Bouncing Back, And Embracing The Luck.

I haven’t had anything to say recently, partly because I don’t have time, but partly because the Royals have been in this weird part of the schedule where they could only add to the narrative that their world is falling apart, they couldn’t detract from it. As I tweeted a week ago, playing six home games against the Twins and Astros constituted the easiest week on their entire schedule, and they could easily go 5-1 without definitively proving that they weren’t the same team that just endured a 4-19 stretch. They then went out and went…5-1, and many of you thought I was being an annoying jerk for refusing to get excited.

I’m not trying to be an annoying jerk. But I hope that I’ve learned, after nearly two decades of false promises, not to get too excited about the Royals until they force me to get excited. Five wins in a row against two of the worst teams in baseball does not force me to get excited. Particularly when the same weakness that has plagued the Royals all season is still evident.

I mean, even when winning five straight games against the dregs of the American League, the Royals scored just 24 runs. In the five games before that – the first five games after George Brett was hired as the hitting coach – the Royals scored just 11 runs. They’ve scored five runs just twice in their last 19 games. Counting last night’s victory against the Tigers, the Royals have 38 runs in the 11 games of the George Brett Era, or 3.45 runs per game. So please, let’s stop the talk about how Brett has charged up the offense.

To be an equal-opportunity dream-dasher, let’s also stop the talk about how Ned Yost’s “stat guys” – let's give them a proper introduction, that would be Director of Baseball Analytics Mike Groopman and Assistant Director of Baseball Analytics John Williams – are responsible for the turnaround, even though the Royals are undefeated since the new lineup was unveiled. I love the new lineup, I think batting Hosmer #2 makes excellent sense (although I’d lead him off and bat Gordon #2, but that’s a minor quibble). I think that the difference in the new lineup might be worth 15 runs over a full season, but that still comes out to about a tenth of a run per game. And so far, of course, we haven’t even seen that. That’s not why they’re winning.

They’re winning the way they won earlier in the season – with fantastic pitching day in and day out. They’ve allowed three runs or fewer in their last 9 games in a row. That is the longest streak of three runs or fewer allowed by the Royals pitching staff since 1991, when the Royals set a franchise record with 11 straight games of 3 runs or less. (They gave up just 13 runs, total, in those 11 games.)

If they keep pitching like this, they have a chance to get back into the race. Hell, if they can keep pitching like this for the next 36 hours, they will be 3.5 games out of first place. One week ago, that’s not something I expected to write at any point this season, let alone today.

And let’s be clear: the Royals are pitching as well as they’ve pitched in a very long time. They have allowed the fewest runs in the league. They have the best ERA in the league. (They are second in runs allowed per game, right behind the Yankees.) The bullpen has a 2.79 ERA. James Shields has been fantastic. Ervin Santana has been wonderful.

And yet those two pitchers are 6-11, and in the games they’ve started, the Royals are 10-15. The Royals have the best ERA in the league, and they’re 29-32. Because you see, no matter how many times people try to convince you that pitching is 90% of baseball, or 70% of baseball, or even 50% of baseball, it’s just not true. Run prevention and run creation are equally valuable. There is some evidence that preventing runs may correlate with winning, or winning in the postseason, more than scoring runs – but it’s a very small difference, something along the lines of 52% to 48%. And of course, a good deal of run prevention isn’t pitching at all, but defense. As Joe Posnanski pointed out, according to Baseball Info Solutions the Royals have the best defense in the AL. (Yes, even with Jeff Francoeur.)

However you apportion the credit or the blame, the Royals are as good at preventing runs as anyone in the league – and they’re still a .500 team, more or less (they’ve outscored their opponents by five runs), because their offense sucks. Until their offense operates at a level where scoring five runs isn’t considered a slugfest, and where they don’t stop the game for a set of congratulatory speeches every time someone hits a home run, I’m going to remain skeptical that this team has what it takes to contend.

I’m going to remain skeptical because the Royals are going to have to score more runs just to stay in place, because their pitching isn’t likely to remain this effective. Just one guy on the entire roster has an ERA over 4.37. Santana has a 2.99 ERA, but has allowed more home runs (14) than walks (13). Individually, you can make a case that any one of these guys can continue to be this effective. Collectively, almost everyone is likely to worsen, and only Wade Davis is a good candidate to be considerably better (and that’s largely because he’s been so terrible so far.)

But no one is a greater regression candidate than Jeremy Guthrie, who represents the very best and very worst of the Royals pitching staff so far. Guthrie has a very solid 3.60 ERA, he’s 7-3, and I actually read someone speculate recently that he might be an All-Star candidate.

And I have absolutely no idea how he’s doing this.

Well, I know how he’s doing this – he throws the white ball to the man with the wooden stick, who hits the white ball to other men wearing a leather glove. I just don’t know how he’s been able to sustain this kind of end-result success when the means to that end – dare I say the process – seem so terribly flawed.

Start with Guthrie’s basic numbers: 85 innings, 86 hits, 28 walks, 44 strikeouts, 16 home runs.

Guthrie has always had trouble missing bats, but his strikeout rate this year – just 12.2% of batters faced – is the lowest of his career. (Mind you, he hasn’t been above 15% since 2008.) It’s extremely difficult – not impossible, but extremely difficult – to be a successful pitcher in the major leagues in 2013 with a strikeout rate that low.

One way to survive without striking anyone out is to not walk anyone, but Guthrie’s walk rate (7.8%) is actually the highest of his career. He’s not that far off his career norms, but still – he’s striking out fewer guys and walking more guys than he ever has before.

The other way to survive with a low strikeout rate is to not give up any home runs. Jeremy Guthrie leads the league with 16 home runs allowed.

So…um…what’s going on?

Well, for one, Guthrie long ago sold his soul to the BABIP fairy. For reasons that remain unclear to me – and I’m not being sarcastic, I’m genuinely fascinated by this – Guthrie has had an ability to keep his batting average on balls in play well below average throughout his career. Aside from his disastrous time in Colorado last year, he has never had a BABIP over .287, when the league average usually hovers around .300. Pitchers have very little control over what happens on balls in play – but Guthrie, for whatever reason, has more control over it than virtually every other pitcher in the majors today.

Among the 138 pitchers this century with 1000 or more innings pitched, Guthrie’s career BABIP of .277 is the 8th lowest. The seven guys in front of him are either severe flyball pitchers (Ted Lilly, Jered Weaver, Ryan Franklin, Jarrod Washburn), moderate flyball pitches with a knack for pop-ups (Matt Cain, Barry Zito), or knuckleballers (Tim Wakefield). Guthrie falls into none of those camps.

This year, his BABIP is .263. And here’s the thing: I’m not convinced it’s a fluke. His career BABIP has largely occurred in front of some fairly mediocre Oriole defenses. If the Royals really have the best defense in the league, .263 almost seems sustainable. If that were the sole reason why Guthrie’s ERA is so much better than his peripheral numbers, I’d say carry on.

But it’s not. Look at these numbers:

Bases empty: .257/.336/.515

Men on base: .279/.323/.361

Runners in scoring position: .217/.246/.317

That’s a phenomenal breakdown. With the bases empty, batters are slugging over .500 against Guthrie. He’s given up 16 home runs this year, but the two-run shot he gave up to Miguel Cabrera yesterday was just the second home run that came with a man on base. That’s remarkable. I’m not saying it’s sustainable, but it’s remarkable. Guthrie has basically become the anti-Hochevar.

Moreover, the leadoff man in an inning is batting .157/.195/.373 against Guthrie this year. He’s surrendered five home runs to the leadoff man – but if they’re not hitting the ball out, they’re not getting on base. That’s forcing opponents to begin their rallies with at least one out already, making it hard to sustain a big inning.

Again, his success has been remarkable. But it’s not sustainable. For his career, Guthrie’s splits with the bases empty (.261 AVG, 763 OPS) are essentially the same as with men on base (.266, 765) and with runners in scoring position (.263, 771). This is a stone-cold fluke. I’m not saying it hasn’t been a valuable fluke – but I don’t see how he can sustain this for very long.

Put it this way: Guthrie has allowed 16 homers, and struck out 44 batters. That’s a ratio of just 2.75 strikeouts per home run. If you can’t miss bats and give up lots of big flies, you’re supposed to get pummeled. Which is why in the post-Deadball-II era (i.e. since 1969), not one pitcher has made 12 or more starts in a season, had a K/HR ratio of less than 2.8, and still allowed fewer than 3.9 runs per nine innings.

Well, one pitcher. Counting unearned runs, Guthrie is at 3.81. More power to him; he’s gotten outs when he’s needed them, and he’s winning games that the Royals need him to win. And I’m rooting for him to continue to defy everything we understand about how pitchers achieve success. When the Royals were swirling the drain, I told you to #EmbraceTheSuck, but every time Guthrie takes the mound, I’m going to #EmbraceTheLuck.

But I don’t know how he can continue to do this for much longer. There’s a reckoning coming, for him and for the pitching staff as a whole. If Hosmer doesn’t reacquaint himself with the fly ball to right field, if Moustakas doesn’t reacquaint himself with first base, if Chris Getz doesn’t reacquaint himself with Omaha, I don’t see how the Royals survive in the long run.

