Reason #11: The Park.

Kauffman Stadium is older than I am, and a lot better looking. Between 1970 and 1973, 4 new major league stadiums opened their doors, all of them round, symmetrical fields with artificial turf, the sort of place for which the term “stadium” was somehow more appropriate than “park” or “field”. Riverfront Stadium, Three Rivers Stadium, and Veterans Stadium have been long since retired, as has Busch Stadium (which originally opened with grass in 1966, but switched to turf a few years later.) And this doesn’t even count places like the Metrodome, which opened in 1982 and is already slated for destruction, or the dearly imploded Kingdome, or Jack Murphy Stadium, or the monstrosity that was Stade Olympique.

Only Kauffman Stadium remains. Only Kauffman Stadium, among the parks of its era, was built solely for baseball, with proper sightlines and seats pointing the right way and that enormous crown which focused all your attention towards centerfield. Once the A’s, Mets, and Yankees move into their new ballparks, Kauffman Stadium will be the fifth-oldest park in the majors.

Fenway Park: 1912
Wrigley Field: 1916
Dodger Stadium: 1962
Angel Stadium: 1966
Kauffman Stadium: 1973

Skydome...er, the Rogers Centre, which opened in the middle of the 1989 season, will rank sixth.

The bond measure which passed a few years ago all but assures it will remain the Royals’ home for another quarter-century, for good reason: it’s a terrific ballpark. It’s easy to get to, the parking lot is the biggest this side of Great America, and the fountains are one of the most distinctive flourishes for any stadium in baseball, if not all of sports. Once they ripped out the turf a decade ago, you really could not file an aesthetic complaint against the place. The one legitimate gripe was that the sports complex, set off from Kansas City proper at the confluence of two major highways, was impossible to reach on foot and was not integrated into the natural rhythms of the city at all.

But today, when more than half the teams in baseball play in a mallpark that’s less than two decades old, and almost every one of them has been wedged into an urbanized downtown setting where you can walk from the business district to your seat, then stop at a bar on the way out – Kauffman Stadium feels almost delightfully retro. The ballpark isn’t a way station between dinner on the waterfront and a nightcap at a piano bar. It’s a place you go to watch a baseball game, and it was designed for that singular purpose. I love it. And I can’t wait to see what it looks like when all the ongoing renovations – an enormous jumbotron, an even larger crown scoreboard, wider concourses, more food options, etc. – are completed by Opening Day 2009.

Reason #12: The Epic.

I have to be honest here: I never expected Gil Meche to pitch as well as he did last year. Hoped, yes. Thought it was within the realm of possibility, sure. But I didn’t expect it. No one did. How could I, when PECOTA was projecting Meche for a 5.40 ERA, and Rob Neyer was openly wondering if the signing of Meche was “dumber than anything Allard Baird ever did” – let us not forget, Baird once traded Jermaine Dye for Neifi Perez?

But Meche pitched like an ace for six weeks – he had a 1.91 ERA in his first nine starts – and was a still-better-than-league-average pitcher after that, with a 4.36 ERA and strong peripherals the rest of the way. He never tired, he never turned into a pumpkin, he never gave an opening for his detractors. His season totals wouldn’t look out of place in Kevin Appier’s prime, right down to the lousy run support. Compare these two seasons:

Year Pitcher  GS   IP    H   BB   K  HR   W  L  ERA    RS

1997 Appier 34 235.2 215 74 196 24 9 13 3.40 3.92
2007 Meche 34 216.0 218 62 156 22 9 13 3.67 3.84

(RS is run support.)

Appier would hurt his shoulder the following winter; the official story was that he fell off his sister’s porch carrying her wedding presents, but there were a lot of unofficial stories out there. In 1997, though, he was continuing an eight-year run as one of the five best starting pitchers in baseball. Meche wasn’t that good, but then, no one in Royals history was as good as Kevin Appier.

I’m not going to be able to just let that comment hang out there, so…let me say it again: Kevin Appier is the best pitcher in the history of the Royals’ franchise. In terms of overall value, he was more valuable than the legends before my time (Dennis Leonard, Paul Splittorff, Larry Gura), or the heroes of my youth, the Leibrandts and the Danny Jacksons. He was better than Bret Saberhagen.

Yes, he was better than Bret Saberhagen. Saberhagen won two Cy Young Awards; Appier won none. But Appier, by any reasonable measure, was the best pitcher in the American League in 1993, and that Jack McDowell won that season was a crime – a crime aided and abetted by the local writers (I don’t know their identities, though I have my suspicions) – as only one of the 28 BBWAA voters that year put Kevin Appier at the top of their ballot. Twenty guesses and you’ll never guess right…it was Phil Rogers, then of the Dallas Morning News. Rogers has gone to bigger things and has become a frequent target of the sabermetric movement, but I’ve always had a soft spot for him because he was the one guy who managed to figure out that the pitcher with a 2.46 ERA was better than the pitcher with a 3.37 ERA.

McDowell won because he went 22-10; Appier went 18-8. But if you simply look at their team’s overall record when each pitcher started – what Joe Posnanski calls “True Wins” – both pitchers were 23-11. And while Appier’s run support was 4.52 per game; McDowell’s was 4.97.

