The Royals have been one of baseball’s most active teams so far this offseason, first swinging a trade for Ervin Santana before re-signing Jeremy Guthrie. GM Dayton Moore has made no secret of his desire to improve a starting rotation that finished 26th in ERA (5.01), 25th in FIP (4.59), and 28th in innings (890.0) this season, and reports indicate that he’s willing to deal one of his young position players for a young, high-end arm. Alex Gordon, Mike Moustakas, and even Eric Hosmer have been floated as trade candidates, ditto Billy Butler.

Butler, 26, is a .300/.362/.468 (121 wRC+) career hitter in over 3,500 big league plate appearances. He enjoyed the best season of his career in 2012, hitting .313/.373/.510 (140 wRC+) with a career-high 29 homers and 3.2 WAR. That earned him his first All-Star Game nod and Silver Slugger. Butler’s biggest negative as a hitter is his propensity to hit the ball on the ground (career 47.2%), which has limited his power output (career .168 ISO) and makes him the mother of all double play candidates — he’s bounced into a twin-killing in 18% of his career opportunities, well-above the 11% MLB average.

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I’m sure it doesn’t feel this way, but I’d really like to see the Royals become a good baseball team. I’d like to see Dayton Moore make some good moves, build around the young core that he has helped develop, and turn the Royals back into a legitimate contender. I’d like to write about how Moore has learned from his past mistakes, and is applying those lessons to make better decisions about what kinds of players he should spend money on. Mostly, I’d just like to be able to say something nice about a Dayton Moore transaction so that we can debunk the idea that FanGraphs has something personal against him or the Royals organization.

But, as much as I’d like to be able to write a post talking about a good Dayton Moore transaction, he has to make one first. And, with news of the Royals agreeing to give Jeremy Guthrie a three year contract, today is not the day that I get to write something positive about a Dayton Moore transaction.

Let’s just start with Guthrie. He turns 34 in April and is one of the more durable pitchers in the league, having thrown 175 innings in six consecutive years. He has a well established skillset as a strike-throwing pitch-to-contact innings eater. There’s nothing too mysterious here. Guthrie is one of the easier pitchers in baseball to break down.

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It’s the bottom of the eighth inning. Men are on first and third base, there’s one out and your team is down by one run. The opposing team has one of the best ground-ball pitchers on the hill, and the infield is playing back and is looking for a double play. All you need is a fly ball to tie the game and significantly swing your chances of winning.

So who do you want at the plate?

It’s likely that the opposing manager will either bring in a ground-ball specialist or just tell the pitcher to stay away from pitches that could be hit in the air to the outfield. Knowing who you’d want to hit requires an understanding of what pitches are the most likely to induce a ground ball — and what hitters manage to hit fly balls against those pitches most often.

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The big news associated with the MVP award announced today will be the winners, especially this year with the Trout vs. Cabrera debate. Besides the winners, the below average players who receive votes get a bit of press. Today, I will look at another group of hitters, those who had a good season, but may not get a single MVP vote.

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Earlier this week I posted about the Best Bunts of 2012 according to Win Probability Added (WPA). Nothing like that is really complete, however, without talking about the worst. So here, divided into some rather arbitrary categories, are some of the worst bunts of 2012.

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That’s right: end of the season, time for me to hand out awards based on semi-goofy. questionable stats. Along with the Carter-Batista Award, this is one of the first I started publishing.. In fact, my very first post at FanGraphs (three years this week! Time flies when you’re wasting it.) back in 2009 was a King of Little Things award presentation. You can also check out the 2010 and 2011 versions for the thrilling results. So which 2012 hitter contributed to most his teams wins in ways not measurable by traditional linear weights?

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The Angels had until today to decide whether to exercise Ervin Santana’s $13 million option or pay him a $1 million buyout and make him a free agent. After a miserable 2012 season, it was pretty obvious that they weren’t interested in picking up the option, so today, they shipped him to Kansas City.

The deal, as reported by Ken Rosenthal, is Santana and cash for LHP Brandon Sisk. Given that the Angels could have made Santana go away for $1 million and that Sisk is a 27-year-old reliever who has never pitched in the Majors, it’s a pretty safe bet that the Angels aren’t kicking in much more than that $1 million they would have owed either way. The Royals are almost certainly going to have to pay $11-$12 million of Santana’s salary in 2013.

So, is he worth that kind of cash? Well, maybe.

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‘Tis the season to fire coaches and managers. Among the coaches fired yesterday was Kansas City hitting coach Kevin Seitzer. The Royals cited underperformance by the hitters. It is hard to argue that the offense did well, relative to expectations. After the team sported a 102 wRC+ last year, it was expected that with young talent like Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas entering their second season, the team’s hitting would be on the way up. It did not work out that way, as the Royals finished the season with a 95 wRC+. Hosmer and (oh boy) Jeff Francoeur, in particular, had horrific seasons in 2012, and after a promising start to the year, Mike Moustakas’ bat fell apart in the second half.

Trying to determine how much of this is and is not attributable to Kevin Seitzer’s work and whether the firing is justified is extremely difficult, and I will not really be doing that in this post. Rather, I simply want to offer some general reflections on the Seitzer’s tenure and dismissal that might be illuminate the difficulty in evaluating these sorts of decisions.

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As it happens, we were at Doug Fister’s major-league debut. By “we” I mean myself, Dave Cameron, and some hundreds of USS Mariner and Lookout Landing readers. We weren’t there specifically for Fister; we were there for a blog event and a game, and Fister just happened to pitch in it. He pitched after Sean White, who pitched after Garrett Olson, who pitched after Chris Jakubauskas, who pitched after Ian Snell. The Mariners did not win that game.

Fister’s debut drew a modest response, because it’s always cool to see a guy play for the first time, and because the Safeco PA system uttered the name “Doug Fister” for the first time. But nobody had attended in the hopes of seeing Doug Fister pitch, because Fister was generally considered a no-stuff non-prospect. He could conceivably fill out the back of a bullpen or serve as rotation depth, sure, maybe, but he wasn’t thought of as someone to get excited over. Fister debuted in August 2009. All these sentences bring us to this:

It’s been a weird ride.

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Science is neat. In many scientific experiments, you can run trials, generate results, slightly change the conditions, run trials, and generate other results. Then you can compare those results to measure the effect of the change that you made. I used to work in a neuroscience lab with fruit flies, and one of the first projects to which I was assigned attempted to measure the draw of potential mates against the draw of fresh food. Without going into detail, we were constantly futzing with the method and seeing what happened to the numbers in the end. It was not a very good experiment and it never came close to getting published. At least there were usually donuts.

Baseball isn’t like science. In baseball, there is but one trial, and it’s always going on. We can speculate about the effects of certain things, and we can feel pretty confident about our speculations, but we can never know for sure. We can never know for sure how many wins above replacement a player is or was worth. We can never know for sure the significance of a borderline pitch call. And we might never know the meaning of a play that Alex Gordon made in Detroit Wednesday evening.

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