Royals Today: 7/21/12

- Our long national – or at least local – nightmare is over. Jonathan Sanchez has been released back into the wild, and it only took the Royals giving him two additional starts after he had proven to anyone with even a modicum of common sense that he was done, damaged beyond repair and devoid of hope. In those two starts, he threw a total of seven innings and allowed 11 runs; the Royals lost both games.

I want to be fair here; it’s easy for me to say after his June 30th start, as I did here, that Sanchez needed to be released. It’s much harder for Dayton Moore to go to ownership and ask for permission to release Sanchez, eight months after he traded for him, and with Melky Cabrera leading the NL in hits. (His job wasn’t made any easier when Cabrera won All-Star Game MVP honors at Kauffman Stadium.) The Royals eventually came to the right conclusion; compared to the Denial Tour that was Jose Lima’s 2005 season, this time they were downright sensible.

But I just want to make the point that there are times when the Royals – or any front office – make decisions which are not just inexplicable, but indefensible. And just because I or another analyst isn’t privy to inside knowledge doesn’t mean that we aren’t completely justified in ripping that organization a new orifice for making that decision. After 15 years of doing what I do, I’ve recently sensed some pushback from some parts of the analytic community, a sentiment that front offices have access to far greater amounts of information than outsiders like us can possibly have, and therefore they have reasons for making decisions that we can not possibly fathom.

I don’t doubt the validity of that. But just because an organization makes more informed decisions doesn’t mean they make better decisions. Knowing little more than Sanchez’s stat line and the track record of similar pitchers in the past, I knew that Sanchez was toast weeks ago. It’s not like I had an axe to grind with Sanchez – I was generally positive about the decision to trade for him. The Royals undoubtedly had access to the same database that I did, and chose to let him torch a few more games before pulling the plug.

Did they know things about Sanchez that I didn’t? Undoubtedly. Did they also have to deal with complexities that may have clouded their judgment? I think so. I didn’t have to worry about how my owner would react to me admitting to him that this trade was FUBAR. I didn’t have to sit Sanchez down in my office and tell him that we were letting him go. I didn’t have to deal with teammates who might have felt Sanchez was getting a raw deal. (Although my guess is that they didn’t. I mean, they were forced to watch every one of his starts.)

Sure, as an outsider we don’t know all of the variables. But sometimes not knowing all the variables makes for a clearer, cleaner, more sober analysis. Sometimes data is useful, and sometimes it’s just noise. I didn’t need to hear all the office chatter to know that Sanchez should have been cut a while ago. The Royals, for whatever reason, needed a few more data points to convince themselves.

In the end, it might have cost the Royals a win, or it might not have; they scored six runs in Sanchez’s last two starts. Sticking with Sanchez a little too long isn’t close to the worst thing that the Royals have done recently. But it’s a good reminder that there’s value in an outside perspective. If there wasn’t, Warren Buffett wouldn’t be worth billions, Nate Silver wouldn’t be read by politicians on both sides of the aisle, and I would have stopped writing about baseball years ago.

Just since Sanchez was released, Bruce Bochy has gone on record as saying that Hector Sanchez is a better hitter than Brandon Belt – and pinch-hit for Belt with someone named Justin Christian – and the New York Knicks refused to match the Houston Rockets’ offer sheet on Jeremy Lin, a decision so jaw-dropping that it transcends the NBA. Sports organizations worth hundreds of millions of dollars are capable of making decisions of profound stupidity. This shouldn’t be news to anyone; corporations worth billions of dollars do the same thing. (New Coke? Netflix’s plan to create Qwikster? Every investment firm that thought real estate prices would go up forever?)

The Royals’ decision to stick with Sanchez is, relative to the examples in the last paragraph, harmless. But the next time someone tells you to trust the experts – whether those experts run your favorite baseball team, the company you work at, or the country you live in – politely tell them to shove it. No one has a monopoly on the truth. Not even people who have a monopoly on proprietary information.

- Sanchez leaves us with some amazing stats. You may have heard that Sanchez had the third-worst ERA in Royals history (min: 40 IP), behind only Chad Durbin’s 8.21 ERA in 2000 and Blake Stein’s 7.91 ERA in 2002.

But in 2000, the AL ERA as a whole was 4.91; in 2002 it was 4.46. This year, it’s 4.06. And remember, in the late 90s and early 2Ks, the fences at Kauffman Stadium were 10 feet closer than they are now, making the stadium a much better hitters’ park than it is now. Sanchez’s ERA+ is 53, which means that after adjusting for the context of the league and the ballpark, his ERA is nearly double that of the AL as a whole. That’s easily the worst in Royals history. (Second-worst? Sean O’Sullivan, whose 7.25 ERA last year was good for an ERA+ of 57.)

And even without adjusting for league, Sanchez’s WHIP of 2.044 is the worst in Royals history. In 53.1 innings, he allowed 65 hits and 44 walks. Batters hit .302/.425/.512 against him.

- Sanchez’s disastrous start on Monday night forced the Royals to use Everett Teaford in relief for five innings. This led to a mad scramble to find a starter for Tuesday’s game, which led to Ryan Verdugo making his major league debut. I have nothing against Verdugo; I think he might have a future in the majors. But if he does, it will probably be in middle relief. In 88 innings in Omaha, he had allowed 14 homers, and walked 44 batters with just 72 strikeouts. His ERA was a solid 3.58, which hid the fact that he wasn’t pitching all that well.

He then went out and gave up six runs in 1.2 innings, which is to say that he had a worse major league debut than Eduardo Villacis. He still pitched better than Sanchez had the night before, though.

- To the Royals’ credit, they immediately sent Verdugo back down to Omaha, and called up Will Smith, who pitched yesterday on normal rest. The rotation now appears to be, in some order, Luke Hochevar, Bruce Chen, Luis Mendoza, Will Smith, and Everett Teaford.

I approve. That’s a terrible rotation on paper, and probably in reality as well. But those are also the five best starting pitchers the Royals have at the moment, at least until they feel that Jake Odorizzi is ready. None of those pitchers project to be even a #3 starter at any point in the future. But you can make a case for all five of them being solid #4/#5 starter types going forward. At the very least, they all have a chance to keep you in a ballgame.

Smith, in particularly, has made enough progress this season to warrant a long look. His seasonal line in Omaha isn’t great – a 3.61 ERA in 90 innings, and 104 hits allowed. But his high BABIP obscures a fine strikeout-to-walk ratio: 74 Ks, 22 BBs. Moreover, in his last eight minor league starts, Smith had a 2.73 ERA, and in 53 innings had 44 Ks against just 10 walks. He’s left-handed, and he just turned 23. Again, I don’t see a lot of upside here – but I do see a pitcher who might survive in the back end of the Royals’ rotation for a few years. Of course, we said the same thing about Sean O’Sullivan. There’s only one way to find out, and I’d rather see him and Teaford get a chance to sink or swim over the next few months then mess around with retreads like Vinny Mazzaro.

Smith’s line in his return to KC was 6.1 8 4 4 2 5, and I heard some suggest that the performance of Verdugo and Smith makes it understandable that the Royals stuck with Sanchez as long as they did. I couldn’t disagree more. Verdugo was not picked for the quality of his pitching, but for his availability. (Ned Yost himself, when asked: “No. 1, he was available to pitch. No. 2, he’s got pretty good numbers at Triple-A.” The order of those numbers is not an accident.) And while Smith didn’t have a great first start, it’s miles better than what we’d expect from Sanchez. Consider:

- Smith threw 6.1 innings. Sanchez hasn’t gotten an out in the seventh inning of a game since May 28th, 2011 – 21 starts ago.

- Smith walked two batters and struck out five. Sanchez hasn’t had more than twice as many strikeouts as walks in a single start since the same game, 14 months ago.

The wild card here is Odorizzi, who you could easily make a case for being one of the five best starting pitching options in the organization right now. Even if he isn’t, there’s a strong case to be made that allowing him to take his lumps in the majors over the next 2-3 months will make him that much more prepared to pitch well out of the chute next year. My feeling is that he should be in the Royals’ rotation by early August. I’m fine with him being the sixth man for the moment, if only because it’s highly unlikely the rotation as it’s presently constituted will hold up for more than two or three weeks anyway. It’s even less likely that it will hold up with all five starters pitching well enough to keep their jobs. I expect an opportunity for Odorizzi to present itself soon enough.

- And, of course, pretty much everything I wrote above went out the door Friday morning, when the Royals somehow traded Jonathan Sanchez to Colorado in exchange for Jeremy Guthrie.

On initial reflection, this is an absolutely incredible deal, not because it changes the fortunes of the Royals franchise dramatically, but simply because another team was willing to employ Jonathan Sanchez. The Rockies have had an incredibly strange year. I’m not sure they’re the worst-run team in the majors at the moment, but they certainly seem to be the most impetuous team, doing things like going to a four-man rotation on the fly, giving 49-year-old Jamie Moyer a shot in their rotation, and of course, continuing to employ Jim Tracy despite a managerial rap sheet a mile long. Take a pitcher who has averaged over two baserunners an inning, and put him in Coors Field? That’s insane, but for the Rockies of late, that’s par for the course.

Guthrie has hardly been better this year; he might have been worse. Like Sanchez, he was the wrong end of an off-season trade which seemed balanced at the time, but turned into one of the worst trades of the past year – in exchange for Guthrie, the Orioles got Jason Hammel, who has a 3.54 ERA in 18 starts pitching in the AL East, and Matt Lindstrom, who was hurt for six weeks but has a 2.53 ERA in 22 innings for Baltimore. Guthrie, meanwhile, has a 6.35 ERA for the Rockies in 91 innings, and leads the NL with 21 homers allowed.

But here’s the thing: he’s pitching in Coors Field. And after years of behaving like just an ordinary hitters’ park, as opposed to one of the most extreme hitters parks of all time, it’s like they turned the humidor off in Denver this year. From 2005 to 2008, Coors Field increased offense by 5-10% (i.e. the park factors were between 105 and 110). But over the last four years the park factors have steadily increased, and this year it’s back to around 120. That’s not quite as high as it was in its heyday – in 1996 and 2000, Coors Field had a park factor of 129, and that was on top of a historically high level of offense. But it’s clear that Coors Field is back to making mediocre hitters look great, and mediocre pitchers look terrible.

