Chen, Getz Fail The Son of God, Hosmer Forgives Their Sins

but this is a poor argument in my mind for a couple of reasons:

1) There has been no direct correlation established between payroll and Draft/Latin signings except when a payroll is stretched at the high end. We are saving roughly 35 million on last year’s payroll. I don’t think even the Jays are putting that kind of difference into their amateur talent budget. It would be hard to inject that much talent into the system and have it all fit/be properly coached, if you could even find enough worth buying on the market. Plus, the process of outbidding everyone else on Latin lottery tickets night be fruitless and totally fuck up the market for years to come. Spend only on what you think is valuable, and only fund what seems like good investments. I have not seen much in the way of reports of the Royals losing out on players they really wanted, and they already have acquired some nice talent now.

2) It works on the assumption that any money spent on mediocre veteran players, over the league minimum, is lost money. Besides just the need to — if only for the politics of MLB’s collective bargaining arrangements and shut the large market owners up about teams pocketing revenue sharing dollars — keep the payroll above the minimum, there is some value in not being the Astros every year. As this site can attest, it fucking drains your fan base. Bruce Chen is costing the team 1.5 million over the league minimum to give the team a shot to win every fifth day. If he was blocking a guy ready to be in the major leagues that had a real chance to be better than him, then it would be a mistake (like playing Kyle fucking Davies as the sixth starter for more money). But who pitches that is both ready and has a real chance not just to be another Bruce Chen (i.e. Mazzaro, Suppan, SOS)? The Rays would be fucking stupid to make Bruce Chen pay them for a starting pitching spot. The Royals are not in that position.

Bottom line: Bruce Chen has performed up to his contract this year in terms of value. We have no future commitments to him (which would indeed be bad). he might even buy some time for other prospects not to be rushed (Monty). He is not causing a budget problem. They did not pay a lot for him at all.

I don’t think you can call the move bad because it seems similar to another move several years ago that was bad.

Nobody in baseball—not scouts, not statisticians, not old-school GMs, not new-school GMs, and especially not Ozzie Guillen—thinks Chen is good. He had something of a ‘breakout’ year in 2010, and still nobody offered him a real contract. The Royals handed him a cheap one year deal to see if he could scrape through another year on smoke and mirrors, and because no one else was interested, Chen took it. And he hasn’t been bad. But there’s no chance that baseball suddenly goes crazy and starts throwing big money his way. I’ll bet that Davies will sign for more than Chen this offseason.

you should be angry with that move, if it happens.

especially when you can fill up a legitimate rotation without him