Reason #13: The Kid.

Royals fans may long rue the final day of the 2006 season, the day the Royals beat the Tigers in 12 innings, completing an improbable sweep, one that coincided with the Devil Rays’ getting swept in their final series, tilting the ownership of the #1 pick in 2007 draft from Kansas City to Tampa Bay. I was watching the game on Extra Innings, and I honestly don’t think I’ve ever rooted harder for the Royals to lose. Less than 48 hours earlier they held a 2.5 game “lead” on the Devil Rays for the first pick in the draft, and were playing the AL Central-leading Tigers. Suddenly they were in mortal danger of losing that pick, and as I have shown in the past, the difference in value between the #1 and #2 overall picks is the largest drop at any point in the draft.

In the bottom of the 11^th, the Tigers had the bases loaded with one out, but with the winning run ninety feet away, Joe Nelson struck out Brandon Inge. He was immediately lifted for Jimmy Gobble, who struck out Curtis Granderson to get out of the inning. The Royals would score two in the 12^th to win. That may well prove to be Joe Nelson’s final pitch in the major leagues. No truth to the rumor that he spent all of last season on the DL with an evil eye.

As bad as I felt at the time, I felt even worse about that day the following spring, when it became increasingly clear that 1) David Price was head-and-shoulders above the pack as the best player available in the draft, and 2) no one could agree on who was the second-best player in the draft.

But if there was a consensus #2 player in the draft, it was Rick Porcello, the high school right-hander from New Jersey who some have called the best high school pitcher of the decade. The Royals did not draft him. Worse still, the Tigers, who figure to be one of the team’s biggest roadblocks to a playoff spot over the next five years, landed him with the 27^th pick in the draft, then signed him for a major-league contract worth about $7 million.

For the span of almost 24 hours last August, it appeared the while the Tigers had signed their man, the Royals were not going to come to terms with the player they selected at least in part because he was more signable than Porcello. Fortunately, Mike Moustakas accepted the Royals’ $4 million offer minutes before the deadline.

You have to wonder at least a little about an organization that thinks the proper answer to the equation “Rick Porcello” – “Mike Moustakas” = “Brett Tomko.” And the talk out of Tiger camp this spring certainly hasn’t made me feel better about passing on Porcello. In his first outing of the year, he retired all six batters he faced, didn’t let the ball out of the infield, and struck out Frank Thomas. In his second outing he wasn’t quite as dominant; a front office source told me “he looked a lot like Justin Verlander in his first camp.” And that was on a bad day. (And Verlander was 22 in his first camp; Porcello’s 19.) He could easily be in Double-A by the end of the year.

Having said all that, Moustakas isn’t exactly chopped liver. He’s a guy the scouts and the stats can agree on. The scouts love his athleticism (he served as his high school team’s closer and touched 97 on the mound) and a swing that’s perfectly tailored for power. The stats say that he set all-time California records for home runs in a season (24) and in a career (52) while hitting .577 as a senior. While we don’t typically put much stock in high school stats, the level of competition in California is pretty darn high, and a lot of major league stars have gone to high school there without ever hitting that many home runs. If Moustakas hit 24 home runs in South Carolina – hello, Roscoe Crosby! – I’d be a touch more skeptical.

The fact that Moustakas has already hit for prodigious power is important, because he doesn’t have the build that projects for additional power down the road (he’s a compact 6’0”, 195 pounds.) That doesn’t mean he can’t hit for power in the majors – Hank Aaron stood 6-foot even, and Willie Mays was 5’11" – but it certainly helps that he already has shown that skill in spades.

The negatives here are that Moustakas was very old for a high school draftee; he turned 19 less than a month after signing. By comparison, Josh Vitters (who the Royals almost took instead of Moustakas, and went #3 overall to the Cubs) is about 11 months younger. On the other hand, Moustakas had better numbers as a high school junior than Vitters had as a senior. Age is important, and an additional year of development can make an enormous difference at that age, but it’s not everything.

The other negative is that while Moustakas should hit well enough to hit at any position, no one knows what position that will be yet. The Royals are keeping him at shortstop for now, which is nice, but no one outside the organization thinks he’ll last at the position, and even a whisper that a minor league player will have to switch positions almost invariably comes true. This is one instance where his height serves him well – if Moustakas has to move, it’s because he doesn’t show the range for shortstop, not because he “outgrows” the position.

If he can last even a few years at shortstop in the majors, sort of like Stephen Drew with the Diamondbacks, he’ll be an immensely valuable player. But even that seems wishful thinking. Third base would make a lot of sense, but that position is sort of taken for the next five years. He has the arm for rightfield, but you lose a lot of positional value if you move him there. There’s even been talk that, given his arm and build, he could move behind the plate. Moving a top hitting prospect to catcher is the baseball equivalent of day-trading on the NASDAQ – the one or two success stories (Brandon Inge, Michael Barrett) get all the buzz, while the 99% that crash and burn get swept under the rug.

That leaves second base, which at least one respected baseball man thinks is his best position. It’s a waste of his arm, and the injury rate among second baseman is almost as bad as among catchers, but the impact of a power bat at the position can not be overstated. Chase Utley, anyone?

