Royals Today: Opening Day Edition.

So, what to write about Opening Day that hasn’t been written before – like, say, last year? What did we see from the Royals yesterday (with one big exception) that we didn’t see a hundred times last season? Yes, it’s just one game, and yes, maybe fans take Opening Day a little too seriously. But there’s a reason why so many Royals fans are putting so much meaning into one game. We’ve seen this movie before, way too many times. I think most of us have accepted that the Royals will suck again this season – but is it too much to ask that they suck creatively? Can’t they suck in a different way than they did last year? Evidently not.

- All those new veteran players brought in to impart a winning attitude to the team, all that time spent on fundamentals again this spring, and the Royals can’t get through the top of the first inning of the season without making a play that belongs on the team’s end-of-season blooper reel.

I don’t know who’s at fault for letting Carlos Guillen’s infield pop-up drop, and I don’t care. All I know is that six men looked up into the sky and swirling wind, and not one of them took charge to make the play. Greinke is exempt from criticism, both because he’s Zack Greinke and because pitchers never have responsibility on infield pop-ups. But the reality is that when he’s on the mound, he’s easily the best defensive player on the infield. At some point, he ought to just say f**k it, and make every play he can himself.

- It’s somehow appropriate that the first run Greinke gives up this season should be an unearned run. He gave up nine unearned runs each of the last two seasons, even though his pitching style should lead to very few unearned runs (as I documented here two years ago). Yesterday was a perfect example of this: with two men on, Greinke induces a pop-up, a ball in play which should almost never lead to an error – unless you’re asking the Royals to catch it.

- I’m not going to rag on Willie Bloomquist too much for taking the error, because that really was a team effort, and he did make a fine play later in the game that might have saved Greinke a run.

Besides, it’s not Bloomquist’s fault that he was the Opening Day third baseman. Yes, it took a perfect storm of injuries for that to happen, with Alex Gordon’s broken thumb and Alberto Callaspo’s tweaked oblique. (Tweaked Oblique sounds like a good name for a band, if anyone’s looking for ideas…) But it still doesn’t explain why Bloomquist started over Mike Aviles.

Actually, I do know why – because Trey Hillman doesn’t feel that Aviles is ready to play third base yet. This is perfectly reasonable – as quickly as he returned from his injury, and as well as he played this spring, we can’t forget that Aviles had Tommy John surgery less than 10 months ago, his arm strength still isn’t 100%, and it may still be a few weeks before Aviles can be safely trusted to play full-out.

I just have one question to ask, if I may: if Aviles isn’t yet ready to start at third base, WHY THE HELL IS HE ON THE ROSTER?

Aviles was a revelation in 2008, not just offensively but defensively, as he played an above-average shortstop while hitting .325 as a rookie. Last year was a lost season, obviously, and after not playing in a game in 10 months, Aviles has a lot to prove. But he certainly has the ability to upgrade the Royals considerably at shortstop, where the Royals have a starter who – as you may know – leaves a lot to be desired in both facets of his game.

So the obvious solution here is to send Aviles to Omaha on a rehab assignment, which allows him to get reps at the plate every day, and allows him to progress defensively from second base to third base to shortstop as his arm strength returns. A month or six weeks from now, Aviles ought to be ready to step in at any position the Royals might need him. In particular, should Yuniesky Betancourt struggle as he did after the trade last season, the Royals will have a viable option to replace him.

Instead, the Royals were so impressed with Aviles’ performance that they brought him north with the team…only to stash him on the bench, where he won’t get the chance to continue his hot hitting, where he won’t be able to work on his arm strength in game situations, and where he’s evidently so fragile that the Royals don’t feel confident that they can use him at all.

Yesterday, the Spork went 0-for-3 with 2 strikeouts in his first three times up. In the bottom of the eighth, Bloomquist was due up again with two outs, nobody on, and the 100 mph-throwing Ryan Perry on the mound. Seems like a good chance to get Aviles up in a low-pressure situation, then let him take the field for the last inning. Instead, Bloomquist batted, and struck out again.

If you’re not going to use Aviles off the bench in a tailor-made situation, then why have him on the bench to begin with? Two months from now, if not sooner, Aviles might be the best shortstop the Royals have. If the Royals were actively trying to prevent Aviles from regaining his previous form, they couldn’t have made a better decision than the one they have.

