Vargas has been throwing and should be back within a week or two. If KC is going after a starter it is to add depth in the case that Duffy and/or Ventura are shut down in September, IMO. While our rotation is good, there's nothing outside of the five guys besides Chen.. need depth.

Vargas threw a simulated game today. I can't imagine they are too worried.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Leftovers on Valencia deal: The team needed to bring up Colon to spell Escobar/Infante. The path to do so led through Ibanez or Valencia.</p>&mdash; Andy McCullough (@McCulloughStar) <a href="https://twitter.com/McCulloughStar/statuses/494257887414218752">July 29, 2014</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>So the option was either DFA Ibanez and receive nothing, or turn Valencia into something. They chose the latter route.</p>&mdash; Andy McCullough (@McCulloughStar) <a href="https://twitter.com/McCulloughStar/statuses/494257962899087360">July 29, 2014</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>For the Royals to pick up Ryan Howard, as <a href="https://twitter.com/JeffPassan">@JeffPassan</a> speculated, the Phillies would likely have to eat basically every dollar on the deal.</p>&mdash; Andy McCullough (@McCulloughStar) <a href="https://twitter.com/McCulloughStar/statuses/494261176776146944">July 29, 2014</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Also, God bless Danny Valencia, but he was worth -0.2 WAR according to B-R and 0.1 WAR according to FanGraphs. Everyone settle down.</p>&mdash; Andy McCullough (@McCulloughStar) <a href="https://twitter.com/McCulloughStar/statuses/494262819613728768">July 29, 2014</a></blockquote>
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lmao

ummmm

that guy just made the exact point I made this thread that you tried to argue

haha

So if Ned Yost makes it to the end of the season, he'll be the longest-tenured manager in Royals history. Think about that.

Passan is stealing my ideas! This might be true now... although my thinking was if they turn Butler loose, the Royals could take on a portion of that salary.

we can buy and sell for all I care

I just know that trading Shields/Holland is the best thing this franchise could do

Well, losing a one run game at home to a clearly inferior opponent while in the playoff chase will surely motivate these guys to bring in a power hitting right fielder (from somewhere, anywhere), right?

Right?

I'm going to see our Royals in Phoenix next week. If they play like this against an awful Dbacks team I'll attack Yost.

Bookmarked. We all expect you to go at Yost like you guys are on the Springer show if these limp dicks play out there like they did here tonight.

I was so embarrassed I went out and posted it.

Now, you should go ahead and read what it actually says.

Lol these one run losses are devastating.

Guess the A's are interested in trading for Lester. Damn Billy wants to win this year.

If GMDM stands pat...that's a huge head scratcher. Is his seat not getting warmer? You have to make a move here. Either get your big bat and say "Playoffs or Bust"...or deal Shields and say "2015 is the year". If he stands pat.....thats just a big 'fug you' to Royals fans.

Some comments from that page:

Yes, if you ignore the fact that Shields and Wade Davis are gone after this year (Davis too expensive to keep under existing contract), and that Tampa still has 5+ years of cheap control of Odorizzi & Shields, AND Montgomery (pitching so well in AAA that he can’t be too far from a call up) & Leonard.

So imagine that Montgomery blows his arm out and never recovers & Leonard quits baseball to become a traveling musician. And Will Meyers only turns out to be an average player, and Odorizzi a mediocre back end starter, and the Rays only get 3 WAR a year between them. That’s akin to KC sending Tampa Bay a check for $15M every year for the next 5 seasons.

And if Myers becomes a star and Odorizzi an average starter, & Montgomery a back end starter or decent reliever, the check should be closer to $30M a year.

So yea, KC took every penny of the value they got from this trade, crammed it into 2013 & 2014, and still barely got more value than Tampa did in those years, and still missed the playoffs, and cost themselves a very large amount of value over the next 5 years to do it.

Shoot me now:

And you forgot that KC spent $30M in extra payroll the last two years to get Shields/Davis, which could have been used on a decent free agent starter, and keep Odorizzi & Myers, and they would have been just as good, if not a playoff team (if the FA pitcher had been Anibel Sanchez who signed a back loaded deal with the Tigers that pays him less than $25M over those seasons)

So you're saying we won the trade?!?!

You can literally go back and find posters arguing this exact same point when the trade happened.

We don't even need hindsight to see how flawed the approach was. Keeping the players and reallocating the dollars was always the approach that DM should have taken, but he's just too ****ing stupid (or narrow-minded) to consider the possibility.

You are right. Forgive me for using this thread as an outlet, my therapist said it would be good for me.

So assuming GMDM is fired in the offseason, who would be your leading candidate for GM?

It's actually probably better for the Royals long term if Moore stands pat and DOESN'T make a move.

1) He doesn't overpay for a player who might or might not give the Royals enough to make the playoffs this year. They're now 3.5 games out of the WC standings with tough trips upcoming.

