Armed with a new measure for offensive volatility (VOL), I wanted to revisit research I conducted  last year about the value of a consistent offense.

In general, the literature has suggested if you’re comparing two similar offenses, the more consistent offense is preferable throughout the season. The reason has to do with the potential advantages a team can gain when they don’t “waste runs” in blow-out victories. The more evenly a team can distribute their runs, the better than chances of winning more games.

I decided to take my new volatility (VOL) metric and apply it to team-level offense to see if it conformed to this general consensus*.

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. Assorted Headlines for the Baseball Enthusiast
2. Graphs: Miguel Tejada’s Career in WAR
3. SCOUT Leaderboards: Dominican Winter League

Assorted Headlines for the Baseball Enthusiast
Kansas City Sign Chavez, Tejada
The Kansas City Royals have signed outfielder Endy Chavez and infielder Miguel Tejada to minor-league deals, reports MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell. The latter will become an MLB deal worth $1.1 million, according to Dionisio Soldevila of ESPN Deportes (with credit to MLB Trade Rumors’ Edward Creech for collecting same information). Tejada, who enters his age-39 season, has been worth 43.8 WAR over his career, although only about one of those wins has come over the previous three seasons.

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Why isn’t there more interest in Michael Bourn? A six-win center fielder is on the market, and our most recent article on the subject is whether or not his agent has waited too long to get him a deal. We don’t know what his asking price is, but the idea that a player coming off a career year and four straight seasons with more than four wins now needs a pillow contract seems to suggest that either there’s a reason to doubt Bourn’s work, or there’s a lack of demand for his services in the market place.

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A week ago, I was one of many who criticized the Royals decision to trade a package of young talent — including Wil Myers, one of the best offensive prospects in the game — for James Shields, even though I’m a big fan of his and I think he’s likely to provide a significant upgrade to Kansas City’s rotation. The argument against making the trade essentially went something like this; the Royals aren’t likely to be a playoff team in 2013 even with Shields, while Myers himself could have served as a valuable upgrade over the ineffective incumbent.

Today, it seems likely that the Toronto Blue Jays are about to make a very similar trade. According to Joel Sherman, the current incarnation of the big rumored trade is a seven player deal that would ship R.A. Dickey (and stuff) to Toronto for Travis D’Arnaud, Noah Syndergaard, and stuff.

The deal isn’t done, and we don’t even know the names of the secondary prospects going each direction, but it’s probably safe to assume that the structure of this deal is going to be similar to the just-completed Shields trade. In this case, D’Arnaud is Myers, Syndergaard is Odorizzi, and the rest of the stuff is probably going to be some offsetting combination of near term value versus long term potential. While that trade wasn’t Myers-for-Shields, and this trade won’t be D’Arnaud-for-Dickey, both deals are centered around an elite-prospect-for-front-line starter swap.

The 2012 Royals were 72-90 and were outscored by 70 runs. The 2012 Blue Jays were 73-89 and were outscored by 68 runs. The talent exchanges are similar. The cost and team control of the acquired pitchers will be similar, assuming Dickey signs an extension with Toronto, which seems like a pretty strong bet. So, if we ripped the Royals for the Shields trade, how can we not rip the Blue Jays for making a similar trade?

In this case, the prior moves make all the difference in the world.

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After the Marlins and the Blue Jays swung that gigantic trade some time back, I found myself researching something with regard to Emilio Bonifacio, since if there was one thing people wanted to read about after that trade, it was Emilio Bonifacio. My research led me somewhere, but it didn’t lead me where I wanted — it led me to Willy Taveras, and I couldn’t think of any reason to write a FanGraphs post about Willy Taveras. The guy hadn’t played in the majors since 2010. The guy didn’t play pro ball anywhere in 2012. Nothing was groundbreaking, and everything was abandoned.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I found out today the Royals had signed Taveras to a contract. It’s only a minor-league contract, but it comes with a spring-training invite, which means Willy Taveras might be back. He is, at least, back on the big-league radar. Here, now, is the rest of a post about Willy Taveras. Because to my knowledge, the Indians and Reds haven’t yet completed a Shin-Soo Choo pseudo-blockbuster.

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In the wake of the Kansas City and Tampa Bay trade from Sunday night, many have speculated upon — and Jeff Sullivan has considered with something not unlike aplomb — how Wade Davis might perform in his return to the starting rotation (i.e. the role he’s likely to assume with the Royals). As Sullivan notes, Davis was a not particularly excellent starter from 2009 to 2011. Then, he (i.e. Davis, not Sullivan) was a considerably above-average reliever in 2012. One is compelled to wonder, naturally, if Davis learned something from his year as a reliever that will aid him as a starter — or, alternatively, if he was merely benefiting from the sort of improvement one sees while working out of the bullpen.

That, as I say, is something a person would wonder. It is not, however, my ambition to meditate on that question at the moment. One reason is because Sullivan mostly did that. A second reason is because the answer (see: “we don’t know”) merits only so much attention.

Instead, what I’d like to examine here — with the aid of, like, 10 or 50 animated GIFs — is what Davis’s likely ceiling is. What, in other words, does Wade Davis look like — and what, in particular, does his repertoire look like — when he is being the best possible Wade Davis.