In 42 innings at home this year, Guthrie has a 9.50 ERA – he allowed 67 hits, including 14 home runs. In 49 innings on the road, he has a 3.67 ERA, and has allowed 7 home runs.

I wouldn’t read too much into that ERA – he hasn’t pitched quite that well on the road, with 27 strikeouts and 17 walks. But he’s clearly been better. He’s clearly no Jonathan Sanchez.

There’s definitely some upside here. Guthrie’s a former first-round pick who flopped with Cleveland – but the Orioles picked him up on waivers before the 2007 season, and was one of the great waiver-wire finds of recent times, basically the healthy version of Felipe Paulino. From 2007 through 2011, Guthrie averaged 31 starts and 197 innings a season, with a 4.12 ERA, pitching nearly half his games against the four giants of the AL East. Last winter, I had him on my list of possible acquisition targets for the Royals, albeit at the bottom of my preferences, given his age (33) and the fact that he was under contract for just 2012.

But I didn’t expect him to fall apart like he has, and unlike Sanchez, there is an extenuating circumstance here that at least gives you a little hope he can turn things around. Coors Field – when it’s playing like Coors Field – can turn even star pitchers into mincemeat. Darryl Kile had finished 5th in the Cy Young vote in 1997, having thrown 256 innings for the Houston Astros with a 2.57 ERA. He signed a free-agent contract with the Rockies, and was beyond awful. In 1998, he had a 5.20 ERA and led the NL with 17 losses; in 1999, he was much worse, finishing with a 6.61 ERA and leading the league in earned runs allowed. At the time, his collapse was so profound that it didn’t look like it was simply a Coors Field effect – in 1999, he walked 109 batters and struck out 116, which is untenable.

But the Cardinals correctly surmised that if they could just get him away from that ballpark – and work with Dave Duncan, I’m sure – he would be fine. They traded four nobodies for Kile after the 1999 season; in 2000, he threw 232 innings with a 3.91 ERA, and his strikeout-to-walk ratio improved to 192-to-58 – MORE THAN TRIPLE his ratio the year before. He was even better in 2001, and was pitching well in 2002 when he tragically died of a heart attack.

Jeremy Guthrie is no Darryl Kile. But it’s not unreasonable to think there’s a chance that he can be Jeremy Guthrie again, and Jeremy Guthrie was a solid starting pitcher. Jonathan Sanchez is not.

The only downside here is that the Royals took on a larger salary – Guthrie is making about $2.6 million more than Sanchez this year, and no money changed hands in the deal, so this will cost the Royals about $1.2 million the rest of the way. Presumably, this is why the Rockies agreed to the deal. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were thinking of designating Guthrie for assignment; this way even if they cut Sanchez tomorrow, they’ll save some money. But it’s not a prohibitive amount of money, and the chance that Guthrie rebounds over the next two months is worth a little payroll.

So I do like the trade, though not for the obvious reason. I don’t really care if Guthrie helps the Royals win an extra game or two this season, and he’s a free agent at the end of the year, so he really doesn’t help the franchise directly. But there are two ancillary benefits here:

1) There’s a non-zero chance that Guthrie pitches well enough over his first 5-6 starts with the Royals that a contender expresses an interest in him for the last 6-8 weeks of the season. Remember, with two wild cards per league, the number of potential contenders increases, but because the value of a wild card is cut in half, teams in the wild-card race are unlikely to make a huge sacrifice in blood and prospects for a true impact player. They’re more likely to dabble on the fringes, trading a modest prospect for someone who might help them in the race, but who is unlikely to cause them a great deal of regret if they fall short.

Also remember that while July 31st is the non-waiver trading deadline, teams can still trade after that if the player clears waivers. Guthrie, making $8.2 million this year, will almost certainly clear waivers – and if he doesn’t, the Royals can simply let him go, saddling his new team with his full contract and saving more money than they spent to acquire him. Realistically, Guthrie will be out there if some team suddenly realizes they’re three games out of a wild-card spot on August 15th. He might fetch the Royals an arm, or save them some money, or both. This isn’t a particularly likely scenario, but it’s far from impossible.

2) Trading for Guthrie should – hopefully – dampen the Royals’ enthusiasm for trading for an elite starting pitcher who they would only control through 2013. I’m speaking specifically of Matt Garza, but there are other names (e.g. Paul Maholm, Wandy Rodriguez) that also fit the bill.

The word on the street is that the Royals have suddenly awoken to the fact that as constituted today, their rotation next year will be just as awful as it was this year, and that they need to make some drastic changes or waste 2013 the way they’ve wasted 2012. It’s great that they’ve finally realized that, but trading for Garza is not the solution. Garza is going to be very expensive, precisely because he can impact two pennant races, not one. If you’re the Tigers or the Reds or another team that’s in the race this year, you’ll crack open the piggy bank for Garza, because he’ll help you make the playoffs this year, and then you’ll get a full season out of him next year. But for the Royals, the first part of that equation is out. If the Royals outbid other teams for Garza, it means they value his contribution in 2013 alone more than other teams value his contributions in 2013 and 2012. Which is nuts.

If the Royals want to make an impact trade for a starting pitcher now, they’re better off targeting guys who are at least two or three years away from free agency. They’d still be wasting the first half-season of that guy’s career in a Royals uniform, but at least they’d be getting a higher percentage of his value in seasons where they might actually contend. Buster Olney wrote about this in a recent column, and speculated on names like Jon Lester and Jeremy Hellickson. Those guys would be crazy expensive too, but at least they’d have the chance to impact multiple pennant races for the Royals.

When you think about Dayton Moore’s track record, one thing that really stands out is that when he strikes early, he tends to strike out. Think about the moves he has made within days of the World Series ending: trading Cabrera for Sanchez, trading David DeJesus for Vinny Mazzaro and Justin Marks, trading Leo Nunez for Mike Jacobs. When Moore tries to jump the market instead of waiting to see what the market will bear, he has almost always misjudged things badly.

I’m worried that he would do the same here for a guy like Garza. So if acquiring Guthrie scratches that itch for the time being, and lessens the sense of desperation in the rotation until the winter, that alone makes his acquisition worthwhile.

I’ve heard the argument that the Royals might want to trade for an impact pitcher now because if they don’t, those guys will be traded elsewhere anyway, and they won’t be on the market when the Royals go shopping this winter. That may be true, but at the same time, pitchers who may not be on the market today will be available in the off-season. This time last year, I didn’t think that Trevor Cahill and Gio Gonzalez would be available from the A’s, or that the Padres might be willing to part with their best starting pitcher in Mat Latos. But in the off-season, teams are willing to move integral parts of their rosters because they have the time to rearrange their rosters before playing another game. And if the Royals are going to make a blockbuster deal, it’s that kind of pitcher – a pitcher with three or four years of club control – that they should be targeting, not an 18-month rental like Garza.

Besides which, if they really want to add a starting pitcher, they can always sign one in free agency. Reports suggest they might be willing to do that. I’d rather spend money than prospects.

- Speaking of trading young assets for established starting pitchers, the Royals got another one of those on Wednesday, when they “won” the new competitive balance lottery and got an extra draft pick.

I say “won” because while they got the first pick, almost every eligible team got a draft pick of some sort. Fourteen teams were part of the lottery, and 12 picks were awarded – every team but the Cardinals and Rays got one.

The picks came in two varieties – six of the picks will come between the first and second rounds (Round A), and six of them will come between the second and third rounds (Round B). The Royals got the highest of the 12 picks, which slots at #32 right now (it will probably wind up around #40 overall once compensation picks are awarded this winter). But the important thing is simply being one of the six teams who got a Round A pick (essentially the same as a supplemental first-round pick) instead of a Round B pick (which we might call a supplemental second-round pick). Keep in mind that in Dayton Moore’s entire tenure in Kansas City, the Royals have had just one supplemental first-round pick under the old rules. They used that pick (#36 overall) to select Mike Montgomery. So clearly the pick has some value. (Jeff Zimmerman takes a closer look at the value of the draft pick here.)

This is another reason – certainly not the primary reason – why I felt that all the commotion about how the new CBA was going to hurt teams like the Royals, small-market teams who spent aggressively in the draft, was overblown. The Royals were certainly hurt this year, because they had just one of the first 64 picks, and their draft pool was below-average. But they’re almost certainly going to be a team that qualifies for the competitive balance lottery every single year going forward, which means they’re going to get an extra pick 80-90% of the time. And with that pick comes draft pool money – the 40th pick this year was allotted $1.291 million, which would be added to the Royals’ pool money next summer.

The other interesting thing to note is that for the first time in history, these competitive balance picks – and only these picks – are tradeable. The Royals can trade this pick (and the money allotted to it) to another team. If the Royals are serious about adding an established starting pitcher, this pick could come in handy; it’s not going to get the deal done by itself, or even headline the deal, but as a third or fourth asset in the trade, the Royals might prefer to move the pick instead of another prospect already in the system.

What’s frustrating is that – for no apparent reason whatsoever – these picks can only be traded during the season – either between now and the end of the regular season, or between Opening Day next year and the day of the draft itself. Which is pointless, and means that if the Royals wait until the off-season to make a trade – which they probably should – they won’t be able to use the pick as bait.

- Finally, I can’t end without saying something about Jason Kendall.

Jason Kendall sucks. The End.

Oh, if it were only that easy. Kendall is 38 years old, and hasn’t played this year rehabbing a shoulder injury. When he was 37, he missed the entire season rehabbing a shoulder injury. When he was 36, he hit .256/.318/.297 for the Royals. He hasn’t hit a home run since he was 35. He hasn’t been a remotely good hitter since he was 32. He hasn’t been a great player – and for many years, in his youth, he was a genuinely great player – since he was 30.

And now he’s back. In Double-A, but still: Jason Kendall is back.

Some pundits have argued that Royals fans are making way too much of this, that Kendall is just like any other thirtysomething catcher who doesn’t want to leave the game and still has something to offer, at least in terms of developing young pitchers in the minor leagues. The Royals had Vance Wilson filling the same role a few years ago.

To which I would say: if the Royals had signed anyone, literally anyone, other than Jason Kendall, they might have a point. But they didn’t. They signed Jason Kendall.

