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.

Royals Today: 4/28/13.

Your standard caveats that it’s still April, it’s only 20 games, blah blah blah…but after 20 games, the Royals are 12-8, and as the Kansas City Star’s Pete Grathoff points out, this is only the third time in the last 24 years that the Royals have a winning record after 20 games. (The others were in 2003 and 2011.) So enjoy it. At this time last year, I had already moved on to looking at minor league box scores and the latest draft scuttlebutt. The longer those topics are in the background, the better.

- Ervin Santana continues to impress. He’s almost certainly going to win Royals Pitcher of the Month honors for April, with a 2.00 ERA in five starts and 36 innings (over 7 innings a start), with five walks and 31 strikeouts. He’s been worth 1.3 Wins Above Replacement already, which according to Baseball-Reference.com makes him the eighth-most valuable pitcher in the AL so far.

Tremendous credit goes to the front office for his acquisition, one which was controversial at the time. My thoughts on the trade were nuanced, but ultimately I endorsed it – you can read my full comments here. The trade was profoundly unpopular among other Royals bloggers, who thought $12 million was a ridiculous amount of money to spend on a pitcher who was worth 1.3 Wins Below Replacement last season.

If there’s a lesson here – and it’s April, so there may not be a lesson at all – it’s that you can’t simply evaluate a pitcher based on his value, the way you can with hitters. So much of a pitcher’s value is tied up in things he can’t control, like his defense, or the vagaries of balls in play, or just flat-out luck. Santana had a 5.16 ERA last year despite pitching in one of the game’s best ballparks for pitchers in Anaheim. He led the league in home runs allowed. On a value basis, he sucked.

But his ERA was largely the product of his home run rate, and his home run rate was largely the product of terrible luck on fly balls – 19% of them cleared the fence last year against Santana, and he had never been over 13% before. Santana’s core skill set was almost unchanged. He didn’t give up fly balls more often than he had in 2011, when he had an excellent season. His walk and strikeout rates had deteriorated only slightly. Despite his terrible season performance-wise, you could argue that he was virtually the same pitcher he had always been, just with worse luck. The Royals made that argument, and took the gamble, and it’s worked out brilliantly for them. So far.

Santana’s outsized success this year is mostly due to his control, which has been fantastic, not just in reducing walks but in getting ahead of counts, allowing him to finish batters off with his slider. It’s likely that it was just one good month and not an indication that he’s taken a step forward as a pitcher – he’s had months like this before. In July of 2011, Santana made five starts, threw 38 innings, walked six, struck out 31, didn’t allow a home run, and had a 1.67 ERA.

But then, 2011 was a very good year for Santana. He’s not going to pitch all season like he has in April. But if he pitches the rest of this season the way he pitched the rest of 2011, he will be worth every penny of his $12 million.

- I’ve already heard questions on Twitter asking me if I think the Royals should sign Santana to a long-term deal. I appreciate the enthusiasm for his work, fellas, but let’s slow down. If Santana continues to pitch this well, he’s likely going to earn something like $15 million a year, for 3 or 4 years, on the open market. That’s a huge commitment for an erratic starting pitcher in his early 30s. For all the reasons I liked Santana on a one-year deal, I would be extremely leery of him on a long-term deal. Last winter the Royals were buying low; signing him to a long-term deal because of his 2013 performance would be buying high.

If he continues to pitch this well, the Royals can make him a qualifying offer – a one-year deal worth around $14 million – which he will likely decline, allowing the Royals to pick up a draft pick when he signs elsewhere. That’s a much preferable outcome than giving him a long-term deal and betting on the fact that 2013 wasn’t simply one of the high points on the roller coaster that is Santana’s career.

- Santana is simply the headline-grabber on a pitching staff which has been phenomenal all season. As I write this, before Sunday’s doubleheader, the Royals have allowed the fewest runs in the league. That’s partly the result of having played fewer games than most teams – the Rangers have a better ERA and have allowed fewer runs per game, despite playing in a hitters’ park – but it’s still an impressive achievement.

The improvement is almost entirely rotation-driven. The bullpen ERA has improved from 3.17 to 2.77, but that’s almost entirely because they haven’t had to throw nearly as many innings as last year, and it’s surprisingly easy to improve your ERA when you’re not sending Vinny Mazzaro and Roman Colon out there to absorb innings. But the rotation ERA has gone from 5.01 to 3.23, while improving from 5.49 innings per start to 6.40 innings per start.

It’s April, blah blah blah. Things can change. I expect things to change. But if you wanted to draft a scenario for the 2013 season which ends with me groveling on my knees and begging forgiveness from Dayton Moore for all the mean things I’ve written and said, well, this is how you’d draw up the first 20 games of the season.

- And now to move on to less happy things, and by that I mean Mike Moustakas. Moose is hitting .152/.222/.197. He’s popped up eight times in 66 at-bats. His defense has seemingly regressed from last year. Add it together, and he’s been worth almost a win below replacement already.

As recently as a week ago, I was counseling patience, he’s only played about 15 games, he’s a streaky hitter, etc. But on Wednesday, he played about as bad a game as you can play in the major leagues. In the second inning, he batted with a man on third and one out and failed to get the runner home. In the fourth, he led off the inning and struck out. In the fifth, he struck out with the bases loaded and two out. In the seventh, he popped out with two outs and men on first and second. And in the fourth, he led a potential inning-ending double play ball go right through his legs, which led to a four-run inning. The Tigers won by two runs.

On 810 WHB the next morning, I compared Moustakas’ game to George Brett’s legendary Game 3 in the 1985 ALCS…only the complete opposite. It’s hyperbole, but only by a little. To have that kind of a game against your chief divisional rival…the only thing that saves Moose is that it’s April.

And I’ll admit, I’m wavering a little on whether a refresher course in Triple-A might help Moustakas right now. I was fine with sticking with him so long as he was playing good defense, figuring he would still contribute in the field until his bat came around. But that game wasn’t the first time a ground ball when through the wickets on him this year. If he’s taking his offensive struggles with him into the field, though, he’s not helping the team, and this isn’t 2006 anymore – the Royals are trying to win this season, and that means making decisions for the good of the team in the short term. If sending Moustakas down temporarily helps the team today, that has to take priority over helping Moustakas develop as a player in 2014 and beyond.

After some reflection, I’m not convinced we’re at that point yet, primarily because it’s not like there are any good alternatives. If Moustakas goes to Omaha, here are our options:

1) Elliot Johnson and Miguel Tejada, likely sharing the job in a quasi-platoon.

