Northwest Arkansas.

If you’re wondering why I’m focusing so much on the farm system to the exclusion of the major league team, here’s why.

On Monday night, after the Royals had lost an excruciating game to the Nationals, 2-1, despite out-hitting Washington 11-4, here’s what Ned Yost had to say:

“That doesn't shut down your [running] game when a catcher throws well,” Royals manager Ned Yost said. “You’ve still got to try and score runs when you're not doing much at the plate.”

This makes perfect sense, except that the Royals converted 11 hits into just 1 run in large part because of their running game, which contributed two caught stealings (and a runner picked off – from second base!) and no steals. The opposing catcher, Ivan Rodriguez, just happens to be one of the greatest-throwing catchers in baseball history. To use Yost’s words, when a catcher throws well you absolutely SHOULD shut down your running game.

And as for “not doing much at the plate” – the Royals had 11 hits in the game, despite giving away five outs – the three above and two sac bunts. They actually batted .333 in the game. Sometimes, doing nothing is the best thing a manager can do. For some managers, it’s also the hardest thing.

And then, after Wednesday’s 1-0 win against the Mighty Strasburg, Yost explained why he was so reluctant to use Joakim Soria outside of save situations on the road:

“If you use your closer on the road in the eighth inning when you’re behind,” Yost said, “to me, that says you’re giving up. It’s much easier to use him (in those situations) at home.”

Yes, yes, of course. Nothing says “I give up” quite like PUTTING YOUR BEST PITCHER IN THE GAME.

So this is why I’m studiously attempting to avoid discussion of the major-league team, and I apologize for falling off the wagon there for a moment. I like Ned Yost; I want to keep liking him. The best way for me to do that at the moment is to ignore him.

Which brings us to Northwest Arkansas, and thankfully, we’ve found the mother lode. The prospect train which Dayton Moore assembled in rookie ball three years ago has since passed through Burlington and Wilmington, and has pulled into Wal-Mart country. The Naturals ran away with the division early, clinching the first-half playoff spot with a 42-28 record that was the best in the Texas League.

Mike Moustakas and Michael Montgomery, whom we’ve already discussed, headline the prospects. It bears mentioning that Montgomery, who missed a few weeks with some elbow soreness, came back and pitched well on a strict 55-pitch count…and then went back on the DL with more elbow soreness. The Royals are adamant that his elbow tenderness is very typical, his MRI is clean, and they are just being cautious with their most prized arm. We all hope that is the case, but it’s never a good sign when someone goes back on the DL just hours after they came off of it. I’m not scared, but I am a little worried.

Moustakas, meanwhile, just keeps mashing the ball – he’s already surpassed his homer total from last season, and is hitting a ridiculous .350/.417/.701. He has to be considered one of the front-runners for Minor League Player of the Year honors, however meaningless that award might be. (Alex Gordon won the award in 2006.)

The only other first-round pick on the roster is Aaron Crow, and there’s no way to sugarcoat it: Crow has been a huge disappointment this season, almost certainly the most disappointing player in the system. He looked strong in spring training, to the point where there were rumors the Royals were considering breaking camp with him in the majors (much as the Reds did with Mike Leake, who the Royals were hoping would fall to them in the draft.) Crow went to Double-A instead, and was expected to shine, if not dominate.

Instead, he’s been taken out behind the woodshed, and if anything the beatings just keep getting worse. Crow had a 3.94 ERA in April, a 5.97 ERA in May, and has an 11.66 ERA in June, having allowed 28 runs in his last 18.2 innings. His strikeout-to-walk ratio is 53 to 40, which is pretty lousy; he’s also given up 94 hits in 79 innings.

The one saving grace to Crow’s record is that he’s getting groundballs in bunches. According to minorleaguebaseball.com, his G/F ratio is 3.37, and his last start was the first one of the season in which he didn’t get at least twice as many outs on the ground as in the air. That’s a sign that his sinker is working, at least, even if nothing else is. The sinker hasn’t kept him from giving up 9 homers already, although at least he’s trending well in that department, as 5 of those came in April.

When he was drafted, it was almost too easy to compare Crow to Luke Hochevar, as both of them failed to sign as college juniors, then both signed with the Fort Worth Cats in the independent American Association, then both were drafted by the Royals in the first round. But today the comparison between the two is even more striking. Like Crow, Hochevar started his first pro season in Double-A and was expected to dominate, and like Crow he struggled much more than was expected. Compare their numbers:

Crow: 6.27 ERA, 79 IP, 94 H, 40 BB, 53 K, 9 HR

Hochevar: 4.69 ERA, 94 IP, 110 H, 26 BB, 94 K, 13 HR

Hochevar pitched better, particular in terms of commanding the strike zone. But his numbers were not what you’d expect from the #1 overall pick. Like Crow, he gave up a lot of homers despite being a fierce groundball pitcher.

So I do think there may be something to the notion that after pitching hardly at all for 18 months, it may be too much to expect even a top pitching prospect to go to Double-A and dominate. Hochevar was moved up to Omaha in July and pitched about the same – a high ERA masking some decent peripherals. But the following year he was excellent in three Triple-A starts before arriving in the majors.

I think it’s fair to call Aaron Crow a poor man’s Hochevar, with all the loaded meaning that implies. Hochevar has been infuriatingly inconsistent, but also undeniably talented. I think Crow may be fated to be the same way – not a complete bust as a pitcher, but someone whose results will lag behind his stuff. I think Hochevar is close to closing the gap – or he was before he went on the DL – and I hope that Crow one day will as well. But that day is still far off. For now, I will be happy if he simply pitches better in the second half than he did in the first half, and genuinely earns a promotion to Omaha for 2011.

J.J. Picollo on Crow’s struggles (remember, this conversation happened 3 weeks ago): He’s trying to be fine – he’s not good with his first-pitch strike efficiency…too fine with his two-seamer, which batters are laying off of, meaning he can’t use his slider and changeup…in spring training the team thought he might be ready by June…trying to get him to throw more four-seamers on his first pitch…they’ve learned from handling Hochevar not to rush him.

If Crow really has lost his spot on the list of the team’s top prospects, you don’t have to look far to find someone to replace him. Out in center field, Derrick Robinson has been a revelation.

Robinson was a fourth-round pick in 2006, who got $850,000 – second-round money – to sign. He was a pure tools play; he was arguably the fastest player in the draft that year, and the Royals were betting they could teach him to hit. They decided to double-down by teaching him to switch-hit at the same time. For the first three-plus seasons of his pro career, it looked like a bad gamble. Robinson hit .245/.316/.322 with no homers in his first season at Wilmington in 2008, and when he was given a second chance at the same level in 2009, he hit even worse, and his plate discipline deteriorated.

Until the end of July, when in desperation – the Royals were considering giving up on the switch-hitting experiment and letting him bat right-handed full-time – Robinson asked if he could change his batting stance from the left side, standing more upright at the plate. He hit .311/.362/.513 in August, with five homers, after hitting just three in his entire pro career to that point. His overall line (.239/.290/.324) was still worse than the year before, but at least you could dream on him a little.

The dream is starting to take shape this season. As my friend Kevin Goldstein loves to say, “always bet on tools”, and at age 22, Robinson’s tools are finally shaping into skills. Despite making the biggest jump in the minors, the one to Double-A, Robinson started the season looking like a completely different player. In April, he hit .324. He drew 12 walks in 19 games and had a .427 OBP. After years of hitting better from his natural right side, he hit better left-handed, a strong sign that his new batting stance made the difference. Now that he was getting on base, he was free to use his game-changing speed even more. He had stolen over 60 bases in both 2008 and 2009, remarkable given his low OBP. This April, alone he stole 15 bases.

He couldn’t keep it up, and didn’t, going into a prolonged slump in early May. But to his credit, he got hot again, and for the month of May hit .286 with a .374 OBP. He slumped terribly a few weeks ago, but is starting to pick it up again, going 10-for-his last-35. For the season, he’s hitting a very respectable .292/.362/.375. Those numbers look a lot better when you consider 1) he’s still only 22; 2) he already has 30 stolen bases in 42 attempts; 3) his speed gives him Gold Glove potential in center field – one of his catches made ESPN’s SportsNation show last month.

I do believe the Royals need to take it slow with him. After drawing 12 walks in April and 15 in May, he’s walked just twice in June, taking his OBP down with it. His power surge last August hasn’t been replicated – he’s still waiting on his first homer of the season. If he can hit .290 in the majors and take his walks, he can be an offensive force even without power – but if he can’t hit for power even in the minors, there’s the risk that pitchers in the majors will just pound the strike zone and turn him into Jason Tyner or something. The Royals have made comments hinting that they want to take it slow with Robinson, and I agree.

A more flattering comparison for Robinson is Denard Span. Span was a first-round pick of the Twins in 2002, and while he hit better than Robinson in the low minors his numbers were disappointing all the way to Double-A. In 2006, at the same age Robinson is now, Span hit just .285/.340/.349 in Double-A with just 2 homers (a career high!)

