Catching Up.

My annual production of blog posts has been on a steady downward slope since I started this site back in 2008, as I’ve fought a losing battle against the combined forces of a growing family and the jadedness that comes from writing the same things about the Royals for – going back to my days on rec.sport.baseball before Baseball Prospectus launched – over two decades now.

I was hoping that my productivity would pick up these last few weeks, but I’ve run into a new and delightfully unexpected problem: I can’t find the time to write because I’m too busy watching the games. There’s no sporting experience like pennant race baseball, because there’s no other sport that sucks away your life day after day after day for weeks, even months on end. If I didn’t have so much emotionally invested in this team, maybe I could write during the games, but I’m not a beat writer. I love Andy McCullough and Bob Dutton, but I understand why they never seem to care too much whether the team they cover wins or loses: if they did, there’s no way they could do their job on deadline. I’m finding it hard to do my job without a deadline. My apologies. I will try to do better going forward. Everyone has to elevate their game in a pennant race, myself included.

[I started writing this column before today’s game, and the only way I’m going to catch up is to simply ignore today’s events – Duffy’s injury, etc – for now.]

- Even more than usual, so much of the narrative of the Royals the last two weeks has revolved around Ned Yost. There were his poorly-timed and poorly-worded comments about the lack of attendance following the most dramatic moment of the season to that point, Alex Gordon’s walk-off home run on August 26th. It’s an old controversy now and I don’t want to wade too deeply into it, but here are some bullet points:

- Talking about fans showing at games is the third rail of the clubhouse. If you’re a player, a manager, a front office person: just don’t do it. I might make an exception for the Tampa Bay Rays, who have an almost comically low ratio of attendance to success, but even in the Rays’ case, the problem isn’t the fans: it’s the ballpark, both its quality and its location. The Rays have many fans, as revealed by their TV ratings; they just don’t have a lot of fans who want to drive an hour to an inconveniently-located indoor mausoleum.

The Royals have a lot of fans too, and the fans are responding to the team’s success, as demonstrated by record TV ratings last year and what will probably wind up another set of record TV ratings this year. It’s true that the Royals drew just 13,847 that night against the Twins. It’s also true that the attendance that night was their first crowd under 20,000 since June 25th, and their first crowd under 19,700 since May 28th.

Attendance wasn’t that low because Royals fans suddenly abandoned their team in the midst of a pennant race – it was that low because, for the first time in three months, it was a school night. Guess what? Fans are less likely to come out to the ballpark if they have to be in bed by 8:30, or if they have kids who have to be in bed by 8:30. The Royals averaged over 35,000 a game for the weekend series against the Indians. The fans are engaged. It’s just that real life beckons. People who work for a major league baseball team would do well to remember that what they do for a living isn’t real life for 99.9% of the population.

- When the fans did pack the stadium over the weekend, the Royals got swept by the Indians, pending an unlikely comeback when Sunday night’s game is resumed in Cleveland on the 22nd. Per Kurtis Seaboldt, if they officially lose that game, the Royals’ record at home since 2004, when drawing 30,000 fans or more, will drop to 25-75.

No, really. 25-75. At home. With a big crowd. That works out to 41-121 over a full season. That would be the losingest season in modern major league history – all in home games. That really is one of the most mind-boggling statistics I’ve ever seen associated with the Royals, and that’s saying something.

So maybe Ned Yost should be careful what he asks for.

- It’s a well-established fact that attendance lags behind winning. Teams almost always draw more fans the year after they win the World Series. Some of this is simply that fans aren’t soothsayers – no one knows when they decide to skip the game in August that their team is destined to win the championship that October. And some of it is that the fans that you bring in to top off the stadium – as opposed to the hard-core fans who fill up half the stadium every night – are, by definition, not as committed to the team. They are bandwagon fans. They need a reason to come out to the game.

And the reality is that “winning” is not the #1 reason for them to come to the game. “Doing something cool” is. The perception of cool is what drives a lot of entertainment choices for a lot of people, and after 28 years of losing, it takes more than the most glorious month-long stretch of baseball in a generation for the Royals to earn back the perception of cool. But if they keep winning, they will.

It’s an important point for baseball teams to understand; if they don’t, they do something petty and stupid like owner Wayne Huizenga did after the Marlins won the world championship in 1997. Upset that the Marlins didn’t draw more fans – mind you, they drew over 2.3 million that year – he burned the team to the ground before they even played their first game in defense of their championship. The 1998 Marlins lost 108 games – easily the most of any defending champion – and that move really salted the earth for baseball in south Florida. Sixteen years and another world championship later, the Marlins are still struggling to recover. They haven’t drawn 2.3 million fans in a year since, and the only season they even approached 2 million was the first year of their new ballpark.

So the point, Ned, is that you should take care of winning and have faith that the fans will come out.

- Having said all that...Ned might have had a teensy point. The last six non weekend-games have drawn 13,847; 17,668; 17,219; 21,536; 19,435; and 15,771. That looks good compared to, say, 2006, when the Royals drew less than 39,000 for all three weekend games against the Mariners in September combined. But it would be nice to see Kauffman Stadium packed for a weeknight game that doesn’t involve Derek Jeter’s final appearance there.

(And being an out-of-towner, I’m obviously part of the problem. I was hoping to fly in for the Tiger series, but unfortunately I can’t get out of some practice commitments. My disappointment is assuaged by the fact that the Royals finish the season here in Chicago. Also, if you’re calling for an appointment to see me in October…let’s just say that, until the playoff schedule is announced, your options are limited.)

The Royals have one homestand left, and I have no doubt that the weekend games against the Red Sox will sell out, and the series against Detroit the following weekend will be perhaps the most raucous Kauffman Stadium crowd since Darryl Motley caught a fly ball. But it would be nice to see the other four games – a Thursday night against Boston, a Monday-Wednesday series against the White Sox – at close to capacity too. Not for Ned. For us.

- Yost committed one of his worst tactical decisions of the season last Saturday, inexplicably going to Scott Downs instead of Jason Frasor in the tenth inning of a tie game. Downs was released by the White Sox just two months ago; since the Royals picked him up he has allowed more walks (5) than strikeouts (3). Just as damning for a purported left-handed specialist, the first batter he faced was Jose Ramirez, a switch-hitter.

Afterwards Yost said that he wanted Downs in the game because Michael Brantley, who bats left-handed, was due up second. That’s certainly different, bringing in a left-handed specialist because the second batter due up hit left-handed. Ramirez tripled, Brantley singled through the drawn-in infield, and by the time Yost acknowledged his mistake and brought in Frasor it was too late. Frasor gave up a soft groundball that turned into an RBI single because Brantley had stolen second and moved to third on Salvador Perez’s error; he then got a strikeout, a caught stealing, and a groundout to end the inning.

I’m hoping this game finally made it clear to Yost that Frasor is his fourth-best reliever. After watching the likes of Francisley Bueno and Aaron Crow pitch so poorly in ostensible mop-up situations that he had to use Greg Holland to close, Frasor is the one reliable guy the Royals have beyond the Herrera-Davis-Holland Death Hydra. He’s never been great but almost always been good, with a 3.62 career ERA, a 3.23 ERA the last six years, and one below-average ERA in his 11-year career. He also has a very small platoon split for his career; RHB have hit .230/.303/.362, and LHB have hit .245/.339/.371. It’s nice to play matchup ball, but the reality is that with a left-handed or right-handed hitter at the plate, Jason Frasor is a better option than Scott Downs. It was a colossal error, and – given that the Royals did score a run in the bottom of the inning – probably cost the Royals the game.

It’s nice to have a left-handed specialist. But it’s not vital; teams have won championships without one before. The Royals have three relievers who are so dominant that you’d be a fool to pull any of them for a pitcher who just happens to throw with his left hand. Frasor isn’t nearly as dominant, but he’s still probably a better option than any left-handed pitcher the Royals have. [Late note: thanks to Brandon Finnegan, this may no longer be true.]

