age of 26. That’s not a reflection on Hillman, but on the man who handed him this team. The good news is that while the success of the team may not change quickly, the complexion of the team just might. Mike Aviles isn’t young, but he represented an immediate upgrade to the lineup; pretty soon we may say the same about Kila Ka’aihue. Blake Wood, called up the other day, is 24. By this time next year, no less than three lineup spots and two spots in the rotation – and, if we’re lucky, the better part of the entire bullpen – might be turned over to young talent.

At that point or soon thereafter, it will be fair to judge Dayton Moore. If those players live up to their hype, then whoever succeeds Hillman as manager next year – whether it’s Ned Yost or (hopefully) someone else – will get the credit. And if they don’t, Moore will take the blame, and Royals fans will get their scalp.

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I hope to be back soon with a full analysis of Ned Yost. In the meantime, from the self-promotion department:

- For those of you who would like to listen to the radio show after the fact (and the timing of Hillman’s firing couldn’t have been better, as we went on the air less than 2 hours later), click here to download the podcast. Scroll down to “Additional Programming”.

- My original hometown paper, the Wichita Eagle, ran a profile of me in Sunday’s edition here.

- Going further back, prior to the season I did my patriotic duty as an American by agreeing to be interviewed by America.gov here. Pay no mind to my prediction that the Atlanta Braves would win the World Series - that quote clearly must have come from Dayton Moore.

Hillman's Last Stand.

I know I owe you some vaguely optimistic words about the callups of Mike Aviles and Kila Ka’aihue. But that will have to wait. There are times for childish fantasies like gingerbread houses and sugar plums and young Royals with upside, but this is not one of them. This is a time to have a very frank, sober, adult conversation.

Trey Hillman has crossed the point of no return in Kansas City.

Yesterday’s game was an exhibition of managerial malpractice almost unparalleled in the history of the franchise. Hillman could hardly have damaged the Royals’ chances to win the game more if he had tried. It is exceedingly important that every Royals fan understand the extent to which Hillman hurt both his team’s chances of winning last night, and his most well-paid pitcher’s chances of earning his generous contract for well into the future.

Some background is necessary to understand why Hillman was the talk of the baseball twittersphere last night.

Let’s start with the trivial stuff. Yuniesky Betancourt, as you probably know, cost the Royals (and Zack Greinke) a run on Friday night when he nonchalantly dropped a routine pop-up with a man on second and two outs. The photograph of his muff – I believe it was on the front cover of the Star’s sports page – should be the emblem of the Royals season. (It’s picture #11 in this montage.)

It has it all – terrible form (Yuni, as you may have heard, likes to catch pop-ups at chest level, with one hand), terrible vision (as the ball is bouncing off his glove, Yuni is staring up at the sky, possibly distracted by a passing robin, or maybe looking for the North Star), and a kind of nonchalant insouciance that suggests that catching pop-ups is beneath a man of Yuni’s talents.

It was a bad, unforgivably bad, play, and it cost Greinke yet another unearned run.

Afterwards, Hillman said that he would take “action” against Betancourt. The appropriate action should be quite obvious – bench him for the next game. Instead, Betancourt started, while Mike Aviles had his first day off in five games. But don’t worry – Betancourt was fined a few bucks, so Hillman’s point was made. Never mind that Betancourt is making $3 million this season, so a fine of, say, $1000 would be the equivalent of a $20 fine for someone who makes $60,000 a year. That’s not even a slap on the wrist; it’s more like punishing him with a tickle fight.

Naturally, Betancourt rewarded his manager’s confidence by going 0-4 last night, batting with a man on base all four times, and with a man in scoring position three times. And once again, he failed to drive home a runner on third with less than two out. In a game the Royals lost by one run.

While Hillman benched Aviles in favor of Betancourt, he did see fit to give Ka’aihue his first start of the season, moving Billy Butler to DH and giving Jose Guillen the day off. Ka’aihue didn’t have a good day, going 0-for-3, before Hillman pinch-hit for him with Guillen against a left-hander in the 7th. That, by itself, was a perfectly defensible move. But after Guillen made an out to keep the game tied, Hillman decided he had to keep Guillen in the game, setting off a ridiculous sequence of musical chairs.

Guillen stayed in at right field, forcing David DeJesus to left field, forcing Scott Podsednik to center field, forcing Mitch Maier to first base.

Maier had never played first base before in the majors. He had never played first base before in the minors. But Hillman decided that the late innings of a tie game was the perfect time for him to get his first opportunity, not to mention downgrading the defense significantly at two other positions. It didn’t cost the Royals in the end, but it was a curious decision. If Willie Bloomquist isn’t on the roster to keep the Royals from playing three players out of position, then why is he here?