For reasons that remain mysterious to me, Kendall holds a svengali-like attraction on the Royals, much the way Yuniesky Betancourt does, or Roman Colon has. It doesn’t make any sense for the Royals to give Kendall a day of service time in the majors this year – but if the Royals were at all rational about Jason Kendall, they wouldn’t have signed him to a two-year, $6 million deal back in 2009. Remember, they cut Miguel Olivo AND John Buck in the span of about 48 hours, all so that they could go with Kendall as their starting catcher – for more guaranteed money than they would have had to give Olivo and Buck COMBINED.

I’ve said this before, but that decision still ranks as the moment I’ve felt the most hopeless as a Royals fan in the Dayton Moore era. This was before the farm system became a fully-operational Death Star, and after follies like Jose Guillen and Yuni and destroying Gil Meche’s arm. At that moment, it appeared the Royals had absolutely no idea how to put together a winning team, and didn’t seem terribly interested in learning how to do so.

Come to think of it, that’s not much different from where they are now. The Royals are 39-53 as I write this, a half-game from having the worst record in the American League. And they’re futzing around with 38-year-old Jason Kendall. And if you think Kendall’s going to be happy just tutoring Mike Montgomery on the finer points of pitching and giving a catching tutorial to Manny Pina, you’re out of your mind. He’s already made statements that he has every intention of getting back to Kauffman Stadium this summer.

And the sad part is, I think the Royals have every intention of giving him that opportunity. The Royals may have information that we don’t have. But they still appear to lack the same trait that’s been missing for most of the last 20 years: common sense.

All-Star Week Recap.

Some brief and belated thoughts on the biggest week of baseball in Kansas City since 1985:

1) With baseball’s spotlight on Kansas City for the first time since 1985…everyone killed it. The team, the ballpark, the fans, the city, the barbeque, everyone. While I couldn’t stay for the All-Star Game itself, I couldn’t miss out on the festivities entirely, so I flew in Saturday morning and stayed until Sunday night.

It was obvious from the time I got off the plane that Kansas City was determined to do this right. There were signs everywhere at KCI referencing the All-Star Game, and while that might seem like a small and simple thing, if this game had taken place at US Cellular Park, you probably could have changed planes in O’Hare and never known the All-Star Game was in town.

That’s the advantage that a smaller market has when it gets to host an event like this: it’s not embarrassed to go all out. From the billboards all around town promoting the game, to the radioactive blue dye they put in the fountains outside FanFest, Kansas City made it clear: this was a BIG DEAL to the city.

2) It was a big deal to the fans as well. I went to FanFest on Saturday, and it was a zoo. Autograph lines snaked around for hours. I went to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum – which everyone should go see if you haven’t been there, but you already knew that – for a Baseball Prospectus event on Sunday morning. We held the event across the street at the Gem Theater, and then went over to the museum proper, which was standing room only to hear Dave Winfield interview former Negro Leaguers talk about their experiences.

I then headed over to Kauffman Stadium to prep for the Futures Game. The game started at 4:05, but when I pulled in to the parking lot at 1:30, it was already a quarter full and people were tailgating. Fans were tailgating two-and-a-half hours early to a minor-league exhibition.

As you may have heard, the Futures Game was a sellout. While there were a few empty pockets of seats in the stands, there were only a few – announced attendance was just over 40,000, and that seemed like an accurate count. It was easily the most well-attended Futures Game in history. While I had to leave to catch a flight, I’m told that more people stuck around to watch the Celebrity Softball Game afterwards than attended most previous Futures Games. Wil Myers was serenaded like a conquering hero.

3) And that, of course, was just a prelude to one of the great random moments as a Royals fan of the last quarter-century. I don’t have anything to add to the coverage of the Can0 Affair itself. Robinson Cano was booed like no Home Run Derby participant in the event’s history, and put on the worst performance of any Home Run Derby participant in the event’s history. (While a few others have also been skunked, I doubt anyone else hit three foul balls among his ten swings.) Those two things are not coincidental. Kansas City fans got into his head, and it was a beautiful thing.

The media reaction was, for the most part, understanding if not necessarily supportive. There were, though, a few in the media who thought that the reaction of Royals fans was tasteless, classless, and made the city look small and provincial. With all due respect, I couldn’t disagree more. If that’s what you took away from what happened, then you must actually think that the booing was about Robinson Cano.

It wasn’t, not really. It was about a fan base that, with the eyes of the nation turned on them for the first time in decades, collectively said, “WE LOVE BASEBALL AROUND HERE. NOT EVEN 27 YEARS OF SUCKING CHANGES THAT. GIVE US A WINNER AND YOU’LL SEE.” For the rest of the nation, the Royals have – justifiably – been irrelevant for the past 27 years. This was a chance to remind the nation that while the Royals may have been irrelevant, Royals fans were not. Royals fans got their moment, and they owned it.

Two comments from the media stood out: the first was that some players were so turned off by the display that they would be less likely to come to Kansas City to play in the future. The second was that if Royals fans really wanted to show their displeasure, they should have been booing the Glass family.

Regarding the first: really? Are you telling me that Cole Hamels might be less likely to sign with the Royals this off-season? Hold on while I peel myself off of this fainting couch. Kansas City has never been a premier destination for free agents, and for the Royals to sign a free agent, they usually have to offer something no other market can – namely, more money. That’s how free agency works. And if the Royals offer a free agent more money than anyone else this winter, he’s not going to say, “yeah, but they booed Robinson Cano.” Otherwise no one would sign with the Phillies, who, you know, boo their own players.

Speaking of which: what ballplayer looks at that display of righteous anger at an opposing player for snubbing their own player and thinks, “Man, these fans hate the other team, and they love their own players. I DON’T WANT TO PLAY HERE.” Booing Cano was not an expression of hatred – it was an expression of passion and loyalty. Loyalty to one of the guys who wears our uniform, who we were led to believe would get to take part in a meaningless but enjoyable spectacle, and then was snubbed.

Personally, I don’t think this affects the Royals’ chances to sign Cole Hamels. But you know who it does affect? BILLY BUTLER. It’s way too soon to know whether the Royals will even want to re-sign Butler at the end of his contact, which ends (if they pick up his option) after the 2015 season. He’ll be almost 30 then, and 30-year-old glacier-slow right-handed-hitting DHs don’t typically age well. But if Butler is still an elite hitter and the Royals do want to re-sign him for 2 or 3 years, you don’t think he’ll remember this supreme exhibition of love from his fan base? Butler was beaming from the time he was introduced on Monday until the game was over on Tuesday. Butler’s a Kansas City kind of guy, and as such was really the perfect choice to represent the Royals at the All-Star Game. Long after this incident is forgotten and Cano has gone back to torturing the Royals on the field, Butler will remember how the city embraced him, and defended him to the world.

And regarding the second point: did you notice how David Glass wasn’t introduced to the crowd? I mean, if Royals fans were told that David Glass would be on the field in front of 45,000 fans, and if they were given a week to prepare about it, you don’t think they would have booed him until he fled inside a dugout?

The message that Royals fans sent to major league baseball? It was also a message to the Glass Family: THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF YOU’LL JUST BUILD US A WINNER. What bothers me about the Glass family’s unwillingness to spend on major-league payroll* isn’t that it’s cheap: it’s that it’s poor business. Spending money on player salaries isn’t a cost – it’s an investment. (Unless you spend it on Jose Guillen.)

*: As recently as 2 or 3 years ago, I felt that the Glass family was spending a reasonable amount of money on major-league payroll, particularly given how much they were spending to sign amateur talent. But this season, the Royals’ payroll is roughly $64 million. That’s almost identical to their payroll in 2008, and more than $10 million LESS than their payroll in 2009 and 2010. Given how much industry revenues have increased the last few years, AND given that the Royals are now prohibited from spending as much money in the draft and in Latin America, that’s inexcusable.

If All-Star week didn’t convince the Glass family that there’s an upside to spending the money to build a contender, nothing will.

4) The game itself? Well, it sort of sucked. How appropriate that the American League suffered the worst loss in its history. That would be The Most Royals Moment of the season, except, of course…

5) …Melky Cabrera was named MVP of the All-Star Game. Yeah, hard to top that one.

6) Before this week, I had said that as it had been nearly 40 years since the Royals had hosted an All-Star Game, it would probably be another 40 years before they did again. But really, Kansas City put on a show, and don’t think that The Powers That Be didn’t notice. One of the reasons it’s been so long is that, for the past 20-25 years, virtually every All-Star Game has been awarded to a team that had just built (or renovated) their stadium. Which was 80% of the teams in baseball.

But that ballpark boom is almost over – there’s maybe 5 or 6 teams left to go. At that point, the game will likely be awarded at least partly based on where it’s likely to get the most attention. And at least locally, it’s hard for a game to have received more attention than this one. I don’t think Kansas City will get to host another game in 5 or 10 years, but at some point in the 2020s, it’s a distinct possibility.

Hopefully there will be some other meaningful games at Kauffman Stadium between now and then.

7) And on that note, I wrote about the Royals for Grantland on Tuesday, which you can read here. I can’t say I was very nice, but I can say that I was fair. The Royals are not in a good place right now. That doesn’t mean that things can’t turn around quickly, but the boundless optimism of 18 months ago has largely melted in the face of the fierce heat of reality. The Best Farm System In The History Of Whatever hasn’t lived up to the hype yet, and Dayton Moore hasn’t done enough to compensate. With 2013 shaping up to be a make-or-break year for him, he’s got about eight months to overhaul the rotation and fix his offense. That’s a tall order.

Royals Today: 7/5/12.

I feel like I owe you an all-positive post today, to make up for all the Sanchez-bashing last time around. So here you go.

Salvador Perez

We all missed Perez terribly, while he missed the first half of the season recovering from a torn meniscus suffered in spring training. (Perez tore his meniscus lunging for a pitch out of the strike zone. Who threw that pitch? Jonathan Sanchez, of course.) But I don’t think we realized just how badly we missed Perez, because I don’t think we appreciated just how good he might be.

I appreciated how good he was last season; as I’ve written before, he had the highest batting average by a 21-year-old catcher (min: 100 AB) in major-league history, and the 3rd highest OPS, behind Joe Mauer and Johnny Bench. But even I was concerned about what his performance meant. Batting average is a highly variable statistic, particularly in a sample size of just 39 games, and Perez hadn’t hit at that level at any point in the minor leagues.

His career line in the minors is .287/.329/.397; in Double-A last season, he hit .283/.329/.427. Those are fine numbers for an elite defensive catcher who is young for his leagues, but not the performance you’d project into an All-Star caliber player in the majors. Throw in the injury, and you had to be concerned that the player we saw on the field in late 2011 was a bit of a mirage.

