I turn my back for one minute...
I get burned out on baseball every once in a while, believe it or not. It's only natural. Wednesday, I spent 14 hours sitting at my computer - on my day off, no less - reading about baseball, doing various types of analysis, watching games (pro and college), following along with MLB's gamecast, writing about baseball. Ugh, you name it. I did a few things yesterday morning and with the Royals playing a dreary Thursday afternoon home game, afterwards, I figured, I'm going to shut it down for the night. I didn't want to spend another day off fixated on baseball.
So I turned off my cell phone, shut down the computer and headed out into the real world. Amy and I had a nice evening, enjoying some Kung Pao scallops on the Plaza and then walking over to watch "Julius Cesear" in Southmoreland Park, under the stars and with a nice bottle of pinot noir from Oregon. When we got home, I didn't even feel like checking scores. Instead I popped "Fog of War" into the DVD player and was mesmorized by Robert McNamara's recollections until I fell asleep. No idea what had happened in baseball, a happenstance which almost never occurs.
Hunter, my dog, trotted in to wake me up about 6:30 AM, a little early for him. Ordinarily, I would have let him into the backyard and then gone back to bed but, for some reason, I decided to accompany him outside and walk around to the front of the house to grab the paper. Why? Because it occured to me that I had no idea who had won the Cardinals-Cubs game. I had no idea how my fantasy team had done. So it was on the sidewalk, in front of my house in midtown, that I unrolled the paper and was greeted by this headline in Sports Daily: ADIOS, CARLOS.
What a strange feeling. I was so jolted that I stayed up despite getting just four hours of sleep. I usually hear all the Royals news before it hits the wires because, of coure, I work at the paper. In this instance, on the biggest Royals story of the year, I was just about the last one to find out. In a sense, however, it was pretty cool to find out that way, in the morning paper.
I've already broken down the trade for my ESPN correspondence. You can hop over there if you're interested. Suffice to say, I'm pleased with what Baird did. I'm concerned about Buck's plate discipline, Teahen's power and Wood's velocity but, all in all, it's a pretty good haul. I was still holding out hope for a Mathis-McPherson package from Anaheim but, realistically, I knew that probably wouldn't happen.
Tonight, I'll get my first glimpse of the new-look Royals in person. Brian is rolling into town and he and Amanda and will be joining Amy and myself for a night at the ballpark. Zack Greinke is hooking up with Matt Morris of the Redbirds. This will be my first time seeing Greinke live and I look forward to that.
Joe Posnanski sounded a somber note in his Beltran trade column, even while noting that it was probably a good deal. I don't disagree with him, necessarily, but I don't feel the same way. I don't look at the general fan reaction as jaded. I look at it as pragmatic. I've grown fond of the modern structure of baseball. Yes, I do think there should be an even distribution of revenue. I am a proponent of a salary floor though, with equally shared revenue, I don't really think a salary cap is necessary. To me, it's fun.
I also think that it IS possible to have a player who spends his entire career with a team, even a small market team, and become the face of the franchise. Everyone wants to point to George Brett around here. He was my favorite player when I was younger as well. Would George Brett have stayed around his whole career in today's climate? It's less likely but not impossible.
George Brett is an unusual case. I wanted to go to the ballpark just to watch him play. I think Zack Greinke has that quality as well. Beltran was a great player for K.C. but I don't think he was that kind of guy. I really don't. I'm not sure why that is and I don't really feel like trying to postulate some sort of half-baked theory. I may be wrong. But as much as I liked Beltran as a player, I really don't mourn his departure.
To have that sort of long-term, one-team player (Brett, Yount, Ripken, etc.), you have to wrap them up early. And you have to get lucky. He has to want to stay (Beltran didn't), you have to invest in the right guy (Sweeney, unfortunately, was not) and that guy has to stay productive long enough to justify your investment. And it need only be one guy, if your aim is to have one player as your franchise's identity. I mean, the old Royals had many very good players who stuck around for a long, long time, like Frank White. But it will always be Brett that you think of when you remember those teams. The rest of the players around Brett could have turned over completely every few years and it wouldn't have that much of a impact on our perceptions, as long as Brett was the top dog and the team was winning.
All this aside, the Royals might have been able to lock up Beltran and attempt to keep him a Royal forever. In 2001, when they inked Sweeney to an $11 million per year contract with some very strong no-trade clauses, they were, in effect, choosing Sweeney over Beltran. If they had not made that deal, Sweeney would be long gone. But they might have been able to offer Beltran, say, a six-year deal for $100 million. That probably would have gotten the job done and would have locked up Beltran till he was 30. Then you have to do it again with another four-year deal. With the right guy, who doesn't want to move around, it can happen. And that's fine. Personality-wise, Sweeney was probably a better bet to be the George Brett of this generation's Royals. Performance-wise? Eh, not so much.
