Posnanski: ....snaps

[tk13]

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...s/14504364.htm

At the end of their ropes
Even the eternally hopeful have a breaking point
JOE POSNANSKI
Kansas City Star

You never know what will make you snap. After all these years of horrendous Royals baseball, I never expected a nice Australian kid named Justin Huber to break me. But so it goes. Consider me broken. This is me snapping. The Royals are an embarrassment. A mess. A disaster. It’s time to blow up the whole thing and start new.

Of course, Huber is just the final straw. It is 10 full years of ghastly baseball that leads to this rant. Ten years, we’ve watched the Royals try out softball pitchers, get hit in the back with relay throws, fall off bases on pickoff attempts, jog toward dugouts while fly balls drop behind them, slash payroll, send out incorrect lineup cards, injure themselves in home-plate celebrations and sacrifice innocent young pitchers at Yankee Stadium.

All of that will get to you after a while.

Through it all, I’ve tried to hold out hope. Hey, it’s baseball. Ya gotta hope. Look at the Cincinnati Reds this year. Look at Detroit. In baseball, there should always be hope.

Then this Royals team came along. And you know what? There is no hope. They broke me. I am finishing a book these days, and so my mornings and afternoons have been spent in a writing fog. My evenings, though, have been reserved for the Royals. I have, for the first time as an adult, been able to watch baseball entirely as a fan, and usually with my oldest daughter on my lap. Elizabeth is 4 now, and she does not care at all about baseball, but she likes eating popsicles where she can make the biggest mess. To humor me, she will occasionally look at the Royals game, notice something similar to baseball happening, and ask, “Daddy, when will the commercials come back on?”

I appreciate the question. This Royals season has been awful. Every game has been torture. The commercial that shows termites attacking wood has been more inspiring.

Sure, it’s true the Royals have been awful almost every minute since the strike of 1994. But this team is a different kind of awful. This is the dreariest collection I can remember for any team in my lifetime. It isn’t just that the Royals can’t hit or field or slug or pitch or run or walk or throw or stay healthy — and that covers just about everything.

No, there’s something else. It is that as you look around the field, you see nothing but despair, nothing but castoffs who signed here for a chance or a few extra bucks, nothing but young players who go out and stubbornly prove every day they are not major league.

How did it get this bad? There’s plenty of blame to go around, from an owner who won’t spend money to a management group that never figured out how to win games to talent evaluators who recommended Eli Marrero and Albie Lopez, to aging veterans just cashing paychecks, to amateur scouts who championed Colt Griffin and Roscoe Crosby, to strength and conditioning people who can’t keep anybody healthy, to coaches who have not developed a single high-quality major-league starter or everyday player.

This team has been a crushing and colossal failure.

And we’ve hit the low point now. The Royals aren’t just bad, they’re old. Hitters two through six average 35 years of age. That’s pure hopelessness.

The Royals aren’t just bad, they’re funny. Last week, Esteban German — for reasons readily apparent to no one — was playing center field. He either forgot his sunglasses in the dugout or purposely left them there. Whatever, a fly ball smacked him in the face. I’m told German did wear his designer shades on the plane out of town that night.

The Royals aren’t just bad, they’re infuriating. John Buck — a key element in the Carlos Beltran trade — actually had a passed ball on a pitchout the other day. First time I’ve seen that one. And it reminds you that the Beltran trade, looking back, was the death knell for this organization. The Royals had one great player to trade, one of the best players in the game, and in exchange they got Buck, Mark Teahen and Mike Wood. A baseball executive e-mailed me that day to say the trade was a fiasco, a breathtakingly dumb move by general manager Allard Baird. I held out hope that the executive was wrong.

He wasn’t wrong. To this point, Buck and Teahen — the two key elements to the deal — are hitting a combined .190 with three times more errors than home runs.

Once the Royals failed to cash in on Beltran, the dominoes tumbled. They hired Buddy Bell, who had one of the worst managerial records in baseball history. They lost Zack Greinke, their best pitching prospect in a decade, to a personal issue that nobody, not even Greinke himself, seems to understand. They acquired a bunch of old pitchers. Before the Beltran trade, they signed Angel Berroa to a long-term deal, a move that at the time seemed like a decent gamble and now seems to have them stuck with a shortstop who has a knack for making disastrous errors and an addiction to pitches in the dirt.

It’s so dark now, you can’t even see bright spots.