These two moves were just the appetizers to the main course, a sequence of events so baffling that even now I keep hoping that the official scorer in Arlington was strung out on meth and that none of what I’m about to recount ever happened.

Starting for the Royals last night was the artist formerly known as Gil Meche, the artist who, after the Royals criminally allowed him to throw 121 pitches despite a self-acknowledged “dead arm” on July 1st of last year, had allowed 53 earned runs in 54 innings. The same Gil Meche who missed time in spring training with tightness in his shoulder. The same Meche who, coming into the game, had a 9.89 ERA this season and had allowed more walks (18) than strikeouts (14).

The Royals have been in denial that something’s still wrong with Meche all season. After his last start, we get this: “He was almost over the hump,” Hillman said. “If the breaking ball (to Rios) with two strikes doesn’t get through the left side … it’s a lot better line for him.” Meche allowed 9 hits and 5 runs in 5 innings in that start; he walked 3 batters and he struck out 2. That performance can’t be explained away by a couple of groundballs with eyes.

Was Meche still hurting? “The only thing I can go on is what comes out of his mouth and the mannerisms you see when he’s pitching,” Hillman said. “Most of the time you see something different in the mannerisms. I haven't seen anything different.”

It is with this background in mind that Meche took the mound last night, and gutted his way through 7 strong innings. I say “gutted” because he wasn’t dominant, or even in control, by any stretch of the imagination. He walked 5 batters and struck out only 3. In the sixth inning, Vladimir Guerrero led off with a single, but was then thrown out by Maier when he tried to advance to third on Ian Kinsler’s single, allowing Meche to get out of the inning unscathed.

But still, through 7 innings and 104 pitches, Meche allowed just 2 runs in 7 innings. The bullpen was fairly rested, thanks to Greinke – only Kyle Farnsworth had thrown the day before, and just one inning. Furthermore, the team has a day off on Monday. With the top of the Rangers’ lineup due up, there was no reason to push Meche any further – get a fresh arm in there.

Hillman sent Meche to the mound to start the bottom of the eighth. Meche promptly walked Elvis Andrus on five pitches. The heart of the Rangers’ order – Michael Young, Josh Hamilton, Guerrero and Kinsler – was due up. Alarm bells were going off on the mound.

The Rangers regifted the baserunner back to the Royals, as Andrus was thrown out trying to steal with Young at the plate. Meche returns the favor again, walking Young on six pitches. He’s now thrown 115 pitches, and walked the last two batters he’s faced. The alarm bells were now accompanied by red and blue flashing strobe lights. There’s a meeting on the mound. "He just came out and asked how I felt," Meche said. "Basically I said, 'I've been in here this long, let me battle my way out of this.' He just said basically, 'Let's go. The ball four is killing us.'" Hillman leaves Meche in.

Hamilton beats out an infield single on Meche’s second pitch. Meche has now thrown 117 pitches. The last three batters he’s faced have reached base safely. The go-ahead run is on second base with one out. A speaker pops out of the pitching rubber and a muffled voice states, “Please pull over into the visitor’s dugout.”

Meche stays in to pitch to future Hall of Famer Vladimir Guerrero. On the third pitch, Guerrero nails a ball to deep center field, which Podsednik runs down as Young cruises into third base. 120 pitches.

Meche pitches to Kinsler. Kinsler works the count to 2-2, fouls off a pair of two-strike pitches, and Meche hangs a curveball. Kinsler bangs it to right field to plate the go-ahead run. 127 pitches.

At this point, sure, why the hell not leave Meche in? We’ve already reached the point of absurdity – what’s one more batter going to do? David Murphy mercifully flies out on the first pitch. Neftali Feliz and his 100 mph fastball come in to pitch the 9th, and despite a pinch single from Aviles, Feliz puts the game away.

So to recap: Gil Meche, who started complaining of a tired arm after throwing 132 pitches in a complete game last June, and who has been consistently awful since throwing 121 pitches with a dead arm last July, and who wasn’t pitching well so much as pitching lucky on this night, was allowed to throw 128 pitches – the longest outing by any major league pitcher this season – on Saturday night. He was left in to complete the 8th inning, despite a fresh bullpen, and despite the fact that he allowed the first three batters to reach base safely.

Oh, yeah - and as a result, Meche surrenders the game-winning run.

Does anyone remember what happened in that game on July 1st? Because Hillman clearly doesn’t. Meche started the 6th inning that day, in a game tied 2-2, having thrown 99 pitches. He allowed the leadoff hitter to reach base. With two outs, he then allowed a walk, putting men on first and second with two outs. Hillman left him in to pitch – TO JOE MAUER – and Mauer hit the go-ahead single. Meche has never been the same since.

