The Cautionary Tale.

So when I wrote about the remarkably young and settled lineup the Royals have trotted out there since Johnny Giavotella and Salvador Perez were called up in early August, my initial naïve thought was that it was the most promising offense the Royals had put together in decades, if not in their history.

And then I realized how ridiculous that was. If you want to find a Royals team brimming with youth and hope, you don’t have to go back to 1976. You only have to go back to 1999.

That season, the Royals finished 64-97, but they were outscored by just 65 runs all year, and their offense was both young and formidable.

25-year-old Mike Sweeney finally found a position at first base and hit .322/.387/.520. Joe Randa, who had been re-acquired in a much-maligned trade for former first-round pick Juan LeBron, shocked everyone by hitting .314/.363/.473, and he was still just 29 years old. Jeremy Giambi, who had put up crazy stats in the minors but wasn’t taken seriously by scouts, got into 90 games and hit .285/.373/.368; he was just 24. Carlos Febles, a 23-year-old rookie, hit .256/.336/.411 as the team’s starting second baseman.

And then there was the outfield. I’ve received some tweets from Royals fans questioning whether this year’s outfield, with Alex Gordon, Melky Cabrera, and Jeff Francoeur, is the greatest Royals outfield ever. I’m assuming these fans are too young to remember the 1999 Royals, who had one of the greatest young outfields of all time. Their leftfielder, a former phenom who had struggled to establish himself in the majors, finally had his breakout season (sound familiar?) – Johnny Damon hit .307/.379/.477. In right field, Jermaine Dye, who like Damon was still just 25 years old, hit 44 doubles and .294/.354/.526 overall. And in center field, the Royals employed 22-year-old Carlos Beltran who hit .293/.337/.454, scored 112 runs and drove in 108, and was named the AL Rookie of the Year.

Twelve years later, Damon and Beltran are still everyday players in the majors, and Dye might still be had he not rejected all the contract offers he got last season and went into a self-imposed retirement.

The similarities between the 1999 Royals offense and the 2011 Royals offense extend to having a catcher with a four-letter first name and seven-letter last name. The 2011 Royals brought in 35-year-old Matt Treanor to catch and mentor the pitching staff; the 1999 Royals brought in 34-year-old Chad Kreuter to do the same.

The Royals scored 856 runs that season; the following spring, I wrote this column for Baseball Prospectus. Yes, our tools were primitive at the time and I was using runs scored and runs batted in to make a point, but still, the case could be made that the Royals’ lineup was historically promising.

In 2000, the Royals was even more potent. Jeremy Giambi had been traded away in a typically lopsided deal with the A’s (the Royals received Brett Laxton, who threw 26 innings in his major league career) – but in his place was phenom Mark Quinn, who had hit two homers in his major league debut the previous September, and as a rookie hit .294/.342/.488. Beltran was injured and ineffective, but both Damon and Dye had career years, as did Sweeney. The criminally underrated Gregg Zaun was the team’s primary catcher and hit .274/.390/.410; the Royals got a random .278/.329/.478 line out of backup first baseman/DH Dave McCarty. The Royals led the AL in batting average that year and scored 879 runs, breaking the franchise record they had set the year before.

And none of it mattered. The Royals went a fairly promising 77-85 in 2000, but fell back to 97 losses again in 2001, and in 2002 the franchise lost 100 games for the first time. They would lose 100 games three more times in the next four years. As Joe Posnanski chronicled in this insanely detailed article – the turn-of-the-millenium Royals were dripping with promise. And they broke all of them.

That’s the cautionary tale these Royals need to avoid duplicating. These are the reasons to think that they will.

1) The 1999 Royals offense wasn’t as good as it looked. The Royals scored 856 and 879 runs in back-to-back years, but they ranked just 7th and 5th in the league in runs scored. In 2000, AL teams averaged 5.28 runs per game. This year, AL teams are averaging just 4.44 runs per game – nearly 20% fewer. So the 2011 Royals, on pace to score 719 runs this season, are almost certain to finish 6th in the AL in runs scored, their highest finish since they were 3rd in the league in runs scored in 2003. (From 2004 to 2010, they never finished higher than 10th.)

It’s not simply that offensive levels were higher at the turn of the millennium. After the 1994 season, you might recall, the Royals moved the fences in 10 feet all the way around, and immediately Kauffman Stadium transformed from one of the toughest home run parks in the majors (but a neutral offensive park overall, as it helped batting average) into one of the better hitters’ parks in the game. The fences were moved back out after the 2003 season, but from 1995 through 2003 the ballpark was a significant aid to the team’s offense. (It was even more of a detriment to the team’s pitchers, which is why they were moved back out.)

Take a look at the three best offensive seasons by a Royals hitter in 1999 and 2000:

Mike Sweeney, 1999: .322/.387/.520, 128 OPS+

Mike Sweeney, 2000: .333/.407/.523, 131 OPS+

Jermaine Dye, 2000: .321/.390/.561, 135 OPS+

Then take a look at the two best offensive seasons from 2011:

Alex Gordon, 2011: .303/.375/.503, 142 OPS+

Billy Butler, 2011: .292/.364/.462, 128 OPS+

Gordon, despite raw statistics that are worse than Sweeney’s and Dye’s numbers across the board, has clearly had the best offensive season by OPS+ – because OPS+ takes into account both the league averages and the influence of the ballpark. And look at Butler – despite an OPS 80 points lower than Mike Sweeney’s performance in 1999, relative to the league and ballpark he has hit exactly as well as Sweeney did.

I think we’re all aware that runs are more precious today than they were a year ago. But it’s easy to underestimate the magnitude of the effect. I wouldn’t have guessed that Billy Butler hitting .292/.364/.462 in 2011 is just as impressive as Mike Sweeney hitting .322/.387/.520 in 1999, but it is.

This extends down the line. Melky Cabrera and Jeff Francoeur both have higher OPS+ totals than either Damon or Dye had in 1999. In other words, while the 1999 Royals outfield may have been the best Royals outfield in terms of future performance, in terms of what they’ve done this season, Gordon, Cabrera, and Francoeur are even better.

(But they’re still not the best single-season outfield in Royals history. That would be the – surprise! – 1972 Royals, with Lou Piniella (138 OPS+), Amos Otis (129), and Richie Scheinblum (140). Yeah, I had no idea either.)

2) The 1999 Royals had a young offense – but not as young as this one. The average age of the 1999 Royals offense, as measured by baseball-reference.com, was 27.0 years old. That’s very young – the 1976 Royals were also 27.0 years old, and those are the two youngest offenses the Royals fielded from 1971 through 2010.

The 2011 Royals average 25.9 years of age. That’s more than a year younger than every Royals team of the last 40 years. And it’s getting younger – the average age of their usual lineup these days is 24, and the team has already shaved two-tenths of a year off their average age in the last two weeks. There’s a chance the 2011 Royals will break the record held by the expansion 1969 Royals, who averaged 25.8 years of age, as the youngest offense in franchise history. (The 1970 Royals averaged 26.4 years, for the record.)

I’ll line up the two teams by age:

Chad Kreuter, 34 vs. Jeff Francoeur, 27

Rey Sanchez, 31 vs. Alex Gordon, 27

Joe Randa, 29 vs. Melky Cabrera, 26

Mike Sweeney, 25 vs. Billy Butler, 25

Johnny Damon, 25 vs. Alcides Escobar, 24

Jermaine Dye, 25 vs. Johnny Giavotella, 23

Jeremy Giambi, 24 vs. Mike Moustakas, 22

Carlos Febles, 23 vs. Eric Hosmer, 21

Carlos Beltran, 22 vs. Salvador Perez, 21

The turn-of-the-millenium Royals would keep fumbling around for a catcher – they wisely picked up Gregg Zaun the following year, then foolishly let him go – and they would need to find a replacement for Rey Sanchez at shortstop before long, which led to the disastrous trades of Neifi Perez and Angel Berroa. The 2011 Royals, by contrast, don’t have even one player who is in imminent danger of being overcome by the vicissitudes of age. Regression to the mean, yes, but not age.

At the younger end of the spectrum, Hosmer and Perez are both younger than Beltran, who was the youngest member of the 1999 Royals and not coincidentally had the most upside.

3) The 1999 Royals were broken up by service time and economic issues that don’t apply in 2011. After the 1999 season, Damon was just two years away from free agency; Sweeney and Dye were three years away. Moreover, this was during a baseball era in which the Royals and other small market teams, for lack of a better term, gave up. It’s not that the Royals couldn’t necessarily afford the likes of a Johnny Damon; this was still just five years after the strike, and the relationship between owners and players was more of a Cold War than a true peace. David Glass, who was in the process of becoming the de jure owner of the team after being the de facto owner, was more interested in proving a point about baseball economics than about winning, and was perfectly willing to cut off his stars to spite his team. (Here’s an article I wrote at the time about the Royals’ unwillingness to spend money to retain their own players.)

That led to the trades of Damon – which aside from Berroa’s rookie season brought nothing in return, and also cost the Royals Mark Ellis – and Dye – which brought back worse than nothing. The Royals couldn’t replace the loss of both outfielders, and set the team on a downward spiral of offense. The team was able to sign Mike Sweeney to a long-term deal, but after having an oral agreement with Carlos Beltran on an extension that would have bought out a year of free agency, the team tried to squeeze another million dollars out of the contract and the deal blew up.

