The Dayton Moore All-Stars

In his 1997 book, The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, Bill James created career All-Star teams for several prominent managers. The idea was to give a snapshot of the best seasons that managed had by position. He didn't do Joe Torre because Torre had just started with the Yankees at that point, but were he to return to it today, it might look something like this:

I put Bernie Williams in left field because both he and Murphy should be mentioned if you're going to provide a representative picture of Torre and besides, Torre rarely had great left fielders, Hideki Matsui being the closest to making the list. Here are the pitchers.

These are a lot of fun to do. I did several of them for Baseball Prospectus back in the day, including the example above, and should probably do a few more, because it's been 16 years since James did his version and we now have managers like Bobby Cox and Tony LaRussa whose entire careers are now in the books, as well as still-active managers with a lengthy record to choose from, for example Jim Leyland, Terry Francona, and Buck Showalter.

It occurred to me, though, that James' All-Star teams could be applied to general managers as well. There are no stats that rate general managers easily. We can compile their trades and look at WAR in and WAR out as a shorthand for winning and losing trades, but that's time-consuming and not always terribly instructive given the many considerations that go into making a deal. It seems to me, though, that maybe it's useful to see just how many standout seasons a GM acquired for his team. I can think of no better place to start than with the general manager of the Kansas City Royals, Dayton Moore.

It feels like a cheat to list Billy Butler twice; Eric Hosmer's post-George Brett surge will probably net him that spot by the end of the year. Still, first base is not going to be the position that rescues the Moore All-Stars from mediocrity. Note the almost complete lack of walks on this table. This is actually a problem that spans the entire history of the Royals franchise. Just six Royals have taken 100 walks in a season, the last being former hitting coach Kevin Seitzer in 1989. No player Royals has taken as many as 80 walks since 1998. This is a shortcoming for which no general manager can escape culpability: You may be required to build your team on the cheap, but no one says you have to build it with self-defeating players.

I thought it would also be interesting to see what the worst seasons a general manager tolerated for an extended period of time were. That's a bit complicated to do in Moore's case because (a) a lot of his best guys are also his worst, though not at the same time, (b) he's packed a whole lot of awful into right field with guys like Jose Guillen, Jeff Francouer, and Mark Teahen that I don't even know how to break all of it out, and (c) Wade Davis is presently rewriting the record books insofar as Moore-era pitching wickedness goes; at 4-9 with a 5.92 ERA he's a full two wins below replacement, so I think we had better wait.

The right field thing is especially wacky. Moore took over as Royals GM at the end of May, 2006. Royals aggregate production in right field since then:

Right field is the position where baseball expects you to stash your burly sluggers, your cleanup hitters. In seven years of trying, Moore's Royals have gotten to average or above once. They may yet get there this year because David Lough has played well since pushing Jeff Francoeur all the way to San Francisco, but it's still not going to be a big, "This is an asset we can point to going forward" kind of win for the team. It's going to be more like, "Hey, we battled one of the easier positions to fill to a draw. Someone order pizza."

This is kind of a low-intensity exercise. We're not saying the general manager had to put together a great team in a single season, but just that we can find the elements of one scattered about his résumé -- maybe he couldn't get it all together in a single season, but by exhibiting taste, intelligence, and discernment, we can see that over a span of years he was able to identify good players at each position. You can't really do that with Dayton Moore.

So when Ken Rosenthal says --

Sources: #Royals willing to listen on Ervin Santana, would move for right offer.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) July 24, 2013

-- and you know Moore is evaluating the players coming back, it doesn't fill you with confidence that he's going to pick the right guys, does it?

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