Mike Jacobs.  I’m not going to waste your time with a big buildup on what GMDM’s biggest miss of the past offseason was, it’s Mike Jacobs.  Jacobs himself has actually played about the way we would expect him to.    He has a bad platoon split, hits bad pitches a long way, strikes out a lot, doesn’t walk much, and is absolutely unplayable in the field.  Anywhere.

So what makes this such a bad deal?  I mean, Jacobs was brought in to hit for power.  And he’s done that at about his standard career levels.  The problem, however, is that the Royals are a team that don’t really do much to emphasise his strengths while due to the makeup of the team, Jacobs’ weaknesses are even more glaring than they would be normally.

A guy who hits for power and nothing else is only really useful if he’s coming up with guys on base a lot of the time.  Because the Royals have an abysmal team OBP, Jacobs doesn’t bat with a full plate often enough to make the power aspect of his game really worthwhile.  Because the Royals have so many guys on the team who are essentially out machines, adding another high out percentage player to the lineup just compounds the problems the team has putting together a big inning.  Or even just stringing together enough hits in one inning to score some runs.

Finally, because Jacobs is literally incompetent to play the field anywhere, Jose Guillen has to regularly start in RF.  And Jose Guillen is nearly as bad at playing RF now that he can’t run anymore as Jacobs is at playing defense in general.  In other words, because Jacobs is so bad in the field, we have to run another guy out into the field who also has no business being there.

There’s one other way in which the Jacobs acquisition was a disaster for the team.  To get Mike Jacobs, we traded away Leo Nunez.  To replace Leo Nunez, we signed Kyle Farnsworth.  If we hadn’t traded for Mike Jacobs, we would have probably promoted Kila Ka’aihue from AAA.  Nunez and Kila combined make less than $1 million this year.  Jacobs and Farnsworth combined make $7 million and are collectively about 16 years older.  Kila isn’t a defensive wizard, but he can play passably in the field, which is a whole lot more than you can say about Jacobs.

So to recap: By acquiring Mike Jacobs, GMDM managed to increase payroll and team age, make the bullpen worse, block a young prospect, lock Jose Guillen out of any kind of semi-regular DHing, and surrender several years of team controlled young players for guys that are either free agents or arbitration eligible.  That’s six downgrades across the team with only one move.  And that’s why this is GMDM’s biggest mistake of 2009.

Tags: dayton moore, gmdm, kila ka'aihue, mike jacobs