Alex Gordon has been a really good, perhaps slightly underrated, player over the last five seasons for the Kansas City Royals. An untimely injury limited his role during this most recent regular season, but he was a big part of the club’s playoff runs each of the past two seasons and played a major role in Kansas City’s first World Series title in 30 years. Thanks to a team-friendly contract extension after his breakout 2011 season, the Royals have paid him just $37.5 million over the last four years, including two potential years of free agency. Although Gordon, heading into his age-32 season, is not reaching free agency at an ideal age, given his production he is still likely to receive a deal totaling around $100 million. The question for the Royals and the rest of the league is, will he be worth that kind of money into his mid-30s?

Gordon has hardly gone unnoticed as one of the best, if not the best, player on the two-time American League champion and reigning World Series titleholder. However, due to the way he’s produced his value — including above-average defense in an outfield corner — it’s possible that Gordon is slightly underrated heading into free agency. Over the last five seasons, he has been one of the very best players in baseball, as evidenced by the WAR leader chart below.

The next five players on that list are Josh Donaldson, Dustin Pedroia, Jason Heyward, Evan Longoria, and Giancarlo Stanton. Gordon has put up a well-above average 123 wRC+ during that time after struggling from 2007 to 2010 as he adjusted to major league pitching following just one full season in the minors. Alex Gordon and Jason Heyward’s name have come up together this offseason as similar players for good reason.

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As we move into May and people start to check our WAR leaderboards, there will inevitably be a discussion about why certain players rank highly, especially if they aren’t putting up big offensive numbers. Most of the time, that discussion revolves around the player’s defensive value; For example, last August, Alex Gordon sat on top of our WAR leaderboards, which generated a fair amount of controversy at the time.

Here at FanGraphs, we use Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) as the fielding component of WAR. UZR is one of two defensive run estimators we host here on the site, the other being Defensive Runs Saved (DRS). Both metrics go beyond traditional fielding stats using the same Baseball Information Solutions (BIS) data set to assign runs to players by dividing the field into different areas and then comparing each play to a league average. At FanGraphs, we don’t have UZR values for catchers or pitchers, so those positions are simply removed from any data visualizations in this post. We also have great library entries that go over the minutiae of the metrics better than I can in this post.

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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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Episode Twenty-Seven
In which the panel records a meltdown.

Headlines
Starlin Castro in the Chicago Sky
Demoted: Alex Gordon
N’doy: The Tampa Bay Rays Are Good
Speaking of Meltdowns
… and other populist declarations!

Featuring
Dave Cameron, Full-Time Employee
Matt Klaassen, Study Carrel-er
Bryan Smith, Resident Prospect Maven

Finally, you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio on the flip-flop.

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Much like Shaquille O’Neal in his prime and/or the libidos of our nation’s politicians, one can’t stop the All-Joy Team, but only hope to contain it.

Yes, we here at the Fidrych Institute (the country’s pre-eminent joy-related think tank) have had our fingers in all manner of multimedia pies recently (comme ci, commme ca), but the luminous mystery of the All-Joy Team has never been far from our minds.

To recap, in our latest episode, we’d just elected Kelly Johnson and Adam Rosales to All-Joy status, bringing the current pre-season roster to its current state:

C	Kurt Suzuki
1B	Brian Myrow
2B	Kelly Johnson
SS	Ben Zobrist
LF	Chris Heisey
CF	Ryan Sweeney
RF	Daniel Nava
UTIF	Adam Rosales

SP	Billy Buckner
SP	Jason Godin
RP	Brandon League
RP	Kevin Jepsen

The reader will notice that, with the exception of a few positional omissions, the above bears a shocking resemblance to a field-able baseball team. Exciting, is the only word for that. Now, let’s see if we can’t clean this up.

Today, you get a third baseman; tomorrow, a designated hitter.

3B: Alex Gordon, Kansas City

Basketball analyst John Hollinger has coined the term “second draft” to describe the acquisition of players who (a) have, at one point, been considered prospects, (b) have fallen from prospect status, (c) have played out the duration of their rookie contracts, but (d) are still young enough so’s to make good on their early promise. Because of the extent of control that MLB organizations exert over their players, this entire cycle can actually occur before the young player escapes his arbitration years.

The Rise and Fall and Other Rise of Alex Gordon is a bad name for a book. But I think, before his tenure in Kansas City is through, it’ll be an accurate one. Even just three years ago, Gordon was receiving Wieters-esque attention from people who know what’s what. It was in that year, 2007, that Gordon was number one overall on Kevin Goldstein’s Top 100 Prospects list, number one on John Sickels’ Top 50 Hitting Prospects list, and the second overall prospect on Baseball America’s list — behind Daisuke Matsuzaka, which is kinda cheating, seeing as the latter had already been a star for a while in Japan and was 26 years old.