2) Irving Falu, who played so well for the Royals last year, but who is hitting .236/.295/.278 in Omaha right now.

3) Johnny Giavotella is crushing the ball again, hitting .329/.413/.506, and would be an interesting choice to play third base. However, he’s played the position five times in his pro career, and made three errors. I’d like to see him play some games at third base for Omaha to see if he can be even adequate at the position, but he hasn’t played there yet this season, and it’s quite possible (and entirely justifiable) hat the Royals have simply made the decision that he would be a disaster at the hot corner.

4) Christian Colon, as a shortstop, should presumably be able to handle third base in a pinch. He’s hitting .241/.273/.313.

That leaves Anthony Seratelli, who I’m rooting for simply because of his story – he was signed out of the independent leagues in 2007, slowly worked his way up through the minor leagues, and turned himself into an on-base machine in Double-A in 2011. He hit .282/.392/.398 for Northwest Arkansas that year, then .299/.374/.492 for Omaha last year, and is hitting .319/.429/.574 so far this year. He’s also 30 years old and never spent a day in the big leagues. As a human interest story, I would be thrilled for him to get the call. But if the best alternative to Moustakas is bringing up a 30-year-old former indy league ballplayer and making him your starting third baseman…I’m thinking that we probably should stick with Moustakas a little longer.

Moose, more than almost anyone else on the team, is supposed to be a team-first ballplayer who is able to separate his own performance from the success of the team, and put a bad ballgame behind him. On Thursday, he went out and doubled in the eighth inning of a tied ballgame, and then caught the Tigers napping by stealing third base. In the tenth, he drew a walk against Phil Coke, who is tough on left-handed hitters, which helped to set up the bases-loaded walk by George Kottaras and the grand slam by Alex Gordon. So hopefully Moustakas can put his early-season failings behind him and turn back into the ballplayer he was last year. The Royals sure need him to.

- Speaking of Kottaras – he’s appeared in only three games and batted only six times, but he’s already made a significant contribution to the team. In his first game, against the Red Sox on April 20th, he pinch-hit with two outs in the ninth, down a run against the Red Sox, and walked to put the go-ahead run on first base for Alex Gordon. Gordon grounded out, but Kottaras did his job.

The next day, Kottaras finally started a game behind the plate in the second game of the doubleheader. He homered in the fifth inning. The Royals would win in extra innings. And on Thursday, after coming into the game after Salvador Perez was removed for a pinch-runner, Kottaras batted in the tenth with the bases loaded and one out against a left-handed pitcher, and coaxed a walk to drive in the go-ahead run. Gordon would put the game out of reach with his two-out grand slam, but if Kottaras strikes out in that situation, Gordon never bats and the game is very much in doubt.

Every roster spot counts. The Royals finally aren’t wasting any, not even on their backup catcher, and it’s paying dividends in the win column.

- Speaking of bases-loaded walks, the Royals have already drawn four of them this year, in just 28 plate appearances with the bags full. Last year, in 113 plate appearances, they walked just twice. I’m not sure what it means, but it’s nice to see.

- Speaking of Kottaras and Salvador Perez, the lineup for today’s first game has been announced, and Perez is catching. Assuming that Kottaras is starting the second game of the doubleheader – never a safe assumption with Ned Yost managing – this means that the Royals have chosen to start Perez against Justin Masterson, and Kottaras against Corey Kluber.

This is absurd. Masterson throws close to sidearm; his arm slot is lower than just about every other right-handed starter in the majors. Not surprisingly, his platoon split is huge – for his career, lefties hit .290/.365/.430 against him, while righties are at just .223/.303/.299. Kluber is a journeyman pitcher who is 27 years old and opened the season in Triple-A. If you’re forced to start your left-handed backup catcher in one of the two games, wouldn’t you start him against the guy who has been killing right-handed batters for his entire career?

I understand that Ned Yost isn’t the most sabermetrically-friendly manager in the world. But is it too much to expect that he understands the nature of platoon splits? Apparently so.

(And just watch. Perez is going to go nuts off Masterson this afternoon, because he’s Salvador Perez, and he can hit anyone.)

- Speaking of Giavotella, am I permitted to point out that Chris Getz is hitting .228/.241/.386? It's nice that he finally hit his first home run as a member of the Royals, but that means he has as many homers this season as walks. Giavotella is crushing Triple-A pitching even more than usual; after a slow start the first week of the season, he's hitting over .400 the last two weeks. I appreciate what Getz brings to the table defensively, I really do. But I'd appreciate a second baseman and #9 hitter who can get on base for Alex Gordon even more. I just wish the Royals felt the same way.

- In the second game of today’s doubleheader, the Royals will be starting Will Smith, who has been called up for the spot start (and because the new CBA allows teams to add a 26th player to the roster for doubleheaders).

In what has been, generally speaking, a disappointing start of the season for the Royals’ top prospects, Smith has been a very pleasant surprise. After impressing everyone in camp, he went back to Omaha and struck out 11 batters in five innings in his first start. In four starts overall, he’s whiffed 31 batters in 22 innings, or 34.8% of batters faced overall.

I have long been skeptical of Smith’s upside, even though he’s left-handed and throws strikes, because of his inability to miss bats in the minor leagues. So this is an unexpected and very welcome surprise. Smith’s career best strikeout rate was 25.5%, and that was way back in rookie ball. Coming into the season, his career strikeout rate in Triple-A was 18.2%; it was 14.9% in his rookie season last year.

So even in a sample size this small, the jump in Smith’s strikeout rate is notable. The rest of his game was already major league-caliber; a jump in his strikeout rate would make him a legitimate #4 starter. So I’ll be watching his performance this evening with interest.

- Smith, as the 26th player on the roster today, will also become just the 26th player to appear in a game for the Royals this year. Were it not for back-to-back Sunday doubleheaders, the Royals wouldn’t have made a roster transaction all year. More to the point, they haven’t had a single injury this season.

Two years ago, you might recall, the Royals won the Dick Martin Award for having the best training staff in the majors, after a season in which they suffered almost no injuries to speak of. Last year was quite different; Perez missed half the year with a torn meniscus, and an epidemic of Tommy John surgery felled four of their pitchers (Joakim Soria, Blake Wood, Danny Duffy, and Felipe Paulino).

I have held the Royals’ training staff in high regard ever since Nick Kenney and Kyle Turner were hired before the 2010 season, and I thought 2011 was more a reflection of their skills than 2012. So far this year, my faith has been justified. Duffy and Paulino are the only guys on the 40-man roster who are on the DL. Of the other 38 guys, the most significant injury all year was the arm tightness that caused Wade Davis to miss a spring training start for precautionary reasons.