Neither of these issues figures to hit the current Royals squad as hard. Hosmer, Moustakas, Giavotella, and Perez won’t be free agents until after 2017; Escobar won’t be until after 2015. And the economics of the game – and their owner – have changed so that the Royals aren’t resigned to losing each of their players once they qualify for free agency. Butler, who otherwise would have been a free agent in two years, signed a long-term deal with a club option that would keep him in a Royals uniform through 2015. Francoeur, of course, just signed a two-year extension that kept him from free agency. And while Alex Gordon is only locked up for two more years, both sides have made every indication that they are willing and able to get a long-term deal done this winter, which should keep Gordon through 2015 as well.

Only Melky Cabrera isn’t signed past 2012, and it’s not entirely clear that the Royals should want him past 2012 anyway. And if Gordon signs a long-term deal, that means that seven of the Royals’ nine everyday hitters are under control for at least four more seasons.

4) The farm system is better-stocked than it was a decade ago. Baseball America started publishing their Prospect Handbook in 2001, so I have a list of the team’s best prospects after the 2000 season. They are:

1) Chris George

2) Dee Brown

3) Mike MacDougal

4) Jimmy Gobble

5) Jeff Austin

6) Angel Berroa

7) Ken Harvey

8) Mike Stodolka

9) Alexis Gomez

10) Kyle Snyder

In hindsight, obviously that looks like an awful mess. It wasn’t nearly that bad at the time, but it wasn’t great. Chris George was just 21 years old and had made it to Triple-A with a fastball in the low 90s and moxie on the mound. Dee Brown had hit .331 with 25 homers and 30 steals in the minors in 1999; he was disappointing in 2000 but still hit .269 with 23 homers in Omaha.

But if you match this farm system with the one the Royals have today, it’s no contest. Mike Montgomery has better stuff than George did; Wil Myers is two years younger than Brown was. Mike MacDougal, the Royals’ #3 prospect 11 years ago, wasn’t the prospect that Jake Odorizzi is today, and Odorizzi is not (at least in my mind) the Royals’ #3 prospect today. Jeff Austin, who had already lost his fastball by that point, wouldn’t rank as one of the Royals’ top five starting pitching prospects today, let alone top five prospects overall.

5) This year’s bullpen doesn’t qualify as a Superfund site. Remember how I wrote that the Royals went 64-97 despite only being outscored by 65 runs all year? There’s a reason for that – the 1999 Royals had the worst bullpen in major-league history. This is not an exaggeration.

At the end of six innings, the 1999 Royals led in 73 games and trailed in 68. That’s right – a team that finished with 97 losses was actually above .500 after six innings. Somehow, the Royals lost TWENTY games that year that they were leading after six. In games that were tied after six innings, they went 5-15. They were a staggering 11-32 in one-run games. The Royals lost 19 games in the standings after sixth inning – the worst performance by any team in history according to available data.

Take a look at the 1999 Royals’ bullpen:

- Jeff Montgomery, in his final season, saved 12 games – and had a 6.84 ERA. From 1989 to 1997, Montgomery averaged 74 innings and a 2.81 ERA; he’s forgiven. The guys below are not.

- Scott Service tried to fill in for Montgomery and saved eight games. He had a 6.09 ERA, and allowed 132 baserunners in 75 innings.

- Matt Whisenant had a 6.35 ERA in 40 innings.

- Alvin Morman impressed with a 4.05 ERA in 53 innings; he allowed 66 hits, and his strikeout-to-walk ratio was 31-to-23. Let’s just say those numbers didn’t portend future greatness, or even future mediocrity.

- Jose Santiago, who was the best reliever on the team with a 3.42 ERA, but who struck out only 15 batters in 47 innings.

- Oh, and throw in Tim Byrdak, who relieved in 33 games but only survived to pitch 25 innings thanks to a 7.66 ERA and a WHIP of 2.11.

And then there were the occasional relief outings from the likes of Mac Suzuki (5.16 ERA) and Chris Fussell (7.39 ERA) and Don Wengert (9.25 ERA) and Ken Ray (8.74 ERA). Suffice it to say that the bullpen was a festering boil for the Royals at the turn of the millennium, one they couldn’t find a way to get rid of. Prior to the 2000 season, they spent free agent dollars on Ricky Bottalico (4.83 ERA) and Jerry Spradlin (5.52 ERA). When that didn’t work, they decided to use Johnny Damon as the lure to bring in a proven closer, and landed…36-year-old Roberto Hernandez, who posted ERAs of 4.12 and 4.33 in his two seasons with the Royals.

In 2003 the Royals finally came up with a home-grown option in Mike MacDougal, and for one year he actually looked like a solution – although even he had a 4.08 ERA. Then he got hurt, and the Royals tried Jeremy Affeldt in that role, and by 2006 the Royals were closing with Ambiorix Burgos, who set the franchise record with 12 blown saves that year.

And those were the closers. You can only guess how bad the set-up men and middle relievers were. But if you can’t, here’s a clue:

From 1999 through 2006, the Royals used 36 different pitchers to relieve in 30 or more games. The LOWEST ERA of those 36 pitchers was 3.73, by the unforgettable Cory Bailey. (Yeah, I had forgotten him too.) Bailey, MacDougal, and Jason Grimsley were the only three relievers who managed an ERA under 4. Sixteen of the 36 relievers had ERAs over 5, and 8 of them had ERAs over 6.

The bullpen was so bad that the Royals couldn’t even luck into a randomly good season from one. Can we all agree that a typical bullpen should have at least one reliever with an ERA under 3? From 1995 through 2006 – a span of TWELVE seasons – the Royals DIDN’T HAVE A SINGLE RELIEVER with an ERA under 3 and at least 30 games pitched. (This year alone, they have three.)

It’s almost impossible to overstate the difficulty the Royals had, for close to a decade, in finding a reliever – any reliever – who could get guys out. This might be the single biggest indictment of Allard Baird as a General Manager. So many of the Royals’ problems in those years can be blamed on meddling or stingy ownership – but no amount of meddling or stinginess should have kept Baird from dredging up a semi-competent reliever every now and then. He couldn’t.

In comparison, the 2011 Royals bullpen has a 3.67 ERA as a group. (Take out Vinny Mazzaro’s one relief appearance, and it drops to 3.46.) Even factoring in the decline in offense, the bullpen as a whole this year is as good as, if not better than, EVERY SINGLE RELIEVER the team employed from 1999 to 2006.

The turn-of-the-millenium Royals failed to launch in part because they traded Johnny Damon for Roberto Hernandez. Unless Dayton Moore trades Alex Gordon for Heath Bell, that’s one bump in the road we probably don’t need to worry about.

6) The 1999 Royals had no starting pitching. The 2011 Royals, well…As young as the Royals’ offense was a decade ago, their pitching staff was even younger. In 1999, the Royals traded Kevin Appier at the trading deadline for three young arms, divesting themselves of their only thirty-something starter. As a result, the average age of the pitchers the Royals used in 2000 was just 25.8, the third-youngest pitching staff in Royals history. Here’s your starting rotation:

- Jeff Suppan (25) made 33 starts.

- Mac Suzuki (25) made 29 starts.

- Dan Reichert (23) made 18 starts.

- Blake Stein (26) made 17 starts.

- Jay Witasick (27) made 14 starts.

- Brian Meadows (24) made 10 starts.

- Chris Fussell (24) made 9 starts.

- Miguel Batista (29) made 9 starts.

- Jose Rosado (25) made 5 starts.

Throw in single starts from Brett Laxton (26) and Jeff D’Amico (25), and every starter the Royals used that year was under the age of 30. All but nine starts were made by pitchers 27 or younger.

And you know what? It didn’t matter, because with the exception of Suppan, they all sucked. (Except for Rosado, whose arm was destroyed by the organization.) Once upon a time, Casey Stengel was asked about a couple of promising young players in spring training camp. “See that fella over there? He’s 20 years old. In 10 years, he’s got a chance to be a star. Now that fella over there, he’s 20 years old, too. In 10 years he’s got a chance to be 30.” The Royals had a very young rotation – but they were all the second kind of fella. It was an entire rotation of Sean O’Sullivans and Vinny Mazzaros – pitchers who had almost nothing positive to offer other than their birth certificate.

As for the 2011 Royals…yeah, not even I can spin their rotation into a positive. If there’s one thing that can derail the dream of the 2011 Royals and turn this into another Lost Decade, it’s the lack of starting pitching. Between now and next April, the Royals need to – and I am almost certain will – acquire two or three potential solutions for their rotation. Their success in doing so, more than anything else, will determine whether the Royals will be legitimate contenders in either of the next two years.

Who should they try to acquire? That will be the subject of my next column.

Ten Years Later.

“Tell your wife to take off her headscarf. Now.”

I met Joe Sheehan in the spring of 1993. You’d be hard pressed to find two people with more disparate backgrounds.  I grew up on the plains of Kansas; he grew up on the streets of New York City. I was 6’3” and almost painfully introverted; he was 5’8” and almost comically gregarious. I had three siblings and two doting immigrant parents; Joe was the only child of a single mother. I was a pre-med student attending Johns Hopkins; he was a journalism major at USC. I was Arab-Muslim; he was Irish-Catholic. We had nothing in common.

Nothing, that is, except baseball. We were both utterly, hopelessly obsessed with it.