Saberhagen’s 1989 is the best single season by a pitcher in team history; by WARP1, he was good for 12.4 wins over replacement that year. He was also over 10 wins in 1985 (10.3) and 1987 (10.1). Appier’s 1993 scores at 11.1, the second-best season by a Royal; he was 10.0 in 1992 and 9.3 in 1996.

The problem for Saberhagen is that those three years are pretty much all he’s got. He was at 8.1 WARP in 1991, but was pretty much a league-average pitcher in all the even years in between (1984, 1986, 1988, 1990). And then he was gone. Appier was at 8.0 in 1997, 7.6 in 1995, 7.2 in 1990, and 6.7 in 1992. In 1994, he only had 5.2 WARP, but was on pace for about 7.4 before the strike. Appier was an elite starter for eight consecutive years. Saberhagen was a Cy Young contender for three years, very good for one year, and then either blah or injured in the other four.

If you arrange their seasons from best to worst, here’s what you get:

 Saberhagen Appier
Year WARP Year WARP

1989 12.4 1993 11.1
1985 10.3 1992 10.0
1987 10.1 1996 9.3
1991 8.1 1997 8.0
1988 6.9 1995 7.6
1990 5.2 1990 7.2
1984 4.5 1992 6.7
1986 4.5 1994* 5.2

Saberhagen wins the top four seasons, by narrow margins. Appier wins the bottom four seasons, by big margins.

By career WARP in a Royals uniform, Appier wins, 68.2 to 62.0. No one else comes close; Paul Splittorff had 54.6 WARP (despite a career high of 6.4; his best season was not as good as Appier’s worst), Quisenberry had 53.6 (amazing for a reliever), and Dennis Leonard was at 52.8.

Actually, there is one other pitcher I haven’t mentioned who I’m amazed to say had the exact same WARP as Appier – Mark Gubicza. Gubie really had two careers, one as a power pitcher and one as a garbage/finesse guy, sort of the Royals’ version of Frank Tanana. From 1987 to 1989 he was as good as Saberhagen; his 1988 WARP of 11.0 is third all-time. He hurt his arm after throwing about 770 innings over three years – imagine that – but after a period of adjustment to losing his fastball, he settled in as a league-average pitcher for a few years, capping it off with a very fine 1995 when he managed to throw 212 innings in a somewhat strike-shortened season because Bob Boone had the audacity to try a four-man rotation for half the year.

I think the tie clearly goes to Appier ahead given that his value was almost entirely packed into eight seasons, whereas Gubicza’s value was spread out over 13 years. Peak value means something – a team is more likely to win a pennant with a pitcher who’s brilliant for a short period of time than with a pitcher who’s simply good for a longer period of time. On the other hand, when Appier’s time was up, the Royals dealt him for three piles of dung (or, if you prefer, Blake Stein and two piles of dung, which isn’t much better.) Gubicza, on the other hand, somehow fetched Chili Davis, who gave the Royals a fantastic season as a DH in 1997.

If I had to subjectively rank the best starters in team history, it would like this:

1. Kevin Appier
2. Bret Saberhagen (that World Series performance counts for something)
3. Mark Gubicza
4. Dennis Leonard
5. Paul Splittorff

Anyway, we got off track here…while Meche is no Kevin Appier, he has an excellent shot at becoming the Royals’ best starter since Appier. This is partly because the Royals have not had any good starters since Appier. Since the 1994-95 strike, only three Royals than Appier) have amassed even 15 WARP, which equates to about three seasons of league-average pitching. Those three are Jose Rosado (21.3), Jeff Suppan (20.4), and Tim Belcher (17.8). Belcher departed in 1998, Rosado’s arm went boom in 2000, and Suppan left after 2002; things have only gotten worse since then.

Since 2000, what pitcher has the most WARP in a Royals uniform? Would you believe Zack Greinke? On the basis of a good year in 2004 (for four months), a good year in 2007 (as a swingman), and a disastrous 2005, Greinke has 14.7 WARP. Suppan has 14.4, and then the list goes Darrell May, Paul Byrd, Jeremy Affeldt, Jason Grimsley…you know what, I’ll stop there. Once you reach Jason Grimsley, there’s really no point in going on.

Meche is already in 11^th place, with 6.9 WARP; he had the second-best season of any Royals’ starter this decade, behind only Paul Byrd’s 2002 (7.7).

I see no reason why he can’t do it again. PECOTA is unrepentant, predicting Meche to finish with a 4.47 ERA. His top comparable is last year’s version of Vicente Padilla, followed by the immortal Roger Pavlik of 1997. I’ll remember to slap Nate Silver upside the head the next time I see him, though in the meantime a dose of humility is warranted: pitchers who have a sudden breakthrough in performance, as Meche did last season, don’t always hold onto it.

I’m confident Meche will, though. His performance spiked corresponded to a specific event, the change in his delivery that had him land on his toes instead of his heel. His injury woes, the ones that kept him off a mound entirely for all of 2001 and 2002, seem long behind him. His control dramatically improved last year, and walk rate is perhaps the one category where a sudden improvement by a pitcher is most likely to be sustained.

