Offseason Prospectus #30: The Kansas City Royals

Last, but not...well, actually...

There are a number of baseball franchises which vie for the title of "Best Punchline."  The Pirates recently set a record of prolonged futility by finishing below .500 for seventeen consecutive seasons.  The Nationals/Expos have made just one playoff appearance in their 41 year history.  And, of course, there are the accursed Cubs, who championship drought recently extended beyond the century mark.

But for pure sporting incompetence, it's hard to argue with the Kansas City Royals.  They won the World Series in 1985 and for a few years thereafter were contenders in the AL West.  Since the late eighties, however, the Royals have managed a winning record only three times (once during the strike-shortened '94 season) and have not returned to the postseason since their '85 championship.

In recent years, they have grown more and more woeful, as they've featured eight managers in their past eight seasons and cracked 100 losses four times.  In the tenure of current General Manager, Dayton Moore, they have become a kind of anachronism, a franchise which seems steadfastly determined to defy the evolutions of their industry...and not in a good way.

In 2009, FanGraphs ranked 154 players according to Wins Above Replacement.  Of those 154, only eight finished below replacement level.  And the man who finished 154th was almost a full win worse than the guy at 153 (Aubrey Huff).  That man was Yuniesky Betancourt, the former Mariner shortstop who was Moore's primary 2009 acquisition.  Betancourt wasn't just the worst player in baseball, he was the worst player by a long shot.

For Dayton Moore, this is just the most dramatic instance of his stubbornly standing in defiance of "new-fangled" statistical metrics.  This offseason alone he signed three players who score extraordinarily low in categories like WAR, UZR, and OPS: Scott Podsednik, Jason Kendall, and Rick Ankiel.  And for this reason he's become the scourge of sabermetric analysts like Rob Neyer, who happens to also be a Royals fan.

But while Moore is eviscerated by sportswriters (in this rare instance, the sabermetricians and the traditionalists seem mostly in agreement) he has the full endorsement of Kansas City ownership, which recently extended his contract through the 2013 season.  Unfortunately, that probably assures that Royals fans are looking at four more years of absolutely dismal baseball.