I’d still rather have Price, and not just because he got a standing ovation in spring training – on the Yankees’ home field. (Granted, the Yankees play in Tampa…) I strongly feel there’s a window for the Royals to win the division in 2010, and Price not only will be in the majors by then, he might well be a Cy Young candidate. Moustakas will be 21 in 2010; he might be in the majors, but to expect him to be any more than an average major leaguer by then is incredibly optimistic.

But the Royals, at least for the moment, seem to have enough pitching. They certainly don’t have enough hitters. Moustakas might not be a better player than Price or Porcello, but he might prove to be the better fit for the Royals in the long run. No regrets here. At least not yet.

xxx

If you can’t get enough of the Brian Bannister Phenomenon, our buddy Jeff Passan has a terrific article that sums it all up.

Reason #14: The Thinker.

As a Royals fan, it’s really been quite amazing to watch over the past few months as the baseball blogosphere has picked up on what we’ve known since last season: that Brian Bannister is one of the smartest players in baseball, and certainly one of the game’s deepest thinkers.

A year ago, when the Royals acquired him from the Mets straight up for Ambiorix Burgos, even baseball insiders weren’t aware of Bannister’s intellect (or if they were, they didn’t think it mattered.) The immediate reaction from other front offices at the winter meetings was that the Royals got the short end of the stick, that they traded a potential closer for a potential #5 starter. The stats bore that impression out: namely, that Burgos was 22 years old and struck people out, while Bannister was 25 and didn’t.

There have been many advantages to being a baseball outsider for all these years. You’re not likely to be swayed by bias because you don’t know the players well enough to be biased one way or another, and you’re not likely to miss the forest for the trees because you’re not close enough to see the trees. (Bill James’ classic piece “Inside-Out Perspective”, which ran at the beginning of the 1984 Abstract, explains this phenomenon far better than I ever could.)

Only sometimes it helps to see those trees, because sometimes they tell you something of value. We may not have been quite so negative about the Bannister trade at the time if, say, we had had the opportunity to talk to Bannister for half an hour and found out what makes him tick. Though I think it’s interesting that the people who are baseball insiders – the guys who work in the game and know these players better than you and I ever will – were not any higher on Bannister than we were.

We quickly learned that we were wrong about Bannister, a lesson we thoroughly enjoyed. One of the better fringe benefits of a Brian Bannister start last season – the main benefit being that he, you know, generally pitched well – was getting to read some of his post-game comments. Most guys are cliché factories; Bannister talked likes he’s instructing kids at a pitching clinic. Smart kids at that.

We were intrigued; we wanted to find out more about the guy. We found out Bannister graduated magna cum laude from USC, and that none of his grades came in ballroom dancing (or accepting favors from an agent, then stabbing him in the back, for that matter.) We found out that in the offseason, he pulls himself away from the hunting and fishing pursuits that are mandated of all ballplayers long enough to run his own photography studio in Arizona. He’s like Curt Schilling without the blog or the ego.

We found out from Joe Posnanski’s blog that he reads Baseball Prospectus, and that he not only has familiarized himself with modern sabermetric analysis, but that he has dabbled in some statistical analysis himself. And then we – along with most every baseball writer – read this astounding interview he gave Tim Dierkes of MLBTradeRumors.com. If you haven’t read it already, I really can’t recommend it enough.

I’ve simply never heard a pitcher say things like “whether you like it or not, baseball is a game of randomness. We play outdoors (mostly) in changing elements and field dimensions, and each pitch results in a series of events that can go in either teams favor…Therefore, as a pitcher, I study and play to put the percentages in my favor more than anything because I know that I can't control the outcome in a single game or series of games, but over the course of a season or a career I will be better than average.” Well, maybe I have, but certainly never so articulately.

But what makes the interview special is Part 3, when Bannister not only states his understanding of DIPS theory, but points out a potential flaw in the theory that he can exploit. For those of you who are not familiar with DIPS theory (or BABIP), I recommend this column. Essentially, Voros McCracken argued seven years ago that the ability to prevent hits once contact is made (except for home runs) is entirely in the hands of the defense, and the pitcher has no ability to influence opposing hitters’ batting average on balls in play (BABIP). That theory has since been adjusted to state, essentially, that the pitcher has very little ability to influence opposing hitters’ BABIP. In modern baseball, the average BABIP is about .300, but can range from .270 for a team with a tremendous defense to .340 or .350 for a team with the equivalent of Billy Butler at every position. And even the best starters in baseball might be able to sway that figure in their favor by no more than ten points. It’s probably the most important sabermetric advance so far this decade.

Here, I’ll let Bannister explain it: “I think a lot of fans underestimate how much time I spend working with statistics to improve my performance on the field. For those that don't know, the typical BABIP for starting pitchers in Major League Baseball is around .300 give or take a few points. The common (and valid) argument is that over the course of a pitcher's career, he can not control his BABIP from year-to-year (because it is random), but over a period of time it will settle into the median range of roughly .300 (the peak of the bell curve). Therefore, pitchers that have a BABIP of under .300 are due to regress in subsequent years and pitchers with a BABIP above .300 should see some improvement (assuming they are a Major League Average pitcher).

Because I don't have enough of a sample size yet (service time), I don't claim to be able to beat the .300 average year in and year out at the Major League level. However, I also don't feel that every pitcher is hopelessly bound to that .300 number for his career if he takes some steps to improve his odds - which is what pitching is all about.”