But at least they’re making things interesting.

How The Hell Did This Happen?

I have to admit: I didn’t see this coming. I realize this is not the first time I’ve written those words. It’s probably not the second or third time either.

It’s not that I didn’t think the Royals would play this poorly in the first third of the season. If you had told me back in March that the Royals would start the season 21-29 – but only be outscored by seven runs in their first 50 games – I would have said that’s quite plausible. For the season as a whole, they’ve basically played like a .500 team, with some bad luck – they’re 7-12 in one-run games. They’ve played worse than I expected, but not a lot worse. I could have foreseen this.

But I could not have foreseen this. If you had told me that they started 21-29, I would have guessed that the primary culprit was that their starting rotation had not lived up to the hype and the resources put into it. I would have guessed that Ervin Santana would have relived 2012 all over again, and that Jeremy Guthrie’s inability to miss bats would have caught up with him, and maybe even that James Shields had been ineffective and/or hurt.

And here’s the thing: if that had been the culprit in the Royals’ terrible start, that wouldn’t be the end of the world. Sure, it would have been a ton of money thrown down the drain, but Santana’s a free agent at the end of the year. Guthrie’s under contract for two more seasons, but Danny Duffy is almost back, and Felipe Paulino shouldn’t be too far behind. The Royals could chalk this up as bad luck, and start fresh in 2014. Sure, they’d be out Wil Myers and Jake Odorizzi, but they could wipe away the mistakes of 2013, start fresh with another rotation makeover, and be confident that their young hitters could rake enough to put them in contention.

Instead, we got this.

Before last night’s bizarre, Matheny-aided, weather-almost-denied victory, the Royals had lost 19 of their last 23 games. That is tied for the worst 23-game stretch since Dayton Moore was hired. Yesterday was also the seventh anniversary of the date Dayton Moore was hired. So SEVEN YEARS AFTER HE TOOK THE JOB, the Royals are playing as badly as they have played since he was hired.

And let’s not overlook this point: the Royals are playing atrocious baseball even though they’ve been healthier than they had any right to expect. Of the 25 guys who broke camp with them, just one – Jarrod Dyson – has been on the DL. And while Dyson’s been missed, particularly since he was just starting to take playing time away from Jeff Francoeur, David Lough has hit .305 in his absence, so you can’t pin this all on him.

The only other absence has been Salvador Perez, who’s been on bereavement leave this week after his grandmother passed. And that’s it. The trainers are doing their job magnificently. The players are not.

Before the year started, I said that I wanted nothing more than to issue an apology to Dayton Moore for criticizing the Shields trade. Yet here we are, two months into the season, Shields is pitching a little better than expected (although Wade Davis has been a disappointment), Wil Myers is hitting a little worse than expected (although coming on strong lately in Triple-A) – and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because of what I did not foresee: a lineup filled with former top prospects, a lineup where no one has yet reached his 30th birthday, a lineup with a pair of 23-year-olds and a 24-year-old, a lineup that every scout loved and every analyst thought was overwhelmingly likely to improve…that lineup has laid a giant goose egg.

Two years ago, with the youngest offense in the major leagues, the Royals finished sixth in the AL in runs scored.

Last year, with an offense that was still the youngest in the majors, the Royals dropped to 12th in the league in runs scored. Eric Hosmer had a terrible season. Salvador Perez missed half the year. Jeff Francoeur was below replacement-level and batted over 600 times. These were all easily fixable problems. We thought.

This year, with a lineup that is still young but has two additional years of experience, the Royals now rank 13th in the AL in runs scored, ahead of only the Mariners and White Sox. The Mariners also can’t develop their hitters to save their life, and their front office is also in mortal danger. The White Sox are finally paying the price for a decade of short-term decisions.

And the Royals are trending downward. They’ve scored 82 runs in their last 24 games. After firing Kevin Seitzer, who is increasingly looking like the Winston Churchill of this organization – the one guy who understood the weightiness of the task before them – because Ned Yost wanted more power, they’ve hit two homers in their last 14 games. Jeff Francoeur’s ninth-inning homer raised that total to three in 15 games, which is still one less homer than the CUBS PITCHERS have hit in that span (thanks, Travis Wood!)

And I hate to say this, but not only am I caught off-guard by what has happened, but I am incredibly pessimistic about what this means for the future of this organization. If the 2013 Royals were in a tailspin because they did a poor job of complimenting their home-grown talent with veterans from outside the organization – again – that would be a problem, but it would be a problem with an expiration date.

Instead, they’ve gone from sole possession of first place to sole possession of last place in 28 days because of their home-grown talent. The one thing that Dayton Moore and his front office was supposed to be good at – the one thing that convinced me to start supporting this front office again after the debacle of 2009 – looks like a fraud.

If you haven’t read it already, here’s Jonah Keri and I over at Grantland last week, talking about what happened to the Best Farm System In The History Of Baseball. The quick recap: two years ago, the Royals had nine Top 100 prospects in their farm system, including three Top 10 hitters, the safest type of prospect. Here’s what the Royals have to show for them:

James Shields – for two years.

Wade Davis.

Two corner infielders hitting .261/.321/.335 and .184/.254/.309.

Danny Duffy, who appears to be hitting on all cylinders 12 months after Tommy John surgery.

John Lamb, who is definitely not hitting on all cylinders 24 months after Tommy John surgery. (In his defense, Lamb’s velocity reportedly ticked up in his last start, and he’s on a run of 14 shutout innings. But as I’ve said many times: never trust a pitcher based on how he’s performing in Wilmington. On the road this year, Lamb has a 5.83 ERA. Unless and until he starts retiring batters at Northwest Arkansas, don’t bother getting excited.)

Chris Dwyer, who might be a #5 starter one day. Might.

Christian Colon, who HAHAHAHAHAHA

So yes, it appears that I need to offer a sincere apology for being wrong. But the apology isn’t for Dayton Moore. It’s for people like Will McDonald, and Matt Klaassen, and Scott McKinney, whose conclusion from his in-depth study on the track record of top prospects was that a farm system, even one as outstanding as the Royals’ farm system appeared in the spring of 2010, was no guarantee of future success.

I tried to parry McKinney’s findings, because I have a blind spot when it comes to the Royals, and in my defense I still think the points that I raised are valid. But I made one fatal mistake, which one should never make when analyzing the Royals: I forgot that I was analyzing the Royals. When it comes to the Royals, Murphy’s Law reigns: if anything can go wrong, it will. And when it comes to prospects, anything can go wrong.

I’m convinced that the theory was sound: great farm systems, more often than not, lead to good teams. I know it can work because I’ve seen it work. I know it can work because I’ve seen it at work all week. Look at the St. Louis Cardinals:

Yadier Molina: drafted by the Cardinals, fourth round in 2000.

Allen Craig: drafted by the Cardinals, eighth round in 2006.

Matt Carpenter: drafted by the Cardinals, 13th round in 2009. Despite never playing second base in the minor leagues, Carpenter has started 34 games there for St. Louis this year. Amazingly enough, the world did not end. Someone should alert the Royals that it’s okay to play a marginal defensive second baseman if he can hit.

Pete Kozma: drafted by the Cardinals, first round (#18 overall) in 2007.

David Freese: acquired from the San Diego Padres for Jim Edmonds – who was released by the Padres after 26 games. Freese was a ninth-round pick who had yet to reach Double-A.

Matt Holliday: acquired for three prospects named Clayton Mortenson, Shane Peterson, and Brett Wallace. Mortensen and Wallace were first-rounders, Peterson was a second-rounder – but none of them would have success in the majors.

Jon Jay: drafted by the Cardinals, second round, 2006.

Daniel Descalso: drafted by the Cardinals, third round in 2007.

Adam Wainwright: drafted by the Braves, first round (#29 overall) in 2000. Acquired by the Cardinals – along with Jason Marquis – for one year of J.D. Drew.

Lance Lynn: drafted by the Cardinals, supplemental first round (#39 overall) in 2008.

Jaime Garcia: drafted by the Cardinals, 22nd round in 2005.

Joe Kelly: drafted by the Cardinals, third round in 2009.

The Cardinals are built around farm system products, or minor leaguers that they shrewdly acquired for veterans, and the one time they traded top prospects for a veteran, they just happened to pick the top prospects who would flop in the majors.

The Royals had the Best Farm System In The History Of Baseball two years ago; this spring the Cardinals just had the Best Farm System Right Now. But in two months, they’ve gotten as much production from their prospects as the Royals have gotten from theirs in two years.

Shelby Miller (#2 prospect, drafted in first round - #19 overall – in 2009) has a 2.02 ERA in ten starts.

Carlos Martinez (#3 prospect, signed from Dominican Republic in 2010) made just four starts in the minors this year before he was promoted to the Cardinals’ bullpen, where he’s allowed four runs in eight innings so far.

Trevor Rosenthal (#4 prospect, 21st round in 2009) throws 100 mph, and in 26 innings in the bullpen, has a 2.08 ERA and 39 strikeouts.