Talent wins ballgames, but talent means nothing if you can’t put that talent on the field. That holds even more true than usual for the Royals, who have very good front-line talent but questionable depth beyond their 25-man roster. More than even Yost or Dave Eiland, the success that Kenney and Turner have at their jobs may determine the course of the Royals’ season. So far, they’re having a lot of it.

Five For Friday: 4/19/13.

Looking for a distraction from the news? I sure am, so I’m here to answer your questions.

Troy Caswell (@OldSoulTCas23): Is Hosmer the next James Loney?

A LOT of questions about Eric Hosmer this week. That will happen when you start the season hitting .242/.359/.273 after 12 games, after hitting .232/.304/.359 last season.

Loney is kind of a worst-case scenario for a first baseman who comes up and immediately rakes. In 2006 and 2007 Loney played in 144 games and hit .321/.372/.543. He then completely stagnated as a hitter, batting .281/.341/.411 over the next four years, and despite playing in at least 158 games each year, he never matched the 15 home runs he hit in just 96 games in 2007. He then completely collapsed in 2012, and is now a Tampa Bay Ray.

The Rays undoubtedly were willing to take a chance on Loney because they had already taken a chance on his doppleganger, Casey Kotchman, in 2011. Like Loney, Kotchman was a top first base prospect without huge power but with a sweet swing, and after some initial success (Kotchman hit .296/.372/.467 in 2007) had fallen apart (.254/.316/.378 from 2008 to 2010). With the Rays in 2011, Kotchman hit .306/.378/.422 while making peanuts. They let him go, Kotchman signed with the Indians last year, and he hit .229. And you wonder why I’m leery of dealing with the Rays…

I don’t think Hosmer is that comparable to Loney, for two reasons. One is that Hosmer was productive over nearly a full season at age 21, while Loney’s success came at ages 22-23. Even acknowledging Hosmer’s struggles last year, the ability to hit that well at age 21 is considerably more rare than the ability to do so even a year later.

But the other reason is that, from a scouting standpoint, they’re not that similar. Loney, like Kotchman, was considered to have an elite hit tool but only average power. Neither player hit more than 11 home runs in any minor league season. Hosmer was considered a step above both of them, as someone with elite hitting ability AND top-of-the-line power, which is why he was drafted #3 overall even as a first baseman. In his one healthy minor-league season, he hit 20 homers. Hosmer had 43 doubles and 9 triples that year, for 72 extra-base hits overall; Loney’s career-high in the minors was 44. Kotchman (who could never stay healthy) never had more than 41.

This is relevant because Loney’s success early in his career was highly dependent on his .321 batting average, and batting average is the most variable skill in a hitter’s arsenal. Hosmer’s skill set as a rookie was more diverse.

So no, I don’t think Hosmer is the next James Loney. His success came at a younger age, and he showed a more diverse and robust skill set. Also, it’s only been 12 games.

I’d sure like to see him pick it up, though.

Mouse in catspeak (@Meous): Is there any hope for Moose’s swing? Looks totally lost. Maybe an Omaha trip like it worked for Alex Gordon?

A LOT of questions about Mike Moustakas this week. That will happen when you start the season hitting .178/.245/.222 after 12 games, after hitting .211/.261/.325 after the All-Star Break last season.

Like Hosmer, in the long term I’m not really concerned about Moose. He’s young, and he was an above-average third baseman overall just last year. In the short term…um…I’m a little concerned.

Here’s why:

Year   FB%  IFFB%  POP%

2010  41.2% 21.0%  8.7%

2011  49.8% 17.6%  8.8%

2012  60.5% 26.1% 15.8%

“FB%” refers to the percentage of balls that Moustakas puts in play (including home runs) that are fly balls. “IFFB%” is the percentage of those fly balls that are on the infield – a fancy way of saying “pop-ups”.

“POP%” is what happens when you combine the two – it’s the percentage of all balls in play that are pop-ups. As you can see, Moustakas has always been a flyball hitter, and he’s always been prone to pop-ups – about a fifth of the balls he puts in the air stay on the infield. Given that pop-ups – unlike outfield fly balls, ground balls, and line drives – are almost always turned into outs, minimizing pop-ups is a key to success a hitter.

This year, in an admittedly small sample size, Moustakas is hitting the ball in the air more than ever – and more of those fly balls than ever are on the infield. He’s popped up six times in just 45 at-bats. By comparison, Joey Votto has popped up four times since the start of the 2009 season.

I don’t think we’re anywhere close to a remedial course in Omaha. Moustakas is still contributing on defense, he’s a streaky hitter who could hit three home runs in the next week and calm everyone down. If you send him down, you’re looking at Elliot Johnson playing third base, or Miguel Tejada, or maybe Irving Falu. You could put up with that in order to help Moustakas out in the long run if you weren’t trying to win this year, but you are. The best thing to do is to just ride it out for now. Also, it’s only been 12 games.

I’d sure like to see him pick it up, though.

Brian Ayers (@Brian_Ayers29): If you were the GM of the Royals, which prospects would you give up if you were to deal for Giancarlo Stanton?

Way too early, guys. Stop tempting me.

Bryan Larson (@jbryanlarson): Should the Royals look into acquiring Chase Utley?

Well, that’s certainly a more realistic question, given that Utley is in the last year of his contract, he’s still an elite player when healthy, the Royals have a need at second base, and the Phillies might be punting later this year.

But it’s waaaaaay too early to start looking for trades. We don’t know if the Royals are legitimate contenders or if they’re two weeks away from being 10-18. The Phillies still think they’re legitimate contenders – and Ruben Amaro, their general manager, is the kind of guy who yells “flesh wound!” after all his limbs are hacked off. Chris Getz, as I write this, is slugging .488 and is second on the team in home runs . There’s no urgency to make a deal, and there aren’t that many sellers to deal with yet.

This is a good time to remember what Billy Beane says about splitting the season into thirds: the first third of the season is to see what you have, the second third of the season is to fix it, and the final third of the season is to let it ride. A third of the season is 54 games. So talk to me at the end of May and – if the Royals are above .500 – it will be time to talk about trade proposals.

ScottKCMO (@ScottKCMO): The team looks significantly better than last year. How many games until I’m allowed to do more than fantasize about September & October?