That may yet prove to be the case, but we’re getting closer and it still looks like an oasis. Perez played 12 games in Triple-A on rehab and hit .340 – a soft .340, with just two walks and two extra-base hits (both doubles) – but still, .340. He was activated on June 22nd – and homered in his first game back. He hasn’t stopped hitting since.

Literally. Perez has played in 10 games since his return, and has a hit in all 10 of them – including one game in which he had a single pinch-hit at-bat. Perez has a ten-game hitting streak going, which is already the second-longest hitting streak by a Royal this season. (Eric Hosmer, surprisingly, hit in 11 straight from May 28 to June 9.)

Late update: Perez is in the lineup for the fourth straight night tonight, and singled in his first at-bat, starting a five-run inning. So 11 games, 11-game hitting streak, tied for the longest of the season.

He’s not just hitting, he’s hitting for power. I remarked on this a little last season, when I was in attendance at US Cellular Field in September when Perez hit an absolute bomb to right field. It’s rare to see any player hit a ball that far to the opposite field, let alone a 21-year-old rookie catcher. He’s shown that kind of power again this year. His second homer, on June 29, was an opposite-field homer at Target Field. Do you know how hard it is to hit a home run to the opposite field at Target Field? I don’t have numbers for this season, but between 2010 and 2011, according to the Bill James Handbook, Target Field reduced homers by 24%. For left-handed hitters, homers were cut 32%, which suggests that it’s even harder to hit homers to right field than elsewhere in that ballpark. (Since the ballpark opened, Joe Mauer has hit 14 homers on the road – and just three at home.)

Here's a link to the video. As you can see, it wasn't a cheapie.

On Monday night, Perez showed a different kind of power. He dropped the bat head on a pitch that was low and inside. Just keeping that ball fair was impressive enough – but he hit a line drive that somehow carried over the left field wall. I can’t do it justice with words – watch it here.

In ten games, Perez is hitting .371/.371/.714; for his career – all of 49 games – he’s hitting .339/.363/.519. There are warts to Perez’s game, certainly. He hasn’t drawn a walk yet, and he’s bounced into two double plays. Extrapolate his career to 162 games, and he’d have as many GIDPs (23) as walks. He’s only thrown out 10 of 44 base stealers (23%) in his career, although 1) his career rate in the minors was 42% and 2) that doesn’t count the three guys he’s picked off.

I realize the sample size is vanishingly small here, but my opinion on Perez isn’t simply based on the numbers, but on – perish the thought – my eyes. He hits everything HARD. His line-drive rate (and with the caveat that “line drives” are highly observer-dependent; what some people will call a line drive other people will call a fly ball) for his career is 27.6%, well above the league average of 18%. He’s earned his .339 average.

And as crazy as this might sound, if you put a gun to my head and I had to predict which player in the Royals organization will go to the most All-Star Games in his career…I’d probably pick Perez. Moustakas, Hosmer, Gordon, Butler…all those guys play high-offense positions where the standard for offense is really high. If Perez is simply a .280-.290 hitter with 15-20 homers, he’s going to be one of the best offensive catchers in the league along with excellent defense. The two best catchers in the AL right now are probably Joe Mauer and Matt Wieters. (Mike Napoli starts the All-Star Game, but that’s a homer pick that’s unlikely to be repeated.) Mauer can’t stay healthy and might move to another position before long; Wieters has the sterling pedigree but is more of a very good player than a star.

Perez has a lot to prove, starting with whether he can stay healthy or not. But everything we’ve seen from him since he arrived in Kansas City says that he’s a budding star. And as for his minor-league track record…let’s not forget that he was 17 when he started playing. He hit .189 in A-ball in 2009 – when he was 18. He started 2010 in Wilmington when he was 19 – he turned 20 a month into the season. Hitting in the Death Valley of the minor leagues, he batted .290/.322/.437. Last year he hit .290/.331/.437 in the high minors and was in the majors three months after he turned 21. (If I’ve done the research correctly, Perez is the ninth-youngest position player ever to suit up for the Royals.)

While much of the reason why the Royals have been such a failure the last 15 years is because many of their top prospects have failed to develop, a contributing factor is that they really haven’t had anyone who wasn’t a top prospect who surprised in a positive fashion. Think of someone like Andre Ethier, who was a 23-year-old in Double-A that the A’s thought so little of that they traded him for Milton Bradley – and then arrived in the majors the following year as an above-average outfielder who improved until he was an All-Star. Or Robinson Cano, who hit .278/.331/.425 in the minor leagues and was made available to the Royals for Carlos Beltran, only Allard Baird decided on Mark Teahen because dadgummit, they needed a third baseman.

Well, Perez might be that guy. When the Royals placed nine guys on Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospect List, we knew some of them would fail, but we hoped that those failures would be compensated for by players who snuck under the radar of that list. Most people would agree that Perez is one of those players. What is much more controversial is that Perez might prove to be as valuable as anyone the Royals had on that list in the first place. It’s way too early to say so with any confidence. But every time we think Perez has reached his ceiling, he builds himself another one. I can’t wait to see the perch he finally settles in at.

In the meantime, I suggest the Royals keep his knees in bubble wrap. Tall catchers and knee injuries go hand in hand. The Royals can’t afford another one.

Luis Mendoza

The quick prologue to the Luis Mendoza story: a journeyman right-hander going nowhere, rebuilt his delivery last season in Triple-A, led the PCL in ERA despite striking nobody out. We were very skeptical of his chances. He pitched very well in spring training, including an excellent strikeout rate, which might have indicated something.

Or not. In his first start, Mendoza walked four and struck out two, which set the tone. In his next start, he walked four and struck out one, and also allowed nine runs in four innings. He was bumped from the rotation after just four starts, but the same pattern continued in the bullpen. Through the 6th of June, Mendoza had 25 walks and 19 strikeouts, and it’s essentially impossible to be even remotely successful in the major leagues in the 21st century when you have more walks than strikeouts. Batters were hitting .312/.405/.399 against him; he was lucky to have a 5.36 ERA.

But then something funny happened. He went back into the rotation on June 12th when the dreaded Black Arm Death swept through the pitching staff. In his first start, he took a no-hitter into the seventh – and struck out four batters against two walks. In five starts since returning to the rotation, he has walked no more than two batters in any start. He has struck out at least four batters in all but one of those starts. Wednesday night, he struck out a career-high nine.

Here’s Mendoza’s line in his last five starts:

30 IP, 28 H, 6 BB, 25 K, 2 HR, 3.26 ERA.

I have no idea what this means. I have no idea if this is sustainable. But strikeout and walk rates stabilize as quickly as any stat in the game, meaning that you don’t need as large of a sample size to trust them. Something happened to Mendoza when he returned to the rotation. Whether it was something as simple as gaining confidence in his pitches, or whether it was trying to mix his pitches up more so that his repertoire wasn’t as predictable the third time through the lineup (where he was getting killed), I don’t know. Maybe he added a pitch, or subtly adjusted an old one. I don’t know.

But I want to see more. Given the state of the Royals’ rotation, it’s easy to say “well, he’ll certainly get the opportunity to show us more,” but it’s actually worse than that. Mendoza has a 4.50 ERA on the season, which is hardly great, or even good – the American League as a whole has a 4.04 ERA, and starting pitchers have a 4.37 ERA*, so his performance is still below-average.

Except that right now, Mendoza has the best ERA of anyone in the Royals’ rotation. Luis Mendoza, for lack of a better term, is currently the Royals’ ace. He is their stopper. Those aren’t the saddest words I’ve ever written, but if you’re thinking that the Royals might actually have a chance to get back in the race this year, I suggest you read the opening sentence of this paragraph a few dozen more times.

*: AL starting pitchers have a 4.37 ERA, but AL relievers have a 3.41 ERA. Relievers generally have better ERAs, because they’re more effective and because of the way inherited runners are charged to the outgoing pitcher, but the gap isn’t usually this wide. Just three years ago, for instance, AL starters had a 4.62 ERA, but relievers had a 4.17 ERA. The ERA gap was 45 points in 2009, and 96 points – more than double – in 2012. So if it seems like every team has a great bullpen…that’s because they do. It might be just one of those years – or it could be that teams are doing a better job than ever of identifying potential bullpen arms and deploying them correctly.

Bubba Starling

Any truth to the rumors that the Royals are keeping Starling in extended spring training to shield him from prying eyes that may notice he’s not very good? – May 2nd

You probably know about my growing concerns with Starling, the hometown kid who was the #5 overall pick in one of the deepest drafts in a generation last season. You probably remember my study from last year about the importance of draft age among high school hitters, and the implication that Starling, who turned 19 before he even signed, was a significant risk to underperform, particularly compared with #8 overall pick Francisco Lindor, who was just 17 when he signed.

My concerns only grew when Lindor headed straight to the Midwest League in April and performed well – he’s hitting .262/.349/.374 as an 18-year-old, and scouting reports are uniformly glowing – while Starling stayed back in extended spring training. They grew more when it turned out our expectations that Starling would head to Kane County as soon as the weather warmed up were unfounded, and that the Royals eventually decided he would be best served by debuting in the Appalachian League, a couple rungs down the minor league chain.

Swing remains long. Wrists very fast. – May 10th

Meanwhile, it felt like every 2011 first-round pick was crushing it. I’m not just talking about the four guys who went ahead of Starling, like Gerrit Cole and Danny Hultzen and Trevor Bauer and Dylan Bundy. I’m talking about Jose Fernandez (#14 pick to the Marlins, now the #8 prospect in baseball per Baseball America) and Matt Barnes (#19 to the Red Sox, #13 prospect) and Lindor (#14 prospect) and Archie Bradley (#7 pick, #16 prospect) and Javier Baez (#9 pick, #25 prospect) and George Springer (#11 pick, #45 prospect).

And then Starling got hurt, straining his hamstring after his first at-bat in an exhibition game two days before his season was supposed to begin. Let’s just say I was becoming less worried and more bitter. I was starting to wonder whether Starling was just the local version of Roscoe Crosby. Starling ranks #46 on Baseball America’s mid-season list – behind ten other guys in the 2011 draft.

Everything’s working except the bat. – May 19th

Starling finally debuted on June 28, and I knew I would violently overreact to his first pro game. Naturally, he went 0-for-5 with three strikeouts (and a walk). Beautiful.