That brings us back to Justin Huber. If you don’t know, Huber is a pretty solid Royals prospect. He should be the team’s first baseman of the future. He led the Texas League in hitting last season, he was hitting quite well in Omaha this season. The Royals wisely intended to keep him in Class AAA most of the season, maybe all season, so he could get experience playing first base and develop his power.

This week, the Royals called up Huber. Why? They concede he will not play first base — he’s not ready, and the Royals paid quite a bit of money to Doug Mientkiewicz to play there, and if you can believe it, Mientkiewicz leads the starters with a .322 on-base percentage (league average on-base percentage: .335).

The Royals also concede he will not be the regular designated hitter, not with 38-year-old Matt Stairs on the team.

So, they brought up Justin Huber, their first baseman of the future, to (drum roll, please) sit on the bench. I assume they could not think of any other way to slow his development. Maybe next week they will start whacking his toes with baseball bats.

I realize, of course, that we are talking about the Royals. This is the team that traded Jermaine Dye for Neifi Perez. This is the team that canceled the team banquet because it was too expensive. This is the team that has decided to give out T-shirts of its best players every Tuesday and has already run out of players, so next Tuesday they’re giving out T-shirts with condiments on them. This is the team that on Thursday tried to get out of its hitting doldrums by skipping batting practice. Next, they might stop wearing batting helmets.

So in the grand scheme of Royals catastrophes, this Huber move hardly ranks up there.

But you never know what it is that will make you snap. The Royals have utterly lost their way. There’s panic in the streets. They’re messing up prospects now. They’re skipping batting practice. It’s only a matter of time before they rush prize prospects Alex Gordon and Billy Butler, along with any other Royals hitter who gets two hits in a row. They’re going goofy.

And it’s clear that everything has to change. Everything. The leadership. The mind-set. The core players. Everything. The worst thing David Glass can do is let this thing linger, make Allard Baird a lame duck, let this organization drift for a minute longer. It’s bad for the club, and, frankly, it’s unfair to Baird, too. You can’t run a team like this. If you’re going to fire him — and you are — do it quick and do it now.

It’s time right now to find a GM who has been around winning. It’s time to pour money into scouting and development and the draft. It’s time to focus entirely on 2007 — this season is flat over. The only thing that matters now is getting some value for those veterans, making the right pick at No. 1 in the amateur draft, giving promising pitchers such as Jeremy Affeldt and Denny Bautista their innings and not squandering those good young hitters Baird and company were able to find.

The Royals finally won on the road Thursday, which was nice. But the Royals need to start on the long road back today.

[banyon]

Here's some other Baird nuggets:

1) traded away Johnny Damon and Mark Ellis to A's for Blake Stein and Roberto Hernandez (who I nickname the "firestarter")

2) did not trade away Jimmy Gobble for Austin Kearns when the deal was offered

3) did not trade Andres Blanco (a Rey Sanchez all-glove, no-bat SS) for Joey Gathright in Tampa. (this trade is not quite as damning because Gathright has not proven he has a big-league bat, but his speed and fielding in CF are otherworldly. An OF with him and Dejesus would be fantastic for range).

On no other franchise would he still be making important decisions.

[Eleazar]

Originally Posted by DaneMcCloud

That's why my "sources" tell me that there will definitely be a Salary Floor in the next CBA. It's not fair to the Red Sox, Yankees, Mets and all the other teams to pay huge Luxury Tax that fund the Royals when the Royals turn around and have a 30 Million dolllar payroll and 20 million in profit. As I've said before, the rest of MLB is tired of subsidizing the Royal.

I predict that Glass will sell the team after the next CBA is ratified.

Right. And what "sources" are these?

Sources that contend that big and medium market owners are going to vote in favor of more competition on the free agent market?

Small market owners that are going to vote in favor of requiring expenses to outstrip revenue?

[Eleazar]

Originally Posted by banyon

Here's some other Baird nuggets:

1) traded away Johnny Damon and Mark Ellis to A's for Blake Stein and Roberto Hernandez (who I nickname the "firestarter")

If you're going to leave out the facts that the deal was for Berroa then you can discuss it. Bottom line is that he got a pitcher and a highly regarded prospect at the most premium position in baseball for a guy that wasn't going to resign here at any price. You can call that a failure if you want to. I wouldn't be surprised if you did.