- Speaking of Betancourt, props to him for one of the most impressive plate appearances I’ve ever seen from him. Granted, that’s damning with faint praise. Still, I should point out that as stunning as it was to see him drive a Justin Verlander fastball 380-plus feet to left-center field, the most impressive part of the at-bat was that his home run came on a full-count. In particular, the pitch immediately before the homer was a 2-2 fastball about three inches off the outside corner, and Betancourt spit on it.

It was one at-bat. And if the 2-2 pitch had been a slider, Betancourt probably would have swung no matter where it was placed. But I have to give credit where credit’s due, and I plan to watch Yuni’s pitch selection a little more closely in the coming weeks.

- I should apologize for suggesting that the Royals lost this game the same way they lost last season.

On Opening Day last season, the Royals’ starter departed the game with a lead, and in their first inning of work, the bullpen gave up three runs and lost the game. On Opening Day this season, the Royals’ starter departed the game with a lead, and in their first inning of work, the bullpen gave up six runs and lost the game. Also, they lost the game in the 8th inning last season, the 7th inning this year. Big difference.

- There’s not much to say about the bullpen’s seventh-inning meltdown. Roman Colon, Robinson Tejeda, and Juan Cruz faced 10 batters in the inning. Three struck out, one walked, and the other six all got hits. There was some degree of bad luck – the Tigers were 6-for-6 on balls-in-play – but if luck is the residue of design, then bad luck is the residue of a lack of design.

Roman Colon is really the Yuniesky Betancourt of the pitching staff – the Royals promoted him last season, and continue to use him in tight spots, even though he’s never done anything remotely positive at the major league level. But he unveiled a new slider this spring that everyone has raved about, and a new pitch is sometimes all it takes for a pitcher to take a dramatic step forward.

The slider I saw yesterday was hardly new; it was a wide sweeping thing that any hitter could recognize about 30 feet from the plate. (Colon said so as much afterwards: “The slider didn’t work today.”) He lit the fire.

Tejeda, who was terrific last season, is nonetheless the kind of guy I’d feel much more comfortable with to start an inning – he needs some space to clean up his own messes, and coming in with two men on base eliminated that margin for error. He threw the worst pitch in the entire sequence, a 1-2 fastball to Miguel Cabrera that was right down the middle, and hit back up the middle for an RBI single.

Juan Cruz almost looked decent, at least after he iced the game by giving up a two-run double to Brandon Inge – he struck out three of the next four hitters. I still hold out hope that he’ll regain his pre-2009 form. I would just rather he prove that in non-clutch situations first.

Colon, Tejeda, Cruz…if I had just described a game from last July, would any of you know the difference? If you had told me that Greinke pitched a brilliant game despite defensive lapses behind him, but then Colon and Cruz came in and blew the game before Soria could get in, I’d say you were describing this game here that I attended last season. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

If insanity is trying the same thing over and over again, expecting the same result, what level of schizophrenia have the Royals descended to?

- I don’t care what anyone else says: no one can protect a four-run deficit in the ninth inning better than Kyle Farnsworth. No one.

- And finally, what would a Royals’ game be without a dose of insane baserunning?

In the fifth inning, recall, Chris Getz got the Royals rolling with a two-out single off Verlander. He stole second, David DeJesus hit a grounder up the middle that Adam Everett could only keep on the infield, and then Scott Podsednik worked a walk. This set up the perfect situation: Billy Butler at the plate, with the bases loaded in a tie game. Butler has owned Verlander in his career, and while I don’t put much stock in hitter-pitcher matchups (all the statistical evidence says that what a batter has done against a specific pitcher is almost meaningless), the fact is that Butler can catch up to a fastball like few others in the game, even one as fast as Verlander’s. Butler poked a single to right field, plating two baserunners.

Two innings later, after the Tigers had put up their six-spot to take an 8-4 lead, the Royals’ offense once again stirred. Jason Kendall beat out an infield single. Getz singled to left as Kendall pulled up at second. And with one out, Podsednik blooped a single into short center field, giving Billy Butler another chance to bat with the bases loaded, representing the tying run, likely against Ryan Perry, another cooks-with-gas right-hander who provides all the energy Butler needs to go deep if he runs into one…

…WHAT THE HELL?!