We had met online, in the primitive days of the internet, on a bulletin board dedicated to baseball discussion. Soon we were shooting each other emails several times a day, and talking by phone for hours at a time. We competed against each other in a fierce fantasy baseball league. We’d stay up until 4 in the morning debating ridiculous topics like whether Steve Sax or Fred Lynn had a better career.

By the fall of 1995, Joe and I, along with three other friends who all met online, decided to take our arguments public. We wrote a book, Baseball Prospectus, and sold it on the same online bulletin board where we had all met. The book sold less than 200 copies. We were so pleased with our success that we wrote another book the following year, and the year after that, and the year after that.

By 2001, the book had a real publisher, sales in the five figures, and a website that was the most popular independent baseball site on the internet. Joe and I still talked about baseball every chance we got. (If you haven’t listened to our conversations, what are you waiting for?)

We rarely talked about anything else. I honestly couldn’t tell you who Joe voted for in the 1996 and 2000 elections, or if he voted at all. I have no idea what his favorite color is, or his favorite meal. When I flew out to LA to visit him in 1996, I was shocked to find out that – growing up in the Bronx – he had never learned how to drive.

It wasn’t that we couldn’t talk about anything else. There was nothing taboo about discussing politics or religion or the weather. It’s just that, like a lot of hard-core sports fans, we derived so much pleasure from talking about baseball that any moment spent discussing something else was a missed opportunity. For eight years, our relationship had been walled off from anything that didn’t resemble baseball talk, and we were too busy to notice.

Until that morning, when those walls came crumbling down along with the Twin Towers.

I was a dermatology resident in Detroit at the time, and our morning lecture was wrapping up when an attending physician popped his head in to tell us that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. We crowded around the one small television in the vast clinic to watch the initial speculative reports – perhaps it was a small Cessna? – before patients started filing in. I went to examine a patient just moments before the second plane hit. I came out a few minutes later, to inform my attending that the patient had psoriasis, and to learn that America was under attack.

I left the office by noon, after the buildings had collapsed, after the Pentagon had been hit, after we learned that a plane that was probably aimed at the Capitol had crashed somewhere in Pennsylvania. By lunchtime it was apparent that no patients were coming into the office, and none of the doctors were in a state of mind to get any work done in the first place. I checked in with my parents, who along with my brother and sisters lived in northern Virginia, just miles away from the Pentagon. Everyone was safely accounted for. I drove the 45-minute commute home in a daze, with the same repetitive thought on my mind.

“Please, God, don’t let this be Muslims who did this.”

I didn’t have much confidence that my prayer would be answered.

Already, news reports strongly hinted at a connection to terrorists from Al-Qaida; by the next day, a link connecting the attacks directly to Osama bin Laden was almost an established fact. I spent the afternoon of 9/11 sitting on a couch next to my wife – herself home early from dental school – watching the wall-to-wall television coverage, and growing increasingly light-headed as the reality of the situation, and the identity of the culprits, fully sank in.

My state of distraction was interrupted by the phone. Joe was calling from LA. For a brief moment, I hoped against all reason that he was calling to talk baseball. I had just filed an article on Barry Bonds the night before. (It would be published when BP finally resumed operations the following week.)

“Tell your wife to take off her head scarf. Now.”

I guess not.

In my befuddled state of mind, I totally misunderstood the nature of the call. After knowing me for all these years, was Joe suddenly lumping me in with these psychopaths? Nineteen guys claiming to be Muslim flew planes into big buildings, and now Joe doesn’t think it’s appropriate for my wife and I to practice our faith the way we choose? For a split second, I felt a wave of anger and betrayal.

“Excuse me, Joe?”

“Tell Belsam to take off her head scarf. You have no idea what kind of danger you’re in right now. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

Anger and betrayal turned into embarrassment, that I would have not trusted a friend in my moment of need. Embarrassment, and gratitude, that with his country – and his city – under attack, Joe felt the need to reach out to me. That while Joe knew little about my beliefs, he knew enough about me to recognize that, whatever I shared with the 9/11 hijackers in terms of religion, I shared nothing with them in terms of my faith. That I had much more in common with him, as an American, than I ever would with the men who killed innocent civilians that day. That I was as much a victim that day as he, or any other American watching the proceedings on TV, was.

In the hours between the second plane crash and Joe’s phone call, all sorts of crazy thoughts had run through my head. Where are we going to move? Will Canada take us in? If I can last another two years and finish my residency, I should be able to find a job almost anywhere in the world, right? I hear Dubai is a great place to live. Or maybe New Zealand – that country looked gorgeous in the Lord of the Rings trailer.

I didn’t want to go anywhere. But watching the indelible images of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center, the terrible footprint the plane made in the side of the building in the frame before the explosion, the live camera shots of fires burning on a mountain of rubble in the heart of Manhattan, it was hard in that moment to imagine an America that would still embrace a Muslim like me as a native son.

Joe’s phone call snapped me out of reverie of self-pity. Even as he acknowledged the fear that the lives of American Muslims had been suddenly made much more difficult, he also reminded me of something very basic, yet very powerful: that whatever we were about to face, we weren’t going to face it alone. Maybe people on the fringe would blame all Muslims for what had happened, but most Americans were capable of differentiating between the Muslims who had come to America to hatch a plot of supreme evil, and the Muslims who had come to America to put down roots, live their lives, raise their children, and join the tapestry of our nation. And that for every American who would threaten the Muslim community in the coming days, there would be ten other Americans who would stand in solidarity with their Muslim neighbors.

I found myself in the strange position of having to calm down Joe’s fears rather than the other way around. I told him that my wife and I had already discussed whether she should temporarily remove her scarf if we felt like her safety was in jeopardy. “Islam considers a person’s safety a more sacred principle than its dress code,” I reassured him.

I got off the phone, and stopped making travel plans to Auckland in my head. Whatever happens next, we’ll get through this, I thought. We’re Americans. This is our home. We’re not going anywhere.

Over the next few days, my wife and I were warned by many of our non-Muslim friends and colleagues that we might be in danger. We received many unsolicited offers of protection.  Don’t hesitate to call us if you need anything, our friends told us. There are nut jobs out there.

While we got a lot of offers of protection from nut jobs, what we didn’t get were glimpses of any actual nut jobs. We certainly heard about them, though. The mother of a close friend had racial slurs thrown in her face at the grocery store. Another friend had to rush to pick up his kids from their Islamic school after a bomb threat was called in. And around the country, there were scattered reports of Muslims being beaten up in reprisal for what happened. A Pakistani business owner in Dallas was murdered; in Arizona, a Sikh gas station attendant was shot and killed. And in Bridgeview, Illinois, the largest mosque in the Chicagoland area – a mosque I had visited once or twice – was set upon by an angry mob of about 300 people, and only quick police action prevented something really ugly from happening.

But in all honesty, it could have been much worse. I was frankly surprised that it wasn’t worse. In terms of danger to the Muslim community, there was a lot of smoke but very little fire. And my wife never did have to take off her headscarf.

The Friday after 9/11, a church in Ann Arbor held an inter-faith community event, inviting Muslims, Christians, and Jews to come together in solidarity. My wife and I sat down in a pew and were quickly joined by an elderly white couple. We made small talk before the program began. The husband, who with his shock of white hair resembled actor Peter Graves, quickly inquired about our well-being.

“I hope that neither of you have been troubled by anyone over the last few days,” he said.

Not at all, we told him. Once again, I was reassuring someone else, who was concerned about my well-being precisely because I shared something in common with the 9/11 hijackers. In the moment, it seemed such a casual, natural reaction by him that it was only afterwards that I realized how dumbfounded I should have been by this.

On the way home, I struggled to put into words how odd it was that most Americans were treating us as well as they were. “Honey,” I asked my wife, “Let me ask you a hypothetical question. Suppose 9/11 had happened in Syria instead.” Both of our parents had emigrated from Syria to the United States in the 1970s; we had both gone back to visit relatives several times. “And suppose it turned out that the hijackers were part of a small minority group that lived in Syria – let’s say the Kurds. How do you think the Syrian public would have reacted?”

She shuddered. “It would have been ugly,” she said.

“There would have been riots, wouldn’t there?” I asked. “Innocent people would have died?”

“Probably,” she said. She knew the country far better than I did; she spoke fluent Arabic, for one. “At the very least, the army would have to be called in to protect the Kurds.” (As you probably know, the Syrian government is currently murdering its people by the thousands, and not even for the crime of being a Kurd.)

I contemplated this as we drove home, uneventfully, without so much as a police escort.

That night, I emailed David Schoenfield, then the baseball editor for ESPN.com. Two years before, my writing for Baseball Prospectus had caught David’s eye, and he had invited me to write several freelance columns for ESPN. An invitation to write about sports for ESPN is sort of like an invitation to attend the White House from the President – barring a really, really, really good reason, you’re inclined to say yes. I had continued to write baseball columns for ESPN.com every few months since.

That night, I asked him for permission to write a very different kind of column. “I’ve never made a request like this before,” I wrote to him, “but then, nothing like 9/11 has ever happened before. I’d like to write a column about being a Muslim and being an American, about being a sports fan, about how sports unite us and how Muslim athletes strive for the same goals as their teammates and how…” By the end I was babbling. I didn’t really know what the hell I wanted to write about. I just knew that I wanted to write about something.  I had to tell my fellow Americans that they could not let 9/11 define the way they looked at their Muslim neighbors, and that remembering the contributions of Muslims in American sports might make it easier to remember the contributions of Muslims in American life.