Dayton Moore himself says that you don’t anything about your team until 40 games into a season, which seems reasonable. But allow me to suggest another cutoff point, which is 46 games. Why 46? Because aside from 2003, the Royals have not had a winning record after 46 games in the last 17 years. (In 2003, they were 25-21, after starting 17-4.)

The Royals have had hot starts before – 18-11 will live in our hearts forever – but larger sample sizes have generally done us in by late May. If the Royals are over .500 after 46 games – meaning if they can play .500 ball over their next 32 games – you have my permission to start dreaming a little.

Ed Bartel (@EdBartel): If Duffy and/or Paulino are ready by the trade deadline, will or should the Royals try to move Santana? What could they expect?

If the Royals aren’t playing well, Santana’s a trade candidate regardless of what Duffy and Paulino are doing. If Santana isn’t pitching well, no one’s going to want to trade for him regardless of how the Royals are playing.

And if the Royals and Santana are both playing well, it’s hard to imagine the Royals trading him away just because Duffy and/or Paulino has fully recovered from Tommy John surgery. For a team in contention to trade away a player who is performing well for them just because he’ll be a free agent at the end of the year…I’m sure it’s happened at some point, but it’s exceedingly rare.

These things have a way of working themselves out. The odds that all five guys currently in the Royals rotation will all be healthy and effective into July, when Duffy is expected back, are pretty small. If they aren’t, Duffy would be an excellent candidate to replace one of them. If they are, the Royals will have a delightful dilemma on their hands. Duffy was throwing 95-96 as a starter last year; I’m sure the Royals won’t be devastated if they’re forced to let him throw 97-98 from the left side out of the bullpen for the second half of the season.

And mind you, given how splendidly John Lamb’s recovery from Tommy John surgery is going (hint: it’s not), it’s best not to assume that either Duffy or Paulino will be good as new by mid-season. At the very least, we’ll want to see a half-dozen starts in the minors first.

Royals Today: 4/16/13.

I had this column all but finished yesterday morning, but right now my mind isn’t really on baseball, and I suspect yours isn’t either. On Patriots Day, at the finish line of the Boston Marathon – as close to a secular holy time and place as there is in New England – criminals inflicted a terror attack on our nation, the most significant in its scope since 9/11. Three are reported dead at this moment; dozens are critically wounded, many with dismembered limbs. It is an unthinkably awful end to one of our country’s most festive events, and it was intended to be so.

We will, I hope, know more in the coming days about the identity of those pieces of human refuse who committed this attack. As you can imagine, while I am horrified as an American by what has happened, I am terrified as a Muslim by the possibility that the people who did this claim to share my faith. I will simply reiterate what I said before the towers had fallen on 9/11: this is not Islam. It is a bedrock principle of my faith to condemn this sort of attack. The words harsh enough to convey my feelings about this do not exist.

Most of you know where I stand on the issue of Islam and terrorism, I hope, given that I wrote about it here on a Tuesday in September in 2001. But I just want to make it perfectly clear: I am not some sort of anomaly. EVERY Muslim I know condemns this act. Essentially every Muslim organization in America has already condemned it, and extended thoughts and prayers to the victims. Of all the generalizations made about Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11, the one that rankles me the most is the notion that “if terrorism really is forbidden in Islam, why don’t Muslims speak out against what happened?”

They have. Repeatedly and consistently. Just Google “Muslims Condemn Terrorism”, or for some examples, just click here or here. And it’s not just organizations that condemn terrorism – according to this Gallup poll, people in Muslim countries are significant LESS likely to see attacks on civilians as sometimes justified as people in America or Canada. But for far too many people, the answer to the question, “If a Muslim condemns terrorism and a journalist isn’t there to report it – or just chooses not to – did it really happen?” is unfortunately “no.”

In any case, to the victims of yesterday’s attack, the identity of their attackers is hardly relevant at this time. I’m praying for them. I’m praying that our government identifies the people who did this as quickly and as accurately as possible. And I’m praying that all Americans – our government, our media, and us – have the sense to differentiate between the criminals who did this and the people who just vaguely look like them.

There’s no harder time of year to write a column about a specific baseball topic than in April. The season’s begun, so you want to focus on the results on the field, but at the same time the sample sizes are so small that drawing any conclusions from said results is folly. So I’m just going to bullet-point the season so far:

- The most pleasant surprise of the season so far has to be Ervin Santana. After giving up four runs in six innings in his first start, Santana has gone eight innings in back-to-back starts, allowing just one earned run in each start. He’s actually tied for the AL lead in innings pitched with 22. He’s walked five and struck out 19 so far. After averaging barely 90 mph on his fastball in his first start, and better than 93 mph in his second, he was somewhere in between in his third start, running his fastball up there in the 91-92 mph range. His slider has been biting as sharply as ever – according to Fangraphs, the pitch has already been worth over five runs in just three starts, which is kind of ridiculous.

It’s just three starts; it’s way too early to get excited. But it’s not too early to be relieved, that this acquisition is unlikely to burn the Royals the way the acquisition of Jonathan Sanchez did. Santana’s just 30 years old, he was an above average starter just two years ago, he’s in a contract year – there are reasons to think this can work. As you’ll recall, I was ambivalent about the trade for Santana. While I loved the idea of trading a token prospect for the option year on an Angels pitcher, I was much more enthusiastic about – and had advocated for – trading for Dan Haren instead of Santana.

Haren had the better and far more consistent track record, with the caveat that his velocity had declined significantly last year. So far, at least, it looks like the Royals made the right move – Haren has been battered for 19 hits and nine runs in nine innings for the Nationals so far. (In his defense, he has 10 strikeouts and no walks, and his velocity has ticked up a bit from last year.) I’ll be keeping an eye on this pair all season, but it’s quite possible that both Santana and Haren will have fine seasons. In which case the key decision for the Royals wasn’t deciding on which Angels pitcher they wanted – it was deciding that they wanted an Angels pitcher in the first place. You can’t normally acquire 200 quality innings on a one-year contract. When you can, it’s worth it to overpay a little.

- The most significant managerial decision of the young season may have occurred on Tuesday, when Ned Yost issued a starting lineup that had Jarrod Dyson in center field, Lorenzo Cain in right field, and Jeff Francoeur on the bench.

Let’s be frank: this is the outfield arrangement – at least against right-handed starters – that gives the Royals the best chance to win, and the more they use it, the more likely they are to win.