And like Robinson, Span’s bat came around after he went back to an old batting stance, as detailed in this interview he gave to Dave Laurila. The Twins continued to take it slow with Span. He spent a full year in Triple-A at age 23 and hit just .267/.323/.355. He returned to Triple-A the following year and the light bulb went on; he hit .340/.434/.481 and was promoted to the majors, and has been an outstanding player since, with high OBPs, good speed, and very good defense more than overcoming his lack of power.

Robinson might be slightly ahead of where Span was at the same age, but I still think he’ll be well served with a full year in Double-A this season, and at least a half-season in Omaha next year before we can think about him patrolling center field in Kansas City. But a year ago at this time, the idea of Robinson making it to the majors at all was a pipe dream. Suddenly, the Royals might have their center fielder of the future. We just may need to look a little farther into the future for this one.

Picollo on the keys to Robinson’s success: It’s a matter of confidence…he has the confidence to get deeper into counts, leading to more walks and two-strike hits. Rusty Kuntz watched him a lot and saw a much more confident approach at the plate in addition to the change in his stance.

The other high-profile prospect on the roster is Johnny Giavotella, the team’s second-round pick in 2008. Giavotella is your classic scrappy 5’8” second baseman, and it said a lot about him that the Royals were willing to spend a high second-rounder on a college player with his profile. He struggled some in Wilmington last year, hitting .258/.351/.380 with sub-par defense, but it was a tough place to hit and he was still young; he was my sleeper pick before the season.

He has played better this year; not a lot better, but better. Giavotella is hitting .283/.365/.375, with as many walks (34) as strikeouts, and while he’ll never be a Gold Glove threat, I’ve heard fewer complaints about his defense this year. Like Robinson he may never hit for power, but he at least has 16 doubles so far this season to keep pitchers honest. The Royals, like every team, were presumably trying to find the new Dustin Pedroia when they took him, but I still think he’s gunning to be the poor man’s Chuck Knoblauch.

A prospect with his profile is in a tough spot, because if he doesn’t hit well enough to play every day in the majors, he doesn’t have the glove to be a utility player because he can’t handle shortstop. Either he’ll be an offensive-minded second baseman, or he’ll be a Quadruple-A player for the next decade. He turns 23 in a few weeks, so he still has time to take one big step forward with the bat. He needs to. Alternatively, given the plethora of second-base options the Royals already have in the majors and the minors, Giavotella would make excellent trade bait.

No other hitter on the roster has the kind of prospect cache that Moustakas, Robinson, and Giavotella do, but that’s not to say there aren’t any other future major leaguers on the team.

Catcher Manny Pina, one half of the haul the Royals got for the lightning arm and loosely-screwed-on head of Danny Gutierrez, looks like a long-time major-league backup at worst. Last year, in the Rangers’ organization, Pina spent the whole year in the Texas League and hit .259/.313/.393. This year his ability to hit for average hasn’t improved – he’s batting .268 – but his secondary skills have. After hitting 8 homers all of last season, he already has 6 this year, and is slugging average (.444) is 50 points higher. And after striking out more than three times as often as he walked in 2009, he has more than doubled his walk rate while cutting his whiffs by 30%, and in 142 at-bats has both 18 walks and 18 strikeouts, leading to a .350 OBP.

Pina came into the organization as a defense-first catcher, making his offensive improvement even more enticing. He just turned 23, and with the Royals’ clear reluctance to use Brayan Pena as anything more than window dressing, Pina has a chance to back up Jason Kendall as soon as next season. Or, if we’re lucky, Kendall can back him up instead.

Other hitters of note:

Clint Robinson, a former 25th-round pick who’s done nothing but hit as a pro, and is batting .301/.389/.548 as Moustakas’ wingman. He’s also a 25-year-old first baseman, and a bench role as a pinch-hitter/defensive replacement at first base might be his upside. But hey, it worked for Ross Gload.

Tim Smith, the other half of the Gutierrez deal, is a 24-year-old outfielder who’s hit .300 at almost every stop, and is doing it once again at .303/.391/.454. He looks like a Shane Costa-ish tweener to me, but I could be proven wrong. Like Pina, his K/BB ratio has completely turned around; he’s drawn more walks than strikeouts after striking out almost twice as often as he walked last year. Double-A hitting coach Terry Bradshaw has an excellent reputation, and for good reason.

Paulo Orlando, a 24-year-old Brazilian native who astute Royals fans will remember as the player we got from the White Sox for Horacio Ramirez – the first time, when the Royals picked him off of waivers and he was good, as opposed to the second time, when he was re-signed for $2 million and sucked raw eggs. Orlando struggled in Wilmington for all of last season, but like a hundred other guys, he was so happy to leave Frawley Stadium that his bat has come alive, as he’s hitting .316/.382/.468. He’s got a good defensive reputation, and has fourth outfielder possibilities.

With all due respect to you Nick Van Stratten and Anthony Seratelli fans, that probably exhausts the list of hitting prospects. Still, on any given night the Naturals can start a lineup where 7 of the 9 batters might wind up spending a lot of time in the major leagues.

The rotation, behind Montgomery and Crow, is a bit shy on prospects. The outlier here is Edgar Osuna, who the Royals took in the Rule 5 draft from Atlanta, and who the Braves refused to spend the measly sum of $25,000 to re-acquire when Osuna didn’t make the Royals’ roster.

Given how little regard the Braves had for him, you wouldn’t expect anything from Osuna, but he has pitched insanely well this season, making the Texas League All-Star Team (along with 8 of his teammates.) The key for him has been, in a word, control. Last year he had good control, walking 35 men in 150 innings between A-ball and Double-A. This year, his control has been insane; he’s walked just nine batters in 80 innings. His other numbers have been pretty average – 55 strikeouts, 79 hits, 8 homers. But you walk one batter per nine innings, and you can thrive even if you’re average in all other respects.

The scouts aren’t buying it. Osuna’s fastball, I believe, runs between 85 and 88; he’s got a slow curveball that gives minor leaguers fits but major league hitters will spit at. His changeup is a genuine major league pitch, but it’s not enough to be successful, even for a lefty. At some point, his performance demands a promotion, at least to Triple-A. The mere fact that the Braves refused to take him back does not guarantee that he’s a nobody; the Dodgers famously declined to take Shane Victorino back from the Phillies after the 2004 season. Still, anything we get out of Osuna at the major-league level is gravy.

Finally, there’s the bullpen, where the Naturals have no less than three relievers with serious major-league possibilities. Well, they had three, until Blaine Hardy went on a run-ger strike, and threatened not to give up another run until his demand to be promoted to Omaha was met. (Horrible pun, I know.) After allowing two runs in his first outing of the year, Hardy didn’t allow another in his next 11 appearances, covering 24 innings, before joining the O-Royals’ bullpen at the end of May.

Hardy, a left-hander, was a 22nd-round pick just two years ago, out of legendary NAIA school Lewis-Clark State in Idaho. He proved to be a find right away, giving up less than a baserunner per inning for Burlington in the Midwest League last year. Still, no one expected this: despite jumping two levels to Double-A, he allowed just 11 hits in 26 innings (!) before his promotion, and he’s been nearly as effective in Omaha. For the year, he’s allowed just 22 hits in 43 innings with a 1.27 ERA. He has just 31 strikeouts against 12 walks, although his strikeout rate is better than it looks, simply because he’s been so stingy with the hit that he hasn’t had as many strikeout opportunities as you’d expect.

Hardy isn’t overpowering, but he throws around 90 and changes speeds well, works both sides of the plate, and doesn’t show a pronounced platoon split. The Royals have made due with Dusty Hughes as their sole left-handed reliever for most of the season, but pretty soon they’ll have a legitimate weapon in that role.

The second lefty in the Naturals’ pen, Brandon Sisk, is a prospect in his own right. Sisk was signed out of an independent league in 2008. As you’d expect from an undrafted left-hander, his fastball is marginal, but according to Picollo “he has excellent deception” in his delivery. He opened eyes last season by allowing just 30 hits in 61 innings in Wilmington. Now pitching in a more neutral ballpark, he’s allowed 39 hits and 15 walks in 40 innings, with 38 strikeouts. Sisk is a lefty specialist at best, but that’s still quite a find from the indy leagues.

The third prospect reliever, Louis Coleman, was the ace of LSU’s College World Series champion team last season, but also came in out of the bullpen to secure the final out of the championship. The Royals got him in the fifth round because his low arm slot meant that he didn’t project as a starter. So the Royals made him a reliever full-time, and he’s been excellent from day one. He reached Wilmington after signing last season and was very effective there, and hasn’t missed a beat for the Naturals in 2010.

