Royals Today: 3/20/2009

Okay, you guys have been waiting for an update for long enough, so let’s jump right into this thing:

- Am I the only one mystified by the amount of attention given to the Sidney Ponson signing? Maybe I’m just annoyed by the fact that the MLB Network’s* hour-long special on the Royals yesterday – part of their “30 Clubs in 30 Days” series – spent over five minutes talking about Slender Sidney.

Look, if the Royals were really planning to open the season with Ponson in the rotation, this would be cause for alarm. Ponson hasn’t had an ERA under five since 2003, largely because he doesn’t strike anyone out anymore. He’s basically a poor man’s Livan Hernandez, and the wealthier version isn’t much to write home about himself.

But I’m taking this signing at face value. While the Royals have rotation depth in the sense that they have six candidates for five spots, they were not particularly well positioned in the event of multiple injuries (something which tends to happen to rotations). The team’s seventh starter is Brandon Duckworth; their eighth starter would probably involve doing something unwise, like rushing Daniel Cortes or giving Robinson Tejeda another shot at starting. Ponson is a replacement-level starter, but I’d rather have him in a pinch than a below-replacement-level starter. At the cost of a minor-league contract, he’s a good pickup. Throw in the ancillary costs to the franchise’s ego and the food budget, and he’s still worth a flyer.

*: The MLB Network has a lot of promise, and I’m happy to see any national network devote a full hour to the Royals, even if the entire show was tailored to the lowest common denominator. But would it really kill the network to hire “analysts” who have qualifications other than “I played the game”? This is an actual quote from Mitch Williams at the end of yesterday’s show on the Royals:

“I think this team will be above .500. Now where that puts them in their own division, that remains to be seen. But I have them picked fifth.”

It’s true, I never played baseball at its highest level, nor did Joe Sheehan, or Will Carroll, or Kevin Goldstein, or any of my other colleagues at Baseball Prospectus. But if the MLB Network ever deigns to put a stat guy in their studio, I can guarantee you that none of us would ever say anything even remotely as dumb as that.

- Jimmy Gobble is gone, and I guess I’m supposed to be all broken up about that. And sure, I agree with Will McDonald that saying goodbye to Gobble hurts on an emotional level. Gobble was a supplemental first-round pick 10 years ago, and when you’ve spent a decade watching a guy develop from touted draft pick to top prospect to major league starter at age 21, then to come to the realization that he, like every other Royals pitcher of his generation, was not nearly the stud we thought he was, then to watch as Gobble struggle to find a niche for himself, then to finally settle in as a LOOGY, and then to see even those lessened ambitions blow up in the span of one horrible inning against the Tigers last July – well, it hurts to see him go out like that. And I agree with Joe Posnanski that Gobble is likely to re-establish himself with another franchise and probably has another decade left in his career.

With all that said, I can’t get too worked up about this from a baseball standpoint. Gobble finally learned how to get lefties out the last two years, but prior to 2007 he wasn’t particularly effective against either side. Even at his best – in 2007, when he had a 3.02 ERA – he wasn’t that good. (That year Gobble was terrible at stranding inherited runners – according to our BP metrics, he was responsible for 4.7 runs that were charged to other pitchers – while at the same time he was very fortunate in that the baserunners he bequeathed to other relievers were stranded at a very high rate. In a fair world, his ERA would have been well into the 4s, and in fact he was a slightly below-average reliever for the season.) Gobble has surrendered more than a hit an inning in every season of his career.

The bottom line is that he would be a nice luxury to have in a land where it’s always September and you can play with 40-man rosters and never, ever have to worry about leaving Gobble in to face a right-handed hitter. But within the constraints of a 25-man roster, it’s very difficult to design a role for Gobble where his weaknesses don’t overwhelm his strengths. I don’t blame the Royals for deciding not to bother anymore, and saving themselves a million bucks in the process.

The interesting question is what this does to the construction of the bullpen. Soria, Farnsworth, Cruz, and Mahay – the multi-year contract guys – are all locks. Waechter appears to be a near-lock, and Tejeda should be. That leaves one roster spot, the spot that Gobble had been penciled in. That spot would presumably go to Bale if he’s healthy – and I wonder if the decision to cut Gobble is a reflection in the Royals’ faith that Bale should be ready soon – but if he’s not, I imagine that would give Joel Peralta and his revamped mechanics a new lease on life.

But would the Royals really open the season with just one lefty in their bullpen? It’s not necessarily a bad idea, just an unconventional one for the 21^st century. It would be great if this meant that the Royals had decided to slide Horacio Ramirez back to the bullpen, but I’m not holding my breath. My guess is that Bale will be on the roster on Opening Day or close to it, with Waechter and Peralta fighting it out for the last roster spot.

- Sam Mellinger argues that the acquisition of Luis Hernandez is the final nail in the coffin that we will gleefully bury the Tony Pena Jr. era in. That may be so, and at this point I’ll buy any rationale for removing Pena from the roster. But if Hernandez really makes Pena expendable, it only goes to show just how replaceable Pena was.