It’s too early to say he can make the mid-career leap from solid starting pitcher to Cy Young contender that Jason Schmidt and Chris Carpenter made. But Schmidt and Carpenter both made their leaps when they were 29. Gil Meche is 29.

So long as Meche gives us four more years like his last one, he’ll be an enormous free agent bargain. Who would you rather have over the next four years, Gil Meche or Carlos Silva? Keep in mind, Silva will make a million more per year than Meche.

The Epic of Gil Meche has yet to be fully written. But whereas a year ago I thought it would be a tragedy, today I’m hopeful that it will be a resounding and heart-warming triumph.

Reason #13: The Kid.

Royals fans may long rue the final day of the 2006 season, the day the Royals beat the Tigers in 12 innings, completing an improbable sweep, one that coincided with the Devil Rays’ getting swept in their final series, tilting the ownership of the #1 pick in 2007 draft from Kansas City to Tampa Bay. I was watching the game on Extra Innings, and I honestly don’t think I’ve ever rooted harder for the Royals to lose. Less than 48 hours earlier they held a 2.5 game “lead” on the Devil Rays for the first pick in the draft, and were playing the AL Central-leading Tigers. Suddenly they were in mortal danger of losing that pick, and as I have shown in the past, the difference in value between the #1 and #2 overall picks is the largest drop at any point in the draft.

In the bottom of the 11^th, the Tigers had the bases loaded with one out, but with the winning run ninety feet away, Joe Nelson struck out Brandon Inge. He was immediately lifted for Jimmy Gobble, who struck out Curtis Granderson to get out of the inning. The Royals would score two in the 12^th to win. That may well prove to be Joe Nelson’s final pitch in the major leagues. No truth to the rumor that he spent all of last season on the DL with an evil eye.

As bad as I felt at the time, I felt even worse about that day the following spring, when it became increasingly clear that 1) David Price was head-and-shoulders above the pack as the best player available in the draft, and 2) no one could agree on who was the second-best player in the draft.

But if there was a consensus #2 player in the draft, it was Rick Porcello, the high school right-hander from New Jersey who some have called the best high school pitcher of the decade. The Royals did not draft him. Worse still, the Tigers, who figure to be one of the team’s biggest roadblocks to a playoff spot over the next five years, landed him with the 27^th pick in the draft, then signed him for a major-league contract worth about $7 million.

For the span of almost 24 hours last August, it appeared the while the Tigers had signed their man, the Royals were not going to come to terms with the player they selected at least in part because he was more signable than Porcello. Fortunately, Mike Moustakas accepted the Royals’ $4 million offer minutes before the deadline.

You have to wonder at least a little about an organization that thinks the proper answer to the equation “Rick Porcello” – “Mike Moustakas” = “Brett Tomko.” And the talk out of Tiger camp this spring certainly hasn’t made me feel better about passing on Porcello. In his first outing of the year, he retired all six batters he faced, didn’t let the ball out of the infield, and struck out Frank Thomas. In his second outing he wasn’t quite as dominant; a front office source told me “he looked a lot like Justin Verlander in his first camp.” And that was on a bad day. (And Verlander was 22 in his first camp; Porcello’s 19.) He could easily be in Double-A by the end of the year.

Having said all that, Moustakas isn’t exactly chopped liver. He’s a guy the scouts and the stats can agree on. The scouts love his athleticism (he served as his high school team’s closer and touched 97 on the mound) and a swing that’s perfectly tailored for power. The stats say that he set all-time California records for home runs in a season (24) and in a career (52) while hitting .577 as a senior. While we don’t typically put much stock in high school stats, the level of competition in California is pretty darn high, and a lot of major league stars have gone to high school there without ever hitting that many home runs. If Moustakas hit 24 home runs in South Carolina – hello, Roscoe Crosby! – I’d be a touch more skeptical.

The fact that Moustakas has already hit for prodigious power is important, because he doesn’t have the build that projects for additional power down the road (he’s a compact 6’0”, 195 pounds.) That doesn’t mean he can’t hit for power in the majors – Hank Aaron stood 6-foot even, and Willie Mays was 5’11" – but it certainly helps that he already has shown that skill in spades.

The negatives here are that Moustakas was very old for a high school draftee; he turned 19 less than a month after signing. By comparison, Josh Vitters (who the Royals almost took instead of Moustakas, and went #3 overall to the Cubs) is about 11 months younger. On the other hand, Moustakas had better numbers as a high school junior than Vitters had as a senior. Age is important, and an additional year of development can make an enormous difference at that age, but it’s not everything.

The other negative is that while Moustakas should hit well enough to hit at any position, no one knows what position that will be yet. The Royals are keeping him at shortstop for now, which is nice, but no one outside the organization thinks he’ll last at the position, and even a whisper that a minor league player will have to switch positions almost invariably comes true. This is one instance where his height serves him well – if Moustakas has to move, it’s because he doesn’t show the range for shortstop, not because he “outgrows” the position.