I didn’t hear back from David all weekend, and resigned myself to the fact that I needed to stick to writing about baseball. I spent the weekend trying to catch up on my dermatology textbooks, with little success.

Late Monday evening, I received a terse email from David. “You’re on,” he wrote. “I sold your idea to my bosses today. They were intrigued. Looking forward to reading it.”

I was flummoxed. I hadn’t heard from David for three days not because he didn’t like the idea, but because he liked it enough that he went to bat for me with his bosses, who wouldn’t know me from Ahmad. And they agreed. ESPN wasn’t in the business of writing about religion, but they were making an exception this one time.

I called Alice, my Chief Resident, and lied. “I need the morning off,” I said. “There’s something important I have to do for my family.”

“Okay.” There was a pause on the phone. “Is…everything okay? Do you need anything?” Add Alice to the list of people who were concerned for my well-being.

“No, everything’s fine, I promise.” And add Alice to the list of people I was reassuring instead of the other way around.

I woke up early on Tuesday, exactly one week after 9/11, and started typing. “As a nation, we grieve,” I began. “And we feel this as a nation, feel it in every community, regardless of race, regardless of religion, as united today as any time in our history.”

“I am a Muslim,” I continued. I wrote about the attacks on Muslims that had occurred around the country. “I am an Arab-American. And right now I am scared to death that in a country I have loved all my life -- in the only country I have ever called my own -- I am no longer truly free. I feel imprisoned by the hatred of others, those blind to the difference between a sick, demented terrorist and a peace-loving American.”

I disassociated Islam from the 9/11 attacks in the strongest possible terms. “So let me be perfectly clear about this: Islam does not condone terrorism in any way, shape, or form. Rather, it condemns it in the harshest possible terms. The killing of innocent civilians, no matter how desperate the plight of the perpetrators, no matter how meaningful their cause, is a capital sin.”

I told the story of the Muslim community in the language of America. “Muslims and Arabs did not come to this country to destroy it -- they came to embrace it. They came, like every other immigrant group to land on America's shores, to escape oppression and discover freedom. They came to forge their own destiny. They came to live the American dream.”

I tried to use sports as a metaphor to connect Muslims with the fabric of our country. “Today, I hope that the accomplishments of Muslim and Arab athletes in this country, both on and off the field, will help remind us of the basic humanity in people of all backgrounds. I hope that people might reflect on the charisma and genius of a Muhammad Ali, or the grace of a Hakeem Olajuwon, and understand that just as Muslim athletes are committed to the same goals, on and off the field, as their fellow athletes, so too are Muslims in this country as innately American as anyone else.”

I concluded with a prayer. “May God bless America. May God bless her with the strength to defeat evil, the courage to defend the good, and above all, the wisdom to tell the difference.”

I pressed send, and left for work.

I came home that evening, and sat down at my computer. I opened Microsoft Outlook and checked my mail.

I had over 300 messages. Most had subject lines like “Your ESPN article” and “I read what you wrote.” Some were “THANK YOU!” and “America Needs To Read This.” As I sat there, each minute another four or five emails would drop in.

Clearly, I had hit a chord. I clicked on ESPN.com and found my article prominently displayed; the editors had added photographs of Muslims praying for the victims of 9/11, and Sikhs holding a candlelight vigil for them. But what stunned me was what the editors had failed to add: my email address. Somehow, I had received 300 emails in the span of a few hours – some from as far away as Singapore – even though my contact information had not been given out.

Well, that wouldn’t do. I contacted Dave to ask him to append my email address to the article. He replied quickly. “We’re getting as much traffic to your article as we’ve had for any article at ESPN all year,” he told me. He also attached a large file to his email. “We’ve had a bunch of people – 128 and counting – email the website and ask us to forward their messages on to you.”

With my address now listed, the emails started piling in, hundreds every hour. Over the next four days I received over 6,000 emails. I had no choice but to create a form letter response.

“Thank you so much for your concern and for your support. I am confident that America will rise to this challenge as she has risen to so many before. But we have miles to go before we sleep.”

The form letter worked for almost every reply, because with few exceptions, the emails expressed concern and offered support. Some emails were more cautious, many of them asking questions about Islam, or asking why Muslims were so upset at America, and I did my best to answer those questions as best I knew how.

But only a few hundred emails expressed misgivings to a varying degree, ranging from “I’m sorry your people are being harassed like this, but you can’t blame people from reacting this way” to “All you Muslims are the same – go back to where you came from.” One email, in particular, threatened physical harm in a vague and grammatically incorrect way.

“I KNOW your a part of THIS – your going to suffer like all the other MOSLEMS will.”

One threatening email out of six thousand? That’s a ratio I could handle, especially when compared to about 5700 emails of support and encouragement.

My article was featured on the home page of MSN.com for a day. I did interviews with ESPN Radio. Fox Sports TV called. Somehow, just a week after Muslims committed an unspeakable act of violence on American soil, Americans were rallying to defend the safety and the dignity of the innocent Muslims in their midst. My prayer was already being answered. America did have the wisdom to tell the difference.

As a Muslim, I was deeply grateful. As an American, I was hardly surprised.

I have never been more frightened to be a Muslim than I was that week.

And I have never been more proud to be an American than I was that week.

And His Name Is Spanish For "Savior".

Salvador Perez had quite a day.

In the first inning of yesterday’s tilt in Oakland, Perez set up to catch Johnny Giavotella’s relay throw, and the ball arrived milliseconds before Jemile Weeks plowed into him. Perez held onto the ball, and Weeks was out, but Perez was shook up on the play and seemed to end up with a welt behind his ear.

With two outs in the bottom of the seventh inning, Michael Taylor fouled a ball right back into Perez’s body. It’s not clear where the ball hit Perez, but it was clearly very painful – he needed about 30 seconds to compose himself before signaling that he was able to continue. Tim Collins finished the inning with a strikeout, but Perez looked so dinged up at that point that I fully expected Brayan Pena to pinch-hit for him in the top of the eighth.

Instead, Perez batted with two out, and after falling behind 0-2, worked the count back to 2-2. He then went with a fastball on the outside corner at the knees, lining it into right field for a clean single. This kept his batting average above .300 since joining the Royals last month.

It was, as you probably know, the Royals’ first hit of the game.

Salvador Perez wasn’t supposed to be doing this. He hit .290 with seven home runs last year, and he did that in high-A Wilmington. He was one of my favorite prospects in the system, and the fact that he ranked somewhere between 17th and 20th in the organization was a testament to how deep the farm system was – but still, he wasn’t supposed to be here.

Perez hit .283/.329/.427 for Northwest Arkansas this year before he was promoted to Omaha in late July. In 12 games for the Storm Chasers, he hit .333/.347/.500, and here he is. He wasn’t supposed to be here. Alone among the Royals prospects to debut this year, he was being rushed. And as recently as two weeks ago, you could argue that he didn’t deserve to be in the majors. In his first 12 games in the major leagues, he hit .227/.271/.318.

Since then, he’s hit .381. In his brief, 23-game major-league career, Salvador Perez is hitting .302/.337/.430, while showing excellent defensive skills and – as he showed yesterday – a catcher’s toughness. And he’s just 21 years old. He’ll still be 21 years old when next season begins.

Maybe that doesn’t sound all that impressive to you. It’s only 23 games and 92 plate appearances, and batting average is subject to so many fluctuations that a .300 average is meaningless in a small sample size. (I actually coined Jazayerli’s Law of Backup Catchers sometime in the last century to describe this phenomenon: Any player can hit .300 in a small number of at-bats. Remember Hector Ortiz?)

Still, Salvador Perez is hitting .300. And he is 21 years old. And – at the risk of being mercilessly mocked for creating a pointless and misleading list – here is the list of every catcher (defined as someone who caught in 70% of his games played) in major-league history who 1) batted 75 or more times and 2) hit .300 or better in his age 21 season. (No catcher has hit .300 or better at age 20 or younger.)

It’s not a long list.

1) Al Lopez. Lopez debuted with the Dodgers in 1928 for three games, but was their regular catcher in 1930, when he was 21 (he turned 22 that August.) He hit .309/.362/.418, which in 1930 wasn’t all that impressive – the league hit .303/.360/.448. Still, Lopez played 19 seasons in the majors, and finished with 1918 games caught in his career, which was an all-time major-league record until it was broken by Bob Boone more than 40 years later. He was so respected as a game-caller and game-manager that he received MVP votes in seven different seasons, including one in which he hit .218/.317/.251 in 91 games. (Imagine Jason Kendall getting an MVP vote last year.)

After his playing days were over, Lopez took over as manager of the Cleveland Indians in 1951. He would manage the next 15 years – six with the Indians, nine with the White Sox – and his teams finished over .500 every single year. He went to the World Series with the 1954 Indians and 1959 White Sox, which is more impressive than it sounds: those were the only two non-Yankee teams to win the AL pennant from 1949 to 1964.

His lifetime winning percentage was .584, which is a better winning percentage than the 1985 Royals. Lopez was inducted into the Hall of Fame for his work as a manager in 1977.