2) It increases the likelihood that this is the end of the shitshow that is the Dayton Moore/Ned Yost era.

3) The Royals don't move out long-term value for dubious short-term gain. When the Shields/Davis trade was made, I compared it to Dayton Moore going all in with something like QUEEN-9, off suit. Making a "splash" trade now is akin to adding his car to the pot while behind before the river. (based on their monetary situation/rumors, the splash trade would have to feature the trading team eating a big portion of the contract, which means higher cost in prospects or young players)

A competent GM would see that moving Shields/Holland for future pieces is the only thing to do that makes any sense. There are teams hungry for pitching looking to make a push and we could use some more cheap, club controlled talent stocked in the pond right now.

http://www.technologyreview.com/site...?itok=0iUkyvzM

Farhan Zaidi.

Odds of a geezer from Northwest Arkansas hiring him? I'd say they're probably about negative eleventy bajilliion.

Anyway, Zaidi is one of the hotter names around. Not sure how in-demand he would be, might be tough for KC to pull him if, say, Philadelphia's GM spot also opened up.

It's nearly impossible to discuss this topic rationally with Royals fans, who say things like "we barely got more value these two years" when Frangraphs shows its been a rout, ~10-4 WAR. We've clearly gotten the better of the deal in the short run and we can debate the long run. But if you can't even recognize facts about the present, then it's all pointless.

I would like to point out how amused I am at the schizophrenic fan base we have here. Who is simultaneously blasting the Shields acquisition, but pining for us to do it again and pick up Marlon Byrd or whoever for prospects. That's some funny shit right here.

I think the majority of us now realize its too late for this and would rather sell now than be buyers.

Hope so. Some head in the clouds, unrealistic type folk still hold onto some fantasy that after over a 100 games, a team is some how going to change its spots, but I agree that most see it for what it is. It was apparent in the spring that this was a .500 ball club and that's exactly what they are. To mortgage any piece of the potential future would be beyond idiotic, which is why I fully expect it to happen by tomorrow.

**** the wild card. We coming for YOU Detroit!

I think that's a matter of the window for a player acquisition helping enough rapidly shrinking.

I know I've beaten the Byrd drum pretty hard, but I've been doing it since early in the season, and the cost for a guy like that in prospects should NOT be incredibly high.

In 10 years. /Dayton

Dayton just needs another five to ten years, and we'll be able to compete for the second wild card slot.

Hey, we gave you a carousel and a whiffle ball park, what do you want from us, people?

or we could have just kept Santana around...

I love armchair GM. Sign Sanchez and Santana! Of course t takes two to tango. Did it ever occur to anyone most FA really don't want to play (or frankly live) here? We are poor and we're not a sexy city for a 30 year old male many of whom are Latino anyway. We ha to trade for Shields because a guy like him normally won't sign here.


People will whine about Shields all day (even though the Fangraphs article says he's been the 13th best pitcher in all of MLB since coming and has been "everything we hoped for"). But we all know the culprits of our failure and last nights game was great reminder of why Shields can't take us to the playoffs.

Yup. Free agents aren't coming here without being paid a little more or having family in teh area, etc.

The Shields trade was always a boom or bust move. I was incensed initially and gradually came around to being more OK with it IF the Royals made the playoffs during his tenure.

If KC doesn't make the playoffs with Shields, it's a losing proposition for the Royals. Just no way around it.

And they still can make the playoffs. And, they could do it without making any trades. I would rather nothing happen than give up a prospect with great potential.

As far as selling, for Shields, they'll get a comp pick. For Holland, Davis, etc, they might actually get more by trading them in the offseason, IE, the Grienke deal.

We can't do that, and there is not a GM in baseball who would make that move, given the history of the club, the fanbase, and the reality of what the Shields trade meant.

This is not video game or strat-o-matic baseball, this is the real thing, with a team that hasn't made the playoffs in almost 3 decades, and after you have already essentially gone all-in for this season 2 years ago.

A few people in this thread have basically said that we're out of it anyway, so we may as well get what we can, but they are just flat-out wrong. The odds are not good, but even the most pessimistic simulations still have it at about 10-15%. Trading Shields and Holland for some low-level prospects undeniably harms if not destroys what little playoff chances we have. Maintaining those small odds for this season is worth more to the team and the fans than what little we may be giving up by not trading them. I wouldn't add to the team, we pretty much need to win or lose with this team, there's no sense in burning some real high-level prospects to improve for this season. But, we just can't wave the white flag.

We weren't going to the playoffs with Shields or Myers. It's stunning to me that people can't see such an obv concept.

The only way the Royals can trade Shields is to get a return that helps the team this year or the Royals lose the PR battle with majority of the fan base.

Good point, to the extent that we may miss out by not trading Shields, some of that is mitigated by the pick we get after he declines the QO. So what we're missing out on by going for it with Shields is the marginal difference between that pick and whatever we would have gotten.

