The Cream of the Crop on the Podsednik Signing

They hate it, they hate it, they hate it.

"Any hope I once had that Dayton Moore knew what he was doing is gone." (David Pinto, Baseball Musings)

"If Dayton Moore were a writer he'd be Murray Chass" (Jeff Parker, Royall Speaking)

"This is yet another day in the past year that I wonder why I am a Royals fan." (Josh Duggan, Bleacher Report)

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Inside Dayton's Head

I like writing about the Kansas City Royals, especially their much maligned General Manager Dayton Moore. Even if you're not interested in baseball, there's something interesting happening in Kansas City.

For the last two seasons Moore has been denounced by baseball writers of a certain school for his roster moves: trading Leo Nunez for Mike Jacobs, trading Ramon Ramirez for Coco Crisp, trading Danny Cortes for Yuniesky Betencourt, signing Jason Kendall to a two-year contract, and on and on. And now those writers have another move to hate, the signing of veteran outfield Scott Podsednik.

The school these writers represent is the sabermetric school, which eschews the traditional measurements of a baseball players value (physical attributes like speed, arm strength, and power) in favor of a set of statistical measurements pioneered by Bill James. For these writers (many of whom work for the sabermetrics mother ship Baseball Prospectus), a player is worth what he has done, and what he has done can be accurately quantified by any number of staistical tools: does he get on base (On Base Percentage); does he hit for power (Slugging Percentage); does he give up many fly balls (Ground Ball/Fly Ball Ratio).

What drives sabermatricians batty about Dayton Moore's signings is that he shows a total disregard for their way of assessing a player's value. In fact, Moore has assembled the worst offensive roster in baseball as measured by the likes of Baseball Prospectus. Prior to 2009, this appeared to be paying off; the Royals increased their win total in three consecutive seasons. But the additions of Jacobs and Crisp in 2009 blew up in Moore's face, and the major league team took a major step backward.

Here's the dilemma, as I see it. Sabermetrics is quickly becoming the new conventional wisdom in baseball, and Dayton Moore continues to make moves with his major league roster that draw the condescension of sabermetric sages like Rob Neyer and Kevin Goldstein and Rany Jayzayerli, and even mainstream media columnist Joe Posnanski. So who's right?

Certainly the 2009 season put a huge feather in the collective Baseball Prospectus cap. But isn't a criteria for greatness independent thought? Would it not be disquieting for a major league executive to make personnel decisions to satisfy the theories of writers?

At the same time, is it not foolish to steadfastly persist in opinions that have been empirically demonstrated to be wrong?

It's the assessment of value that's a stake here. For the Dayton Moore's of the world, value is something you can see with your eyes and project into the future. Value is inferred, projected. It takes a certain kind of scout with an eye for the right attributes and "intangibles" (as an angry mob of sabermatricians shouts: "There are no intangibles!") to recognize value.

For sabermetricians, value is something you can mathematically measure by looking at past data sets. Value is measured. It can be analyzed by anyone with basic spreadsheet capabilities and rudimentary math.

I have strong sympathies with the latter view of value. At the same time, I'm rooting for Dayton Moore's moves to translate into success, if only to vindicate an open-ended, non-deterministic view of the world.

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Cutting HIs Losses

Last November I defended Royals' General Manager Dayton Moore in his acquisition of Mike Jacobs, a move roundly panned by baseball writers reputable and obscure alike. "Dayton Moore isn't stupid," I scolded. While I stand by that assertion today, I also am forced to acknowledge that those writers aren't stupid either. The Jacobs trade clearly stands out as the worst move Moore has made since taking over as GM in June of 2006. Anyone could have seen this as early as May of last season.

Including Dayton Moore.

So now the Royals have released him. Unconditionally.

Thankfully, his contract was only for one year, so it's off the books. But that's little consolation to Royals fans who watched a Leo Nunez-less bullpen give away 7th and 8th inning leads all summer while Nunez (Jacobs' trade opposite) racked up 27 saves for the Marlins.