Last night, facing a virtually identical situation, Hillman made the exact same decisions. It’s as if the game of July 1st never happened. It’s as if I and Joe Posnanski and a hundred other bloggers – Royals fans and non-Royals fans – hadn’t immediately declared Hillman’s decision to be one of the dumbest moves of the season. It’s as if we weren’t immediately proven correct when Meche’s season went into the tank. It’s as if Meche didn’t miss the entire month of September. It’s as if those who do not learn from history are not actually doomed to repeat it.

But they are. Ten months ago, Trey Hillman made perhaps the worst decision of his managerial career, and ruined – perhaps irrevocably – his second-best starting pitcher. Yesterday, faced with the same choice, he made the exact same decision. There can be no stronger evidence that Hillman hasn’t learned a thing on the job.

The old me would now proceed with a few thousand words filled with choice insults and all but demanding that when the Royals return home today, that Hillman be left behind in Arlington along with his retired number. The new me is trying to be a little less emotional and a little more analytical. So I’m not going to insist that the Royals fire Hillman on the spot.

I’m not going to argue that Hillman should be fired. I’m just going to predict that he will be. Probably soon.

It doesn’t take an archaeologist to read the writing on the wall of this cave. Hillman’s contract expires at the end of the season; he was conspicuously not given a contract extension over the winter, cementing his lame-duck status. The Royals are 11-20 and fading fast. As Royals fans we’ve become inured to losing, but it’s worth pointing out that the Indians, who inspired this classic media meltdown the other day, actually have a better record than the Royals.

And trust me: David Glass is getting pissed. Most fans still have this image of Glass as this soulless, bean-counting owner who cares about the accounting ledgers more than the standings. But I stand by what I’ve written since Dayton Moore was hired: David Glass has been a model owner for the last four years. He hired the man who was considered the #1 GM prospect in the game by Baseball America, he’s let Moore run the team without interference, and he has opened his wallet when Moore asked him to.

The team’s payroll may still be low, but it’s no longer among the lowest in the game, and the Royals have spent more money in the draft over the last two years than any team but the Pirates. And part of the reason the payroll is so low is that the Royals simply didn’t have any players worth spending millions of dollars on. Since Moore took over, the Royals haven’t lost a single player to free agency that they wanted to keep. Instead, they’ve signed a pair high-profile free agents from other teams (Meche and Guillen), and several more mid-range free agents like Kyle Farnsworth, Juan Cruz, Willie Bloomquist, and Horacio Ramirez.

The money spent on those players has almost uniformly been wasted – but that’s just it. It’s Moore’s fault for spending the money – not Glass’s fault for not spending the money.

And I have it on good authority that Glass is getting pissed off. It wouldn’t surprise me if the decision to release Juan Cruz outright was a reflection of that (although it might also have something to do with the fact that Cruz, in addition to pitching terribly, was a gigantic pain in the ass.) But Glass is starting to realize that his front office isn’t wearing any clothes, and I expect that pretty soon Moore will have to make a more substantial sacrificial offering.

Since the Royals’ magical, mystical 18-11 start last season, they have now played 164 games – a full season plus two more games. They’re 58-106 in that span. That’s astonishing. In 2005, the year before Moore was hired, the Royals reached the absolute nadir of their existence by going 56-106. Five years later, despite a payroll more than 50% higher, despite millions being invested in the farm system, the Royals are exactly as bad now as they were then.

And they show no signs of getting better. On the contrary, as Posnanski wrote on Friday, they show all the signs of a team about to fall into the abyss. He wrote that the day before Hillman launched his second sneak attack on Gil Meche’s shoulder.

I didn’t expect much from the Royals this season, and I suspect most of you didn’t either, but so far the Royals are failing to meet even my meager expectations. It’s been clear for a long time that Hillman wasn’t part of the solution, but now we have overwhelming evidence that he’s a part of the problem.

The Royals have 21 games left in May as I write this. If they play under .500 in that span – say, 9-12 or worse – they’ll be 20-32 or worse after Memorial Day, and the Hillman Watch will begin in earnest. I put the odds that he gets cashiered before Flag Day at about 30%; the odds that he’s gone by the trading deadline have to be around 70%. And the odds that he returns next year? Jose Guillen has a better chance of coming back.

Sayonara, Trey. I had high hopes for you when you were hired, so believe me when I say I’m sorry it didn’t work out. But they didn’t. It’s in the best interests of everyone for you to move on.

Especially Gil Meche.

Royals Today: 5/6/2010

As usual, I picked a bad week to disappear. Well, not disappear exactly – I’ve taken advantage of having the Royals in Chicago to spend a lot of time watching them at the ballpark and talking to people connected to the team. I just haven’t taken the time to write. So let’s catch up with the events of the last week:

Zack Greinke pitches brilliantly again, loses again.