Yep, that’s the Royals’ catcher churning around third base, with one out, the Royals’ best hitter about to come to the plate, down four runs in the seventh inning. That’s the Royals’ catcher being thrown out at the plate, with the Royals’ best hitter about to come to the plate, down four runs in the seventh inning.

Yes, it was a terrific throw, and a bang-bang play. But so what? When you’re down four runs in the seventh inning, and you’re about to bring up the tying run at the plate in the form of your #3 hitter, the only excuse to have a runner thrown out trying to score is if he slips and falls down halfway to home, then gets back up only to step on a landmine. Otherwise, it’s a fireable offense.

Dave Owen, the Royals’ third-base coach, was not fired over the winter.

In his defense, though, Kendall’s not going to have the speed he once had before that severe ankle injury in 1999.

- Momentum is tomorrow’s starting pitcher. After the hissy fit we all threw on Opening Day last year, the Royals won their next two games against the White Sox, and suddenly they were 2-1 with three dominant starting pitcher performances under their belt, and they were well on their way to 18-11. So let’s not get too riled up this time around.

I do feel compelled to point out that last year, tomorrow’s starting pitcher was Zack Greinke. This year, tomorrow’s starting pitcher is…Luke Hochevar.

Hope still springs eternal. But spring better show up quick.

Prospect Rundown, Part 7.

Let’s finish up with a few quick comments on prospects that have so far escaped the reach of my keyboard. This isn’t necessarily a list of the best prospects that I haven’t covered yet, just the prospects that I think warrant mentioning because they’re relatively close to being major-league ready.

Jeff Bianchi: Well, this one’s easy – Bianchi’s out for the year with a torn UCL necessitating Tommy John surgery. His entire career has been an exhibit in promising talent limited by injury. He hit over .400 in rookie ball in both 2005 and 2006, but a torn labrum in his shoulder in 2006 ended his season after 12 games, and he was awful in 2007 and only slightly better in 2008. Last season, he showed the talent that made him a 2^nd round pick in 2005: he hit .300 in Wilmington and .315 at Northwest Arkansas, with a little pop (9 homers, 29 doubles) and some speed (22 steals). His plate discipline isn’t great (39 walks against 95 Ks) but acceptable for a shortstop.

When he was drafted, the upside comparison I heard was Michael Young. After last season’s resurgence, he projects as a poor man’s Michael Young – a line-drive hitter whose solid fundamentals allow him to play shortstop despite below-average range. That’s not a great player, honestly, maybe a league-average shortstop at his best, or a very good utility player. Still, he projected as better than Yuniesky Betancourt, which would have made his injury a big blow to the Royals – if Mike Aviles wasn’t the surprise of camp. If Aviles is healthy, the Royals won’t miss Bianchi this season.

We’ll see if he can come back next season and make good on his promise. It won’t take much for him to be a success by recent Royals standards. For as much attention as the Royals have received for the failure of their high first-round picks, they’ve gotten a pass for their 2^nd round picks, which have been terrible. Here’s a list of every 2^nd rounder drafted in the last 15 years:

1996: Taylor Myers

1997: Dane Sardinha (did not sign)

1998: Robbie Morrison

1999: Wes Obermueller & Brian Sanches

2000: Mike Tonis

2001: Roscoe Crosby

2002: Adam Donachie

2003: Shane Costa

2004: Billy Buckner and Eric Cordier

2005: Jeff Bianchi

2006: Jason Taylor

2007: Sam Runion

2008: Johnny Giavotella

You don’t expect to hit on all your 2^nd round picks, but oh my God, that’s awful. No wonder the Royals gave up their 2^nd round pick last season when they signed Juan Cruz.

Obermueller pitched briefly, and not successfully, in the majors; Sanches made it to the majors as a middle reliever when he was 27, and actually had a good year for the Phillies last season at age 30. Tonis got six at-bats in the majors. Costa was Shane Costa. Buckner has a 5.74 ERA in the majors.

And those are the success stories. No one else on that list reached the majors. (Eric Cordier was throwing 95 this spring and has a lot of people excited again about his future. Of course, he’s the guy the Royals gave up for Tony Pena Jr.) The two guys drafted after Bianchi, Jason Taylor and Sam Runion, are at the moment two of the biggest busts in the organization.