I'll still defend the trade on the grounds that Moore was trying to inject some power into a woefully weak major league lineup, and Jacobs appeared, if not an unlikely contributor, a potential one. Moore's behavior this off season indicates that he's given up on the major league roster; he knows it's going to be awful in 2010, and he's willing to take his lumps in exchange for amateur players filed away in the minors (see the team's acquisition of 19 year-old Cuban defector Noel Arguelles).

Moore is entering his fourth full season as a major league GM. I'm comfortable with acknowledging that he's still learning the job. It's an impossible balance, with a small market team like the Royals, between cultivating a healthy long-term farm system that won't produce big league results for three-to-five years down the line and actually improving the big league roster. I think last year showed Moore that the worst of the best free agents available in any off-season are still worse that the best of the worst players in the farm system.

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Dayton Moore Isn't Stupid

Last week NPH's affliction of a baseball team made a trade for a free swinging, power hitting first baseman. News of the trade had hardly hit cyberspace before the army of Royals bloggers were on it, decrying it as a meaningless, if not foolish move (I'd link to the posts, but they're long on letters and short on nuance). I don't let the ability to publish on a blog delude me into thinking I know a durn thing about this business, and I have no reason to doubt that people like Rany Jazayerli know exactly what they're talking about. But they've reduced the game of baseball to a mathematic equation in which the correct compilation of digits--percentages! percentages!--will automatically churn out a playoff team.

The surprising low budget success of the Oakland Athletics and Billy Beane, as chronicled by Michael Lewis' engrossing book Moneyball, has spawned a generation of stathead baseball fans who have a higher reverence for Bill James than for Babe Ruth. I'm fascinated by what Beane was able to do in Oakland. It heralded a new era in baseball, really, one in which a player's performance is seen less in terms of potential and more in terms of the raw data of his production. And there's a new statistical formula for assessing that production engineered every day: VORP, OPS, OBP--take your pick.

So when Dayton Moore said that the Royals' offense needed to address its very, very bad On Base Percentage (OBP), the bloggers shouted in acclamation. It shan't be long, they opined, before Kansas City has its own wonder of calculus on the diamond. But then he traded for Jacobs, a player who's OBP is really terrible. Out came the torches.

Moore became the GM of the Royals in the middle of the 2006 season, and I've already chronicled the team's improvement since his arrival. That, to me, buys him a lot of credit, because the teams he's run out there every summer have been different from one another in minimal respects (add a Gil Meche and Jose Guillen here, take away an Angel Berroa there). And yet they're getting better.

What blogger-dom seems not to perceive is that Moore is trying to build an excellent organization, not simply a feel good story of unappreciated talents mined for their maximum potential. So given the chance to acquire a raw, power hitting first baseman who never walks but who could hit 30 homers a year for well into the team's future, he'll scrap the stat and nab the player. Then he'll address On Base Percentage some other way; just maybe he's got a plan to improve Jacobs' OBP.

Beane's A's won lots of games and a few division titles. But they barely sniffed the World Series for all those wins. That, for Moore, is not a model to emulate. After all, Moore cut his teeth in Atlanta, where the Braves won 14 consecutive division titles, a span in which they went to the World Series five times.

I'm operating from a different assumption than the one animating bloggers' twitchy fingers: Dayton Moore knows more than they do.

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Mental Health Break: Hope for the Royals

Some quick-and-dirty math for all those starry-eyed Royals fans.

Dayton Moore was hired as the Royals General Manager in 2006.

In 2005 the Royals won 56 games.

In 2006 (the year Moore took over) the Royals won 62 games (an improvement of 6 games)

In 2007 the Royals won 69 games (an improvement of 7 games)

Now, with 2008 in the books, we can say that the Royals won 75 games (another improvement of 6 games).

The team is getting better.

If they maintain their rate of improvement over the last three seasons and add 6 to the "win" column in 2009, that will match the number of wins the Cleveland Indians had this year. They finished 7 games out of first place.

If they add another 6 wins in 2010, that's an 87-win season. That's one win less than both the White Sox and Twins accumulated this regular season, and they're tied for first place.