2) Ted Simmons. Simmons was the Cardinals’ first-round pick in 1967 out of high school and debuted in the majors a little more than a year later. In 1970, as a 20-year-old rookie, he hit .243/.333/.317 in 82 games. The following year he took over the everyday job and hit .304/.347/.424, earning some MVP votes. That was the start of a 13-year-run in which Simmons hit .294/.356/.459, good for a 126 OPS+ in the low-offense 1970s. He had a reputation as a subpar defensive catcher, but still finished with over 50 bWAR in his career, and is widely considered one of – if not the best – eligible catcher not in the Hall of Fame.

Lopez and Simmons are not fair comparisons to Perez, because they both played a full season in the majors at age 21. Our next two players, like Perez, played abbreviated seasons.

3) Dale Murphy. It’s easy to forget this now, but Murphy came up as a highly-touted catcher, reaching the majors for a cup of coffee at the age of 20 in 1976. In 1977, he played in 18 games and hit .316 with 11 extra-base hits in 76 at-bats.

The following year he played everyday, but his shaky defense behind the plate became untenable when he developed a mental block about throwing. He only caught in 21 games, playing the rest of the season at first base. He hit .226 and led the league with 145 Ks, but also hit 23 homers. In 1979, the Braves once again tried him behind the plate, and once again the experiment failed, as he caught just 27 times. But in 104 games he hit .276/.340/.469.

Finally, in 1980 the Braves gave up and moved him to center field. He responded by hitting .281/.349/.510 and making his first All-Star team. After an off-year in the strike-shortened 1981, Murphy was probably the best player in the NL from 1982 to 1987. He won MVPs in 1982 and 1983, led the league in home runs in 1984 and 1985, and had perhaps his best season in 1987, hitting .295/.417/.580 with a career-high 44 home runs.

He was just 31 that year, but he was essentially done; two years later he was one of the worst players in the NL, hitting .228/.306/.361. He hung around until 1993 and even latched on with the expansion Colorado Rockies in 1993 in a failed effort to get to 400 career home runs. He finished with 398. He’s not in the Hall of Fame, but depending on how strongly you weight a player’s peak over his career contributions, you can certainly make a case for him.

4) Joe Mauer. In 2004, as a 21-year-old rookie and the #1 prospect in baseball, Mauer hit .308/.369/.570 in 35 games before an injury cost him the rest of the season. He returned in 2005 to hit .294/.372/.411, then won batting titles in 2006, 2008, and 2009. (No other catcher in American League history has won even one batting title.) He’s suffered through a lousy, injury-plagued 2011, but he has to be considered better than even odds to wind up in the Hall of Fame.

5) Salvador Perez, who in 23 games is hitting .302/.337/.430.

Well, that was fun. And pointless. And misleading. But still fun.

No, I am not saying that Perez deserves to be discussed in the same sentence, or paragraph, or even the same book as the four other guys on this list. One of the reasons I wanted to write this today is that if he goes 0-for-3 tonight, he will drop off this list tomorrow.

What I am saying is that Salvador Perez has elevated his status dramatically this season. A year ago he was in the Carolina League; today he’s holding his own in the major leagues offensively and defensively. Maybe it’s a fluke, but precisely because he is so young (he’s the third-youngest player to appear in an AL game this year), we can’t rule out the possibility of a tremendous upgrade in his base skills. I don’t think he’s a .300 hitter; I do think that he has shown himself to be ready for the challenge of hitting major-league pitching at the age of 21. As you can see, that in itself is a rare, and highly promising, skill.

I don’t think Salvador Perez is headed to the Hall of Fame. I do think that given his defense at a key position, he might be the most important prospect the Royals have called up this year other than Eric Hosmer. And I do think that having a catcher who can contribute on both sides of the ball is going to make the challenge of contending in the next few years a lot easier.

Double Trouble.

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I like to throw out cool stats that I come across from time to time. But occasionally I come across a really cool stat, one that I think deserves its own column. This is one of those occasions.

Over the weekend I was looking at the Royals’ stats, and something stuck out at me. Jeff Francoeur, who continues to defy his detractors, has 44 doubles – tying Jermaine Dye’s franchise record for doubles hit by an outfielder.

Behind Francoeur and Dye on the all-time list of doubles hit by a Royals outfielder is Carlos Beltran, with 41 – a place he now shares with Alex Gordon. And not far behind them is Melky Cabrera, who has 39 doubles this season, ranking him among the Royals’ top ten outfielders for doubles in a season.

And it’s still Labor Day.

All three members of the Royals’ outfield have hit 39 or more doubles. In the history of baseball, only two teams have ever had all three of their outfielders hit 39 doubles.

The 1998 Angels did it with Darin Erstad (39), Jim Edmonds (42), and Garret Anderson (41).

The 1932 Philadelphia Phillies did it with Kiddo Davis (39), Chuck Klein (50), and Hal Lee (42).

You might notice that both of those teams had one outfielder who stopped at 39 doubles. So let me put this bluntly: with Melky Cabrera’s next double, the Kansas City Royals will be the first team in major-league history to have all three outfielders hit 40 doubles. We’ve already seen an outfield of .400 hitters – the 1894 Philadelphia Phillies – but never an outfield of 40-double hitters. We’re one two-bagger away.

But that’s not it. Because you see Billy Butler has also hit 38 doubles this year. Which means the Royals are a couple of doubles away from having four different players each hit 40 doubles this year.

Only three teams in major-league history have accomplished that feat. They are:

- The 2006 Texas Rangers, with Mark Teixeira (45), Michael Young (52), Gary Matthews (44), and Mark DeRosa (40).

- The 1929 Detroit Tigers, with Dale Alexander (43), Charlie Gehringer (45), Harry Heilman (41), and Roy Johnson (45).

- And the aforementioned 1932 Philadelphia Phillies, who along with Klein and Lee also had Dick Bartell (48) and Don Hurst (41). Kiddo Davis was one double short of giving the Phillies five separate 40-double hitters, but before you’re too impressed remember that the Phillies played in the Baker Bowl, where it was about 280 feet to right field, and the wall was about 45 feet high – it was the Green Monster on steroids. That year the Phillies hit 204 doubles at home – and just 126 doubles on the road.

The Royals are about to become the fourth team in major-league history to have four different players hit 40 or more doubles. What’s more, with Alex Gordon hitting his 42nd double of the season in Oakland this afternoon, the Royals need three more doubles from Cabrera, and four more doubles from Butler, to become the first team in major-league history with four players that hit 42 or more doubles.

The thing about naming your team the “Royals” is that it leaves unsaid what kind of Royals they are. The 1985 team were Kings, obviously; the 2005 team were Court Jesters, or possibly (with a nod to Mel Brooks) the Pissboys.

It’s pretty clear who the 2011 Kansas City Royals are. They’re the Earls of Doublin’.

Mea Culpa.

Two years ago, this blog went on hiatus for a time. The Royals were terrible, their beloved Process was opaque, they had become increasingly defensive of anyone who criticized it or them, and rooting for the organization had ceased to be enjoyable. So I took my ball and went home, at least for a while.

Today, as many of you have noticed, I am once again blogging quite infrequently. Some of that has nothing to do with the Royals – I have family, a career, we just completed the month of Ramadan, and along with my weekly podcast I also now write for Grantland. But my lack of production these last few weeks can also be blamed on the team.

Only this time, the reasons are completely different. The Royals’ record may be terrible, but their record is not reflective of the way they are playing*. The Process is no longer opaque – it’s actually pretty clear: patiently build a fantastic farm system, and then wind it up and let it go. I can’t speak to whether the organization is defensive of its critics or not, because it’s increasingly difficult to find critics – certainly there are critics of specific players and specific decisions, but you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who is genuinely critical of the team’s overall direction.

*: The Royals are 57-81, but they’ve been outscored by just 58 runs all season. Only the Astros have lost more games, but seven teams have been outscored by more runs.

And rooting for the Royals is as fun as it’s been since at least 2003. The 2003 season was a different kind of fun – it was the fun that comes from knowing that the law of averages were going to catch up to you, but rooting for them to hold off until the end of the season. This year’s fun comes from watching young players get acclimated to the majors, knowing that whether the Royals win or lose, the important thing is that the best is yet to come.

And precisely because it’s fun to watch the Royals play, day after day…I find I don’t have much to say.

Eleven players have made their major-league debuts for the Royals this season, roughly one every other week. Here, let’s line them up chronologically:

March 31: Aaron Crow

March 31: Nate Adcock

March 31: Tim Collins

April 21: Louis Coleman

May 6: Eric Hosmer

May 17: Everett Teaford

May 18: Danny Duffy

June 10: Mike Moustakas

August 3: Manny Pina

August 5: Johnny Giavotella

August 10: Salvador Perez

It’s not just the quantity of prospects – no other team has had as many players debut this season – but the quality. Pina is a backup catcher, and Teaford is a lefty specialist (although even Teaford has some upside). Adcock is a swingman. Collins, Coleman, and Crow are quality relievers, and Crow at least has some starter possibilities.

But that leaves the Royals with five potential impact players – a starting pitcher in Danny Duffy and four everyday hitters, including a second baseman, a third baseman, and a catcher.

