Performance Evaluation: Dayton Moore and Drafting Pitchers

This year I’ll be doing weekly performance evaluations of the Royals.  Most of these will center around player performances in the majors and minors but to get us started lets checkout how the General Manager and his troops have done at finding pitching talent.

The Royals have moved beyond the “Greatest System” days, past the four lefty studs into the next step of The Process.

Have they actually failed or is this just a product of baseball?  To identify that we should look at GMDM’s development crew past and present.  Judge it against the staffs that preceded and replaced him.

To do this I thought it be appropriate to checkout the Top 5 rounds of the draft in the time Dayton has had major influence on the picks his team makes.  I chose the Top 5 rounds because there is a somewhat of a consensus within those rounds to who has the possible talent to make an impact in the majors.  Yes a player can slip due to signability but as we’ve seen with Wil Myers and Tim Melville those players generally get taken prior to the end of the 5th round.  Other players outside the Top 5 rounds can become stars but I’ll use the Tom Brady principle in my thinking, if you passed on a guy multiple times prior to picking him and he became a star then your own luck outweighed your talent.

GMDM Era ’07-Current 4.3 brWAR (Crow and Coleman)
2007 – Sam Runion, Danny Duffy and Mitch Hodge
2008 – Mike Montgomery, Tyler Sample, Tim Melville and John Lamb
2009 – Aaron Crow, Chris Dwyer, Louis Coleman
2010 – Kevin Chapman and Jason Adam

Atlanta Braves Since 2007 6.4 brWAR (On Kimbrel’s back)
2007- Cory Gearrin
2008- Brett DeVall, Tyler Stovall, Zeke Spruill, Craig Kimbrel, Jacob Thompson
2009- Mike Minor, David Hale, Thomas Berryhill
2010- Dave Filak

Photo by Levi Payton

Allard Baird Era Previous 5 Seasons 30.8 brWAR (the power of hitting with one stud)
2006 – Luke Hochevar (-0.1), Jason Godin
2005 – Chris Nicoll
2004 – Matt Campbell, JP Howell, Billy Buckner, Erik Cordier, Nate Moore, Henry Barrera
2003 – Chris Goodman
2002 - Zack Greinke, Dan Christensen

Atlanta Braves 02-06 3.3 brWAR (Matt Harrison pulls this group from the negative with his 8.9 brWAR)
2006 – Steve Evarts, Jeff Locke, Dustin Evans, Chad Rogers, Lee Hyde and Kevin Gunderson
2005 – Joey Devine, Beau Jones, Jeff Lyman, Mike Broadway and Will Startup
2004 – James Parr
2003 – Luis Atilano, Jo-Jo Reyes, Jake Stevens, Matt Harrison, Chris Vines
2002 – Dan Meyer (made it as a hitter), Charlie Morton

To recap the GMDM era drafts have produced 7.6 pitching brWAR from 2002 to today.  The majority of that value comes from Matt Harrison who the Braves traded in the disgusting Mark Teixeira deal that has seen their team miss out on nearly 30 brWAR for one and a half seasons of Tex.  While the GMDM group put up 7.6 wins above replacement their counterparts have put together 37.2 brWAR to date, thanks to the lawnmower man and his 29.5 wins above replace.  In both instances one solid starter did most of the heavy lifting while bullpen pieces added to the mix.

The uglier sign of that GMDM era in Atlanta is that the Top 5 rounds actually resulted in a -5.1 brWAR for the Braves franchise.  That is right, the little possitive value that GMDM drafts created from ’02-07 went to other teams in trades.  A couple lower round picks, Tommy Hansen and Jonny Venters have produced 11 brWAR in their time with the Braves however.

It is too soon to close the door on the draft classes that the Moore era has created in KC as we still haven’t seen what John Lamb, Danny Duffy and the rest of the crew can produce but considering his past track record in Atlanta and the possible failure of the greatest farm system since sliced bread, things aren’t looking too shiny.  Is it development?  Is it talent evaluation?  Or is it just bad luck?  We likely won’t find out those answers for a few more years.

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