Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 14: This is Gonna Be Ugly

Episode Date: August 6, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss the Royals, and then they discuss the Royals some more.

Hey. Hello. This could be ugly. Okay. Good morning. This is Effectively Wild, the daily podcast for Baseball Perspectives for Monday, August 6th. We're glad you're joining us on the $100 microphone overlooking the Hudson River. We have my esteemed editor-in-chief, Ben Lindberg. Which sounds exactly the same as the $30 microphone. But it sounds a lot better than my $4 microphone. And under the faint glow of a fluorescent light that keeps my compost worms from escaping, I'm Sam Miller in Long Beach, California. Ben, how are you doing? Doing pretty well.

We got through the weekend. I hope everyone who begged us to do a weekend show got through the weekend, even though we didn't do a weekend show and probably never will. That guy was persistent. Yeah, well, he likes the show. I appreciate that he likes the show, but we don't have a lot to say under the best of circumstances, so pushing it to seven days a week would be pushing it. Well, you've had two full days to think of a topic to discuss tonight. Do you have one?

I do. I'd like to talk about the Royals. Oh, man. I would like to talk about the Royals. Oh, man. I would like to talk about the Royals. Right. This is trouble because I have exactly five minutes that I can fill on the Royals. So I was hoping that your five minutes on, like, I don't know, Brad Penny or something. Hopefully we'll have different aspects of the Royals to discuss. You want to start? Okay. Well, I had a couple approaches I was going to take and I ruled a couple of them out, but maybe I'll have to bring them back now. So the Royals beat the Rangers

today, 7-6. Jeff Francor hit a home run, which weird um because jeff francois is having the worst season of jeff francois career which is really saying something jeff francois was traded for by the rangers two years ago uh for their world series push which is also really weird uh and the royals initially caught my eye today because they designated unit uniesky betancourt for assignment for the crime of being Uniesky Betancourt, pretty much. I wonder if Uniesky Betancourt got really excited that he had an assignment. Well, he was going to be my topic until I figured it would just be too predictable

for someone from a baseball prospectus to say snarky things about Uniesky Betancourt. Although it is amusing that his career true average essentially matches his 2012 true average. So it's hard to say what the Royals were expecting exactly other than what they got, which clearly wasn't good enough to stay on the Royals. But just in a more general sense, the Royals are now 45-62. That is a 421 winning percentage. It is the worst winning percentage in the American League by quite a wide margin.

And I guess I kind of wanted to talk about the state of their youth movement and whether it's going as well as you would have expected two years ago when everyone was saying that the Royals had the best minor league system they'd ever seen or that they'd seen in decades? And he said worse, although he said worse but not as disastrous as miserable Royals fans make it out to be. And I left a couple of curse words out of that sentence because I'm too lazy to go back and make this out to be. And I left a couple of curse words out of that sentence because I'm

too lazy to go back and make this podcast explicit again. So I just kind of wanted to see how you felt about, I mean, for a while there, the refrain was that they would be contenders in 2013, that that would be the year when the youth movement kind of came together and the young guys had a little bit of experience under their belts and were all up and maybe would be playing well enough that the Royals would be contending in what is usually a fairly winnable division. So do you still see any chance of that happening? Will it happen in 2014? Will it never happen? What do you

think? Well, this is almost exactly how I was going to introduce my topic. So I was actually hoping to say all those words in introduction and then throw it open to you. But no, I think that first off, congratulations on not simply stealing what Kevin Goldstein told you for your own. That's a pretty big thing you just did. You know, you could maybe I'm sure there are people who could make the case that the Royals have have failed in there in a way, because four not quite good enough years, or whether they're actually close enough that they should be thinking about buying for 2014, and whether we've seen enough that they actually are close enough to make a legitimate push in a division that still isn't that strong around them. And that probably will get weaker with the Tigers having kind of put a lot of resources into this year at the expense of future years.

So I do think that there are a lot of reasons for the Royals to feel hopeful. There are a lot of reasons for the Royals to feel hopeful, and I'm sure that they're just delighted to hear me say that. I'm sure the Royals are waiting to find out what I think about their hopefulness. But it does seem like even though they promoted a lot of talent last year and that knocked their minor league system a little bit down from where it had been in in 2011 for good reasons but nonetheless they have really kind of rejuvenated it in the last year they once again have a lot of high upside talent in the minor league system a high upside and yet not totally far away from helping so in a lot of ways they're in a similar situation they were in two years ago. And, you know, Hosmer has been a tremendous disappointment this year, but he wasn't last year.

And so you basically have seen half of a very good start to his career, and he's still in his age 22 season. And Moustakas has been good this year and wasn't last year. He started out great. He's been pretty bad for the last couple months. Overall, it looks like a significant improvement from last season, though. Yes. Do you still think that – I mean, I guess any time a guy comes up

and has a couple years in the majors, it tells us a lot of information about him. Do you think that the shine is off those two or are they both future superstars? I mean, I guess that's a tough question to answer, but it's a relevant one. Yeah, it's tough because, I mean, for guys like you and I, to a large degree, go on what the prospect people tell us until we actually see the players play. Um, I mean, we look at the numbers and obviously those guys had very impressive numbers. Um, but I mean, to a degree we're relying on what other people who, who can maybe glean more from seeing a player in person or who at least saw those players more than we did in person tell us about their long-term potential um and and so those were certainly both