Bannister goes on to say that his idea for improving those odds is that, because BABIP can be shown to fluctuate depending on the count, a pitcher who can induce more contact in 0-1 or 0-2 counts will have a lower BABIP than a pitcher who typically falls behind 2-0 or 2-1 before contact is made. It’s a simple concept, and one I had given a fleeting thought to in the past, but to the best of my knowledge Bannister is the first person – pitcher or otherwise – to articulate the idea in print.

I can think of only one other time when a baseball player came up with a new theory for baseball analysts to think their teeth into, and that was when Sean Burroughs argued that among left-handed hitters, guys who also throw left-handed tend to develop power earlier (think Ken Griffey Jr.) than guys who throw right-handed (think George Brett.) The problem with Burroughs’ hypothesis was that the evidence to support it was minimal, as I discovered in this column. (The best evidence that his theory was wrong, unfortunately, turned out to be his own career.)

Bannister, on the other hand, turns out to be right, or at least partially right. It’s true that a pitcher could lower his BABIP by getting into more favorable counts (i.e. throwing more strikes) – but it turns out the effect is quite small, on the order of five to ten points at most.

And this is important, because Bannister owes much of his success last year to his own BABIP, which at just .262 was one of the lowest marks in the majors. (I believe it was the lowest mark of any qualifying starter, though I can't confirm that.) I have no doubt that Bannister has the ability to get the most out of his ability, as it were. But I refuse to believe that he can sustain a BABIP that low, for the simple reason that no pitcher in the history of baseball has sustained a BABIP that low relative to his league and team defense.

So we arrive at an impasse. As Bob Dutton put it recently, “There is a certain irony to it. The Royals pitcher most likely to understand the reams of quantitative analysis so dear to baseball’s burgeoning sabermetric community is the pitcher whose future draws so little love from its conclusions.” Those conclusions are this: that a pitcher who strikes out just 4.2 men per nine innings, as Bannister did last year, can not succeed consistently unless he does one of two things: he has impeccable control, or he is an extreme groundball pitcher who rarely gets nicked by the home run. If you have the first, you can be Carlos Silva; if you’re the second, you can be Scott Erickson. (If you’re both, you can be Dan Quisenberry.)

Bannister is neither. He walked 44 batters in 165 innings last year, which is very good but not in the Silva category. More worrisome, he’s actually a little more flyball-prone than the average pitcher; his career groundball/flyball ratio is 1.06, while the major-league average is around 1.20.

So I maintain that if Bannister pitches like he did last year, his effectiveness will almost certainly diminish in the long-run, and he’ll be hard-pressed to maintain even a league-average ERA.

But there’s the rub: if Bannister pitches like he did last year. Bannister’s pitching acumen will not allow him to maintain a .262 BABIP, or anything close to that. But it will allow him to improve in those areas where a pitcher really does have control of his destiny: his ability to limit walks and homers while striking out more batters.

In all the talk about how Bannister is a finesse pitcher because he didn’t strike anyone out as a rookie, what’s lost is that, in the minor leagues, his strikeout rates were far better than average. In 2004, he struck out 134 batters in 154 innings; in 2005 it was 142 Ks in 154 IP, including more than a man per inning (48 Ks in 45 IP) at the Triple-A level. For his minor league career he had 365 strikeouts in 417 innings, or 7.88 per nine. That’s not Dwight Gooden, but it’s not Jeff Ballard either.

And that’s why, while I’m a little leery of Bannister in the short term, I’m confident that he can make the adjustments to continue being an above-average starting pitcher in the long term. Put it this way: let’s say that Bannister can’t keep his BABIP at .262, but has the ability to keep his BABIP at .290, about 10 points better than league average. In that case, if his strikeout rate rises from 4.2 per nine innings to 7.04 per nine innings, he will surrender the exact same number of hits that he did last season.

The question is, can he do that? Most pitchers increase their strikeout rates in their second full season, but a leap of that magnitude is rare. On the other hands, Bannister’s strikeout rate last season appears almost as flukish – given his minor league resume – as his BABIP was. I don’t think he’s going to strike out 7 men per nine innings, but 6 or 6.5 is not unreasonable. Combine that with excellent control and even an average strikeout rate, and you’ve got yourself a heck of a #3 starter.

Brian, if you’re reading this, just remember that the numbers aren’t saying you can’t remain effective. What they’re saying is that you can’t remain effective the same way. So while your efforts to keep your BABIP at a low level are laudable, focusing your efforts on getting more strikeouts is going to yield a lot more bang for your buck.

I don't mean to brag...

But since a few of you asked…

                    
SS Derek Jeter     Was on base something like 3 times a game
RF Jack Cust       The bat was more than worth the glove
3B Chipper Jones   First-round pick obliterates RHP
CF B.J. Upton      Team took off when Upton took over in CF
LF Barry Bonds     The bat was more than worth the glove
C Russell Martin   Steal of the draft in the 7th round
1B Prince Fielder  Yes, Prince Fielder batted seventh
2B Dustin Pedroia  Made all the plays in the field 
              
CF Carlos Beltran  No on-base against RHP, so I benched him
1B James Loney     +11 in the clutch, an absolute monster PH
3B Ryan Zimmerman  Crushes LHP; I platooned him with Chipper
OF Alex Rios       Jack Cust’s glove and platoon partner
OF Norris Hopper   Every team needs a PH who can lead off
C Brian McCann     I think he batted twice in the tournament
          