I’m not sure what more I can add to this. As Posnanski pointed out a while back, going back to August 16th, 2008, Zack Greinke had made 46 starts with a 2.11 ERA – and the Royals were 22-24 in those starts.

Now, his ERA in that span is 2.08, and the Royals are 22-25.

Sometimes I wonder if the Royals were put on this earth with the express purpose of teaching the world the core principles of sabermetrics. Want to understand the importance of the base on balls? Consider that the Royals are 11-17, and have been outscored 148-113, even though they’ve outhit their opponents this season. The Royals have 270 hits; their opponents have 264. The Royals have been outhomered by a modest margin, 29-25, but the big difference is this: the Royals – as usual – rank dead last in the AL in walks drawn, with 75. And the Royals – as usual – rank dead last in the AL in walks allowed, with 123.

In 28 games, the Royals have allowed 48 walks more than they’ve drawn, a difference of nearly two walks a game. If OBP is life, the Royals are walking zombies, much as they’ve been for the last quarter century.

If you want to know why it seems like so much of the Kansas City media – and increasingly, the Kansas City fan base – is so stat-savvy even though the team itself is stuck in the 1970s, it’s precisely because we’ve seen what happens to a team that ignores 30 years of analytical progress. Royals fans understand the value of a walk, because they’ve seen first-hand the consequences of a dismissive approach to plate discipline.

And now, they understand the worthlessness of win-loss records for pitchers, because they’ve seen how even the most brilliant pitcher the majors has seen in a decade can go winless into May when the other 24 men on the roster stab him in the back.

Run support? The Royals have scored 16 runs in his six starts.

Bullpen support? In the five games that Greinke has turned the game over to the bullpen, his relievers have pitched a total of 13.1 innings – AND ALLOWED 20 RUNS. Greinke’s relievers have allowed more runs in 13.1 innings than his offense has scored in six entire games. In other words, if Greinke had not allowed a single run all season, the Royals still would have been outscored, 20-16, in his six starts.

On Sunday, Greinke was able to eliminate the bullpen from the equation – knowing that Joakim Soria was probably unavailable after pitching in three straight games, he pitched efficiently as well as brilliantly, throwing just 87 pitches in eight innings. Joe Maddon may have been exaggerating when he said that Greinke could have gone 15 innings, but I have no doubt that if the Royals had managed to score one run, Greinke would have pitched the ninth, and probably the tenth as well – becoming the first Royals’ starter to go into extra innings since Kevin Appier went 10 innings in 1992.

But the Royals, of course, didn’t score a run. And Greinke lost a 1-0 complete game for the second time since the beginning of the 2009 season. In that same span, every other starting pitcher in baseball has combined to lose a 1-0 complete game (not counting rain-shortened starts) twice.

As Joe Sheehan tweeted after the game, the Royals don’t deserve Zack Greinke. I wrote that exact phrase in a column with Rob back in 2005, and it remains equally true today.

These two articles are still parodies, I think. At the rate we’re going, one day they may not be.

Royals take advantage of their bullpen depth to trade Carlos Rosa.

It’s too easy, really, to make jokes about the fact that on Sunday the Royals, who at the time of the trade had the second-worst bullpen ERA in all of baseball, traded away Carlos Rosa, probably their most major league-ready relief prospect.

It’s too easy to see that the Royals traded Rosa for a 20-year-old shortstop with a career line in the minors of .256/.304/.338, and say that once again the Royals have made a move that defies common sense.

In this case, though, it really is too easy. The reality is a lot more complicated.

Two years ago today, Rosa was arguably the best pitching prospect in the organization, which says as much about the state of the farm system then as it says about Rosa. He was a starting pitcher with a terrific fastball – excellent velocity, excellent late life. The fastball was good enough to dominate Double-A hitters – in eight starts, he had a 1.20 ERA and allowed just 37 baserunners in 45 innings – despite a lack of a quality off-speed pitch.

The thinking was that if Rosa could just develop his off-speed stuff, he could be a #2 starter. But here we are, two years later, and Rosa is no closer to coming up with a second pitch today than he was then. He tried to develop a changeup, he tried to develop a slider, but both pitches are still below-average. And in the interim, he’s dealt with some arm woes that have sapped his fastball.

He only made 11 starts in Triple-A in 2008 because of arm trouble, and after the season the Royals decided to move him to the bullpen, as much to keep him healthy as to hide the fact that he was still a one-pitch pitcher. That winter, you may remember, the Royals were set to trade him to the Marlins for Mike Jacobs, but the Marlins were sufficiently concerned about the status of Rosa’s elbow that they backed out of the deal – forcing the Royals to substitute Leo Nunez instead. (Nunez has allowed just 3 hits and one run in 11.1 innings for Florida this year. Put him back on the Royals this year, and the team is probably at .500 instead of 11-17.)