If he can last even a few years at shortstop in the majors, sort of like Stephen Drew with the Diamondbacks, he’ll be an immensely valuable player. But even that seems wishful thinking. Third base would make a lot of sense, but that position is sort of taken for the next five years. He has the arm for rightfield, but you lose a lot of positional value if you move him there. There’s even been talk that, given his arm and build, he could move behind the plate. Moving a top hitting prospect to catcher is the baseball equivalent of day-trading on the NASDAQ – the one or two success stories (Brandon Inge, Michael Barrett) get all the buzz, while the 99% that crash and burn get swept under the rug.

That leaves second base, which at least one respected baseball man thinks is his best position. It’s a waste of his arm, and the injury rate among second baseman is almost as bad as among catchers, but the impact of a power bat at the position can not be overstated. Chase Utley, anyone?

I’d still rather have Price, and not just because he got a standing ovation in spring training – on the Yankees’ home field. (Granted, the Yankees play in Tampa…) I strongly feel there’s a window for the Royals to win the division in 2010, and Price not only will be in the majors by then, he might well be a Cy Young candidate. Moustakas will be 21 in 2010; he might be in the majors, but to expect him to be any more than an average major leaguer by then is incredibly optimistic.

But the Royals, at least for the moment, seem to have enough pitching. They certainly don’t have enough hitters. Moustakas might not be a better player than Price or Porcello, but he might prove to be the better fit for the Royals in the long run. No regrets here. At least not yet.

xxx

If you can’t get enough of the Brian Bannister Phenomenon, our buddy Jeff Passan has a terrific article that sums it all up.

Reason #14: The Thinker.

As a Royals fan, it’s really been quite amazing to watch over the past few months as the baseball blogosphere has picked up on what we’ve known since last season: that Brian Bannister is one of the smartest players in baseball, and certainly one of the game’s deepest thinkers.

A year ago, when the Royals acquired him from the Mets straight up for Ambiorix Burgos, even baseball insiders weren’t aware of Bannister’s intellect (or if they were, they didn’t think it mattered.) The immediate reaction from other front offices at the winter meetings was that the Royals got the short end of the stick, that they traded a potential closer for a potential #5 starter. The stats bore that impression out: namely, that Burgos was 22 years old and struck people out, while Bannister was 25 and didn’t.

There have been many advantages to being a baseball outsider for all these years. You’re not likely to be swayed by bias because you don’t know the players well enough to be biased one way or another, and you’re not likely to miss the forest for the trees because you’re not close enough to see the trees. (Bill James’ classic piece “Inside-Out Perspective”, which ran at the beginning of the 1984 Abstract, explains this phenomenon far better than I ever could.)

Only sometimes it helps to see those trees, because sometimes they tell you something of value. We may not have been quite so negative about the Bannister trade at the time if, say, we had had the opportunity to talk to Bannister for half an hour and found out what makes him tick. Though I think it’s interesting that the people who are baseball insiders – the guys who work in the game and know these players better than you and I ever will – were not any higher on Bannister than we were.

We quickly learned that we were wrong about Bannister, a lesson we thoroughly enjoyed. One of the better fringe benefits of a Brian Bannister start last season – the main benefit being that he, you know, generally pitched well – was getting to read some of his post-game comments. Most guys are cliché factories; Bannister talked likes he’s instructing kids at a pitching clinic. Smart kids at that.

We were intrigued; we wanted to find out more about the guy. We found out Bannister graduated magna cum laude from USC, and that none of his grades came in ballroom dancing (or accepting favors from an agent, then stabbing him in the back, for that matter.) We found out that in the offseason, he pulls himself away from the hunting and fishing pursuits that are mandated of all ballplayers long enough to run his own photography studio in Arizona. He’s like Curt Schilling without the blog or the ego.

We found out from Joe Posnanski’s blog that he reads Baseball Prospectus, and that he not only has familiarized himself with modern sabermetric analysis, but that he has dabbled in some statistical analysis himself. And then we – along with most every baseball writer – read this astounding interview he gave Tim Dierkes of MLBTradeRumors.com. If you haven’t read it already, I really can’t recommend it enough.

I’ve simply never heard a pitcher say things like “whether you like it or not, baseball is a game of randomness. We play outdoors (mostly) in changing elements and field dimensions, and each pitch results in a series of events that can go in either teams favor…Therefore, as a pitcher, I study and play to put the percentages in my favor more than anything because I know that I can't control the outcome in a single game or series of games, but over the course of a season or a career I will be better than average.” Well, maybe I have, but certainly never so articulately.

But what makes the interview special is Part 3, when Bannister not only states his understanding of DIPS theory, but points out a potential flaw in the theory that he can exploit. For those of you who are not familiar with DIPS theory (or BABIP), I recommend this column. Essentially, Voros McCracken argued seven years ago that the ability to prevent hits once contact is made (except for home runs) is entirely in the hands of the defense, and the pitcher has no ability to influence opposing hitters’ batting average on balls in play (BABIP). That theory has since been adjusted to state, essentially, that the pitcher has very little ability to influence opposing hitters’ BABIP. In modern baseball, the average BABIP is about .300, but can range from .270 for a team with a tremendous defense to .340 or .350 for a team with the equivalent of Billy Butler at every position. And even the best starters in baseball might be able to sway that figure in their favor by no more than ten points. It’s probably the most important sabermetric advance so far this decade.