SP Tim Hudson      Second-best starting pitcher in the set
SP C.C. Sabathia   Couldn’t turn him down in the 19th round
SP Roy Halladay    Someone had to pitch 5 innings every 4 days
SP Derek Lowe      Someone had to pitch 5 innings every 4 days 
LRP Rafael Perez   The best lefty reliever in the set
LRP George SherrillA poor man’s Rafael Perez
LRP Ron Mahay      The token Royal (well, new Royal)
RRP Manny Corpas   Closer who gets RHB and LHB out equally
RRP Russ Springer  Death to RHB, acceptable against LHB
RRP Lee Gardner    A poor man’s Russ Springer
RRP Joaquin Benoit A mirror-image of Lee Gardner

The team started slow, losing its first two games, before finding its footing, but was just 10-8 and two games out of a playoff spot with four games to go. I then benched Beltran for Upton and unleashed a monster. I swept my final four games to win my division, dismantled my semifinals opponent three games to one (albeit two of those wins coming in 13 and 14 innings), and winning the finals four games to one. For the tournament the team was 21-10; while I haven’t counted up the numbers yet, I’m guessing that Cust and Bonds combined for about 25 homers.

I’d like to say that this is no big deal for me, that I’ve won tournaments before, but I haven’t, and I’ve played in probably 20 tournaments going back to 1993. You need a good team, but you also need a lot of luck. Joe Sheehan, drafting in a different division, ended up with a remarkably similar team and went 9-11.

It was a fun weekend.

Let’s tie this into the Royals somehow…we played 8-man drafts, which means 200 players were drafted, but only two of them played for the Royals last year: Joakim Soria, who’s one of the best relievers in the set, and Brian Bannister, a late-round starter. Gil Meche is on the bubble; he’d probably be taken in a 10-man draft. Greinke might get taken, although he’s a few innings shy of qualifying as a starting pitcher. John Buck should have been taken, and almost certainly goes in a deeper draft. That’s it.

It’s not quite as rigorous as Joe Posnanski’s “Championship Caliber Guys”, but counting up the number of players worthy of being drafted in a Stratomatic tournament isn’t a bad way of evaluating your team’s chances. The average team has about seven players picked. The Royals had two. That’s going to have to change this year. I’ll put my money on Meche, Greinke, Soria, Gordon, Butler, Buck, Guillen, and one of the lefty relievers for next year.

Back soon with a continuation of the countdown.

Reason #15: The Pick.

Here’s something that Yankee fans can’t say about their team: the Royals have drafted in the top half of the first round every year since 1996. (So there.) Unfortunately, drafting that early is hardly a guarantee you’ll land a great player. It’s drafting guys like Dee Brown (#14, 1996), Dan Reichert (#7, 1997), Jeff Austin (#4, 1998), Kyle Snyder (#7, 1999), Mike Stodolka (#4, 2000), and Colt Griffin (#9, 2001) that led to the Royals continuing to pick early in the first round.

(Take a look at that list of players again. Six straight years with Top-15 picks, the last five picks in the Top 10. Two of those guys never made the majors – Stodolka still might, but as a hitter now. Snyder might be the best pick of them all; he’s 8-17 with a 5.45 career ERA. And you wonder how the Royals lost 100 games three straight years.)

But since 2002, the Royals have drafted Zack Greinke (#6, 2002), Chris Lubanski (#5, 2003), Billy Butler (#14, 2004), Alex Gordon (#2, 2005), Luke Hochevar (#1, 2006), and Mike Moustakas (#2, 2007). Lubanski might still be a flop, and it’s too early to say much about Hochevar and Moustakas. But the other three guys alone make this run of first-round picks a success. So with the #3 overall pick this June, with guys like Pedro Alvarez and Justin Smoak available from the college ranks, and Tim Beckham and Tim Melville out of high school, the Royals are in perfect position to add another Grade A prospect to their stable.

For all the talk about competitive imbalance in baseball, the reality is that the draft remains an incredibly powerful tool to reversing that imbalance…so long as that tool is used wisely. The Rays are proof that, if you draft with even some intelligence, eventually all that sucking is going to work in your favor. It’s not just that the Rays have drafted in the Top 8 for nine straight years, and have used those picks to draft Rocco Baldelli, B.J. Upton, Delmon Young, Evan Longoria, and David Price (not to mention Josh Hamilton, and there’s still hope for Jeff Niemann.) It’s that, drafting at the very top of the second round, they got first crack at the leftovers, and came away with Carl Crawford and top prospect Reid Brignac. In the third round, they got Wade Davis, and that round would look a lot better if 1) Elijah Dukes wasn’t a misogynistic, violent creep with a temper problem and 2) if they had signed Andrew Miller out of high school in 2003. Throw in 2004 fifth-rounder Jacob McGee, and five of the top six prospects in the best farm system in baseball are in this paragraph.

But you have to draft well. The Royals didn’t for many years, and they’re still trying to pick their way through the rubble. From 1994 to 2002, the Pirates drafted Mark Farris, Chad Hermansen, Kris Benson (#1 overall pick), J.J. Davis, Clint Johnston, Bobby Bradley, Sean Burnett, John Van Benschoten (who they, alone among the 30 teams, decided to use as a pitcher after he led the NCAA in homers his junior year), and Brian Bullington (another #1 pick, who their owner forced them to take over B.J. Upton.) That’s how you continue to pick at the top of the draft every year. GM Dave Littlefield didn’t seem to learn, as he used last summer’s #4 overall pick on Daniel Moskos, a perfectly good college left-handed pitcher – a left-handed reliever. To the relief of Pirate fans everywhere, that final insult seemed to be, well, the final insult: Littlefield was canned not long thereafter.

