#7 - Same guy in a different suit

If you want us to believe that things are going to be different, you’re going to have to stop sounding like things are exactly the same, J.J. Picollo.

When newish Royals owner John Sherman made the move to fire Dayton Moore—a move I’d argued for without cessation since about 2012, even while they were in their very limited competitive window which only opened because there was a dead ball in baseball for two-plus years because it was as clear then as it is now that Dayton Moore did not have the skillset to run a baseball team in the modern era—it was a move that still left the more critical spirits scratching their head.

It wasn’t just that Moore couldn’t evaluate free agent talent on the open market, which he absolutely could not do, as the well-above market contracts issued to Ian Kennedy, Gil Meche, José Guillén, Omar Infante, Willie Bloomquist, Juan Cruz, Brandon Moss, Jason Hammel, Travis Wood, and more bear out.

Or that Moore couldn’t draft and develop amateur talent, an issue that was truly exacerbated once they hard-slotted spending caps in the draft meaning he couldn’t just outspend everyone, which he did early on and then pinned all hopes on the big-money prospects who got to the bigs on sheer talent and talent alone.

Or that Moore couldn’t pull the trigger on trading players away for prospects when it was crystal clear that it needed to happen, like with Joakim Soria or David DeJesus or Ron Mahay or Whit Merrifield (for like five years).

Photo by Jason D on Unsplash

Or that Moore couldn’t employ even a shred of critical introspection, castigating justified critical spirits instead of actually analyzing why his teams kept showing deficiencies in the same areas year after year.

Or that Moore held an annual anti-pornography symposium for his players in an apparent effort to be baseball’s Edwin Meese all while sending up test balloons to see how the public might react to him drafting Luke Heimlich, who was a convicted molester of his own niece, because he’s spoken with the young man and knew the true self that lay underneath the skeezy molesty surface apparently.

The reasons for retaining Moore were pretty much limited to: he seems to genuinely care about baseball and about his players.

So when Sherman fingered Moore’s lieutenant, J.J. Picollo to succeed him as the Royals top exec in baseball operations, it was genuinely puzzling to see Sherman speak about how the organization needed to evolve while plugging in a man who’s worked in Moore’s shadow for his entire professional career. If Moore wasn’t equipped to keep running the franchise, why would someone who presumably learned everything he knew in the game at Moore’s right hand be better suited for the job?

Sherman and Picollo proceeded to say all the right things in their Moore dismissal/Picollo promotion presser, but saying the right things and actually being able to do them are not the same.

Additionally, the subsequent hiring of a manager and then this week of position coaches who superficially seem like solid gets helped make it look like things might be on the right track.

Then J.J. Picollo sat down for an interview with David Laurila of FanGraphs…

…and it was honestly like Dayton Moore had never left. He unfurled a string of completely meaningless buzzword doublespeak right off the bat.

When asked how he’d differ from Moore, he responded:

Culturally and fundamentally, there will be a lot of similarities, because it’s just baseball and how you run an organization. That said, we want to be a little more open-minded to different ways of improving our roster, and utilizing our roster. Player acquisition… a lot has been made about being transactional, but I think that can be overstated. When you’re transactional, you’re just trying to make your team better. If it makes our team better, then we’ll be transactional…

Could he have hedged any harder about being transactional? He’s basically saying, “Don’t worry, kids, I’ll only make moves to make the team better!” while saying he both will and won’t be transactional.

When prodded about the org’s failures with regard to pitcher development over the duration of his tenure in the org as Moore’s second-in-command, he had the gall to answer as follows:

I think what needs to happen is mostly at the major league level. We’ve examined what we’re doing developmentally. And by no means do we think we’re perfect in developing pitchers, but I believe we had the third-highest number of pitchers from the 2018 draft in the major leagues. When you compare what they’ve done to other teams, we’re a top-five development system. It’s just that they haven’t had the success at the major league level, as a group, that is needed for us to compete at the top of the division.

What needs to happen is mostly at the major league level? Are you fucking high? How can an org that has two of its last three first-round draft picks—both of whom are TOP 10 PICKS (and if I wanted to be even more of an asshole, they’re top 7 picks)—completely unable to throw strikes while wasting away in A-ball. Your #4 pick of the 2020 draft walked more batters than he struck out this past season.

2018 is only the success you claim it to be because you and the org took four pitchers in the first 40 picks of the draft. Brady Singer is the only one who looks the part of the successful major-leaguer at this point. Development doesn’t stop the instant a player is promoted to the major-league roster, J.J. Jackson Kowar, Daniel Lynch, Kris Bubic, Jon Heasley aren’t success stories just because you’re wanting them to be when measured solely by the metric that the reached the majors. The non-Singer class of 2018 were all within the error bars of being replacement-level this past season.

And top-five development system?

Fuck off.

When asked about whether they’ll utilize analytics more in giving their pitchers the tools they need to complete their transformation into successful major-league pitchers, he falls back on the same shit Dayton Moore parroted about being more “analytics-minded” than they’re credited for, but that coaches need to find a way to incorporate the data better. So not only are they way more into analytics than we think, but it was the fault of the coaches THEY FUCKING HIRED for not doing a better job before of getting players to buy in.

You don’t get to say you’re into analytics if the org doesn’t use any of the data generated by your analytics team, J.J. You’re just telling us that you burned an entire department’s worth of money.

If you want us to believe that things are going to be different, you’re going to have to stop sounding like things are exactly the same, J.J. Picollo.