That game stands out, though, because for the most part Yost has done a terrific job running his bullpen for the second straight year. It’s not simply that he chooses the right guys to bring into the game – I’m pretty sure most middle school students in the Kansas City area could figure out that Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis, and Greg Holland are the team’s three best relievers. It’s that they’re pitching so well in the first place. Yes, that’s Dave Eiland’s job as well, and he deserves credit for it. But in an era where pretty much every team – even the most sabermetrically-inclined – believes in giving relievers set roles that require them to pitch in short spurts, we have to acknowledge that having set roles and pitching in short spurts may help relievers to pitch better. And for the second straight year, the Royals’ relievers are pitching better than pretty much every other team in baseball.

Last year, the Royals’ bullpen had a 2.55 ERA, the lowest of any AL team since the 1990 A’s, and we all thought it was impossible that they would repeat that performance this year. We were right, although it’s worth pointing out that right now the Seattle Mariners’ bullpen has a 2.44 ERA. The game has changed; pitchers are ascendant, and teams have figured out that you’ll get better results from seven relievers throwing a maximum of one inning than from five relievers who might get up to six outs at a time.

The Royals’ bullpen, however, has a 3.43 ERA, 7th in the AL. It’s a good bullpen, but not nearly as good as last year’s. Or is it?

What made last year’s bullpen so remarkable was that the Royals literally didn’t have a single bad reliever in it. I mean almost literally – every single pitcher who relieved in even one game, except Luis Mendoza, had an ERA under 3.90. That’s an incredible luxury for a manager to have, to know that even the guy you call upon when you’re down 8-3 in the fifth inning is capable. But it is a luxury. It’s not a necessity.

This year, the Royals have had plenty of guys who have wet the bed coming out of the bullpen. Aaron Brooks, in addition to giving up seven runs in his one start, gave up six runs in his one relief appearance. Justin Marks allowed three runs in two innings; Donnie Joseph allowed six runs in less than an inning. Take those three guys out, and the Royals’ bullpen ERA drops to 3.12.

While the mop-up men have done a terrible job of mopping up, the business end of the bullpen has been taking care of business. Last year, the Royals had Greg Holland with one of the best relief seasons in team history, and Luke Hochevar was nearly as dominant as his set-up man. But this year, while Holland has taken a slight step back, Wade Davis has replaced Hochevar and is putting up a season for the ages. Forget Royals’ history – Davis’ 0.72 ERA is the third-best in major-league history for any pitcher with 50+ innings. He didn’t give up an extra-base hit until July 31st, ending a streak of 49.2 innings going back to last September, the longest such streak by a reliever in major league history.

And here’s the thing – the two pitchers with lower ERAs than Davis – Dennis Eckersley in 1990 and Fernando Rodney in 2012 – both gave up four unearned runs along with their five earned runs. As I’ve gone on the record many times, the distinction between earned and unearned runs is essentially meaningless in today’s game. Davis hasn’t given up an unearned run all year. His RA is also 0.72. Rob Murphy also had a 0.72 RA as a rookie in 1986, when he threw 50.1 innings. No other pitcher with 50+ innings has ever had an RA of under 1.00.

And the icing on the cake has been Kelvin Herrera, who since June 27th has pitched 26.2 consecutive scoreless innings. Neither Herrera and Davis has allowed a home run all season. Holland’s 1.60 ERA is actually the highest of the three. Teams have had two dominant relievers before, but very few teams have had three, and perhaps no team has had three quite as dominant as the Royals. No team in major league history has had three pitchers who pitched in 40+ games in relief with an ERA of under 1.75. With three weeks to go, the Royals have three guys who have pitched in 59 or more games with an ERA no higher than 1.60. That’s insane.

The HDH trio – someone please come up with a nickname for them, preferably one that’s not groan-inducing – have stepped on the gas in the second half. As a result, the Royals – who were 10-20 in one-run games in late July – have won 11 of 13 one-run games since. And they are 18-8 in two-run games for the season, meaning in games decided by one or two runs they are 39-30 overall. This is why they are 78-61 despite a run differential of only +26 – they have won six more games than you would expect from their runs and runs allowed. It’s not just that their bullpen is so good – it’s that it’s good in all the right places.

Which brings us back to Ned Yost, and at some point we have to acknowledge that for all his tactical issues, he does the rest of his job well enough to make up for them. Last year the Royals roared out of the second half by winning 19 of 24, and their 43-27 record after the All-Star Break was the second-best in baseball. This year, they’ve just completed their hottest month since Jim Frey (!) was their manager. In both cases, the team was considered a fairly significant disappointment up until the moment they got hot.

It does seem to me that if a manager is respected in the clubhouse, if he maintains an even keel through the highs and lows of a season, if he’s able to motivate his troops even when things appear bleak, this would be one of the signs of it: that instead of packing it in when faced with adversity, instead of letting a frustrating first half snowball downhill, the team would rebound when no one expected it. And I think I’m being honest when I say that for the second straight year, no one (outside the organization) expected the Royals to get as hot as they did.

Yost does things that will drive you crazy. I still haven’t forgiven him for pinch-hitting with Carlos Pena, or letting Jeremy Guthrie pitch the eighth, and I’m still terrified that he might do something similar again this September. Well, again again, because he already did it last Saturday when he picked Downs over Frasor.

But you know what? Every manager in baseball, with one or two exceptions, makes tactical decisions that drive analysts crazy. Yost is better than most in some ways; for instance, the Royals have issued just 12 intentional walks this season, the fewest in baseball, and last year they issued just 21, fewer than every team but the Nationals and Red Sox.

And for the second straight year, he got the pecking order in the bullpen straightened out early in the season and reaped the rewards. If we all agree that bullpen management is one of the areas on which a manager has the most impact, then it seems unfair to claim that Yost doesn’t deserve some credit when the Royals’ bullpen has been kicking ass and taking names for years.

Making Memories.

So much of being a sports fan is the chance to be a part of shared memories. Non-sports fans might share in a cultural experience every now and then – Who Shot J.R.?, the Seinfeld finale, the Red Wedding – but to be a fan of a sports team means to share in their most important moments, good or bad, with thousands of strangers who have as much invested in that moment as you. And those memories can resonate years or even decades later. Red Sox fans will always remember where they were when Dave Roberts stole second base. Cubs fans can never forget where they were when Mark Prior got tired in the eighth inning and Alex Gonzalez flubbed a routine double play grounder. If you root for a sports team, you share memories with everyone else who does too.

Except for Royals fans. We don’t have any real shared memories because we haven’t seen our team play a truly meaningful game in a generation.

We have surrogate memories, of games and moments which were ultimately meaningless but at least gave us an emotional rush in the moment. Last time I mentioned Bob Hamelin’s walk-off homer in the 12th inning on July 25th, 1994, the third game in what turned out to be a 14-game winning streak that brought the Royals to within a game of the AL Central lead. Except it happened in July, in a season that was cut short by a strike on August 11th. There was Carlos Beltran’s walkoff homer in the 10th inning on July 20th, 2003, that gave the Royals a 6.5 game lead in the AL Central – except it happened in July, in a season that ended with the Royals in third place, seven games out.

More recently, there was Justin Maxwell’s walk-off grand slam in the 10th inning last year, a memory that still gets Royals fans buzzing. That moment, at least, occurred on September 22nd, just one week before the end of the season. Not to be a buzzkill, but all that win did was keep the Royals in seventh place in the AL, 3.5 games behind the Indians for the final Wild Card spot with seven games left to play. It kept the Royals mathematically alive, but only barely.

Good or bad, shared memories are what make being a sports fan worth it. To have a connection with people you’ve never met, to say the words “Dane Iorg” like some sort of super-secret password within a select community, is worth a thousand meaningless 5-3 losses in mid-May.

But ever since Dane Iorg, the Royals have had only the meaningless losses, not the meaningful memories.