Jarrod Dyson: During my brief stay at the Winter Meetings the Royals held a press conference for Trey Hillman, and at the end of the presser I got in a question, asking Hillman what prospects he was looking forward to bringing up to the major league roster this season. He immediately brought up Dyson, which was…curious, given that Dyson wasn’t even listed when Baseball America ranked the team’s top 30 prospects.

It would be all too easy to mock the Royals for thinking so highly of Dyson, who is 25 years old and still hasn’t demonstrated the ability to, you know, hit. In four minor league seasons, he has a .270 lifetime average, and his next homer will be his first as a pro.

But Dyson has one undeniable tool – speed – and to his credit has developed that tool into two identifiable skills: baserunning prowess and defensive range. The kid can fly, and he’s a stolen base threat every time he reaches base – which is far too rare. (In his career he has reached base of his own accord 308 times, and has 107 steals – an incredible ratio.) But he’s also a defensive whiz in centerfield. Those two skills don’t make a ballplayer, but they do make for a handy fifth or sixth outfielder – if teams had the space for five or six outfielders, which they don’t.

I’ve seen people compare him to Joey Gathright, which is silly for two reasons. One is that Gathright actually hit: in his first full season, Gathright hit .331 in the minor leagues, then hit .334 the following season between Double-A and Triple-A, and was in the majors by the time he was 23. But the other is that Gathright, despite his amazing speed, was never a particularly good outfielder, which is why he has been unable to stick in the majors as a backup (he was just released by the Blue Jays the other day.) The better comparison for Dyson, I think, would be to a poor man’s Endy Chavez, who was briefly with the Royals as a Rule 5 pick many years ago.

Chavez has never hit well enough to play every day in the majors, but he could always run, and if he were an everyday player people would recognize him as one of the best defensive outfielders in baseball. His running over-the-wall ice cream-scoop catch of Scott Rolen’s home run ball in Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS would rank as one of the three most important defensive plays in playoff history had the Mets not lost the game anyway on Yadier Molina’s ninth-inning home run.

I doubt that Dyson will ever develop enough to be a regular, or even semi-regular, outfielder in the majors. But if nothing else, he has tremendous value as a September callup, because when you have unlimited rosters, a guy who can pinch-run and play great defense off the bench will always have value. If anything, Dyson might be more valuable to a better team – a team that’s in the hunt in September could use a guy like Dyson that might steal them a game with his legs or glove. A team like the Royals needs September to look at guys who might be regulars for them in the future. Barring a radical improvement in his offensive game, Dyson won’t be that guy. If Hillman really thinks Dyson can help the Royals as an everyday player, he’s only fooling himself.

Kila Ka’aihue: The Royals keep trying to bury him, and he keeps making himself difficult to ignore. The power he showed in 2008 was unsustainable – Ka’aihue hit 37 homers but just 15 doubles, and that’s not a ratio that even the most hulking behemoth of a slugger can maintain for long. Sure enough, his homers dropped to 17 last season even as his doubles jumped to 27. But the drop in his batting average was more concerning; after hitting .315 in 2008, he hit just .252 for Omaha last year.

Fortunately, his plate discipline, his greatest skill, remained unharmed. He drew 102 walks last season after drawing 104 the year before. Remember, no Royal has walked 100 times at the major league level since Kevin Seitzer two decades ago. And while some guys draw lots of walks because they watch a lot of close pitches, including a lot of called strike threes, Ka’aihue has never struck out 100 times in a season.

He’s not as good as he looked in 2008, but he’s not as bad as he looked in 2009 – and in 2009, his performance still translated to have been a big improvement on Mike Jacobs. Jacobs is gone now, and while Jose Guillen has the DH spot for now, I have this suspicion that the odds Guillen loses the job to injury, non-performance, or simply a refusal to adapt to the position are quite high. Ka’aihue has had a monster spring, punctuated with a two-game stretch last week when he ended one game with a walk-off, bases-loaded walk, and hit the go-ahead homer in the eighth inning of the next game.

The Royals have pinned him with that awful label, “slider-bat speed”, a label that’s harder to get rid of than herpes. I’m not sure it’s true, and I’m not sure it’s relevant. Jacobs could hit a good fastball, but the problem was that he swung at a lot of bad fastballs as well. Ka’aihue may not be able to catch up to a perfectly-placed fastball, but few hitters can. And the good sense to lay off fastballs outside the strike zone mitigates that weakness.