Matt Adams (#7 prospect, 23rd round in 2009) can’t even break into the Cardinals’ lineup because they’re so stacked with hitters, but is hitting .346/.382/.577 in 52 at-bats, mostly off the bench.

Pete Kozma (#13 prospect, first round - #18 overall – in 2007) looked like a rare bust for the Cardinals; his career totals in the minors are .236/.308/.344, and last year he hit .232/.292/.355 in Triple-A. But called up late in the year to fill in for Rafael Furcal, Kozma hit .333/.383/.569 and started at shortstop in the playoffs. This year, he’s hitting a respectable .263/.321/.327.

John Gast (#26 prospect, sixth round in 2010) has made three starts for the Cardinals this year, winning two of them.

And of course, the team’s #6 prospect coming into the season, Michael Wacha, who was drafted with the #19 pick last year and raced to the majors in under a year, debuting last night by retiring the first 13 batters he faced, going seven innings and allowing two hits and no walks. Meanwhile, Kyle Zimmer, like Wacha a college right-hander, drafted #5 overall by the Royals, has a 5.28 ERA. In A-ball. IN WILMINGTON, one of the best pitchers’ parks in America.

And unlike the Royals, the Cardinals didn’t feel it necessary to trade their top prospect, an outfielder considered one of the five best prospects in the game (Oscar Taveras) for a quick fix to their pitching staff. They still have Taveras in the minors, along with fellow Top-100 prospect Kolten Wong, a second baseman who’s hitting .333 with walks and pop in Triple-A. (And unlike the Royals, the Cardinals show no signs of giving up on their second base prospect. But then, the Cardinals don’t have Chris Getz.)

So you see, having a great farm system can pay dividends. It can even pay instant dividends. It just requires an organization that has some ability to convert minor league potential into major league production. The Royals have shown shockingly little ability to do so. EVERY PLAYER they placed on the Top 100 list has seen his career go backwards in the two years since, with the arguable exception of two players – Myers and Odorizzi – who are no longer in the organization.

And suddenly, you look at the Royals roster and realize that Dayton Moore has no clothes. He was hired by the Royals SEVEN YEARS AGO yesterday, and in the seven years since:

- There is NOT A SINGLE PITCHER signed by his administration who has made a start in the major leagues this year.

- Only one position player signed in the last seven years is playing every day in the majors without sucking: Salvador Perez. The only other position players who have reached the majors: Jarrod Dyson, Derrick Robinson, Mike Moustakas, David Lough, Clint Robinson, Eric Hosmer, and Johnny Giavotella.

By the way, Derrick Robinson? The guy the Royals drafted in the fourth round in 2006, paid him $1 million to sign, but never learned to hit and was designated for assignment this winter? He signed with the Reds, made their team out of spring training, and in 46 plate appearances off the bench, has hit .342 with a .444 OBP. It’s probably a fluke. But in seven minor league seasons with the Royals, he rarely showed enough ability to make you think he could muster a .444 OBP in the majors even as a fluke.

The Royals have drafted plenty of relievers, and there’s something to be said for having relievers. But two of the relievers on their team right now were taken in the first round, one with the first overall pick, one with the 12th pick. Turning Luke Hochevar and Aaron Crow into major league relievers isn’t a feather in the cap of the front office; it’s an indictment of them.

Speaking of first round picks…let’s take a closer look at them.

2006: Luke Hochevar (#1)

2007: Mike Moustakas (#2)

2008: Eric Hosmer (#3)

2009: Aaron Crow (#12)

2010: Christian Colon (#4)

2011: Bubba Starling (#5)

2012: Kyle Zimmer (#5)

First off, that’s an utterly breathtaking stretch of horrible play – the Royals had a top-five pick SIX TIMES IN SEVEN YEARS.

And what do the Royals have for those picks? A pitcher with a 5.39 career ERA as a starter, who might find some success out of the bullpen. A pair of corner infielders who have suddenly lost the ability to hit. Another college starter who had to be converted to relief before he even reached the majors. A shortstop-turned-second baseman who’s hitting .246/.297/.341 in Triple-A, and is already 24. A tools-laden outfielder who’s hitting .209/.291/.368 in low-A ball, has struck out in over a third of his at-bats, and turns 21 in August. A starting pitcher who, in his first full pro season, has a 5.28 ERA in a fantastic pitchers’ park in high-A ball.

I’m not going to spend too much time on the 2006 pick, both because no one wants to take credit/blame for it, and because the player that most deemed worthy of that #1 pick, Andrew Miller, is himself a failed starter trying to hold on as a lefty reliever. But in 2007, the Royals chose to go the long route, selecting a high school hitter over the best college player in the draft – and picked Moustakas over Matt Wieters. In 2008, the Royals chose to go the long route, selecting a high school hitter over the best available college player in the draft – and picked Hosmer over Buster Posey.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with selecting a high school hitter over a college hitter – the study I did back in 2006 showed that the advantage college players had enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s has pretty much disappeared. But you have to get it right. The Royals, to this point, haven’t got either pick right.

In 2009 the Royals took Aaron Crow, and given the options on the board, it wasn’t a bad pick. While the Cardinals got Miller at #19, Crow is probably the best player that was taken between picks 11 and 18. But they then panicked after he had one bad year as a starter in the minors, turned him into a reliever, and now are too dependent on their crutch to ever try him in a more significant role. In 2010 they finally took a college player – only this time it was a compromise pick that was made at least in part because shortstop was, at the time, a position of need. They almost took Chris Sale, but they did not. I wanted Yasmani Grandal, and while it’s not clear how good he’ll be – at least in part because he failed a steroid test and missed the first 50 games of this year – he’s a damn sight better than Christian Colon.

In 2010, easily the deepest first round since Moore was hired, the Royals took Bubba Starling, ignoring the fact that Bubba was nearly 19 years old. Sure, they wanted one of the four pitchers that were taken ahead of him – but that’s a weak excuse when the four players taken after Starling were Anthony Rendon (can’t stay healthy, but hitting .330/.473/.625 in Double-A and has already played in the majors), Archie Bradley (just 20 years old, promoted to Double-A this year, has a 1.01 ERA and 80 Ks in 63 innings), Francisco Lindor (Gold Glove-caliber shortstop hitting .313/.385/.438 in high-A ball, is just 19), and Javier Baez (shortstop – future third baseman – hitting .264/.299/.487 in high-A ball, just 20).

And that doesn’t count #11 pick George Springer (tied for the minor league lead with 16 homers), or #14 pick Jose Fernandez (made the Marlins’ rotation out of spring training at age 20), or any of a dozen other guys taken in the first round that the Royals would gladly trade Starling for straight up – and get turned down in a heartbeat.

I’m not going to pass judgment on Kyle Zimmer yet – Zimmer, at least, has struck out 29% of the batters he’s faced this year. But despite drafting in the top five of the draft SIX TIMES, the Royals haven’t hit on a single player yet. Not one.

Meanwhile, the much-maligned Allard Baird, hampered from his first day to his last by financial constraints that Moore hasn’t had to worry about in the draft, hit on three of his five first-round picks – Zack Greinke, Billy Butler, and Alex Gordon. Only Gordon was a top-five pick (although Baird also whiffed on Chris Lubanski, taken fifth).

There’s still plenty of time for Hosmer and Moustakas to turn things around, Alex Gordon looked like a bust a couple of years ago, yada yada yada. The point is that despite more drafts, despite far more elite picks, despite substantially more financial resources than Allard Baird, Dayton Moore has yet to come close to Baird’s success. And Baird was chased out of town by a pitchfork-wielding mob five years after he got the job.

You know what else Allard Baird had during his five years as the Royals’ GM? A winning season. Sure, it was a stone-cold fluke, and yes, the Royals lost 100 games in each of the other four seasons in which Baird was GM on Opening Day. But still: at least he had a winning season once in his five years.

Dayton Moore doesn’t. And he’s had seven. And this winter, he traded one of the most significant prospect packages this century in order to jump-start the rebuilding process and win in 2013. And the Royals are 22-29. A year after they went 71-91, two years after they went 70-92, they’re on pace to go…70-92.

So I think it’s time we acknowledge the elephant in the room, and stop worrying about who the hitting coach is. Yes, Jack Maloof deserved to get fired – if not for his performance, than for his ridiculous comments to Jeff Flanagan in this column, comments that I said on Twitter ought to end his career, and – shockingly – actually did end his career. (Although in retrospect, given how fast the move was made, I wonder if Maloof already knew he was being let go and decided to go out with a bang.)

And look, I’m thrilled that George Brett is the new hitting coach, if for no other reason than it’s a blast to see him in uniform during the season for the first time since I was 18. And I’m genuinely curious to see whether he can have an effect. It’s a no-lose situation for him; if the hitters hit, he’ll be hailed as a genius, and if they don’t, they were already broken when he got here.