Rosa was healthy enough to pitch in 2009, but in retrospect it’s clear that he had lost a little off his fastball, and for a guy who only had that one above-average pitch, he couldn’t afford to lose even a little. He got off to a terrible start in Omaha’s bullpen last year, and while he pitched much better the second half, he still had a 4.56 ERA for the season. In particular, his control was way off – after walking just 19 batters in 96 innings in 2008, he walked 32 batters in 71 innings last year. This year, at the time of the trade, he had walked 7 more batters in just 12 innings.

Since switching to full-time relief last season, Rosa had pitched 83 innings. He had struck out 90 batters, but he had also allowed 82 hits (including 8 homers) and 39 walks. Translated to the majors, those aren’t the numbers of a future major league closer, or even a quality set-up man. Those are the numbers of a garbage-time reliever. Factor in the scouting report on him, and I can see why the Royals were willing to get rid of him. I mean, we just had a reliever on the roster with a good-not-great fastball and no quality secondary offerings. His name was Roman Colon, and he was just sold to a Korean team. For Rosa, at least, the Royals got a prospect in return.

Navarro isn’t a great prospect by any means, but I’ve seen too many people focus on his statistics – as listed above – without mentioning his most important statistic: he’s just 20 years old. He’s 20 years old, and already in high-A ball. He’s a shortstop, and by most accounts a good one. The Royals are coming off a Lost Decade of shortstops, having featured such luminaries as Rey Sanchez, Neifi Perez, Angel Berroa, Tony Pena Jr, and now Yuniesky Betancourt. With Jeff Bianchi out for the year, shortstop glaringly remains the one position where the Royals had no quality prospects in the minors.

So I don’t know about you, but I’m willing to take a flier on a kid barely out of his teens who can switch-hit, who has at least some understanding of the strike zone (he had walked 8 times in 19 games before the trade), and at the very least isn’t a liability with the glove.

It’s a cliché to say that if the Royals make a decision about a player, the exact opposite opinion is likely to be true. But in this case, I really do trust their judgment. The fact that the Royals didn’t call up Rosa, despite a desperate need for a reliever who could keep his ERA under 6, is very telling.

And keep in mind that the Royals traded him to the Diamondbacks, the one team in baseball with a worse bullpen ERA than the Royals at the time. And then keep in mind that Allard Baird’s old assistant, Muzzy Jackson, works for the Diamondbacks and was likely the impetus for their interest in Rosa.

And then keep in mind that Muzzy’s interest in another Royals farmhand was the impetus for the last trade between these two teams, when the Royals traded Billy Buckner to Arizona – in exchange for Alberto Callaspo.

I don’t expect this trade to work out nearly as well, but I do think it’s a good trade for Kansas City. The Royals’ bullpen woes notwithstanding, you’ll rarely get burned trading away relievers, and credit to Dayton Moore for not letting the team’s current situation obscure that fact.

The Alex Gordon Era comes to an end. Sort of.

I hate it.

I hate it that the Royals, after giving Alex Gordon just 31 at-bats to prove himself this season, decided that they had seen enough. I hate it that the Royals let the return of Chris Getz – Chris Getz! – take a job away from a player who, for all his faults, remains one of the few players on the roster capable of hitting 25 homers, or mustering an OBP north of .350.

I hate the fact that once again, the Royals have managed to take a situation that seemed impossible to screw up, and screwed it up. Alex Gordon is probably the most can’t-miss prospect in the history of the organization. The #2 overall pick in the draft. College Player of the Year. Then Minor League Player of the Year, and #1 prospect in all of baseball according to multiple publications. A standing ovation in his first major league at-bat on Opening Day.

Three years later, he’s no longer a major leaguer. And he’s no longer a third baseman.

So yeah, I hate what’s become of Alex Gordon, and I hate what the Royals did to him last Sunday.

I hate it. But I agree with it.

I agree with it because ultimately, I don’t think the Royals made this move because they were dissatisfied with Gordon’s bat. I think they could no longer tolerate his glove. And I think they are right.

That batting average is a vastly overrated statistic is one of the central maxims of sabermetrics. But batting average looks like Win Shares compared to fielding average, which is such a useless stat that even the mainstream media rarely mentions it anymore.