But if I’m allowed to overreact over one game, I can also overreact over one week. And I will say, a week later, that I’ve lowered the DEFCON rating a slot on Starling. On Monday, in his fourth game as a pro, he homered – twice – and singled. On Tuesday, he went 2-for-4. Last night, he went 2-for-4 with a triple and two walks.

Starling’s had a hand dip in his swing his whole life. Will take time to unlearn and retrain. Easy thing to spot, don’t know how easy to fix. – June 14th

Through six games, Starling is hitting .360/.484/.680. More importantly, he’s showing at least a rudimentary understanding of the strike zone. In six games, he’s struck out seven times – and drawn five walks. Even in a sample size of just six games, those rates are somewhat meaningful. The #1 pitfall for tools demons who get drafted in the first round is plate discipline. As an example, Anthony Hewitt was the Phillies’ first-round pick in 2008 despite being very raw at the plate, because he was one of the best athletes the draft had seen in years. In his first pro season, he struck out 55 times – and walked seven times, for a K/BB ratio of nearly 8 to 1. Incredibly, it got worse each of the next two years – 77/9 in 2009, 158/13 in 2010. Hewitt is 23 years old and still in A-ball, his career jeopardized by a simple inability to tell balls from strikes.

I’d venture to say that there is no point in Hewitt’s career where he drew as many as five walks during a stretch where he struck out seven times. Simply ruling out an extreme case of plate indiscipline makes it more likely that Starling will reach his considerable ceiling as a hitter. It’s certainly not enough – Donavan Tate, the #3 overall pick in 2009 and a worst-case scenario for Starling, has had pretty good strikeout-to-walk ratios throughout his career; he simply hasn’t hit worth a damn.

Bubba Starling’s swing is transformed. In like a month. Whoever’s been coaching him has worked wonders with it. He’ll match the hype even if he doesn’t improve his technique any further. – July 5th

All quotes in italics are from a Baseball Person whose opinion I trust greatly. If anything, the evolution of his opinions are more dramatic – and more optimistic – than any amount of statistical evidence that six games can provide.

I’d still rather have Dylan Bundy. I’d still rather have Francisco Lindor, frankly. But then we knew on Draft Day that Starling was a bigger risk than either of them; it’s just that he had an upside that bordered on historic. It’s still doubtful that he’ll reach it, but I’m feeling a heck of a lot better about him than I was a month ago, or even a week ago.

Royals Today: 7/1/12.

My apologies for the long gap between posts, though this time, I have an excuse you’ll actually appreciate: I’ve been writing a review of the 1985 World Series for 810 WHB’s All-Star Program, which I’m told will be available (free!) in various outlets around Kansas City over the next 7-10 days. So pick one up if you get the chance. It was a weird sensation to write about a Royals team in a completely positive manner.

And now back to what I hope will be shorter, and more frequent posts going forward.

- Rooting for this team right now is an incredibly frustrating experience, because they seem determined to maintain a bipolar existence, playing like minor leaguers for a stretch, then like contenders for a stretch, often within the same week. Of their last seven series, four have been sweeps – two each way. After winning four in a row to close to within four games of .500 – their best record since their 12-game losing streak – they’ve lost three in a row to the team with the worst run differential in the majors. And for whatever reason, since June 7th, the Royals are 9-1 between Monday and Thursday, and 3-10 between Friday and Sunday – with the result being that the analysis you hear from me on 810’s The Border Patrol Monday mornings is completely different from the analysis I give on The Program on mid-day Fridays.

The Royals are currently seven games under .500 at 35-42, which is appropriate, because they’ve stayed within a tight band between four and ten games under .500 every single day since their losing streak ended. The random streaks disguise the fact that this is pretty much what they are – a below-average, but not terrible, team. They’re on pace to finish 74-88, which would make them the 8th-worst team* in the majors. If they draft #8 next season, it would be only the second time in the last nine drafts that they didn’t pick in the top five. So…um…progress?

*: Though they currently have a better record than the Philadelphia Phillies, who are suddenly in full-on sell mode. This seems like a good time to link to this. Murky at best, y’all.

- One of the biggest reasons why the Royals are unable to sustain any kind of winning streak is that they insist on trotting Jonathan Sanchez out there every fifth day. Their allegiance to Sanchez long ago passed through “annoying” territory, then “exasperating”, and now is quickly moving through “destructive”. I can’t make this any more clear than to go to all caps:

JONATHAN SANCHEZ IS DONE. HE HAS NOTHING LEFT.

In 46 innings, Sanchez has walked 40 batters. He has struck out just 32. His walk rate is 55% above his career average AND his strikeout rate has been cut by a third. He’s allowed 52 hits. He’s hit five batters. He’s thrown four wild pitches. He’s made four errors, for a tidy fielding percentage of .600. He’s averaging barely 4.6 innings a start. He has a 6.80 ERA. There is literally nothing he has done well this year.

And he’s not getting better. The Royals already tried the gambit of giving him a month on the DL to rest his arm. He came back on June 13 and allowed just one run in five innings – but seven hits and two walks. Since then:

On June 18, he went six innings, and deserves a gold star for that given that the bullpen desperately needed a breather after a 15-inning game the day before. But twice he made errors trying to pick off a runner at first; the first throw was so wild the runner scored, while the second time he got to third base. That runner reached base when he was hit by a pitch, then scored on a single. With two outs and the runner on first, Sanchez hit a batter, then allowed a single to load the bases, then walked in a run. He allowed four runs, and was saved when a runner was thrown out at the plate. The Royals lost, 9-7.

On June 24, he allowed a three-run homer to Carlos Beltran in the first when he threw a 0-2 fastball right down the middle. In the second inning he allowed two more runs; both runners reached base on a walk, and the second one scored on a wild pitch with two outs. Sanchez escaped with a no-decision despite allowing 6 runs in 5.2 innings, because the offense bailed him out, but the Royals lost 11-8 because their bullpen is ultimately human.

On June 30, he gave up 10 hits and six walks in 4.1 innings. Twice he allowed a double steal because he wasn’t paying attention to the runners. On an admittedly-bizarre squib single that spun back into fair territory, he failed to cover home plate, allowing the speedy Ryan Doumit to score from second base on an infield single. The Royals lost, 7-2.

Since coming off the DL, including his successful first start, Sanchez has allowed 27 hits and 18 walks in 21 innings. Batters hit .325/.452/.506 against him in June. He’s not getting better. He’s getting worse.

I could mention here the terrible body language, the fact that he seems to have been uninterested in playing for the Royals since the day he was acquired. But honestly, it’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is when he does things like forget the runners or fail to cover a base, because those things cost runs, and runs turn into wins. And what’s relevant is that his performance is so bad that even if he had Jeff Francoeur’s personality and Bruce Chen’s sense of humor, he’d deserve to get cut.

And the Royals are circling the wagons around him. Here’s Bob Dutton’s lede from Saturday’s game: “The breaking point for the Royals with struggling left-hander Jonathan Sanchez remains, apparently, far down the road…”

I get it: the Royals know what they’re doing, they have information that we don’t, we’re just frustrated fans who don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.

I cheerfully admit that I’m not an insider, and that I don’t know the details regarding his struggles. But that’s sort of the point. The Royals are so close to the situation that they can’t see the forest for the trees. I’m sure they have a bunch of explanations for why Sanchez sucks so much, and with those explanations come solutions – if we just fix his mechanics here, if he just gets the umpire’s calls there, if every scalding line drive just happens to find a glove…he’s gonna be fine.

But if they would just take a step back, they would realize two things: 1) Few pitchers have ever been as wild as Jonathan Sanchez has been, and 2) Those few pitchers who have, never got it back. Never.

In the last 20 years, just six pitchers have walked at least 7 batters per 9 innings, while making at least 10 starts.

Jesus Sanchez walked 60 batters in 76 innings in 1999, as a 24-year-old sophomore for the Marlins. Sanchez really shouldn’t count; 11 of his 60 walks were intentional, and while he made 10 starts, he also made 49 relief appearances. In any case, Sanchez “rebounded” in 2000 to make 32 starts with a 5.34 ERA, but his career quickly fizzled out; he had a below-league-average ERA every year of his career.

Aaron Myette was, like Sanchez, a 24-year-old pitcher in 2002 when he walked 41 batters in 48 innings. He also allowed 64 hits, including 11 homers, and had a 10.06 ERA. He would throw a grand total of 7 more innings in his career, in which he gave up 11 runs. He finished with 154 innings – and a 8.16 career ERA. That’s the highest ERA by a pitcher with 120+ innings in major league history.

Nick Neugebauer was a flame-throwing right-hander the Brewers selected in the 2nd round in 1999, sort of the primordial version of Jeremy Jeffress. He threw as hard as anyone in the minors, and in 2001 struck out 175 batters in 149 minor league innings. Baseball America ranked him the #17 prospect in baseball before the 2002 season. That year, he made 12 starts for the Brewers, and walked 44 batters in 55 innings. He then blew out his shoulder something fierce, and aside from a single appearance in A-ball two years later, his career was over at the age of 21.

Unlike Sanchez, none of those three guys ever had success in the majors before their command disappeared. But Dontrelle Willis was a sensation – Rookie of the Year in 2003, second in the Cy Young balloting in 2005. But he started to go bad in 2007, with a 5.17 ERA for the Marlins, before the Tigers acquired him along with Miguel Cabrera for six prospects.

Willis then lost the strike zone completely. He walked 35 batters in 24 innings for Detroit in 2008, then 28 batters in 34 innings in 2009. By 2010 the Tigers had tired of him, let him go mid-season and Arizona gave him a shot, so for the season he made 13 starts, during which he walked 56 batters in 66 innings. The Reds gave him a chance in 2011 and he had his best season in four years, “best” being a relative term, since he had a 5.00 ERA and walked 37 batters in 76 innings. His career is somewhere between limbo, jeopardy, and the River Styx at the moment.

Speaking of sensations, Steve Avery was the #1 prospect on Baseball America’s first-ever Top 100 Prospects list back in 1990. He made the Braves’ rotation that year; in 1991, he went 18-8 with a 3.38 ERA and was beyond fantastic in the NLCS to pitch the Braves to the World Series. Too many pitches too soon took a toll, and his career started to go downhill in 1994, when he was 24. By 1999, he was pitching for the Reds and pretty much washed up – in 96 innings, he walked 78 batters and struck out 51. He spent all of 2000 in the minors and then took a couple of years off. The good news is he made it back to the majors briefly in 2003. The bad news is that he made it back as a reliever for the worst team of my lifetime, the 2003 Detroit Tigers. Steve Avery was done after that.