But the problems with this team go deeper than the hitting coach. They go deeper than the manager, which is why I don’t understand why everyone is focusing their frustrations on Ned Yost. Is Yost a great manager? No. But he’s not as terrible as everyone thinks either. Just by way of comparison, did you see how the Royals ended their eight-game losing streak Thursday night? (Well, not the very end – only the crazies stayed up until 3 AM to see that.) Here’s what Cardinals manager Mike Matheny did:

- With a 2-1 lead to protect in the top of the ninth, and closer Edward Mujica unavailable because he had pitched four games in a row, Matheny turned to…Mitchell Boggs. Boggs came into the game with a 10.43 ERA, having allowed 20 hits and 14 walks in 15 innings. He was the worst pitcher in the Cardinals’ bullpen, and maybe in any team’s bullpen.

- After Boggs gave up a game-tying home run to Jeff Francoeur, and walked Alex Gordon, Matheny replaced him with…Victor Marte, who had just been called up from the minors, and had a career 7.09 ERA. Worst of all, Marte was a former Royal. Marte let the next two batters get on base even though both guys were trying to sacrifice themselves – he hit Alcides Escobar with a pitch, and then threw wildly to third base on David Lough’s bunt.

- Matheny ordered an intentional walk to Chris Getz. I don’t care that it worked (four hours later, when Miguel Tejada just wanted to put a pitch in play and get the game over with). He intentionally walked Chris Getz.

Mike Matheny, it should be noted, managed the Cardinals to the playoffs last year. I see no evidence (and not just this game) that Matheny is a better tactical manager than Yost. But he has the horses. Yost doesn’t have the horses.

Yost doesn’t have the horses because his GM hasn’t given them to him. And now fans want Yost fired, just like they wanted the manager that Yost replaced, Trey Hillman, fired. Well, at some point you have to ask yourself if the problem is the manager, or the guy who hired him, and who hired his predecessor, and allowed them both to fail?

I’m not calling for Dayton Moore to be fired quite yet, for a couple of pragmatic reasons:

- The draft begins next Thursday, and as you’ll recall, the only thing worse than having your draft run by a GM no one has any confidence in, is having a draft run by no GM at all.

- On the morning of May 6th, the Royals were 17-10 and in first place. As horrible as this month has been, I’m not sure it’s fair to go from signing a GM’s praises to axing him on the basis of barely three weeks of data.

Having gotten the Royals into this mess, it’s fair to give Moore another couple of weeks to see if he can get them out of it. But if he can’t…it’s time to acknowledge the reality that it’s time to make a change in the GM’s chair. Because it will also be time to acknowledge that it’s time to make a change with the roster, because the roster just isn’t good enough. It will be time to administer Omaha therapy to Moustakas and Hosmer. It will be time to send Crow down with them and tell him he’s a starting pitcher again. It will be time to trade Ervin Santana for the best possible package, and it will be time to, yes, at least entertain offers on James Shields.

It will be time to blow up the entire roster, in other words. It will be time for the Royals to take yet another stop backwards in order to take two steps forward. Dayton Moore can’t take that step, nor should he be expected to – if the Royals are going to take a step backwards, Moore won’t be there when they start moving forward again.

But they need to take a step backwards. And so they need a GM who can focus on the long term without having to worry about his job security in the short term. It’s not fair to anyone, least of all Moore, to ask him to do his job when doing his job right may cause him to lose it.

I hope this doesn’t have to come to pass. If the Royals go 18-9 in June and get back over .500, maybe we’ll look back at this as a bad dream. But right now, with an offense that can’t score and a rotation of guys who are, frankly, pitching over their heads, I think the Royals are more likely to go 9-18 than 18-9.

And if they do, then it’s time. Seven years is long enough. The Best Farm System In The History Of Baseball was a nice fantasy, but it’s looking like that’s all it was: a fantasy. If that’s the case, then the notion that Dayton Moore can ever be a playoff-caliber general manager is a fantasy too. And so it will be time to give someone else a chance to be that guy.

What The Hell Happened?

Well, for the first time in ten years, the Royals didn’t have a six-game losing streak by the middle of May.

Instead, it took all the way until Memorial Day. So I guess they have that going for them. Which is nice.

That’s now ten straight years in which the Royals lost six in a row by Memorial Day; if that’s not a record, it should be. But really, this six-game losing streak just ties a pretty bow around an utterly remarkable three-week stretch for the Royals. Really, prior to today they had played about as poorly as it is possible to do without a six-game losing streak. This stretch started with the Royals losing six of seven, and prior to this afternoon they had lost 9 of 10.

And in the span of three weeks, the comparisons to 2009 went from being a funny joke to being somewhat alarming to being eerily similar to being terrifying to being, if anything, hopelessly optimistic.

In 2009, you may recall, the Royals started the season 18-11. They then lost six in a row (check!), and after winning three of four, then lost 13 of 15. This year, the Royals started 17-10, then lost six of seven, and after winning two of three, have lost 10 of 11.

The 2009 Royals went 5-20 after their 18-11 start. The 2013 Royals have gone 4-17 after their 17-10 start.

The 2009 Royals lost 97 games, and to this day people like our good friend Sam Mellinger describe it as the most disappointing season in Royals history. I have no idea how many games the 2013 Royals will lose, but I can tell if you if they lose anywhere close to 97 games, it will lap 2009 in terms of disappointment.

At the end of the 2009 season, Dayton Moore was punished for his team’s failures with…a contract extension, as I discussed here. If the 2013 Royals finish anywhere close to their 2009 counterparts, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Moore won’t be getting another extension.

I don’t think the Royals will lose 97 games. I’m somewhat confident – perhaps “hopeful” is a better word – that they won’t lose 87 games. But I have absolutely no confidence whatsoever that the Royals can turn things around and make a run for the playoffs.

It’s not simply that they’re well under .500 and playing in the same division as the Tigers, although that’s certainly part of it. Clay Davenport’s playoff odds – not including today’s loss – had the Royals’ odds of winning the AL Central at 2.5%, with a 7% chance of nabbing one of the two Wild Card spots. (And Clay’s numbers are optimistic – Baseball Prospectus has those odds at 0.9% and 2.9%, respectively.) My lack of confidence is predicated on the fact that playoff-caliber teams simply don’t have stretches as bad as the Royals are on right now. Not in April, not in May, not at any point in the season.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter saw my research on the last team that had overcome a 4-15 stretch to qualify for the playoffs. There wasn’t one last year, or in 2011, or in 2010, or in 2009. In 2008, finally, I found a team – the Milwaukee Brewers, who woke up on the morning of September 1st with a 80-56 record, 5.5 games ahead of the pack for the Wild Card. They lost 15 of their next 19 games, and after the end of play on September 20th were 84-71, 2.5 games out of the Wild Card spot.

The punch line here, of course, is that on September 15th, after losing a doubleheader to the Phillies – completing a four-game sweep, their 12th loss in 15 games – the Brewers fired their manager. Ned Yost. The last team to overcome a 4-15 stretch to make the playoffs fired Ned Yost in the middle of it. Dale Sveum was hired, and after losing three of his first four games, won five in a row. After losing game 161, the Brewers sent C.C. Sabathia out there in the last game of the season, his fourth straight start on three days’ rest, and he threw a complete game victory to clinch the Brewers’ first playoff spot since 1982.

It would be easy to turn this into a Ned Yost punchline. I certainly did so on Twitter, as did the 260+ of you who retweeted me. And Yost certainly shares in some of the blame for what has happened. He persists in leading off Chris Getz (.265 OBP this year), and persists in batting Alcides Escobar (.254/.281/.333) in the #2 spot, which is why Alex Gordon had batted in the first inning with two outs and nobody on base 14 times in a 16-game stretch. Meanwhile, Lorenzo Cain (.295/.362/.404) gets relegated to batting 5th or 6th because he “didn’t look comfortable” in his three starts each batting leadoff and second.

Yost defends Mike Moustakas to the hilt, an admirable quality even if it did lead to the whole Third Base Tree meme, but defending Moose is one thing, and playing him and his .178/.252/.308 performance is another. Yost continues to play Francoeur against right-handed pitchers occasionally, and last week started him over David Lough because “When you’ve got two players you’re looking at, there are certain days you want to go with offense and certain days you want to go with defense. Today, I wanted to go with the defense.” 

That’s right – Ned Yost started Jeff Francoeur FOR HIS DEFENSE. Jeff Francoeur, who at this point in his career is essentially the Georgian version of Jose Guillen in the field. In that game, Francoeur lost a ball in the lights, and then in the eighth inning let a playable fly ball get over his head and tip off his glove for an RBI double in a one-run game.

The Royals are 7-12 in one-run games, and while the manager has only a small influence on that mark, he does have some influence.

So yeah, Yost deserves his share of the blame for what’s happened. But only a share, and frankly he is taking more than his fair share of abuse from the fan base. That’s not only a disservice to Yost, it trivializes the problems with this team. The Royals’ issues are too deep and fundamental to be solved simply by firing the manager.

As if to drive that point home, after matching the 2008 Brewers’ 4-15 slide, the Royals have lost two more games. To find a team that weathered a 4-17 stretch and still made the postseason, you have to go back farther – but only a little farther. In 2005, the Houston Astros were at the end of their run atop the NL Central, but were unwilling to acknowledge it. After starting the season 8-7, they lost 17 of 21…and after winning three straight, lost seven in a row to fall to 15-30. They were toast.