Four years ago, Alex Gordon hit the first walk-off home run of his career, and from the Kauffman Stadium press box, I called it on Twitter. It was a fun moment; this was the pre-renaissance Gordon who was still lost at the plate, and he’d had a terrible game, and as he batted with two outs and two on in the ninth, I decided that, having already predicted his failures in his previous at-bats, that I’d have a little fun and be optimistic this one time. I tweeted this. Gordon hit a blast to right. The Royals beat the Orioles, and some of you joined me in having a fun time rehashing it on Twitter.

But it wasn’t a meaningful memory. The Royals won that game, but they only won 66 other games that year. The biggest legacy of Gordon’s swing that night was that it gave the Orioles a higher draft pick than the Royals, which is why Baltimore ended up with Dylan Bundy and the Royals ended up with Bubba Starling.

Tonight, Alex Gordon hit the second walk-off home run of his career. And with any luck, this one will be remembered by Royals fans years from now, maybe decades from now. The Royals had been shut out all night, and had scored two runs in their previous 28 innings. They were three outs away from squandering another great outing from Danny Duffy, from losing their third game in a row, from letting the Tigers move to within a half-game of first place. Gordon faced Glen Perkins, the rare left-handed closer, who had given up just two homers all year, who has had an ERA under 2.60 for four straight seasons. He was down in the count 0-1. He got a breaking ball that caught too much of the plate and lofted it to right field.

And 28 years of Royals fan experience led me to believe that the ball would be caught, first at the warning track, then at the wall, and then with a leaping grab over the wall. It didn’t look like it had quite enough, and losing a game on a fly ball that was a few inches shy of leaving the yard seemed like a quintessentially Royals thing to do. Only it turned out this ball had just barely enough, or it was being pushed by a tailwind, or the breath of angels. It cleared the wall, Gordon was – for this one night – MVP, the offensive doldrums of the last few days were forgotten, and the Royals were back on a winning streak.

Maybe this home run will survive only as a wistful memory the way Hamelin’s and Beltran’s and Maxwell’s home runs do, a nice moment in an ultimately meaningless season. But it already feels like the biggest moment for the Royals in 29 years.

And it feels like just the first of many big moments – moments that we’ll all remember, and we’ll still be talking about when we’re sitting in rocking chairs many years hence – to come. Win or lose, I’m looking forward to sharing as many of those moments with you as possible.

- While we can no longer claim Alex Gordon to be massively underrated, there is one member of the Royals who still manages to fly under the radar despite having an enormous impact on their success this season and last. I’m speaking of Head Athletic Trainer Nick Kenney. (And as always, “Nick Kenney” is just shorthand for “Kenney, and Assistant Trainer Kyle Turner, and the rest of the Royals’ training staff.”)

One hidden indicator for a team’s success in any given season is this simple question: how many starts did they have to give to pitchers who were not supposed to be in their rotation? Generally speaking, teams whose five primary starting pitchers make 150 or more starts in a season are contending teams. That’s true even if not all five pitchers are elite starters; think of the Reds the last couple of years, who had Johnny Cueto and Mat Latos, yes, but also Mike Leake and Bronson Arroyo and Aaron Harang. Never having to send a clay pigeon onto the mound is almost as valuable as having #1 starters in your rotation.

This year, the Royals’ Opening Day rotation included James Shields, Jason Vargas, Yordano Ventura, Jeremy Guthrie, and Bruce Chen. Chen was re-signed largely for his ability to move to the bullpen if and when Danny Duffy was ready, and that’s exactly what happened when Chen hurt his back and Duffy was put in the rotation in early May. Chen returned to the rotation for a couple of starts when Vargas had an appendectomy, but otherwise has stayed in the bullpen.

Shields, Vargas, Ventura, Guthrie, and Duffy have started all but eight of the Royals’ games this year, and Chen has started seven of the other eight. We knew this at the beginning of the season: the Royals clearly had six guys in the organization capable of starting in the majors this year, but they just as clearly did not have seven. While their overall record is a surprise, it would be much less of a surprise if we had known before the season that on August 26^th, those six guys would have started 129 of the Royals’ 130 games.

The 130th game was Aaron Brooks’ notorious start in Toronto, when he allowed seven runs and was knocked out of the game in the first inning. That just reinforces the importance of having starters who take the ball every fifth day, and it reinforces the importance of a training staff that can keep pitchers healthy. Let’s not forget the bumps in the road – the reason Brooks made a start was that Ventura walked off a mound on May 26th holding his elbow. While you and I were scheduling his Tommy John surgery, the Royals waved it off from the beginning, and they were proven right when Ventura only missed one start. Better still, he has stayed healthy since returning to the rotation; while his strikeout rate has dropped, his velocity has stayed steady.

The game is designed to break pitchers. For all the advances that baseball teams have made in playing a better game, the code of keeping pitchers healthy has been an incredibly difficult one to crack. Pedigree helps; Shields has been incredibly durable throughout his career, and Guthrie has cheerfully given his team six innings and three runs allowed for the better part of eight seasons. But Vargas missed half of last year with a blood clot in his armpit, a potentially serious issue that sometimes is a harbinger of Thoracic Outlet Syndrome. Ventura’s a rookie, a 5’11” rookie who throws 100 mph. Duffy just returned from Tommy John surgery last August. It was unrealistic to assume the Royals would get to mid-August with all five guys still in their rotation.

But they are, and the Royals are winning. That’s not a coincidence, and that’s not simply luck. The Royals have been one of the healthiest teams in baseball ever since Kenney and Turner were hired after the 2009 season; they won the Dick Martin Award presented to the best training staff in the majors after the 2011 season. And it goes beyond the rotation, obviously; aside from Luke Hochevar blowing out his elbow in spring training, and aside from Eric Hosmer’s broken hand, the Royals haven’t suffered a significant injury all year. Ok, Bruce Chen’s bulging disc counts, but Scott Downs’s sore neck doesn’t. They’ve barely used the DL. And they might have been even healthier last year.

I mean, look around the majors. Remember that point about starts from your projected Opening Day rotation? The Texas Rangers, widely expected to be World Series conteders before the season, had so many injuries to their projected rotation before and during spring training that they opened the year with a rotation of Tanner Scheppers (making his first career start on Opening Day!), Martin Perez, Robbie Ross, Joe Saunders, and Nick Martinez. They have the worst record in baseball. The Tigers have a rotation that includes the 2013 AL Cy Young winner (Max Scherzer), the 2012 AL Cy Young winner (David Price), and the 2011 AL Cy Young and MVP winner (Justin Verlander). But Verlander hasn’t been right all season – maybe he’s not hurt in the traditional sense, but he’s clearly not 100% - and now Anibal Sanchez is on the DL, and the Tigers’ rotation includes the likes of Robbie Ray, Buck Farmer (who was in the Midwest League in July), and now Kyle Lobstein is supposed to get a spot start.

No one in the Royals’ rotation is at the level of a Price or a Scherzer, at least not consistently. But every single game the Royals put a guy on the mound who can be at least adequate (Guthrie), and generally better than that. It’s a testament to the front office finally figuring out this pitching thing, but it’s also a testament to a training staff that, by keeping their charges healthy, have made the job of the front office that much easier.

The Royals have announced that Ventura will miss tomorrow night’s start with a sore back, so for only the second time all season, someone other than the six guys the Royals went to war with back in March will get a start. This time, at least, it’s Liam Hendricks, who looked like a throw-in in the massive Danny Valencia/Erik Kratz trade back in July, but was having a phenomenal season in Triple-A at the time. For the season, Hendricks had 13 walks and 126 Ks in Triple-A in 143 innings. He’s been pretty terrible in the major leagues – 6.06 ERA in 169 innings – but if his control has gone from pretty good to phenomenal, he might yet turn into something. There’s a non-zero chance he’s the next Bob Tewksbury. In any case, I’d rather see him on the mound than Aaron Brooks, and it says something that the Royals are turning to him instead of Chen.

But the sooner the Royals go back to their best-case rotation, the better, and it seems like the Royals are skipping Ventura’s start out of an abundance of caution. In Kenney and Turner’s fifth season on the job, they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt from me that they know what they’re doing.