In light of the hype, Gordon’s freshman campaign was a relative disappointment, although still good enough for a 2.1 WAR. In his second season, he improved his batting mark to a 109 wRC+ from the 89 wRC+ he posted in his rookie season. Even with a drop in UZR and 30 fewer PAs, he still improved his WAR to 2.4. Last year he hurt his hip early in the season, and his end-of-year numbers suffered predictably. But look here: you still have a guy with at least a league-average bat, most likely an average glove at third, and a great pedigree. He’s turning 26, which means he’s got some projection left, and CHONE likes him to post a 114 wRC+ this season with exactly league-average third-basing — good for a 2.6 WAR in only 479 PAs. Not earth-shattering, sure, but good.

Gordon does have one proverbial strike against him, in that he’s a Royal. Though I don’t know of any hard evidence to support this, there’s something to be said for organizational culture, and my sense is that — and again, I’m speculating wildly — but my sense is that some players will underperform their talent level in certain situations. Obviously, Gordon’s teammate Zack Greinke is a glaring example of the exact opposite phenomenon. But I also think of a player like Felipe Lopez, who did some interesting things in Cincinnati before moving to the uber-woeful Nationals, where he proceeded to play like Willie Bloomquist*. Then, as you probably know, Lopez was sent to St. Louis, where he once again began hitting and playing like a legitimately talented player. Ditto last year, during which he posted a career-high 4.6 WAR in stints with Arizona and Milwaukee. I’m curious as to whether the baleful effects of Kansas City’s mediocrity could affect Gordon’s ability to realize his potential so long as he’s there.

*No exaggeration here. From 2006 to 2008, Lopez had a -0.1 WAR in 1354 PAs with Washington. Over the same stretch, Bloomquist registered a 0.8 WAR in 663 Mariner PAs. You could make the argument that he was protected from certain, tougher pitchers or whatever, but still.

Other than Zack Greinke’s historic season, the 2009 Royals had little go right. Billy Butler was one non-Greinke bright spot. After a disappointing 2008, Butler raked in 2009, hitting .301/.362/.492 (.369 wOBA). He even became the everyday first baseman despite questions about his defense, beating out celebrated glove-man Mike Jacobs.

The Royals’ other “Savior,” Alex Gordon, has not quite (ahem) lived up to expectations. Hailed as “the next George Brett” upon being drafted in 2005, Gordon started at the hot corner on Opening Day 2007 and received a standing ovation. Things went downhill from there, as Gordon ended 2007 with a .317 wOBA. In 2008, he posted a merely decent .344 wOBA. Gordon got seriously injured to start 2009 , struggled upon returning, got demoted, and finally limped to a .321 wOBA (although 189 PA tells us next to nothing). The current attitude of many is understandable: Butler is The Man, and Gordon is a question mark at best.

Butler is clearly superior to Gordon as a hitter, and his minor league performances always indicated a higher offensive upside. But it is curious that so many smart people following the Royals have so readily hailed Butler’s 2009 as an awesome breakthrough while saying “meh” to Gordon’s decent 2008. Why is this curious? Because despite the glaring offensive disparity, we live in the Age of WAR. Let’s compare each player’s best season so far: Butler’s 2009 vs. Gordon’s 2008.

Butler’s 2009 value was excellent offensively at 21 runs above average. It was less impressive defensively. Despite looking better than expected, Butler posted a -6.7 UZR at first base (with a -12.6 overall positional adjustment). Butler’s overall WAR for 2009: an above-average 2.4.

Gordon’s 2008 value was more evenly distributed. +7.7 runs hitting, but only -3.0 UZR. However, the latter was accumulated while playing the much-more-valuable 3B. Altogether Gordon had a 2.6 WAR in 2008. It is obvious why many were down on Gordon’s 2008 relative to the Butler’s awesome 2009. Wait, what? Gordon was actually slightly more valuable in 2008 than Butler was in 2009?

Not really. After all, FanGraph WAR doesn’t currently include baserunning (other than SB/CS, which are included in wOBA/wRAA). Looking at the non-SB elements of baserunning using Baseball Prospectus’s EqBRR, as Erik did, we find that Butler was one of the worst baserunners in baseball in 2009 at about five runs below average, putting his WAR at about 1.9. In 2008, Gordon was about +3, which puts his WAR at about 2.9. So Gordon’s 2008 wasn’t “slightly” more valuable than Butler’s 2009, it was significantly more valuable. In fact, once baserunning is fully taken into account, Butler’s 1.9 WAR 2009 isn’t even quite as good as Gordon’s 2.1 WAR from his “disastrous” 2007.

My point is not about the relative value of Butler and Gordon going forward. Batting generally improves the most in the early 20s (whereas fielding and baserunning are relatively static), and Butler is two years younger than Gordon. There are legitimate questions about Gordon’s future given his performance and health. My intent is neither to run down Butler nor celebrate Gordon. One might respond that “Gordon’s value was primarily due to defense, position and baserunning!” But that is exactly the point — those things matter. Despite living in the Age of WAR, informed observers sometimes still focus on only one aspect of a player’s performance. And that can lead to a gap between a perception of one value disparity and the reality of the opposite.