Hernandez hit .241 in limited playing time for the Orioles last year, and his career line in the majors is .264/.297/.304 in 148 at-bats. That’s par for the course for a glove-first shortstop backup. Unfortunately, that line is about as deceptive as Pena’s 2007 line was. Last year, in over 200 Triple-A at-bats, Hernandez hit .185. That’s not a productive .185 either – he had all of seven extra-base hits (all doubles) and eight walks. He hit .244 in the minors in 2007, with equally poor secondary skills. Honestly, I’d rather have Pena, if only for the mop-up relief possibilities. The problem is that Pena is out of options, but there is a very good chance that he would clear waivers, in which case I’d let him start in Omaha while subtly suggesting to him that his future, if he has one, is likely to be on the mound.

The fact that the Royals think Luis Hernandez – just one of the many gloves that fall out when you shake a tree – could replace Pena, is testament to just how silly it was to trade actual talent to get Pena in the first place. You don’t need to develop players like Pena and Hernandez, because there’s always a half-dozen of them ripe for the plucking off of some other team’s roster.

- I know it’s fun to look at spring training stats and dream a little, but please, please remember: it’s Arizona. I don’t mean that just in the sense that spring training stats are meaningless – though they are, mostly – but in the sense that the Cactus League is full of inflated numbers. As happy as I am that the Royals moved to Surprise many years ago – and left behind that dump in Baseball City – the downside to training in Arizona is that offensive numbers are so inflated that it’s even harder to evaluate your hitters (and your pitchers) in March than usual. Remember when Ruben Gotay hit .360 with 6 homers in 2005? When Angel Berroa hit .441 and slugged .691 the same year? Or when Berroa hit .451 and slugged .745 the following spring?

So when you see John Buck hitting .414/.514/.862 in 12 games, or Mike Jacobs batting .317/.417/.732 in 15 games, or Mark Teahen at .462/.517/1.154 in nine games, try to control your enthusiasm. And by the same token, don’t spend any time fretting over Zack Greinke’s 8.27 ERA, or Gil Meche’s 12.15 mark. Repeat after me: Spring Training Stats Mean Nothing. Spring Training Stats Mean Nothing.

- While you keep repeating that mantra, I’m going to point out one stat that I hope does mean something. Behold, the major league leader in walks drawn this spring with 12, one more than Albert Pujols: Covelli Loyce Crisp. It might mean nothing. But it might also mean that Coco is taking this leadoff role to heart. It might also mean that Kevin Seitzer is working some magic. The Royals drew 392 walks last year, one of the five lowest totals by a team in the last 60 years. If they raise that number over 500 this year, the Royals should just induct Seitzer into the team’s Hall of Fame on the spot.

- Buck’s stats may not mean anything, but this story does. Players are not, as much as we may want to characterize them as such, stat-generating robots. I can’t imagine that it’s easy to concentrate on hitting fastballs when your wife and two newborn sons are in the hospital. I’m making excuses for Buck in part because I thought he was going to have a breakout year last season, and now I’m just covering my ass. But I’m interested to see if a clear head and the secrets of the man Sam Mellinger calls “The Bat Whisperer” can make a difference.

(The best part of the story, by far, is when Buck says that he was able to buy into Seitzer’s hitting program after talking with Pujols during a chance encounter at a sub shop. Really? Buck and David DeJesus decided to go grab a sandwich from Quizno’s or something and Pujols just happens to be sitting there? Why does this never happen to me?)

- Finally, this has nothing to do with baseball, but since it’s my blog I figure I can use this site to shamelessly publicize myself. A few of you have already heard, but for those who did not I had a segment on NPR’s “This American Life” last weekend, which NPR junkies tell me is kind of a big deal. If you’re interested in listening, go to the show's website and click on the “Wrong Side of History” episode. Despite the name, amazingly, this has nothing to do with my life as a Royals fan. It has everything to do with politics and religion, the twin towers of radioactive topics for a sports blog, so please, don’t listen if that’s not your cup of tea. If it is, my segment starts a little over 18 minutes in.

Depth.

Last time, I talked about the advantage the Royals can garner by keeping their worst players out of the lineup. But this was really a smaller point in a larger overall theme for the Royals. As beneficial as it is for the Royals to keep the likes of Ross Gload and Tony Pena Jr out of the lineup, it’s even more beneficial to keep them off the roster entirely.

Making sure that your Opening Day lineup is major-league caliber from top to bottom is an important first step to a winning season, but it’s just that: a first step. The baseball season is long. Players get hurt. Bench players become everyday players. Minor leaguers become major leaguers. Depth matters, and say what you will about the moves Dayton Moore made this winter, but one thing the moves accomplished was to add depth to the roster. Indeed, the Royals are as deep as I can recall them being in a long, long time.

Let’s run a thought experiment here, while hoping it remains just that: let’s imagine that we learn this week that someone on the roster has suffered a major injury and will be out indefinitely, perhaps for the entire season. How would the Royals be affected?