The process of slowly replacing a roster of placeholders with long-term fixtures was happening at a deliberate schedule until four weeks ago, when the Royals decided to accelerate the process. Johnny Giavotella’s callup was not unexpected – he was clearly ready for the major leagues, having hit .338/.390/.481 in Omaha. (Although the common perception that the Royals left him in the minors too long is not entirely fair. Giavotella was hitting just .285 with two homers at the end of May, and then hit .398/.431/.610 in June and .383/.430/.570 in July. He probably could have been called up a month earlier, but that’s a far cry from saying he was ready back in May.)

But the callup of Salvador Perez signaled a change in the Royals’ approach. Perez was the first player the Royals called up this season who you could reasonably argue had been rushed. For one thing, he was barely 21 when he was called up – he’s six months younger than Hosmer and three years younger than Giavotella.

For another, he had played a grand total of 91 games in the high minors. Giavotella had 134 games in Double-A and another 110 in Triple-A before his recall; Moustakas had 173 games between the two levels. Hosmer, amazingly enough, had just 76 games above A-ball when he was recalled – but in those 76 games he had hit .355 with 16 homers, along with his obscene performance in the Texas League playoffs last year. Perez had hit .290/.331/.437 in the minor leagues this year, a respectable performance but certainly not one that forced the Royals’ hand. In 12 games in Triple-A, he had hit .333, but had not drawn a single walk. He wasn’t ready for the majors, but the Royals made the decision that he could continue his development with the big club.

And in calling him and Giavotella up in the same week, the Royals closed the links in the Royals’ lineup chain. On August 10th, the night of Perez’s debut in Tampa Bay, the Royals featured their new lineup. You know the one – it’s pretty much the same one Ned Yost has been using for the last three weeks – but for posterity’s sake, here it is:

LF: Alex Gordon, 27

CF: Melky Cabrera, 26

DH: Billy Butler, 25

1B: Eric Hosmer, 21

RF: Jeff Francoeur, 27

2B: Johnny Giavotella, 24

C: Salvador Perez, 21

3B: Mike Moustakas, 22

SS: Alcides Escobar, 24

Melky Cabrera would turn 27 the next day, but at least for this one day, the average age of the Royals’ lineup was just a tick over 24 years old. Felipe Paulino, a young veteran at just 27 himself, was the starting pitcher – four nights later, that same lineup took the field in defense of 22-year-old Danny Duffy.

A superficial examination of the farm system would lead you to conclude that it’s been a disappointing year for the team. Christian Colon already looks like a mistake selection with the #4 overall pick last year. Wil Myers has been a big disappointment. Aside from Duffy, the other three top left-handed prospects – Mike Montgomery, John Lamb, and Chris Dwyer – have all been either ineffective or hurt. That’s five of Baseball America’s top eight prospects before the season.

If you divorce the farm system from the organization as a whole, it has been a disappointing year – a year after being named the best farm system in a generation, the Royals may not rank in the top five in all of baseball. But the whole point of having prospects is to turn them into major leaguers. And when you account for the major leagues, I think it’s actually been a better year than expected for the organization.

First off, there are the prospects who have graduated from the minor leagues. Remember, six months ago the general expectation was that Hosmer would spend most of the season in the minor leagues – and possibly qualify as a prospect once again. Obviously, he does not. After hitting three homers in the Tigers series and reaching base five times on Thursday, Hosmer’s line for the season is .283/.335/.452. As a rookie, Will Clark hit .287/.343/.444. That comparison just gets spookier and spookier.

Mike Moustakas has followed his prescribed timeline – he debuted, as expected, in early June. Apparently his name is Greek for “Dan Uggla”, because after batting .182/.237/.227 in his first 53 games, and inspiring this column – he’s now working on a 15-game hitting streak, which ties the mark for the longest hitting streak in history by a Royals rookie. He’s still in the deep woods, but at least he can see the way out now.

Giavotella and Perez, on the other hand, have both elevated their prospect standing dramatically in the last five months. Giavotella was the #18 prospect in the system according to Baseball America – while he hit .322 last season, he stands 5’8” and his defensive reputation wasn’t very good, and there were some doubts he could hit that well again. Instead, he hit even better, and while his defense is erratic, he’s complemented every mistake with a web gem. Giavotella’s performance this year has completely negated the impact of Colon’s failure to develop.

Perez was Baseball America’s #17 prospect – a young catcher with elite defensive skills but whose .290/.322/.411 line in Wilmington last year made his bat a question mark. I thought he was underrated, because the difficulty of hitting in Wilmington is always understated – most Royals prospects actually improve their numbers when moving from A-ball to Double-A. Perez’s numbers in the minors this season were eerily similar – he hit exactly .290, but with a smidge more power – and he remained a beast behind the plate, throwing out 46% of basestealers.

If anything, he’s elevated his status even more since being called up to the majors – he’s hitting .279/.315/.426, with a respectable strikeout-to-walk ratio of 10-4, and hit an absolute bomb for his first home run on Monday. If he’s been rushed, he’s hiding it well.

It’s important to remember this when the off-season organizational rankings are released this winter: if the Royals had kept Giavotella and Perez in the minors for just another two or three weeks, both of them would probably have kept their rookie eligibility for next year, which means they would both be counted as part of the Royals’ farm system. Instead, they’ll probably both pass the 130 at-bat limit. This may cause the Royals’ minor league ranking to suffer a little, but it means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things – it’s just a semantic distinction. Whether Giavotella or Perez count as “prospects” or not is a PR issue; it’s not a baseball one.

Then there are the lesser prospects who have established themselves in the bullpen, all of whom have at least lived up to expectations, if not exceeded them. Aaron Crow (#9 on Baseball America’s list) was an All-Star, and we’ll just ignore what he’s done since. Tim Collins (#13) needs to throw more strikes, but doesn’t need to miss a lot more bats. Louis Coleman (#19) has been terrific for most of the season. And Greg Holland, who didn’t even make the Royals’ Top 30 Prospects, has been the best rookie reliever in the American League.

And then there are the young but established hitters in the lineup. Billy Butler is Billy Butler, more or less, and Alcides Escobar is doing roughly what should have been expected of him, hitting an empty .250 but playing excellent defense.

As for Cabrera and Jeff Francoeur, well, you know the story there, and you know that there are still doubts they can keep hitting the way they can. So let’s just focus on Alex Gordon. In 2005, Gordon was the best college player in America. In 2006, he was the best player in the minor leagues. In 2011, he’s hitting .304/.377/.502. If that’s all you knew about Alex Gordon, you’d have to conclude that his career has played out as expected.

And, of course, you’d be completely wrong. Alex Gordon hit .215/.315/.355 last year. The year before, he hit .232/.324/.378. I know this, and you know this – and yet I don’t think you really know this, because I don’t think I really knew it either. Gordon has been such a consistently excellent player from the first (well, second) day of the season, and we all were so confident that he was capable of this kind of performance, that I think we may have forgotten just how close we came to never seeing this performance in a Royals uniform. A huge portion of the fanbase had written him off, and there was legitimate concern that the front office had as well.

Instead, he’s been absolutely fantastic. According to baseball-reference.com, Gordon has been worth 5.3 Wins Above Replacement this year, the best season by any Royals hitter since 2003 (and aside from Zack Greinke’s 2009, the best by any Royals player period.) And there’s still a month left in the season.

So when taking stock of, say, Wil Myers’ disappointing season in Double-A, it’s best to keep some perspective. Would the Royals be better off if Myers were raking like he did last year, but with Gordon limping to the end of another disappointing season? Of course not. While Myers has failed to meet expectations, he’s still just 20 years old. By 2013 he might be ready to join the Royals’ lineup as an above-average rightfielder – only now the Royals project to have an even better player in the other corner.

In calling up Giavotella and Perez, and signing Francoeur to a two-year extension, the Royals have accomplished something extraordinary: the lineup that took the field on August 10th, 2011 is likely to be the same lineup the Royals use for all of 2012. While I may have disagreed with the particulars of the Francoeur deal, I also believe that he is a fundamentally better player than he used to be, and is capable of being at least an average rightfielder for the life of the contract. (And he has hit .305/.328/.475 since re-upping.) I’m not a fan of Cabrera’s defense, but I’m a big fan of a .303/.337/.474 performance out of my centerfielder.

In almost every Royals game of the last 25 years, there has been at least one player in their lineup that didn’t deserve to be there – someone who was washed up, someone who was still productive but was too old to be a part of the next good Royals team, someone who had youth to dream on but not the talent to take advantage of it, or someone who was never that good in the first place. Whether it was David Howard or Jose Lind, Chuck Knoblauch or Neifi Perez, Terrence Long or Doug Mientkiewicz, Mike Jacobs or Jose Guillen – there was always someone in the lineup who it was difficult to root for. There was always someone in the lineup who deep in your subconscious you wanted to fail, because the more they failed, the quicker the Royals would give up on them and move on to someone who might be a part of a brighter future.

Today, for one of the few times in my history as a Royals fan, EVERYONE in the Royals’ lineup is a part of their future. I want to watch EVERYONE who comes to the plate. There are no bathroom breaks in the lineup anymore. I don’t care what the Royals’ record is – that alone makes this season a success of sorts.

For the season, the average age of the Royals’ hitters – weighted for playing time – is 26.1 years old. That is by far the youngest offense the Royals have had in the last 40 years. The 1969 expansion Royals averaged 25.8 years of age. The 1970 Royals were 26.4 years old. Every other Royals offense averaged at least 27.0 years old. And it’s already a good offense. The team ranks 6th in the American League in runs scored.

