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Funny thing...I agree with much of what both sides of this little argument have been saying.
I agree that Ackley is worth more than he has shown thus far and had some bad luck and bad park fit problems this year.
I agree that Gordon has a high stop-loss value to him and is a good fielder with multi-position flexibility...but....
I also agree that he does not have star-caliber upside offensively and therefore doesn't address our line-up problem the way we need him to, and that defense-heavy WAR is soft-WAR because defensive wins are volatile by the WAR metric. Incidentally, PCA has not shown in back-of-envelop calculations that Gordon is anywhere near that valuable defensively...he's a little above average...not God.
And I also agree that it's hard to peg Ackley's value if you're the Royals, so you don't want to over-value him.
BUT...this is the problem. This is why we can't trade Ackley now. We think he's gonna be a star...the rest of baseball doesn't know...we'll NEVER get proper value for him right now because it will be darned-near impossible for other clubs to value him the way we do until he goes out there and does it for a whole year. So no...now is not the time to trade Ackley...and it's not because I'm overvaluing him...it's because placing his value right now is not possible.