I don’t think there’s another player in the past five years who has won me over the way Dyson has. I could never understand why the Royals kept talking up this 50th-round draft pick, and kept promoting him, even though he 1) was really old for his levels and 2) couldn’t really hit. In 2008, Dyson hit .260/.337/.288 in Wilmington when he was 23 years old. The next year, he hit .258/.331/.319 in Double-A. In 2010, he missed half the season with injuries, rehabbed in rookie ball (6 games) and A-ball (12 games), then played 7 games in Double-A, then reached Triple-A Omaha for the first time, hit .272/.327/.349 in 46 games – and was in the major leagues. He was 26 years old, and had just hit the first home run of his pro career, and the Royals were acting like he was a legitimate prospect, and I couldn’t understand it.

And then I saw him play. I wrote about him extensively here. And I realized that even though he was old for a prospect – he was nearly 22 and exceptionally raw when the Royals drafted him – that his speed, defense, and (unusual for a tools guy) plate discipline were enough to make him a good fourth outfielder if nothing else.

Coming into this season, Dyson had played 146 games in the majors – many in a pinch-running role only, as he had only 448 plate appearances. He had hit just .247 and slugged .323, but with enough walks for a respectable .320 OBP. Even so, a .247/.320/.323 line from an outfielder is barely replacement level. (Mitch Maier’s career line, by way of example, is .248/.327/.344.)

And yet, according to Baseball Reference, in less than a season of playing time Dyson was worth 3.0 Wins Above Replacement. He’s been worth that much largely because of his speed (50 steals in 57 attempts, worth an extra nine runs of offense) and because of his defense (12 runs above average in center field). But runs count the same whether you’re driving them in with your bat, stealing them with your legs, or saving them with your glove.

And frankly, he’s the third-best outfielder on the team, at least against right-handers. Francoeur is a perfectly acceptable platoon option; he has a career line of .290/.341/.479 against left-handed pitchers, and is 5-for-15 against them this year. But against right-handers, Francoeur has hit .256/.297/.405, while Dyson has hit .262/.331/.357. At the plate, they’ve been almost equally valuable – but Dyson holds a significant edge in almost every other facet.

The main reason I’m supporting a platoon option is what happened Friday night against the Blue Jays, when Emilio Bonifacio launched a fly ball to deep rightfield in the top of the second inning. Francoeur took a tentative route to the wall and the ball ticked off his glove at the warning track for a double – a double that turned into a Little League home run when Francoeur missed the cutoff man, allowing Bonifacio to head to third base, and then Salvador Perez overthrew third base and Bonifacio was able to scamper home.

Perez got the only error on the play, but it was Francoeur’s defense that cost the Royals most dearly. It was a catchable fly ball, and if Francoeur catches it the Blue Jays score at most one run in the inning, and possibly none. If they don’t score, Yost doesn’t bring in Luke Hochevar to pitch in a tie game in the sixth inning (right? Right?) and the Royals might actually come back to win.

With Dyson in center field and Cain in right, along with Gordon in left field the Royals have one of the best defensive outfields in baseball. With Francoeur in right field they have two-thirds of a great defensive outfield, and Jeff Francoeur.

I don’t expect Francoeur to be demoted into a strict platoon yet, but at the very least, he should be on the bench any time the Royals face a right-handed pitcher who throws a good slider. Sliders are naturally tougher on same-side hitters than opposite-side hitters to begin with, and anyone who has watched Francoeur bat knows how completely helpless he is against the pitch. If the Royals move to a job-sharing arrangement where Francoeur plays against lefties and select right-handers, and both Francoeur and Dyson wind up with 300-350 plate appearances, they’ll be a better team for it.

- Speaking of Luke Hochevar…he entered Friday’s game with men on second and third and two outs, because apparently Ned Yost wanted to find out one last time whether the rumors about Hochevar’s inability to pitch with men on base were really true. He gave up a two-run single, and then a walk, and then fell behind Jose Bautista 3-0 before somehow coming back to get the strikeout.

He then faced six batters in the eighth and ninth, all with the bases empty, and retired them all, four on strikeouts.

For his career:

Bases empty: .251/.312/.425

Men on base: .304/.373/.479

Scoring position: .315/.388/.503

Le plus ca change…

- The Royals won Sunday thanks to Santana’s terrific outing and another scoreless inning from Kelvin Herrera. But they pissed away a terrific opportunity to take the lead in the seventh, thanks to one of my managerial pet peeves – the dreaded sacrifice bunt with a man on second base.

The standard sacrifice bunt – with a man on first base and no one out – is almost always a poor percentage play unless the guy at the plate is an absolutely terrible hitter – and by “absolutely terrible” I mean he’s a pitcher. There are exceptions, but generally speaking the odds that you’ll score one run in the inning go up very slightly if at all when you bunt, and the odds that you’ll score MORE than one run in the inning go down significantly. (Keep in mind that with men on first and second, the bunt is more defensible, because in that case you’re moving two runners up a base instead of one.)

But as bad as it is to bunt with a man on first only, it’s even worse to bunt with a man on second. Perhaps the most underappreciated benefit of bunting is that you stay out of the double play. With a man on second base, the double play has already been taken out of the equation.

And then there’s the fact that with a man on second base, a groundball to the right side will almost certainly move the runner over to third base anyway. The batter was Chris Getz, who 1) is a groundball hitter and 2) bats left-handed, meaning if he just pulls the ball, he’ll move the runner over. So why would you give up an out on purpose when you could swing away and likely gain the same result even if you don’t get a hit?

Oh, yeah – the runner on second base was Dyson, one of the fastest players in the majors. He was on second base because he had just stolen second base, his 53rd steal in a career of just 154 games so far, his 53rd steal in 61 attempts (87%). If you really wanted to get him to third base, why wouldn’t you just send him again?

Instead, on a 3-1 count (!), Getz put down a bunt which moved Dyson to third. Alex Gordon failed to take advantage, striking out on three pitches when he somehow took a called strike three. Alcides Escobar would fly out with two outs to end the inning. In the end, it didn’t matter because Getz doubled in the ninth and Gordon swung at the first pitch and drove it into right field. But it was a terrible managerial call, combining a high cost (an out) with a minimal gain (a base which could have been picked up by other means).

- Speaking of Herrera, Sunday was the first time all season in which he didn’t strike out at least half of the batters he faced. (He was only one for three.) For the year, Herrera has whiffed 11 of the 19 batters he faced, or 58%.

Last year Herrera whiffed 22.4% of the batters he faced, which is solidly above-average but not as high as you’d expect for someone who throws 96-99 with a killer changeup. At no point last season did he have a stretch like this one – the closest he came was striking out 11 of 24 batters from June 13 to June 20. I don’t think he’s going to go all Craig Kimbrel on the league, but I do think it’s reasonable to assume, given his age, given that he has one full season under his belt, and given his ridiculous two-pitch arsenal, that a big bump in strikeouts may be in order this season.

