Alex Gordon's career would be in less trouble if this really was all about service time

I'd be even more stunned if you made a comment that was good...or maybe a comment that wasn't an "irrelevent rationalization"...Go yell at people on a Chiefs blog, we don't need people like you here...
JT

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That is insightful commentary- I think your points are much more on target than the host of this blog

but then again you just say what you think and leave the office politics out of it

How can you say Gordon is possibly done with the big leagues when he's had two respectable years already? Alex Rodriguez is having a down year (for him) and even now is only batting .257 -- a solid 45 points under his career average. Is he done with Baseball?

Granted, A-Roid is a much better player than Gordon, but just because he's having a down year after rushing back from a major surgery doesn't mean his passion and potential are gone.

I think this move is purely about service time and it's convenient b/c Gordon gave them an easy excuse to send him down.

Because even if he ends up being major league average (his career OPS+ is still 95 after his nose-dive this year) we'll get a major league average player at lower cost for an additional season, and when your payroll is what a small market team can afford, you take what you can get.

Plus, why push it with Gordon when this season is lost anyway? We probably shouldn't have hurried him back after the all star break, too, since the season was lost then.

No offense, but I think you're wrong...Previous ownership and management of the Kansas City Royals traded away talent and got talent such as Alex Gordon, Chris Lubanski, and Luke Hochevar that were viewed as "busts". The new management is different. The new management has gotten the owner to spend more money on draft picks than any other team in the league. Yes, David Glass hasn't spent as much as other teams have on current payroll and the players that we've signed on that low amount of money for payroll have not been the best players. But I think the problem has been the lack of organizational depth (minor leagues) which is a direct result of signability in the draft. So, to answer your questions, neither a 10 million dollar payroll boost or a new general manager would do us better. We would need a much bigger payroll boost, but keep our current GM. I think Dayton has done well enough with the crap he's been given...
JT

we drafted all those guys -never traded for any of them- pklease do your homework before you make irrelevent rationalizations for the most incompetant team in sports today

Alright, knight in white shining armor, coming to save the day...Maybe you should read a post or two yourself. He said, "When we have talent we trade it away. When we try to get talent, the guy busts." Well, the draft is probably the biggest way to get talent that we don't already have. Did that ever occur to you?

Oh, before you go making demoralizing statements like, "pklease do your homework before you make irrelevent rationalizations for the most incompetant team in sports today" you might wanna go ahead and make yourself look a little smarter and SPELLCHECK! "Pklease"? (please). "Incompetant"? (incompetent). "Irrelevent"? (irrelevant).

Do you even know what an irrelevant rationalization is? That means that the point made has nothing to do with the previous comment. I would argue that it has everything to do with the previous comment, especially in light of what I said after that comment...Get a life...
JT

You are my life JT- you are my hero-

I think you have to give them some credit for spending the money on draft picks and minor league development to be more on par with most of the other big league teams. The jury is probably still out on the results there.

My issue is with the choices DM has made with his signings at the MLB level. I wouldn't give him any more money until he shows he can sign people that are at least MLB average. (And that our manager can manage them properly.)

I think you're missing my point. Dayton Moore can't make players come to Kansas City if the players don't wanna come here. What does he have to offer them? A "chance to rebuild a dead team"? He had the chance to sign Torii Hunter and he actively pursued it. We had the largest contract in Royals history ready for him, but Torii wanted to play for a contender. In KC, I think it has less to do with money and more to do about the team. Heck, they couldn't even get freaking Andruw Jones to come and play for the Royals. We had a nice deal for him and he declined to play for the Dodgers. Next best was Guillen...When the owner says, "Here's some money to go out and get a FA veteran", you don't wait a couple years to grab Dunn or Burrell...He needed impact bat immediately. We shouldn't fault him for that.

Was Coco Crisp a bad deal? It looked good when we were winning, but suddenly, when we start losing, we decided to blame Dayton Moore for going out and getting him...makes a ton of sense there. Jacobs was a DH type hitter with a ton of slug. We traded a reliever THAT HADN'T EVEN PLAYED MUCH THE PREVIOUS YEAR for him. We paid a guy 4.5 million when he hit 37 homers the previous year. I'd say that's a steal. He didn't turn into that hitter at Kauffman and suddenly it's Dayton's fault.