But even fielding average is useful at the extremes. And with four errors in just 10 games at third base, Gordon’s defense was certainly extreme. His fielding average is .765. Seven-six-five. Anything under .950 is terrible; anything under .900 is historically bad. Fielding .765 is like batting .110 – just like there’s no combination of power and walks that can make a .110 average look good, there’s no amount of range that can make up for booting or throwing away a quarter of your fielding opportunities.

Not that Gordon’s range was any good either. In 84 innings at third base, he made just 13 plays, for a range factor of 1.39 plays per 9 innings. That’s exactly half the major league average of 2.78 plays per 9 innings for a third baseman.

Prefer more advanced statistics? Baseball-reference.com puts Gordon at 4 runs below average – 4 runs in just 10 games. Fangraphs.com has him at -4.2 runs. That translates to close to 70 runs below average over a full season.

The only saving grace here is sample size – maybe it was just a bad 10 games. A really, really bad 10 games. If Gordon had a history or a reputation for being a quality third baseman, that would be a legitimate excuse. He has neither. Gordon, at his best, was an average third baseman, and he hasn’t been at his best for much of his career. I’m not sure that this is the right time to pull the plug, but I’m not sure that it isn’t either.

Particularly since the domino effect of moving Gordon away from third base is that the Royals can move Callaspo away from second base. Far, far away. We might not be certain that Gordon will never play a quality third base – but we can be damn well certain that Callaspo will never be even an adequate second baseman. He was bad last year; he was downright intolerable this season. He missed line drives six inches over his head; he couldn’t run down balls in the hole that were ten feet to his left; his double play pivot was neither quick nor graceful.

I’m not nearly as convinced as the Royals are that Chris Getz is an excellent defensive second baseman. Frankly, it doesn’t matter. Even if he’s just adequate, replacing Gordon with Getz upgrades the defense at two positions. Callaspo’s skills translate much better at third base than at second. He has agility and reasonable first-step quickness, which plays well at third – he’s just ungodly slow. On the basepaths, he runs like a catcher, and Craig Biggio aside, there’s a reason you never see catchers move to second base.

My main concern with demoting Gordon to Omaha was that the Royals would move him to first base, which would be unbelievably dumb, given that they have Kila Ka’aihue ready and Eric Hosmer not far behind. But they moved him to left field instead. I suggested that the Royals move him to a corner outfield spot as early as two years ago, and while it’s far from an ideal position given the offensive demands, it’s more ideal than the alternatives.

My other concern was that the demotion was punitive, rather than corrective, in nature – that the Royals were simply fed up with Gordon, and that he likely had played his last game in a Royals uniform. But multiple sources close to the team assure me that the team really is sincere about giving Gordon another chance – maybe just one more chance – as an everyday player, once he’s mastered the nuances of the outfield. There’s a good chance that neither Scott Podsednik nor Rick Ankiel will be back next season, Guillen is as good as gone, and even David DeJesus may not return, either because of a trade or because the Royals elect not to pick up his option.

So the opportunity will be there for Gordon to play regularly in the outfield; he just better be sure to take advantage of the opportunity this time, because there may not be another one. I hate that it’s come to this, that Alex Gordon, superstar third baseman of the future, is now Alex Gordon, hopefully-adequate left fielder of the present. But as I’m fond of saying, what’s past is prologue. Gordon isn’t the player that we thought he would be. But if we accept him for the player that he is, we might be pleasantly surprised by his worth.

More to come, but I have a radio show to get ready for, so I’ll try to pick back up as soon as possible.

Royals Today: 4/29/2010

The wait is over: Rany on the Radio returns this evening at 6 PM. We’ve tried to make an effort to give the show a consistent time slot this year – last year we’d be on Thursday unless the Royals were playing, in which case it would be Wednesday, unless it was a day game on Thursday…it got to be like a third-rate network sitcom that bounced around to accommodate the rest of the schedule. This year, the hope is that you can find us every Thursday at 6 PM on 810 WHB. (This is why we didn’t start last week – evidently some non-baseball sports league was holding a draft or something. Stupid NFL.)

Some quick thoughts before the show tonight:

- It appears that all the talk about Luke Hochevar’s improved fastball was an illusion after all. As Greg Hall recounts here, even the pitching staff thinks the radar gun at the K is hot, and as Jeff Zimmerman analyzes the data here, they’re right – the gun is about 2 mph faster than at other parks. I don’t know how the Pitch F/X data could be this off, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the Royals, it’s that they can make the impossible seem commonplace.

- Greg Schaum is reporting that the Royals are putting John Parrish on the DL and calling up Victor Marte. Let me be the first to say: Marte is not the answer. If he goes back down in a couple of days when Chris Getz returns, this is no big deal. But if the Royals send down Alex Gordon instead…well, they are the Royals. They have a reputation to live up to.