He’s the best reliever on the team. Whether he’s the closer or not is almost irrelevant – I actually prefer him as the set-up man, because it allows Yost the flexibility to pitch him in different situations – he can come in with men on base, or (as he did yesterday) in a tie game in the ninth inning. Let Holland get most of the saves; just let Herrera get most of the key outs.

- Speaking of Getz, in 2011 he played in 118 games and swatted nine extra-base hits. In 2013, in 11 games, he already has five extra-base hits.

He still doesn’t have a home run in a Royals uniform – let’s not get crazy now – but he has a different batting style at the plate, and it appears to be paying off. He has the very strange batting line of .306/.306/.472 – while he’s able to hit the ball in the gaps, Getz hasn’t drawn a single walk yet.

From 2010 to 2011, Getz hit .248/.309/.283 for the Royals – even though he had less power than pretty much every other position player in the game, he was able to coax 49 walks in 604 at-bats. Since the beginning of last year, when he switched to a more upright stance in spring training, he’s hitting … with 14 doubles and 4 triples in 225 at-bats, but just 11 walks. Maybe the reason is as simple as the fact that by standing more upright, his strike zone is enlarged because the top of his zone is higher than it was before. So far it’s been a tradeoff worth making, but you’d like to see him mix in a walk every now and then.

And by “him”, I mean “99% of Royals batters from 1981 until today.”

- I know people are worried about Eric Hosmer and I’d like to see him with more than one extra-base hit (a double) in 10 games. But you know what? For now, at least, I’ll take the .400 OBP. He’s second on the team with five walks, and until he gets his swing completely straightened out, he can help the team just fine by doing what he’s been doing.

- Hosmer is second on the team in walks, but the guy in front of him, Billy Butler, has twice as many walks as anyone else on the team, with 10. (Granted, two of them are intentional.) Butler is hitting .257/.435/.457, and has just four strikeouts to go against those 10 walks. That seems meaningful, as meaningful as any stat can be on Tax Day. Butler has never drawn more walks than strikeouts, and last year had more than twice as many Ks (111) as walks (54). But this year, if it’s not in the strike zone, he’s not chasing. And if it is in the strike zone, he’s hammering it.

Perhaps it’s because he has more faith in the guys batting behind him to come through. Perhaps it’s because opposing managers look at what the Royals are getting from their cleanup hitters, and deciding that they’ll take their chances with the guy batting behind Butler. But perhaps this represents Butler’s ongoing maturation as a hitter. Going into the season, I thought last year represented the peak of Butler’s ability level, because his doubles dropped even while he set a career high in home runs. But even if last year marks the limits of his power potential, there’s one way he could still substantially improve as a player, and that’s to develop the ability to walk 100 times a season.

Edgar Martinez, the greatest DH of all time, has long represented the best-case scenario for Billy Butler’s career. The greatest difference to this point has simply been Martinez’s ability to walk. Martinez was always a patient hitter – in his first full season, 1990, he drew 74 walks, which is more than Butler has drawn in any full season. But Martinez didn’t become a true on-base machine until 1995, when he walked 116 times. That began a run of four straight 100-walk seasons and seven straight 90-walk seasons. Martinez was a beast in 1995, finishing third in the AL MVP vote, winning a batting title (.356), leading the league with 52 doubles, and hitting 29 home runs.

Butler’s not going to hit .356/.479/.628 – to put that in perspective, Martinez’s OPS (1107) was just 11 points lower than George Brett’s in 1980 (1118). But his skill set isn’t that different. He’s a career .300 hitter. (Keep in mind, 1995 was in the heart of the juiced era, and the old Kingdome was a hitters’ park.) Butler hit 51 doubles in 2009. He hit 29 home runs last year. The only skill he hasn’t flashed yet is the ability to just take first base whenever it’s offered to him. For all of Butler’s talents, his career high in OBP is just .388. If he starts spitting on pitches out of the strike zone, he could get into the .400 range, a level no Royal has reached since Mike Sweeney in 2002.

And if you’re worried that having Butler on first base all the time will only clog up the basepaths, remember that Edgar Martinez wasn’t exactly a burner. In 1995, Martinez was on first base when a single was hit 39 times, and only went first-to-third nine times. But you know what? He led the league in runs scored anyway. On the journey to touching home plate, the first step is to touch first base.

(Granted, Martinez would have still whipped Butler in a race. Last year, Butler went first-to-third just six times in 36 opportunities – and that was a career high. In 2011, Butler was on first base when a single was hit 25 times…he made it to third base once. But even playing strict station-to-station baseball, if Butler gets on base 40% of the time, he’s going to score a bunch of runs.)

Five For Friday: 4/12/13.

Working on a column, but I owe you a morsel to tide you over until then, and it’s been a few Fridays since a Five For Friday, so here you go.

Matt B (@_MathewB): What are your thoughts on Santana’s velocity? It looked to be better in his second start. Kauffman inflation?

Certainly there are a few extenuating factors to Santana’s velocity on Monday. The Kauffman Stadium gun has historically been juiced relative to the gun in other parks; a fastball at Kauffman will register as much as 1.1 mph faster than the same pitch at another stadium. It was the home opener, and maybe Santana was a little fired up.

But if you look at this chart, and see the gap between his first and second start, you can’t help but feel optimistic. Santana averaged barely 90 mph on his fastball in Chicago, but averaged over 93 mph on Monday in Kansas City. He had better velocity in his last start than he did in all but one start last season. This continues to bear monitoring, naturally, but I’m feeling a lot better about Santana’s skill level right now than I did this time last week.

Jeff Russell (@rock_hawk): I put on my Greinke jersey for the first time since he left today. Your take on the brawl?

I haven’t worn my Greinke jersey in years, and that sounds like an excellent way to actually get some use out of it – take a stand against Carlos Quentin’s churlishness by saying We Are All Zack Greinke today.

My take is this: Carlos Quentin has taken advantage of the rule which awards a batter first base when a pitched baseball touches a part of his body more than all but a few players in major league history. (The last player I can think of who more brazenly used the HBP as a weapon was Ron Hunt 40 years ago. Take a look at his page.)

Quentin led the NL in hit-by-pitches with 17 last year. He led the AL in hit-by-pitches with 23 the year before that. He averages 26 HBPs per 162 games in his career. He holds the all-time minor league record for HBPs in a season with 43 back in 2004. (Granted, HBP stats were not always kept in the minors, so it’s possible that someone got plunked more once upon a time.)

