Too easy.

Anyone care to play devil's advocate? The argument would be that he's improved the farm system, right?

Yeah, also there is no point in hiring a GM to run a rebuilding team and making judgements on him after just 3 years. If you felt he was the right guy to turn such a bad team around you need to see him in action for at least 5-6 years

His acquiring Yuniesky Betancourt's contract and actually giving away a good live arm for him is all the information you need, as an owner, to be certain you made a horrible, horrible mistake when you hired him.

Arguments for:

The franchise was a shambles when he came in. Nobody could work that sort of miracle. He's done some good things and has improved the farm system and hopefully the drafting. Teams do need stability and, to properly evaluate his approach, you have to give him a few years to put his plan into action. Many first-time GMs get off to rocky starts in one or more areas of their job then get better (e.g. Kenny Williams rightly took a lot of heat for bad moves early in his career but has developed into one of the better GMs).

I actually don't thing there are that many arguments against ... the problem is that although they are few in number and small in long-term impact, some of these mistakes were such obviously bad ideas that you simply have to question how well the guy can evaluate talent, at least at the ML level. Bloomquist, Farnswroth, Ramirez, Betancourt, Guillen are just dreadful moves. Even moves I thought were reasonable (Jacobs) turned out even worse. They've got two decent, not great, catchers in Olivo and Buck -- and they're both making about $3 M on arb-eligible contracts instead of picking one, trading/non-tendering the other, signing a cheap backup and spending that $3 M elsewhere. 2/$6 M on a Japanese pitcher (Yabuta) who has spent most of the last 2 years in AAA. Clearly they were hoping for a short-term patch job with mediocre ML vets (add Crisp, most of the bullpen, lots of older "prospects") while the farm develops ... and clearly Moore is not (currently) a guy you would hire for that job.

But, in the end, I'd evaluate him on the drafting, the system, whether the kids seem to be developing. Gordon looks like a negative but, whoever deserves credit, Butler's starting to look pretty good, Greinke's become a stud, Soria's become a stud. I don't know enough to evaluate how well the farm is doing but if it's doing well, I'd consider extending him following a frank discussion in which I explained I'd appreciate it if he stopped wasting my hard-earned millions on crap like Farnsworth and Betancourt. It would be a short extension though.

If Moore's a great talent evaluator or farm system constructor, that's swell; hire him to run player development or scouting. Good move. But it's very obvious based on both the moves he's made at the major league level and his wince-inducing attempts at defending them that he really doesn't understand how you win or lose baseball games. A GM HAS to at least have some fundamental understanding of that. Moore does not, and that makes his tenure near-certain to be a catastrophe.

Yeah, also there is no point in hiring a GM to run a rebuilding team and making judgements on him after just 3 years. If you felt he was the right guy to turn such a bad team around you need to see him in action for at least 5-6 years

I don't agree with that at all. I'm agnostic with respect to Moore, but it could be abundantly clear that a new GM was making a mess of things after only a couple of years. The Royals ownership doesn't owe Moore anything - if they feel that he's not the man for the job now, they should make a change, regardless of what they thought at the time of his hiring. The criteria they use to make that judgment is important, of course.

His acquiring Yuniesky Betancourt's contract and actually giving away a good live arm for him is all the information you need, as an owner, to be certain you made a horrible, horrible mistake when you hired him.

Which is basically what I and many others said about the Todd Ritchie trade -- not to mention Kenny Williams acquiring Royce Clayton, the Bradford trade, the Foulke trade, getting nothing of importance for Durham, Lofton, etc.

People do learn on the job and GMs don't need to excel at everything to succeed. It's still not clear to me that Williams excels at anything other than finding durable starting pitching and is above-average in anything else but not making disastrous FA signings.

So far Moore has been a horrible manager of KC's meager resources. But he has made solid deals with Greinke and Soria though, being long-term contracts with pitchers, they are risky deals. His trade balance sheet is mostly negative but he hasn't (yet) given up anybody's who's haunted him that I can think of (of course he had few if any such players to trade away to begin with).

It's unlikely he'll still be there for the "next good Royals team" but, given where they were when he took over, that was always unlikely -- i.e. there was nothing there so that next good team was at least 5 years away and even that was a stretch.

His trade balance sheet is mostly negative but he hasn't (yet) given up anybody's who's haunted him that I can think of (of course he had few if any such players to trade away to begin with).

I'd still like to have J.P. Howell.

If Moore's a great talent evaluator or farm system constructor, that's swell; hire him to run player development or scouting. Good move. But it's very obvious based on both the moves he's made at the major league level and his wince-inducing attempts at defending them that he really doesn't understand how you win or lose baseball games.

Wasn't this Allard Baird's problem? (not counting the fact wasn't given any resources)

Bloomquist, Farnswroth, Ramirez, Betancourt, Guillen are just dreadful moves.

To me, Moore just can't overcome this litany of horror.

Ignore Guillen. For the other 4 he's expended approx. $25M and a couple of prospects to get replacement level performance.

That amount of cash would have gotten them Miguel Inoa ($4.25M bonus) plus the best international prospect each of the next 4 years.

That ignorance of relative value can not be accepted in a GM.

That amount of cash would have gotten them Miguel Inoa ($4.25M bonus) plus the best international prospect each of the next 4 years.

That ignorance of relative value can not be accepted in a GM.

While I certainly wouldn't blame the Royals for canning him given all the crappy moves, we don't know whether it was his idea or the ownership's idea to try to be "decent" in the short-term by investing in some "decent" vets. As I said, Moore has given us pretty ample evidence he's not the guy for that job but it might well have been ownership that wanted to be "decent" while the kids developed. And they did approve all of those moves so if he was able to convince them that Betancourt was a good pickup a month ago, why should they change their minds now.

I don't really want to defend the guy -- he looks like Littlefield redux. But man he took over a hopeless situation and anybody who thought the Royals 2007-2009 were going to be substantially better than this was misguided IMHO. The underlying question is whether things look better now than they did when he took over and the answer to that question is all about their record of drafting (and signing) and developing.

injuryexpert Moore re-signs for 5 years? I can't wait to read Rany's take on this. Incompetence is rewarded in too many places, or is it complacence?5 minutes ago from Tweetie