Dear Dayton,

I know it's been a rough season for you. Things just haven't gone the way you planned, and although you can't come out and admit it to the press, I'm certain that you know mistakes were made. Terrible mistakes. Frankly, I'm disappointed both in the team's performance, and in the "process" you're asking us to trust; the former for obvious reasons, and the latter because it certainly seems to be a flawed process. That's what I'd like to talk to you about.

First, let me state that while I grew up on Bill James and believe that advanced statistics can tell us far more about the game than the back of a baseball card, I do not believe them to be the final authority. You can lie with statistics, after all. Scouting is important, and these statistics are not compiled in a vacuum. There are always other factors which I, as a fan, am not privy to which might explain things the statistics cannot. However, at the same time, those factors don't mean the statistics are wrong, nor do they mean that it follows that an analysis of the statistics is inherently wrong. A poor performance is a poor performance. Where these other factors come in is simply in explaining why we might be able to ignore a subset of those numbers, either because the organization has a viable plan to improve them, or because they're injury-related and expected to return to normal.

Your off-season moves weren't as bad as people would like you to believe they were; re-signing Zack was a no-brainer, signing Cruz was actually a good move even though it hasn't worked out well, and with Bloomquist you at least acquired a player who knows the difference between a strike and a ball in the dirt a foot off the plate. I will allow that perhaps you saw something in Coco Crisp in much the same way you saw something in Gil Meche, and Crisp's ability to get on base early in the season despite barely hitting his weight could be a point in your favor... assuming that's the sort of thing you expected him to do. Jacobs and Farnsworth, on the other hand... well, the process surrounding those guys is precisely what I'm going to talk about.

The first problem is the one you keep hearing about: OBP. The thing is, I think it hasn't been explained properly; too many people talk about walks as if you need to go get guys who walk a lot. I'm not one of those guys, Dayton. I don't automatically assume that a guy who doesn't walk 80 times a season is a hacktastic failure at the plate. It's not about drawing walks; rather, it's about being able to judge the strike zone. Put another way, if a guy hits .340 and slugs .500, I don't much care whether he draws walks on the face of it... but if such a player does not, in fact, walk a lot, it tells you about his plate discipline. I mean, we're taught growing up, playing Little League, that a walk's as good as a hit. It's both true and false; a walk is not as good as a hit in most cases, but it's so much better than an out that it may as well be as good as a hit. If there were only one thing that Bill James has universally contributed to baseball, I would hope that it would be the understanding that -- from the offensive perspective -- the only important mechanism toward increasing offense is to avoid making outs as much as possible.

Dayton, you've been in the game long enough to understand that in most cases, a "good hitter" will draw walks; it's not because he's up there trying to take ball four, but because pitchers give good hitters less to hit. I realize that scouts have a tendency to want to see guys swing the bat, and believe it or not I understand that completely. A scout has no idea whether a guy can actually be a successful hitter without watching his swing and seeing what happens when he connects. That's why the cliche with Dominicans is "you can't walk off the island," because they have to show scouts they can actually hit the ball.

But the problem with your process in regard to trading for Mike Jacobs is precisely that your scouts know he can hit, but you ignored the numbers showing he's not a very good hitter. Mike is a good guy. He's clearly got power in spades. But a hitter like Jacobs who doesn't draw walks is simply not a hitter the opposing team fears, or even respects. He's not as bad as Miguel Olivo, who'll swing at anything, but he's most certainly willing to chase bad pitches rather than forcing the pitcher to give him something to hit. And that's why Mike Jacobs, for all his power and desire and good nature, is now mostly sitting on the bench with unplayable numbers.

I've said all this by way of getting to the main point, which is this: you need scouting to tell you what players have the physical ability to do, but you need numbers to tell you how well they're translating that ability to success. You had those numbers with Jacobs, and you ignored them because you thought his potential outweighed his poor OBP. If Mike was a .340 hitter, nobody would care that he doesn't draw walks (well, some people would complain that he'd be an even better hitter if he walked, but that's like saying Tony Pena Jr. would be an even better hitter if he could hit). The problem isn't that he doesn't walk, but that he doesn't get on base. Of course, part of the reason he doesn't get on base is that pitchers know he's unlikely to accept a free pass.

I can't stress this enough. Pitchers won't give guys who swing at everything any pitches to hit. It's that simple. When numbers guys talk about walks, it's not in the sense that walks in and of themselves are a desirable outcome, but in the sense that they are a symptom of a condition. Guys walk because they work the count, and because pitchers are more likely to avoid throwing strikes; the walk is the residue of the pitcher's desire to avoid letting the hitter beat them with the stick. Guys who don't walk have no patience; there is no hitter in history who has a low walk total explainable by the fact that he always got good pitches to hit. Not one. They don't walk because they won't wait for the right pitches. The only guys who've been "good" hitters despite lacking patience have been guys who were simply astounding slap-hitters -- guys like Tony Gwynn or Luis Castillo. (And even Gwynn started walking more midway through his career, because even with little power a pitcher will start nibbling against guys who can hit .380.)

And that allows us to segue; pitchers also won't give in to guys who have no power, which is why Pena couldn't hit as a major-leaguer. Pitchers aren't afraid of the chance that their inevitable ground ball or weak pop fly will find a hole. Obviously, that's why SLG is important as well. But even a decent SLG can be deceiving, especially when your ballclub's primary problem is a lack of baserunners.