And…I’m having difficulty coming up with things to say. At least when it comes to the offense, what’s there to argue about? I’ve already said my piece about Francoeur, so going into next season, what other decisions need to be made? The Royals need to decide between Cabrera and Lorenzo Cain in centerfield. They need to decide whether Brayan Pena works as their backup catcher – I think he does, but I respect that my opinion is in the minority. They need to settle on their bench. They absolutely need to get Gordon signed to a long-term deal - and both sides expect that to get done this winter. And that’s it.

That doesn’t preclude them from entertaining bold ideas like trading Billy Butler for pitching or trying to sell high on Moustakas. But those ideas are luxuries; they’re not necessities. When it comes to the offense, standing pat is a completely viable option for the Royals this winter.

And that, in turn, relieves the pressure on the hitters in the farm system. Essentially, every hitter in the minor leagues gets a mulligan for next season, because barring injury, none of them will have their services required any time soon. Last year, all the fun we had as Royals fans was vicarious, as we perused minor league box scores and read scouting reports. Now, the fun is on TV every single day.

That doesn’t absolve the organization of the ongoing problems they have with the pitching staff, which merits its own column. And there is a cautionary tale from the organization’s past that must be dealt with as well. But if you’ll permit me to navel-gaze this one time, I just wanted to explain my reason for not writing about the Royals of late: I’ve been too busy rooting them on. This isn’t a lineup I want to analyze. It’s a lineup I want to experience.

Francoeur Forever.

We can argue the merits of the deal all day long. But I think we can all agree one thing: it was inevitable.

Having landed his white whale last winter, Dayton Moore wasn’t about to let Jeff Francoeur go. One year turned into three; after paying just $2.5 million (with some incentives) to secure Francoeur’s services for 2011, the Royals will be paying him $13.5 million to keep him in town for 2012 and 2013.

And like almost every move Moore makes, I’m deeply ambivalent about the signing. In the first 24 hours after the deal, I probably changed my position a half-dozen times. Ultimately, though, I have decided I am against the extension. I’m not vociferously against it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it works out, but I think the odds are against it. But the reasons why I’m against the extension are probably not what you think.

There are two questions that have to be asked of the extension:

1) Is Jeff Francoeur worth $13.5 million over the next two years?

2) Is Jeff Francoeur a good fit for the Kansas City Royals over the next two years?

My answer to the first question is decidedly more neutral than most members of the sabermetric community. But then, I’ve been out of lock-step with the sabermetric community on Francoeur for over two years now, ever since I advocated that the Royals acquire him. Francoeur is a flashpoint in the still-simmering battle between scouts and stats. He is a player with undeniable skills – he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated at the age of 21 for a reason – and equally undeniable flaws.

From 2008 to 2010, from the ages of 24 to 26, Francoeur hit .256/.301/.389 and was one of the worst everyday players in baseball. His 2008 season, when he hit .239/.294/.359 with bad defense in right field, ranks (according to Baseball Reference) as one of the ten worst seasons by any hitter in the last 50 years. It was worse than Neifi Perez’s 2002 season, which seems hard to believe.

Nonetheless, Francoeur has been an everyday player for virtually his entire career, in part because teams still see his underlying tools, and in part because of his vivacious personality. Francoeur clearly got more opportunities than his performance has warranted – but just as clearly, the sabermetric establishment has tried to overcorrect for his reputation. I have no argument with the way analysts have consistently portrayed his performance over the last five years as beyond wretched – I agree with it.

But it’s one thing to say Francoeur is wretched – it’s another to say he is beyond redemption. Players aren’t static creatures, and they are capable of improvement, particularly when they are still in their mid-20s. Francoeur is no exception to that rule, but at times he has been treated that way, as when the Royals signed him this winter. Most – certainly not all – analysts thought it was a terrible move for the Royals, even though it was just a one-year commitment, and it wasn’t a lot of money, and the Royals had no better internal options.

Even when Francoeur got off to a great start this season, it was written off as typical Frenchy, always hitting well in his first month with his new team before reverting back to form. (Which is true, but in lieu of an actual explanation for why he would choose to suck after his first month, I failed to see why we should assume Francoeur was just baiting us.) And when Francoeur slumped in May and June, the conventional wisdom was that he was returning to his true talent level.

But since July 1st, Francoeur has disrupted the narrative. Here’s his monthly splits:

April: .314/.357/.569

May: .233/.287/.388

June: .235/.280/.367

July: .306/.377/.531

August: .306/.351/.458

For the season, he’s hitting .277/.330/.463, good for an OPS+ of 119, in a non-trivial sample size of 123 games. And I would submit that if someone named “Jeff Spainoeur” were a 27-year-old rightfielder with a cannon arm, and was hitting .277/.330/.463, and was an impending free agent, and his team signed him to a 2-year, $13.5 million extension…the reaction from most analysts wouldn’t be nearly so negative. It might, in fact, be positive.

That’s a red herring of sorts, because Jeff Spainoeur wasn’t one of the worst players in the game from 2008 to 2010, and Jeff Francoeur was, and past performance matters. By giving him a two-year extension, the Royals are basically gambling $13.5 million that, in this case, past performance doesn’t matter.

And that’s really the question here. If Francoeur plays as well in 2012 and 2013 as he has in 2011 – no better – he will justify this contract and then some. If he regresses even a little towards his performance the last three years, he’ll be an overpriced albatross.

So let’s break down his performance this year. What stands out to me is that – with the notable exception of his steals (he has 19 already, after having never stolen more than eight in any previous season) – Francoeur isn’t doing anything that out of character for him. He’s hitting .277; his career average is .269. He’s on pace for 19 homers, matching the number he hit as a 23-year-old in 2007; as a 22-year-old, he hit 29 homers. He’s hit 37 doubles and is on pace for about 45, which would be a career high; on the other hand, he’s hit over 30 doubles in three of the last four years.

He is on pace for 45 walks – breaking his career high of 42 – and 124 strikeouts, close to his career high of 132. He hasn’t struck out over 100 times in a season since 2008. If anything, it appears Francoeur made too much contact the last few years, or at least too much weak contact. His strikeout rate is back where it was from 2005 to 2007, when he was a decent player. Overall, he has the best strikeout-to-walk ratio of his career, but it’s not dramatically out of line with his past.

Aside from his steals, there’s nothing in Francoeur’s performance that seems unsustainable – and the Royals aren’t paying him $13.5 million because of his ability to steal bases. His improvements are subtle, but they’re across-the-board, and they’re made more impressive by the fact we’ve entered a low-offense era. Consider this:

2007: .293/.338/.444, 102 OPS+

2011: .277/.330/.463, 119 OPS+

In terms of raw offensive numbers, Francoeur is hitting almost exactly the same this year as he did four years ago – he’s traded eight points of OBP for 19 points of slugging. But the value of his performance is dramatically different – in 2007 he was essentially a league-average hitter, while in 2011 the same numbers are well above-average.

If you’re looking for numbers that will support the conclusion that he’s having a fluke season, your best bet is to look at his platoon splits. Most of the improvement Francoeur has shown this season has come against left-handed pitching – he is crushing them to the tune of .315/.378/.604. His OPS against southpaws this season is 141 points higher than his career numbers of .300/.347/.494. Against right-handed pitching, he’s only slightly better this season (.265/.314/.420) than his career line (.257/.299/.405).

On the other hand, hits against left-handed pitchers still count on the scoreboard. I’d be more concerned if his numbers this year were skewed by facing more left-handed pitchers than he normally does, but he’s actually faced left-handed pitching slightly less often (24% of the time) in 2011 than for his career (28%) as a whole. Basically, Francoeur is a league-average hitter against right-handed pitching, and an All-Star against left-handers.

Looking at Fangraphs’ pitch data, one thing stands out about Francoeur’s performance this season. While he swings at pitches outside the strike zone as much as always – he’s taken a hack at 40% of pitches outside the zone, a little higher than his career average of 38% – he has swung at pitches inside the strike zone at the lowest rate of his career. Francoeur has tried his luck against just 72% of pitches inside the zone, compared to a career average of 80%.

He’s still more aggressive than the average hitter – the typical batter swings at only 65% of pitches in the strike zone. But this fits with the theory that Francoeur isn’t succeeding by making more contact – he’s succeeding by making better contact, or more precisely, by not swinging at pitches that he can’t do anything with other than pop up or ground out weakly.

I don’t know if his performance is sustainable – but there is nothing about his performance that suggests it isn’t. And, again: he’s 27 years old. Alex Gordon is 27 years old, and he’s having a season that’s more out of character with his previous career than Francoeur is. (Last year, both Gordon and Francoeur had an OPS+ of 84 – but this year, Gordon’s OPS+ is 139.) Few people think Gordon’s improvement is a fluke. Sure, that’s because Gordon was a stud in the minor leagues – but it was just one season, and if we’re going to talk about just one season, then Francoeur was a stud in the major leagues at an age when Gordon was still a college junior. Gordon showed promise as a sophomore in the majors – but there’s hardly any difference between Gordon’s 2008 and Francoeur’s 2007.