In 48 innings he’s allowed just 31 hits and 14 walks, and struck out 52. Those are outstanding numbers across the board, but a word of caution: as you’d expect from someone with a low arm slot, he has a big platoon differential. Lefties are hitting .257 against him this year, while right-handed hitters are batting just .124. His walk and homer rates are pretty similar from each side, but still, that’s a sizeable difference which limits his effectiveness.

In the modern bullpen, where 7 relievers are standard and most teams carry one if not two LOOGYs (Left-handed One Out GuYs), there’s a place for a ROOGY like Coleman. If Yost spots him correctly, Coleman should be a useful piece of the puzzle as soon as next April.

Picollo on the Naturals’ relievers: Hardy is ahead of the other guys simply because he throws the most strikes…throws 89-90 but touches 93…good changeup, curveball is inconsistent. Coleman has a low three-quarters delivery and throws across his body, also quite deceptive…he doesn’t throw a four-seamer which is unusual for a bullpen guy…his velocity is down to 89-90 after sitting at 92-93 last year, but he’s still getting results.

So to sum up: the Naturals have one Grade A stud hitter (Moustakas), one potential above-average center fielder (Robinson), a potential everyday second baseman (Giavotella), a borderline starter/excellent backup catcher (Pina), three role players (Smith, Robinson, Orlando), a Grade A left-handed starter (Montgomery), an enigmatic right-hander who still has top-shelf stuff (Crow), a Jamie Moyer Scratch-Off Lottery Ticket (Osuna), and three potential long-term relievers (Hardy, Sisk, Coleman).

That’s an impressive collection of talent on one team. There have been years where the Royals didn’t have this many quality prospects in the entire organization. And we’re likely to see more prospects pass through Northwest Arkansas before the year is out. While Hardy has moved to Omaha, his place in the bullpen has been taken by Patrick Keating, a 25th-round find last year who I’ll talk about in the Wilmington piece. There’s a good chance we’ll see Eric Hosmer here before the year is out, and now that he appears to be signed it’s possible Christian Colon might reach Double-A this year. Danny Duffy will probably make his Double-A debut in about a month. A late-season appearance by Chris Dwyer or even John Lamb isn’t out of the question.

Put it all together, and a very strong case can be made that the 2010 Northwest Arkansas Naturals has the greatest collection of future major league talent of any Royals’ farm team in history. But that’s an article for another day.

Father's Day.

Baseball, they say, is a game for fathers and sons. I don’t doubt that they are right; I’ve seen Field of Dreams, after all. But baseball is not the only thing that binds fathers and sons together. My father wouldn’t know a double from a double play, but I would be neither the man nor the writer I am today without him. So today, on Father’s Day, I hope you’ll indulge me as I tell you a little about my dad.

Nabil Jazayerli was born in Damascus, Syria in 1944. He grew up in a middle-class family, although “middle-class” meant something entirely different in the Middle East in the 1950s than it does in 21st-century America. My grandfather, Muhammad Yunus Jazayerli, owned a factory that produced liquid nitrogen, which was then sold to a variety of companies that needed the stuff for industrial purposes. In America this would have made my grandfather a wealthy man; in Syria, it meant that he had the ability to provide for his family, and eventually buy his house instead of renting it, but it was a path to self-sufficiency, not a yellow brick road.

My father did well in school, as much by necessity as by choice. In Syria, as in most countries outside the western world – then and now – your career path is decided by the time you graduate high school. Every high school senior in the country takes a standardized exam (the Baccalaureate) and your composite score on the exam determines where you stand in line when it comes to picking your college. Or to put it more bluntly, it determined whether you were accepted to medical school. There were about 90 slots in the University of Damascus’ medical school, and that meant that the top 90 high school seniors in the country got the opportunity to become doctors. The 91st-best senior got the shaft. It’s not like anyone was in a position to turn down the opportunity to become a physician. Medicine wasn’t simply a noble and well-compensated profession – it was the noble and well-compensated profession.

While my father was in high school, my grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer. Told by the doctor that his disease was caused by the cigarettes he had been smoking in ignorant bliss for decades, he threw away his stash and never lit up again. He would have a lung removed, and managed to survive seven more years in progressively deteriorating health before he passed away. The official cause of death was his cancer, along with heart failure, but a contributing cause of his death was Ba’athitis.

It’s almost impossible to believe today, but in the 1950s, Syria was a functioning democracy. The president was elected – fairly – and served for a period of time before his term expired. Judges had immense power to apply and enforce the law. People enjoyed civil rights like freedom of speech and political expression.

One of the groups that took advantage of the latter was the Ba’ath party, a group of disaffected socialists who railed against the perceived injustices of government. This group gradually gained control of key positions within the army, and in 1963 they struck. A coup d’état was successful, and the Ba’athists soon set out to bring to the masses all the injustices that they had claimed to be fighting against.

One of the Ba’athists’ first targets was the bourgeois middle class, who had the chutzpah to conduct business with the intention of making a profit. In January, 1965 the government began “nationalizing” private businesses, “nationalizing” being a euphemism for “nice business you’ve built – we’ll take it!”

They came for my grandfather’s factory in the middle of the night. They were let in by the night security guard, a member of the Ba’ath party. My father was preparing to head to class the next morning when some of the factory employees rushed to the family’s house to tell them what had happened. It was common knowledge by that point that once the government had taken over your business, your best move was to just stay away. More than one businessman had made the mistake of going to his office to try and reason with his occupiers, and had suffered a savage beating for his impertinence.

My father had the unhappy duty to inform my grandfather of the news. He found Muhammad Yunus sitting on his bed, putting on his shoes.

“I don’t think you should go to work today,” was all my father could say.

My grandfather looked up at him, and immediately understood. “They’ve taken the factory, haven’t they?” My father could only muster a nod.

“Very well,” my grandfather said, and started removing his shoes. He then lay down in his bed and went back to sleep.

My grandfather did not last long after that. Neither would the factory; the Ba’ath party put the security guard in charge of the factory, which is a bit like giving the general manager’s job to a peanut vendor. (Don’t get any ideas, Mr. Glass.) Within six months the factory ceased to function, as every machine in the place had broken down.

At home, my father – barely out of his teens – had a mother, a sick father, and three younger sisters to provide for, and suddenly there was no source of income. My father had only one option open to him – the government, committed to its socialist principles, continued to provide free tuition for all medical students, and moreover they provided a small stipend to students who were in the top 25% of their class. If my dad was to continue in medical school, he simply had to find a way to rank at the top of his class.

So he did. When he wasn’t in class, he had a textbook in his hand. His neighbors would later tell me that when they woke up at dawn, they’d see my father sitting on the family porch, book in hand; when they went to bed at night, they’d still see him sitting there, studying under a fluorescent light.

By the time he finished medical school in the summer of 1970, my father had a wife and a 10-month-old daughter to take care of in addition to his sisters and widowed mother. All he had in his pocket was a medical degree, a plane ticket, and a contract to begin his medical residency in a distant land called Michigan.

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Growing up in the late 70s and early 80s, I was blissfully unaware of all of this. I was born in June, 1975, in the suburban Detroit hospital my father trained at; two weeks later my dad completed his Cardiology fellowship, packed up the family, and drove to his new job in Wichita. Like most of his classmates who journeyed with him, my dad never originally intended to stay in America forever, not when his family was back in Syria, not when his mother country was in desperate need of well-trained physicians. Their goal all along was to stay in America just long enough to save up enough money to live comfortably back home. That was why they accepted jobs in small towns like Wichita and Appleton, Wisconsin and Moline, Illinois. Save as much money as you can for a few years, and get out.

Sociologists speak of “the myth of return” – the notion intrinsic to immigrant communities that one day they will return home, no matter how unrealistic that return might be. It’s a dangerous myth, because so long as they expect to return, there’s no incentive for them to integrate themselves into their new society.

For my dad and his classmates, the myth died quickly. My dad visited Syria in 1977, planning to scope out a possible return. He found a country in the grip of a socialist, totalitarian government, with an economy in much worse shape than when he left in 1970. A country where money was scarce, electricity was rationed, and where the greatest ambition for the best and brightest students was to study and move abroad like he had already done. In that moment, my dad realized he was an American. “I could have gone back and lived comfortably,” my dad would later tell us. “But there was no way I could let you kids grow up in a country without a future.”

I’ve long tried to imagine what it would be like for me to move in my mid-twenties to a country on the other side of the world, where I barely spoke the language, where the only people I knew were the few friends who came with me, and then create a life there, knowing that my children would grow up completely immersed in their new culture, without any memory or connection to the one I grew up in. It’s hard enough for me to imagine changing my allegiances towards a freaking baseball team. Embracing a new country? I could never do it. My parents did.

My parents threw themselves whole-heartedly into the new life they had chosen for themselves. Whether it was the PTA or the hospital’s medical establishment or the local tennis club, my parents attached as many strands as possible to the web that made up Wichita society. Before I ever identified myself as a Muslim or as someone of Arab descent, I knew myself as an American. And I never knew that I was supposed to find a dichotomy between those parallel identities. No one ever told me I couldn’t be both American and Muslim, because my parents wouldn’t let them.

