With the trade deadline looming and the continued pursuit of the roster/organization on everyone's mind  it's worthwhile to take a look at the moves Dayton Moore has already made. Part I takes a look at how the position players with the big club. Stay tuned for Part II (big league pitchers) and Part III (minor leaguers).

It was 2006, Lebanon and Israel were doing their thing, FEMA did a "heckuva job" in New Orleans and the Royals were supposedly beginning an era of competence (as per Posnanski after Opening Day) thanks to a bizarre December spending spree that brought in Mark Grudzielanek, Doug Mientkiewicz, Joe Mays, Paul Bako and Reggie Sanders. (Vintage RR posts here and here.) Meanwhile, the franchise was a full season behind the Beltran trade and preparing for the Jackson County Stadium Tax Subsidy Vote. In a stunning coincidence, Bud Selig "promised" Kansas City an All-Star game pending a proper allocation of JC's limitless public monies.

To a surprising extent, the 2006 lineup, as Moore more or less inherited it, remains the 2008 edition. You can find good teams that have had more turnover than this:

The 2006 Royals went 62-100.

You can quibble with some of these slots as they are crudely defined here -- for example, I'm considering Gathright a bench player in the table above, although he's actually played more innings in CF than anyone else -- but for quick and dirty purposes these are the positions according to the organizational masterplan for the two seasons. As in Gathright's case, for some of the players "bench" may not be quite the right label, but more or less it works, and I've included only the additional players who logged significant playing time.

What stands out is how much holdover there has been. Three of the positions are exactly the same, although perhaps not without some controversy. Buck is still the primary catcher, Grudzielanek is still at second base and DeJesus is still in center. Moreover, Mark Teahen remains an everyday fixture in the lineup, although he's shifted from third base to the outfield, and Esteban German is still a utility player. When you factor in that Alex Gordon and Billy Butler, lineup cornerstones if everything goes well, are also Baird-era draftees, the 2008 lineup remains a very Allard creation.

Subjectively and intuitively, the 2008 edition should be better than their 2006 progenitor: the holdovers (Buck, Teahen, DeJesus) should be hitting their peaks, Emil Brown has been upgraded to Jose Guillen and a decline-phase Mike Sweeney has been converted to supposed prospect and pure hitter Billy Butler. Miguel Olivo is a huge upgrade over Paul Bako. Unfortunately, the sum of their parts just hasn't quite added up to being much more better than the Minky era. The 2006 team ended up averaging 4.67 runs per game, better than the current squad's 4.06 average.

Huh?

To start, the holdovers, DeJesus somewhat excepted, have failed to truly break out. Grudz and German are still around and are, as the man sang, still the same. We wait still on Gordon and Butler to truly arrive. Seemingly really easy upgrades at SS and 1B have turned into, umm... Tony Pena Jr. and Ross Gload. This bears repeating. Just find someone better than the worst overall player in the game (Berroa) and one of the weakest first basemen (Minky). He couldn't do it. Where have you gone Doug Mientkiewicz? Jose Guillen has had one insanely awesome month and two bad ones. Finally, although Miguel Olivo has out-hit Paul Bako, Dayton Moore's first big league pickup, Joey Gathright, has eaten up a ton of playing time over the last three seasons and consistently failed to hit. In 237 plate appearances this year, Gator has three extra-base hits. Three. In 248 last year, he had eight. Gains like the Bako/Olivo and the Brown/Guillen exchanges have been mitigated by players like Gathright.

Over the last few months there's been a persistent meme that Moore is focused on rebuilding -- really, "building" should be used throughout this post, since it was so long ago that anything around here was actually built -- the organization's pitching coffers, and that the lineup will be more of a patchwork project. And while it isn't yet clear that the team's lineup core is actually enough of one to bother building around, it was certainly more than there was among the hurlers. Sure, in 2008, Butler and Gordon are disappointments, but they are near locks to improve, at least a little bit. There are problems however, and Moore is not immune criticism for his utter failure to upgrade the roster at two slots, SS and 1B, that looked to be no-brainer/any AAA lifer would have been better. He hasn't found better bench options than what Allard managed in Stairs/Costa/Graffy and it's possible he's done worse.

Lastly, there's the large but mysterious issue of defense. The quality of the team's defense is harder to definitively pin-down, but according to BP's defensive efficiency data, the 2008 squad is, relative to competition, an improvement. Then again, the 2006 team was terrible, posted a D-Eff of .682, good for 28th best in baseball and 13th in the AL. The current team stands at 19th overall and 9th in baseball. (Although the pure number, .698, is not much different.) So regarding defense, Moore has taken a terrible team and produced a below-average one.

The Royals hired Moore on May 31, 2006 and after over two years of his stewardship, the offense is worse than the bad one he inherited.  Considering that he also had nothing to do with Butler or Gordon, and with no notable position prospects in the system, we must conclude that Dayton's handling of the position players in blue and white has been akin to Argentina's performance in the Falklands War: at best, a disappointment, and at worst an abject failure.

 
Nice little roller coaster fangraph.  The Royals build a nice little lead, Davies gives it up bigtime and then the Royals get a huge inning and the bullpen takes us home.  I guess sometimes a bunch of singles can get you seven runs.