Here, I’ll let Bannister explain it: “I think a lot of fans underestimate how much time I spend working with statistics to improve my performance on the field. For those that don't know, the typical BABIP for starting pitchers in Major League Baseball is around .300 give or take a few points. The common (and valid) argument is that over the course of a pitcher's career, he can not control his BABIP from year-to-year (because it is random), but over a period of time it will settle into the median range of roughly .300 (the peak of the bell curve). Therefore, pitchers that have a BABIP of under .300 are due to regress in subsequent years and pitchers with a BABIP above .300 should see some improvement (assuming they are a Major League Average pitcher).

Because I don't have enough of a sample size yet (service time), I don't claim to be able to beat the .300 average year in and year out at the Major League level. However, I also don't feel that every pitcher is hopelessly bound to that .300 number for his career if he takes some steps to improve his odds - which is what pitching is all about.”

Bannister goes on to say that his idea for improving those odds is that, because BABIP can be shown to fluctuate depending on the count, a pitcher who can induce more contact in 0-1 or 0-2 counts will have a lower BABIP than a pitcher who typically falls behind 2-0 or 2-1 before contact is made. It’s a simple concept, and one I had given a fleeting thought to in the past, but to the best of my knowledge Bannister is the first person – pitcher or otherwise – to articulate the idea in print.

I can think of only one other time when a baseball player came up with a new theory for baseball analysts to think their teeth into, and that was when Sean Burroughs argued that among left-handed hitters, guys who also throw left-handed tend to develop power earlier (think Ken Griffey Jr.) than guys who throw right-handed (think George Brett.) The problem with Burroughs’ hypothesis was that the evidence to support it was minimal, as I discovered in this column. (The best evidence that his theory was wrong, unfortunately, turned out to be his own career.)

Bannister, on the other hand, turns out to be right, or at least partially right. It’s true that a pitcher could lower his BABIP by getting into more favorable counts (i.e. throwing more strikes) – but it turns out the effect is quite small, on the order of five to ten points at most.

And this is important, because Bannister owes much of his success last year to his own BABIP, which at just .262 was one of the lowest marks in the majors. (I believe it was the lowest mark of any qualifying starter, though I can't confirm that.) I have no doubt that Bannister has the ability to get the most out of his ability, as it were. But I refuse to believe that he can sustain a BABIP that low, for the simple reason that no pitcher in the history of baseball has sustained a BABIP that low relative to his league and team defense.

So we arrive at an impasse. As Bob Dutton put it recently, “There is a certain irony to it. The Royals pitcher most likely to understand the reams of quantitative analysis so dear to baseball’s burgeoning sabermetric community is the pitcher whose future draws so little love from its conclusions.” Those conclusions are this: that a pitcher who strikes out just 4.2 men per nine innings, as Bannister did last year, can not succeed consistently unless he does one of two things: he has impeccable control, or he is an extreme groundball pitcher who rarely gets nicked by the home run. If you have the first, you can be Carlos Silva; if you’re the second, you can be Scott Erickson. (If you’re both, you can be Dan Quisenberry.)

Bannister is neither. He walked 44 batters in 165 innings last year, which is very good but not in the Silva category. More worrisome, he’s actually a little more flyball-prone than the average pitcher; his career groundball/flyball ratio is 1.06, while the major-league average is around 1.20.

So I maintain that if Bannister pitches like he did last year, his effectiveness will almost certainly diminish in the long-run, and he’ll be hard-pressed to maintain even a league-average ERA.

But there’s the rub: if Bannister pitches like he did last year. Bannister’s pitching acumen will not allow him to maintain a .262 BABIP, or anything close to that. But it will allow him to improve in those areas where a pitcher really does have control of his destiny: his ability to limit walks and homers while striking out more batters.

In all the talk about how Bannister is a finesse pitcher because he didn’t strike anyone out as a rookie, what’s lost is that, in the minor leagues, his strikeout rates were far better than average. In 2004, he struck out 134 batters in 154 innings; in 2005 it was 142 Ks in 154 IP, including more than a man per inning (48 Ks in 45 IP) at the Triple-A level. For his minor league career he had 365 strikeouts in 417 innings, or 7.88 per nine. That’s not Dwight Gooden, but it’s not Jeff Ballard either.

And that’s why, while I’m a little leery of Bannister in the short term, I’m confident that he can make the adjustments to continue being an above-average starting pitcher in the long term. Put it this way: let’s say that Bannister can’t keep his BABIP at .262, but has the ability to keep his BABIP at .290, about 10 points better than league average. In that case, if his strikeout rate rises from 4.2 per nine innings to 7.04 per nine innings, he will surrender the exact same number of hits that he did last season.

The question is, can he do that? Most pitchers increase their strikeout rates in their second full season, but a leap of that magnitude is rare. On the other hands, Bannister’s strikeout rate last season appears almost as flukish – given his minor league resume – as his BABIP was. I don’t think he’s going to strike out 7 men per nine innings, but 6 or 6.5 is not unreasonable. Combine that with excellent control and even an average strikeout rate, and you’ve got yourself a heck of a #3 starter.