Along with my two older sisters and younger brother, I lived an idyllic childhood growing up in Wichita. My brother and I manned a lemonade stand the summer I turned 6; my mom no doubt spent more money on powdered lemonade than we ever made selling it (10 cents a cup!) We watched Saturday morning cartoons like everyone else, until that exciting moment in 1982 when the USA Network started the USA Cartoon Express – cartoons on Sundays too!

I grew up reading A Cricket in Times Square and Henry Huggins and the Encyclopedia Brown books. When I was older I graduated to that uniquely American genre, science fiction, devouring the books of Isaac Asimov, who himself was the child of immigrant parents and whose name was also worth a lot of points in Scrabble.

My parents recognized my precociousness early and did their best to cultivate it. When I was 5 or 6 years old, I suddenly became obsessed with learning as much as I could about Americana, and with my parents’ help I sent away for information from the Chamber of Commerce of every big city in America. Soon my bedroom was filled with pamphlets and brochures about the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and the Liberty Bell Center in Philadelphia.

Soon thereafter I became a Weather Channel junkie – I’m guessing all the cool multi-colored maps were the thing – and would watch by myself for hours at a time. One of the shows invited viewers to submit their own weather questions to be read on the air. My parents not only helped me to submit my question, but when I was picked, they helped arrange for me to read my question live on the air. I was just 7 when I made my national media debut; I believe my question went something like this: “I understand that hurricane season runs from June to November. Has there ever been a hurricane outside of hurricane season?” Yes, I know: a scintillating question. I was 7. Leave me alone. (And if you want to know the answer – you know you’re just dying to find out – click here.)

The summer I turned 8, I was at a friend’s house and we were looking for something to do when his mother said, “why don’t you play that dragon game you just bought?” And so I entered the world of (Advanced) Dungeons & Dragons, which given my obsessive personality devoured a good chunk of my free time for the next seven years.

And, of course, there was baseball. I have no memory of George Brett’s white-hot summer of 1980, but I have no doubt that I owe my position today to the relevance of the Royals on the national scene throughout the late 70s and early 80s. My first baseball memory was of the Brewers blowing out the Cardinals in Game 1 of the 1982 World Series; then of Fred Lynn’s grand slam in the 1983 All-Star Game – even then I was an AL partisan. My first Royals memory is of a Royals-Yankees game I watched live on July 24th, 1983: the Pine Tar game.

My dad generally encouraged all of my interests, though he was decidedly lukewarm about my baseball obsession. Like any immigrant who owed his success in America to hard work, he was puzzled by America’s cultural obsession with sport. He had nothing against sports; he just didn’t understand how ordinary people might schedule their lives around them. For his oldest son, baseball was just a distraction from the ultimate goal of becoming a doctor as well.

Even so, in 1981 my father spent $50 to buy his numbers-crazed six-year-old a copy of the brand-new edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia, which ran a little over 2200 pages. It was my most-prized possession until I left for college a decade later.

When it became clear to my dad that my love for baseball was not a passing fad, even through college and medical school, many times he would say to me, “Son, I hope that one day you find your baseball in medicine.” I hope you find your life’s passion in your career.

My parents didn’t simply embrace America’s secular traditions, but even while holding fast to their own faith, they found a way to accommodate America’s religious ones as well. We had a Christmas tree like everyone else; we participated in Easter egg hunts like everyone else. The year I turned 13, my parents even sent me to Camp Kanakuk, a Christian summer camp tucked away in the Ozarks, for two weeks. This was 1988, before the Berlin Wall fell and when the Soviets were still our greatest enemy, so I was viewed with curiosity more than suspicion. “You’re a Muslim? Wow. I’ve never met one of you before.”

I didn’t see much of my father as a child; as a cardiologist building his practice, he was frequently on call and usually working late. But he made sure the times we spent together were special. My dad had grown up watching westerns and war movies in the cinemas of Damascus – before they were shut down – and loved nothing more than to watch a good World War II flick. And he made sure my brother and I watched them with him. Whether it was The Guns of Navarone or A Man Called Intrepid or The Longest Day, my dad would sit us down at night to watch. He’d let us stay up past our bedtime, and in return we’d do our best to comprehend what the hell was going on.

My dad enjoyed no movie quite as much as he enjoyed Ike: The War Years, a five-hour mini-series that came out in 1980, during the Golden Age of Mini-Series, with Robert Duvall in the starring role. I’ve only watched it, beginning to end, a couple dozen times. It’s been nearly twenty years since I’ve seen it, and I’m sure I could still recite half the lines by heart. Every other kid of my generation knew actor Paul Gleason as the malignant principal in The Breakfast Club. I knew him as Beetle, the genial aide to General Eisenhower.

Eisenhower was even more of a hero to my dad because he was a Republican. My dad, like most of his Syrian doctor friends, were proud Reagan Republicans, as you might expect from men who through sheer hard work had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps from a life of uncertainty in another country to become successful and wealthy physicians in America. They’ve all reluctantly been forced to become Democrats now, after the GOP made it clear that Muslims are no longer welcome in the party, but Dwight David Eisenhower still holds an exalted place with my father as one of our nation’s greatest presidents. Even better – he grew up in Kansas! More than once my dad would load my brother and I into the car and make the two-hour trek to Abilene to visit the Eisenhower Library and Museum.

In 1983, Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War would come to the small screen, and it was as if the mini-series was made for us. We watched it as a family – all 12 hours of it – at least once or twice a year through the end of the 1980s. You might know Ali McGraw from Love Story; I only know her from this.

At no time in all of this did it strike me as incongruous that my family would have such a passion for World War II movies, would identify so strongly with America’s struggle to defeat the Nazis. No one in my family served in the war, obviously; we had no personal connection to it. (“But I was born during the Battle of the Bulge,” my dad would remind me.) All that mattered was that we were American, and the war was an indelible part of American history. If our connection to this country debuted after 1945, what of it? We were part of a nation of immigrants; the exact year of immigration seemed a pointless detail.

My dad didn’t have time to volunteer with the Cub Scouts, but when I came to him asking for help to build a car for the Pinewood Derby, I saw a side of him I hadn’t seen before. He took me into the basement, opened a toolbox that I didn’t know existed, and in the span of an hour or two molded a block of wood and some plastic wheels into a sleek racing car. I was as astonished as any eight-year-old kid could be. I knew my father was smart, and hard-working, and respected, but until that moment I had no idea that he could be cool.

There was a lot that I would soon learn about my father, and his father, and his father’s father. I learned that my dad was so handy because he had grown up around my grandfather’s machine shop. I learned that my grandfather was a mechanical savant, who during World War II, when there was an acute shortage of metal parts, devised a method to repair a specific defect in Crossley diesel engines using only scrap metal. It was so ingenious that, after the war, representatives from the England-based company came to Damascus and asked him to show them what he had done. Afterwards, they sent him a thank-you letter, along with an offer to pay full tuition, room and board for his young son – my father – should he ever choose to study engineering in England.

I learned about my great-grandfather, Mahmoud, who was a soldier in the Ottoman army and spent nearly a decade in a Siberian prison camp before he was released during the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. I learned about my great-great-grandfather, also Muhammad Yunus, whose story needs its own blog post, and just might get it.

The more I learned about my family, the more I understood just what my parents had given up when they came to America. It was easy as a child to be oblivious to the sacrifices my parents had made, because my own life was so free of worries. It was only as a teenager that I realized that the ease with which I considered myself an American was a testament to just how hard my parents strove to do the same thing.

We all learned in our history textbooks about the great and glorious history of immigrants to our nation’s shores. I knew about Jamestown and the Pilgrims, about indentured servants and the slave trade, about refugees from the Irish potato famine in the 1840s and Jews escaping European anti-Semitism in the 1920s and 1930s. I knew that immigrants built this country, and I knew that each wave of immigrants had to conquer bigotry and racism before they could take their place on the tapestry of American life.

Maybe that’s why I never really felt like the child of immigrants myself. Immigrants are supposed to struggle before they, or more likely their grandchildren, found acceptance in America. I never had to struggle to be accepted. I knew I was different, but then in America we’re all different, aren’t we? That’s why I thank God every day that I was born in America, where more than anywhere else in the world – and today even more than in the past – a child of immigrant parents can be accepted right away as an equal member of society, where no opportunities are denied us, where no dream is too big to dream.

And I thank God for the sacrifices my parents made to come here, because it was their willingness to share the same dreams and endure the same hardships as the generations of immigrants before them that made my life possible. A Boeing 747 may have been their crossing ship, and a terminal at Detroit Metropolitan Airport may have been their Ellis Island. But they were immigrants just the same. They suffered the heartache of leaving the only land they ever called home just the same.