And finally…you may remember when I analyzed this trade back in November, I made the point that the range in what Sanchez could be was enormous. If you spliced the data a certain way, there were two people in baseball history that compared to Sanchez. One was Randy Johnson.

The other was Oliver Perez, who is an eerily good comp for Sanchez, because like Sanchez, even at his best he was uncomfortably wild. In 2004, Perez had a 2.98 ERA in 196 innings, struck out 239 batters…and walked 81. In 2005 and 2006, he was so wild that he had an ERA north of 6 over that span, but found himself a little after joining the Mets in 2007 and 2008. After the 2008 season they signed him to a 3-year, $36 million contract, even though he had led the NL in walks in 2008.

In 2009, Perez made 14 starts, threw 66 innings, walked 58 batters, and had a 6.82 ERA.

In 2010, Perez made 7 starts and 10 relief appearances, threw 46 innings, walked 42 batters, and had a 6.80 ERA.

(As a reminder, Sanchez has made 10 starts, thrown 46 innings, walked 40 batters, and has a 6.80 ERA. Spooky.)

Perez is back in the majors, having resurfaced with the Mariners as a reliever, and has pitched reasonably well in five outings. But when his command went, nothing could save him as a starter, and no amount of hoping could change that.

Perez, Avery, and Willis were all left-handers; all of them had above-average fastballs when they were young. All of them lost velocity on their fastball at the same time their command failed them, which is probably not a coincidence. Another pitcher comes to mind here: Scott Kazmir, who was never quite this wild, but in 2010 mysteriously lost his magic fastball shortly after the Angels acquired him from Tampa Bay. His strikeout rate plummeted that year, his walk rate was a career high, and he had a 5.94 ERA. Despite being just 26 years old, his career was effectively over. In 2011 he made a single start, allowed five runs in 1.2 innings, and hasn’t pitched since.

So, I’m sure you’re asking, what do we know about Sanchez’s fastball? I’m glad you asked.

In 2009, the average velocity on his fastball was 91.6 mph.

In 2010, it was 90.5 mph.

In 2011, it was 89.7 mph.

In 2012, it is 89.1 mph.

Hmmm…a left-hander with career-long command issues, who has lost his fastball and can’t throw strikes? Yeah, let’s keep throwing him out there every fifth day.

I know the Royals don’t give a damn about my opinions, but I’m still entitled to them. And my opinion is that JONATHAN SANCHEZ IS DONE. The evidence couldn’t be more clear. Look guys, I’m sorry that you gave up Melky Cabrera to get him. I’m sorry that Cabrera is making you look like the laughingstock of baseball, hitting .352/.394/.514, leading the NL in hits, and being elected to start the All-Star Game – back in Kansas City. I understand you want to get something out of the trade.

But accept the facts: Jonathan Sanchez is a sunk cost, and letting him continue to take the mound is throwing bad starts after good. I was supportive of the trade at the time, and so were many others in the KC media. I’m owning up to my mistake: I was wrong. And if you would admit to your mistake, or better still if you would have admitted to it two weeks ago when it was clear that this train wasn’t coming back to the station, we could put this behind us and move on. No team has a perfect track record when it comes to trades; if you make trades, you’re going to make some stinkers. So be it.

I’m not a fraction as upset about the trade as I am about your stubborn unwillingness to admit you screwed up. It’s over. Melky Cabrera is awesome. He’s also going to be a free agent at the end of the year. Just pretend you traded Cabrera for Ryan Verdugo, and move on.

The sad part of this? This isn’t even close to the worst case of the Royals sticking with a starting pitcher beyond all reason. You may remember 2005, when the Royals signed Jose Lima to a one-year, $2.5 million contract after they let him get away to Los Angeles following the miracle 2003 season. Lima then rewarded them with a 7.33 ERA heading into the All-Star Break – he had allowed 121 hits, including 20 homers, in 93 innings. And they just kept pitching him. Lima stayed in the rotation all season, making 32 starts. He was better in the second half – his ERA after the Break was all the way down to 6.57. For the season, Lima had a 6.99 ERA, the worst by a qualifying starter in a non-strike-shortened season since 1936.

And here’s the kicker: Jose Lima had incentives in his contract based on starts made. By sticking with him all season, he earned over $1 million in bonuses. If I ever get Allard Baird attached to a lie detector for ten minutes, the first question I’m asking him is…well, the first question is “Tell me about every single instance of the Glass family meddling in baseball affairs.” But the second question will be “WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING WITH JOSE LIMA, YOU IMBECILE?!”

We’re not at that stage with Jonathan Sanchez yet. But we’re on that track. And this is a track that should never, ever be used.

- I meant to cover a lot of things today, but of course Sanchez got me all worked up into a lather. So let me just finish with Billy Butler, the first Royals’ hitter to make the All-Star Team in seven years.

I’m not sure that Butler is the most deserving player on the Royals’ roster. Mike Moustakas has probably been the Royals’ best player overall, given his offensive and defensive contributions. Alcides Escobar has been an absolute joy, and I’ve done him a disservice by not talking about him (or his contract, which suddenly looks like a bargain) at all this year. And Baseball-Reference somehow has Alex Gordon as the team’s best player, although that’s because they’ve scored his defense this year somewhere in Andruw-Jones-in-his-prime territory. He’s good; he’s not that good.

But if the Royals were to only have one representative – and with the game in town, it’s a shame they only have one – I’m glad it’s Butler. For too long, people have focused on what he can’t do – play defense, or hit at a Pujolsian level – instead of what he can. Since the beginning of the 2009 season, he’s hitting .303/.369/.480. He’s averaging 45 doubles and 21 homers a season. And after years of people complaining that he just doesn’t hit enough home runs, he’s finally tapping into it this year – he has a career-high .512 slugging average, and 16 homers in just 77 games. He’s on pace for 34, and while he’s more likely to regress to the mean than he is to pick up that pace, there’s at least the possibility he could make the epic Chase For 37 a reason to tune into Royals games in September. So good for Billy.

Unfortunately, that may be the only reason to tune into Royals games in September. At least that’s what I think now. Talk to me Friday morning, and I may sing a different tune.

The Pen Is Mightier.

As I write this, as Saturday afternoon’s ballgame gets underway, the Royals rank 5th in the American League in runs allowed.

That may be somewhat deceptive. The Royals have allowed 263 runs, just two fewer than the Rangers and seven fewer than the White Sox. (The Rays have allowed 262 runs; if I had written this yesterday, the Royals would have ranked 4th in the league in runs allowed.) All three teams have played 64 or 65 games, while the Royals have played only 62 – if we lined teams up by runs allowed per game, the Royals would rank 7th.

But the point here isn’t whether the Royals rank 4th or 5th or 7th. The point here is that the Kansas City Royals, who were widely assumed to have one of the worst rotations in the league before the season – and whose rotation has played to form and then some – are better than average when it comes to run prevention.

Before the season, I said that while I didn’t expect the Royals to contend, that I also didn’t think their rotation automatically disqualified them from consideration. If the Royals could just get mediocre production from their starting five, the rest of the team was good enough to vault the Royals into contention. Basically, the rotation was to the Royals what Matt Cassel is to the Chiefs.

As I saw it, the Royals looked like they had an above-average offense, an above-average defense, and a well-above-average bullpen. With starting pitchers throwing fewer and fewer innings every year throughout baseball, their relevance was also declining with each season, and the Royals were strong enough in other areas to compensate.

As it turns out, the offense hasn’t been above-average or anywhere close, an issue which I hope to address later. But the rest of that argument has held up well.

The Royals’ starters have combined for a 4.87 ERA, which is next-to-last in the AL. They are in no danger of falling to dead last – the Twins have a remarkable 6.09 ERA from their rotation. It’s almost as if putting a bunch of finesse pitchers in front of a bad defense isn’t a good idea. But still, the Royals are 13th in the league, which is about where we’d expect them to be.

The Royals’ bullpen has a 2.87 ERA, the fourth-best in the AL.

So far, so good. But here’s the thing: as Sam Mellinger pointed out a few days ago, the bullpen isn’t only effective – it’s also prolific. The Royals are on pace to get more innings from relief pitchers than any other team in baseball history.

Royals starters have thrown 316 innings in 62 games. That’s 5.10 innings per start. Think about that for a moment. We’re in the middle of June, and the Royals are getting basically five innings from their starter every single day. (Late update: after Bruce Chen got knocked out in the second inning, the Royals are now averaging 5.04 innings a start.) The Twins have 329 innings from their rotation, while EVERY OTHER TEAM IN THE LEAGUE has at least 366.

To compensate, the bullpen has thrown 239 innings in 62 games. Let’s compare the Royals to the Oakland A’s, who rank just ahead of the Royals with a 2.80 ERA from their bullpen:

Oakland: 196.1 innings, 61 earned runs, 2.80 ERA.

Kansas City: 238.2 innings, 76 earned runs, 2.87 ERA.

The Royals’ pen is slightly worse on a per-inning basis – but they’ve thrown 22% more innings. If you subtract out the A’s numbers from the Royals, you get:

42.1 innings, 15 earned runs, 3.19 ERA.

Kansas City’s bullpen has basically matched what the A’s have done – and then thrown another 42 innings with a well-above-average league ERA.

If you do this with the Yankees, who rank second in the league with a 2.71 ERA – but in only 170 innings – here’s what you get:

69 innings, 25 earned runs, 3.26 ERA.

The Royals can’t touch the Orioles, whose bullpen not only has a 2.38 ERA, but thanks to a ton of extra-inning games, have thrown 219 innings as well. But a strong case can be made that given the extra work that’s been asked out of them, the Royals have the second-best bullpen in the league.

Another way to look at it is this: the Royals essentially have three types of pitchers on their roster. They have starting pitchers, they have relievers, and they have “shadow starters”, pitchers who are trained to be starters but who are stashed away in the pen, waiting for the inevitable call in the third inning. Some of these guys have made starts of their own. Nate Adcock. Everett Teaford. Vinny Mazzaro. Luis Mendoza.