If things are going good for the team, it's definitely the players that are to blame for winning. But when players don't perform up to expectation, it suddenly becomes the GM's fault. When was the last time you praised DM for trading away a felon for Brian Bannister? What about locking up Zack Greinke? What about signing Willie Bloomquist? Let's be consistant in our critiquing the Royals. If the GM does something right, recognize it. If the coach does something right, recognize it. (Good choice in pinch hitting Jacobs for Betancourt and getting the 3-run homer 2 days ago, just to name one...)
JT

Individually any of these things can be excused. When you put one on top of another-they can't be.

1)"Dayton Moore can't make players come to Kansas City if the players don't wanna come here."--This is his job. If he can't make players want to come here, then find someone who can.
2)Just because Moore can't pay for a good player doesn't mean he should give out the richest contract in Royals history to a subpar player. Guillen was a league average hitter who couldn't run or play defense. These things things were known at the time. No one who follows baseball is surprised with how things have turned out.
3)Crisp wasn't the worst deal. I'll give you that. The decision to add him while giving up something vs. adding someone w/o giving up something is puzzling. Why not keep Ramirez and pay for Abreu, Hudson, or Dunn--all of whom were cheaper and had better track records than Crisp? Surely, you'd rather have two good players than on fairly good one.
4)The Jacobs deal is, was, and has been from the very start, ridiculous. First off, he didn't hit 37 HR. Why pay $4.5 MM (only 500K less than Abreu got) for a player who is far inferior to Butler at defense and has been a league average hitter in an inferior league? We could have played Kila for a league min salary and spent that money elsewehere.

These are all terrible decisions and were known to be terrible at the time. You seem to be stuck in the mindframe of "Player A" is the best available (such as Guillen) or "Player B" is a little better than "Player C" so we won the trade (as in the Crisp and Jacobs deals). I'll be the first to admit I thought these deals were both good when they were first announced--for a couple of days. Then reality set in. What I ignored, and what you are ignoring is the concept of opportunity costs. This is a basic economic concept that you should have had drilled through your head at all levels of schooling. Instead of thinking "hey, Jacobs is better than Nunez" you should be thinking "hey, we could have Nunez, Kila, and Abreu" for roughly the same price.

Thinking of these decisions without weighing all of the costs and benefits is careless. That is why Moore has struggled. Clearly, there were better moves to be made at the time. Go read any comments by unbiased baseball analysts at the time of these deals. They were panned by everyone. When you make bad decisions, you end up with a bad team. When you support bad decisions like you are, then you are encouraging failing behavior.

Finally, a well thought out argument...Thank you for that...

1. Let's think through this one...Dayton Moore can polish the turd, change the color and make it look real good, but it's still a turd. This franchise for the last 15-20 years has been the turd. This is where over-paid veteran free agents come to get their last paycheck. (Juan Gonzalez, Reggie Sanders, Jose Guillen...) I'm not saying that Dayton Moore can't make it look enticing, I'm saying that DM doesn't have much to allure FA's with. It's his job, I completely understand that, but it's not an easy job, especially when your employed by the Kansas City Royals.

2. Yep, Guillen isn't who we needed him to be and he's everything that every other team thought he would be. Probably not DM's best move. However, in defense of DM, who else was there that year? As mentioned before, Torii Hunter was offered a HUGE contract and turned it down for a slightly bigger one in LA. Andruw Jones was given one as well, but turned it down for the NL side of LA...We needed that bat immediately and Jose Guillen was the best out there. Lots of baggage, bad attitude, but the dude hit the ball. 20HR/99RBI...it was better than Teahen in RF.

3. I agree with you...it would have been better to pick up one of those 3 guys than trade for Coco & Jacobs.

4. My error on the HR's. It was 32. Still a lot more than anyone else we had...And I also agree, KK would have been a better call up, but maybe DM thought he needed another year in the minors? Jacobs wasn't my favorite trade, but I can see the reasoning behind it.