My father is 65 now, and retires at the end of the month. (It’s his third retirement; once a doctor, always a doctor. I’m hoping this one sticks.) Even after 40 years, the pull of the homeland remains strong, and my parents plan to split their time between the States and Syria, where economically if not politically, things are headed in the right direction. Forty years ago he came to America with nothing; today, he retires to a life of comfort, having watched his children grow up to become two doctors, a lawyer, and an MBA. (Or as we call it, the Jazayerli HMO.)

Only in America. And only to someone that believed in, and worked for, the American Dream.

So today, on Father’s Day, I just want to say: thanks, Dad. (And Mom!) Thanks for making the impossible sacrifices that only a parent could make for their child. Thanks for putting up with the snotty, bratty, spoiled, selfish complaints of children who could not possibly comprehend, let alone appreciate, what you did for them. Thanks for giving me a guidepost as I try to figure out how to raise my own three children. Above all, thanks for giving us the one thing every parent wants to give their children: a better life than the one you grew up in.

And Dad: I’m not sure I ever found my baseball in medicine. But I did find my medicine in baseball.

Omaha.

The Royals have put together a Triple-A team that is sort of the standard blueprint for Triple-A teams in modern baseball: a team that is perhaps short on prospects, but long on solid replacement-level talent. There might not be any future All-Stars on this team, but there are a number of players who can be called up in a pinch and perform adequately in the majors.

Nowhere is this more true than in the rotation, where the Royals put together an all-veteran unit that included Gaby Hernandez, Anthony Lerew, Brian Bullington, Philip Humber, and (after his early-season beatdown with the Royals) Luis Mendoza. Bruce Chen has already jumped from Omaha’s rotation into Kansas City’s, and has pitched quite well in his second season following Tommy John surgery. And just yesterday, needing another rotation replacement after Luke Hochevar hit the DL, the Royals called up Lerew.

Lerew had pitched well in Omaha (2.84 ERA, 70 hits in 73 innings, 41/27 K/BB ratio, 3 homers) this season, after pitching well if not superbly for Northwest Arkansas last year. I’m generally fond of giving solid organizational soldiers like Lerew a call-up when the need arises, because in addition to the fact that they can earn more in a month in the majors than they will all season in the minors, it sends a message to the other minor leaguers in the organization that no matter whether you’re considered a legitimate prospect or not, good performances will be rewarded.

Lerew made the issue of whether his promotion was deserved or not a moot point, allowing just two runs in six innings while striking out seven. I’m not sure he showed us anything that we didn’t already know; he’s a Quadruple-A pitcher, and he got to face a Quadruple-A team in the Houston Astros, so his success wasn’t that surprising. Still, for a team that once had to send Eduardo Villacis to the mound at Yankee Stadium to make his first (and last) major league appearance, it’s nice to know that the Royals have hoarded a number of near-major-league-caliber starters just a phone call away.

Omaha’s bullpen has some legitimate prospects, although with Blake Wood now plying his craft in the majors, none of them are of potential game-changers. (And can we slow it down with the Blake-Wood-is-a-savior talk? In 17 innings in the majors, he has struck out five batters. Five. While his fastball has a lot of movement, it hasn’t translated into a lot of groundballs – his groundball percentage is just 44%, which is around league-average. His success so far is primarily the result of a very low line-drive percentage – just 13% – which is unsustainable. He’s a good sixth or seventh-inning option. Unless and until he starts missing bats, he’s not ready for the eighth.)

You all know how I feel about Chris Hayes, and he’s working his typical magic with homers and walks, but batters are hitting .337 against him, and there’s just no way to sugar-coat that. The Royals haven’t done him any favors by forcing him onto the DL with phantom injuries twice to clear up roster space, but ultimately he’s going to have to pitch better before I make his case again.

Victor Marte has also graduated to the majors, and while I’m skeptical of his long-term chances, I’ll happily admit that he’s pitched well so far. Other guys like Greg Holland and Federico Castaneda may have major-league futures as well. The big name in the bullpen is Blaine Hardy, but as he’s only been in Triple-A for a few weeks I’ll cover him with Northwest Arkansas.

On offense, the O-Royals have a similar blend of late-20s players who aren’t real prospects but have the ability to fill in as the need arises, as Wilson Betemit has shown the last two weeks. Third baseman Ed Lucas, a Dartmouth grad who’s hitting .324/.393/.486, is tempting me to adopt him Disco-style. Alas, he’s 28, and never hit remotely this well in the past.

The two legitimate prospects on the roster are both outfielders, and comparing how the Royals talk about the two lends some unfortunate insight into how the front office operates. David Lough came into the season as the #10 prospect in the organization per Baseball America, and in all fairness he’s been disappointing.

Last year, between Wilmington and Northwest Arkansas he hit .325, and when you hit .325 people will overlook your mid-range power and poor plate discipline. This year’s he’s hitting .276, which makes his weakness much more glaring. He doesn’t hit for a lot of pop (5 homers and just 7 doubles this season), and has drawn just 9 walks in 56 games. Put that in the statistical blender, and you wind up with a .307 OBP and a .414 SLG. Those numbers would disappoint in the majors even without the adjustment that he’ll experience coming up from Triple-A.

The Royals like him a lot, and have compared him to David DeJesus in the past. If only. DeJesus made it to Omaha when he was 23 and hit .298; the next year he hit .315 in Omaha and was called up for good in June. He drew a lot of walks (his OBP exceeded .400 each year) and hit for enough power to slug .470 and .518. Lough simply isn’t in DeJesus’ class as a hitter, and while he gets good marks for his ability to play the corner outfield, he isn’t in DeJesus’ class as a fielder either. He might be one day, but right now he’s the proverbial tweener.

The more intriguing prospect – to me, anyways – is Jordan Parraz, who was pilfered from the Astros two years ago for the dessicated remains of Tyler Lumsden’s left arm. Last year, in his first season with the organization, he hit .358 with a .451 OBP in the Texas League. This season, he’s hitting .260/.372/.397 in Omaha, which is better than it sounds. He’s overcome a hellacious start; after batting just .156 in April, he’s hit .323/.459/.472 since. Superficially, Parraz resembles Lough, in that they’re both corner outfielders whose power doesn’t profile at the position. But Parraz is as disciplined a hitter as Lough is free-swinging. Lough probably has better range, but Parraz has a cannon for an arm, plenty good enough for right field.

The Royals would probably get as much production from a Parraz/Lough platoon as they’ll get from Scott Podsednik this year, but that’s damning with faint praise. I don’t expect big things from either player, but I think that the team’s modest hopes for Lough might be better directed toward Parraz, who makes a fine bench option as a fourth outfielder who mashes left-handed pitching.

And finally, like most Triple-A teams the O-Royals have a couple of veteran sluggers manning the 3-4 slots in their lineups. Unfortunately, neither one is a real prospect, as both of them are 36 years old.

No, wait, that’s a typo. They’re both 26 years old. Hmmm.

Let’s look a little closer then. One of them has a .385 OBP and a .526 SLG, the other one has a .402 OBP and a .513 SLG. Very good numbers for Triple-A, but I worry that their bats might be a little short to man left field and first base in the majors.

Oh, sorry – another typo. The left fielder doesn’t have a .385 OBP – he has a…wait, what?

A .485 OBP? And a .626 SLG?

The first baseman has a .502 OBP? A .613 SLG?

As Cartman would say, “Da F@!k?”

I have tried my best to regain my usual optimism about the Royals this season, and the Royals have largely obliged with the performances of their minor leaguers. But then I look at what Alex Gordon has done to minor league pitchers since he was exiled to Omaha, and at what Kila Ka’aihue has done all season long, and I just throw up my hands and say, once again, that I have no earthly idea what the Royals are thinking.

In 1956, a 23-year-old first baseman named Dick Stuart hit 66 homers in the minor leagues, nearly breaking the all-time record for homers in a professional season. He would say later – I’m paraphrasing here – that if he had just hit 36 homers that season, he would have been taken seriously as one of the best power prospects in the minors and rushed through the farm system. But instead he hit 66, which was such a preposterous number that the Pirates simply didn’t know how to process it.

Stuart started the season in A-ball. He finished the season in A-ball. Sixty-six homers didn’t warrant a promotion. It would take two more years of homering every third game in the minors before he finally reached the majors in July of 1958 – and in 67 games for the Pirates he hit 16 homers and slugged .543.

I suspect – because I’m the charitable sort – that what’s going on with Gordon and Ka’aihue is something akin to Dick Stuart Syndrome. If they both were slugging around .500 and had OBPs close to .400, as I initially suggested they had, the Royals would intuitively understand that they were having excellent seasons. But frankly, their numbers are so off-the-charts good that I don’t think the Royals truly comprehend how ridiculous it is that they’re both stuck in Triple-A purgatory.

