2019 Leaves the Royals Feeling Blue
“I don’t do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.” – Allen Ginsberg
There’s no team harder for me to get a read on than the Kansas City Royals. The afterglow of the 2015 World Series has long faded, and attendance is falling back towards levels you might expect for a baseball team playing in Florida. Given the team’s inconsistent statements concerning the organization’s present — and the accompanying moves in harmony with that theme — I’m not sure whether Kansas City is incompetently rebuilding, incompetently retooling, or incompetently competing. Short of a sudden change in organizational focus, the Royals’ main task is to mark the time between the end of one Pat Mahomes season and the start of the next one.
The Setup
After two years of treading water post-championship, 2018 was the year that everything came crashing down. That that season was going to be a dreadful one was largely preordained, prophesied by the team’s contract situations. After winning 80 games in 2017, players worth more than half of the team’s WAR (13.0 wins out of 24.7 total) hit free agency, and there was little hope of one of the league’s weakest farm systems or a fat ownership wallet making good on those losses. Mike Moustakas returned to Kansas City after receiving scant interest in free agency and Alcides Escobar was re-signed for no fathomable reason, but there was little reason to believe that these moves were enough to keep the team wild card pretenders into August.
The 2018 Royals finished with 104 losses and it seemed as if they were finally ready to embrace a full-blown rebuilding process. After all, the Royals spent the summer trading most of their veterans who could fetch some kind of player in return; Moustakas, Kelvin Herrera, Jon Jay, Lucas Duda, and Drew Butera were all dealt. A rebuilding team hardly needs a dedicated pinch-runner and Terrance Gore was traded to the Cubs. Even Escobar started to have his playing time curtailed in just his third consecutive year of near replacement-level production. Sure, players like Alex Gordon and Ian Kennedy stayed put, but they were largely immovable anyway.
But the Royals proceeded to have a rather puzzling winter, one that was more consistent with a team that believes themselves to be in contention. Signings such as Billy Hamilton, Chris Owings, Duda, or Jake Diekman seemed more fitting for a team headed for an 85-77 record trying to fill holes on the roster. Martín Maldonado was brought back to mentor the team’s young pitchers and Homer Bailey was brought in to do something or other.
The Royals didn’t pick up a single young player in a trade, whether a top prospect, a fringe prospect, or even someone vaguely interesting in their mid-20s. In one of the more confusing moves made by a team this offseason, the Royals placed Brian Goodwin on waivers to make room on the roster for Duda, a 33-year-old first baseman/DH who last had a league-average season in 2015 and spent 2018 putting up a dreadful .241/.313/.418 combined triple-slash for the Braves and Royals. I won’t lie and say I expected him to hit .286/.346/.511 for the Angels (nor did ZiPS), but Goodwin, a .246/.315/.456 hitter in 2017-2018 who could at least fake being a center fielder, had far more upside than the washed-up Duda, whose most compelling strength at this point is the ability to make headlines with Big Lebowski puns.
Clearly, the Royals intended to flip players like Billy Hamilton after a successful 2019 season, but I was skeptical about this approach. Nobody wanted Hamilton last offseason; what was he going to do after four seasons of zero development to change teams’ minds?
The Projection
It will hardly be shocking that the ZiPS projections did not greatly depart from my pessimism about the 2019 Royals, which could be described as “black as the universe after its eventual return to thermodynamic equilibrium.” ZiPS was perhaps a little sunnier, and projected a 0.10% chance of the Royals making October and a final median record of 68-94. I found the scenario in which the Royals could make the playoffs to be much murkier than that of the Detroit Tigers; the Tigers had just as poor a roster, but they also had enough talent in the upper-minors they could be interesting if absolutely everything broke the right way.
The Results
The 2019 Royals hit their high-water mark before April even started by winning the first two games of the season against the Chicago White Sox and temporarily holding first place. The team then proceeded to lose 10 games in a row and fell into the AL Central basement. It took the Tigers three months of their best efforts to seize control of last place. Curiously, rumors flew that the team had an internal belief that they could make a run at the second wild card something that would have been too out-of-whack for even me to buy if it hadn’t been reported by the impeccably sourced Ken Rosenthal:
The Royals are talking internally about making a run at the second wild card, and the idea, at least according to the math, is not as crazy as it sounds — the team, while owning the worst record in the AL, faces just an eight-game deficit. More realistically, the Royals will just continue building, and possibly return to contention sooner than expected.
