Jose Guillen Available

Unable to find any suitors via trade, the Kansas City Royals cut outfielder Jose Guillen, one of their highest paid players. Signed after a decent season in Seattle, Guillen was never the middle of the order bat the Royals had envisioned, but then again they were pretty stupid to think he would be. Although he showed flashes of power and the ability to hit for average in the middle part of the decade, Guillen never showed a consistent ability to work the count and take a walk (his career walk rate is 5 percent, compared to Albert Pujols who's career walk rate is 13.4 percent). Ultimately, KC was paying about 12 million dollars annually for a 20-25 home run player with a .300-.315 OBP. For a small market team with limited revenue streams, I can think of about 12 million better ways to allocate that sum of money.

At this point, Guillen's probably a platoon bat, best suited for the AL where he can DH--which he had been doing exclusively in Kansas City--that can give you a little bit of pop from the right side. His ability to get on base has declined severely in his time with Kansas City, as his walk rate and strike out rate in '10 hover around 6 percent and 21 percent, respectively. Any player who walks 6 percent of the time and strikes out almost a one-fourth of the time is going to be of limited offensive use. ESPN is reporting the Yankees and Giants may be interested- the latter because they're starved for offense and the former because they can afford to make any dumb mistake that comes across their check book.

The real lesson here, as I alluded to earlier, is that the Royals should not have thrown that much money at a short term DH solution, that isn't any good, and won't help your team win. Compounding the issue is the fact that the Royals plan when they signed Guillen as a free agent was essentially to lose, in the interim, and slowly build a winner over time. How a 3 year, 36 million dollar contract to a player of Guillen's caliber helps achieve that long-term goal escapes me. Forgetting for the moment that Guillen sucks (which he does, and did when he was signed by KC), shouldn't a team like the Royals set aside that 12 million dollars to spend on their draft, where they can cultivate and control home grown, potentially A-caliber players for many years? Sure the draft can be a crapshoot and many players who are highly touted don't amount to much. But if you're a small market team, it's a risk that MUST be taken for the good of the franchise. The payoff, if done properly, is you end up like the Rays who are 2 years removed from a world series and are currently battling for first place in a division with the Yankees and the Red Sox.