The Zack Greinke trade of last December was aptly dubbed a “blockbuster,” meaning that several players changed hands in the transition. So to evaluate the trade requires more than just a one-to-one comparison.

Photo Courtesy of Minda Haas

One of the centerpieces of the trade for the Royals was Alcides Escobar. Their arsenal of top prospects lacked a hot shortstop, and fans lusted for a change from whipping boy Yuniesky Betancourt.

Betancourt was not a centerpiece of the trade. He was a throw-in. Or more accurately, he was a throw-out. The Royals wanted rid of Betancourt, and the Brewers were willing to swap shortstops to get Greinke.

But what if the Royals had had the opportunity to trade Betancourt for Escobar even up during last off-season?

Certainly they would have jumped at the chance. Escobar’s struggles in his debut season in Milwaukee hadn’t completely tarnished his top-10 prospect ranking. Betancourt, on the other hand, couldn’t even get credit for hitting three of the Royals’ four grand slams in 2010. No one liked him, and his chances of emerging from the doghouse in KC were nil.

Looking back now, however, would a trade of Betancourt for Escobar, even up, be such a good idea?

It didn’t always look like a good idea. Like when Betancourt hit .333 with a homer and 5 RBI’s in the National League Championships Series. It didn’t when he scored five runs against the D-Backs in the previous playoff series.

But it did when he muffed an easy ground ball that opened the floodgates against the Cardinals in game 5. And it did when balls that would seem playable by average shortstops eluded his reach repeatedly throughout the playoffs.

Such is life with Betancourt. But under close analysis, is Escobar any better?

Comparison of a few of their numbers would show there wasn’t much difference between the two during the 2011 campaign.

Escobar’s batting average during the first two months of the season would have embarrassed Mario Mendoza. But he heated up to finish with a .254 mark. Yuni, meanwhile, posted a .252 average. No difference there.

Escobar’s .290 OBP was just 10^th among AL shortstops – well below average. But Betancourt, who has a career .292 OBP, managed just .271 this year. Advantage Escobar.

Slugging is where Yuni has a decided advantage. Like him or not, you can’t debate that Yuni has developed some pop. His slugging percentage in 2011 was an acceptable .381. Not great but just .007 behind someone named Derek Jeter. And last year, he slugged .405. Escobar on the other hand? An anemic .343 last year. Advantage Betancourt.

After knocking 16 homers in 2010, Betancourt popped 13 more this season. After Ned Yost bragged about Escobar’s power in the spring, his shortstop managed just 4. Big advantage Betancourt.

But while Betancourt begins to look like the better player, we can’t forget to look at the total package. Escobar far outshines Betancourt in the eye test. Who can forget the lazy showing on fly balls? Or the strikeouts with runners on base? Or the lack of speed or range?

Those headache-inducing defensive statistics seemed to back up the perception that Escobar is the far superior fielder. He scored higher in fielding percentage and in putouts + assists per 9 innings. Yost boasted that Escobar’s “runs are in his glove,” meaning that he is taking away an inordinate number of runs from the opponent. His arm is certainly one of the best, and he seems to move much better than Betancourt.

And speaking of moving, Escobar can move on the base paths as well. He was third among AL shortstops with 26 stolen bases. Betancourt has just 30 steals in his 7-year career. Escobar also led AL shortstops with 8 triples. Betancourt has a decent number of triples in his career, but just five in the last two years combined.

So in addition to fielding, Escobar has a definite advantage in two areas – 1) speed and overall athleticism, and 2) age.

Escobar is just 24 and looks lithe and agile. Betancourt is 29 but looks like he’s 39.

Escobar’s stock appears to be trending up, while Betancourt’s is decidedly headed down. Escobar took off after his horrid start and improved drastically over the course of his second season in the bigs. Betancourt, on the other hand, seemed on the decline. I have little doubt that Betancourt will be replaced within the next couple of years and probably won’t even be in the big leagues when Escobar peaks.

Before the season, I wrote the following:

With the proper expectations, Escobar has a great chance of being one of the best in team history. If Escobar could hit .250 with 10 homers and 30-plus stolen bases in a season, he’d fall right in with the best offensive shortstops the Royals have ever had. If he plays excellent defense, it would be first time in a decade the team had that at short.

If he performs any better than that, he could go down as the greatest shortstop in Royals history.

(See the whole article about KC’s history of shortstops)

While he didn’t exactly blow anyone’s mind with his play last year, I’ll stand by that statement. I saw enough potential from June to September to believe Escobar is a significant upgrade over Betancourt. I believe he is Kansas City’s answer at short, and I believe he will be a fixture on great Royals teams for the next decade.

The same could never have been said about Yuni.

