Dayton Moore Comes Out as a Francophile and Re-signs a Sino-Panamanian

After giving me nothing to write about last week (which coincided with having all of my sports-energy drained by that other Kansas City team), Dayton Moore went out and addressed the most gaping hole on the roster: the starting rotation.
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*Little known fact: Townes Van Zandt wrote this song because he would have been such a Jeff Francis fan. The selection of this song for this post is in no way trying to attach a possibly racist collective nickname for Brucie Chen and Francis.

It was no secret that as the roster had been constructed that the Royals were thin on Major-League-ready pitching.  Heading into the end of this past week, their opening day rotation was likely going to consist of Luke Hochevar, Kyle Davies, Vin Mazzaro, Sean O’Sullivan, and one of the likes of Danny Duffy, Everett Teaford, Kevin Pucetas, or Nathan Adcock.

With a new week comes a bolstered rotation featuring lefties Jeff Francis and Bruce Chen. If ever there was a southpaw fetishist in the MLB GM ranks, that man would be Dayton Moore. Since taking the reigns in the wake of Allard Baird’s departure, each off-season has been marked by Moore trying in vain to acquire left-handed starting pitching. In the AL Central as it has been constructed for the duration of his time in Kansas City, this has made at least a little sense, as many of the best bats in the division are left-handed. Yes, this obsession has been mocked amongst the ranks of the more cynical Royals fanbase, as it has led to some pretty dubious signings–or, in the worst case, a inexplicable re-acquisition after successfully dumping the briefly useful Horacio Ramirez onto the roster of the intradivisional rival Chicago White Sox and getting the raw but toolsy Brazilian outfielder Paulo Orlando in return just months prior to signing Ramirez to a guaranteed contract. 

Chen. Determination incarnate.

First the bad news: Bruce Chen will likely be considerably worse than he was last year. His BABIP of .286 will likely regress to the mean. The pedestrian nature of his 6.29 K/9, 3.66 BB/9, 1.72 K/BB, 33.9% GB rate, and 8.1% HR/FB all point toward the over-performance indicated in his 4.54 FIP and 5.01 xFIP from 2010.

The palatable side to this $2 million signing (with another $1.5 million in performance-based bonuses) is that there is value to the Royals at this stage in the game in simply having arms that can go six innings every five days. There is nothing sexy about the 5.00 ERA that last season’s xFIP is pointing towards, but there is also nothing sexy about watching Sean O’Sullivan pitch. Period. Ultimately, O’Sullivan still has options left, Hochevar missed more than half of last season, and the four aforementioned starters in the mix in Spring Training are not likely to be ready. By the end of the 2010 season, the rotation held only two of its starters that had been in the rotation at the onset of the campaign, with Gil Meche, Brian Bannister, and Hochevar all having missed significant time. With the defections to Japan of Bannister, Anthony Lerew, and Bryan Bullington, the depth of arms that do not need protection and can be modestly trusted to get you into the sixth inning was shockingly non-existent. Simply said, the Royals need innings. Chen can give them this.

Is this a great signing? Not even remotely. The fact that we have to hope he doesn’t zoom right past the mean on his way to the ERA-stratosphere is a little disheartening, but of the remaining candidates to be signed to fill out the rotation, Chen was probably going to cost less than Kevin Millwood, and the Royals really only need Chen to be serviceable until June or July, when not only do arms like Duffy, Mike Montgomery, Chris Dwyer, Aaron Crow, and Teaford start to garner serious consideration for getting called up but Zach Miner also is likely to be able to pitch again. At the least, Chen needs to serve as a bridge to the first wave. At most, he needs to pitch all year because injuries have ravaged the rotation. Given the price tag and what the Royals actually need him for, much more damage could have been done.

Canuck

The other wrong-handed pitcher is a Canuck by the name of Jeff Francis. Setting aside the fact that the Royals now have the makings of an excellent baseball reality show called Jeff Franc Squared, Francis came to Kansas City for Chen money and actually has some upside–enough that Dave Cameron deemed this the Best Free Agent Signing of the Winter. Dave Cameron is much better at this than I am.

While this seems like a bit of an overstatement, it does seem like there is very little money committed to Francis in the deal with another one-year $2 million deal with incentives that can add up to another $2 million. While it is true that both Bruce Chen and Jeff Francis were once highly regarded prospects, Francis’s track record in the Majors is much more encouraging. Where Chen’s career GB% is a scant 35.1%, Francis possesses a more impressive career rate of 43.2%–an average that is actually lower than all of his campaigns but one thanks to an extreme outlier of 37.7% in 2005. Every other season has seen Francis sitting in the 43.6 – 47.0% range. Furthermore, his career ERA of 4.77 is more than a quarter of a run higher than both his FIP and xFIP (both of which are weirdly 4.46), which has been inflated by .314 BABIP. His 2010 ERA was inflated by both a .322 BABIP and a 64.5% LOB%, so worries about that 5.00 ERA are probably unwarranted (even with the Royals defense behind him), as both his FIP and xFIP were over a full run lower–3.88 and 3.94, respectively.

If you skipped that last paragraph (or read the aforelinked Dave Cameron article that had much of the information regarding his 2010 campaign in it), Jeff Francis is a good candidate to have an ERA in the low-4.00s this year, even with some admitted holes defensively.

Sure, each pitcher is only committed to one season, and Francis is likely just playing for a contract with someone else in 2012, but $4 million total for two pitchers is a sound investment for a team that is in dire need of ML-ready starting pitchers with the ability to eat innings for one year while the prospects are sufficiently seasoned.