In Gordon and Ka’aihue, the Royals have two of the three highest slugging averages in Triple-A, and two of the three best OBPs in the entire freaking minor leagues. Yet they wait. And wait. And wait.

Gordon, obviously, is not a prospect. His extended trial with Omaha seems to be the product of some secret experiment the Royals are conducting on what happens when you send an established major-league hitter, in the prime of his career, to Triple-A. Look, I agree with the decision to move him to the outfield, as I think he was pressing a lot at third base, and I think it helped the team defensively at two positions. But there’s no law that states you have to learn how to play a new position in the minors. Ryan Braun, to bring up a player that’s all-too-frequently compared to Gordon, made the transition from third base to left field in the majors.

The Royals say that numbers aside, they’re still not thrilled with Gordon’s approach at the plate, and they still want to close a hole in his swing. They may have a point – despite his awesome numbers, Gordon has struck out 44 times in 163 at-bats in Omaha, a strikeout rate which is actually a tick higher than his major-league average. But here’s the thing: it strikes me as unreasonable to expect a player to make major adjustments to his swing WHEN HE’S HITTING THE BEJEEZUS OUT OF THE BALL. At some point, Gordon’s success may start to work against him. Some of the adjustments they want him to make can only be made against major-league pitching.

As for Ka’aihue, it’s not clear that the Royals have ever had faith in him. They didn’t have faith in him when he hit .314/.456/.628 two years ago, choosing to inflict Mike Jacobs on us again. They certainly didn’t have faith in him when he hit .252/.392/.433 in Omaha last year, declining even to give him a September callup. And while Ned Yost said some nice things about Ka’aihue shortly after he was hired – and right after he sent Ka’aihue down – it’s not entirely clear that the Royals are sold him on even now.

And to be perfectly fair, there are some non-Royal scouts who say the same thing, that his numbers are a product of beating up on inferior pitching. The thing is, there are also some non-Royal scouts who absolutely believe in the bat. There is no scouting consensus here. There is, however, a sabermetric consensus: the dude can mash.

The closest comp I can think of to Ka’aihue, in terms of a left-handed hitter in the minors who combined prodigious power and plate discipline but was not a favorite of the scouts, was Hee-Seop Choi. In 2002 the Korean slugger hit 25 homers and walked 95 times in Triple-A, and yet all we heard from scouts was that he had a hole in his swing.

The scouts were right, sort of. Choi hit .240/.349/.437 in the majors, nothing special for a first baseman, and was out of the majors for good after the 2005 season.

But here’s the thing. Aside from the fact that a line of .240/.349/.437 would approximate Jose Guillen’s product at DH for one-thirtieth the cost, the fact is that by letting Choi play in 2003, the Cubs were able to establish that he did have some value – enough so that they were able to trade him essentially straight up to the Marlins for Derrek Lee after the season. Yes, the Marlins were in the quadrennial fire-sale mode, but still, Choi was seen as a legitimate everyday player at the time. If the Cubs had buried him like the Royals have buried Ka’aihue, they would never have been able to establish any kind of value for him on the trade market.

And besides: in 2002, Choi hit just .287/.406/.513. Ka’aihue is hitting .335/.502/.613. Again, it’s Dick Stuart Syndrome. Maybe the Royals see Ka’aihue as another Choi – but they’re unable to process that he’s basically Choi plus FIFTY POINTS of batting average and ONE HUNDRED POINTS of OBP and SLG. His numbers are, literally, ridiculous. As in, they don’t make sense. And so the Royals simply ignore them.

I remain hopeful that the Royals really do understand that Gordon and Ka’aihue could step into the team’s lineup tomorrow and improve the team at two positions, and that they’re simply waiting to unload guys like Guillen and Podsednik onto other teams first. Whether they’re able to do that or not is a question that requires its own article. For now, it’s not unreasonable of the Royals to hope they can swing a trade. But the team’s excuses will pass with the trading deadline in six weeks. Come August 1st, both Gordon and Ka’aihue are in the Royals’ everyday lineup, or I’ll take back every nice thing I’ve said about this organization this year.

In their own way, the resurgences of Gordon and Ka’aihue this season are nearly as important as the steps forward taken by Mike Moustakas and Eric Hosmer. But if the Royals can’t see the low-hanging fruit just waiting to be plucked in Omaha, there’s no reason for us to have faith that they’ll be able to climb the prospect tree and harvest players that have yet to ripen in the future.

Royals Today: 6/14/2010

I’ll get back to my minor league review soon, but it’s been weeks since I discussed the happenings in the majors, so I felt I owed you all some updates.

- Thank God. Maybe Zack isn’t hurt after all.

I really had no reason to think he was, other than the fact that after pitching at an All-Star (if perhaps not Greinkesque) level for two months, only to be betrayed by his offense, defense, and bullpen, Greinke had only himself to blame in his last four starts. He gave up 19 runs in 20.1 innings, which is just as well, given that the Royals didn’t score a single run while he was in the game in any of those four starts.

But after the worst sustained streak of pitching from Greinke in two years (he gave up 21 runs in 24 innings over four starts in late May and early June, 2008), we had reason to be concerned. Maybe he was pressing, figuring he had to be perfect on every pitch given the lack of support from his teammates. Maybe it was just bad luck. Maybe it was a mechanical issue. Or maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t the same Zack Greinke anymore.

It appears that the correct answer was (c). As detailed here, Bob McClure had him raise his arms a little higher before he went into his motion before his start on Sunday. The result was 12 strikeouts and no walks, and a complete game in just 105 pitches. He did give up two homers to Joey Votto, but the first was a wall-scraper in a notoriously homer-friendly park, and the second came when he was just pounding the zone with strikes trying to close out a five-run lead in the ninth. Craig Brown has a good breakdown of his start here; I’ll just add that it was, in many ways, his best start of the season.

That isn’t to say he’s back to his 2009 form or anything. According to Fangraphs, the average velocity on his fastball this season (92.7) is a full 1.0 mph slower than last year, and the lowest since he returned from his sabbatical in 2006. Now, I don’t know if that is significant or not. Pitchers sometimes lose a little velocity for no reason, and sometimes it returns as mysteriously as it disappeared. It’s possible Greinke’s velocity is lower because he’s pacing himself more, much as he did when he first came to the majors. It’s certainly worth monitoring, but if he keeps striking out 12 batters a start, I won’t be all that preoccupied with how hard he’s throwing.

- It’s a moment that may one day occupy an exalted place in Royals’ lore, the day Luke Hochevar made his first start under new manager Ned Yost, who left him in there to work his way out of a jam in the seventh-inning, even as Hochevar coughed up 4 runs and the ballgame.

Afterwards, Yost made it clear that he left Hochevar in there, even if it meant losing a ballgame, because it was time Hochevar learned how to fight his way out of a jam:

“I told him, `Look, in those types of situations,’” Yost said, “`I’m going to let you pitch yourself out of trouble. You need to learn how. When you get yourself into those situations when you’re rolling, you need to learn how to get yourself out of those situations.’”

The message: Long-term gain is worth the short-term pain.

“That’s part of the plan coming in,” Yost said. “You manage two ways every night. You manage for the small picture. You do everything you can to win tonight, but you also manage for the big picture.

“We’re trying to change things around here. We’re trying to find ways to take ourselves to the next level…I’m pretty darn sure that Hoch is going to be a key part of that when we do get there.”

Well, since then Hochevar has made five starts, and in 35 innings has struck out 31 batters against just 6 walks. He’s given up more homers – five homers in five starts, as opposed to just one homer in his first eight starts. But the improvement in his control has made him more effective regardless. If the gist of Yost’s message was that Hochevar had to stop being a nibbler and start attacking hitters, the point got through.

And in the process, while Hochevar has been nicked up for runs here and there, he may have finally turned the corner when it comes to surrendering the big inning that has been his downfall for so long. Consider this: since giving up four runs in the seventh inning against the White Sox that night, Hochevar has not allowed 3 runs in any single inning since. He has now thrown 35 consecutive innings without allowing a three-spot. That’s the longest stretch of his career, surpassing a streak of 33.1 innings set as a rookie in early 2008.

Hochevar hasn’t gotten over the hump yet. But I suspect he’s standing at the top of it right now. The best is yet to come.

- The handling of Jason Kendall is just one more example of how, no matter how many of the little details the Royals are starting to get right, they still have a habit of making ridiculous decisions at the macro level due to an almost impossible dearth of common sense.

As Will McDonald has chronicled repeatedly throughout the season, Kendall has now caught 92.4% of the team’s innings this season, with Brayan Pena getting the other 7.6%. No other catcher in baseball has caught even 85% of his team’s innings this season. Kendall has started 61 of the team’s 64 games behind the plate – he’s on pace for 154 starts. No catcher has caught in 154 games – let alone started that many – since Carlton Fisk in 1978. Fisk started 150 games and relieved 4 times.