Honestly, I wish some more of the Royals had slider-bat speed. If Guillen had slider-bat speed, maybe he’d actually hit some of those sliders he swings at. Somehow, the fact that Miguel Olivo had “fastball-bat speed” was okay. It’s okay if you swing over every off-speed pitch in the book, but God forbid you can’t hit a really good fastball.

Ka’aihue is one of the five best hitters in the organization right now, no matter what speed his bat is. If the Royals ever give him the chance to perform, they might be surprised at the results. Even if the rest of us won’t.

David Lough: When I spoke with J.J. Picollo a few weeks ago, I asked him for a sleeper from among the pitching and hitting ranks. His pitching sleeper was John Lamb, who we’ve already covered, and Lough was his hitting sleeper. His point wasn’t that Lough was an unknown – he ranks as the Royals’ #10 prospect by Baseball America, and reached Double-A last season, hitting .331/.371/.517 – but that this spring he looked even better than the Royals thought he was. They farmed him out early, but not before he made a big impression in camp.

It’s almost too easy to compare Lough to David DeJesus, but sometimes the easy comparison is easy for a reason. Like DeJesus, Lough projects as a tweener, a guy whose bat can play in center field, and whose glove looks good in a corner spot, but who might not fit at any specific position. And like DeJesus, Lough’s biggest strength is a lack of weaknesses. He hits for a good average, modest power (14 homers last year, 16 homers the year before), steals bases (19 last year, 12 in 2008), rarely strikes out, runs well, and has the range to hang in center or shine in a corner. The comparison even extends to his arm: like DeJesus, Lough doesn’t have great arm strength, but is very accurate with his throws. The biggest difference is that Lough doesn’t walk a lot – just 24 walks last season – and he’ll need to work on that if he’s ever going to have an acceptable OBP.

DeJesus has had a much better career than many expected, and it’s not because he developed any surprising skills like start to hit for power, it’s just that he was maybe 5% or 10% better across the board than he was expected to be, and at his level of performance, that’s the difference between fringe-average and average-plus, as the scouts say. DeJesus started his career in center field, where his glove was average but his bat was a little above-average, and then last year he moved to left field, where his bat was average but he was one of the best defensive left fielders in the game.

Coming into spring training, I was worried that Lough would be a true tweener, a guy who maybe was a good fourth outfielder but just wouldn’t hit enough to play every day. But as with DeJesus, a little improvement goes a long way when you’ve got a broad base of skills like Lough does. If Lough really does take his game to another level this season, he might be ready to take over if and when Rick Ankiel or Scott Podsednik break down, and may play well enough to hold onto the job all season. Lough’s a very athletic guy who was recruited to a Division II college to play football, and is still young in baseball terms, which means that even at age 24, continued development is not unlikely. If the Royals were seeing something real in spring training, he could soon be starting for them for a long time.

Johnny Giavotella: Johnny G is my sleeper, and not just because his name makes him sound like an extra in “Goodfellas”. Giavotella is a true sleeper, in that his first full pro season was widely considered a bit of a disappointment: he went to high-A Wilmington and hit just .258 with 6 homers. He’s also not considered to be a particularly good second baseman defensively.

But look deeper. He was just 20 when he signed – he was unusually young for a college junior – and played most of last season at age 21. Almost on cue, he hit better after he turned 22 in July; he hit .292/.355/.423 in the second half of the season. And he played for the Blue Rocks, where the ballpark is a notoriously tough place to hit, but particularly so for right-handed hitters. He has tremendous bat control; he walked 66 times against just 54 strikeouts last season. He has good speed, with 26 steals. Moving to a much-better hitters’ park in Double-A this year, I think Giavotella may surprise everyone with a breakout season offensively.

When he was drafted, I tried to find major league players that he would compare to, and finally settled on “Chuck Knoblauch without the speed”. So I was quite pleased when I opened this year’s edition of Baseball Prospectus, and under Giavotella’s projection, his most comparable player was…Chuck Knoblauch. (And yes, yes, I’m quite aware that the elves have invaded the PECOTA system this spring, and if you check online I’m sure Giavotella’s closest comp will be Ichiro Suzuki, or maybe Dan Quisenberry. I’ll stick with Knobby.) His glove will continue to be an issue, but you can do worse than a second baseman with a .370 OBP and speed, even if his defense is subpar. The Royals certainly have.