Those four pitchers have made 13 starts, in which they’ve thrown 61 innings. But they’ve also made 13 relief appearances, in which they’ve thrown 44.1 innings. In essence, those are the extra innings that the Royals have gotten from their bullpen. In those 44.1 innings, they’ve allowed 17 earned runs.

So here’s a way to break down the performance of the Royals’ pitching staff:

Starters: 316 innings, 4.87 ERA

Shadow starters: 44 innings, 3.45 ERA

Relievers: 194 innings, 2.74 ERA

(To go on a tangent here, you can drop that ERA nine points if you take out Roman Colon’s appearance last night. I’m trying to stay positive here, but…I think Dayton Moore’s attachment to Roman Colon has now leapfrogged past Jeff Francoeur and even Yuniesky Betancourt as the most bizarre fetish of his career.

You may recall Colon as the reliever the Royals acquired from the Tigers shortly after he had been suspended from his Triple-A team after punching a teammate in the face. In 2007, he had a 4.43 ERA in the minors. In 2008, he had a 4.74 ERA in the minors. But in 2009, he pitched reasonably well in 13 relief appearances, and got promoted to Kansas City, where he fashioned a 4.83 ERA in 50 innngs, with a strikeout-to-walk ratio of just 29 to 21.

But the next spring Colon reportedly had developed a new nuclear slider which was supposed to change the world, so he made the team out of spring training. In five appearances, he allowed 8 of 14 batters to reach base, and was sent packing with an 18.00 ERA. He was soon sold to a team in Korea, and even in Korea he didn’t pitch all that well.

In 2011, he was back stateside with the Albuquerque Isotopes in the Dodgers’ organization, where he fashioned a 4.85 ERA. This winter the Royals re-signed him, sent him to Omaha, and he was modestly effective. In 30 innings he had a 3.34 ERA, but he also had walked 14 batters and allowed 27 hits.

And Friday, they called him up. They did so despite the fact that Colon has never been effective at the major-league level, he’s never been dominant at the minor-league level, and he’s 32 years old. They did so even though it meant burning a spot on the 40-man roster. They did so even though they had sent down Louis Coleman THE DAY BEFORE. Coleman’s numbers IN THE MAJORS (20 innings, 3.15 ERA) were better than Colon’s numbers in the minors. They sent Coleman down so that they could keep Clint Robinson in the majors – and then sent Robinson down one day later. So in order to keep Clint Robinson on the roster FOR ONE MORE DAY, they replaced Coleman with Roman Freaking Colon. Who, naturally, coughed up two runs in two-thirds of an inning last night. If the rest of the staff hadn’t thrown 8.1 innings of shutout ball, this would have cost the Royals the game.

The Royals front office has a lot of smart guys and they’ve done a lot of smart things. But the blinders they have towards certain players are more than just aggravating – they are potentially destructive. End of rant.)

I don’t know if the bullpen can continue to maintain this level of excellence going forward. Some regression to the mean is likely even if you don’t think that they’re going to burn out from all the times they’ve been called on.

To the Royals credit, they’ve spread out all those innings as much as possible. Not only have they carried eight relievers most of the season, but they’ve worn out I-29 shuttling pitchers back and forth – Adcock, Mazzaro, Coleman, Teaford, and Tommy Hottovy have all gone back and forth. They essentially have had a nine-man bullpen, with the ninth man resting his arm for a few days in Omaha.

Here are the relievers on pace to throw the most innings for the Royals this year:

Kelvin Herrera: 88.2

Tim Collins: 81.0

Aaron Crow: 75.0

Jose Mijares: 68.0

Jonathan Broxton: 64.1

That’s not a particularly heavy workload  – only two pitchers are on pace to throw 80 innings, and none are on pace to throw 90. But here’s a list of the relievers on pace to appear in the most games this year:

Jose Mijares: 84

Aaron Crow: 81

Tim Collins: 76

Kelvin Herrera: 76

Jonathan Broxton: 65

There’s some cause for concern there. The interaction between innings and appearances for relievers is complicated and not well-understood. But my belief is that it is risker to let a reliever throw 80 innings in 70 games than to throw 100 innings in 50 games. We never see the latter anymore; relievers rarely cross even 90 innings anymore, and yet they continue to get hurt, whereas someone like Goose Gossage could throw over 130 innings in a season three times in his career without a problem (but only once in his career did he pitch in more than 65 games).

I start to worry about a pitcher who makes 75 appearances in a season, and the Royals might wind up with four guys who fit that profile. The depth in the bullpen makes it tempting for Ned Yost to call on three or four different guys a night to throw an inning apiece, but my suspicion is that it would be better to ask guys like Herrera and Crow – who were both starters in the minors – to throw two innings at a time, but only use them twice a week.

It will be interesting to see if the bullpen can keep up this pace all season. It will also be interesting to see if the Royals learn from the mistakes of the past, recognize that even elite relievers are one pitch away from the DL, and sell high on some of these guys – not just the obvious pitcher in Broxton, but one or two of their young, club-controlled commodities like Crow or Herrera. That’s a topic for a later time.

But one thing is clear: a bullpen this strong and this deep can absolutely cover for a rotation this bad. The Royals are 27-34 with the lowest-scoring offense in the league. With even an average offense, they would be over .500 and fighting for first place in the AL Central even with a rotation of Bruce Chen, Luke Hochevar, Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum, and Eduardo Villacis.

Which makes it that much more frustrating that, for lack of an offense, they’re not doing just that.

Draft Recap 2012.

I said before the draft that I would find it almost impossible to rip the Royals, no matter who their first-round pick turned out to be. And when the Royals took Kyle Zimmer, I accepted their choice with good cheer, even though I had my reservations. But with each passing day, I’ve warmed up to the pick more and more. On Monday, I thought that Zimmer was the safe pick. Today, I think he might have been the best pick as well.

On my pre-draft board, I had Zimmer ranked 8th, which of course means that he was not the top guy left on my list when the Royals picked. But let’s look at the guys that were still there:

At #7, I had Albert Almora, the Florida high school outfielder. Honestly, I didn’t have a strong feeling one way or another as to who to rank higher – I originally had Zimmer #7 and Almora #8. When it’s this close between two players, I have no problem drafting for need and taking the college pitcher over the high school hitter. And I wouldn’t question the Royals at all if they felt it was not close.

At #4, I had Lucas Giolito, the high-school right-hander who might have gone #1 overall before he strained his elbow. I still think he’s the one pitcher in this draft with #1 upside, and if the Nationals can get him signed at #16, that’s a massive steal for them. But I get the decision not to take him. Given the concerns about his arm, given the concerns about his signability, given that he might have to sit out a year at some point if and when his elbow gives out, I appreciate that there were a lot of risks involved. Obviously, the Royals weren’t the only team to pass on Giolito’s upside. They might have been wrong to do so, but if so, they have a lot of company.

And that leaves Mark Appel, whose slide to the #8 spot in the draft was the biggest surprise of the first round.

Everything else equal, I’d rather have drafted Appel, and as stunning as it was that he was available when the Royals picked at #5, it was completely unsurprising when the Royals passed on him. It’s just like the Royals to look a gift horse in the mouth, and then send it back.

The question is, why? Why did he fall so far, and why did the Royals pass on him in favor of another college pitcher? The easy answer is that he’s a Scott Boras client, and he was going to be a tough sign and blah blah blah. We’ve heard it all before, like when the Royals passed on J.D. Drew and took Jeff Austin again.

Only that’s too easy. That was 14 years ago; Drew’s retired, for God’s sake. Dayton Moore’s Royals didn’t let Mike Moustakas or Eric Hosmer or Bubba Starling pass by because of their Boras-ness. (Nor did they let Luke Hochevar or Christian Colon pass by, though maybe they should have.) The new draft rules complicate things, but if anything, they should reduce the leverage of Boras clients, not enhance it.

That leaves only one other possibility, which is that the Royals honestly believe that Kyle Zimmer is the better prospect. And I will say, in the days since the first round was consummated, that I have heard from some people in the industry who share that assessment. It’s a minority opinion – but not a tiny minority. There is a segment of baseball people who really like Kyle Zimmer. Appel has more consistent stuff and a much longer track record; the general consensus is that he’s the safer pick. But a lot of people feel that Zimmer has the higher upside.

Remember, the one nick on Appel before the draft was that the whole didn’t always add up to the sum of the parts – that he should have dominated college hitters even more than he did, given his stuff. That may mean nothing; a similar complaint was lodged against Justin Verlander in college. But you can forgive the Royals for seeing this as a giant red flag, given that they have the poster child for this at the major-league level in Hochevar. I don’t know if their experience with Hochevar factored into the decision to pass on Appel. But I wouldn’t blame them if it did.

I’m not sure I agree with the decision to take Zimmer instead of Appel. But based on what I know now, I’m fairly confident that the decision was made based on a pure baseball evaluation, not simply on the finances involved and the difficulty in signing each player. All I can ask is for the Royals to take the player they think is the best available, and I think they did that here.

And I’ll say this: I’m not sure they’re wrong. Zimmer is really growing on me.

What worried me before the draft – the reason I placed him behind Appel and Gausman – were two things: 1) he sort of came out of nowhere, in the sense that two years ago he wasn’t pitching, and before this college season he was seen as a mid-to-late first-round pick; 2) after dominating early in the season, his stuff was down at the end, presumably (but not assuredly) because of a hamstring injury.

I haven’t encountered anyone who is genuinely worried about his velocity drop; it seems to be a consensus that it was, in fact, just a product of a tight hamstring, and that when he returns to the mound later this month or in July, his fastball will be back to sitting 95 and touching 99 again. And while he did have a meteoric rise from high school third baseman to college ace, he’s shown enough stuff for enough time that the odds it was all a mirage are close to nil.

Two years ago, Cubs’ GM Jim Hendry shocked the industry by using their first-round pick on a kid named Hayden Simpson, a Division II pitcher who had added velocity leading up to the draft. Almost from the moment he signed, Simpson’s new-found velocity disappeared – he had a nasty case of mono, and his fastball never came back. He currently has a 7.32 ERA in A-ball, with 29 walks and 14 strikeouts, and Hendry is no longer the GM of the Cubs.

Maybe that was in the back of my mind when I evaluated Zimmer before the draft. Or maybe it was Colt Griffin, who threw in the upper 90s for roughly three months in his entire life – it just happened to be the three months before the Royals took him in the 2001 draft. There are a lot of pitchers who show elite velocity for a short period of time, and you don’t want to be the team drafting them in the first round.