2) did not trade away Jimmy Gobble for Austin Kearns when the deal was offered

Source.

3) did not trade Andres Blanco (a Rey Sanchez all-glove, no-bat SS) for Joey Gathright in Tampa. (this trade is not quite as damning because Gathright has not proven he has a big-league bat, but his speed and fielding in CF are otherworldly. An OF with him and Dejesus would be fantastic for range).

Source.

If you haven't noticed, Gathright is a career .250 hitter at best. He's not even good enough to keep himself on the D-Rays roster most of the year.

Considering the Royals will score fewer runs than some individual players this year, Do we need any more .250 avg / .300 OBP hitters?

That kind of decision-making is why the team is the mess that it is.

[banyon]

Originally Posted by Cochise

If you're going to leave out the facts that the deal was for Berroa then you can discuss it. Bottom line is that he got a pitcher and a highly regarded prospect at the most premium position in baseball for a guy that wasn't going to resign here at any price. You can call that a failure if you want to. I wouldn't be surprised if you did.

You are correct, that was a brain seizure on my part. Berroa is not helping that deal look better though.

Originally Posted by Cochise

Source.

Originally Posted by Cochise

Source.

These deals are both according to Soren Petro on 810 in his conversations with Allard Baird who is a regular guest on the show.

Originally Posted by Cochise

If you haven't noticed, Gathright is a career .250 hitter at best. He's not even good enough to keep himself on the D-Rays roster most of the year.

First, the DRays are loaded with OF talent, so there's no shame in that. It's a lot like the crowded OF's in Cincy and Texas which is why we targeted those teams too (Mench in Texas has long been a coveted hitter by Baird, but it may be too late to snatch him up). Second, he's fairly young to think that we will never hit. He hasn't even had a full season in the majors yet. His end value could be a Juan Pierre-esque success or Tom Goodwin-esque pinch running duties.

Originally Posted by Cochise

Considering the Royals will score fewer runs than some individual players this year, Do we need any more .250 avg / .300 OBP hitters?

I concur that with the K's dimensions, the Royals should get speed and defense which are relatively inexpensive as opposed to low avg. guys. I think Gathright's avg would be even lower if he played in the K as home park.

Originally Posted by Cochise

That kind of decision-making is why the team is the mess that it is.

Well we completely agree on the last part. I thought you had me on iggy? I don't know why, I don't have anything against ya. Oh well, good to talk Royals with you even if they are the worst team in major league history.

[Thig Lyfe]

Originally Posted by bkkcoh

Don't you mean Wal-Mart!!!

Are you kidding? That would totally ruin David Glass's profit margin!

[FringeNC]

Originally Posted by DaneMcCloud

That's why my "sources" tell me that there will definitely be a Salary Floor in the next CBA. It's not fair to the Red Sox, Yankees, Mets and all the other teams to pay huge Luxury Tax that fund the Royals when the Royals turn around and have a 30 Million dolllar payroll and 20 million in profit. As I've said before, the rest of MLB is tired of subsidizing the Royal.

I predict that Glass will sell the team after the next CBA is ratified.

A salary-floor would be a disaster. Look at Florida. The Marlins understand if you aren't going to compete for a few years, cut all the high-priced guys, and save the money for a run when there is an uptick in the talent cycle. Florida won the WS not too longer after gutting their whole team, and they just did it again.

How are you suppose to rebuild without getting rid of all your veterans?

If there is to be any salary floor, it can't be on a yearly basis, but on a ten-year period or something like that.

[sedated]

Originally Posted by bkkcoh

Don't you mean Wal-Mart!!!

why would the owner of a store trade for coupons to his own store? seems like if he wanted a discount, he would have no problem getting one.

of course, it is Allard Baird, so anything is possible.

[Eleazar]

Originally Posted by banyon

These deals are both according to Soren Petro on 810 in his conversations with Allard Baird who is a regular guest on the show.

Fair enough. But neither of those are huge misses. They are swapping one player who isn't good enough for another. Kearns would be something of an upgrade, nothing that is a huge miss. But Blanco and Gathright are just about the same player, it's nothing to complain about.

Plus, if you hate Berroa, and you want us to trade Blanco too, who's going to be playing short? Sluggerrr?

Baird takes heat for trades but he has not done poorly aside from Dye. With Damon and Beltran, he got some marquee prospects of the time. Sometimes players just don't pan out. Happens to every team. Nobody thought Beltran was a bad trade at the time. When Berroa won rookie of the year Baird looked like a genius. Not to mention stealing players like Batista for scraps like Grimsley.