As for the last point, I get the economic reasoning, but we don't know everything that happened in the front office. I know it's a lame excuse, but Dayton Moore seems to be a pretty smart guy. I'm gonna go ahead and say that he probably knows things about certain players that we can't have information on. Maybe the things he's done have been because of that, or maybe he's just a bad GM. I don't know, but until he's gone I'm gonna support him.
JT

Koro,
I think you hit the nail on the head. Everytime I see the excuse (and this is not to single anyone out) that "we can't get players to come to KC" or "we can't get other teams to take our players in a trade" or that "this organization doesn't have the money to get good big league players" it drives me nuts. That's what Moore's job is. To FIND those players and teams and to make deals. But most importantly, it's to follow a philosophy and stick to it. I also understood the Crisp deal and thought it was a decent move. Not great or season changing, but decent. I never really understood the Jacobs trade but gave the benefit of the doubt because as JT mentions, Nunez just didn't play much and didn't appear to be someone that was worth holding onto. However, the money could have been spent better on the players you mentioned. Now some would say, that those players wouldn't come here, but that's a cop out. I think MOST players will go to whomever gives them the best deal. Moore's challenge in getting said players to come here is two fold. First, he has to sell his approach to rebuilding this team to the player to let them know that this organization is interested in putting winning first. And he has to get Glass to understand that he'll have to pay more than other teams to off-set the lack of competitive baseball in the near future.

I agree that we as fans and collectively as a ML baseball city, need to expect success. All too often we make excuses like 'small-market' and 'cheap owner'. The first step in achieving success is expecting it. I think Moore has the right philosophy in rebuilding the minors, but that's academic and certainly not some revelation that gets him off the hook for poor moves. On the other hand Moore has had some bad luck as well this year. What Moore CANNOT do is contradict himself by claiming he wants guys with good OBP (like he did last winter) and then get a guy like Mike Jacobs. Jacobs was a guy coming from the inferior NL where any novice knows that most likely his numbers were going to fall off in the American League and then expect that his 'power numbers' would offset his lack of BA or OBP. This is one area where Dayton needs to be criticized.

I'm not ready to give up on Dayton yet, but moves like Jacobs & Betancourt are not helping his credibility.

I agree with everything but the statement of, "I think MOST players will go to whomever gives them the best deal." I don't think that every player will go to a team just because the money is ample. I think every FA wants the money, but also wants to play for a winning team. I really don't think that Jose Guillen wanted to come here. But, we over-paid, he came and we lost a big bet...Anyway, I think winning has a lot more to do with it than we think. Hunter and Abreu went to a winning organization in LA (Angels). Andruw Jones and Orlando Hudson went to the other winning organization in LA (Dodgers). Dunn, like Guillen, chose the money in Washington.

A GM has to be good at selling his team to FA's. But, if he has nothing to sell, how can we expect the FA's to buy in to what we're doing?
JT

PS - When we expect success and success is not given, what do we do? Do we stop going to games? Do we stop watching on TV? I don't think expecting success is going to do anything for us as fans except put us in a bad mood when we don't achieve it.

First off, I used the qualifier "MOST" and capitalized it because of the point you make regarding players coming here. I'm aware that not "every" player will put money ahead of the opportunity to win.

Second, I will use 2 examples of fan bases that expect to win. One, Boston, has tons of money and therefore I will concede that there are other factors that go into how their management handles itself. The other is St. Louis, who is much more similar to KC. However, both have rabid fan bases that not only would scream bloody murder over the things we regularly debate (ownership & FA vs Minors)but they're vested in the baseball team to the point that ownership would never allow things to get to our level in the first place. Their fans EXPECT to succeed and DEMAND it. Ownership reciprocates because, among other reasons, they know that they would be skewered by a press & fan base that would not tolerate the kind of management we've endured here in KC. Now I know that the Royals 40 year history pales in comparision to these 2 'foundation' baseball franchises, but the fact remains that their ownership respects their fan bases (and their expectations) enough to make sure they are always putting winning first.

Our fan base can and has caused change. See Chiefs' regime change last December. I grant that changing the owner is much more difficult but the fan base can still affect change if it is united and committed. We've got to stop letting ownership poor-mouth itself for lack of success. This starts with the KC media digging deep to expose the financial situation of Glass & this team and running scathing articles in the Star to put the heat on him. The MEDIA, who represent us the fans, needs to do its job.

Alright...Got it now. I wasn't quite thinking of it like that, thanks...
JT