[This is my "objective" analysis... more "subjective" reflections on the Royals side of things will come later and elsewhere... UPDATE: "Subjective" reflections can be found here.]

Seriously, Kyle must be paying off Dayton Moore to keep making teh awesome tradez so that I'll exceed my post quota every week. Make no mistake: this was a big day for Dayton, or, as he is known to the Royals' faithful, "DMGM." Not only did he finally acquire the long-desired (can't find the original Sam Mellinger article any  more) Yuniesky Betancourt, but he also failed to acquire the man whom he once called "one of the greatest competitors I've ever known," Jeff Francoeur. Fittingly, Frenchy was acquired today by Dayton Moore's Dominican Doppleganger for Ryan Church. Sigh... I wonder who won these trades?

Francoeur to the Mets, Ryan Church to the Braves

Jeff Francoeur

#0 / Right Field / New York Mets

Height: 6-4

Weight: 220

Bats: R

Throws: R

Born: Jan 08, 1984

Francoeur is getting paid $3.375M  this season in his first year of arbitration. Assuming $4.5M for each Win Above Replacement, we take $0.4M off for the replacement salary, and assume he's getting 40% of his value. so 3.375-0.4 = 2.75/.40 = $6.875 market value for the deal. So Francoeur is being paid like a 1.5 WAR player. Sure, he's having a dreadful season so far (-13.4 offense, 0.6 defense, -0.6 WAR at FanGraphs), but we to estimate true talent going forward.

Transactions are only going to get more frequent, so I'm going to just use the ZiPS in-season projection tool for offense this time out. Francoeur is having another of his classic seasons at the plate.

A timeless classic.

Batting: ZiPS Rest-of-Season projection has him hitting .259/.307/.381 for a .304 wOBA. That's about 14 runs below average ( -14).

Fielding is trickier to measure and predict. Francoeur's reputation and numbers were great when he came into the league, but he's really dropped off in UZR. His UZR prorated for 150 games (UZR/150) over the last four seasons: 2006: +7.5, 2007, 16.9, 2008 -4.9, 2009 -1.5. A weighted average and crude regression gives me an estimate of +3 per 150 games. Sean Smith's pre-season projection for  TotalZone was +2. Pretty close. Over a full season, let's call it +3.

Value: -14 Offense + 3 defense -7.5 positional adjustment + 20 NL replacement = +1.5 runs above replacement * 85% playing time = about a 0.1 WAR player.

So... The Mets are getting about a $500,000 player on a contract for this year that's worth just under $7M. Ryan Church must really be bad and/or be on a terrible contract, right?

Ryan Church

#0 / Right Field / Atlanta Braves

Height: 6-1

Weight: 190

Bats: L

Throws: L

Born: Oct 14, 1978

Church is in his second year of arbitration and is getting paid $2.8M. Same formula as above (with 60% for the second year of arbitration). 2.8-0.4 = 2.4/.60= $4M. That's less than 1 WAR, so Church is getting paid like a bench or platoon guy.

Batting: Church has had a rough start to the season, hitting 280/.332/.375 for a .310 wOBA. But, again, we need to take context into account, past performance, etc. ZiPS projects his real talent at .344 wOBA (.273/.346/.433), or about +10 over 700 PAs.

Fielding: Church played some CF a couple years back, but is mostly a corner outfielder now. A weighted and regressed average of his UZR/150 numbers gives us +3, and Rally has him projected at +4 TotalZone. Let's call it +4/162 games.

Value: +10 offense +4 hitting -7.5 position + 20 NL replacement = 26.5 x 75% playing time (because of age and past injuries, that's all we should really expect)  = 1.9 WAR player. Wow... getting paid like a 4th OF and he's about a league average player.

I guess Omar Minaya and his scouts saw something in Francoeur. Sure, Church is older... But Francoeur isn't 21 anymore. He's not at the usual peak, but he's replacement-level now, I'm going to guess and say he has about a 5% chance of becoming as good as Church in the next couple of seasons, even though he's being paid more right now (RBI!). It's not like the Mets  have  a young core they are stacking up for a future run at contention. What am I missing Mets fans? This just a terrible trade for the Mets. Probably even a bit worse than...

Yuniesky Betancourt to the Royals, Dan Cortes and Derrick Saito to the Mariners

Let's get this over with.

Yuniesky Betancourt

#0 / Short Stop / Kansas City Royals

Height: 5-10

Bats: R

Throws: R

Born: Jan 31, 1982

The contract stuff is a bit complicated. According to Cot's (already updated!), Betancourt has the rest of this season (so about $1M of $2M) left, then is owed $3M in 2010, $4M in 2011, with a club option for $6M in 2012 with a $2M buyout. The Mariners are picking up about $2M along the way... without adjusting for inflation, that's the buyout. So as far as guaranteed money goes, the Royals are giving Betancourt $8M over the next three years guaranteed, or about $7M over replacement. He's already 27 (and  I' sure we can trust his Cuban birth records, right?), and, as we'll see, he's not exactly at a stage where we can't expect him to decline already. I'd say he needs to be a 1.0 WAR player right now for the Royals to have this pay off... .and that's not counting the prospects.

Batting: He's smoking the ball to the tune of .250/.278/.330 so far, with a .270 wOBA. But, hey, that only tells us what he has already done. ZiPS says his true talent is .273/.293/.373 for a whopping .291 wOBA, which is about 22 runs below average in the current run-scoring environment.

Fielding: Betancourt has or had a stellar defensive reputation, but UZR/150 numbers show that he was more of an average defender may be morphing into a horrible, Michael Young-esque shortstop,  a +2.1 in 2006, +0.7 2006, -1.4 in 2007, -12.7 in  2008, and a -18.0 2009. But with regression and weighting, he comes out to about -5, and TotalZone has him as average (!), although that's before the season started. Let's call it -3, which may be generous, but we're sticking with the numbers here.

Value:-22 batting - 3 defense +7.5 position +25 AL replacement level= 7.5 x 855 playing time = 0.6 WAR player.

So, even assuming that he will regress heavily towards the mean (a reasonable assumption), this is a bad deal for the Royals straight up, even if they didn't give up anything. But they did -- they gave up at least a fair pitching prospect in Dan Cortes, and a lower-level one in Derrick Saito. The Willie Bloomquist signing was bad enough, but this is just as bad. No, it's worse. The best part is that the Royals have yet another ex-Mariner, Tug Hulett, who isn't good, but is at Omaha right now and is probably at least as good as either of them, and at the league minimum. All things considered, this makes the Mike Jacobs trade look pretty good in comparison. 'Nuff said.

In the comments regarding Dan Szymborski's suggestion that Billy Beane's time in Oakland, things got briefly sidetracked onto Kansas City Royals' GM Dayton Moore. One commentator asked me why I thought Dayton Moore wasn't a very good GM... I gave the usual reasons... Jose Guillen, Mike Jacobs, Kyle Farnsworth, Horacio Ramirez, Ross Gload, Willie Bloomquist... but I needed haven't, for the very next day, Mr. Moore obliged with a demonstration more powerful than any words I could string together. He's doing a heckuva job.

EDIT: devil_fingers was so mad that he made about 12 glaring typos. I fixed them so his anger would come through more clearly. SERENITY NOW!

Edit 2: d_f here. Found even more. I'm on little sleep. Bedtime. After I rant some more.

Edit 3: vivaelpujols here:  I like cheese.