Only they then won 11 of 16, and 29 of 42 overall to inch over .500 at the All-Star Break at 44-43…and went 45-30 after the Break to finish 89-73 overall, sneaking into the playoffs by one game over the Phillies for the Wild Card. The Astros would end up winning their first NL pennant before the White Sox swept them in the World Series. Thanks to that season, the Astros would refuse to read the warning signs the next few years, figuring that a terrible start hadn’t kept them from a pennant before. But you can’t ask a magician to perform his trick more than once, and the Astros have not only never reached the playoffs again, they’ve bottomed out as one of the worst major league teams of the last 50 years.

So anyway, if you’re looking for a thread of hope to grasp onto, I guess those 2005 Astros are your thread. It’s a flimsy thread; the Astros, after all, had been to the playoffs the year before, and five of the previous eight years, and had been over .500 for 11 of the previous 12 years. They were a proven good team going through a terrible stretch. They weren’t the Royals.

I’ll get into the reasons why the Royals are where they are next time, and what – if any – the solutions are. But I just wanted to get this out there: if the Royals want to give us any reason to hope that they can turn things around, they need to do so NOW. They’ve already endured a stretch that few playoff teams have ever witnessed, and another couple of losses may well put them in unprecedented territory – I haven’t done the research, and would rather not do so unless I have to.

But with three more games against the Cardinals followed by three more against the Texas Rangers, I fear I’ll have to.

Royals Today: 5/16/13.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I simply can’t write as often as I used to. I’d like to say this is just temporary, but really, it’s the new normal. I’m sure there’s a very strong and inverse correlation between the number of children and the frequency of my writing, and ever since daughter #4 arrived last March, once a week is about all I can manage, at least until the Royals are playing for something in September. I’m not apologizing; I’m just explaining, and hope you all will bear with me anyway. Thanks.

- We lost a good man this week. Denny Matthews is the voice of the Royals and deservedly so, but for 25 years it was Denny Matthews and Fred White on the radio, and if the former was one of the most talented broadcasters of his era, the latter wasn’t far behind.

I was privileged to listen to the Royals on radio many times during their last 10 years together, which means that I missed the glory years when Denny and Fred covered the Royals when they had something to play for. But I didn’t miss Denny and Fred at their broadcasting best. They were both remarkably talented at the simple skill of describing a baseball game orally in a way that your brain could translate visually. If you wanted aural fireworks or blatant homerism from your radio announcer, you were out of luck in Kansas City. If you wanted to know what was going on in the game, there was nowhere else you’d rather be. (Five years ago, I wrote more about the men behind the various mikes here.)

White was let go by the Royals after the 1999 season, through no fault of his own, and like many Royals fans I couldn’t stand Ryan Lefebvre for the first year or two, before I finally gave in and acknowledged he was actually sort of good at this broadcasting thing too. I’m still not sure whether Ryan got better at his craft, or whether I just needed time to process that he wasn’t Fred White.

White’s the second Royals announcer we’ve lost to melanoma in the last two years, following Paul Splittorff, and the timing of his passing made me more melancholic than usual. Partly it’s the suddenness of the news – on Tuesday the Royals announced that White had retired “due to recent health issues”, and Wednesday he was dead. But I think it has something to do with the fact that yesterday, the day Fred White passed away, George Brett turned 60 years old.

I recognize that Brett is not immortal, and is subject to the same aging process as you or I. It’s not that he’s getting older that bothers me – it’s that the last time the Royals were worth watching, he was still in the prime of his career. Brett was 35 years old the day he lifted Bret Saberhagen off the mound, younger than I am today. He’s 60 now, and the Royals haven’t played a meaningful game since. No playoff games, and no late September games where the eyes of a baseball nation have been upon them.

Brett is 60 years old. White has passed away. Splittorff, who had just turned 39 and had been retired barely a year when the Royals won the World Series, died two years ago. Denny Matthews is 70, and I don’t want to think about how I’ll react when he passes on. My childhood heroes are disappearing, years after the memories they created, and the Royals have created precious few of either of them in the years since.

I want Brett to throw out the first pitch before a Royals playoff game. And I want him to still be in the prime of his life when that day comes. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for. I know many of you think I’m too critical of the front office, and maybe I am. Just understand: I want the same thing they want. I want this team to matter again. And I don’t apologize for wanting it perhaps more than I should.

- I hope it’s not too crass to talk about this, but White and Splittorff both died of melanoma, a skin cancer that if caught early is usually curable. If their deaths remind some of you to see your friendly neighborhood dermatologist for a full skin exam, then some good may come of it. You’re all welcome to make an appointment with me, though I suspect I’m a long commute for 99% of you. But see someone. Get that mole checked out. And wear sunscreen.

- Getting back to the team on the field…after a weekend performance against the Yankees that was horrifying as both a fan and as an analyst (given that I wrote in March that the Yankees were about to collapse), the Royals righted the ship by taking two of three in Anaheim. The Angels may be a genuinely bad team, or they may just be a good team going through a terrible stretch – but if the Royals are to be taken seriously, when an opponent is on the ground, they have to keep their boot on their opponent’s neck. To their credit, they did.

So they’re now 20-17. They’ve outscored their opponents by 17 runs, which means their Pythagorean record is…20-17. Which means they’re on pace for 87-88 wins. This is the team we (well, I) thought they would be, even if we had no idea they’d be this good while Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas would be this bad.

- Speaking of Hosmer and Moustakas…I don’t have any answers for you. Hosmer hits like right field is in foul territory, and Moustakas hits like anything hit high in the air is a home run. I still believe in their talent. I still believe they will play well in the long run.

But I’m reminded of a couple of pearls of wisdom from economist John Maynard Keynes: 1) we are all dead in the long run, and 2) markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent. Hosmer and Moustakas may be supremely talented, and eventually that talent might shine through. But their talent can remain dormant longer than the Royals can remain in contention. It will be little solace indeed if by the time they both figure things out, the Royals’ window has passed – or worse, their time with the Royals has passed.

(For more on the remarkable inability of the Royals to produce a top prospect who actually fulfills expectations from the get-go, turn over to Grantland next Tuesday, where a long conversation between Jonah Keri and I on that subject should run.)

The fall and rise of Alex Gordon almost assures that the Royals won’t give up on either player until absolutely necessary, and frankly, they shouldn’t. Not only that, but if you listened to this week’s Baseball Show With Rany & Joe podcast (download at iTunes or listen here), then you know that Joe and I discussed the fact that this would be the perfect time for the Royals to offer both players a long-term contract extension.

I know that sounds ridiculous, but that’s exactly the point. If you want to get a young player signed to a long-term deal that buys out free agency years, you either want to do it as soon as he reaches the majors – witness the Salvador Perez contract – or you want to do it when the player is in a down cycle. Both Hosmer and Moustakas are Scott Boras clients, and were both long shots to ever sign a long-term deal. But those shots are suddenly not quite so long. Anthony Rizzo just signed a 7-year, $41 million contract with the Chicago Cubs (with two club options). As recently as two months ago, most people would rather have Hosmer over Rizzo on their team – but given his struggles, you don’t think Hosmer would at least consider the opportunity to sign a contract that guarantees him $41 million right now?

There’s obviously a ton of risk involved for the Royals, because if Hosmer or Moustakas doesn’t figure it out, that’s a lot of money to eat. But if you’re a small-market team, the only way to lock up your best players through their prime years is to assume some risk. The Royals were fortunate to sign Perez and Alcides Escobar to contracts that are so team-friendly that the risk pretty much involves a catastrophic injury – but a contract doesn’t have to be that team-friendly to make it worth doing.

If the Royals want to be bold and savvy, they should be offering contracts right now to Hosmer, and to Moustakas, and frankly they should be laying the groundwork for a long-term deal for Danny Duffy that gets signed the minute he shows his stuff is back to 100%. (If Duffy isn’t willing to sign a long-term deal, then his Twitter account is the greatest acting job of all time.) They should be at least talking with Lorenzo Cain’s agent, acknowledging the fact that they can’t pay Cain based on his performance this year, and that Cain is 27 and is unlikely to improve from here.

On an individual basis, the Royals are likely to get burned on a long-term contract eventually. It’s happened before, after all, with Angel Berroa. But even then, what was the downside – the Royals were out $10 million? In baseball terms, that’s pocket change, even for the Royals. But if you have Perez AND Escobar AND Hosmer AND Moustakas AND Cain AND Duffy all signed before they’re even arbitration-eligible, you can accept the risk that one of those contracts will be a bust – because that means five of those contracts will be a steal. A diversified portfolio is going to bring you big returns even if one of your stocks tanks.

This might be a moot point, given the representation that Hosmer and Moustakas have contracted with. But you never know. Fear of failure does things to people. Having tasted enough failure to know fear, maybe Hosmer or Moustakas has had a change of heart. In which case, it might just be the time to strike.