- Speaking of Gordon…I’ve defended Trey Hillman to an extent for his handling of the bullpen. But that doesn’t mean his overall body of work is anything to be proud of. Case in point: last night, with the Royals down a run in the 8th, after Alberto Callaspo singled with two outs, Hillman pinch-ran for him with Gordon.

Meanwhile, Willie Bloomquist was still in the lineup at second base, and was due to bat in the 9th.

This is amazing on several levels:

1) Hillman decided that it was more important to upgrade from Callaspo to Gordon on the basepaths than to upgrade from Bloomquist to Gordon with the bat.

2) Bloomquist was in the starting lineup, I suppose, because the Mariners started a lefty on the mound. It so happens that the Mariners’ closer, David Aardsma, is right-handed.

3) Jason Kendall was at the plate when Gordon pinch-ran. If the point of bringing Gordon in to run was so that he might be able to score on a double in the gap, wouldn’t it make sense only if the batter could actually hit a double? We’re talking about the player with the lowest slugging average in the majors last year. Kendall has 3 extra-base hits so far this season, and had just 23 all of last year.

4) Rick Ankiel is supposedly available to pinch-hit, but he stayed on the bench in the 9th, while Bloomquist naturally made an out. So either Ankiel really isn’t available and the Royals are pulling our leg (never!), or Hillman really thought Bloomquist was his best option in the 9th.

- I know that Yuni is hitting .325, and we’ve been subject to the requisite articles that he’s become a better, more disciplined hitter. Pardon me if I wait a little longer before acknowledging defeat. His new-found discipline has translated into exactly one walk all season. Last night, he worked the count to 3-1 with two outs in the ninth, prompting Frank White (himself a fair swinger) to recommend that Yuni take a pitch and try to work a walk. He fouled off the 3-1 pitch, then swung on a 3-2 pitch that was high and a foot outside to end the game.

According to Fangraphs, Betancourt has swung at 56% of the pitches he’s seen this season – by far the most in his career. He’s swung at 46% of pitches outside the strike zone – last year he swung at just 31%, and his career high is 34%. All the evidence suggests that he’s LESS disciplined at the plate this season.

This lack of discipline has been most galling when it comes to situational hitting. Seven times this season Betancourt has batted with a man on third base and less than two out, i.e. a situation where you just want to put the ball in play. He has one hit in those seven at-bats, but the problem is that in his other six at-bats he didn’t bring the runner home even once. This cost the Royals the game on Saturday night, when he struck out with the game-winning run on 3rd base in the 10th (he saw four pitches, all of them out of the strike zone, and swung at three of them). It might have cost the Royals the game on Tuesday, when he grounded out weakly with Mitch Maier on third base and one out after Maier had tripled in the game’s first run. Maier didn’t score; the Royals lost 3-2. The major league average for bringing home a runner on third with less than two out is in the 55-60% range. For Yuni so far this year, it’s 14%.

So yeah, he’s hitting .325, but his approach hasn’t changed at all; if anything, it’s gotten worse. Batting average is a notoriously variable statistic, and even a bad hitter can hit .325 for a month. Just look at Betancourt himself:

July 2006: .374

May 2007: .327

August 2007: .317

April 2008: .301

August 2008: .305

September 2008: .343

Hell, Betancourt batted .303 last April, and by June the Mariners were desperate to get rid of him. Because even when Betancourt hits .300, his complete lack of walks and modest power makes him only marginally useful. And when he hits .214, like he did last May, he’s a lineup killer.

If Betancourt is hitting .325 at the All-Star Break, call me. Until then, call me a skeptic.

A Tale Of Two Bullpens.

How bad was it? The Royals’ bullpen broke more records than the White Sox on Disco Demolition Night. Ray Bradbury’s agent was calling them to pose for the cover of “Fahrenheit 451”. In “Close & Late” situations, over 728 at-bats, Royals’ opponents hit a ridiculous .328/.404/.520, turning every hitter into Gary Sheffield. Never before had a team blown more saves than they had recorded; the Royals saved just 29 of 59 games. The Royals were the first team in AL history to record a Rolaids Relief score below zero. According to Tom Ruane, the Royals’ 11-32 record in one-run games was the worst by any team in over 60 years. The four worst winning percentages in one-run games this century:

Year Team W L Pct.

1935 Boston (NL) 7 31 .184

1937 St. Louis (AL) 10 31 .244

1999 Kansas City 11 32 .256

1916 Philadelphia (AL) 11 32 .256

The 1937 St. Louis Browns finished 46-108 - and they were the best of the other three teams on this list. The 1935 Braves finished 38-115, the second-worst record this century. The worst? Those 1916 Athletics (36-117). Three teams with overall winning percentages in the .200s, and last year’s Royals. Wow.