Yet you traded away a valuable reliever for Mike Jacobs despite having a monster of a prospect seemingly ready in Omaha -- one who performed better last September than Jacobs has this season, no less. Because of that trade, you apparently felt the need to acquire Farnsworth, compounding the issue. And the ultimate agony of all this is that there is one thing I think you're very good at: picking up players off the scrap heap who turn out to be useful either on the roster or as trade bait.

And here, you've amassed a roster of guys who either have no strike zone judgement or have no power (or both). DeJesus, Callaspo, and Butler are the current exceptions. (Teahen and Gordon are almost there; they both have particular blind spots where they seem to inevitably swing at certain pitches out of the strike zone and take certain pitches in the strike zone. Gordon is obviously still potentially correctable; Teahen might be past that point, although his versatility means his bat still plays.) Yet it's telling that you're not responsible for most of those guys being here.

Butler and Gordon are still your cornerstones, of course, but you still need another hitter or two that can legitimately drive the ball and get on base for the middle of the order. And then you need to fill out the lineup (and bench) with guys who don't throw away outs.

And, of course, I mean that both offensively and defensively. Dayton, I realize that defensive metrics are not nearly as well-developed as offensive metrics. If you're not on board with OBP (and it's clear you're really not, despite your protestations to the contrary, or you wouldn't be trading for guys like Jacobs and Betancourt), then it must be triply as difficult to place your faith in defensive metrics. But I gotta tell you, when virtually every metric agrees that someone's horrible afield, you have to listen. These guys are all trying to be scientific about this. There are differences in their methods, which is why some players look good in one person's method and poor in another; with those players, you need to rely on your scouting eye to sort out why the metrics differ from method to method, and then make your decision that way.

But when they agree that a player is simply a horrible fielder, as they do with Guillen and Betancourt, you have to pay attention to that. I cannot understand why you acquired Betancourt, Dayton. He doesn't hit, he doesn't get on base, and he's a lousy shortstop. Yes, he's better than Tony Pena, but any number of freely-available AAAA shortstops meet that qualification. You didn't need to give up two pitching prospects and take on what's left of that salary to replace Tony. (That said, if you'd only given up Cortes on the basis of simply being tired of his crap, that might have been justifiable.)

Lastly, the bullpen. Your first mistake, obviously, was giving up two perfectly good set-up men in the off-season, then rushing to replace them with a can of high-octane jet fuel. I wouldn't blame you so much for Farnsworth's performance, since the act of putting him in positions where he was highly likely to fail falls on your manager... except you apparently feel content to continue allowing your manager to mishandle the bullpen without calling him into your office and telling him to pull his head out of his backside. I am not here to tell you that Soria needs to be pitching multiple innings, as so many others do. I frankly don't care whether Soria only gets three outs four-five times a week. What I do care about is Soria standing out in the bullpen in the eighth inning while lesser pitchers desperately try to hold onto a lead with runners on base. He's your best reliever, and he should not be getting held in reserve so that he can come into the game with nobody on and nobody out simply because he can't get a save if he doesn't finish the game. If Hillman would just use him to get out of the eighth-inning jam, the odds of another reliever being able to safely navigate a non-jam situation are quite clearly better than the odds of winning the game after losing the lead in the eighth inning.

Don't get me wrong; your job is to put together the team, and Trey's job is to manage it. However, that doesn't change the fact that you're his boss. If he is continually making the same errors and steadfastly refusing to correct them, you tell me, Dayton -- who bears the responsibility for correcting it?

This is a small-market team, with small-market pressures. You're never going to sign an Albert Pujols (at least not until the team starts winning post-season series), and if you develop one the odds are great you'll lose him. You have to work on the margins, which means not throwing away basics... like outs, like the chance to preserve an eighth-inning lead, like letting a boat anchor play in the outfield because it might make him sulk. This team has to take chances, but they have to be rational chances.

But above all, you can't afford to make decisions which are clearly not going to solve anything. You signed Jacobs because you thought this team needed power. Well, it did need power, but more than that it needed baserunners after a season where on most nights the bottom five guys in the order couldn't find their way to first base with GPS. That has been this team's problem... well, forever, if we're being honest, but at least in the Brett Era we actually had some of those guys who hit .340 but didn't walk much.

The Royals currently have a .313 OBP. They are last in the league. They are also last in the league in runs scored. The Yankees lead the league in OBP, at .357. They also lead the league in runs scored. It's not a coincidence, Dayton. The same is not true of other stats. Boston's fourth in the league in runs scored, but they're below mean in batting average. Cleveland's fifth in the league in runs scored, but near the bottom in slugging. Only three teams in the league have hit fewer homeruns than the Angels, but they're second in the league in runs.

It's OBP, Dayton, and while walks are an indicator, it's not about the walks. It's about getting on base, period, especially with the core of our starting rotation being so adept at preventing other teams from scoring runs. I hope that someday, you'll actually understand that rather than just talking about it once in a while yet making moves which make it clear you don't comprehend it. I don't want you fired, Dayton. I don't want you to quit. I just want you to learn from the very clear mistakes you've made in the last nine months, tell us that you understand them, and move forward with a better process.

You know, before I'm so senile that I start having trouble remembering sitting in the stands on October 27, 1985.