The Royals’ draft efforts from 1996 to 2001 are the reason why the Royals continued to draft high from 2002 to 2008. But the draft efforts from 2002 to 2008 may enable this cycle to finally end.

Last year’s draft, the first one with Dayton Moore at the helm, looks very strong at this point. Moustakas looks like a good pick in the first round, albeit he’s not Rick Porcello. Second-rounder Sean Runion had a decent debut for a projectable high school pitcher, and third-rounder Daniel Duffy, a lefty out of a small California high school, was a revelation in rookie ball. Matt Mitchell, another pitcher from an out-of-the-way California school, was drafted in the 14^th round and Baseball America wrote this winter that “the Royals might have come away with one of the steals of the 2007 draft.” The Royals gambled $300,000 to sign their 31^st-round pick, Keaton Hayenga, at the deadline.

The Royals need to keep the strong drafts coming, because there’s simply no way a small-market franchise can become a contender without a perpetual supply of young talent. To their credit, the team (or more precisely, the owner) finally realizes that, and has authorized money to be spent both in the draft and in the international amateur market. The Royals can’t afford to waste the #3 pick this June. If they don’t, there’s a good shot it will be the last time they draft that high in a long time.

***

Just a heads-up: RotR will be going dark for a few days. I should be leaving shortly for Indianapolis, where I will be appearing with Joe Sheehan and Will Carroll from Baseball Prospectus, and John Gasaway from our new Basketball Prospectus, at the Marriott downtown; come out if you live in the area. Then this weekend Joe and I will be playing in a Stratomatic tournament in Indy. Yes, I'm a geek.

Reason #16: The Neighbor.

It’s a little-known rule outside Kansas City, but the locals all know: the Royals and the Chiefs can’t be competitive at the same time. Don’t question why. Nobody knows why. But they can’t. Forty years of history have borne that out.

I’ve put together a list below of the records of the Royals and Chiefs going back to the Royals’ first season in 1969. Games +/- .500 are also listed, but for the Chiefs I multiplied this number by four to account for the shorter season. By this method, a 10-6 season rates as a +16, the same as an 89-73 season in baseball. A 10-6 team is on the bubble, but will make the playoffs more often than not; an 89-73 baseball team is on the bubble, but would make the playoffs more often than not if MLB expanded the playoffs to 12 teams. A 14-2 team powerhouse equates to a 105-57 juggernaut in baseball. A 16-0 NFL team would be equivalent to 113-49 in MLB, which makes the Patriots the 2001 Mariners of football. Asterisks denote playoff teams.

(I apologize for the formatting - no matter how hard I try, I can't get the columns to line up, even in Courier font. If someone who knows blogger.com formatting can help, please leave a comment. Thanks.)

                                                                                
Year  Royals  +/- .500  Chiefs  +/- .500 (*4)  Total
1969      69-93    -24     11-3*      +32          + 8
1970       65-97    -32      7-5-2     + 8          -24
1971      85-76    + 9     10-3-1*    +28          +37
1972      76-78    - 2      8-6       + 8          + 6
1973       88-74    +14      7-5-2     + 8          +22
1974       77-85    - 8      5-9       -16          -24
1975      91-71    +20      5-9       -16          + 4
1976      90-72*   +18      5-9       -16          + 2
1977  102-60*   +42      2-12      -40          + 2
1978       92-70*   +22      4-12      -32          -10
1979       85-77    + 8      7-9       - 8            0
1980       97-65*   +32      8-8         0          +32
1981       50-53*   - 3      9-7       + 8          + 5
1982       90-72    +18      3-6       -12          + 6
1983       79-83    - 4      6-10      -16          -20
1984       84-78*   + 6      8-8         0          + 6
1985       91-71*   +20      6-10      -16          + 4
1986      76-86    -10     10-6*      +16          + 6
1987       83-79    + 4      4-11      -28          -24
1988       84-77    + 7      4-11-1    -28          -21
1989       92-70    +22      8-7-1     + 4          +26
1990       75-86    -11     11-5*      +24          +15
1991       82-80    + 2     10-6*      +16          +18
1992       72-90    -18     10-6*      +16          - 2
1993       84-78    + 6     11-5*      +24          +30
1994       65-51    +14      9-7*      + 8          +22
1995       70-74    - 4     13-3*      +40          +36
1996       75-86    -11      9-7       + 8          - 3
1997       67-94    -27     13-3*      +40          +13
1998       72-89    -17      7-9       - 8          -25
1999       64-97    -33      9-7       + 8          -25
2000       77-85    - 8      7-9       - 8          -16
2001       65-97    -32      6-10      -16          -48
2002       62-100   -38      8-8         0          -38
2003       83-79    + 4     13-3*      +40          +44
2004       58-104   -46      7-9       - 8          -54
2005       56-106   -50     10-6       +16          -34
2006       62-100   -38      9-7*      + 8          -30
2007       69-93    -24      4-12      -32          -56
  

A few notes:

1) The Royals have made the playoffs seven times, the Chiefs 12 times, but they’ve never made the playoffs in the same year. Assuming I’m doing the math right, the odds that two teams will make the playoffs 19 times combined over a 39-year span without ever reaching the playoffs in the same year is 0.49%. (The formula I used to calculate the odds was (39!/20!)/(39^19), if you care to know.)