As historic as their futility in close games was, it was the Royals’ collapse at the end of games that is so damning on the bullpen. The Royals, owners of the third-worst record in baseball, were better than .500 through 6 innings. Consider this chart, where “expected wins” assumes the Royals won all the games they were leading, and half the games they were tied:

Inning 6 7 8 Final

Ahead 73 70 66 64

Tied 20 15 14 0

Behind 68 76 81 97

Expected Wins 83 77.5 73 64

Through 6 innings, the Royals were 73-68 with 20 ties, yet by game’s end were 64-97. They slipped 19 games in the standings after the 6^th inning. Nineteen games. Inning-by-inning data is not available prior to 1980, but with Keith Woolner’s help, we found that over the last 20 years, the 1985 Pirates had held the record with an 18-game drop. After 7 innings, the Royals 13.5-game drop broke the record of 12, previously held by the 1997 Cubs.

You get the point. This isn’t your standard “we would have won 10 more games with a good bullpen” sob story. This was the Real McCoy. The 1999 Royals were the worst late-inning team of at least the last 20 years, and the worst close-game team of the last 60.

- Baseball Prospectus 2000

I wrote those words over a decade ago, and I never thought I would see a worse bullpen in my lifetime. I probably won’t – the season is still young, after all. But the 2010 Royals are giving the 1999 Royals a run for the money – and that’s with a shutdown closer in Joakim Soria.

Let’s compare the two head-to-head:

The 1999 Royals were 29 of 59 in save opportunities – as mentioned above, the first team in history to have more blown saves than actual saves. The 2010 Royals are 6 of 13 in save opportunities.

The 1999 bullpen had a composite 5.77 ERA. The 2010 bullpen has a 6.61 ERA. (And remember, 1999 was the peak of the juiced era – the league ERA was 4.86. The ERA of the American League this year – keep in mind that offense usually is down in April – is just 4.11.)

The 1999 bullpen allowed opposing hitters to bat .303/.385/.479. Against the 2010 bullpen, opposing hitters are batting .306/.408/.502.

The 1999 bullpen allowed 124 runs in the 7th inning (0.77 runs per game), and 111 runs in the 8th inning (0.69 runs per game). The 2010 bullpen, through 20 games, has allowed 23 runs in the 7th (1.15 runs per game) and 14 runs in the 8th (0.70 runs per game). That’s right – the team is allowing OVER ONE RUN AN INNING in the seventh.

The 1999 Royals were just 53-20 (.726) in games they were leading after 6 innings, and 55-15 (.786) in games they were leading after 7. The 2010 Royals are 5-6 (.455) in games they lead after 6, but 7-2 (.778) in games they lead after 8.

As shown in the chart above, the 1999 Royals were 73-68 with 20 ties after 6 innings – their “expected record” was 83-78, but they finished 64-97. In other words, they lost 19 games between the end of 6 innings and the end of the game. They lost 10.5 games after 7 innings, and 9 games after 8 innings.

After 6 innings, the 2010 Royals are 11-6 with 3 ties. (Read that again.) Their expected record is 12.5 – 7.5, which would put them in second place, just 2 games behind the Twins. Instead they are 8-12. Just 20 games into the season, the Royals have already lost 4.5 games after 6 innings. After 7 innings, they are 9-10 with one tie; they’ve lost 1.5 games after 7. They are 7-11 with 2 ties after 8 innings; thanks to Soria, their record hasn’t dropped at all after the 8th inning.

By almost every metric, the 2010 Royals have performed worse to this point than their 1999 counterparts. This is astonishing, given that the Royals have one of the best closers in baseball at their disposal. Partly thanks to Soria, and partly thanks to the Royals coming back after Kyle Farnsworth had given up the go-ahead run in extra innings against Detroit, the Royals’ record in one-run games is actually 4-4. Which, if anything, makes the performance of the bullpen even worse. The 1999 Royals suffered from bad luck as much as a bad bullpen; the bullpen found a way to give up just enough runs to lose, and the offense shut down in the late innings. By contrast, the 2010 Royals have actually come back in the late innings twice – once against the Tigers in the 11th, and once on Rick Ankiel’s bloop single in the 8th to beat the Red Sox. Without a more productive offense, the situation could be even more dire.

The closer for the 1999 Royals was Jeff Montgomery, who was on his last legs – he would retire after the season. Monty had just 12 saves and a whopping 6.84 ERA. Take out his performance, and the team’s middle relievers had a 5.64 ERA. Take out Soria’s performance this season (just 2 runs allowed in 9 innings), and the middle relievers this season have allowed 44 earned runs in 53.2 innings – a 7.38 ERA.

Yogi was right. It’s déjà vu all over again.