Funny story, I ate some pizza with mushrooms on it for dinner during the game and someone at the pizzeria must have put some psychedelic mushrooms on my pizza because I had this weird hallucination early in the game that TPJ got a home run.  Weird.

The Royals finished April with a 12-15 record and ended the fifth month of the year with a 22-34 mark (now 23-34). Considering the month contained the team's epic losing streak, an overall record of 10-19 in May wasn't a total disaster, and could have been much worse.

Let's take a look at how the boys in blue did at the plate in May. First, the team totals:

101 runs is actually not last in the league, it's tied for 11th. The Angels also scored 101 (in one fewer game) and the Mariners and Indians were worse, scoring 99 and 98 runs respectively, as the new deadball era sweeps across the American League. Despite the advantage of the DH, scoring in the American League is lower than in the NL, which of course can 100% be attributed to PEDs testing. 100%. Everyone who used PEDs was a hitter in the AL. Moving on... The Royals only hit 12 homers in May, which is remarkable. Not surprisingly, no team in the AL was anywhere close to this number, as the league average was 24 homers.It isn't anything like a full consolation, but the Royals did rip 65 doubles in May, second-most in the American League. Weirdly, the Royals continue to not hit triples, despite having some decent triplers getting regular playing time. They hit just 2 in May. Then again, no one ever got poor betting against Joey Gathright's extra base hit totals.

Speaking of Gathright, now about those individual numbers, sorted by OPS:

This is how you have a bad month. For a guy who probably won't be in the Major Leagues in 2010, Tony Pena Jr. has generated a ton of discussion this month, but he isn't standing alone in the forest of horribleness. Considering defensive value and where they play, it's certain that Ross Gload (another Dayton pickup) was the worse player in May, and Alberto Callaspo wasn't far behind. You can say the same for Billy Butler, who slugged .302 with no value on defense.

Other than Miguel Olivo's studliness and a decent month from Jose Guillen (characteristically a lack of walks drags down his performance, even when he's hitting over .300) nobody else stepped into the void. Although Gordon (and Teahen) continued to get his walks and John Buck tossed in his annual random month of hitting .300, there isn't much good displayed here. (Expect a .210 average from Buck in June.)

Pitching numbers will be up tomorrow.

“I’m going to stick with Tony for a little while. I look at his recent history, meaning last year, knowing he got off to a slow start, knowing he’s one of those guys who has not accumulated a ton of major league at-bats. We would like that to be a productive slot, as you would any other slot.” - Trey Hillman on Yahoo! Sports

Dayton, Trey, you're doing a heckuva job evaluating talent and putting together a roster/lineup.

Tony Pena Jr. is not hitting. Even if we pretend that he's the best defensive shortstop in the league, there is a certain level of competence at the plate that simply isn't being displayed. This is compounded by the dirty little secret that Pena's play at shortstop is uneven and not beyond criticism either.

Think of it this way, and I'll use batting average since, well, we all know how important OBP is around these parts. If Pena improved his batting average one hundred points, he still wouldn't be hitting enough to justify regular playing time. We hear all the time about how a great bullpen shortens the game, which may be true. What then of the free inning the Royals hand right back each and every game?

As jonfmorse mentioned in the game thread today, Pena has done absolutely nothing to earn this blind faith and patience. I'm not a huge fan of Ross Gload the player, but there's a solid body of evidence that he'll hit at a certain level and that he's probably not going to be sporting an OPS under .600 at the end of the year. Compared to Pena, Gload is Jim Thome. But to date, after Dayton Moore acquired him with almost no experience in the upper levels of professional baseball, Pena has been given over 700 plate appearances. Why? Even if you accept that last season was a lost cause and he was a stopgap, how do you explain 2008? The Royals left Surprise with barely a backup second baseman that they trust, much less a shortstop. The Royals have had plenty of time to address this situation, and it's frankly damning that it has been allowed to reach this point.

The Royals are now last in baseball in runs scored. They've been outscored by the Orioles, Padres and Giants. The Nationals have outscored the Royals by eighteen runs already. They are fifty runs from being a middle of the pack AL team, much less a good one. Sadly, the AL Central suddenly looks much tamer than we originally thought -- it might only take 88 wins to claim the division -- and the Royals are wasting a legitimate shot at contention thanks to a lineup that simply isn't good at anything. Anything.

Predictably, Hillman believes that Pena is saving something absurd, like "a run a game" with his defense. He isn't. Everyone understands that defense matters, especially at shortstop. But there has to be a limit, and at a certain point you're out-smarting yourself and hurting your ballclub, all while congratulating yourself on how old-school and gritty you are.

With apologies to Hillman's we're planning on a 180 game season routine, the Royals have played 29.6% of the 2008 season and are now on pace to win 70 games.

Hillman, all early season basepath stupidity aside, has proven himself to be just another guy. Just another fifty-something strangely dressed in a player's uniform managing like the rest of his peers. Rany wrote a few weeks ago that one of the major disappointments regarding Trey was this very bland conformity. The Royals went all the way to Japan to hire the next Phil Garner, Tom Trebelhorn, Buddy Bell or Sam Perlozzo. And that's ok, I suppose, because apparently it's unavoidable, here in the sport without ideas.

Still, it would be nice if we could see some other tactical or managerial move beyond finding creative ways to get Joey Gathright and Tony Pena Jr. as many plate appearances as possible.