There is no one in the major leagues today who has less standing to protest being hit by a baseball than Quentin. It takes some level of chutzpah for him to charge the mound after getting hit under any circumstances, let alone a full-count pitch to lead off an inning with his team down by one run, let alone against Zack Greinke, whose jersey I own, and who may or may not be on my Stratomatic team.

I know the precedent for charging the mound is a suspension of no more than 10 games, but I’m hoping Bud Selig throws the book at him. A 15-game suspension seems reasonable to me.

Jake Lebahn (@JakeLebahn): Most underrated Royal right now during this 6-3 stretch?

I’m going to say Ned Yost. Yost doesn’t have the greatest reputation as a tactical manager, and a nine-game stretch doesn’t prove he’s improved as a tactician any more than Jose Iglesias going 9-for-20 to start the year proves he’s a better hitter for the Red Sox. But he’s pushed all the right buttons so far.

I love his bullpen management so far, and the way rosters are set up today (with 7 or 8 relievers and just 3 or 4 bench guys), bullpen management is at least half the job between first pitch and last. He’s using Tim Collins as a multiple-inning reliever, letting Collins go two innings twice, and in his other outing Collins came in mid-inning and then went out for another clean inning. He’s handled Greg Holland’s struggles as well as could be expected. After Holland blew the save on Saturday and got into trouble Sunday, Yost made what could be one of the season’s signature moves, pulling him for Kelvin Herrera to nail down the win.

There has been no better sign this season that the Royals are playing to win in 2013. This isn’t 2011, where Yost wanted Alcides Escobar to learn how to face tough pitching in the ninth inning even if it cost the Royals games in the standings. Yost wasn’t prepared to let Holland work through his troubles at the expense of losing a game that the Royals led by five going into the ninth. Nor should he have.

Yost has handled the fallout of that decision as well as possible. He publicly stuck with Holland as his closer after the game. With Holland and Herrera having both pitched Saturday and Sunday, Yost called on Aaron Crow to pitch the ninth on Monday – a move I called for on Twitter – and it worked well. Holland closed Tuesday and nearly blew the save, but in his defense was pitching in the middle of a monsoon. He threw enough pitches that Yost could say he was just giving him a rest when he turned to Herrera Wednesday night.

The Royals finished off a three-game sweep in which three different relievers both earned a save. That’s not quite as rare as I thought – ESPN’s Jayson Stark did the research and found that the Braves had a similar sweep last May against the Rockies. But in the Braves’ case, two of the saves were of the long reliever variety – Christhian Martinez threw 2.2 innings in a 7-2 win, and Livan Hernandez pitched 1.2 innings to close out a 13-9 game. What the Royals did – three different relievers came into the game to start the ninth in a save situation – strikes me as exceedingly rare, if not unprecedented.

That’s a reflection of the depth of the pen, but it’s also a testament to Yost not getting too wrapped up in the myth of the closer as some sort of special reliever. When Crow came in on Monday night, he had two saves in his career. When Herrera came in to rescue Holland on Sunday, he had three saves in his career. They both closed out the game with a win, because they’re both excellent relievers, and almost without exception, excellent relievers can close.

There’s the hit-and-run Yost called for last Thursday in Chicago, which Jeff Francoeur executed perfectly for a single that put men on first-and-third and set up a three-run inning that won the game.

There’s the way that Yost aggressively used pinch-hitters last Friday in Philadelphia after the Royals fell behind 4-0. He pinch-hit for Wade Davis, who had only thrown four innings, in the top of the fifth, and Miguel Tejada responded with a single; the Royals would score two runs in the inning. Bruce Chen came in ostensibly to pitch long relief, but when Chen’s spot came to bat in the top of the sixth, with men on second and third, Yost didn’t hesitate to turn to Billy Butler. The Phillies intentionally walked Butler, because apparently any time you have the chance to pitch to Alex Gordon with the bases loaded you should do so. Gordon cleared the bases with a triple, the Royals led 5-4, and they’d cruise from there.

(Speaking of dumb intentional walks – Yost hasn’t issued a single one in nine games. While there is a time and a place for them, generally speaking they are vastly overused by managers who underestimate the risks involved in issuing one.)

And then Wednesday, after Davis had worked in and out of trouble for five scoreless innings, Yost turned to Chen again. Chen threw a scoreless sixth and seventh, and after the Royals added two insurance runs in the bottom of the seventh to runt heir lead to 3-0, Yost stuck with Chen for another inning. And why not? While there are benefits to having relievers throw max-effort for one inning at a time, the downside is that managers will pull a reliever even when he’s pitching well. Chen was pitching well, and has the stamina to go multiple innings, so why not stick with him until he gets into trouble? He gave up a triple with one out on a ball that Lorenzo Cain almost hauled in, but then went back-to-back strikeouts to get out of the inning.

I can’t say Yost has been completely perfect; George Kottaras is the only player in all of baseball who 1) has been on a major league roster since Opening Day and 2) hasn’t appeared in a game yet. I get that you want Perez starting every day – and will all the April off-days, I don’t disagree – but if you can’t find a way to use Kottaras for an entire series in an NL park, then you’re essentially wasting a roster spot.

But really, Yost has done nothing to materially hurt the team so far. And he’s done a lot of things to help.

Bill Carle (@BillCarle1): What has surprised you most about the team so far?

Right now, the Royals’ pitching staff leads the AL in most strikeouts (86) AND fewest walks (21). I expected the pitching staff to be better, but I didn’t expect to see a K-BB ratio of better than 4-to-1. (Take out Holland, and the ratio is 81 to 15.) On an individual level, I’m sure some of those performances are outliers, but as a team, you can hardly ask for better than that.

Here’s a hidden stat that may speak to the team’s defense: in 300 at-bats, Royals opponents have hit just seven doubles and one triple. That’s not sustainable, but it’s still pretty remarkable. (The Royals themselves have 22 doubles and three triples.) If you’re wondering how the Royals can play so well despite being outhomered 11-4, their advantage in the other extra-base hits is a big part of the answer.

Shawn Michael Deegan (Deeg_1990): What’s one thing you see from the Royals so far that has the best chance to carry through the season?

It’s not a surprising answer, but it’s the innings totals from the starters. Wade Davis has only throw nine innings in two starts – he was pinch-hit for in one of them – but the Royals have received 6+ innings in every other start. They have 53.2 innings in nine starts, just a tick under 6 innings per start on average, and that’s in early April when they’re still stretching out their arms. Just once in nine games has a starter been pulled from a game mid-inning.