I’d personally argue that the math was, in fact, as crazy as it sounded considering how difficult it is to be eight games out of a wild card spot in mid-May. In fact, on the date the article was published, 28 of the 30 teams in baseball were within eight games of a playoff spot, with the Miami Marlins being the only other exception.
Whether the Royals truly believed this is unknowable, but the team certainly didn’t act as if they were a rebuilding team. They continued to play Billy Hamilton every day and seemingly only realized in May that playing their star second baseman, Whit Merrifield, in right field to make room for Chris Owings to start was perhaps not an optimal lineup. The team’s desire to see if Frank Schwindel had discovered something in the minors in 2017 (.329/.349/.541) and 2018 (.286/.336/.506) only lasted four starts. It took them three months to wonder if Tim Hill, who had a 2.12 ERA for the Triple-A Storm Chasers and who put up a 3.51 FIP on the actual major league team in 2018, deserved more than four innings to prove he could upgrade one of the league’s worst bullpens.
Perhaps the most controversial decision the Royals made was not trading Merrifield at the deadline. While the team didn’t categorically refuse trade offers, all indications were that the ask for Merrifield was astronomical. Multiple sources indicated the Royals insisted on multiple “win-now” pieces, a curious ask to make of the teams in contention that would be most interested in acquiring him. Similarly, after rehabbing Ian Kennedy’s career as a closer, the Royals allegedly refused to eat any of his contract in a trade, preferring to have a 35-year-old closer on a 90-loss team in 2020 than the prospects they could add instead.
That’s not to say 2019 was all doom and gloom. Adalberto Mondesi has real weaknesses in his game that will likely prevent him from being a superstar at short, but a .265/.294/.423 line is enough for him to be in All-Star territory given that his defense is legitimately All-Star level, and he could likely steal 60 bases over a full year. Hunter Dozier’s headed for a four-WAR season and Jorge Soler has passed the 40-homer pole thanks to staying completely healthy for the first time in his career. The starting pitching wasn’t as dreadful as it could have ended up being, and trading a catcher they didn’t need for Mike Montgomery and letting him start full-time was an excellent notion and one of my favorite Royals moves in recent years.
As the season closes, the starting lineup looks more like it ought to have at the beginning of the year. As with Brian Goodwin, I’m extremely skeptical about the futures of Brett Phillips and Bubba Starling, but giving them regular playing time is infinitely more productive in the context of the future of the team than trotting out Billy Hamilton every night. Nicky Lopez has disappointed in the majors, but unlike Owings, there was enough upside for the Royals in Lopez working out to make playing him worthwhile. Nor am I yet convinced that Lopez is a lost cause; a 24-year-old shortstop with a .296/.378/.403 career minor-league line is a player any rebuilding team should take seriously.
What Comes Next?
I remain deeply pessimistic about the future of the Kansas City Royals. While I appreciate the stated commitment of the new ownership group, led by local businessman and part-owner of the Indians John Sherman, to treat the Royals at least partly as a community asset, the apparent commitment to signing general manager Dayton Moore to a long-term extension doesn’t fill me with hope.
And yes, the 2015 Kansas City Royals won the World Series. There is an unsettling number of predestination arguments when it comes to the Royals, as if winning the World Series validated all the moves that happened before winning the World Series. The 2015 Royals were a very good team, but they were also a team that enjoyed a lot of good fortune on their way to the championship. It’s odd to evaluate a front office by World Series victories; Dayton Moore would not be the slightest bit inferior if Will Harris could have held a lead in a single October game. A front office can only build a consistent winner and hope for the best, and the Royals have not been consistent winners over Moore’s tenure. Going back to Moore’s first full season in 2007, only the Marlins and Orioles have won fewer games than the Royals.