In the meantime, I think we can agree that Kevin Seitzer wasn’t the problem. Particularly given this study at Baseball Prospectus, which evaluated hitting coaches and came to the conclusion that among hitting coaches with more than two years’ experience, and who didn’t ply their craft at Coors Field, no hitting coach in the last 20 years was worth more runs to his team than Seitzer. It's a crude estimate, but it certainly fortifies my position that Seitzer should be working somewhere in organized baseball.

- Maybe Hosmer and Moustakas can’t hit, but at least we have Salvy. As Sam Mellinger noted, Perez now has exactly 150 games and 600 plate appearances to his credit in his career, and has hit .309/.335/.455 with 15 homers and 32 doubles. Admittedly, he only has 22 walks, and that’s hardly ideal. But he’s now batted 130+ times in three different seasons, and hit over .300 in each one. Batting average is overrated, but that’s still pretty awesome. The only catcher to hit .300 or more (with 100+ plate appearances) at ages 21, 22, and 23 is Ted Simmons, who many people feel should be in the Hall of Fame.

But I don’t want to talk about Perez as a hitter. In light of this terrific article at Grantland yesterday, which crystallizes the latest research on the importance of pitch-framing by catchers, I want to ask the question: how much of the improvement in the Royals’ pitching staff this year is actually due to having Perez behind the plate to frame their pitches?

To be more specific: how much of Ervin Santana’s stunning improvement this year can be traced to getting more strike calls on borderline pitches? How much of Jeremy Guthrie’s renaissance – essentially from the moment he arrived in Kansas City, after Perez had returned from his knee injury – is due to the catcher he’s been throwing to? (Guthrie has made 22 starts since joining the Royals – 21 of them throwing to Perez.)

I’m not asking a rhetorical question – I honestly don’t know. The numbers I have seen have shown Perez to be a very good pitch framer, but not one of the game’s elites. But this is a great example of the fact that the more we learn about baseball, the more we learn what we don’t know. This is why I love sabermetrics, and why so many of the criticisms of sabermetrics are so shrill. Contrary to what some believe, we don’t think we know all the answers – if we did, we wouldn’t have looked into the importance of a catcher’s ability to frame pitches in the first place. Three years ago we thought that Jose Molina was a fringe major leaguer at best – today we’re wondering if he’s one of the most underrated players in the game.

I don’t know how valuable Perez has been to the pitching staff. But I sure as hell know he hasn’t hurt. And I sure as hell think he’s the most important player, signed to the most important contract, on the roster.

- Jarrod Dyson makes me happy. The player who once had eight extra-base hits in an entire 93-game minor league season has eight extra-base hits in just 41 at-bats. That’s ridiculous, of course, as is the fact that Dyson’s slugging average (.561) is nearly double his on-base average (.286). But it’s not ridiculous to say that he has dramatically improved as a hitter in the last 2-3 years, and it’s not ridiculous to say that he should be starting in a platoon role in the major leagues.

Obviously, he should be starting in a platoon role for the Royals, given that the alternative is Jeff Francoeur. And to their credit, the Royals have all but acknowledged that, even if Ned Yost won’t admit to it – Dyson has been in the lineup in five of the last six games the Royals have faced a right-handed pitcher. But I think Dyson could be more than just a guy that starts for the Royals because they don’t have anyone else.

Think of how Angel Pagan became a valuable everyday outfielder, or Andres Torres, or even Endy Chavez for a time. When you have elite speed and defense, you don’t have to be a great hitter to be a good player. Dyson isn’t an elite defender, but he’s not bad, and he’s one of the fastest players in the major leagues. He is, honestly, probably the fastest player I’ve ever seen in a Royals uniform – with the caveat that I didn’t see Willie Wilson when Wilson was young. But keep in mind, the young Willie Wilson has a case to be made as the fastest player in major league history. (Wilson hit 12 inside-the-park homers in his career. All came by 1983, and five were in 1979 alone, including this walkoff homer against the Yankees.)

I just hope Dyson’s ankle is okay. (Late update: it's not; he's probably going on the DL. Dammit. Let's just hope that David Lough, hitting .340/.393/.477 in Omaha, keeps Francoeur in a platoon role.)

- Chris Getz is hitting .193. He has three walks this year, one of them intentional (yay, Robin Ventura!) He does have the first home run in his four-year career with the Royals. Since hitting that home run, he is 4 for his last 46, all singles.

Meanwhile, Johnny Giavotella is hitting .289/.364/.465 in Omaha, which qualifies as a slump for him. Yes, Elliot Johnson is hitting .302/.333/.395 in 46 plate appearances. That raises Johnson’s career line to .229/.287/.343; yippee. Giavotella, having failed both of his trials in the majors to this point, has a career line of .242/.271/.340. The fact that Giavotella is considered a major disappointment because he’s hit about as well as Johnson in his career is an indictment of Johnson more than Giavotella.

But then we don’t really need to compare Giavotella to Johnson, because Johnson isn’t the odd guy out on this roster. Getz doesn’t have the range for shortstop, the arm for third base, or the bat for anywhere. If he’s not in the lineup, he’s a glorified pinch runner. Send him to Omaha, bring up Giavotella, and you can still spot Johnson in the lineup. Johnson has hit right-handed pitchers better than left-handed pitchers in his career, so instead of platooning him with Getz (forcing Johnson to hit from his worse side), the Royals can start him against tough right-handers in Giavotella’s place. They can also use Johnson as a defensive replacement. Johnson complements Giavotella’s talents far better than he does Getz.

I’m sure you’re sick of my Gio fetish, but let’s be clear: whether or not Giavotella can be an above-average second baseman in the majors is irrelevant at this point. All that’s relevant is whether he can be better than Getz. He can, and he is. The Royals are just postponing the inevitable here.

- Finally, you’ve probably heard the news that Bubba Starling is getting his eyesight checked out, and might have had LASIK surgery by the time you read this. As someone who has written on multiple times – and this wasn’t my opinion so much as I was relaying what I was hearing from the industry – that Starling looks like a bust, this can only be described as good news. Maybe this is just a case of the Royals desperately trying to find a solution. But maybe it really is a solution, and at this point, there aren’t a whole lot of other solutions for a player who turns 21 in August and is hitting .213/.286/.354 in low A-ball, with 10 walks and 41 strikeouts.

Eric Hosmer hit .241/.334/.361 in A-ball in 2009, then ended his season a few days early to get LASIK. The next year, he hit .338/.406/.571 and finished the year with six home runs in the Texas League playoffs. The LASIK wasn’t everything, but it was something. So if Starling does go under the laser, let’s hope he can start fresh, and I’ll do my best to start fresh with my evaluation of him as well. It looks like the Royals blew one top-five pick already. They can’t afford to blow another one.

Royals Today: 5/9/13.

Remember when the Royals were the toast of the town, and working their way to becoming one of the best stories in baseball? I believe they called that time “Sunday”.

It’s still early, folks. It’s still early. When a three-game losing streak – the first streak that long this season – can upend the way the entire team is perceived, that’s a pretty good sign that it’s too early to be making any firm conclusions about what this team is supposed to be. I can’t overstate how important it is to keep this mind. Because when you don’t, you wind up writing columns like this.

“No One Hating The Big Game James Trade Now”

I won’t quote anything past the headline; you can guess how it goes from there. I’m sure there have been some trades in baseball history that can be accurately judged in less than 30 games, but this ain’t one of them. I don’t want to keep going back to the Shields trade, partly because you guys are sick and tired of hearing me talk about it, and partly because a trade of this nature – prospects for established veterans – can’t be adequately judged for years.

But if Jeff Flanagan wants to judge the trade right now…well, if the season ended right now, the Royals wouldn’t be in the playoffs. For the talent the Royals gave up, they can’t win this trade unless they go to the playoffs. There’s always next year, I guess.

So far, Shields has been everything the Royals could have expected, and more. I happily admit that he’s been better than I expected to this point – a 2.52 ERA (and no unearned runs) is exceptional. If he stays healthy, averages over 7 innings a start, and maintains a 2.52 ERA through the end of 2014, I will concede that it was a price worth paying. But can we not render judgment on a trade after seven starts?

Meanwhile, Wade Davis has a 4.75 ERA, which is about what I would expect from him – not bad enough to get pulled from the rotation, but not good enough to be any kind of asset. It’s early, of course, and he’s making a big transition. Wil Myers has slumped a little in Triple-A (9-for-his-last-48), bringing his overall numbers down to .276/.372/.414. (I’ve heard through the grapevine that Myers is not happy – justifiably so – that the Rays have not promoted him to the majors. He wouldn’t be the first elite prospect to slump in Triple-A out of frustration that he’s not in the majors.) Meanwhile, Jake Odorizzi threw seven no-hit innings in his last start, and in 34 innings has more strikeouts (39) than hits + walks (34).

The final chapter in this trade has yet to be written. The first chapter in this trade has yet to be finished. Let’s all calm down about declaring victory or defeat just yet. And let’s see if the Royals can win one of their next three days, and thus avoid a six-game losing streak by mid-May for the tenth consecutive season.

Moving on…

- It’s really quite remarkable that the Royals are 17-13 despite getting virtually nothing from The Best Farm System In The History Of Baseball. Of the nine guys on Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospect list two years ago, here’s what we have:

Myers, Odorizzi, and Mike Montgomery brought in Shields and Davis.