There’s a reason why Luke Hochevar has thrown just two innings in nine games. The Royals are likely to get 100 more innings from their starters this year compared to last year, which means they simply don’t need as many relievers as they did in 2012. The six-man bullpen has essentially disappeared from the game, but if the Royals want to be bold, replacing one of their relievers with a bench player who can hit right-handed pitching would be a smart move. It’s unlikely to happen barring a trade, because the only pitchers in their bullpen with options are the four guys who are way too good to demote. But it’s something to think about.

The Score Board: 4/4/13.

Nothing like early April to turn a two-game losing streak into widespread panic.

Fortunately, an 0-2 stretch to start the season counts the same as an 0-2 stretch in mid-August. Two games. Nothing to worry about. There might be reason to be concerned if the Royals had been blown out in both games. But they lost the first game 1-0 because Tyler Flowers heard me mock him on The Baseball Show as not fit to wear A.J. Pierzynski’s jock, and because Salvador Perez hit a bullet that just wasn’t quite high enough to clear the fence in left field.

They lost the second game 5-2 because Alex Gordon set up on the fence about three inches to the right on Dayan Viciedo’s home run. If he were just the slightest bit to the left, he makes an epic catch, the game is tied going into the bottom of the 7th, and there’s no way that Ned Yost goes to Luke Hochevar with the score tied in that situation. (Right? Right?)

If you’re looking for one reason why the Royals started 0-2, you can start with this: four times they batted with the bases loaded, and four times they made out, without driving in a run. You can rail about “they can’t hit in the clutch!” all you want, but aside from the fact that there’s miniscule evidence that “hitting in the clutch” is a real skill: it’s four at-bats.

Two games. Two close games. No reason to panic yet. But yeah, I was awfully relieved when they won this afternoon as well.

- The story so far for the Royals is their inability to generate offense. Five runs in three games, and no homers in maybe the best home run park in the American League, is a little concerning.

In their defense: it’s cold out. It was very cold on Monday and Wednesday, a little warmer this afternoon, when the Royals finally put together a three-run rally (sparked by a walk. Who knew?)

Also, the funny thing about the first series of the season is that you’re pretty much supposed to face the opposing team’s top three starters. Chris Sale is one of the best left-handed starters in the game. Jake Peavy won a Cy Young Award once, and last year (when he was an All-Star) was his best season since then. Struggling to score runs against those two guys isn’t a huge indictment of your offense. Today the Royals faced Gavin Floyd, a perfectly reasonable mid-rotation starter, and got to him for three runs.

So yes, of the ten hitters who have started a game for the Royals, one (Alex Gordon) has an OPS of even 600. But let’s wait until the Royals have actually seen a fourth or fifth starter before we get too concerned.

- Speaking of starters, given that I wrote here that Ervin Santana’s success is directly tied to his ability to keep the ball in the park, it’s not exactly the best omen in the world that he gave up three home runs in his first start. Yes, US Cellular Field is a terrible fit for Santana – but the White Sox were dealing with the same weather conditions the Royals were.

In Santana’s defense, he walked one batter and struck out eight, and if you do that every time out you’re going to have a good year no matter how many home runs you surrender. (Not that I want to test the limits of that prediction. If Santana gives up three homers every start, the previous sentence is invalid.) The homers are concerning, but I see no evidence that Santana is going to go full Jonathan Sanchez on us.

The bigger concern is that, according to Jeff Zimmerman’s research over at Royals Review, Santana’s fastball has been losing velocity all spring, and is now 2 mph slower than it was last year. This is, obviously, a concern, particularly since two of the three homers he gave up were on fat, 89 mph fastballs right down the middle.

Early April sample sizes will be the death of all of us. It’s just one start. But it definitely bears watching.

- If you’re going to panic over Santana giving up three home runs in his first start, then you have to be equally excited over the fact that in his first start, Jeremy Guthrie struck out nine of the 24 batters he faced.

After all, if Santana’s weakness is the gopher ball, Guthrie’s weakness is that, despite a pretty good fastball velocity-wise, he has always had a low strikeout rate in a game in which that is increasingly becoming untenable. His career high K% is 17.0%, and he hasn’t hit even 15.0% since 2008. Meanwhile, the league-wide average jumped all the way to 19.8% last season.

So even though it’s just one start, given that strikeout rates stabilize much quicker than other stats, it’s a good sign that Guthrie missed so many bats. It’s just the sixth time in 184 career starts that he’s whiffed nine or more batters. And just once in his career has he struck out a higher percentage of batters in a start, that coming way back in 2007, when he struck out 10 of 25 hapless Nationals hitters.

I’ll take Santana’s homers if it comes with Guthrie’s strikeouts. Santana may yet prove a turkey like Sanchez was – but like Sanchez, he’s only under contract for this season, and if he’s truly terrible the Royals can cut their losses in June and move on. But the Royals sunk a three-year commitment into Guthrie. They gambled $25 million that his perennially low strikeout rate wouldn’t come back to haunt them. They have to breathing a little bit easier after his performance today. I know I am.

- The importance of a good bullpen is generally overstated, but when you have a bullpen like the Royals do, you can understand why. It took the Royals 24 innings to get their first lead of the season, but when Guthrie turned over a two-run lead with nine outs to go, the relievers did their job. Aaron Crow, Kelvin Herrera, and Greg Holland may all be among the top 50 relievers in the game (along with Tim Collins, although we haven’t seen him yet and he struggled some in spring training).

It’s not exactly news that the Royals have a very good bullpen, or at least a very good top half, which is what matters most. Last year those four guys combined for a 2.99 ERA, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they improved on that mark this season.

But the real difference this season isn’t that the Royals have the bullpen to shut opponents down when they have the lead after six innings – it’s that they have a rotation full of starting pitchers who are capable of throwing six innings. In each of their first three games of the year, they got six innings from their starter – and keep in mind that managers sensibly don’t want to stretch out their starters too much at this point in the season, particularly in cold weather.

Six innings from your starter each night may not sound like much, until you remember the disaster that was last season. Last year, the Royals didn’t get three consecutive starts of six innings or more until June 17 through 19. They didn’t complete their first four-game streak until August. This is the Royals’ whole strategy this year: get six innings from your starter that don’t suck, and then let your relievers take over. It’s not a bad strategy, so long as your starters don’t suck, and your bullpen takes over.

Oh, and that your offense scores more than five runs in a series. But remember, it’s early.