Links: Well, I went through a lapse in posting in this space, but I was keeping busy.
In this Stat Guy, now woefully irrelevant, I created something of a shitstorm when I used projected EqA to compile a list of ten desirable names for the Royals to acquire for Beltan. If you ever want to provoke a reaction, just make a list. That was a lesson I learned in that exercise. One thing I do regret is that I simply let the stat create the list. In hindsight, this was a mistake. See, the list wasn't my list of the ten best prospects the Royals could have gotten for Beltran. It was simply the top ten in this one category that told only a partial story at best. I though I t was simply being objective but I would have used objective criteria to construct my own list anyway, just not that specific of a category. But at least then, I could have defended the list a little bit better.
Something else I learned from that column: the name Jeremy Brown sends people running and screaming as if they just heard the stock market collapsed. Hey, I'm not sold on Brown as a prospect either but, after this, I hope he makes it big.
Oh yes - the final lesson from the Beltran fodder column: don't trust your memory when going over the facts. I spend so much time on the Royals that it is easy for me to forget what is happening with the 29 other teams. I'm trying to address this shortcoming (ie, the organizational analysis exercise that I began with the Brewers entry below). But, in this column, after using preseason prospect handbooks to compile my list, I completely forgot that Franklin Gutierrez (who wouldn't have even been on my list if only I would have used my prospects) was the primary prospect in the Milton Bradley deal. Thus, I listed him with the Dodger. Believe me - I heard about it. At least I found out that there are a lot of knowledgeable baseball fans who read my work.
By far, I got more response from the Beltran article than anything I've ever published. I even did a twenty-minute stint with Brian McRae and Billy Sample on MLB.com radio, which was a lot of fun. Check it out and let me know what you think. The interview veered off into revenue sharing and general baseball economics so it was cool.
Last week, I decided to take more of a quiet approach. I'd been wanting to do a piece based on my fondness for looking at similarity scores, so I wrote about this in the latest Stat Guy. Yes, it is a little early for similarity scores on Greinke and I think I made it clear that, at this point, we don't have enough to go on. But it is fun to have some archetypes in mind and then watch how he develops. I wrote a little long (18 inches just isn't that much). Here is a passage which was left on the cutting room floor:
In the introduction to PECOTA in the 2003 Baseball Prospectus, there is an excerpt from Stephen Jay Gould that serves us well in considering a special talent like Greinke: “…variation itself is nature’s only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency.” Statheads, myself among them, will impatiently try to pigeonhole into Greinke one sort of career path or another. However, you only have to see Greinke pitch once to know that he has an elusive quality. If it’s not quite immeasurable, this quality certainly is something that we don’t quite know what to make of just yet.
The other thing I was able to do with this piece was to express my excitement for The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers. Because I do love to watch similarity scores and identify comparables for up-and-comers, the idea that you can take a scouting report on a contemporary player and compare it to the reports of a past player who matches up statistically is really cool. I didn't get as much of a response, but I did get a Baseball Think Factory link.
The Northern League beat: In this notebook, I noted the general streakiness of Northern League teams in the early going and awarded my player of the week award to former Royal Jermaine Allensworth who, way back when, was drafted ahead of Scott Rolen, among others. In the following notebook I wrote that SW Missouri State product Brad Zeigler was snatched up by the Oakland Athletics. Zeigler had a 26:1 K:BB ratio at the time of his promotion. Finally, I made it out to a T-Bones game last week and covered a rather uninspired 9-2 loss to Winnipeg. Thursday afternoon home games is just not the time to watch a Kansas City baseball team.
Whither Dee Brown?:
Just what are the Royals doing with poor Dee Brown? Here is Brown's game log since being recalled from Class AA Wichita:
Date Opp. AB R H RBI
Jun 16 @ ATL 1 0 0 0
Jun 17 @ ATL 5 0 2 2
Jun 18 @ PHI 1 0 0 0
Jun 19 @ PHI did not play
Jun 20 @ PHI 1 0 0 0
Jun 22 DET did not play
Jun 23 DET 4 0 2 2
Jun 24 DET 0 0 0 0
Total 12 0 4 4
I just don't understand it. What is the purpose of playing Desi Relaford (193/265/293) in left field? If you're not going to play Brown, why bring him up? The organization has always dicked around Dee Brown and I can't understand why. By all accounts, he is one of the most polite, congenial players you'll find in any locker room. He was a top-ten draft pick and after all these years of being the Royals' yo-yo, he is still only 26 years old. Why won't they give him an extended, unfettered shot? What better use could be made with the remainder of this season? Even if you still think you can win this year, how does playing Relaford in left help you to accomplish this? I don't get it.