I know some of my criticisms of the Royals’ organization may ring hollow in retrospect, and there are things I’ve said that I wish I could take back. But I’ll stand by those words I wrote five years ago. Not to beat a dead horse or to pick on someone years after the fact, but hiring a new training staff is one of the best things that Dayton Moore has done as general manager. I hope Kenney and Turner are awarded full playoff shares by the team. Because if the Royals get there, they will have done as much as anyone to make it possible.

Stretch Run.

The Royals have just completed a 30-game stretch unlike any they have played in over 30 years. Less than five weeks ago, the Royals were 48-50, having responded to Ned Yost’s prediction that they were “a second-half team” by losing their first four games after the All-Star Break. They were in third place in the AL Central. They were eight games behind the Tigers.

Before losing this afternoon they were 72-56, the farthest above .500 they’ve been since a single day in 1994, the final game of their 14-game winning streak that year. They made up an unbelievable 11 games on the Tigers in 33 days, and even after today’s misstep they lead the division by two games. They’re just 1.5 games behind the Orioles for the #2 seed. All this thanks to the franchise’s first 24-6 stretch since August 27th, 1980. To give you some perspective, George Brett went 1-for-3 that day to drop his average to .406.

(This was the day after his legendary 5-for-5 day that got his average back over .400. It would stay over .400 until September 4th, and got back to .400 one last time on September 19th. And remember, Brett was hitting .247 on May 21st.  From May 22nd to September 19th, Brett hit – this is not a misprint – .445 over a 77-game stretch. Narrow that down a little from May 27th to August 30th – a 63-game stretch – and Brett hit .469. Other players have had better years, but I’m not sure anyone has ever quite so good for quite so long as Brett was that summer.)

I remember 1994, and the dizzying winning streak out of nowhere (Bob Hamelin’s walk-off homer in this game is one of my most indelible memories as a Royals fan.) I do not remember 1980, which is not surprising given that I turned five years old that summer, although I have no doubt that season had a huge impact on me becoming a fan of the team.

The point is, I have literally no memory of the Royals playing this well for this long, and if you’re under the age of 40, neither have you. It may be a long, long time before we see it again. Put it this way: if the Royals just win six of their next nine games, they will have accomplished Dayton Moore’s goal of “winning 15 out of 20” back-to-back. So yes, I’m questioning everything I thought I knew about this team, about Dayton Moore, about Ned Yost, about the James Shields trade (notice I’m not calling it the Wil Myers trade). Everything.

If you didn’t get the memo, the New York Times kindly asked me if they could run an abridged version of my article on Sung Woo Lee, and I was more than happy to oblige. Also, I covered the Royals for Grantland last week, and tried my best to explain how they’ve turned things around without resorting to Supernatural Koreans or #RoyalsDevilMagic. (Also, for a more detailed rundown of the Season of Sung Woo, here’s a great summary.)

Frankly, the only thing that hasn’t been perfect about this last month is that I haven’t had nearly enough time to write about it. I intend to make amends for that going forward. If this is the last season of Rany on the Royals, I want to go out with a bang, not a whimper, and the Royals are doing their damndest to accommodate me. And, yes, make me look like an imbecile at the same time, but you can’t have the former without the latter.

- With the Royals suddenly everywhere – on the cover of Sports Illustrated last week, hosting their first ESPN Sunday Night baseball game since 1996 next week – the baseball world has just as suddenly woken up to the fact that, hey, Alex Gordon is pretty good.

The Royals ascension to first place has coincided with Gordon briefly leading the major leagues in Wins Above Replacement according to Fangraphs. This has sparked a lot of discussion, some from critics of WAR who thinks it’s ridiculous that Alex Gordon is the Most Valuable Player in baseball, even though no serious analyst (at least none that I’ve seen) is actually arguing that Gordon should win the MVP award.

For one thing, Fangraphs’ version of WAR is just one version – fWAR – and the other version, as calculated by Baseball Reference (bWAR), doesn’t have Gordon ranked nearly so highly. (Gordon is ranked 5th among AL position players, and 8th when you include pitchers.) The difference mainly stems from how much value you place on Gordon’s defense. Baseball Reference has him as “just” the best defensive outfielder in the American League; Fangraphs has him as far better than that.

I think, given the relative lack of reliability of defensive stats, that Baseball Reference’s conclusion is more reasonable. It’s hard for any left fielder to be worth more than 20 runs above average with a month left to play, especially since word has finally gotten around baseball that YOU DO NOT RUN ON ALEX GORDON. Gordon got just his seventh baserunner kill of the year this afternoon, after having at least 17 assists in each of the last three years, becoming the first left fielder in at least 60 years (as far back as we have defensive data broken down by position) to kill 17 baserunners or more in three consecutive seasons.

On the other hand, it’s not like Gordon’s defensive numbers this year are an enormous outlier. He’s won three Gold Gloves in a row on merit. He was a third baseman until he was 26 years old, and he’s making a case for being one of the best defensive left fielders of his generation. That’s insane.

But that’s Alex Gordon, whose dedication to his craft – his legendary diet, his workout routine, his work ethic – makes me proud just to have watched him all these years. Four years ago he was considered a bust by a wide swath of both fans and industry types; I went against the grain when I wrote here that Gordon still had a chance to live up to expectations, and that was three years before he broke out.

I’m not taking credit for that; when you’re optimistic about practically every highly-touted Royals player of the last 25 years, you’re going to be vindicated occasionally just by accident. I thought Gordon would become a very good player, but I figured that he’d eventually hit 30 homers as a slugging third baseman. Instead he’s become a guy who hits 15-20 homers and is the best defensive left fielder in baseball. It’s a credit to him that when he wasn’t able to find success the way he was ordained to, he found a different path to becoming a star.

And now comes word that Gordon, who is only under club control for one more season but has a player option for 2016 at just $12.5 million, intends to play under that option. Make no mistake: if Gordon plays as well next season as he is this season, the bidding for him will start at 5 years and $75 million and go up from there. He’d be walking away from a few million dollars, and taking the risk that at age 32, an off-year might cost him tens of millions more after the season.

Which is why I’m hopeful that Gordon’s comments lead to a different scenario, one in which he and the Royals agree to a long-term contract that replaces his player option. That may happen this winter; while the track record of players signed to extensions two years before free agency (think Justin Verlander, or Ryan Howard) is pretty crappy, when you’re signing a guy just one year before he can walk away, the risk/reward ratio is pretty balanced.

And I think the risk with Gordon is a lot less than with Verlander or Howard, because he’s not a pitcher, and he’s a fantastic athlete who takes phenomenal care of his body. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of hitter who will fall apart at age 32, but the kind of player who will have a long, graceful decline into his late 30s. Think of Carlos Beltran, who lost foot speed and bat speed but had the athleticism to change his approach as he got older, drawing more walks and hitting for more power. I wouldn’t blink an eye about committing a five-year contract to Gordon after this season that would keep him in a Royals uniform through 2019.

The irony is that in this sabermetric age, Gordon’s hidden value is not so hidden anymore, and even with a hometown discount it remains to be seen whether the Royals are willing to pay $15 million a year to keep him. Twenty years ago, Kevin Appier was the most underrated pitcher in baseball, but that very underratedness allowed the cash-strapped Royals to re-sign him to a four-year extension after the 1995 season for far less than he was truly worth. In another era, Alex Gordon might be the most underrated player in baseball. But not in this era. And not with the Royals in first place.

I don’t want to take too much focus away from what the Royals are doing in the here and now. But Gordon is the heart and soul of this franchise, their best player and their role model. It’s not a coincidence that the Royals are playing their best baseball in 34 years while Gordon is on a tear at the plate, hitting .327/.384/.549 from July 21st through yesterday. Everything about this past month feels like a dream, so why not dream about Gordon being paired with Salvador Perez under contract for the rest of the decade; about him finishing his career with Kansas City; even about 4 being retired under the scoreboard along with 5, 10, 20, and 42?

