Hope I don't step on RRs toes, as I know he is preparing a season ending post in which we can (hopefully) put this sad year in some kind of perspective.

I was looking at Baseball Prospcetus' VORP for Pitchers, and it got me wondering. I sorted the category by team, and looked at KC.

Did you know we used 31 pitchers on the year, and nearly half (15) of them posted a negative VORP?!? That's ridiculous! VORP is supposed to represent "replacement level" talent; i.e., pitchers that are readily available in the minors and in theory would produce a zero VORP rating if just given the chance.

I then totalled VORP for all of our pitchers, and it came up to:

-7.5

That's right - our pitching staff, as a whole, was BELOW REPLACEMENT LEVEL!

Honestly, the good people at BP must be having second thoughts about their methodology! This simply should not be possible!

Of course, if you stick with pitchers who are clearly inadequate, and you stick with them too long, I suppose this result is less amazing.

Let's take a look at some of the larger offenders:

Joe Mays -16.9 in only 23.7 IP
Hernandez -13.2 in 109.7 IP
Wood -7.7 in 64.7 IP
Sisco -7.6 in 58.3 IP
Stemle -6.1 in 6 IP
Duckworth -5.2 in 45.7 IP
Dohmann -4.9 in 23.7 IP
Affeldt -3.7 in 70 IP

Mays didn't work out at all; however, at least they dumped him after a relatively low number of innings. Wood and Sisco could both probably benefit from more minor league seasoning. Stemle got hurt, so can't criticize the organization too much on that one. Affeldt was traded for a positive position player; however, Dohmann was acquired in said trade and did not merit the number of innings given to him, IMHO. Ditto for Duckworth - should have been released, hopefully will be by Nov 20th deadline for setting the 40 man roster. That leaves the most egregious error on the list - Fat Elvys. Absolutely cannot see a justification for giving over a 100 innings to a guy performing that poorly. Yes, you could argue they were desperately trying to showcase him for trading, but realistically, how bad would your team have to be before you would attempt to acquire him? And even if you did, why in the world would you risk trading even a Grade B prospect for him?

I want to be fair to Dayton here. Rather than an indictment of Moore, what this probably indicates more than anything else is just exactly how much our minor league system was left to rot under the Glass "leadership". Seriously, it appears our pitching was so thin in the minors that we couldn't even come up with replacement level bodies to replace the failures on the major league staff.

Keep in mind, replacement level means minor leaguers that nobody really covets all that much, NOT the good prospects whom you presumably would not want to use in this manner anyway.