KC Royals: Dayton Moore Reclamation Projects

The KC Royals general manager, Dayton Moore, has become one of the best in baseball. His reclamation projects are a big reason why.

While Dayton Moore has been very successful at salvaging ‘broken’ players, that hasn’t always been the case. In this article, we’ll review some of Dayton Moore’s biggest ‘hits’ and ‘misses’ when it comes to his reclamation projects.

First, it’s important to layout how I’m defining the term ‘reclamation project’. Dayton Moore has brought in a lot of good players in his time with Kansas City. He’s also brought in a lot of bad players. There are going to be ‘hits’ in this list that are far worse than some of his acquisitions, and ‘misses’ who are far better.

The key component in the word ‘reclamation’ is the prefix ‘re’, which means ‘again’. I’m defining ‘reclamation project’ as ‘A player with a history of success, who has recently experienced failure due to injury or mechanical flaws, with a chance to be good again.”

Dayton Moore has brought in plenty of players that don’t meet that criteria. For example, James Shields was good before he came to KC and stayed good in KC, while Kyle Davies was terrible coming in and terrible going out. Those aren’t the types of players you’ll find on this list.

It should be noted that most of Dayton Moore’s successes and failures with true ‘reclamation projects’ started only very recently. Prior to 2011, most of his acquisitions fell into the James Shields/Kyle Davies model, and unfortunately more of them looked like Davies than Shields.

Let’s look at Moore’s true  reclamation projects, starting with the pitchers, and decide if they were a hit, or a miss.

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