It’s tough to talk about the Royals this week. Usually a daily topic among my friends and I, even in the winter, we’ve found it hard to talk about the Royals this week. There’s simply nothing else to discuss. A precipitous falling back to earth has occurred. There is a myriad of topics that if they were the proverbial horse and we beat them anymore, PETA would be in front of www.I70baseball.com Headquarters protesting the cruelty to said horse.

Streakers can be entertaining

But I made a promise to write something every week. So this week I’m going to talk about streaking. Not the type of streaking that happens in less civilized Major League Stadiums. The type of streaking the Royals as a team, and Royals players have been doing. Alex Gordon went on a 19 game hitting streak. Certainly the longest of Gordon’s career, and one of the longest in recent memory for any Royals player. Last September Gordon declared to the Kansas City Star that he expected “to dominate next year”. Since then my friends and I have been calling him The Dominator. At first it was in jest, mocking Gordon’s domination of the American League. Now we call him The Dominator because he is actually dominating. Of Course, it’s only one month of domination. We reserve the right to switch at any time.

Not to be out done: Jeff Francoeur, at the time of this writing has at least a 17 game hitting streak. It’s the longest of Francoeur’s career. Francoeur and Gordon’s hitting streaks are the second time since 1900 teammates have had hitting streaks of longer than 15 games in April. Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez did in April 2007. Even if Francoeur’s streak ends, hopefully he continues on his hitting tear, and let’s a teammate become the Fan’s whipping boy this season.

Despite the awesome streaks from individual players. The Royals are on a six game losing streak. Another American League team had a six game losing streak to begin the season and you would have thought the sky was falling. Royals fans go through a six game losing streak and just assume that it’s supposed to happen. Certainly any baseball team can go on a six game losing streak and still have a nice season. Most of us understand the expectations were low for this season anyway. However, it’s frustrating to see a team give everything back in one road trip, and as of this writing the streak has not ended.

Like I wrote last week. This team is going to be a roller coaster. Right now we’re on the first big drop. But do not fear. Coasters usually go back up….at some point. They way the starting rotation is going, come June I expect the young arms in Omaha to ditch their Nexrad Radars and mesonets for crowns and scepters. At least I hope so. If not, the next time I go to Kauffman Stadium I’m going to root for a real streaker.

At the beginning of Spring Training if someone would have said the Royals are going to be good enough to win or split their first five series of the year, I would have been extremely skeptical along with most other baseball writers and analysts.

They are currently tied for first in their division with another surprise team, the Cleveland Indians, who are coming to town on Monday. Both teams will be coming in on early season high notes and with the expectations of setting an early tone for the American League Central.

The Royals bats have definitely gotten into rhythm with several everyday players batting at or over .300. The pitching staff is starting to come together quite nicely but now have an open slot for the setup role due to Robinson Tejada’s recent placement on the disabled list for the next couple of weeks. The defense continues to back up the quality pitching efforts by both the starters and the bullpen.

If the Royals can finish out their current series with Seattle on a high note, they will be able to carry that momentum into the showdown against Cleveland. The Cleveland series is games 5-8 in their thirteen consecutive playing day stretch this month. A sweep by either team would send a strong message to the rest of the division that their franchise is tired of being the American League whipping boy.

Last year the Royals finished out 8-10 against the Tribe including three straight losses to close out the season series. If the Royals want to continue to make positive strides with their young team, they will have to continue to step up and execute as they did the past two weeks.

Solid pitching from first pitch to the last out, timely hitting, and solid defense is what the Royals have demonstrated so far this month. Their success has even reached the realm of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, where people are saying things like this:

“Royals, you are getting my hopes up. Be careful for your sake!”
“Life in our house is great because the Royals are winning.”
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. How about another I-70 series!”

It’s very early in the season, but I don’t see anything wrong with instilling and investing a little excitement into this young and exciting team.

The aftershocks of the Zack Greinke trade are still reverberating in Royals-land, and KC fans are trying to wrap their heads around life without Zack and the outlook for the four new names added to the franchise. A lot of unknowns. But here I will take a look back at the known: Greinke and fellow trade piece Yuniesky Betancourt’s time with the Royals. Zack and Yuni both stirred the emotions of Royals fans. The similarities end there though.

Betancourt was another stopgap in the seemingly endless merry-go-round of subpar shortstops in Kansas City, and became a whipping boy for many fans. To the sabermetrically inclined, GM Dayton Moore’s acquisition of Betancourt mid-season 2009 was another glaring example of the organization’s head-in-the-sand attitude towards advances in baseball analysis. He was dreadful in his 71 games with the club in ’09 and marginally better in 2010. His 16 home runs—four of the grand variety—in 2010 came out of nowhere and did provide a boost. Still, that Moore included him in this trade takes the sting out of losing Greinke ever so slightly.