People expect GMs to know the future. They don't. All will make some mistakes.

You can rap Baird on the knuckles for free agency, player development, the draft for the first part of his tenure, but blasting the trades makes a person look silly because that's the one area he has done fairly well.

[quote]
(Mench in Texas has long been a coveted hitter by Baird, but it may be too late to snatch him up). Second, he's fairly young to think that we will never hit. He hasn't even had a full season in the majors yet.
[quote]

I heard it was Mench for Affeldt. I don't know if that is a huge gain even if the trigger had been pulled. He's not Manny Ramierez or anything.

His end value could be a Juan Pierre-esque success or Tom Goodwin-esque pinch running duties.

Well there's about .100 points of BA difference between Pierre and Goodwin. One of those players the Royals had already and wasn't good enough.

As far as Gathright turning into Juan Pierre, color me doubtful. He's hitting under 200 this year. It's his third chance in the majors and none have been successful.

I thought you had me on iggy? I don't know why, I don't have anything against ya.

I did. I wasn't logged in when I saw the post. I was annoyed around draft time. I will put people on ignore temporarily pretty frequently.

[KevB]

Originally Posted by FringeNC

A salary-floor would be a disaster. Look at Florida. The Marlins understand if you aren't going to compete for a few years, cut all the high-priced guys, and save the money for a run when there is an uptick in the talent cycle. Florida won the WS not too longer after gutting their whole team, and they just did it again.

How are you suppose to rebuild without getting rid of all your veterans?

Florida's already completed two firesales the right way, in the meantime the R's "plan" continues to flounder. The difference is the Fish said, "I'll trade our vets, but I want the very best young talent back, regardless of postion. We'll sort that out later". Baird said, "for Carlos Beltran, the best player on the market at this time, I will only take a 3B, catcher and a pitcher, period". So, we completely limit the suitors for Beltran. It's not like we were so flush with talent that we only needed a piece or two to get over the hump.

Same thing when we traded Dye....he wanted s shortstop, period. Now we're so devoid of talent, we have nothing to trade. We also couldn't lure a top free agent here unless we paid him 20%+ more than another team because it's so blatantly obvious that we're years away from competing.

We can spend that additonal $20M of so called profit on free agents, but we won't attract top FA talent until we build this team into a semi-winner with youth.

[Ultra Peanut]

if you can believe it, Mientkiewicz leads the starters with a .322 on-base percentage

Oh my God.

[WilliamTheIrish]

Clap, clap, clap.

[banyon]

Originally Posted by Cochise

Plus, if you hate Berroa, and you want us to trade Blanco too, who's going to be playing short? Sluggerrr?

Depends, would he remember to wear his sunglasses on a pop fly? (I know that's German, but rep to anyone who can Photoshop that).

Originally Posted by Cochise

Baird takes heat for trades but he has not done poorly aside from Dye. With Damon and Beltran, he got some marquee prospects of the time. Sometimes players just don't pan out. Happens to every team. Nobody thought Beltran was a bad trade at the time. When Berroa won rookie of the year Baird looked like a genius. Not to mention stealing players like Batista for scraps like Grimsley.

People expect GMs to know the future. They don't. All will make some mistakes.

You can rap Baird on the knuckles for free agency, player development, the draft for the first part of his tenure, but blasting the trades makes a person look silly because that's the one area he has done fairly well.

I have a low opinion of the trades we have made, but you are right in that the worst of them by far is the Dye deal. I also was for trading Sweeney at the beginning of last year when the Angels were purportedly interested, but Petro said, no, we could have a competitive team in 2006 and we need a solid stick in the lineup. I think his fondness for Sweeney as a person clouded his judgment on that one.

Originally Posted by Cochise

I did. I wasn't logged in when I saw the post. I was annoyed around draft time. I will put people on ignore temporarily pretty frequently.

Not a fan of my Tamba Hali thread, eh? I did go a little over the top on that one.

[DaneMcCloud]

Originally Posted by Cochise

Right. And what "sources" are these?

Sources that contend that big and medium market owners are going to vote in favor of more competition on the free agent market?

Small market owners that are going to vote in favor of requiring expenses to outstrip revenue?

