Poz and the cycle of suck

Joe Posnanski has been trying to point out the obvious.

But Poz has to go over to The K and look into the souls of Dayton Moore and Trey Hillman from time to time, so he has to be fair and careful. The thing is, he can't be too conservative. He is, of course, a journalist/columnist, and he’s charged with sharing facts, lies, opinions and injustices with The Public. After all, he’s the one with the access.

The purposes of communication are to inform, persuade, entertain and inspire. And Posnanski is one of the few sports columnists who is actually good at all four. He’s one of the best. But he stashes some of his very best work on his blog, which is informal, funny, meandering, and most of all it contains hard truths about the Royals. Lately, some of the stuff in his blog is much better than the stuff in the printed paper, and that illustrates one of the many reasons why newspapers as we know them are dying.

Anyway, Poz is a nice guy. That's obvious. He writes like a nice guy. He generally pussy-foots around the hard truths in order not to be mean. He can't help it. I like him a lot. I wish I knew him. He's a great writer...This is my Poz way of giving him his due before I tear him down...Except I'm not going to tear him down. I'm just going to show you how his next column in The Star should start.

This is more or less the way he'll write it when he eventually writes it...

Dayton Moore was one of the brightest baseball minds available when the Royals hired him away from the Atlanta Braves. Everybody agreed. Heck, the Boston Red Sox allegedly tried to hire the guy the year before the Royals lured him to KC. When David Glass made the decision to give Dayton what he wanted and bring him to town, it was an indication to people in baseball that maybe, just maybe, the owner in Kansas City (who lives in Arkansas) really was sick of losing.

Meanwhile, Trey Hillman was a successful manager in Japan. They said he got the most out of his talent, that he was a fundamentals guy. They said he was a winner. He was originally from the Yankees organization, and it was rumored that, if the Royals didn't hire him as manager, the Yankees were considering it. Also, he's from Texas and he's probably in the Guinness Book of World Records -- in the facial hair section. You don't mess with a guy like that.

(I will say at this point that it would be easier to make Hillman sound really tough if his first name was Mitch or Hank, or anything, really, other than Trey. Same goes for Dayton. You can practically get kicked out of the Army just for having a name like Trey or Dayton.)

So Dayton hired Trey. They were going to do the impossible. They were going to make the Kansas City Royals winners again. It was a good story. Some Royals fans even believed it would come true.

And, hey, the Royals were trying to throw some real money at free agents. They were starting to sign some expensive draft picks. The Royals even erected one of the most audacious scoreboards in the history of sports. I mean that thing would make almost anybody proud to be a fan and a taxpayer, right?

Maybe things really were going to turn around?

Only, no, the Royals are still as bad as ever, even though they have Greinke, and it doesn't look like anything on the field is going to change any time soon. Sure, you’d think Dayton and Trey deserve more time. It's not their fault that the farm system was in a state of complete disrepair...It's not their fault that baseball rules require you to field a shortstop.

But it is their fault that they have not kept up with the new information that is available when it comes to the game of baseball. It’s like they collectively lost their relatively young minds as soon as they got to KC. The only person who can get away with not keeping up with the times these days, apparently, is Denny Matthews, who insists on denying the merits of computers.

My dad is a retired CPA. (OK, now this is obviously starting to sound more like me than Posnanski; my dad has never even been to Cleveland.) Anyway, Dad still has all these tax manuals from 1984 in his den. He’s still a really smart man, but, because of those old manuals, I’m a little afraid to ask him for advice on money (not that I have any) and taxes. He’d probably try to get me to hide the money I don’t really have in some Reagan era loop hole tax shelter that no longer exists.

And this is the problem with the Royals.

Dayton and Trey are stubbornly clinging to the idea that they know everything there is to know, despite evidence to the contrary. They think injuries and possibly the rabid badgers in the KC media, along with one pesky dermatologist from Detroit, have shipwrecked their season. The injuries hurt, but there are other obvious reasons for failure that are too numerous to go into in detail, so let’s just list some of them:

On-base percentage, serious lack of team speed, terrible base running, atrocious defense, negligent medical/training staff, Jose Guillen, Mike Jacobs, on-base percentage, Horacio Ramirez, treacherous bullpen management, whoever the third base coach is, horrible on-base percentage for the last DECADE, Tompkins Industries, Hillman’s hair face. And so on.

Heck, we’re talking about an organization that employed Tony Pena Jr. as a Major League Baseball player for two years.

Meanwhile, most organizations hire special baseball statisticians, known as sabremetricians (sabermetricians?), to help them evaluate and analyze data about players. Lots of smart people know about this stuff. All of the smart organizations utilize the information to help them avoid expensive and disastrous mistakes.

Dayton and Trey apparently think it’s stupid to rely on opinions that don’t come from crusty scouts. Sometimes they have open animosity for objective analysis. They are fairly young, but they’re definitely old school. Any nerdy stat head could have told Dayton that Mike Jacobs and Yuniesky Betancourt don’t have a chance in hell at getting on base enough to help this team. Everybody knows Trey can’t be trusted to utilize Soria correctly, manage a bullpen in general, or make Gil Meche come out of a game before he hurts himself.

And any casual stat head could tell you that Dayton and Trey don’t have a chance in hell of turning this team around.

So now Dayton and Trey are paranoid and they’re making excuses out at The K. That’s when you know it’s not going to end well. You hate to see it, you really do. Especially when we’re going to have to continue to watch this whole thing rot and fester for at least another summer or two.

Glass will keep Moore around as long as possible, because he hired him, and Moore will keep Hillman around for as long as possible, because he hired him. This is the way things work. Kansas City is stuck in a cycle of suck.

P.S. Posnanski would have put a lot more statistics and examples in this, because, unlike me, he really does know what he’s talking about. He puts it all in his blog.

P.P.S. Rany Jazayerli has used the words “vortex of suck” to describe the Royals – and Rany has been very wordy about his displeasure. (In the business, this kind of disclosure is known as attribution after the fact.)

P.P.P.S. You could probably get kicked out of the Army for having a name like Lance, too.

P.P.P.P.S. Yes, I know lots of other Royals fans and bloggers have been saying and writing this stuff for a long time. I just think that it should be in PRINT somewhere instead of only on the Internets. In that way, I am old school.

Last P.S. My dad’s den is actually his garage. He actually does know his stuff, though, and I would happily go to him for advice. The analogy was embellished slightly.