Guillen a Royal

Last year the Royals wanted to break their reputation for being cheap, they went out and signed Gil Meche along with David Riske and Octavio Dotel, they'd flip the latter at the trade deadline, and Riske would walk this off-season, but the exclamation point of Meche's 55 million dollar contract would be felt.

Naturally the Royals would go out and make a splash this off-season as well and while the name Andruw Jones kept popping up it seems the Royals - or perhaps Scott Boras and Andruw Jones - decided to sign Jose Guillen to a 3/36 deal.  

I question the move, not because Guillen's 2007 where he hit .290/.353/.460, but rather that his career averages are .274/.325/.447 and that he's just a year removed from a .216/.276/.398 disaster of 2006. In the past he's shown this breakout season disease and reverted right back to what you'd expect from him - decent average, low iso discipline, decent slugging, look at 2004 when he hit .294/.352/.497, a year later he hit .283/.338/.479. I hate to sound like Joe Morgan but he's simply not consistent enough to warrant 12 million for the next three years.

2007 screams fluke in his trend stats as well, a xBABIP of .280 resulted in a .330 BABIP, in 2006 when he had a BABIP of .234 his xBABIP was .260, doesn't it seem a bit odd that his BABIP and line drive rates fluctuate so often? Perhaps it's because he's always switching teams and leagues, but that should also throw up a red flag.

Speaking of red flags, a day after signing Guillen was suspended for the first 15 days of the 2008 season for performance enhancing drug issues - yikes - I'm not sure if anyone has proven whether steroids or the likes have truly improved performance or not, but that's your 36 million dollar investment who performed well above career norms, and hasn't put up back to back good seasons in quite a while being slammed for drug usage - certainly this deal can't go wrong.