2) The Royals’ all-time best record was set in 1977, the same year the Chiefs had their all-time worst record.

3) The Royals’ only losing record between 1975 and 1982 was 1981 – granted, they made the playoffs that year thanks to the minor-league split-season schedule MLB adopted after the strike. The Chiefs’ only winning record between 1974 and 1985 came the same year.

4) In 1986, the Royals finished 75-86, their worst record between 1971 and 1989. (Royals fans, read that again, and weep.) That fall, the Chiefs won 10 games and made the playoffs, the only time they had managed either feat between 1972 and 1989.

5) The Royals have finished above .500 18 times, and in those season the Chiefs have a combined record of 124-141-5. In the 21 years the Royals finished under .500, the Chiefs are 179-147-2.

6) The Chiefs and Royals have both had winning records in consecutive seasons only once, in 1993 and 1994. They have both had losing records in consecutive seasons only once, in 2000 and 2001.

7) This balance seems to have fallen apart in recent years. Between 1969 and 2000, the “combined” records of the Royals and Chiefs fell between a band of -25 and +37 every single year. Since 2001, the combined records have fallen outside that band every year – generally on the low end, although in 2003 the teams had their best combined year ever, as the Royals stayed in the playoff hunt into September and the Chiefs had another one of their “13-3, undefeated at Arrowhead during the season, lose at Arrowhead in their first playoff game” specials. Not that I’m bitter.

8) Last year was the worst season for a Royals/Chiefs fan in history.

There's a formula known as the Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient, which allows us to determine how two separate entities are correlated. Using this formula, the correlation coefficient between the Chiefs and Royals record over the last 39 years is -0.31, which means they tend to run in opposite directions by a significant, though not overwhelming, margin.

There’s no obvious reason why these two franchises always seem to be headed in different directions. The Chiefs had built a dominant team in the old AFL, but the front office kept an aging team together for too long (sound familiar?) and the team fell apart at the same time that an incredibly savvy Royals’ front office was building a terrific base of talent through the draft and lopsided trades. The Royals stayed at least competitive right until their Ewing Kauffman, one of the game’s great owners, passed away in 1993, but it took the Chiefs until the late 80s before Lamar Hunt, one of the NFL’s great owners, finally brought in a competent GM in Carl Peterson and let him make whatever changes were necessary in order to build a winning team again.

The Chiefs lost their way in the post-Schottenheimer years, save for a brief renaissance under Dick Vermeil (that came crashing down from years of draft neglect last season). But just as Lamar Hunt brought in Carl Peterson, David Glass brought in Dayton Moore, and the trajectories of both teams have once again reversed. Even before this most recent, disastrous football campaign, my brother and I agreed that, the way each team was headed, the Royals were likely to reach the World Series before the Chiefs reached the Super Bowl.

Rooting for the Royals and Chiefs over the last 15-20 years has led to two very different experiences, but with one thing in common: they both led to heartbreak. The Chiefs are going to need some time to regain their footing, although recent comments from Clark Hunt, who inherited the team from his father, give us reason to hope. In the meantime, let’s hope that one team’s winter is another team’s summer.

Interlude II.

First off, a warm welcome to those of you who were led here by FoB (friend of the blog) Bill Simmons. The amount of support I’ve received from the rest of the baseball blogosphere has been deeply gratifying. This site has now been linked to by both ESPN.com and Deadspin, which might actually be illegal.

In honor of my first appearance in a Simmons column, here’s an email that I sent to him immediately after the Patriots lost to the Colts in the AFC Championship game a year ago. In light of recent events, I think the comparison bears repeating.

“The parallels between the 1996-01 Yankees and the 2001-06 Patriots are pretty eerie, when you think about it:

1) The Yankees won four championships in five years; the Patriots won three.

2) Both teams won their first championship with a squad that really wasn't all that impressive. The '96 Yankees had nothing on the '98-00 version, just as the Patriots' 2001 team looked nothing like the 2003-04 squad.

3) Both teams were huge underdogs in their first World Series/Super Bowl and won stunning victories. The Yankees lost the first two games - at home - to the Braves, who were the defending world champs and looked like they would be the team of the 1990s. The Patriots weren't given a shot in hell against the Rams, who won the Super Bowl two years prior and looked like they were in the midst of a dynasty run.

4) Both teams had an off-year the following season, then started Year 3 on a bad note - the Patriots got blown out by Buffalo, 31-0, and the Yankees started the 1998 season 1-4 and rumors were swirling that Joe Torre was about to get canned.

5) Both teams then went on truly historic runs of dominance. The Yankees went on a ridiculous 60-16 tear after their 1-4 start, finishing with 114 wins and tacking on 11 more in the postseason. The Patriots would go 35-3 after the loss to Buffalo that included a 21-game winning streak.