Nearly a decade ago, in the pages of Baseball Prospectus 2007, I wrote, “He`s a lifelong Royals fan whose brother was named after George Brett, so this could be the start of a beautiful relationship.” I could only hope it would be this beautiful, or last this long. In a season that feels like a fairytale, I’m still rooting for the fairytale ending.

- More to come; I’ve got literally thousands of words bubbling to the surface, but like the Royals, I need to pace myself and finish strong.

To Sung Woo, Thanks For Everything! Rany Jazayerli

How do I begin this story? How do I explain the inexplicable? How can I convince you that the greatest story for Royals fans in 29 years is unfolding before our eyes, and its protagonist lives a hemisphere away, speaks imperfect (but diligent) English, and had never set foot at Kauffman Stadium until this past Thursday?

I first became aware of Sung Woo Lee maybe eight or nine years ago. I didn’t know his name was Sung Woo Lee, I just knew there was a poster at a site named Royals Corner that I occasionally dropped in on – back when there was more time in my day and fewer options for the sports-minded reader – who went by the handle “KoreanFan”. He wrote like English was his second language, but he got his point across, and he was eternally optimistic at a time when hundred-loss seasons were something the Royals could only aspire to. I thought it was impressive that someone from Korea followed the Royals, but didn’t think too much more of it.

Years later KoreanFan joined Twitter as @Koreanfan_KC, affording him the opportunity to interact with other Royals fans more easily. And slowly, through osmosis, I picked up his general story: that Sung Woo Lee was from South Korea, had somehow become a Royals fan in the 1990s, and loyally stuck with the team even though he had no connection to the team or city whatsoever – I don’t think he had ever been to America. I’d answer a couple of his questions on Twitter at times and he appeared genuinely thrilled that I responded. He seemed earnest, polite, and perpetually optimistic about the team despite the many slings and arrows they threw at him. He was basically everything I’m not, in other words.

Over time he became a well-known and welcome part of the Royals social media community. His devotion to the team, despite the vast geographic and cultural and even chronological gap – he would frequently tweet during Royals games on the weekend even though it was the middle of the night in Korea – earned him respect, as did the fact that he never criticized the team, but also never criticized the critics. In one memorable exchange two years ago, Danny Duffy – who was as honest and open and heartfelt on Twitter as any athlete, which is probably why he had to finally quit it – offered to fly Sung Woo to Kansas City to see the team play.

Chris Kamler, who the world knows as @TheFakeNed, interviewed Sung Woo for his website in 2012, and you get the full sense of his personality and devotion there. Kamler ended the interview by once again needling Sung Woo about when he was going to finally fly to Kansas City to see the Royals play.

This summer, Sung Woo finally decided to take the plunge. Taking advantage of a job change, he was able to carve out ten days from his schedule to come to Kansas City, watch the Royals play, and maybe do a little sight-seeing and barbecue-eating while he was in town. He emailed Kamler and fellow Royals fan Dave Darby that he was buying his plane ticket and reserving his hotel room; they told him not to worry about transportation, that they’d pick him up and drive him to the ballpark and introduce him to Arthur Bryant’s and maybe the Negro League Museum while he was in town.

If the story had ended there, that would have been enough: three people who have never met, and can barely communicate with each other, bonding together like long-lost friends over a shared mutual interest in a crappy baseball team. A couple of guys were going to take a day or two off of work to show a complete stranger around town. Movies have been made with flimsier plots.

But then Kamler decided to have a little fun, and use his influence – and I use the term “influence” loosely for a guy who impersonates Ned Yost on Twitter and spends most of his time there making fart jokes – to publicize the fact that Sung Woo Lee was finally coming to Kansas City, and it would be great if other Royals fans would welcome him and make him feel at home.

He had no idea what he was getting himself into. None of us did. I tweeted Kamler on August 1st that since I wasn’t in town to see Sung Woo myself, I’d be happy to drop him a line and talk to him on the phone for a few minutes. I’m not trying to pat myself on the back here – talking about the Royals with someone isn’t exactly a sacrifice for me. I’m just pointing out that nine days ago, the story of Sung Woo Lee was still something that only the Royals Twitterati knew about, and the only ambition any of us had at the time was simply for Sung Woo to have a good time while he was in town.

And then things got a little crazy. Kamler started pushing the hashtag #SungWooToKC on Twitter to get the word out. Kamler can run a hashtag into the ground – if something like, say, #CareerEndingTwitterTypos was trending, he’ll tweet out 37 career-ending Twitter typos in quick succession. Kamler is a social media pro, and has enough big names in the KC media world following him to get the word out a fair bit. But still: how many people, aside from us hard-core Royals fan types who even use Twitter in the first place, were going to care about some guy from South Korea who was flying to Kansas City to watch a few baseball games?

This is the point where we have to tip our cap to the Royals themselves. Shortly after Kamler launched #SungWooToKC, the Royals reached out to Lee directly and offered him to throw out the first pitch at Monday’s game. Coming from an organization that has made missteps with the way it communicates to its fan base at times, this was an incredibly gracious and classy move. When trying to piece together how this story went viral, it’s – almost by definition – impossible to tell what the tipping point was that made Sung Woo Lee a phenomenon. But being offered to throw out the first pitch had to have made a difference. As a media story, “hey, there’s this Royals fan coming all the way from Korea to watch his first game at Kauffman Stadium” is nice, but “hey, there’s this Royals fan coming all the way from Korea to watch his first game at Kauffman Stadium, and the Royals are letting him throw out the first pitch on Monday!” has a much bigger hook.

The media, the fans, the entire damn city took the hook. Kamler wrote about Sung Woo’s approaching trip, including his itinerary while he was in town, for Pine Tar Press last weekend. At that point, I just hoped that his trip might warrant a brief mention in the Kansas City Star or something. By the time he landed in Kansas City Tuesday afternoon, he had four local TV crews waiting at the gate for his arrival. The city has laid out the red carpet for him ever since, and the story just continues to grow.

For posterity’s sake, I’m going to do my best to summarize what has happened since, though to save time I won’t be able to link to everything. To get the full flavor, check out Sung Woo’s Twitter feed, or Kamler’s.

- Greeted by camera crews Tuesday afternoon, was on four local TV broadcasts that night.

- Was featured in the Star Wednesday morning.

- Took a tour of the Negro League Museum later that morning, featuring tour guide Bob Kendrick and an entourage of two dozen people.

- Gets featured at Deadspin and USA Today.

- Has lunch at Arthur Bryant’s.

- Is interviewed on 610 Sports that afternoon.

- Trolls the Best Fans In Baseball.

- Tours Boulevard Brewing Company that evening.

- With the Royals still playing in Arizona, he gets a shoutout from Danny Duffy – who, behind the scenes, also had a lot to do with Sung Woo’s story becoming as big as it has – on the Royals pre-game show.

- Got an email from Mike Sweeney.

- This is all still Wednesday, by the way.

- Appeared on 96.5 The Buzz Thursday morning. Was given a helmet signed by Billy Butler and a hat signed by Bruce Chen from the station.

- Is featured in the English-language Korea Times.

- Received a personal tour of Kauffman Stadium from the Royals, led by Jennifer Splittorff, who presented him with a SPLITT patch and one of her dad’s bobbleheads afterwards. Goes out on the field, touches the grass, picks up a bullpen phone, basically does everything short of hitting a double in the gap.

- Gets a personalized “SungWoo Lee” #23 Royals jersey, presented by Curt Nelson, the Director of the Royals’ Hall of Fame.

- Walks across the Truman Sports Complex to tailgate before the Chiefs’ preseason opener.

- Is presented with his own personalized #1 jersey by the Chiefs, gets tickets near the 50-yard line. Meets former players and current team president Mark Donovan.

- Friday was a pre-scheduled trip to see the Double-A Northwest Arkansas Naturals, so much of it was spent in the car. However, once there he managed to:

- Watch batting practice from next to the cage;

- Get invited into the clubhouse by manager Vance Wilson, who had heard about his story;

- Shake hands with every player one by one, and give Mitch Maier – back mentoring the baby Royals – a bear hug.

- Rode the Naturals’ pickup onto the field with their mascots.