Without dropping names let's just say that I have a very close friend who is VERY close to the owners of a couple of NY baseball teams. And from what I've been told for the past 2 years is that all of the big market teams are absolutely SICK of subsidizing the Royals. In their opinion, there's no such thing as small market teams - just small market owners.

In the case of the Florida Marlins, Loria is trying to make a point by dumping salary. How in the world can Miami, Florida be considered a small market? The Hurricanes are sold out every Saturday in football, the Dolphins and Heat are sold out all year long. There's an absolute ton of money down there. It's small market baseball because the owner didn't get a new stadium. In addition, they've won TWO World Series and dumped salary afterwards and it was different owner each time.

Oakland shouldn't be considered small market either. Pac Bell park is less than 30 minutes (or so) away and is sold out constantly. They pay their stars big money. It's the Owner's decision to be small market. Hell, the Minnesota Twins owner WANTED to be contracted because he wanted the $250 million buyout from MLB.

So you tell me - would the MLB owners be better off without the Royals and Devil Rays sucking money out of their pockets every year in order to exist, or do they put forth rules in the next CBA to guaranty spending, forcing the "small market" teams to sh*t or get off the pot?

Believe me, I was up in arms about this information as well and was trying to defend the Royals position. But it's going to be harder and harder to defend them when most teams have double the payroll, even though those very same teams are put in hundreds of millions of their own dollars to keep the Royals in business. MLB is NOT the NFL.

[alanm]

Originally Posted by Deberg_1990

and another thing.....Their problems are obviously alot deeper than him but why on earth did they hire Buddy Bell???? At least try and get a proven winning manager in here to try and turn things around.

Could of had Jim Leyland when he was just sitting at home twiddling his thumbs. BUT NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. I cried when they hired Bell.

[tk13]

Originally Posted by DaneMcCloud

Without dropping names let's just say that I have a very close friend who is VERY close to the owners of a couple of NY baseball teams. And from what I've been told for the past 2 years is that all of the big market teams are absolutely SICK of subsidizing the Royals. In their opinion, there's no such thing as small market teams - just small market owners.

In the case of the Florida Marlins, Loria is trying to make a point by dumping salary. How in the world can Miami, Florida be considered a small market? The Hurricanes are sold out every Saturday in football, the Dolphins and Heat are sold out all year long. There's an absolute ton of money down there. It's small market baseball because the owner didn't get a new stadium. In addition, they've won TWO World Series and dumped salary afterwards and it was different owner each time.

Oakland shouldn't be considered small market either. Pac Bell park is less than 30 minutes (or so) away and is sold out constantly. They pay their stars big money. It's the Owner's decision to be small market. Hell, the Minnesota Twins owner WANTED to be contracted because he wanted the $250 million buyout from MLB.

So you tell me - would the MLB owners be better off without the Royals and Devil Rays sucking money out of their pockets every year in order to exist, or do they put forth rules in the next CBA to guaranty spending, forcing the "small market" teams to sh*t or get off the pot?

Believe me, I was up in arms about this information as well and was trying to defend the Royals position. But it's going to be harder and harder to defend them when most teams have double the payroll, even though those very same teams are put in hundreds of millions of their own dollars to keep the Royals in business. MLB is NOT the NFL.

There's nothing the Marlins can do. Don't forget, the first time they won a title, they did exactly what some Royal fans would want Glass to do... he went out and spent huge dollars in the FA market, put a World Series champ on the field, and still lost $30 million dollars due to poor attendance. That's when Wayne Huizenga wanted out and sold the team... that's not his fault, he's a pretty successful businessman, owns the Dolphins, etc... and he put his money where his mouth was, and it didn't work.

Oakland's a bad example too, look at how the Raiders never sell out.

I don't expect David Glass to lose money owning the team. I think that's an unrealistic goal, and up until last year he had not turned any huge profits on this team... and that kinda backs up Fringe's point. He makes some money trying to develop players, then gets pressured by the other owners, and he goes out and signs a bunch of older players to make it look like he's spending the money which kind of throws a wrench in things. If you don't like "subsidizing" the Royals, don't go over the luxury tax. That's the whole freakin idea behind it! Genius. I don't think David Glass is the smartest baseball guy but I don't think he's a bad businessman and I do think he has the best interest for parity in baseball as a whole in mind. I'm all for a salary floor, as long as we put in a reasonable salary cap. Can't have it both ways. And that's all he's pushed for all along.