6) Both teams had developed an aura of invincibility just as their run was about to end. The Yankees made it to the World Series in 2001 only because they came back from a 2-0 deficit against Oakland in the first round (and only won Game 3 because Derek Jeter made a smart play and Jeremy Giambi forgot to slide), then had to face the Mariners - who had broken the Yankees' own record for AL regular season wins with
116 - and dispatched them in five games. The Patriots had to go on the road to face the 14-2 Chargers and all-time TD record holder LaDanian Tomlinson, and won even though the Chargers had nearly triple the rushing yards and Brady threw three picks.

7) Both teams had their run of dominance end on a rare failure by one of their signature players, the Yankees when Mariano Rivera failed to hold a one-run lead in the ninth, the Patriots when Tom Brady threw an interception on a two-minute drill.

The analogy isn't perfect; for one thing, today's game wasn't the Super Bowl. On the other hand, it was Pats-Colts, which is a more compelling matchup than any game involving an NFC team. The fact that Boston didn't come under a terrorist attack eight weeks ago also stretches the analogy a bit.

Nevertheless, it holds. And just as the Yankees gained even more respect for the way they went down swinging even in defeat, I have to say I hold the Patriots in higher regard now than I did 24 hours ago. That they made it to within 60 seconds of a Super Bowl with Jabar Gaffney and Reche Caldwell as their best receivers, with a rookie kicker, with the roster devastated with injuries, with half the team recovering from the flu...that's a bad-ass performance. There's no shame in that.

But just as the Yankees learned, in the ensuing years, what the rest of baseball already knew - that winning a championship is very, very hard, even if you have the talent to make the playoffs every year – I have a feeling the Patriots are going to struggle to win another Super Bowl again with this collection of talent.”

A year later, and you can add one more piece to this analogy. The New York Yankees became the first baseball team to choke away a 3-0 lead in a playoff series, to the Boston Red Sox. The Boston – well, New England – Patriots became the first NFL team to lose their first game of the season in the Super Bowl, to the New York Giants. In this analogy, Dave Roberts’ Steal = David Tyree’s Helmet Catch.

The Yankees have gone to the playoffs every year since 2004, but the aura of invulnerability is long gone, and their solution to their repeated playoff failures has been to throw more and more money at the problem. It remains to be seen how the Patriots respond to their most recent loss, but I will be shocked and ridiculous impressed if they rebound from this to win another Super Bowl.

Moving on…I had a couple of sources from front offices around the league comment on my previous entries. One source stated that I shouldn’t be so sure that Justin Huber would be picked up off of waivers if he doesn’t make the roster out of spring training. His point was that the Rangers just snuck Chris Shelton off their roster, and no other team bit on him.

It’s an interesting comparison. Shelton’s two years older than Huber, and only hit .269/.381/.420 in Triple-A last year, but on the other hand he actually has two major league seasons on his resume which say he can hit, 2005 and 2006, which is two more seasons than Huber has. I stand by my original point, which is that given the alternatives at first base (or DH if Butler shows he can field the position), Huber might be the best option to play even if he did have options.

Anyway, it appears we’re going to find out if he can clear options or not; the Royals have just announced that he’ll be playing solely in left field this spring. I was starting to get worried there – it’s been months since he’s been asked to change positions. His one hope here is to make the team as a replacement for Jose Guillen while the latter serves his suspension, and then to hit like gangbusters for the first two weeks. Hey, it worked for Mike Sweeney in 1999.

Another source disagreed with my evaluation of Luke Hochevar, deriding him as having “average starter stuff at best, and I don’t see an out pitch there.” He made the very valid point that Hochevar’s velocity has never approached the numbers he was hitting on the gun for the independent Fort Worth team he played for right before the draft.

I completely agree that the Royals made a huge mistake in overemphasizing their most recent impression of him before the draft. Teams get into trouble all the time drafting a player based on a few well-timed good months, and conversely, guys who have a disappointing junior season (or senior season of high school) turn out to be draft steals more often than not. One of the best draft picks the Royals ever made was Johnny Damon, who was talked about as a possible #1 overall pick before his senior year, then let the pressure get to him and hit so poorly (he failed to hit .300 that year) that he fell to the 35^th pick in the draft. The Royals signed him, he batted .349 in rookie ball, and there’s been no looking back. For an example of a guy the Royals drafted based entirely on his senior year performance, I give you two words: Colt Griffin.

But I still think Hochevar has the stuff to be at least a #3 starter. He might not have an out pitch, but he makes up for it by throwing four pitches that are at least average. He started for the Royals on the last day of the season and hit 90-91 on the gun, with good movement. But more and more I’m warming up to the idea of apprenticing him in relief, so long as the team has the roster space to accommodate him while not losing one of their other young arms.

Finally, Jorge de la Rosa appears to be making one of the strongest early impressions in camp, and the Royals plan to start him in place of Brett Tomko in the spring training opener this week. I think de la Rosa’s arm is way too lively to give up on, and for the life of me I can’t understand why no one has broached the subject of using him in the bullpen. You’ve got a lefthander who throws in the mid-90s but can’t throw strikes? Doesn’t the bullpen seem like the perfect tonic for a guy like that?

I’ll touch on this more later, but this yet another reason why I strongly dislike (I’m tempted to use the word “hate”) the signing of Ron Mahay. Suddenly the Royals have three left-handed relievers projected to break camp with the team (including Jimmy Gobble and John Bale), and they still have Neal Musser and his 0.49 ERA in Omaha last year lying around. They didn’t need Mahay, and now they’re in a situation where de la Rosa either gets a rotation spot or gets a one-way ticket out of town.

