It’s been a frustrating time waiting for the rebuilding to stick. I have to agree with Michael above on the free agent point – the Royals can only sign whoever agrees to sign with them. The good players are going to attract attention from everyone and it takes something extra for the Royals to get them to come our way. Right now, it’s opportunity – Jeff Francis, Jeff Francoeur, Melky Cabrera. Last year it was Rick Ankiel and Scott Podsednik – they all wanted the opportunity to show they could still be every day big leaguers.

In the future, the opportunity will be the chance to be on an up and coming team and could (should?) make it a bit easier to get free agents here when necessary. That being said, Dayton has shown some strange moves in his free agent signings so far. Guillen is one example, but offering the second year to Jason Kendall and Kyle Farnsworth in the past (and overpaying) seems like a ploy that was necessary to get them to sign…but that Dayton felt they were necessary to sign when so many other options were available is the concerning part. He’s shown he can draft and sign solid players from the amateur ranks, but he hasn’t shown the same skill – yet – in constructing a major league roster or in evaluating talent already in the majors. To me, that’s the heart of my inability to get 100% behind DM (not that anyone should be anyway).

As for the 2006 draft…until either he or Hochevar are out of baseball, if someone asks Dayton “who would you have drafted if you were coordinating the Royals draft?” I don’t think you’d get a straight answer…

“And to point to the Twins and the time it took with that team, and completely ignore the wasted money and unclear thought processes of roster acquisition at the Major League level with this team, is irresponsible reasoning that only happens when a fan is talking about their favorite organization.”
—-And what free agents, and this is an important one that EVERYONE seems to ignore, would have signed here? It’s real easy to say, “the Royals should have signed Tori Hunter, or Cliff Lee, or Carl Crawford” but THEY HAVE TO WANT TO SIGN HERE. So the question comes, how do we get them to want to sign? Answer: We build a team from drafting, Latin America, and trades. Which is exactly what we have done. You have to work with who will work with you. I’m going to make a prediction here and say once the Royals start winning and show some promise to the rest of the league, we will be able to land a good major free agent or two.

With saying that, I’m not excusing some of the acquisitions at the major league lvl. I didn’t like the Guillen move and some others as well, but every team has these acquisitions.

“*It was also commented that my worries about a GM asking out of the draft process because of his ties to his former employer are misplaced because that was actually a sign of “integrity”. I would argue that true integrity, if one was truly concerned about involvement with two teams during one draft, would have been not to accept the new job to begin with.”
—This is ridiculous. Integrity isn’t about NOT taking another job with another team. Look at the context of the situation. Dayton had done a years worth or more work on the 2006 draft for Atlanta. He potentially could have really sabotaged Atlanta and manipulated the draft in the Royals favor. Him sitting out and not having any input on the draft for the Royals that year is integrity.

As for how much fast could it have gone: working on that now. I’m not at all stuck to one way of thinking about this. I’m hoping that what I’ll find is the drafts of the last four to five years could not have gone any better. Of course, that doesn’t excuse the monies wasted on major league signings. That’s the big issue, and always should be.