Eric Hosmer is hitting .268/.339/.330.

Mike Moustakas is hitting .219/.294/.333.

John Lamb, Christian Colon, Danny Duffy, and Chris Dwyer have contributed nothing.

So the contribution those nine guys have made on the 2013 Royals are a pair of corner infielders who haven’t hit, a #5 starter, and James Shields. This is…sub-optimal.

And yet the Royals are 17-13. That’s a credit to the front office, for not letting the disappointment of their farm system inhibit them from getting contributions elsewhere. Obviously, they’ve benefited mightily from the two holdovers from the Allard Baird administration, Alex Gordon and Billy Butler. But the acquisitions of Ervin Santana and Jeremy Guthrie, which were maligned by large portions of the blogosphere, have paid dividends so far. (Yes, it’s early. There’s still plenty of time for these transactions to go south, particularly Guthrie, who’s on a three-year deal.)

Salvador Perez, obviously, has contributed far more than the 17 guys who were ranked ahead of him in the farm system two years ago. The Royals have turned a 10th-round pick, an undrafted high school player who they got in a trade for Rick Ankiel and Kyle Farnsworth, a Dominican prospect who couldn’t stay healthy as a starter, and a first-round pick who had failed as a starter, and turned them into an excellent bullpen.

And two years on, I think we can safely say that the Royals did an excellent job of extracting talent in the Zack Greinke trade. (Though in May of 2011, I’m willing to bet that some people who cover the Brewers thought that they pulled a heist on Kansas City. Alcides Escobar was hitting .200! Lorenzo Cain was in Omaha! “No One Hating The Zack Greinke Trade Now”)

Today, Escobar is hitting .272/.308/.392, largely putting to rest concerns that his offensive improvement last year was a mirage. The Royals have a shortstop who is slightly above-average both offensively and defensively, and who is under club control through 2017. And Cain has been the most pleasant surprise on the entire roster. He leads the team in OPS, hitting .327/.383/.455 so far, while continuing to play excellent defense in center field.

Cain has been worth 1.1 Wins Above Replacement in 28 games, which is an All-Star pace, but is really in line with his value his entire career. In 138 career games, he’s been worth 5.3 bWAR. That’s exceptional. Like Escobar, the Royals control him for the next five seasons. And Odorizzi, the third player in the Greinke trade, was good enough to be the second player in the Shields/Davis trade.

I’m not saying that Brewers fans hate the trade now, even though they probably would have made the playoffs in 2011 without Greinke, and even though he pitched poorly in the postseason when they needed him most. But if they don’t, it’s only because the Brewers were able to flip Greinke for three prospects of their own last July, one of whom (Jean Segura) is hitting .328/.372/.513 as their starting shortstop. The Royals won the trade, but the Brewers didn’t lose it. The Angels did.

Dayton Moore deserves considerable credit for the Royals’ 17-13 record. What’s astonishing is that almost none of that credit is due to his ability to develop players out of his own farm system. At least not until Hosmer and Moustakas start hitting the way we think they can.

- While Moore has said on multiple occasions that you need about 40 games to properly evaluate your roster, the Royals elected to shake things up starting at game #30. I don’t blame them.

Last night, for just the second time this season, the Royals started Dyson in center field and Cain in right field. As you know, platooning Dyson and Francoeur is something I’ve been advocating for some time, so this was a welcome development. (Tonight’s lineup, however, has Francoeur back in right field against right-hander Freddy Garcia.)

Last night, Elliot Johnson started at second base over Chris Getz for the second straight night; Getz, in fact, has only started two of the Royals’ last seven games, with Johnson getting four starts and Miguel Tejada one start at second base. (Getz is back in the lineup tonight.)

It’s not hard to discern why; Getz is hitting .216/.247/.338 on the season. Even great defense can’t justify putting that kind of bat in the lineup, and as Getz showed on Monday, when he failed to corral a ground ball up the middle that would have ended the game with a victory, he’s not a great defender.

But this raises the question, for the umpteenth time, of why the Royals aren’t willing to give an opportunity to Johnny Giavotella. During spring training, the second base job was a battle between Getz and Giavotella; no one saw Johnson or Tejada as anything more than utility guys. But now that Getz has – not surprisingly – revealed himself as the same replacement-level player that he’s been his entire career, the Royals are giving his playing time to Johnson, who’s only better than Getz insomuch that he can be a replacement-level player at multiple positions.

Meanwhile, Giavotella is hitting .277/.357/.411 in Omaha – not great (he was hitting .326/.396/.489 a week ago, before embarking on a 1-for-21 slump), but certainly no worse than what Getz has provided. And Giavotella, at least, has shown the ability to hit in the past – he’s a lifetime .325/.392/.469 hitter in Triple-A – something Getz really hasn’t.

Instead of optioning Getz to Triple-A and giving Giavotella an opportunity to play, the Royals started Giavotella at third base yesterday for the first time this year. Two weeks ago, when Moustakas was playing so badly that a demotion to Omaha seemed like a real possibility, I advocated that Giavotella should get some playing time at third base to see if he could fill in. Naturally, now that Moustakas has heated up (in his last 10 games, he’s hitting .367/.432/.633), and now that Getz is ice cold (since hitting his first home run as a member of the Royals, he’s 4-for-37) – NOW the Royals try Giavotella at third base.

Sometimes this organization drives me nuts. Just as the hole they had at third base is closing up, the hole they’ve always had at second base is gaping wide – and not only is the potential solution to that hole being ignored, the Royals are actively steering him away from the problem he might be able to fix.

I hope I’m wrong when I say this, but at this point, one can only assume that the Royals have internally decided that they want nothing to do with Giavotella as their starting second baseman. They might be right about Gio; he has had his chances at the major league level, and has not taken advantage of them.

But they might be wrong, and right now, he can hardly be worse than their alternatives. Maybe the Royals will eventually go outside the organization for a solution, and by July the answer will be Chase Utley or someone else. But in May, the best solution the Royals have on hand right now might be Giavotella. At the very least, he deserves the same opportunity to make his case as Getz has.

- Some more changes are in store for tonight’s game, as Ned Yost finally got tired of the lack of production around Billy Butler, and caved in to conventional wisdom, moving Alex Gordon into the #3 hole, Butler to cleanup, and making Alcides Escobar the new leadoff hitter.

Look, I get it. Eric Hosmer hasn’t hit a home run yet this year. The Royals don’t have a home run from the cleanup spot this year. Billy Butler is on pace for 108 walks this year, and as much as I’d like to compliment him for his new-found patience, I have no doubt that his walk total is influenced by the fact that teams feel comfortable pitching around him and taking their chances with whoever comes next.

And while Gordon has hit very well in the leadoff spot this year, his profile is…weird. He only has five walks all season, as the organizational plague of poor plate discipline appears to have finally infected him. (Personally, I blame Francoeur. That dude’s a cesspool of the hacking virus.) But Gordon leads the team in homers; he has as many home runs as walks, which is something you hardly see from anyone, let alone a leadoff hitter.

(It has happened, though. In 1966, Felipe Alou led off for the Braves 127 times year, even though he hit 31 home runs and walked just 24 times. Manager Bobby Bragan hit upon the then-revolutionary idea that you should bat your best hitters at the top of the lineup so that they’d get more at-bats. He probably took the philosophy a little to the extreme, but not only was Alou his primary leadoff hitter, Eddie Mathews got the most plate appearances in the #2 spot, just ahead of Hank Aaron. And Alou did lead the league with 122 runs scored.)

On top of that, Gordon has some very funky splits this year. With no one on base, he’s hitting .205/.224/.337, and leading off an inning he’s just 9-for-53 with one walk. But with runners in scoring position, he’s batting .483 (14-for-29), and he’s 10-for-20 with a man on first base alone.

Those splits are a complete fluke, and if the Royals are moving him down in the lineup to take advantage of them, they’re making a big mistake. If they’re moving him down because they want to bunch their two best hitters together, or because his power is wasted in the leadoff spot and his lack of walks is a problem, then I’m fine with it.

This still leaves two problems. The first is that Hosmer is still batting behind Butler, just one slot lower, and if he doesn’t start hitting, teams are going to continue to pitch around Billy until someone makes them stop. The other is that Escobar is no more a leadoff hitter than Hosmer is a cleanup hitter. Since the start of last season, Escobar has a .327 OBP, which is fine for a shortstop but less than ideal for your leadoff guy.

One way to kill two birds with one stone would be to move Hosmer into the leadoff spot. It’s unconventional, but no more unconventional that moving Gordon into the leadoff spot in the first place. Hosmer’s getting on base, at least, at a .339 clip, and he’s faster than you’d expect from a first baseman – since the start of last year, he’s 18-for-19 in stolen base attempts. At least until he starts pulling the ball and hitting for power again, putting him in the leadoff spot is the best use of his talents, allows you to bat Escobar lower in the order, and you can move Salvador Perez – who’s probably the best choice to protect Butler in the lineup – into the #5 spot.

