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I wrote this on June 3, 2007:
That’s it. I’m done with Alex Gordon. It’s time to take a stand, and I’ll do it. He needs to be sent down to the minors. Check out his performance at the plate over the weekend: 0-8 with five strikeouts. It’s getting so I can barely watch his at bats. I’m not giving up on him, he has so much talent, but something needs to be done. And the longer the Royals wait, the worse it’s going to get. They need to be proactive here and farm him out for a few weeks. I’m advocating the Mark Teahen treatment: Down for a month and bring him back. Let him tear up some minor league pitching and get his head right.
At the time of that post and through the first 52 games of his career, Gordon was hitting .172/.287/.278. He was lost at the plate and in the field. He had skipped Triple-A after spending 2006 in Double-A and was clearly off track. When I wrote that, the feeling was he was over his head in the majors and simply needed some more seasoning in the minor leagues.
Here we are two and a half years later and Gordon is finally going down.
There’s been a ton of speculation about the move being tied to service time and delaying Gordon’s free agency. Currently, he’s set to become a free agent following the 2012 season. It’s possible this demotion could push his free agency back a year, to after the 2013 season.
Let’s try to clearly spell out this service time thing.
A player must spend 172 days on a major league roster to count as a full season. That includes time on the DL.
Alex Gordon has spent 135 days on the Royals roster this year. There are 47 days left in the season. On the surface, it would appear that if he spends 10 days in Omaha, he won't get credit for a full season.
However, there’s an exception...
If a player is sent to the minors for a total of 20 days or less during a season, that player will earn a full year of service time.
The Omaha Royals have exactly 20 days left in their season. This means Gordon can finish the Triple-A season and be recalled on September 8. If that happens, he will have his free agency pushed back a year. Also, don’t assume that just because the Omaha season ends on September 7, Gordon has to be (or will be) back in Kansas City. He can be recalled at any time between now and the end of the Royals season on October 4. So if the Royals think he’s still struggling with his bat when Omaha’s season ends, they can send him to Arizona to continue his work.
Basically, that’s the service time issue in a nutshell. If Gordon is back before September 8, his service time clock keeps ticking and he’ll be eligible for free agency following the 2012 season.
(By the way, this does nothing to effect the fact he will be eligible for salary arbitration this winter. If he doesn’t have three years of service time, he will still qualify as a Super Two.)
OK. Now if the Royals are truly doing this to manipulate his service time, that is about as low as an organization can get. Of course, Dayton Moore says the demotion is all about performance.
From Royals.com:
"Since he's come back from injury, he's been behind a little bit. I just think it's been a little fast for him and he just needs to get some consistent at-bats in a different level of competition and get his sense of timing back both offensively and defensively."
Perhaps. But I’d feel a little better about what GMDM says if he hadn’t told me how he values OBP. Basically, I take every thing he says with a grain of salt. Besides, do you think he’d come out and say something like, “We want to delay his free agency as much as possible. We may even do something like this next year.” Uh, not going to happen.
Predictably, Moore says the demotion doesn’t have anything to do with Gordon’s service clock. Here’s his quote from Dutton at the Star:
“We’re trying to win games at the major-league level,” he said, “and we’re trying to make sure we put our young players in a position to be successful long term. This (move) in our opinion, in our baseball judgment, puts Alex Gordon in the best position to be successful.”
Trying to win games? Man, with everything that is wrong with this team, I’d rank Alex Gordon’s offensive issues somewhere in the middle. It’s not helping, but when your line up is stacked with stalwarts such as Wee Willie Bloomquist, Miguel Olivo and Mike Jacobs, Gordon kind of just blends in. He’s part of the crowd.
Personally, I think it’s a happy (for the front office) coincidence that this move is being made now. I think there are some in the organization who feel Gordon needs to get his timing and confidence back. And I think they realized a move now would be to their potential benefit in 2013.
Because he has been horrible. For me, the red flag was his lack of extra base hits upon his return. It took him 14 games and over 50 plate appearances before he hit anything more than a single. He’s never hit for much power (or enough power, depending upon your perspective) but that kind of power outage was crazy.
Defensively, I don’t know. Hillman says his positioning is off. That’s really weird because I thought positioning wasn’t really a skill. Gordon has never really impressed me with the glove (I’ve found him to be an average to slightly below average defender) so I can’t say I’ve really noticed anything out of the ordinary.
It’s a shame this organization didn’t have the foresight or the guts to send him down when he needed it the first time. Then we wouldn’t be having this conversation today.
Then, there’s another thing that needs to be addressed. With this move, the Royals will now be carrying 13 pitchers. Thirteen pitchers.
Is this part of The Process? Quantity over quality? There is no Earthly reason this team (or any team) needs 13 pitchers. None.
From Daily Baseball Data, here’s a snapshot of how SABR Trey has used his bullpen over the last seven games (excluding Tuesdays win against the White Sox.)
He just hates going to Robinson Tejeda, doesn’t he? Of course, he had to go to him tonight. It was the Good Tejeda who pitched (3 IP, 5 K!!!) so he threw 45 pitches. The point is, there aren’t enough innings to go around to begin with. Why add another reliever? Besides, adding another bullpen arm only gives Hillman another chance to screw things up. Is that what we want, eight pitchers used in a Kyle Davies start instead of seven. Damn, the games are long enough already. What about Roman Colon? The dude has been absolutely horrible. Why does he still pitch in the major leagues?
Rany makes this point, and it’s a good one. For all the struggles with the bullpen, the Royals have used only 12 relievers this season. And that counts failed starters Sidney Ponson, Bruce Chen and Horacio Ramirez. Pretty amazing. You have a bullpen that is absolutely horrible and all you do is rotate players on and off the DL. That’s it. That’s the only move. No call-ups from Triple-A. No trades. No signings off the free agent scrap heap. Nothing.
And now there's the issue of Gordon and his free agent year. This will do nothing but hurt this team in the long term. Agents will recognize this and steer their young draft picks away from the Royals with whispers of, "You don't want to play for these guys. They'll find a way to screw you." Then there are those who will decry the Wal-Mart tactics of this team - always taking the cheap way out. For awhile, I would get angry at the writers who would always say the same thing about the Royals... How they're cheap and don't ever spend. "That's not fair!" I argued. "Things are different, and have been for awhile." Now, I'm not so sure anything has really changed. This reeks of Royals Baseball, circa 1999.
The official line from the Royals is that Gordon was sent down to work on his timing. Turns out, the Royals need to work on theirs.
Trust The Process.
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Comments
I just have a feeling if he can figure out ML pitching, then we could be looking at an ideal 2 hitter who could on base in the .375 to .400 range, with a bit of pop. That is something this team could desperately use seeing as it seems we are always going to have "sure thing" outs at the bottom of our order.
As far as the others Hoch has looked great at times this year and still looks like he is figuring things out. I think he could be a legitimate 3, but if he is our 4 or 5 for the next few years then I'll take it. Moustakas and Hosmer are two and one years out of high school respectively, so lets reserve judgment until they fail at the same level twice.