Flags fly forever, but fan interest doesn’t. Short of a miracle, Kansas City’s attendance will decline for the fourth straight season. Even knowing that they would have trouble keeping the team together after 2017, the Royals did not aggressively keep the team competitive, something that separates the team from the 1975-1990 Royals that created an entire generation of fans, the legacy of Ewing Kauffman, who was arguably the best team owner in professional sports. After winning the World Series in 1985, Kansas City’s average attendance didn’t drop below their 1985 level until a third straight out-of-contention season in 1992. The 2014-2015 Royals created fleeting moments rather than a new fanbase.
The Royals claim to be repeating the blueprint of their World Series victory, but this rebuilding has started even more haltingly than the previous one. There’s no Zack Greinke to trade to kickstart the next generation. Whit Merrifield’s a nice player and all, but he has nowhere near the trade value that Greinke had back in the day. Mondesi’s still young, but a lot of Kansas City’s “young” core isn’t actually young enough to build around. Merrifield is already 30, Dozier just turned 28, and Soler will be 28 in 2020 and a free agent after 2021. Years of incompetent drafting — Merrifield, taken in the 2010 draft, is the most recent Royal draftee to amass five WAR for the Royals — have left contention a long time in the future, short of unexpected developments. By Eric and Kiley’s rankings on THE BOARD, KC’s farm improvements this year have only bumped them from the 29th-best farm system to 26th. Contention is a long way off. More than any team other than perhaps the Colorado Rockies, the Royals could have used a completely new direction, starting with a clean sweep of the organization.
The Absitively, Posilutely, Way-Too-Early ZiPS Projection – Adalberto Mondesi
OK, I’ve been characteristically grumpy about the Royals. So, let’s end with some fan-service, with the sweet, sweet projections of the aforementioned Mondesi.
| Year | BA | OBP | SLG | AB | R | H | 2B | 3B | HR | RBI | BB | SO | SB | OPS+ | DR | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | .256 | .289 | .435 | 527 | 72 | 135 | 26 | 10 | 16 | 71 | 25 | 155 | 50 | 92 | 10 | 3.2 |
| 2021 | .256 | .292 | .454 | 504 | 72 | 129 | 26 | 10 | 18 | 72 | 26 | 153 | 44 | 98 | 10 | 3.4 |
| 2022 | .253 | .292 | .457 | 506 | 73 | 128 | 26 | 10 | 19 | 74 | 28 | 159 | 44 | 98 | 10 | 3.4 |
| 2023 | .250 | .290 | .466 | 504 | 73 | 126 | 26 | 10 | 21 | 75 | 29 | 164 | 41 | 100 | 10 | 3.5 |
Yes, the plate discipline is…interesting. But Mondesi’s a fun player who gets value in a different way than the prototypical 2019 player. A player who gets most of his offensive value from triples and stolen bases and can legitimately make an All-Star roster is a variety that’s lacking at times in today’s game. Even I can’t have tacos three meals a day, seven days a week.
Dan Szymborski is a senior writer for FanGraphs and the developer of the ZiPS projection system. He was a writer for ESPN.com from 2010-2018, a regular guest on a number of radio shows and podcasts, and a voting BBWAA member. He also maintains a terrible Twitter account at @DSzymborski.
I think it is weird that Soler and Merrifield stayed put, but I think that their non-trading them could also be an indication that nobody is willing to give up good prospects anymore in trades.
Let’s think through what a fair deal would be for Merrifield. ZiPs thinks Merrifield is worth 3.2 wins in 2020 and 2.6 wins in 2021, at least based on what we see here on the website right now. If we take that rate of decline in 2022, that’s 7.8 wins for a multi-positional player (meaning he’s probably not blocking anyone), plus there’s an affordable 6.5M option in 2023. He also had about 40% of an almost 3-win season left where he was getting paid $1M; to be conservative we’ll ignore the deadline premium. Let’s also ignore the option, just to be conservative. That’s about $15.5M in payroll for something like 8.5 wins (we’ll round down, again to be conservative). That’s about a FV65 in value, or two FV50s plus a FV45-FV40+ (the valuation on those seem pretty fluid).