guys that prospect people and and stat people were in complete agreement about uh especially hasmer who it seemed like almost everyone was in agreement that he would come up and was more than ready and had nothing left to prove at any minor league level and would hit immediately, which he more or less did last season. Sort of. Right. I mean, he didn't dominate or anything. Yeah, and he wasn't really good initially. He had a tremendous second half,

so there was an adjustment that he had to make as well. So I don't know. I don't think I would, in his case, given the scouting reports and everything, I wouldn't bump down his ceiling too much, I don't think. Although, I mean, I don't know. Obviously, you can point to Hall of Famers who struggled for a while when they came up and Hall of Famers who immediately hit like Hall of Famers. So it's hard to say which one he is. But I guess just looking at all the very hyped people from two years ago,

it's hard to pick out any of them who has really exceeded expectations, maybe, in that he's struggling. Moustakas struggled last year and hasn't been great this year, especially lately. And I guess Will Myers is still a very, very highly regarded prospect. And then just, I mean, of course, there are injuries. John Lamb had Tommy John and is not pitching this year. And Mike Montgomery is not pitching so well. Duffy. yes, right. So I guess, and that was always a risk. Everyone knew, even though they did have this incredibly impressive farm system on paper, that there was some possibility that it wouldn't really pan out. And I think it's far, far too early to say anything like that.

But at the same time, it hasn't gone smoothly, certainly. Well, let's talk about the Nationals as a comparison. I mean, in a lot of ways, the Nationals were in a similar situation. They hadn't had much success recently. were in a similar situation. They hadn't had much success recently. They had a ton of high upside talent coming through their system as well as returning from injury in Strasburg. And they put their full faith in that, and they leaped.

They closed their eyes and they leaped. They signed worth, as we talked about a couple days ago. They traded a boatload to get geo gonzalez into their rotation and um they it seems as though they have hit um they they have the uh you know one of the two or three best certainly teams in the national league and um it worked out perfectly so the royals now are kind of in a similar situation um are would it would it be prudent for them to go into this offseason uh ready to add the two or perhaps three pieces that they think that they need to become a contender um immediately

or is this a team that should be patient and wait and sort of just to think, well, maybe 2013 won't be our window either, but maybe 2014 is. Gordon and Butler are both signed through 2015. Of course, they've got a whole bunch of pre-arb guys, and I guess that's the decision. So what do you think? I don't think there's a great urgency. I don't think it has to be 2013 or never. So no, I would say if the right opportunity came along, yes, but that they don't necessarily have to make a push this offseason as opposed to the offseason after.

the offseason after. But it's, I mean, the narrative around the Royals has always been, even when they had that incredible farm system, has always been people were worried that Dayton Moore would not be able to make those complementary moves that would elevate the team from a bunch of young, talented, promising guys to a winning team because it's very difficult to build a winning team entirely from your farm system. So there was always some sense that the Royals would have to supplement with some veteran pieces from elsewhere.

And that really hasn't been the strength of, of Dayton Moore's regime. I mean, it hasn't, but yeah, but on the other hand, I mean, to, to some degree,

that's the easiest part, right? I mean, it's, it, there's not the, the difference. I think that the team's probably very,

a great deal in how they rate prospects and draft picks and, and, and in how they develop rate prospects and draft picks and in how they develop those prospects and draft picks. I imagine that there's not a huge deal of difference between how Dayton Moore views Zach Granke or Brandon McCarthy or some other free agent this year and how you and I do. I mean, it's hard to make those deals come together. But I mean, I don't think Dayton Moore is too incompetent to identify a good free agent. I don't know. I'm always hesitant to say that any general manager is incompetent because they are all extremely competent in many ways. But he does have a very

short track record of successful major league moves, I would say, or at least moves that exceeded expectations or moves where he really got a lot of surplus value. And I mean, maybe that would be different when he's not in charge of a losing team, where it almost doesn't matter so much what you do at the major league level or where the emphasis is on the scouting which he seems to have excelled at um but still it's just it's hard to point to any moves that he's made that have just worked out really really well i remember once uh randy jazierly made the point that like the highlight of Dayton Moore's major league,

uh, general managership was like the Alberto Ciaspo move or something, which was a fairly minor move that he, um, and probably that's probably been replaced by the milky Cabrera move who he promptly swapped for Jonathan Sanchez. Right. So I don't know.

I, I don't think you can say that he's incapable of making that sort of move, but I think it's a concern. I mean, it seems like he, at least with, I mean, to double dip on uni is just, you know, like once i can get i can understand twice yeah yeah well i don't i don't i think that there's a i mean we're gonna go way too long if we get into uni but i mean i think that there's perhaps a role that uni can play on a team but the problem was that he ended up playing a lot more than i expected him to i mean he's not the worst guy to have on the bench in my opinion the other thing is that second base and short are just so hard to upgrade right now. And it's not

going to be easy this offseason at all. There's virtually nobody of value out there. And that's where they really seem to need help. And that's not where they're going to find it in the short term. And really, looking at their system, it doesn't look like in the long term. So I think that's going to be a difficult challenge for Moore, and perhaps the move that defines him as a general manager. So let's wrap this up. Ben, it was great talking to you about the Royals. And tomorrow, let's come with different topics. Two different topics, yes.

Or we could always just talk about how many innings Steven Strasburg has left now because he started today. Can we talk about whether the conversion of Neftali Feliz? Yes, we'll talk about how his rehab is going as we find out. All right, so with Effectively Wild, the daily podcast on baseball perspectives, we are thrilled you tuned in and we'll talk to you tomorrow.