Brian, if you’re reading this, just remember that the numbers aren’t saying you can’t remain effective. What they’re saying is that you can’t remain effective the same way. So while your efforts to keep your BABIP at a low level are laudable, focusing your efforts on getting more strikeouts is going to yield a lot more bang for your buck.

I don't mean to brag...

But since a few of you asked…

                    
SS Derek Jeter     Was on base something like 3 times a game
RF Jack Cust       The bat was more than worth the glove
3B Chipper Jones   First-round pick obliterates RHP
CF B.J. Upton      Team took off when Upton took over in CF
LF Barry Bonds     The bat was more than worth the glove
C Russell Martin   Steal of the draft in the 7th round
1B Prince Fielder  Yes, Prince Fielder batted seventh
2B Dustin Pedroia  Made all the plays in the field 
              
CF Carlos Beltran  No on-base against RHP, so I benched him
1B James Loney     +11 in the clutch, an absolute monster PH
3B Ryan Zimmerman  Crushes LHP; I platooned him with Chipper
OF Alex Rios       Jack Cust’s glove and platoon partner
OF Norris Hopper   Every team needs a PH who can lead off
C Brian McCann     I think he batted twice in the tournament
          
SP Tim Hudson      Second-best starting pitcher in the set
SP C.C. Sabathia   Couldn’t turn him down in the 19th round
SP Roy Halladay    Someone had to pitch 5 innings every 4 days
SP Derek Lowe      Someone had to pitch 5 innings every 4 days 
LRP Rafael Perez   The best lefty reliever in the set
LRP George SherrillA poor man’s Rafael Perez
LRP Ron Mahay      The token Royal (well, new Royal)
RRP Manny Corpas   Closer who gets RHB and LHB out equally
RRP Russ Springer  Death to RHB, acceptable against LHB
RRP Lee Gardner    A poor man’s Russ Springer
RRP Joaquin Benoit A mirror-image of Lee Gardner

The team started slow, losing its first two games, before finding its footing, but was just 10-8 and two games out of a playoff spot with four games to go. I then benched Beltran for Upton and unleashed a monster. I swept my final four games to win my division, dismantled my semifinals opponent three games to one (albeit two of those wins coming in 13 and 14 innings), and winning the finals four games to one. For the tournament the team was 21-10; while I haven’t counted up the numbers yet, I’m guessing that Cust and Bonds combined for about 25 homers.

I’d like to say that this is no big deal for me, that I’ve won tournaments before, but I haven’t, and I’ve played in probably 20 tournaments going back to 1993. You need a good team, but you also need a lot of luck. Joe Sheehan, drafting in a different division, ended up with a remarkably similar team and went 9-11.

It was a fun weekend.

Let’s tie this into the Royals somehow…we played 8-man drafts, which means 200 players were drafted, but only two of them played for the Royals last year: Joakim Soria, who’s one of the best relievers in the set, and Brian Bannister, a late-round starter. Gil Meche is on the bubble; he’d probably be taken in a 10-man draft. Greinke might get taken, although he’s a few innings shy of qualifying as a starting pitcher. John Buck should have been taken, and almost certainly goes in a deeper draft. That’s it.

It’s not quite as rigorous as Joe Posnanski’s “Championship Caliber Guys”, but counting up the number of players worthy of being drafted in a Stratomatic tournament isn’t a bad way of evaluating your team’s chances. The average team has about seven players picked. The Royals had two. That’s going to have to change this year. I’ll put my money on Meche, Greinke, Soria, Gordon, Butler, Buck, Guillen, and one of the lefty relievers for next year.

Back soon with a continuation of the countdown.

Reason #15: The Pick.

Here’s something that Yankee fans can’t say about their team: the Royals have drafted in the top half of the first round every year since 1996. (So there.) Unfortunately, drafting that early is hardly a guarantee you’ll land a great player. It’s drafting guys like Dee Brown (#14, 1996), Dan Reichert (#7, 1997), Jeff Austin (#4, 1998), Kyle Snyder (#7, 1999), Mike Stodolka (#4, 2000), and Colt Griffin (#9, 2001) that led to the Royals continuing to pick early in the first round.

(Take a look at that list of players again. Six straight years with Top-15 picks, the last five picks in the Top 10. Two of those guys never made the majors – Stodolka still might, but as a hitter now. Snyder might be the best pick of them all; he’s 8-17 with a 5.45 career ERA. And you wonder how the Royals lost 100 games three straight years.)

But since 2002, the Royals have drafted Zack Greinke (#6, 2002), Chris Lubanski (#5, 2003), Billy Butler (#14, 2004), Alex Gordon (#2, 2005), Luke Hochevar (#1, 2006), and Mike Moustakas (#2, 2007). Lubanski might still be a flop, and it’s too early to say much about Hochevar and Moustakas. But the other three guys alone make this run of first-round picks a success. So with the #3 overall pick this June, with guys like Pedro Alvarez and Justin Smoak available from the college ranks, and Tim Beckham and Tim Melville out of high school, the Royals are in perfect position to add another Grade A prospect to their stable.