The Braves, Cubs, and Phillies all reportedly had interest. For the Cubs, that’s something like Amaya, Hoerner, and someone else (Ian Happ? Richard Gallardo?). For the Phillies, that’s Bohm, Howard, and someone else (Moniak?). For the Braves, we’re talking about Bryse Wilson, Kyle Wright, and someone else (Johan Rojas?). If the Royals could have gotten that and didn’t, then I think they made a huge mistake not flipping him. But I’m not sure they were getting anything close to that.
Incidentally, this was also why signing veteran position players to flip at the deadline is weird, because although teams are still willing to give up something for a pitcher the market for position players at the deadline has been dead for years now.
The margins count, but complaining about playing Billy Hamilton, Chris Owings, Duda, and Jake Diekman over Frank Schwindel, Tim Hill, and Brian Goodwin seems like small beer. Not like the Royals couldn’t cut the 4 re-treads and play the 2 AAAA guys by June. (Goodwin was a regrettable loss.)
Now that Dombrowski got fired, I think we may see even fewer top-prospects-for-all-star trades, though I think the current reticence is that sellers didn’t really have all-stars to trade this past ASB, though Greinke and Bauer (terrible since the trade, wow!) were close .
To be fair, I partly agree with Dan on this point. The Royals have consistently gone for veteran stopgaps when it made no sense to do so. The point of playing Frank Schwindel isn’t because he’s likely to be any good, but because if you play enough Frank Schwindels you find a Brian Goodwin. You can take this too far, but Chris Owings and Lucas Duda weren’t likely to offer much anyway so it’s no loss to go that way.
OTOH, I don’t agree that Martin Maldonado or Jake Diekman were bad signings. Budget relievers and having someone to play catcher are a good thing for all teams.
I think you’re probably not trying hard enough on the taco front.
Not doing anything they could to trade Kennedy just proved to me how incompetent the FO is. The Royals have somehow convinced themselves they are only a couple years away from competing, when realistically they should be thinking 5 years for the start of being competitive again. They have a bloated payroll with no real players, they have a horrible farm system that almost entirely rests of Witt producing, and their best hope for a new TV deal is one that will pay them about half of what the Rays are getting.
I love my Royals, but I’m also thinking the ‘every 30 years’ mantra for a world series is closer to reality than us fans can ever admit.
The thing is, not trading Kennedy has nothing to do with competing in a couple years. He’ll be a free agent after 2020, and nobody, not even Dayton Moore, has cited next season as a year to compete. So they’re just going to keep eating his salary and having him pitch competently out of the bullpen while the team loses 85-90 games instead of eating part of his salary and having him pitch competently out of the bullpen for someone else while the team loses 88-93 games and has a new decent prospect in the minors who might or might not be part of that mythical 2021 window. (I don’t buy that window one bit, but that’s what Moore keeps insisting.)
There is not one reason to keep Kennedy if there was interest. They will save money by trading him, even if they have to eat salary, and it will cost them zero playoff appearances. If they can get someone in return, perfect. If not, well, it’s still better than hanging onto him while his potential value goes from slight to zero.
Sherman also owns part of the Indians? That seems like conflict of interest, or poor form, or something. Is this common and I hadn’t noticed?
Sure, MLB is also one big special anti-trust violation, but about the money, not about the teams’ decisions affecting play. That’s how you get the Spiders.
Not the craziest thing, and he’ll have to sell his stake in the Indians as part of getting approval for his purchase of the Royals
I’m almost 100% positive that Sherman will be forced to divest his stake in the Indians as a condition of purchasing the Royals.
I’m 100% positive, no “almost” about it.
I dont think the Royals legitimately think they are going to compete in the next couple years (let alone this year as Rosenthal reported). Criticize Moore all you want but he isnt clinically insane. He is looking at the same roster/system everyone else is and there is no universe where any sane baseball person looks at that and thinks they are competing this year or next year or even the year after.
i suspect its more PR than anything and its kind of amusing everyone seems to believe it . I think alot choose to believe it, even though its a pretty transparent PR move, so they can make fun of the Royals for being dumb. Which is a past time in the sabr community (not saying its not deserved alot of the time)
Overpromise and underdeliver is really effective in a hope-springs-eternal business like sports for a little bit, but if you use that kind of PR for too many years it tends to drive fans to stop caring.