- Got on the field as a human bowling ball during a mid-inning promotion. He managed to knock over six pins.

- Got Maier’s autographed jersey after the game.

Saturday, he was back in Kansas City for his first chance to watch the Royals play live.

- Prior to the game he was the star of a massive tailgate party in the parking lot, where he met his adoring masses.

- Appeared on the Jumbotron in the middle of the fifth inning.

- Was a story on Sportscenter – SPORTSCENTER – after the game Saturday night.

- Appeared in studio with Joel Goldberg and Jeff Montgomery on today’s pre-game show. Montgomery gave him an autographed glove as a gift.

- Took part in the dance-off competition against Jimmy Faseler – whose spot as Everyone’s Favorite Royals Fan he usurped. Sung Woo won, of course. (Sorry, Jimmy.)

- Was featured at MLB.com.

Somewhere along the way he appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered. He’s gotten tweets sent to him from Jeremy Guthrie, Eric Hosmer, and Billy Butler (at least – there may be more.)

I managed to speak with him by phone on Saturday before he headed to the ballpark; I’m pretty sure I was more nervous than he was. He told me that he and his brother, Sung Jin Lee, who is also a Royals fan but not as involved on social media, would read Rob & Rany on the Royals back in the day and argue about the Royals afterwards. “I was optimist like you,” he told me. “My brother was like Rob, not pessimist, but…” he struggled to find the right word. “…realist.”

(A decade of Rob & Rany on the Royals, summed up by Sung Woo Lee in one depressing sentence.)

As an aside, do you know hard it was to be a Royals fan in South Korea in 1995? This was years before an MLB Extra Innings package existed, let alone MLB.tv and watching games over the internet. Sung Woo was able to watch the Royals play only rarely – he told me he saw most of their highlights from the satellite TV equivalent of CNN Headline News, a snippet here, a ten-second clip there. I lived overseas from 1984 to 1991 and it was almost impossible to keep up with the Royals – but at least I was already a Royals fan, and we came home to Wichita every summer from early June to mid-August. The level of devotion it took for him to become a Royals fan warrants every good thing that’s happened to him this week.

After we spoke, he had to take another phone call – from Jason Kander, the Missouri Secretary of State.

Tonight he attended a Sporting KC watch party at the Power & Light District – Sporting KC dropped by the tailgate yesterday to present him with one of their jerseys – and he’s a guest of the Hilton President hotel tonight. He’s supposed to be on 810 WHB in the morning. I believe he’s appearing on the Korean version of “Good Morning America” on Monday. And, of course, he’s throwing out the first pitch at Kauffman Stadium tomorrow night. Whereupon I expect he’ll get the loudest ovation heard at Kauffman Stadium since George Brett retired.

So, you know, just like your summer vacation.

At this point, I'm not willing to put any limit on just how big a story this can be, since I'm not entirely sure how this became such a big story to begin with. A feature on one of the national nightly newscasts? Why not? This seems like the exact kind of story that Diane Sawyer or Brian Williams would want to end their show with. A shoutout from President Obama? Well, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest is a huge Royals fan - I mean, it's in his Twitter handle. So who knows?

And really, if this story was just about how Kansas City opened its homes and its heart to a Royals fan from South Korea, that would be enough. It would be enough to feel for once an immense swell of pride at being a Royals fan, of being part of this community of people who paid back the devotion of a foreigner with the best of Midwestern hospitality. It would be a story we’d be talking about for years to come.

But of course, that’s only half of the story. Because the other half of the story is that ever since he arrived the Royals can’t stop winning. They were already on a hot stretch before he arrived, winning 9 of their last 12 games and handing the A’s their first home series loss in three months. But ever since Sung Woo Lee arrived at KCI Tuesday afternoon, the Royals have taken this to another level. They crushed the Diamondbacks that night, 12-2, hitting three homers with at least two men on base for only the fifth time in franchise history. The fifth inning that night was the first time the Royals had ever hit a three-run homer and a grand slam in the same inning.

Wednesday they edged Arizona, 4-3, with Mike Moustakas driving in all four runs; the next night they finished off the sweep, 6-2, as Jeremy Guthrie threw the Royals’ first complete game of the year. Friday the Royals returned home to play the Giants, and San Francisco should have scored five runs in the third inning – they had a stretch of six hits in seven at-bats – but Nori Aoki threw out a runner at third base (when Hunter Pence briefly overran the bag) and at home plate to end the inning, becoming the first Royal outfielder in over 40 years with two assists in one inning, and the Giants settled for only two runs. Butler and Gordon hit RBI singles in the sixth inning and the Royals won, 4-2.

And then yesterday, Sung Woo’s first game ever at Kauffman Stadium, the game was scoreless in the middle of the fifth inning. That’s when the Royals put his picture up on the jumbotron. The very next batter – Alex Gordon, leading off the bottom of the fifth – homered. The Royals would win, 5-0, as James Shields threw the Royals’ first shutout of the year. Prior to the game, Sung Woo had tweeted this out. His English was ambiguous – did “Go Royals… make it 5-0 today” mean he was rooting for them to win their fifth straight since he arrived? Or win today, by the score of 5-0? Decades from now, scholars will parse his tweet the way amateur historians watch footage of Babe Ruth’s called shot, trying to determine his intent.

The Royals won today, 7-4, with Sung Woo’s patron Duffy getting his second win since Lee arrived, after Duffy hadn’t won a game since June. Afterwards, Sung Woo waved a broom for everyone to see.

Today’s win was the Royals’ 15th in their last 18 games, meaning that – after not winning 15 of 20 games in more than 10 years when Dayton Moore made his infamous comment last year at the All-Star Break – they have now had three stretches of 15 wins in 20 games in the last 13 months. Today’s win was also the Royals’ seventh in a row, giving the Royals their second seven-game winning streak of the year, something they hadn’t accomplished since – wait for it – 1985.

And while the Royals have been winning, pretty much every team they’re trying to catch has been losing. When Sung Woo landed on Tuesday, the Royals had the seventh-best record in the AL, 1.5 games behind the Blue Jays for the second wild card. As I write this, they are in the catbird seat for the second wild card, at least 1.5 games ahead of every team chasing them. Their daily playoff odds, as calculated by sites like ESPN.com and Baseball Prospectus and Fangraphs, have more than doubled in the last week. Their current playoff odds at ESPN.com sit at 59.2%, which is the highest number their daily playoff odds have been since daily playoff odds were invented.

And while those playoff odds include the possibility of a one-game winner-take-all playoff set against the Angels on the road just for the right to play in the ALDS, the Royals’ chances of avoiding the Coin Flip Game by winning the AL Central have risen even faster than their overall playoff odds. On the morning of July 31st – ten days ago – the Royals were five games behind the Detroit Tigers. That morning the Tigers traded Drew Smyly and Austin Jackson for David Price, while the Royals did nothing.

Ten days later, the Royals are a half-game behind Detroit. The Tigers lost three of four to the Yankees, and then after coming back to beat Toronto in the ninth inning Friday night, lost Saturday when Joe Nathan blew a one-run lead in the ninth and Joba Chamberlain gave up the walk-off hit in the tenth. Today they had a 5-0 lead through five innings with David Price on the mound; their lead was down to 5-4 in the ninth, and this time Chamberlain gave up the tying run. Had the Blue Jays finished off the rally there it would have been grand enough, but instead the Tigers and Blue Jays played ten more innings, exhausting both bullpens in the process, with the Tigers turning to starter Rick Porcello in the 17th inning – and the Blue Jays walked off in the 19th inning. The Tigers’ bullpen is gassed, they lost the series, and they lost both Joakim Soria (to an oblique injury) and Anibal Sanchez (a strained pectoral muscle) until September. Oh, and they don’t have a day off until a week from tomorrow.

Meanwhile, though the Royals host the Oakland A’s for the next four days, after that their schedule turns cupcake-easy, as teams that looked like contenders before the season – Texas and Boston – have packed it in instead. The Royals play one of their subsequent 19 games (a make-up against the Yankees) against a team with a winning record. In fact, after Thursday the Royals have just ten games out of 42 left against winning teams – four against the Yankees, and six head-to-head against Detroit.