Just sayin'.

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Three Cheers for Clear Thinking

NPH is relieved at the sanity that is surfacing now that the dust has started to settled from our home town team's trade over the weekend, in which we acquired the guy there on the left and got rid of a taco-snarfing pitcher.

For example, Clark Fosler at the Royals Authority blog says this:

My take, is simply that this was another shot across the bow of the entire organization. Just a year ago, former GM Allard Baird pretty much labeled relievers Mike MacDougal, Burgos and Sisco as untouchable and building block for the future. Today, all three are gone. The message: potential and ‘plus projections’ are great, but you better be able to perform and you better have a mentality focused squarely on winning. Oh, and by the way, you are just relievers.

And a reader calling him/herself "Howserfan" at Royals Review points out that

This move shows the importance GMDM [General Manager Dayton Moore] places on two things difficult to measure and therefore often dismissed even by attentive baseball fans.

Namely, defense and attitude.

GMDM's first principle is that you have to get 27 outs a game to win. You can win [or lose] with one run, or three, or ten but you must get 27 outs to win a regulation game.

His second principle seems to be that attitude & character matter. Without it, players are unlikely to help build a winner long-term.

Just about all of the moves so far have been about getting more outs or getting players with better charcter/work habits.

Imagine, a leader in an organization making decisions based on work habits and attitude. When you're a small-market operation, you simply can't afford the weighing down effect of star players' bad attitudes; you have to try to be the little engine that could. And for that to happen, everybody's got to be "all aboard."

Ooh, NPH apologizes for that.

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Oh The Things We Know

On Saturday, NPH's hometown baseball team traded a big lefty relief pitcher with lots of upside for a backup first baseman. Initial reporting of the trade was befuddled, loudly wondering what Royals GM Dayton Moore could be thinking. The player they got, it was pointed out, could be got anywhere in the minor leagues in any year, while the player they gave only comes along once in a great while, even if his performance last year was a marked regression from the year before. One writer deemed the move "less than impressive" and concluded that Moore was a "Bad GM" who got caught on a "bad day."

Such is still the majority opinion. And yesterday the GM of the team with whom Moore made the deal pooh-pooh's his new pitcher's poor last season and said,"There's a mechanical issue or two that hopefully by now, by going down to winter ball, he's gotten himself straightened out." Got that? It's a mechanical issue.

Only, the mechanics seem to have more to do with tacos than they do fastballs or sliders. It seems that Mr. Upside was cut by his winter ball team for eating tacos on the stadium concourse during the first inning of a game. Here's the text of an email that one baseball writer received a couple of weeks ago"

"Check this out: [the player Moore traded], the 6'9" kid from Eastern Washington who pitches for [NPH's home team], was just cut by Mazatlan. He was pitching well enough, however the team director saw [him]munching on a couple of tacos in the stadium concourse...during the first inning of a game. Apparently, heshowed up in the dugout sometime in the second, but his fate was sealed."

NPH always assumes, when the ink starts to fly about a trade, that the GM knows more than the writers do. And more than simply un-worried about Moore's latest move, we're positively thrilled by it. It may have added five ticks to the win column by itself.

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Dayton Moore Update

From the Royals blog on the Most Valuable Network:

But what we are seeing here is more evidence Dayton Moore is following the Atlanta Braves model. The Royals are in dire need of starting pitching. If they’re actually thinking about adding Miguel Batista for three years, that’s insane. So, they decide to deal a reliever who might never realize his potential because he was rushed to the major leagues, for a decent (and cheap) starting pitching prospect.

This in response to the news that Moore has inked a trade with Mets GM Omar Minaya to send reliever Ambioroix Burgos to New York in exchange for starter Brian Bannister.

Not exactly a headline-ticker trade, but evidence of what Moore is all about: get more starting pitchers. As a fan, this is fun to watch.

Other rumors have the Royals in the running for Miguel Bautista and Gil Meche. Again, innings-eaters, guys who will beef up the starting rotation.

NPH is enjoying this.

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