Moore also went on a rant about players not watching porn, and he insisted, for some reason, that Luke Heimlich deserved a second chance. Those aren’t exactly good PR moves, so I’m not going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s just citing an early contention window to get people excited. Besides, if he wasn’t just saying it, he’d be trading the assets the Royals do have. And he isn’t!
I can understand not trading Whit. He’d probably get back less than we’d all think, and there’s some value to having a face of your franchise, even in down years. But less sensical is keeping guys like Kennedy around.
Even the Soler trade never made much sense. Davis for Soler was a fair deal, value considered, but there’s no way Soler was going to be useful at a point when the Royals could actually compete again. They’d have better off taking some high upside A-ball fliers. The guys who are being touted as the next big pieces of the next great Royals team have no chance of being on that team when it actually comes about.
Okay. So what is Moore doing?
Look, i dont think the royals are outright lying when they say they want to rebuild quickly.
They have been taking college players in the past couple drafts. Witt seems like the type of guy who could rise fairly quickly through the system (huge if though) and they will have another high pick this year.
They’re sort of acquiring Quad A types to see if any of them can do something (McBroom, Phillips, Meija even Soler to an extent but he will be a FA soon).
As Dan says they are finally giving some of their younger guys a chance to see what they can do (who saw Hunter Dozier doing this?)
they do have a couple guys on the 25 man roster who could still be around and productive in 3-4 years (Mondesi, Junis, Keller)
so they do seem to be trying to get better sooner rather than later. I just think they are exaggerating what “quickly” means for the sake of better PR. I dont think anyone internally thought they would be good this year, or next year or probably even in 2021. But thats just me, a random dude on the internet. Maybe (probably?) I’m totally wrong
PR campaign? Definitely! Deceitful? Maybe more wishful thinking. Absurd? Yeah, but who thought the 2013 Boston Red Sox would win the WS the next season after salary dumping so many big names? Very few. I’m not saying I expect the Royals to be competitive in the next few years. On paper, this team with its farm system can’t touch the best teams in baseball (and likely won’t for several years – and that’s only if everything falls into place). But, strange things happen in baseball (like the 2014 and 2015 KC Royals that had worse preseason odds than the 2013 Red Sox).
This is a great article, not least because it made me look at Brett Phillips’ page. We REALLY need a full article on him.
He has been worth 16.5 DEF runs in 295 career PA.
He’s been worth 11.8 runs by UZR in CF in 500 innings (a 25.9 pace over a full season!).
If you prefer DRS, it’s even more ridiculous, with him saving 18 runs in basically half a season in CF. That’s astounding.
He’s either the best defensive centerfielder in baseball right now, or both defensive systems are somehow way off (in the same direction).
His defense is so good, that he’s on a 4-win pace in his career even with a .214/.290/.351 batting line.
His career UZR/150 is 7 runs better than Harrison Bader and almost double that of Kiermaier.
I know some of this is obviously small sample size, but no team in baseball could use him? Mets?
I think he could be part of a platoon. His career wRC+ against righties is 83. His career wRC+ against lefties is 12. Of course, the Royals don’t have a lot to lose by letting him play every day and seeing if he can make contact.
I’ve been banging this drum a bit elsewhere. There’s every reason to think he could produce a 2012 Drew Stubbs-like season: 65 wRC+ but 8.7 BsR and 9.8 DEF leading to 1.3 WAR. He’s almost certainly an even better defender than that and not quite as good a baserunner. At what he costs right now, that is valuable. And there are reasons to believe that what tanked his hitting beyond all recognition last year has been mitigated some this year.
This could be a 1.5+ WAR player who won’t be arbitration-eligible until 2022. He seems to be at least at the level Alcides Escobar was at, and they exercised two $5M+ options on that guy.
Or he might not be! Defensive numbers are volatile. And although he looks less broken this year than last, maybe he’ll revert, never able to hit enough to even hold a roster spot. But the Royals really ought to give him every chance to show one way or the other.
Terrible Job by this front office (or owner if that was in him- I could see him wanting to fake competitiveness to milk the WS a little more and sell tickets).