Zack has been a part of the Royals organization since the 2002 draft, so Royals fans have had a long time to get attached to him. He whizzed through the minors and made his Royals debut in a start in Oakland in 2004 when he was just 20 years old. He pitched well enough in his five innings that day to be in line for a win. The game served as an ominous foreshadow of things to come for Greinke: with the Royals up 4-2 and two outs in the bottom of the ninth, the Royals were primed to celebrate their young prospect’s first victory. But Eric Chavez hit a two run blast to tie it up, and the Royals dropped the game in the 11th. If Zack had any idea how many times his talents would be wasted by hapless Royals teams over the ensuing years, he would have demanded a trade then and there. Instead he trudged on, and had an encouraging rookie year (3.97 ERA, 4.70 FIP). Then came a tortuous sophomore campaign in which nothing seemed to go right. Zack wasn’t as bad as his 5.80 ERA and 5-17 record suggested (his FIP actually improved to 4.49), but the year took a toll on him.

His struggle with anxiety and depression that led to him walking away from baseball in 2006 spring training has been well documented and probably overblown, so here’s the short version: Greinke headed home to Orlando thinking he might become a lawnmower, but received some help and rediscovered his drive to play. Zack has credited then Royals GM Allard Baird and manager Buddy Bell for handling his problems with grace. He headed to AA Wichita where Frank White was managing and the team was winning games. Zack was supposedly enjoying being part of a winning team so much that he was disappointed when the call came to head to the losing big league club for three late-season relief appearances.

Greinke was hit hard early in ’07 and was moved to the bullpen after seven starts. There he made 38 largely effective appearances before being put pack into the rotation in time for seven more starts at the end of the year. It was in those games Greinke began filling his potential as an ace. With the season winding down, he shut out the White Sox for eight innings, allowing two hits, zero walks and striking out 10. He has never looked back. In 2008 he put it all together over a full season, and Kansas City had the makings of a star on their hands.

Royals fans were already endeared to Greinke at this point, but it was taken to a new level when he signed an extension before the ’09 season that everyone thought would keep him in Kansas City through 2012. In a city jaded by seeing homegrown players who achieve success bolting for larger paydays, fans were jubilant that Zack actually wanted to stay. He seemed to think Moore was putting the Royals in a position to contend, and silly as it seems now, there were dreams that the ’09 Royals could do just that. A motivated Greinke flew out of the gates, reeling off one of the sickest stretches of pitching in history. It took 24 innings into the season for anyone to get a run off him—and it was unearned. Through 10 starts, his ERA stood at 0.84 and he had 73 strikeouts and 12 walks. Royals fans started wishing each other a Happy Greinke Day when he was starting. And as if they needed anymore reason to love him, he told the media in New York, “I don’t want to pitch for New York in the playoffs. I want to pitch for Kansas City in the playoffs.”

The complete domination abated slightly in the middle of the season—perhaps when it was clear the Royals weren’t contenders—but then returned in full force at the end of the season. On August 25, he struck out 15 to set a new Royals record. He followed that up with an even better game: a one-hit shutout in Seattle. Much of his success was predicated on a slider so filthy it buckled the knees of anyone in a ten mile radius. He landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated and dominated an inning of the All-Star game. When the year was over, he had 242 strikeouts, a 2.16 ERA, an impossible 205 ERA+, a 2.33 FIP and a Cy Young trophy. It was probably one of the three greatest individual seasons in Royals history (along with George Brett’s 1980 and Bret Saberhagen’s 1989).

But Zack never seemed particularly excited about or interested in the individual achievements. He found it “annoying” when KC fans chanted “Cy Young” during his last home start of ’09. Greinke just wanted to win. And in spite of his once-in-a-decade performance in ’09, the team was merely 17-16 in games he started thanks to criminally bad run and bullpen support.

No one was deluding themselves that the 2010 Royals would be contenders, and it seemed to most observers that Zack lacked motivation last season. The traditional stats (4.17 ERA) show that he was downright mediocre, but of the things Zack could control, he was still an elite pitcher (3.34 FIP). Fangraphs WAR rated him the seventh best pitcher in the AL in 2010. But in August, he revealed to the Kansas City Star just how frustrated he was with the Royals. He stated that he had no reason to get excited about another youth movement in Kansas City since even if it paid dividends, it would not be until after his contract was up. Then during this off-season, it became clear Greinke was pushing hard for a trade to a team that had a chance to win now. Dayton Moore had failed to build a competent team around his star, and that led to his hand being forced to move him.

There are real reasons to be excited about the future of the Royals starting in 2012 or so, but for now, there’s a gaping hole on the mound where one of Kansas City’s favorite athletes used to be. Dayton Moore signing Greinke to that extension in ’09 was probably his finest move as GM; his inability to keep Greinke content and in KC may be his worst. I shudder to think what a re-energized Greinke might do to the National League in 2011. And for now, Royals fans are left to wonder what could have been in Kansas City.