Jason Kendall, 2 yrs and $6 milllion...
What exactly to make of the Royals recent Jason Kendall signing:
I spilled some ink writing about the parallels between the Pirates and Royals earlier in the year. The two ‘small market teams’ have made some similar mistakes over the the course of the past two decades and the result has been a combined total of one winning season (Royals in 2003) over the past fifteen years.
When the one constant of franchise over such a long stretch of time is mediocrity it becomes really easy for frustrated fans and some of the less thoughtful baseball writers and bloggers to make lazy superficial generalizations when discussing the organizations recent operations. The meme is, the Royals/Pirates are cheap, and that’s the context in which the current moves are judged, there’s no attempt at deeper or more thoughtful analysis, no recognition that both teams are currently run my presidents and general managers who weren’t present for the aforementioned seasons.
Dayton Moore, GM of the Royals was hired in 2006. Neal Huntington, GM of the Pirates in 2007. Dayton Moore didn’t sign Mark Davis or trade Carlos Beltran. Neal Huntington didn’t dump Aramis Ramirez’s salary or sign Pat Meares. Whatever perceptions one may have formed about previous front offices shouldn’t apply to the current ones. Their decisions, their successes, and their mistakes should be judged completely separately from those that have preceded them.
That said the two general managers and the two front offices seem to have taken dramatically different approaches to pulling their teams out the bottom most depths of Major League Baseball.
It would seem from afar that despite his pedigree as Assistant GM of the Braves. Dayton Moore (given a 5 year extension this summer) has continued to repeat the very same sort of mistakes that doomed both franchises over the last two decades. Namely spending and overspending the teams limited resources on average to below average veteran players like Jason Kendall who are of little value to a club so far from contention.
Meanwhile Neal Huntington, who inherited a real mess of an organization, has employed a strategy of rebuilding from the ground up. He made the assessment that the Pirates not only had below average talent at the major league level (an assessment born out by their string of 70 win seasons), but were also severely deficient throughout their minor league system. He’s traded away their mid level major league talent for prospects and has concentrated their resources on development. Over the past two years the Pirates have been among the top spenders in the MLB Draft. and finally moved to open a baseball academy in the Dominican Republic (why they were so late to the game on this is one speaks to the mismanagement of previous front offices).
Fangraphs has a reaction to the Kendall signing, as well as the release of Mike Jacobs (another ill conceived Moore acquisition) and an assement of Moore’s tenure. They are similarly unimpressed by his work.
I’d be curious to hear thoughts from Royals and Pirates, particularly those of Adam Ohler (the only Royals fan I actually know), are my conclusions accurate? Is more Moore continuing to run the Royals into the ground, is Huntington employing the right strategy to resurrect the Pirates?