The main reason people take Gordon’s performance more seriously than Francoeur’s is because Gordon knows the strike zone. That’s a valuable skill, but there are players who can succeed without plate discipline, and we shouldn’t discount Francoeur’s performance simply because he’s swing-happy. And the other reason why we take Gordon’s performance more seriously is that it’s coming on the heels of only two bad seasons, while Francoeur has had three in a row. But again: they’re both 27 years old. I don’t think it’s fair to penalize Francoeur because he was an above-average player in the majors at a younger age than Gordon was.

With all that said, I think the Royals overpaid a little. Francoeur’s having a good season at the plate, but he’s a rightfielder; most of them have. Of the 30 rightfielders in baseball who have played in 80 or more games, Francoeur ranks just 12th in OPS+. His defense is good but overrated – his arm, which is legitimately great, is not matched by his range, which is average or maybe a tick below.

He gets points for his durability; I don’t think Francoeur has ever been on the DL. Add it all up, though, and I thought Francoeur was likely to earn somewhere between $10 and $12 million over the next two years. He got $13.5 million instead. That’s not a huge overpay, but the Royals didn’t get any kind of Dayton Moore discount either. If Francoeur continues to play at the level he has sustained over the last four months, he’ll earn his money and more. But at this salary, I think the upside is limited. The downside, given Francoeur’s history, is considerable.

The downside is limited by one thing: it’s only a two-year deal. Francoeur will not have turned 30 by the time he’s a free agent. It’s nearly impossible to hand out a bad one-year deal, and even with a two-year contract it’s pretty difficult. The most overpriced part of any contract is the final year of the deal. I was worried that Moore would go three years or even longer in order to keep Francoeur in tow, particularly with Wil Myers struggling in Double-A. By signing Francoeur for just two years, Moore keeps the Royals from paying for his decline, and sets up a graceful transition to Wil Myers in late 2013 or at the beginning of 2014.

Add up all the pros and cons, and I come to the conclusion that it’s a fair deal for both sides. The Royals paid Francoeur his market value, more or less.

And with all that, I don’t like the deal.

The first reason for my skepticism is this: why now? Why hand out a multi-year deal in the middle of the season? This wouldn’t bother me so much if the Royals didn’t have an official policy of not negotiating contracts during the season. I mean, just last week we heard the happy news that the Royals had expressed to Alex Gordon their interest in discussing a long-term contract after the season, and he had expressed an interest to reciprocate. That’s terrific news – a long-term contract for Gordon should be the Royals’ #1 priority this off-season – but it raises the question: why did the Royals make Francoeur’s contract extension a higher priority than Gordon’s?

There are two possibilities. One is that Francoeur came to the Royals with an interest to sign a contract, which is the exception to the team’s policy, as they also did an in-season deal with Joakim Soria. But Soria’s contract, as everyone in baseball knows, was a very club-friendly deal. This contract isn’t. Francoeur got market value.

The other possibility is that the Royals were just so freaked out about Francoeur reaching free agency this winter that they were determined to sign him before he could test the market. If that’s the case – I mean, come on. Francoeur’s having a nice comeback season, but it’s not like he’s hitting like an All-Star. Factor in the possibility that he could go back to being the hitter that got chased out of Atlanta by a pitchfork-wielding mob, and a 2-year, $13.5 million contract was probably about as well as he could do.

This looks like a bit of a desperation move to me, in which the Royals decided to get a deal done just so they could cross it off their to-do list. What worries me is that the last time the Royals made a big transaction that appeared to be a bit premature, it was the David DeJesus trade. As they did last November, the Royals emphasized expediency over actually getting the best deal done.

If Francoeur continues to hit well the rest of the season, it won’t matter much. But by signing him in mid-August instead of after the season, the Royals are running the risk that he tanks over the last six weeks, in which case he’s signed to a contract that’s way overpriced before it even starts. If Francoeur hits like he did in May and June over the next two weeks, he’ll wind up with a line of .260/.310/.420, which is barely worth playing at all, let alone guaranteeing eight figures for. Even if you believe Francoeur’s performance is for real, given his history, wouldn’t you rather have six months of data to feel good about instead of four?

The Royals did this seven years ago, when Allard Baird was so impressed by Angel Berroa’s rookie season that he was committed to getting him signed to a long-term deal, and not even Berroa’s slump to begin 2004 could diminish Baird’s enthusiasm. The four-year deal was announced in mid-May, when Berroa was hitting around .200 with no secondary skills. He wound up batting .262/.308/.385, with noticeably worse defense than he showed as a rookie, and there were already second thoughts about his contract before it even went into effect. But the Royals had already committed to Berroa from 2005 through 2008; after a marginally bad 2005 season, Berroa was one of the worst players in baseball in 2006, and by 2007 the Royals had sent him and his bloated contract to Triple-A.

Francoeur’s contract only runs half as long. But as with Berroa’s rookie season, there is at least some reason to think Francoeur is having a fluky year, and I think the Royals should have waited as long as possible, and for as much data as possible, before committing to him past this year.

The second, and more significant, reason for my skepticism is that while Francoeur’s contract makes sense in the abstract, I don’t think he’s the best fit for the Royals going forward. This contract tells me that the Royals believe they can think about contending as soon as next season, a sentiment I share.

That requires a sea change in the way the organization builds its major league roster – winning trumps development, and tactical considerations trump strategic ones. That means that the Royals can’t just put a bunch of talented players on the field and hope. It means they need to do things like pinch-hit for their shortstop when the need arises, and not stick with a struggling starting pitcher when the game is on the line. It also means that they need to consider how the different parts of their lineup fit together.

Going into 2012, the Royals had three in-house candidates to fill two spots: center field and right field. (I will give them the benefit of the doubt that Alex Gordon’s place in left field is secure.) Those candidates were Francoeur, Melky Cabrera, and Lorenzo Cain.

Cain has the advantage of being the only one of the three who is a plus defender in center field. I’ve said this before, but it’s become enough of a problem that it needs to be repeated frequently: Melky Cabrera is a centerfielder in name only. The Royals rank 27th in the majors in Defensive Efficiency, and that’s despite the massive upgrade from Yuniesky Betancourt to Alcides Escobar at shortstop. With a young and inexperienced rotation likely for the next few years, more improvement is needed. Getting Cabrera out of center field is a top priority. That doesn’t mean trading him – he has been an adequate corner outfielder in the past, and probably will be again if the Royals move him to one.

Cabrera has the advantage of being the only one of the three who does not bat right-handed. I’ve written this before, but since no one else seems to be talking about it I’ll mention it again: the Royals are in danger of being a very right-handed-hitting team. Mike Moustakas, Eric Hosmer, and Alex Gordon all bat left-handed. But Billy Butler, Johnny Giavotella, Alcides Escobar, and Salvador Perez all bat right-handed. Not only that, but every top hitting prospect in the organization bats right-handed. The best prospects in the entire system that don’t bat right-handed are:

Triple-A: David Lough and Jarrod Dyson. (Yes, and Clint Robinson and Kila Ka’aihue, but they have no future in Kansas City.)

Double-A: Derrick Robinson and Paulo Orlando.

High-A: Rey Navarro, the one legitimate prospect on this list.

Low-A: No one.

Everyone from Wil Myers and Christian Colon to Brett Eibner and Cheslor Cuthbert bats right-handed. As does, I should point, Bubba Starling.

Cain and Francoeur both bat right-handed, while Cabrera is a switch-hitter. If the Royals commit to Cain in center field and trade Cabrera, the Royals will have six right-handed bats in the lineup almost every day next year, with little hope that the ratio will balance out in the near future. (Incidentally, this is one of the main reasons why I think the Royals would be foolish to let go of switch-hitting Brayan Pena as their backup catcher.)

Francoeur is the only one of the three who could neither play good defense in center field nor bat from the left side. The obvious solution for the Royals was to promote Cain, move Cabrera to right field (or possibly to left field, with Gordon switching corners), and to wave Francoeur good-bye. That would have upgraded their outfield defense while maintaining the platoon advantage in at least four spots in the lineup.

By re-signing Francoeur, the Royals put themselves in a difficult decision. Maybe they are able to trade Cain for a starting pitcher, in which case they’re stuck with a bad defender in a crucial up-the-middle position. Maybe they can turn Cabrera into prospects, in which case they’re going to be eaten alive by tough right-handed pitching. But the Royals have created a situation where, no matter which way they go, they’ve left the 2012 team with a significant tactical weakness.

Maybe the Royals get really creative here, and trade both Cain and Cabrera in order to open a spot for Jarrod Dyson (which honestly isn’t as crazy as it sounds). Or maybe they trade Butler and DH Cabrera (which is as crazy as it sounds, as I don’t think the Royals can get fair value for Butler). But as it stands now, bringing back Francoeur is the first domino in a chain reaction that, whichever way it goes, doesn’t end well for the Royals.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope that, between now and Opening Day, the Royals come up with an outfield arrangement which maximizes their chances of winning in 2012. The problem is that they already had such an arrangement at their fingertips, and let it go rather than relinquish their precious Francoeur. Re-signing Frenchy certainly isn’t a crippling move along the lines of the Jose Guillen contract; it doesn’t clearly make the Royals worse like the Mike Jacobs trade did. But the Royals spent a fair amount of money on a player who doesn’t have a long track record of success, and who the Royals didn’t really need in the first place.

There were better ways to spend that money. Love may be blind, but it ain’t cheap. If Dayton Moore’s love is requited, this contract won’t hurt the Royals. Unfortunately, “not hurting the Royals” is about the best we can hope for.