The latest Jos&#233; Guillen controversy is troubling, but maybe not for the reasons you think.</p><p>Shrouded in the rhetoric in comments regarding Guillen&#8217;s clubhouse antics is a bit of conventional wisdom that screams to be debunked. And no, we&#8217;re not talking about the quotes in which Guillen has been portrayed as everything from Beetlejuice to Ward Cleaver.</p><p>My personal stance on athletes is that they are human, exceptional in some ways, flawed in others. Who cares? This is sports. All that matters happens between the white lines.</p><p>Listen, this is where I really get crusty on the Guillen story: In all these comments, it&#8217;s sort of taken for granted that Guillen has been fine and productive on the field.</p><p>I&#8217;m sorry, but he hasn&#8217;t. Guillen has been a disappointment. I didn&#8217;t expect much. I know the usual career path for 32-year-old outfielders of Guillen&#8217;s skill set, and I didn&#8217;t figure he&#8217;d be worth nearly the amount the Royals are paying him. Still, I expected a little more than what he&#8217;s offered.</p><p>The fatal flaw in his performance is, quite obviously, his on-base percentage (.291). Depending on which day you look, Guillen is one of the five-worst on-base players in the AL this season. This isn&#8217;t just a poor showing in just another statistical category. This is a terrible performance in the most important statistical category.</p><p>Everyone gets excited about Guillen&#8217;s 71 RBIs, but consider this: Only Alex Gordon has made more outs for the Royals this season, and he has more than 40 more plate appearances. If you&#8217;re not getting on base, you&#8217;re making an out, and each out brings your team closer to a loss.</p><p>That is a huge consideration, especially when you&#8217;re talking about a player who is supposed to be your best run producer. The problem is you don&#8217;t just produce runs by getting hits with men in scoring position. You also produce runs by not making outs.</p><p>David DeJesus (68 runs created) and Gordon (54) have both actually produced more runs than Guillen (49) this season.</p><p>By any advanced and reasonable measure, Guillen has been a below-average hitter this season, a performance for which the Royals are paying $12 million. And, at his age, it&#8217;s only going to get uglier from here.</p><p>The idea of calculating how many runs a player creates is one of the oldest and most basic tenets of sabermetrics, motivated by the notion that team-dependent statistics, like RBIs, are a poor indicator of a player&#8217;s productivity.</p><p>Think of it like this. In a general sense, simply getting on base, even if it&#8217;s only a single or walk, is worth roughly .40 runs in an average situation. An average out costs you .30 runs per plate appearance.</p><p>Guillen and DeJesus have roughly the same number of plate appearances, but Guillen has made 42 more outs. So for just those 42 plate appearances, you could say that DeJesus has produced at least 17 runs, while Guillen has cost the Royals about 13 runs. That&#8217;s a 30-run gap &#8212; three wins&#8217; worth, simply for not making an out.</p><p>Runs-created formulas tell us how much offense a player produces by looking at all of his statistical categories, not just the ones you see flashed up on the screen during a telecast. And the formulas work, too. If you add up the runs-created figures for the players on any given team, they will be very close to the actual runs that team scored during the season.</p><p>The scary thing about all this is the possibility that the Royals might really think that Guillen is having a good year. If that were true, then one would have to seriously worry about their evaluative abilities.