For all the talk about competitive imbalance in baseball, the reality is that the draft remains an incredibly powerful tool to reversing that imbalance…so long as that tool is used wisely. The Rays are proof that, if you draft with even some intelligence, eventually all that sucking is going to work in your favor. It’s not just that the Rays have drafted in the Top 8 for nine straight years, and have used those picks to draft Rocco Baldelli, B.J. Upton, Delmon Young, Evan Longoria, and David Price (not to mention Josh Hamilton, and there’s still hope for Jeff Niemann.) It’s that, drafting at the very top of the second round, they got first crack at the leftovers, and came away with Carl Crawford and top prospect Reid Brignac. In the third round, they got Wade Davis, and that round would look a lot better if 1) Elijah Dukes wasn’t a misogynistic, violent creep with a temper problem and 2) if they had signed Andrew Miller out of high school in 2003. Throw in 2004 fifth-rounder Jacob McGee, and five of the top six prospects in the best farm system in baseball are in this paragraph.

But you have to draft well. The Royals didn’t for many years, and they’re still trying to pick their way through the rubble. From 1994 to 2002, the Pirates drafted Mark Farris, Chad Hermansen, Kris Benson (#1 overall pick), J.J. Davis, Clint Johnston, Bobby Bradley, Sean Burnett, John Van Benschoten (who they, alone among the 30 teams, decided to use as a pitcher after he led the NCAA in homers his junior year), and Brian Bullington (another #1 pick, who their owner forced them to take over B.J. Upton.) That’s how you continue to pick at the top of the draft every year. GM Dave Littlefield didn’t seem to learn, as he used last summer’s #4 overall pick on Daniel Moskos, a perfectly good college left-handed pitcher – a left-handed reliever. To the relief of Pirate fans everywhere, that final insult seemed to be, well, the final insult: Littlefield was canned not long thereafter.

The Royals’ draft efforts from 1996 to 2001 are the reason why the Royals continued to draft high from 2002 to 2008. But the draft efforts from 2002 to 2008 may enable this cycle to finally end.

Last year’s draft, the first one with Dayton Moore at the helm, looks very strong at this point. Moustakas looks like a good pick in the first round, albeit he’s not Rick Porcello. Second-rounder Sean Runion had a decent debut for a projectable high school pitcher, and third-rounder Daniel Duffy, a lefty out of a small California high school, was a revelation in rookie ball. Matt Mitchell, another pitcher from an out-of-the-way California school, was drafted in the 14^th round and Baseball America wrote this winter that “the Royals might have come away with one of the steals of the 2007 draft.” The Royals gambled $300,000 to sign their 31^st-round pick, Keaton Hayenga, at the deadline.

The Royals need to keep the strong drafts coming, because there’s simply no way a small-market franchise can become a contender without a perpetual supply of young talent. To their credit, the team (or more precisely, the owner) finally realizes that, and has authorized money to be spent both in the draft and in the international amateur market. The Royals can’t afford to waste the #3 pick this June. If they don’t, there’s a good shot it will be the last time they draft that high in a long time.

***

Just a heads-up: RotR will be going dark for a few days. I should be leaving shortly for Indianapolis, where I will be appearing with Joe Sheehan and Will Carroll from Baseball Prospectus, and John Gasaway from our new Basketball Prospectus, at the Marriott downtown; come out if you live in the area. Then this weekend Joe and I will be playing in a Stratomatic tournament in Indy. Yes, I'm a geek.

Reason #16: The Neighbor.

It’s a little-known rule outside Kansas City, but the locals all know: the Royals and the Chiefs can’t be competitive at the same time. Don’t question why. Nobody knows why. But they can’t. Forty years of history have borne that out.

I’ve put together a list below of the records of the Royals and Chiefs going back to the Royals’ first season in 1969. Games +/- .500 are also listed, but for the Chiefs I multiplied this number by four to account for the shorter season. By this method, a 10-6 season rates as a +16, the same as an 89-73 season in baseball. A 10-6 team is on the bubble, but will make the playoffs more often than not; an 89-73 baseball team is on the bubble, but would make the playoffs more often than not if MLB expanded the playoffs to 12 teams. A 14-2 team powerhouse equates to a 105-57 juggernaut in baseball. A 16-0 NFL team would be equivalent to 113-49 in MLB, which makes the Patriots the 2001 Mariners of football. Asterisks denote playoff teams.

(I apologize for the formatting - no matter how hard I try, I can't get the columns to line up, even in Courier font. If someone who knows blogger.com formatting can help, please leave a comment. Thanks.)