Maybe that’s why, at the moment, ESPN.com estimates the Royals’ playoff chances (59.2%) as higher than Detroit’s playoff chances (55.9%).

Maybe it’s just a coincidence that one of the Royals’ greatest weeks on the field in a generation just happened to coincide with one of the Royals’ greatest stories off the field in a generation. Probably it’s a coincidence. A rational approach to what’s happened would tell you that of course it’s a coincidence.

But I’m just about ready to take leave of reason when it comes to these Royals. You see, Sung Woo Lee has done something even more improbable than spreading Korean pixie dust all over the organization, turning them from pretenders to contenders in less than a week: he’s made me want to believe again. Let’s be honest: after being bruised and battered for two decades, I was finally shattered by the Myers trade, and I’ve had a hard time picking up the pieces. I still wasn’t fully healed. Even a week ago, when the Royals were starting to pick up steam again, I was just waiting for them to start losing once again so I could mock them.

Well, I’m done waiting for them to lose. I’m done with being cynical, at least for now, at least until I close up this blog after the season. For most of the past two decades, ever since I started writing about baseball, writing about the Royals has always been a battle between my heart and my brain. And rooting for the Royals has always been a battle between wanting them to win and wanting to be right. As you know, I and my analytical brethren see the game a certain way, a way that has been embraced by much of baseball, but a way that the Royals have been painfully slow to adopt. For 20 years, I’ve had to choose between victory and vindication.

All that seems kind of silly right now. Baseball isn’t a morality play. It’s not a war between the old school and the new school. Maybe it once was, but the war is over, and as part of the peace terms, the new school won acceptance, and the old school held on to its relevance. Billy Beane is taking the A’s to their seventh postseason in 15 years. Bill James has three world championship rings. Friends and former colleagues of mine work in the front offices of a dozen different organizations, including the Royals – and if I had been willing to give up my dermatology practice last year, I might have joined one myself.

So sure, if the Royals make the playoffs I’ll be proven completely wrong about The Trade, and look like an imbecile. I will owe some people an apology. It won’t be the first time. It won’t undo a generation of sabermetric advances in the game. It won’t render my entire career a sham. But it will be the first time in my adult life that I’ll get to see my team in the playoffs. That seems like a reasonable trade.

So I’m all in now. Besides, the trading deadline has passed, so the time for moves and decisions is over. Now’s simply the time to play the games and see what happens. To quote Julius Caesar, “the die is cast”. To quote Jake Taylor, “Well then, I guess there’s only one thing left to do…win the whole f****** thing.” I’m going to do my best to turn my analytical brain off for the next two months, and just enjoy the ride.

Either way, this week will have been one of the most special weeks in my lifetime as a Royals fan. Because you see, Sung Woo didn’t fly all the way here from South Korea to see the Royals win. He came here to be a part of Royals Nation. He came here to be part of a community. He came here to meet us. And an astounding number of people have returned the favor.

In the end, this really isn’t a sports story, or at least it’s not a story about sports themselves. It’s a story about what sports does to us. It’s a story about how sports can bring us to a higher place, about why we cling to fandom no matter how bad our team is playing or how far away they are. The reason we’ve all stayed Royals fans through a generation of sadness and failure is because the joy we took from being Royals fans wasn’t derived solely from their success on the field. It was from the joy of being part of something bigger than ourselves. It was from the joy that comes from connecting with others. Being linked together by sadness and failure is far better than not being linked at all.

It’s funny. For twenty years I’ve been trying to make the Royals play better by writing about them analytically, by bringing a scientific approach to baseball and using it to show what the Royals are doing wrong and how they could do things better. And for twenty years maybe I’ve been doing it wrong. Maybe science and intellect doesn’t work here. Maybe it works in Boston and Oakland and Tampa Bay, but not in Kansas City. Maybe what works here isn’t reason, but emotion. Maybe what the Royals needed wasn’t someone to explain to them that OBP matters, but someone who loved them so much that he’d fly 6,000 miles to see them play. Maybe what they’ve been missing isn’t talent, but a talisman.

Sung Woo Lee is that talisman. Chris Kamler and Dave Darby – and Kevin Robinson, Ethan Bryan, Jeff Huerter, and please forgive me if there’s anyone else I missed – brought him to Kansas City, and he’s brought us all together. He throws out the first pitch tomorrow night, before a series against the Oakland A’s, who are the antithesis of the Royals in pretty much every way, from offensive philosophy to focus on player development to, well, level of success. Maybe tomorrow night reason will win, as it usually does, and the Royals’ dream bubble will be pricked by the best team in baseball. Maybe emotion and narrative will hold off for another night. Either way, I’ll be rooting for the Royals to win. Sung Woo’s been rooting for us for 20 years and we didn’t even know who he was. Now it’s time for us to root for him.

State Of The Royals: The Offense.

Oh, yeah, I guess I have to talk about the offense.

As you and I saw this weekend, it’s not so hot, and it’s not getting better. The Royals scored five runs while getting swept in a three-game series in Boston; about the best thing you can say about their performance is that at least Jon Lester didn’t no-hit them again. Today’s shutout drops the Royals to 12th in the AL in runs scored, and they're just eight runs ahead of the last-place Red Sox. (Yes, the Red Sox have scored the fewest runs in the league. No, I don’t know how that’s possible.) The Royals have scored 87 runs in their last 27 games. Maybe Dale Sveum isn’t a witch after all.

The Royals now have the 9th-best record in the AL, meaning that even with two Wild Cards in play they need to pass four other teams to make the playoffs. They are closer to last place (4 games ahead of Minnesota) in the AL Central than first place (7 games behind Detroit). They are nearly as close to last place as they are to the second Wild Card (3.5 games behind Seattle). Since their 10-game winning streak ended, the Royals are 9-17, which is to say, since their 10-game winning streak started, they are merely 19-17.

The winning streak not only looks like an enormous anomaly, it looks like it might have been the worst thing for the Royals in the long run. Had they simply played .500 ball for six weeks after they fell into last place on June 4th, the narrative of the season would still be that they have been enormously disappointing. The winning streak vaulted them into first place, into the national consciousness for a few glorious days, and took the focus off the front office at a critical time.

(And before you argue that the Royals are just unlucky because they’re 10-20 in one-run games, I’ll point out that they’re 12-5 in two-run games. For the season, they’ve been outscored by four runs, which is almost exactly what you’d expect from a 48-49 team.)

For purposes of this exercise, we will continue to treat the Royals as contenders, because their front office thinks they are a contender, and the question of whether their front office deserves to keep working will be left for another day. This is their last gasp, and I assume they will do everything in their power to turn the season around. Again.

Only…I don’t know exactly what they can do. Let’s take a look at their lineup regulars:

C: Salvador Perez. Hitting .282/.327/.432. Fantastic defender. Started the All-Star Game. Signatory to one of the ten best contracts in baseball. I think they’ll keep him.

LF: Alex Gordon. Hitting .269/.350/.421. Fantastic defender. Selected to the All-Star Game. Keeps himself in frighteningly good shape; the best lead-by-example guy the Royals have had in years. I don’t know if he’ll be a Lifelong Royal, but I wouldn’t complain if an effort was made to make him one. He’s not going anywhere.

CF: Lorenzo Cain. Hitting .297/.334/.413. Fantastic defender. Unable to play more than about 120 games a year, but the Royals are well-situated with a replacement to fill in the gaps, hiding his only weakness. He stays.

SS: Alcides Escobar. Hitting .281/.317/.383. Very good defender. Under contract with club options through 2017 that would pay him $14.75 million over the next three years – combined. When your shortstop has a higher OPS than your team as a whole, your shortstop isn’t the problem. Or at least not your main problem. He stays.