Dude, you said what I was trying to say. You just said it better.

WTF are you talking about. Santana WAS HERE.

We're taking the division folks. I have a very positive outlook today for whatever reason (caffeine?). Tomorrow I'll be back to normal and I'll say we have 0 chance of a division title or wild card...

Plus, you trade away those guys now with where we sit, and good luck attracting FA to come play here without grossly overpaying. It sets a terrible tone of the franchise's mindset.

Santana was traded, he didn't have choice.

that's true, but if we had actually offered him a fair multi year deal he would have taken it.

But nobody offered him what he thought was fair. He ended up signing for exactly what the qualifying offer was the Royals offered.

By my count, after last night the Royals this year are 4-8 in games that end 2-1. That seems like an extraordinarily high number of 2-1 games played, but I don't know how it compares to other teams.

I do know that last year the Royals were 3-3 in 2-1 games.

This. The playoff shot rested on Butler, Hosmer and Moose not totally busting. They all did this year and even with a bit of bounce back the rest of the way, to little to late. No way Ventura and Duffy both go all year, Shields is ok but we still trot Guthrie and Chen out there every 5th day. This is not a playoff team. People should accept that and not set themselves up to be disappointed come September.

I didn't like the Shields trade when it happened, but it is what it is. Moore needed to save his job and he apparently did enough to do that so his personal mission was accomplished.

Pretty sad that we gave up our best offensive prospect and "threw in" players who Tampa turned into valuable pieces. You can look back at it now and it's even worse than it was then. This team is an offensive joke and on top of that this pitching staff would be good without Shields. You'd add Odorizzi back and odds are there's more than enough money to pay Santana without the Shields or Davis contracts.

Of course it's hindsight but tons of people hated this trade when it happened so is it really hindsight?

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>The Indians are trading Justin Masterson to the Cardinals</p>&mdash; Peter Gammons (@pgammo) <a href="https://twitter.com/pgammo/statuses/494544422940712960">July 30, 2014</a></blockquote>
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Are people really bitching about Guthrie as a 5th starter and Chen as an injury fill in? Geez.

When your offense is this bad you need 5 aces to stand a shot.

When people say things like "hey the back of the Royals rotation is better than most" that's true it is. But it doesn't help when your run production is this god ****ing awful.

People need to understand that what destroyed our playoff chances was a guy who never played here: Chris Sale. Our internal debate over him led us to choose Colon on the draft. Had we not done that, we'd have made the playoffs. (And not lost games to him either)

Yep.

Yea well according to a bunch of people that think the Shields trade is great if we had taken Sale he'd either be Mike Montgomery who they gave up on or a left handed setup man.

I'm not saying it's over, but....

This should be the first post on next year's thread.

Sale was a finished product. Move through the Sox system in about 2-3 months of actual playing time.

Probably couldn't have fugged that up.

And yes, if they take Sale over Colon and he has the same level of success, they never make the Shields trade.

OH NOES!

I hope Brandon Finnegan will be the Royals equivalent to Sale. I'd love to see him in KC's rotation next year.

Don't get to attached. I'm sure he'll be traded for Bobby Abreu tomorrow

Ha !! I try not to be that pessimistic. I believe Finnegan is closer to making it to KC than Zimmer is.

Okay. I won't be so negative. He'll be traded for Cody Ross then

How is Zimmer's arm now that he's been throwing for a few weeks?

Last I heard he was still in Arizona and not pitching in games.

I think he's on a throwing program for a couple of weeks. Once he's done with that then he'll finish at one of the MILB teams in August,

not quite exactly...and at that point moore had already said we had moved on.

if we hadn't traded for shields do most people here think we couldn't have signed him?

this is my point exactly

The fug ...?

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Teams closing in on Bonifacio are Kansas City San Francisco , Baltimore and Seattle .</p>&mdash; Bruce Levine (@MLBBruceLevine) <a href="https://twitter.com/MLBBruceLevine/statuses/494562065437061120">July 30, 2014</a></blockquote>
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I'd laugh HYSTERICALLY if we gave boni up for NOTHING and end up giving ANYTHING to get him back ROFL

I say fire Moore, let Yost be a lame duck and trade everyone.

LMAO.

No ****ing way. LMAO. This would have to result in automatically firing DM.

Because Royals.

Trading to reacquire Bonifacio, should it happen, might rank top 5 on the list of the Royals most facepalm worthy moments in franchise history. I've never heard of anything like that before.

Which makes it all the more reason that it needs to happen. Get on the phone Dayton!!

29 years and counting...

If I remember correctly, back in the Carl and Marty days, they had the ability to sign Bam Morris when he was a free agent but didn't. Then they later traded a draft pick for him.

edit: it might have been Barry Word instead of Bam Morris. I don't feel like looking it up.

That's hilarious

Does the "It's a process" fit here?