                                                                                
Year  Royals  +/- .500  Chiefs  +/- .500 (*4)  Total
1969      69-93    -24     11-3*      +32          + 8
1970       65-97    -32      7-5-2     + 8          -24
1971      85-76    + 9     10-3-1*    +28          +37
1972      76-78    - 2      8-6       + 8          + 6
1973       88-74    +14      7-5-2     + 8          +22
1974       77-85    - 8      5-9       -16          -24
1975      91-71    +20      5-9       -16          + 4
1976      90-72*   +18      5-9       -16          + 2
1977  102-60*   +42      2-12      -40          + 2
1978       92-70*   +22      4-12      -32          -10
1979       85-77    + 8      7-9       - 8            0
1980       97-65*   +32      8-8         0          +32
1981       50-53*   - 3      9-7       + 8          + 5
1982       90-72    +18      3-6       -12          + 6
1983       79-83    - 4      6-10      -16          -20
1984       84-78*   + 6      8-8         0          + 6
1985       91-71*   +20      6-10      -16          + 4
1986      76-86    -10     10-6*      +16          + 6
1987       83-79    + 4      4-11      -28          -24
1988       84-77    + 7      4-11-1    -28          -21
1989       92-70    +22      8-7-1     + 4          +26
1990       75-86    -11     11-5*      +24          +15
1991       82-80    + 2     10-6*      +16          +18
1992       72-90    -18     10-6*      +16          - 2
1993       84-78    + 6     11-5*      +24          +30
1994       65-51    +14      9-7*      + 8          +22
1995       70-74    - 4     13-3*      +40          +36
1996       75-86    -11      9-7       + 8          - 3
1997       67-94    -27     13-3*      +40          +13
1998       72-89    -17      7-9       - 8          -25
1999       64-97    -33      9-7       + 8          -25
2000       77-85    - 8      7-9       - 8          -16
2001       65-97    -32      6-10      -16          -48
2002       62-100   -38      8-8         0          -38
2003       83-79    + 4     13-3*      +40          +44
2004       58-104   -46      7-9       - 8          -54
2005       56-106   -50     10-6       +16          -34
2006       62-100   -38      9-7*      + 8          -30
2007       69-93    -24      4-12      -32          -56
  

A few notes:

1) The Royals have made the playoffs seven times, the Chiefs 12 times, but they’ve never made the playoffs in the same year. Assuming I’m doing the math right, the odds that two teams will make the playoffs 19 times combined over a 39-year span without ever reaching the playoffs in the same year is 0.49%. (The formula I used to calculate the odds was (39!/20!)/(39^19), if you care to know.)

2) The Royals’ all-time best record was set in 1977, the same year the Chiefs had their all-time worst record.

3) The Royals’ only losing record between 1975 and 1982 was 1981 – granted, they made the playoffs that year thanks to the minor-league split-season schedule MLB adopted after the strike. The Chiefs’ only winning record between 1974 and 1985 came the same year.

4) In 1986, the Royals finished 75-86, their worst record between 1971 and 1989. (Royals fans, read that again, and weep.) That fall, the Chiefs won 10 games and made the playoffs, the only time they had managed either feat between 1972 and 1989.

5) The Royals have finished above .500 18 times, and in those season the Chiefs have a combined record of 124-141-5. In the 21 years the Royals finished under .500, the Chiefs are 179-147-2.

6) The Chiefs and Royals have both had winning records in consecutive seasons only once, in 1993 and 1994. They have both had losing records in consecutive seasons only once, in 2000 and 2001.

7) This balance seems to have fallen apart in recent years. Between 1969 and 2000, the “combined” records of the Royals and Chiefs fell between a band of -25 and +37 every single year. Since 2001, the combined records have fallen outside that band every year – generally on the low end, although in 2003 the teams had their best combined year ever, as the Royals stayed in the playoff hunt into September and the Chiefs had another one of their “13-3, undefeated at Arrowhead during the season, lose at Arrowhead in their first playoff game” specials. Not that I’m bitter.

8) Last year was the worst season for a Royals/Chiefs fan in history.

There's a formula known as the Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient, which allows us to determine how two separate entities are correlated. Using this formula, the correlation coefficient between the Chiefs and Royals record over the last 39 years is -0.31, which means they tend to run in opposite directions by a significant, though not overwhelming, margin.

There’s no obvious reason why these two franchises always seem to be headed in different directions. The Chiefs had built a dominant team in the old AFL, but the front office kept an aging team together for too long (sound familiar?) and the team fell apart at the same time that an incredibly savvy Royals’ front office was building a terrific base of talent through the draft and lopsided trades. The Royals stayed at least competitive right until their Ewing Kauffman, one of the game’s great owners, passed away in 1993, but it took the Chiefs until the late 80s before Lamar Hunt, one of the NFL’s great owners, finally brought in a competent GM in Carl Peterson and let him make whatever changes were necessary in order to build a winning team again.

The Chiefs lost their way in the post-Schottenheimer years, save for a brief renaissance under Dick Vermeil (that came crashing down from years of draft neglect last season). But just as Lamar Hunt brought in Carl Peterson, David Glass brought in Dayton Moore, and the trajectories of both teams have once again reversed. Even before this most recent, disastrous football campaign, my brother and I agreed that, the way each team was headed, the Royals were likely to reach the World Series before the Chiefs reached the Super Bowl.

Rooting for the Royals and Chiefs over the last 15-20 years has led to two very different experiences, but with one thing in common: they both led to heartbreak. The Chiefs are going to need some time to regain their footing, although recent comments from Clark Hunt, who inherited the team from his father, give us reason to hope. In the meantime, let’s hope that one team’s winter is another team’s summer.