In the entire retrosheet era – from 1954 until today – only one player has ever started 154 games at catcher in one season: Randy Hundley, who in 1968 started 156 times. And given that the regular season was only 154 games long prior to 1954, Hundley is probably the only one.

Hundley, incidentally, hit .168/.228/.211 in his last 34 games, and finished with a line of .226/.280/.311. Even in the Year of the Pitcher, that was awful. The year before, he hit .267/.322/.403; the year after, he hit .255/.334/.391. I’m sure it was just a coincidence.

I see no reason to think that the Royals might change their approach. I’ve become quite the fan of Ned Yost, but let’s remember that two years ago, when Kendall started 149 games for the Brewers (most starts by any catcher since 1982) – Yost was his manager. Kendall hit .202/.295/.298 in September that year. (Granted, he hit rather lousy the whole season.)

This year, it doesn’t look like Kendall is waiting until September to let the effects of catching every. single. day. wear him down. Eight days ago he was hitting an impressive .299/.360/.361, and for all the complaints I had about signing him this winter, if he ends the season with a .360 OBP, I’ll happily eat my words about him. But in his last six games, Kendall has gone 1-for-25, dropping his seasonal numbers to .269/.328/.324, which is about what we could expect from him prior to the season.

If any other player, at any other position, were in a 1-for-25 slump, we’d expect them to have gotten a day off at some point, to clear their head if nothing else. Kendall has started every game since May 31st.

But at least his veteran influence is helping the pitching staff. After all, without him the Royals might not have the…uh…second-worst ERA in the American League? The Royals publicly stated that Kendall was brought in largely to help nurture the enigmatic arms of Luke Hochevar and Kyle Davies. Hochevar, as discussed, has been better, but 1) he hasn’t been that much better, not yet; 2) he could have been expected to improve regardless of who was catching him; 3) the improvement we have seen from Hochevar seems to be temporally associated with the arrival of Yost, not Kendall. As for Davies, he has a 5.48 ERA and seems to be the same slightly-above-replacement-level starter he’s always been.

So, to recap: Jason Kendall is on pace to start more games behind the plate than any catcher in 40 years. His surprising bat is starting to go dead. His veteran influence and leadership have not translated into better pitching performances. He’s thrown out only 24% of opposing basestealers; the league average is 28%. He turns 36 in two weeks. He’s under contract for another season.

I stand by my original position: signing Kendall was a mistake. The sad thing is, it didn’t have to be. If the Royals would just show a modicum of restraint in the way they’re using Kendall, he might actually be an asset.

That’s the funny thing about common sense. It’s distinctly less common than you’d think.

- Speaking of stopgaps under contract for another season, Yuniesky Betancourt is…Yuniesky Betancourt is…it’s hard for me to write these words…playing better than I expected.

Admittedly, he could hardly have played worse. But as I write this, Yuni is batting .281/.310/.424. Those numbers are a dead ringer for his performances several years ago; in 2006, he hit .289/.310/.403, and in 2007, he hit .289/.308/.418. This is who he is at his best: a shortstop who can hit .280, and has more power than the Rey Sanchezes of the world, but whose abhorrence of the walk prevents him from being even a league-average hitter.

Having said that, I must concede that while his numbers this year are virtually identical to his numbers from 3 and 4 years ago, the value of those numbers is not, because the overall offensive numbers for the AL have dropped significantly this year. In 2006, the AL batting line as a whole was .275/.339/.437. This year, the average AL hitter has a line of .261/.332/.410. Those numbers figure to go up a little now that we’re into the warm part of the season, but that’s a very real drop, and it means that Betancourt’s numbers are better than they look.

Yuni, in fact, is challenging my statement that he’s “even a league-average hitter”. His OPS+ at the moment is 98, which is to say he’s a rounding error away from average. And that’s average for all hitters – it’s considerably above-average for a shortstop. (The line for all AL shortstops is .260/.316/.366.) Betancourt’s OPS+ is essentially the same as Alberto Callaspo and Mike Aviles, who both sport 99s at the moment.

Betancourt’s defense still rates as bad, and while I Am Not A Scout™, I’d be hard-pressed to argue with the statistics based on what I’ve seen. Betancourt has never had much of a problem ranging to the hole, but he has an almost comical lack of range to his left side. Basically, if there’s a ball hit up the middle, the only way it’s turning into an out is if 1) the Royals have the shift on, or 2) the second baseman can get to it. Yuni won’t.

Last year, Betancourt’s defense rated as 20 runs below average for the season, which is abysmal. This season, he’s on pace to be about 10 runs below average. Those numbers correspond, I think, to the general perception of his defense: better than last year, but still bad.

If he can maintain this pace, Betancourt’s going to make the Royals look awfully smart, and make a lot of analysts – myself included – look awfully dumb. A shortstop who hits around the overall league average, even with subpar defense, has value. To a team that was trotting Tony Pena Jr. out there this time last season, it has a lot more value. Given that Daniel Cortes, the main prospect the Royals surrendered to get him, has a 6.54 ERA in Double-A at the moment…you get the idea.

I remain unconvinced that Betancourt can continue to play this well. After the trade last season, in a larger sample size than we’ve seen this year, he hit .240/.269/.370. In 131 career games with the Royals, his line is .259/.288/.395. If that’s the real Yuni, then he remains a true liability for a team that can play Aviles at shortstop and wants to give Chris Getz the opportunity to prove himself every day.

But the possibility that Dayton Moore and the Royals will eventually be proven right about a trade that was savaged by everyone outside the organization – scouts, analysts, sportswriters, fans – has to be acknowledged. I’ve always tried to let the evidence guide my opinions, no matter where the evidence leads. If that means using my face to crack an egg, and washing that egg down with a black gamy bird, so be it.

At this point, the jury is still out. And I still hold out every hope that Christian Colon makes Betancourt expendable at the end of next season. I suspect the Royals feel the same way.

- Finally, to end on an inarguably happy note: David DeJesus is on pace for his finest season. In 17 games since the birth of his son, he’s hitting .429/.493/.619, bringing his seasonal line to .314/.392/.479. His numbers are eerily similar to Billy Butler’s, except of course he’s a fine-fielding corner outfielder as opposed to a below-average first baseman.

Bob Dutton has an article today which explores the Royals’ options when it comes to DeJesus, who can be kept for another season if they so choose. I plan to write about this more later, but of all the players the Royals might conceivably trade in the next 2 months – and there are a ton of them – DeJesus might be the only one whose absence would significantly hurt the team in 2011. If he is to be traded, it needs to be for quite a haul, particularly since whatever team trades for him would almost certainly get one draft pick (and possibly two) when he leaves for free agency.

I just wanted to bring DeJesus’ numbers to your attention because I think he’s one of the most underrated players in the history of the franchise. He’s spent the equivalent of about 6 full seasons on the team’s roster, and he’s beginning to enter the all-time Royals leaderboard in several categories.

He’s played in 847 games, 13th all-time, but just 50 games behind John Mayberry in 9th place.

He has 933 hits (9th).

He has 182 doubles (8th).

He has 45 triples (7th).

He has 489 runs (10th).

He has 383 RBIs (12th).

Heck, even his 61 career homers ranks 17th on the Royals’ list. And with 70 HBPs, he’s just 8 behind Mike Macfarlane’s team record.

So I’ll just throw this out there, and feel free to discuss in the comments. If DeJesus were traded tomorrow, I’d vote him to be included in the Royals’ Hall of Fame when he’s eligible. And I’m optimistic that one day he will find himself enshrined there.

Draft Review.

Well, that didn’t go according to plan.

Or did it?

As you no doubt noticed, the saga of the Royals’ first draft pick played out until the very last moment. What appeared to be a deal-in-hand with Miami catcher Yasmani Grandal either fell apart (according to some) or never existed in the first place (according to others). By late Saturday the reports came in that the Royals were back to favoring Chris Sale; by Monday morning he appeared to be a lock. I was all prepared to write a column asking the very serious question, “has any team ever had more left-handed pitching prospects in their system than the Royals do right now?”

At 4:41 Monday afternoon – less than 90 minutes before the draft – I had this conversation by text with a draft expert:

Me: At this point, I’m just hoping for Christian Colon…

Him: I’ve heard they have no interest – Sale is basically confirmed.

Yeah. The Royals didn’t play their cards close to their vest – their cards were in a secret pouch sewed into the lining of their underwear.

The question everyone has is why. Did the Royals take Colon because they truly thought he was the best player available at #4, or because they didn’t like the price tags on Grandal and Sale? In the draft position the Royals were in, where they had the luxury of choosing the player they wanted, all I really want to hear is that they took the player they truly believed was the best available. Even if they had taken Sale, I would have held off on criticizing it so long as the Royals truly felt he was the best player available – after all, while Keith Law saw him as a supplemental-round pick, both Jim Callis and Kevin Goldstein felt he was truly one of the five best players in the draft. Given the results of the last few years, I’m willing to give the Royals the benefit of the doubt on who they select, at least until we have a pro track record to look back on.