Reason #17: The Enigma.

Twenty-five years ago, Jose Cruz Sr. was earning the title as “the most underrated player in baseball”, at least in sabermetric circles. There was good reason for this: he played in the Astrodome, a park that absolutely killed his power numbers, in an era when pretty much everyone outside of sabermetric circles seemed to be in denial that park effects existed. It became almost a running joke in Bill James’ annual abstracts: another year, another season in which Cruz put up MVP numbers on the road.

It was in the power department that the splits were most glaring. In 1980, Cruz hit 7 homers on the road, 4 at home. In 1981, it was 10 on the road, 3 at home; in 1982, it was 6 and 3; 11 and 3 in 1983; an amazing 12 and 0 in 1984; 8 and 1 in 1985. Over that six year stretch he hit 54 homers on the road, 14 at home. In 1984 he hit .344/.394/.545 away from the Astrodome, just .276/.367/.371 in Houston.

But here’s the funny thing: call a player underrated long enough and, at least in sabermetric circles, he might have become overrated. It’s not like the mainstream media didn’t notice him at all – he finished in the Top 10 in MVP voting in 1980, 1983, and 1984, and won Silver Sluggers in both 1983 and 1984. And the focus on his home run totals and his extreme splits in 1984 obscured the fact that most years, he wasn’t particularly hurt by his home park. In 1982, he had a higher OPS at home than on the road, as well as every year from 1977 to 1980. In 1978, he hit more homers on the road than at home (9 to 8), but he hit for a higher average at home (.312 to .288), drew more walks at home (41 to 28), and had more doubles and triple at home (23 to 18). His overall splits that year were .312/.394/.517 at home, .288/.344/.440 on the road.

For his career, Cruz managed to hit 106 homers on the road, just 59 at home, almost certainly one of the most pronounced home/road splits of any player in history with that many home runs. And yet for his career, his home splits (.289/.366/.418) are better than his road splits (.280/.344/.422). There’s no question that Cruz, at his peak, was hurt by an oppressive home field, but he was probably affected less than, say, any San Diego Padres hitter is today.

All of this is an incredibly long-winded, tangential, and possibly irrelevant way of saying that just as Jose Cruz was considered so underrated that he became overrated, I’m beginning to think that Luke Hochevar has been called overrated – or synonyms like “draft mistake” and “not Tim Lincecum” – so often that he’s now become underrated.

Ignore the fact that he was the #1 overall pick in 2006, that the Royals took him over Andrew Miller and Lincecum, to say nothing of guys like Joba Chamberlain or Clayton Kershaw (neither of whom, despite obvious talent, were considered realistic #1 overall picks at the time). Just look at his body of work:

1) In his first full professional season, he started the year in Double-A, moved up to Triple-A in August, and pitched well (2.13 ERA) in a September callup.
2) Struck out nearly three times as many batters as he walked (138 to 47) in the minors.
3) Showed no signs of fatigue or injury all season.

That’s not a bad debut for a prospect, even a top prospect, is it?

The criticisms of Hochevar seem to boil down to this:

1) He gave up way too many hits and home runs in the minors;
2) He was a #1 overall pick.

Also, owing to his holdout, he was awfully old for a draft pick, and is already 24. On the other hand, age is not nearly as meaningful a factor for pitchers as it is for hitters, and if there is such a thing as an injury nexus, Hochevar is probably past it.

The hits, and especially the homers, are concerning. Hochevar is a flyball pitcher, and he’s going to give up his share of big flies. But the high BABIP is likely to be one of those fluky things that won’t stay with him in the future. Not to make excuses for him, but the Royals reportedly would sometimes restrict his repertoire during the season to tighten up his breaking pitches. More importantly, the scouts who saw him did not feel that his erratic performance was reflected in his stuff, which was still #2-starter caliber.

I only saw him pitch in September, but what I saw reminded me a lot of Gil Meche. Like Meche, Hochevar works off a good fastball and an excellent big-breaking curveball, but all four of his pitches are at least average. Maybe Meche isn’t the comparison I want to be making, given that it took him 7 years for his stuff to translate into results. But Meche’s medical reports could fill a file cabinet; Hochevar’s wouldn’t fit inside the MacBook Air.

I don’t think he’s ready for a rotation spot now. Another half-season in Triple-A would be ideal, but the notion of breaking him in as a reliever is not a bad idea so long as it remains a temporary one. Hochevar could also be compared to the Mets’ Aaron Heilman, a first-round pick who also spent his first full season in Double-A and Triple-A. Hochevar’s K/BB ratio last year was 138-to-47; Heilman’s K/BB ratio that year was 132-to-44. But Heilman struggled in the Mets rotation for parts of the next two years, and was starting to smell like a bust before the Mets moved him to the bullpen in 2005, where he’s been tremendous ever since. The problem is that the Mets are so concerned about his previous struggles in the rotation that they’ve decided to leave him in the pen permanently, despite a starter’s repertoire, and as a result his talents have been somewhat wasted.

If using Hochevar in middle relief for a season makes his transition to the rotation easier, I’m all for it. Better one year in relief now than a lifetime in relief later.

Do I wish the Royals had drafted Lincecum or Kershaw instead? Yes. Do I think that Hochevar could be an above-average major league starter in 2009? Yes. What’s past is prologue. The future for Hochevar is still pretty bright.