First letting all those guys (hosmer, moustakas, cain) walk was bad. Sure they got comp picks but a comp pick is like a 40+ fv or so on average so they could have done better.
And then they do not trades perez and merrifield. Sure the market for 2b and Cs was very bad but those guys while not old aren’t super young either, there always was a risk and with perez it backfired already. Plus the market for him is not going to get that much better so better take what you get.
The royals missed an opportunity. They were not like the 2013 phillies or 2018 Orioles with no talent to trade, they did have assets but they chose to keep them, maybe due to financial reasons.
They really should have sold 2017 and 18 albeit I do understand an owner somewhat who wants to ride out the WS high a little and make Money.
To be fair, they did offer Hosmer a competitive contract and it looks like they dodged a MASSIVE bullet there. Trade value wise, who knows, but the general consensus was that he was not worth that much (the reaction to his contract bears that out lol)
There was little/no interest in Moustakas as a FA so you can extrapolate what the trade market for him was (and they did end up re-signing and trading him for Phillips)
signing a 31 year old Cain for multiple years really would have made no sense. I suppose you could argue they should have traded him but again, whats the market for a 31 year old soon to be FA? The Brewers wound up getting him for 5/80, which isnt alot, so again you can kind of extrapolate what his trade value would have been.
Perez is pretty overrated IMHO. Not sure what you could get for him.
Merrifield should have been traded but maybe they tried and got not much for offers.
I dont think they had the assets you claim they had. I dont think those guys bring back much more than they got in comp picks.
With letting them walk I implied they should have traded them instead of just cashing in the comp picks.
I agree the returns wouldn’t have been great but hosmer and cain certainly would have netted a 45 and a 40+ or so which is like twice the value of a comp pick even if it isn’t a haul of course.
Man if not for trading wil myers Dayton Moore would be called the worst gm outside of Dave Stewart( maybe worse). They are still benefiting from that trade in Soler.
I really don’t think that’s true at all. Dayton Moore has made a lot of really strange moves, but the Greinke trade paid huge dividends for them, they did a great job of converting mediocre pitchers into unbelievable relievers (so much that they started a trends across the league), and they did a great job of pouring resources into the analytics of advanced scouting. That makes him at least a mediocre GM.
And you really have forgotten how bad a lot of the GMs were even 10-15 years ago…Stewart, Zduriencik, Ruben Amaro (who wasn’t as bad as we remember, but would very likely be the worst GM if he was employed today), whoever was responsible for the total destruction of the Angels’ development pipeline (Reagins? Stoneman?), Allan Baird, Dave Littlefield, Chuck LaMar…there were some bad GMs out there.
That seems pretty harsh for a guy who built an insane farm system and went to back to back world series.
I wouldnt put him anywhere near the top in terms of FO’s but worst GM ever is kind of crazy hyperbole.
Wade Davis was a dominant reliever with Tampa before reverting back, they didnt really use that strategy with anyone else? Hochevar got hurt so went to relief, Herrera was always a reliever, soria was another small frame, Collins.
And yes being the worst team in baseball for 5 years and trading a greinke should build a great farm.
Those back to backs were a direct result of the wil myers trade, they don’t make the deal they probably don’t make the playoffs.
Davis had 70 prettyinnings (one season) in relief before the Royals got him and NO ONE thought he was anything other than a throw in. Thats just completely inaccurate
The back to back WS were a result of a phenomenal system and trading Greinke. Their best player (Cain) came over in that trade as did two other pretty good peices (Escobar and Odorizzi who helped them get Shields/Davis). Its also worth noting that alot of people thought the Myers trade was a bad trade for the Royals at the time. So its funny you now say it was so amazing.
Davis was never a throw in. He was just a top 40 reliever and proven 5th starter in a pinch with team control.
Their best player was Alex Gordon, from the 2005 draft.
From 2005-2013, so 9 drafts. Their worst pick was 12th, they drafted outside the top 5 twice ( the other 8th). And traded a top 5 pitcher, of course they had a great farm. And anyone could have built one with that ammo.