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Episode 285
FanGraphs managing editor Dave Cameron analyzes all baseball — and, in particular, the part of baseball concerning the James Shields-for-Wil Myers (etc.) trade. Also: the Dodgers. Also-also: how the guest refuses to read the host’s work even once.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 44 min play time.)

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Were you to read FanGraphs, and only FanGraphs, you might be led to believe there’s only one opinion one might have on Sunday’s trade between the Rays and the Royals. And that one opinion would be “that’s a bad trade, for the Royals.” Indeed, many feel that way, but many also do not feel that way, for reasons I won’t bother to get into. Those people don’t write here. While there’s a spectrum of thought on the deal, though, there’s one thing all opinions have in common: Wade Davis is kind of the forgotten guy. James Shields is the rotation ace the Royals were after. Wil Myers is maybe the top hitting prospect in baseball, and the other prospects are other prospects. But Davis is in there, and the Royals have plans for him. Big plans. Starting plans!

In 2012, Davis lost a spring-training rotation battle to Jeff Niemann, and shifted to relief. As a reliever, Davis came to excel, but all along there was talk the Rays still saw him as a starter long-term. Now Royals property, it appears as if Davis will be looked at as a starter. The Royals’ press release announcing the trade, at least, referred to Davis as a starter. This is a re-conversion that’s probably worth exploring.

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It’s no secret that I don’t think the Kansas City Royals made a very good trade last night. In my view, the price was just too high, and the Royals weren’t in a position where their team needed to give up that kind of future value to improve their chances of winning in 2013. Reasonable folks can disagree, of course. There’s a case to be made that the Royals are closer to contending than I think they are, and if KC can overtake Detroit for the division title, then the reward may justify the cost. Win-now moves can be worth it, and as teams like the Nationals, Orioles, and A’s showed last year, pre-season projections aren’t written on stone tablets and handed down from on high.

But, this morning, I’m not reading many arguments in favor of this trade that come from that angle. Instead, the defense of this trade from the Royals perspective is coming mostly from a different angle. Here’s Jeff Passan’s take, for instance:

While Shields is a known quantity – six straight seasons of 200-plus innings, a strikeout rate that approached one per inning last year and battle scars of the AL East to show for it – there is little allure in the expected. The fetishization of prospects is a baseball-wide malady, and it’s why sentiment skewed decidedly in the Rays’ favor. Granted, it should – Myers has the sort of talent that wins awards, Odorizzi looks like a mid-rotation starter, Montgomery is a high-ceiling left-hander and Leonard comes with the one tool, power, that everybody wants – but not nearly to the degree it did.

There’s a reason Tampa Bay turned down Myers for Shields straight up. There’s a reason Oakland turned down Myers for Brett Anderson straight up. Despite the scouting reports that glow and the awards he won this year, the 22-year-old Myers remains a risk. He is a safer one than most – his .314/.387/.600 line with 37 home runs between Double-A and Triple-A last season portends stardom – but any number of players have aced the minor leagues only to lag behind early in their major league careers.

Shields “is a known quantity”. Myers “remains a risk”. The Royals just traded a grab bag of who-knows-what for an ace, turning potential into performance. Myers might be good, but Shields already is. This argument gets trotted out there every time a team trades young for old. Unfortunately, this argument simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

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In some ways, this post feels like a repeat. When rumors first surfaced that the Royals were considering shipping off Wil Myers to acquire a veteran starting pitcher, I wrote up my feelings on why that wasn’t such a great idea. If you want to see my full breakdown on swapping Myers for Shields, start there. The brief summary goes something like this; sure, the Royals need better pitching, but they also need better outfielders, and better infielders, and better everything. The Royals were not a particularly good baseball team last year, or the year before, or really any time in recent history.

They won 83 games back in 2003, the last time they had a winning season. Prior to that, you had to go back to 1993 to find a season where they won more games than they lost. Two winning seasons in 20 years can make a franchise desperate for respectability. And desperate teams often do desperate things. But I don’t think anyone saw the Royals doing something this desperate.

If you haven’t heard the news yet, the Royals agreed to trade OF Wil Myers, RHP Jake Odorizzi, LHP Mike Montgomery, and 3B Patrick Leonard to Tampa Bay for RHP James Shields, RHP Wade Davis, and a PTBNL or cash. Whenever there’s “or cash” attached, you can be pretty sure the PTBNL is no one of note, so basically, the Royals traded their best prospect, their best pitching prospect, and two other talented youngsters for Shields and Davis.

The obvious comparison here is the Erik Bedard trade. Coming off an 88 win season, the Mariners decided to go for broke, shipping off prospects Adam Jones, Chris Tillman, Tony Butler, and Kam Mickolio along with reliever George Sherrill to acquire Bedard from the Orioles. The Mariners weren’t as close to winning as they thought they were, and after they won 61 games in 2008, the entire front office was fired and the organization went into a full scale rebuild. Bedard spent his two years in Seattle on and off the disabled list, while Jones has blossomed into one of the game’s best center fielders and Tillman continues to flash some potential as a young starter with a big league future.

That trade is generally regarded as the worst prospects-for-veteran swap in recent history. This might be worse.

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