But if the Royals – or any team drafting out of the top three this year – allowed financial considerations to impact their first-round pick, they’re fools. This year provides the perfect scenario for a team to draw a line in the sand, offer their draft pick slot money (if not a little less), and say “take it or leave it”. The Royals can say that because they can mean it – the best-case scenario honestly might be that the player doesn’t sign.

After the top three picks, this year’s draft looks very weak in the first round. By comparison, next year’s draft already looks to be one of the strongest in years, possibly since the 2005 draft, when Justin Upton, Alex Gordon, Ryan Zimmerman, Ryan Braun, Ricky Romero, and Troy Tulowitzki were six of the first seven picks. Now a lot can change in a year, but it’s unlikely to change so much as to make next year’s draft weaker than this year’s. In particular, for the Royals, if their #4 pick doesn’t sign this year they get the #5 overall pick next year. There are already at least five players eligible for next year’s draft who are the equal to anyone that was available to the Royals at #4.

True, if the Royals don’t sign their pick this year, next year’s compensation pick is not protected, i.e. if that player doesn’t sign, the pick is gone for good. So the Royals would need to work out a deal ahead of time with someone who’s not quite worthy of that pick on merit. Even so, the Royals possess incredible leverage with this year’s pick. If Colon doesn’t sign, the Royals may get a better player next year. Meanwhile, if Colon doesn’t sign, he goes back into a loaded draft next year as a college senior with no leverage.

Colon’s agent, a certain Mr. Scott Boras, is smart enough to understand the implications here. Which is why, while you’ll see Bryce Harper hold out until the final 30 seconds or so, the Royals and Colon have already made statements hinting that an agreement should be in place quickly once Cal State-Fullerton’s season ends.

Now, about Colon. In my last article, I made only a brief reference to him: “Colon would be an excellent option; he’s a shortstop who can hit and can probably stay at the position. Colon went to high school with Grant Green, who was the college shortstop I wanted the Royals to take last year; Colon would give them the chance to make amends.” What I would have said if I thought there was the slightest chance the Royals might draft him is this: Colon is the shortstop version of Grandal, and just as the Royals need a long-term solution behind the plate that will remove the temptation to keep Jason Kendall past next season, they need one at shortstop to remove the temptation to keep Yuniesky Betancourt a moment longer than they are contractually obligated to.

Colon, like Grandal, was well-considered coming out of high school, but was drafted late because he seemed committed to college. Both players have been successful playing for a major collegiate program, and both players had their best seasons as a junior. Both players are expected to be able to stay at a premium position, both are considered gamers that play above their tools, and both are “safe” picks who are expected to reach the majors quickly. Like Grandal, Colon doesn’t project as a superstar player, but is a good bet to be an above-average major leaguer who contributes in both halves of an inning. Like Grandal, Colon has his own intangibles – he was named captain of the U.S. National team last summer, the first player ever so honored.

I liked the idea of taking Grandal, so obviously, I’m quite happy with the selection of Colon. While the Royals need a long-term solution at catcher, they are actually quite well-stocked in that department in the minors; even if Wil Myers has to move to the outfield, Double-A catcher Manny Pina projects as at least a solid backup, and in A-ball, Salvador Perez may be the most underrated prospect in the system, and would be my pick to be the team’s starting catcher by 2013.

But at shortstop, with Jeff Bianchi out for the season, the well is dry. Rey Navarro, who the Royals acquired for Carlos Rosa, is the closest thing to a real shortstop prospect playing in the minors right now.

From my perch, it’s very difficult to tell whether the Royals wanted Colon or just settled for him. As Bob Dutton tweeted in his typically understated way, “Royals officials contend Cal State-Fullerton SS Christian Colon was their top preference all along. If so, they sandbagged everybody.”

Call me naïve, but I’m inclined to think this wasn’t just a case of settling for the most signable player. If the Royals had been rumored to be considering Colon at any point in the last six months, I might say that they turned to him only because Plan A and B wouldn’t agree to terms. But precisely because their interest in Colon was such a secret, even though Colon made perfect sense to the organization, I have a feeling that Colon was in their sights all along. Given the premium Dayton Moore puts on secrecy, the very fact that this stayed a secret for so long suggests that it was real. (By the way, has anyone seen Moore and Scott Pioli in the same room together?)

The draft picked up today, and to my untrained eye the Royals had a very solid effort. With their second pick, they took college RHP/OF Brett Eibner, who was ranked #23 overall by Baseball America and was considered the best player on the board by more than one draft analyst. (I really wonder if the Royals would have taken Stetson Allie, a high school pitcher with the best raw stuff of anyone other than Jameson Taillon. Alas, the Pirates took him two picks earlier. It tells you how far the organization has come that I thought Allie, who reportedly wants $3 million to sign, was someone the Royals might pounce on.)

Eibner’s problem is that he’s a two-way player; while most scouts seem to like him on the mound more, Eibner prefers to hit, and spurned the Astros out of high school in large part because they wanted to make him a pitcher. Greg Schaum has tweeted that the Royals are committed to him as a hitter, where he has a power bat and has the glove (and certainly the arm) for right field, if not center. He’s definitely a great value in the second round, but perhaps not as good a value as if he were committed to pitching. If nothing else, he has a fallback option; the Royals have converted Tony Pena Jr. and Brian Anderson to the mound, after all.

The third-round pick, Michael Antonio, is the only pick in the first half-dozen rounds that seems a little bit of a reach. Baseball America projected him as a sixth-to-tenth round talent; he’s a shortstop out of George Washington HS in New York (Manny Ramirez’s alma mater) who looked great in showcase events last year but has slowed down considerably in recent months.

Fourth-rounder Kevin Chapman, a lefty out of the University of Florida, was one of the best college relievers in the draft, and perhaps the best left-handed reliever. The Royals used their fourth pick (in the fifth round) on LSU star Louis Coleman last year, moved him to the pen, and he’s already thriving at Double-A. I’m sure that factored into their thinking with Chapman. He’s a great value at this point; if your fourth-round pick makes any kind of contribution in the majors, it’s a success. Even if he’s just a set-up man in the majors, Chapman will do more than most fourth-rounders ever will.

And in the fifth round the Royals took my favorite pick, RHP Jason Adam out of Blue Valley Northwest HS. I wrote about this earlier this year, but the Royals have seemed to make a concerted effort to draft local talent in recent years, and that trend was even more pronounced this year. By my loose standards, Eibner (out of the University of Arkansas) qualifies as a local. So does 8th-rounder Michael Mariot, the ace of the staff at the University of Nebraska; 13th-rounder Jonathan Gray, a RHP out of an Oklahoma high school; and a number of later round picks.

But no one is more of a local than Adam; who attends the same high school that at least a few of my readers attended, I’m sure. While the Royals have drafted players from the Kansas-Missouri-Nebraska-Iowa region before, I believe this is the first time they have used a high draft pick on a kid who can be legitimately called a Kansas City native since 1981, when they used their third-round pick on Rockhurst High pitcher David Cone.

Making thing more interesting is that Adam was considered a second-round talent before the draft, but may have slipped because of bonus demands. Keith Law tweeted that he’s looking for $1 million. In terms of both his roots and his bonus demands Adam is very reminiscent of Tim Melville, who also slipped in the draft because of the money he wanted. The Royals took Melville, gave him the money (in Melville's case, $1.5 million), and have to be happy with their decision – while Melville was 9 flavors of awful in April, he’s pitched as well as anyone in the farm system over the last month. I have a feeling that the Royals know what it will take to get the local kid signed, and are prepared to give it to him.

Adam and Antonio were the only two high-school kids the Royals drafted in the first 12 rounds. While some are saying that the Royals went college-heavy so that this year’s crop will reach the majors hand-in-hand with the high school studs from past seasons, I think their tactic was much more basic than that: in a draft that’s fairly weak overall, it makes more sense to draft low-risk players who will contribute something, as opposed to drafting a bunch of lottery tickets in a year where none of them are likely to pay off.

Not much to say beyond that. I know next to nothing about the players taken in the late rounds, although 11th-rounder Alex McClure is interesting – he didn’t play at all this season, as he sat out a year after transferring from Vanderbilt to Middle Tennessee State. That he fell so far is less a reflection of lack of talent than of lack of opportunity; if he shines in summer ball, the Royals can pay him a lot more than 11th-round money to sign.

It wasn’t a perfect draft; it couldn’t be a perfect draft given where the Royals were drafting. But I think the Royals did as well as could be expected. If they were drafting second, and had been able to draft Taillon and Allie, this would be hailed as one of the best draft hauls in baseball. As it is, it wasn’t the strongest draft in the game. But given the circumstances the Royals were in, it was about as strong a draft as we could have hoped for.