My point was without the myers trade they don’t make the playoffs, they needed Shields and davis or they don’t win. (Myers never had a position and I was always the low guy on him, but without the wrist problems probably a well above average first basemen.)
“But the Royals proceeded to have a rather puzzling winter, one that was more consistent with a team that believes themselves to be in contention. Signings such as Billy Hamilton, Chris Owings, Duda, or Jake Diekman seemed more fitting for a team headed for an 85-77 record trying to fill holes on the roster. Martín Maldonado was brought back to mentor the team’s young pitchers and Homer Bailey was brought in to do something or other.”
There’s a fundamental flaw right off the bat here- contending teams weren’t signing those guys- they aren’t guys contenders were interested in, and were value (albeit not a great value mostly) signings. Everyone seems to think the Royals brass thought they’d be contenders if they signed those guys. Despite the moron rhetoric, I believe they knew they were scrap heap guys with some upside for trade value, that did indeed provide some veteran presence to a club that has rolled out a significant amount of it’s AAAA inventory this year, even if they weren’t top prospects.
Maldanado and Bailey brought youth inventory, despite little offseason interest. The others didn’t pan out, oh well (Diekman did have a good first half). A 33% return (or slightly higher if you think Diekman was worth anything at the trade deadline) isn’t a horrible haul for a bunch of scrap heap guys.
Let’s armchair quarterback Dayton Moore to death, or, rather, realize that they are much better than a Detroit team that’s supposed to be further along in the process, much better than the O’s and Marlins’ messes, have a better RD than the heralded rebuilding White Sox, etc. Nobody gets second guessed like Dayton Moore, who rebuilt a barren small market franchise to back-to-back WS appearances, something NONE of the other small market teams can claim recently. I agree, I don’t want to wait 30 more years, but it’s amazing how fickle people are. Dave Dombrowski is available, go hire him and see how it works out for the long-term health of the franchise.
“I’d personally argue that the math was, in fact, as crazy as it sounded considering how difficult it is to be eight games out of a wild card spot in mid-May.”
I laughed hard at this bit.
I wonder what a year and a half of Sal Perez would yield should he return to form in the first half of next season.
I know that there’s very little chance of that actually happening (because of what he means to the team and fans, FWIW). I also don’t imagine it would be some godfather-package of future value.
Still, when looking at roster resource for this team, it’s very hard to find ways in which they canrebuild. Merrifield, Perez, Kennedy, and Soler seem like they MIGHT (should they play well enough) be ways in which they can. Maybe Gordon, IF they paid enough of his contract AND his first half of 2020 looked like is first half this year (108wRC+).
Whit, Perez and Gordon are all fan favorites and organizational favorites. They’ll have to eat a lot of money for Kennedy to bring anything back. Soler’s contract is actually pretty fantastic for them. (It also seems like players like him skill-wise don’t generate as much interest as they used to, on the market.)
A “complete tear down” is sort of hyperbolic here, as there isn’t much to actually tear down even if the team had a change of heart and decided to make these kinds of moves.
What’s really surprising is that GMDM has been the GM since 2006. Off the top of my head, that makes him the 3rd longest tenured GM/head of baseball ops in the game behind only Cashman and Beane. I hope that’s correct, because there is something slightly humorous about that
I’m a Royals fan, to put my bias at the fore, but this article feels like an exaggeration.
I remember 2005, 2006, et al where there was legitimately no hope (remember, this is when Greinke had a terrible season and subsequently quit baseball for a year). The Royals of today are a very incomplete team, but they do have a decent offensive core.
The minor leagues and pitching staff are disasters, but it’s easy to forget how many prospects fail. When the Royals went to the World Series in 2014 and 2015, it was supposed to be on the back of its pitching prospects: Kyle Zimmer, Danny Duffy, Mike Montgomery, John Lamb, Chris Dwyer, Yordano Ventura, Jake Odorizzi, etc.. Obviously, that wasn’t the case (TINSTAAPP, I know). Some of those guys have had decent careers – mostly with other teams – but the emergence of those teams did not follow the logical progression you would expect.
With that said, I do think Dayton Moore and Lonnie Goldberg have mostly done a terrible job. I don’t think they’re light years away from being competitive, however.