But that shortchanges Zimmer. Gaining velocity quickly is not a red flag in itself. Stephen Strasburg went from throwing 89 to 99 in less than a year, going from undrafted out of high school to a guy who, after his freshman season, was already being talked about as a potential #1 pick after his junior year. You just want to see a pitcher maintain his new-found velocity for more than a month or two. Zimmer only threw in the upper 90s for a couple of months, but he’s thrown in the low-to-mid 90s for the better part of two years. He outdueled Gerrit Cole when Cole was pitching at UCLA last season. That’s real.

Beyond that, Zimmer’s not defined by his velocity. His curveball is a fantastic pitch, and he has terrific command of both pitches. Actually, that might be the most interesting thing about Zimmer: that for a guy who didn’t start pitching until two years ago, he has tremendous polish.

Then there’s the age factor. Zimmer is still just 20 years old; he doesn’t turn 21 until August. (He’s just 11 months older than Bubba Starling, who was drafted out of high school.) My original study on the impact of age was limited to high school hitters, but I expanded on that study for a chapter I wrote in Baseball Prospectus’ book Extra Innings, which came out this spring. What I found was that younger draft picks tended to outperform older draft picks among college pitchers as well – although the effect was muted, roughly half as significant as the effect on high school hitters.

Still, that’s a good sign. The combination of youth, inexperience, stuff, and polish is really quite rare, and I struggle to think of another pitcher who fits that mold. I mean, in Royals history, the last example I can think of would be Bret Saberhagen, who wasn’t even drafted as a pitcher – he was a 16th-round pick as a shortstop – but was in the majors within two years, became the youngest Royals player ever, and as a rookie walked 32 batters in 158 innings.

I’m not comparing Zimmer to Saberhagen. I’m just saying that just because an 18-year-old position player magically turns into a 20-year-old phenom on the mound isn’t a bad thing.

(As long as we’re talking about converted third basemen turned into elite pitchers, Brandon Beachy was a third baseman in college, barely pitched at all, the Braves took a flyer on him as an undrafted free agent…and he was in the majors in barely two years. Last year, as a rookie, he led all major leaguers with 100+ innings in strikeouts per nine innings. This year, he leads the majors in ERA.)

As a former position player and multi-sport athlete in high school, Zimmer also does the things you’d expect from athletic pitchers, like field his position well, repeat his delivery, etc. And the other benefit from his lack of experience on the mound is this: he only threw 88 innings this year. Unlike pitchers at some college programs, Zimmer wasn’t abused at all by his coach, who never allowed him throw more than 120 pitches in a game. The Royals are getting a fresh arm; if he gets hurt, it’s not because he was mishandled before they ever got their hands on him.

And finally, yes, there’s the signability issue. Again, in some ways the new rules make it easier to sign elite players, because teams have the leverage that they have to stick to their slots or face punitive penalties. But in some ways the new rules make it harder to sign elite players, or at least more painful, because every dollar you give that player is a dollar you can’t give someone else. No one knows if Appel signs with the Pirates; while they would appear to have the upper hand, I’ll declare defeat for Scott Boras only after the game is over. But even if they do sign him, it will probably take more money than the $2.9 million that pick is slotted for, meaning they’ll have to take that money from other slots.

By getting Zimmer to agree to a deal quickly, the Royals not only signed him within days of the draft – becoming the first top pick to sign that fast since Billy Butler in 2004 – but worked out a $3 million deal, $500,000 less than the slot money assigned to that pick.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that Zimmer’s a bargain. Major league baseball was actually quite generous in their allotment for some of the slots at the top of the first round. While it took $5 million for the Diamondbacks to sign Archie Bradley, the #7 pick last year, Bradley is the only #7 pick in history to receive a signing bonus of more than $2.5 million. (And Bradley was a special case; that pick was a compensation pick for the Diamondbacks after they didn’t sign Barret Loux the year before. The pick was not protected, meaning if they hadn’t signed Bradley, the Diamondbacks would not have received a compensation pick the next year. So Bradley had more leverage than usual.)

Nonetheless, Zimmer signed for less than slot, and quickly, allowing the Royals to move that money elsewhere. I’m not sure whether I’d rather have Zimmer over Appel. But I’m pretty sure I’d rather take Zimmer, save on drama as well as money, and use the money saved to draft and sign better players elsewhere in the draft. That’s exactly what the Royals did, and it’s hard to fault them for that.

My fear, going into the draft, was that the Royals would take a college pitcher over Carlos Correa, who as you know I really, really, really like. As it turned out, that possibility was eliminated the moment the draft started. The fact that I might be partially responsible for the fact that Correa wasn’t available when the Royals picked – The Economist weighs in here – is, ahem, uncomfortable. (Particularly since Sam Mellinger hints here that the Royals probably would have taken Correa if he was available.) But given that he wasn’t, there wasn’t anyone else on the board who was clearly a better use of the #5 pick than Zimmer.

In the second round, the Royals took Sam Selman, another college pitcher, this time a left-hander from Vanderbilt. Sort of a boring pick, Selman ranked #146 on Baseball America’s draft rankings. He vaguely resembles Zimmer in that he’s a college pitcher who has a relatively fresh arm; whereas Zimmer steadily improved his draft stock over the past two years, Selman really only came on in the last half of this season. I’m a big fan of Vanderbilt players in general, which may reveal my own bias towards a school that melds academic and athletic success (at least in baseball) as well as any college in the country. If I had a son who was worthy of a Division I scholarship, Vanderbilt would be on my short list of schools I’d want him to go to. But I don’t know if that makes Selman a better prospect or not.

Third-rounder Colin Rodgers has already signed, albeit for $700,000, about 50% more than the $476,500 slot for his pick. BA had Rodgers ranked #207 overall, but the Royals clearly differ in their opinion. He’s a left-hander out of high school with good stuff when he’s on, but he’s not always on, and at 6’ even and 185 pounds, there’s not a lot of projection there.

My favorite pick in the draft after Zimmer – one of my favorite mid-round picks the Royals have made in recent years, in fact – is fourth-rounder Kenny Diekroeger, a shortstop out of Stanford. Diekroeger turned down $2 million from the Rays out of high school; after he hit .356/.391/.491 as a freshman, there was talk that he might be the #1 overall pick in this draft. Even after a disappointing sophomore season (.293/.356/.364), he was still looked at as a probable first-round selection.

Last September, Baseball America released their preliminary Top 50 for this year’s draft. Diekroeger ranked #18 on the list. One spot below him, at #19, was…Kyle Zimmer. At #20 was...Carlos Correa.

Of course, Diekroeger had an even more disappointing junior year; as I write this (Stanford is still playing) he’s got a .271/.339/.372 line this season. His swing is a mess, and most scouts think he’ll have to move to second base as a pro.

But…Diekroeger plays at Stanford. The Cardinal have a fantastic track record in college baseball, but they are notorious for having a hitting approach that doesn’t fit every player, emphasizing hitting the other way over power. While some players have taken to it very well, both in college and in the pros (e.g. Carlos Quentin), other players who were top high school prospects were completely fouled up by it. Most famously, Michael Taylor, who was a very well-regarded prospect out of high school (he attended school with Zack Greinke, two years behind) fell all the way to the fifth round in the 2007 draft after a poor Stanford career. By the end of the 2009 season he was one of the 30 best prospects in baseball, after hitting .346/.412/.557 and .320/.395/.549 in back-to-back years. He was then a key part of the Roy Halladay trade, and while he is still struggling to break through in Oakland, he was definitely a worthwhile use of a fifth-round pick.

Of course, there’s only one Michael Taylor, and there are plenty of Stanford picks that simply never panned out in the pros. But it’s a fourth-round pick. In a weak draft. He doesn’t pan out? Neither do 90% of other guys taken in that round. But I think it's worth a fourth-round flyer to draft a kid who, nine months ago, ranked ahead of two of the top five picks in the draft. (Keith Law, incidentally, had Diekroeger #49 overall on his draft sheet, largely on the theory that there might be a ballplayer waiting to break out once his Stanford Swing is fixed.)

The Royals will probably need to pay Diekroeger more than slot money to sign, which is why it’s nice they saved some money on Zimmer. This leads to a discussion of the Royals’ philosophy in this draft, in light of the new draft rules. Many teams decided to use their draft pool to go after premium players early, and then subvert the system by drafting college seniors – who generally aren’t as talented and definitely have no leverage – from rounds 6 to 10, thereby moving their draft pool money to the top guys. (Remember Allard Baird’s Glass-family-mandated “take it or leave it” $1000 offers to college seniors? Turns out the Royals were just a decade ahead of their time.)

The Blue Jays, for instance, took a bunch of tough-to-sign top prospects in the first three rounds – where they had seven picks – and then, from the fourth through the tenth rounds, they took a college senior with every pick, and not one of them was listed among Baseball America’s Top 500. These guys are getting $5,000 to sign, and the Jays will presumably be able to afford the elite guys they drafted. They’re like ringers in reverse.

It’s a shrewd philosophy, with one drawback: it means you’re wasting mid-round picks on guys with essentially no chance to develop into prospects. The Royals went the other route: perhaps because they knew that Zimmer would sign for less than slot money, they didn’t take a single college senior in the first ten rounds. Presumably, they took the best player on their board in each round; if even one of those later picks develop, they’ll be ahead of the vast number of teams in those rounds.

I say “presumably” because many of the players the Royals selected in those rounds were not high on Baseball America’s list either. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong; the Royals have earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to identifying amateur talent. But it’s worth watching. Last year, remember, the Royals gave bonuses of at least $575,000 to eight different players, some of whom were not ranked highly before the draft either. I can’t tell you how those decisions have worked out, because not one of those eight players (not even Bubba Starling) has played a game this year – they’re all in extended spring training waiting for the short-season leagues to start.

One undeniable benefit – at least to the Royals – of the new rules is that players are signing much, much faster. Of the Royals’ first ten picks, everyone except Selman and Diekroeger has already signed. Between them and last year’s holdovers, we’ll find out a lot in the next three months about whether the Royals can keep their draft touch going. But in a draft this weak, and with just one selection in the top 65, Kyle Zimmer’s success or lack thereof will make or break this draft for Kansas City. I’m optimistic, but then, I usually am.