Okay, now it gets a little more serious, in increasing order:

2B: Omar Infante. Only hitting .279/.317/.389, but he’s rebounded nicely after a miserable start, hitting .344 since June 8th. He’s in the first year of a four-year, $32 million contract, and is hitting almost exactly his career norm of .280/.319/.402, which is to say he’s exactly what the Royals should have expected. He’s also a massive upgrade from the likes of Chris Getz; it’s hard to see how the Royals can upgrade here, or why they should try.

1B: Eric Hosmer. Three weeks ago this was a much easier call. After hitting .320 through May 11th, Hosmer hit .186/.229/.266 from then through the end of June; my suggestion in early June that he be sent down to Omaha was being picked up by, well, pretty much the entire fanbase. But he’s now on a 16-game hitting streak, and is batting .424/.493/.627 in July. The overall package remains unacceptable for a first baseman, but the Royals refused to bury him when he was terrible; they’re certainly not going to give him a break now. Hosmer has not only played every game this year, he’s played every inning this year.

3B: Mike Moustakas was hitting .152/.223/.320 when he was mercifully sent to Omaha in late May. Since returning, he’s hitting .221/.284/.402. That is both 1) unacceptable and 2) a huge improvement, not to mention 3) about what Moustakas’ true ability is. The Royals could upgrade here, although there is the matter of Danny Valencia, who is hitting .373/.397/.525 against LHP this year; if the Royals do upgrade, they would probably want just a platoon bat so they could continue to let Valencia do what he does best.

This doesn’t leave a lot of options; the Royals probably aren’t going to pay what it will take to get Chase Headley out of San Diego, and it’s not clear that they should. The obvious fit here is Luis Valbuena, who is hitting .246/.331/.408 for the Cubs, and who is eminently available. But Valbuena wouldn’t be THAT much of an upgrade on Moustakas, and he’s under contract for two more years after this one, driving up his price for value that the Royals aren’t really looking for.

Anyway, we know this ain’t happening. Moustakas, like Hosmer, was selected by Dayton Moore’s front office in the first round. They can’t bring themselves to admit they made a mistake on Bubba Starling and Christian Colon; they’re not going to bring in someone to take Moustakas’ job.

RF: The Royals would be happy for someone to take Nori Aoki’s job; they’ve been disappointed with him practically since Opening Day. He’s hitting .255/.324/.316 with defense charitably described as “creative”, so it’s not hard to understand why.

I could see the Royals going for a name player here, possibly Alexis Rios, who is hitting .302/.330/.435 and could be a free agent in three months. (He has a club option for next year; at $13.5 million, he’s on the fence as to whether it should be picked up.) But Rios won’t be cheap either, and again, I’m not sure he’s a significant upgrade. His defense is below-average, and as I’ve written several times, Jarrod Dyson’s defense is so far above average that his overall value is higher than Rios, or Marlon Byrd, another name that’s rumored.

I don’t understand why the Royals won’t simply embrace their identity and go with the All-World Defense outfield alignment of Gordon, Dyson, and Cain. Against lefties, Aoki can start over Dyson; even this year Aoki’s hitting .348 against southpaws, and while it’s extremely unusual for a left-handed hitter to have a “true” ability to hit lefties better than right-handers, Aoki’s batting style is so unusual that it might actually be the case for him.

Oh, and just for the record: Jarrod Dyson’s .351 OBP leads the entire team. The Royals, as they have pretty much every year since I was in kindergarten, desperately need OBP. Replacing him for a guy like Rios or Byrd, who would add power but subtract baserunners, seems like treading water. Trading away prospects to do so seems like a mistake.

DH: And finally there’s everyone’s favorite punching bag, from Caller Todd on line one to Ned Yost. Billy Butler is hitting .269/.320/.348. He has three home runs. He has grounded in 14 double plays. He was Jayson Stark’s pick for the AL Least Valuable Player in the first half. He’s been terrible.

I’m not completely convinced he’s done, but I’m growing more convinced by the day. Yeah, he’s only 28, and even slow overweight unathletic guys usually can hang on until they’re 30. But while Butler isn’t unusually overweight, he is unusually slow and (seemingly) unathletic; even at his best he had literally one baseball skill. I wish it wasn’t so, but this looks like the beginning of the end for Butler. Remember, this slump didn’t come out of nowhere – last season he hit .289/.374/.412, his lowest batting and particularly slugging numbers since 2008. He kept his on-base percentage high by being more selective at the plate, but now that pitchers don’t fear his power anymore, they’re just pouring strikes over the plate and he’s been unable to adjust.

Ben Grieve was Rookie of the Year at age 22. At age 24 he hit 40 doubles and 27 homers. That winter the A’s traded him to Tampa Bay in the three-team deal that brought Angel Berroa and Roberto Hernandez to Kansas City and sent Mark Ellis and Johnny Damon to Oakland. As usual, Billy Beane picked the perfect time to trade Grieve; at age 26 he hit just .251/.353/.432, and he was done as a full-time player by the time he turned 27.

Billy Butler hit .313 with 29 homers just two years ago. It doesn’t seem like he should be done. I don’t want him to be done. But he might be done. And with a $12.5 million option for next year looming, his time in Kansas City is almost certainly done.

So the question is, can you improve upon him? If the question is “can you improve upon his performance in the first half”, the answer is unequivocally “yes” – Butler is a below replacement-level player this season, and that’s the very definition of what replacement level means. But they don’t need someone better – they need someone MUCH better, is why futzing around with Raul Ibanez is so pointless. This is where Rios or Byrd would fit better, if they just slotted those guys in at DH and left Dyson to roam the outfield.

The rumors that the Mariners are still interested in Billy Butler seem too good to be true, but it’s been well known that the Mariners have had their eye on Butler for years; their interest in him was compared by a trustworthy source to Dayton Moore’s interest in Jeff Francoeur, which is to say it’s almost inevitable that he’ll end up there in some capacity at some point. Maybe my dream of snatching Nick Franklin away from Seattle is unrealistic, although there’s no question they’ve soured on him. But if the Royals can get something – anything – for Butler at the same time that they replace him with an upgrade, they should do it. Yeah, Butler may help Seattle, and the Royals are chasing Seattle in the standings, but given the way he’s hit this year he’s equally likely to hurt them.

Speaking of Franklin, there’s the guy I argued over the winter represented his absolute upside: Ben Zobrist, who is out there, and given his ability to play all around the field, would be the perfect solution for the Royals, who could trade for him first and figure out where he played second. But Zobrist 1) may be paired in a trade with David Price to extract maximum value and 2) even on his own would be very expensive. Would you give up Miguel Almonte and Sean Manaea for him? If you were fighting to keep your job, you might. And given the unpredictability of pitching prospects, you might even be justified.

But the trade market fits the Royals as poorly today as it did three months ago when it was clear they needed to beef up their offense if they wanted to contend. There just aren’t that many hitters out there worth acquiring, and the positions that could stand an upgrade the most are the positions where the Royals have the most invested in their incumbent.

As I speculated they would last week, they went out and made a small trade for a middle reliever, grabbing Jason Frasor from the Rangers in exchange for Spencer Patton. Frasor has accomplished the neat trick of being a middle reliever who’s never had a bad year; in 11 seasons in the majors, he’s never had an ERA above 4.58, and he’s had an ERA under 3.7 in six of the last seven years. Patton has pretty numbers in Triple-A, or at least a pretty hit total – he had allowed just 26 hits in 46 innings. But he had also allowed 22 walks and 9 home runs, and he’s 26 years old; he’s 18 months older than Tim Collins. He’s a fair price to pay.

But if the Royals are going to replicate their whiz-bang second half from last season, they’re going to need more than a reliever. They need offense, and it’s no easier to figure out where they’re going to get that offense today than it was in May. Maybe they’ll surprise me and deal for Zobrist, or Chase Headley, or someone who at least has the potential to be a middle-of-the-order hitter for the next three months. But, well, it will be a surprise. And if this is who the Royals are, after getting swept in Boston thanks to a combination of managerial and lineup failure, then writing columns about who the front office should go after suddenly seems a lot less relevant than writing columns about whether their front office should just go.