I will say this: lineup analysis is overrated, and the most important priority in building a lineup is maintaining left-right balance. Tonight’s lineup goes R, R, L, R, L, R, L, R, L. Ned Yost literally can’t do any better than that.

Five For Friday: 5/3/13.

Apparently, the only thing that can slow the Royals down is a snowstorm in May. Yesterday’s “game”, in which the Royals wasted four shutout innings from Ervin Santana and had a 1-0 lead struck from the books, was a debacle and an embarrassment. But it’s not the Royals who should be embarrassed; it’s Major League Baseball.

I wrote about this issue after another Royals’ rainout years ago, and you can read what I wrote here. (Baseball Prospectus re-published this after rains threatened to shorten the deciding game of the 2008 World Series. The Phillies could well have been crowned World Champions by an umpring crew calling Game 5 in the middle of a blinding rainstorm. That didn’t happen only because 1) the umpires let the game proceed in unplayable conditions long enough for the Rays to tie the game, and 2) because Commissioner Bud Selig made the unprecedented decision to “suspend” game until the rains abated…more than 48 hours later.)

There’s simply no precedent in any other major sport for the results of a game that has already started to be completely thrown out simply because of weather conditions. The solution is simple: any game stopped because of weather is suspended, and will be resumed from that point, whether it’s in the fourth inning or the eighth inning.

Instead, we have a ridiculous double standard, whereby a game that goes 3 ½ innings is thrown out completely, but a game that goes 4 ½ innings is considered completed. We have a situation where the umpires are incentivized to let yesterday’s game start even though no one thought the weather would hold up for nine innings – the hope was that they could get just enough of a game in to declare it “regulation”.

You have a situation where Ned Yost is asked to be a meteorologist as well as a maanger, and put his best starter so far this season on the mound in the hopes that he can steal a five-inning game. If the weather had held off another 20 minutes, it would have been a brilliant move. Instead, the Royals got an excellent start from an excellent starter – and it was all for naught. Worse than that, it’s as if it never happened.

It does raise the question of why, given that everyone knew the snowpocalypse was about to hit Kauffman Stadium, the game couldn’t have been started an hour or even 30 minutes early. Sure, it would have meant that some fans would have showed up at gametime and found that they had missed two innings. But is that any less fan-friendly than making fans sit through miserable weather, then through a miserable rain-delay, to find out that the game they attended never actually happened in the first place?

One of these days, Major League Baseball will recognize how stupid and antiquated their rules are regarding rain delays, and will change them. In the meantime, we’ll have to put up with the ridiculousness that we saw yesterday afternoon.

On to your questions:

Bob Long (@BobLeeLong): Am I wrong to be excited about this Royals team?

Not at all. They’re 15-10, they’ve outscored their opponents by 15 runs, they went on a roadtrip against three teams whose records are 17-11, 20-8, and 16-11, and finished 4-3. The Royals have displayed many of the hallmarks of a winning team.

But if you’re excited about this Royals team now, you probably should have been excited by this Royals team before the season began. I predicted them for 86 wins and second place, and so far they’ve played to those expectations. Their pitching has been better than I expected; their offense has been worse. They have yet to suffer an injury or make a single roster change other than bringing up Will Smith to start in a doubleheader.

Even so, they’re now behind the Tigers by a half-game, and a half-game up on the A’s and Orioles for the second wild-card spot. So by all means, be excited, because this is probably the Royals’ best team in the last 19 years. But temper your excitement with the acknowledgment that even if this IS the Royals’ best team in the last 19 years, they still might not be playoff-bound.

AJ Exner (@AJExner): Do you think there are any other teams in the division (besides Detroit) that we should really worry about?

Well, let’s look one by one:

- The Twins are hanging in there at 12-13, but I can’t take their playoff aspirations seriously. They lost 96 games last year, which is close to the record for most losses by a team that reached the playoffs the following season. (The 1991 Braves, 2008 Rays, and 2011 Diamondbacks all went to the playoffs a year after losing 97 games.)

The Braves and Rays, in particular, radically changed their rosters in the interim off-season. The Twins, though, are basically the same team they always are – trying to build an offense around Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau, and trying to build a pitching staff out of guys who can’t strike anyone out. Put it this way: the Twins don’t have a single pitcher on their roster with 18 strikeouts. The Royals have two relievers – Holland and Herrera – with 18 strikeouts. The Twins are dead last in the AL in Ks, and first in the league in fewest walks allowed, just the way they like it. Color me skeptical that it’s going to work out for them this year.

And after years of waiting for time and a chronic neglect of their farm system, this looks to me like the year the White Sox finally pay for their sins. They’re dead last in the league in runs scored. Adam Dunn is hitting .147. Paul Konerko is 37 years old and is hitting .227/.287/.392. They’ve fooled us before, in large part because they’re better than anyone at keeping pitchers healthy, but aside from Sale and Peavy it’s not clear they have any starters worth keeping healthy. And Gavin Floyd’s about to have Tommy John surgery. They could still get back in the race, but I think it’s an uphill battle for them.

That leaves the Indians, and…don’t sleep on the Indians. They went into tonight’s game hitting .270/.336/.463, leading the league in slugging. Carlos Santana is having his long-awaited breakout year. Assuming Jason Kipnis and Lonnie Chisenhall get their bats going, there really isn’t a weak spot in their lineup. If their rotation can just be halfway decent, they could win 85-90 games.

So it’s still a three-team race for now. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it stays that way well into the summer.

Bryan Larson (@jbryanlarson): Does playing Elliot Johnson in three straight games signal a Gio recall? Should it?

It doesn’t signal a recall, but it does raise some questions. Chris Getz isn’t answering them by hitting .227/.250/.364 so far. Yost can make all the excuses he wants about how he started Johnson again at second base on Thursday because Johnson was on a hot streak, but let’s be real – if Getz is doing his job, he doesn’t sit on the bench because a utility guy hit a homer the day before.

I don’t think the Royals are prepared to bring up Giavotella yet. But he is hitting his usual .323/.391/.479 for Omaha, and Getz has an option left. I imagine that if Getz doesn’t pick up his bat significantly by the end of the month, the Royals might make a move. Having one of your best hitters in the leadoff spot in Alex Gordon makes the ability of the #9 hitter to get on base that much more important. If Getz can’t even do that part of his job well, an upgrade will be in order.

Aaron Bryant, Esq. (@aaronjbryant): What would you give up for Giancarlo Stanton mid-season?

Still too soon, guys. Especially since Stanton pulled his hamstring badly and is out indefinitely. It’s fun to think about, though.

Andrew Sutherlin (@Cptndeez): David DeJesus is hitting .282/.351/.541…solid defense despite a weak arm…he’s better than Frenchy…a cheap trade target?

Assuming the Royals don’t break the bank for Stanton, DeJesus actually makes a shocking amount of sense. He’s a free agent at the end of the year, he doesn’t make a ton of money ($4.25 million), and the Cubs are pretty clearly playing for the future. On top of that, DeJesus has a $6.5 million club option for next year. He’s 33, an age where a player of his caliber tends to decline quickly, but he’s shown no sign of it so far, hitting .282/.351/.541.

DeJesus would make a fantastic platoon partner for Francoeur, getting most of the at-bats as the left-handed part of that platoon. And assuming he plays well, he could be the everyday rightfielder again next year on a one-year contract, making him the perfect bridge to Jorge Bonifacio, who if all goes right could be ready by the end of 2014.

Obviously, he has a history in KC and would be welcomed back warmly, and I think Royals fans would appreciate his skill set more than most teams. DeJesus is highly underrated because he doesn’t do anything really well, but he doesn’t do anything poorly either. If he continues to hit this well, he’d be pricey but not prohibitively so. It’s something to keep an eye on if Francoeur doesn’t start hitting.

Kevin Flanagan (@Kevin_Flanagan): What’s wrong with Wade Davis? I thought he was going to step on the gas? His velo is down 2 mph. His line drive rate is 33%. Yikes.

After two shutout starts in a row, Davis was beyond terrible in his last two starts. When you give up more baserunners (27) than you record outs (25) over a two-start stretch, you’ve sucked.

Overall, he has a 5.55 ERA, but his BABIP is .425, which suggests a rather heaping dose of bad luck. His velocity is certainly down from last year, when he was a reliever, but it corresponds pretty well to how hard he was throwing in April of 2011, his last year as a starter.

I don’t think we’ve seen enough of Davis to render any kind of judgment on him yet. He’s on a new team, in a new role, he’s been brilliant and awful already this year…he needs 15 or 20 starts before the Royals have a good handle on what he is. They have a lot riding on him staying in the rotation – if he does, they control him for five years, but if he has to move back to the bullpen, his options are almost worthless. (His options start at $7 million in 2015 and go up from there, and you don’t want to pay $7 million for any but the best relievers. And in the case of Joakim Soria, sometimes not even then.)

So unless he absolutely gets his ass handed to him, Davis is probably going to stay in the rotation at least through the end of June. That will give the Royals more time to make a decision, and that will also give the Royals time to come up with a superior alternative in the form of Danny Duffy, who should be ready by then.