October is a dreadful month.
There may be a final blast of summer, but the overnight frost acknowledges that winter is just around the corner. Baseball is over - for my team. Deadlines for next season's annual publications come in rapid-fire succession. It's dark when I go to work in the morning. And it's almost dark when I come home. The season over, inspiration is in short supply.
And the Red Sox and Cardinals are in the World Series.
Goddamnit.
Dick Kaegel can't even be bothered with September. How the hell am I supposed to deal with October? Kaegel's last tweet was from September 3.
I see the Royals are listening to offers for Billy Butler. Remember how they were *this close* to trading Butler for Yuniesky Betancourt in the early days of the Dayton Moore administration. Back when we thought he had an idea about what made a player valuable or how to properly run a baseball team? Funny how a rumored trade can make an entire fanbase nod their heads knowingly. "Yep, that sounds like Dayton."
So if Butler is indeed traded, I fully expect him to go to Chicago for Jeff Keppinger. Or if Dayton is allergic to intra-division trades, he could go to Toronto for Maicer Izturis. That "solves" the second base issue and then to fill the Butler void, it's a two year contract to Michael Young. At the press conference to announce the signing, Dayton talks about Young's "competitiveness" and his "leadership" and how he's a "winner."
Right now, you're nodding your head knowingly. "Yep, that sounds like Dayton."
(At this point in the story, I run the Auto Tag feature in SB Nation's blog platform to link the player names. All I get is a return on Betancourt, even though I've named four other active players. Yep. Not even my blog platform gives a damn.)
Myself, I'm not opposed to dealing Butler. There's a lot of sense in Zimmerman's post from yesterday. I'm just not entirely sure what Dayton can mine from the trade market. There would also be a sense that you're dealing Butler at a low point on the value scale. Yet there's $8 million on his contract. for 2014 and a club option for $12.5 million in 2015. Twitter is full of morons and goofballs who dislike Butler for the wrong reasons. I don't have time for that rabble. I'll leave them to Dutton. Butler - one dimension and all - is one of my favorite players on this team. I remember how this city embraced him in 2012 at the All-Star Game and how the feeling seemed to be mutual. I thought it would stick, but apparently he's fat, slow, lazy and unclutch. We can only love the fat kid for a little while before he has to go back for seconds at the buffet apparently.
Being the second best hitter on a below average offensive team isn't anything to write home about. In the old days, that would get you a "second-best" ribbon and that ribbon would mean something. Now, all the ribbons say "participant" and everyone gets one. But I digress.
Butler is a good hitter, but isn't the best. He's not the problem on this team, but he needs help. It seems like the Royals could always use his bat in the lineup, double plays be double damned, but if he's the central cog in the offensive machine then that machine is running on steam power. How about you keep Butler. Get help.
Solution?
If I was a fan of a normal team, a story like this would barely move the needle. Yet Dayton Moore is the GM and my team is the Royals. Dayton doesn't wait for the market to take shape. He sets the market. We are anywhere from four to seven games from him making some sort of move. It's the Royal version of the October Surprise. And as we learned last winter from The Trade, guys like Buster Olney tweet trade rumors when they have legs. Sources and all that.
Honestly, I didn't sit down to write about Butler. I didn't know what I was going to write about, but a stream of consciousness led me here. It beats talking about a Cardinal-Red Sox World Series.