If it’s Coco Crisp, then David DeJesus moves to center, Mark Teahen starts in left. Impact: significant on defense, but a wash or possibly even an improvement on offense.

If it’s DeJesus, he’s replaced with Teahen. Impact: mild.

If it’s Jose Guillen, he’s replaced with Teahen. Impact: none, maybe an improvement.

If it’s Alex Gordon, he’s replaced with Teahen. Impact: significant, but survivable.

If it’s Mike Aviles, he’s replaced with, well, I’m not sure. Willie Bloomquist probably moves over from second base, and Pena almost certainly makes the roster. Impact: enormous.

If it’s Bloomquist, then Alberto Callaspo secures his hold on the everyday job at second base, but Pena makes the roster as a utility player. Impact: an upgrade in the lineup, a downgrade on the bench – at worst, a wash overall.

If it’s Callaspo, then we’ll be treated to the Spork on an everyday basis, with occasional doses of Pena to remind us of how much worse it could be. Impact: significant.

If it’s Mike Jacobs, then Ryan Shealy likely makes the roster along with Gload, and a quasi-platoon probably plays out between the two of them – at least until Kila Ka’aihue is deemed ready. Impact: mild to moderate.

If it’s Billy Butler, same thing, same impact.

If it’s John Buck or Miguel Olivo, the other guy gets the starting job, and Brayan Pena gets the backup job he is ably suited for. Impact: none.

If it’s a member of the starting rotation, well, the Royals have six starting pitchers for five spots. (Or at least, the Royals think they have six starting pitchers – the rest of us think that Horacio Ramirez is a ticking time bomb.) Impact: as long as they have to replace just one starter, mild.

If it’s Joakim Soria, a month ago this would have been an absolutely devastating injury – can you say “now pitching the ninth inning, Kyle Farnsworth”? – but Juan Cruz is more than capable of filling in as closer, and in fact would make for a better closer than anyone the Royals had from 1999 to 2006. Impact: mild to moderate.

If it’s another right-handed reliever, the Royals are already having trouble finding space for both Robinson Tejeda (who absolutely should make the roster) and Doug Waechter, and Carlos Rosa is almost ready for his close-up. Impact: minimal.

If it’s a left-handed reliever, it might actually make the front office’s job easier trying to decide between John Bale and Jimmy Gobble as the second left-hander behind Ron Mahay. (I’m expecting the Royals to DL Bale even if he’s ready to start the year, giving him some time to “rehab” in Omaha and pushing any roster decisions a few weeks into the future.) Impact: None.

The point here isn’t that the Royals could weather the loss of any one of their players equally – obviously, losing Zack Greinke would hurt more than losing Brian Bannister. The point is that at almost every position, the Royals have a backup plan that is almost starter-quality. Some of their backup plans would have been starters for the Royals a few years ago – actually, their main backup plan (Teahen) was a starter for many years.

This might seem like a small thing, but it’s not. The Yankees just lost Alex Rodriguez for a month or two, and their backup plan appears to be Cody Ransom. For all the money they’ve spent on their starters, the reality is that the Yankees’ backup third baseman can’t hold a candle to the Royals’ backup third baseman – which is why the Teahen-to-the-Yankees rumors started in the first place.

Teahen’s not just the backup third baseman, though, he’s also the backup for all three outfield spots. For that reason alone, I think the Royals would be foolish to trade him, and I doubt they are seriously considering that option anyway. A DeJesus-Crisp-Guillen outfield is many things, but durable is not one of them. None of the three missed significant time with an injury in 2008 or 2007, but in 2006 all three outfielders missed at least 43 games. I’d be surprised if Teahen doesn’t start at least a few dozen games in the outfield this year.

But with Teahen covering the four corners, and Bloomquist covering the middle of the field, the Royals have covered seven positions with two players about as well as it can reasonably be covered. Even with just a four-man bench – and don’t get me started again on the silliness of a 12-man pitching staff – the Royals can carry a backup catcher and still have a bench spot to carry the best available hitter. They might carry Gload instead, but at least the option is there.

Viewed from this perspective, the signing of Cruz is one of the final pieces of the puzzle, because an injury to Soria that would have previously been crippling is now something that only requires crutches and a good chiropractor. Really, the only position that the Royals don’t have an adequate firewall for is shortstop. That’s right: Mike Aviles is the most irreplaceable player on the Royals’ roster. (I’ll take “sentences I’d never thought I’d write a year ago” for $1000, Alex.)

If anything, the Royals may have focused on depth a little too much, in the sense that there are a few positions in which an injury might actually help the team. The Royals would exchange power for OBP in the event of an injury to Guillen, an exchange that might benefit the team overall. An injury to Bloomquist would mean more playing time for Callaspo, and an injury to Ramirez would mean the Royals would not have to use precious time in April finding out whether he has any business starting in the major leagues any more.

I’m rooting for Ramirez, both because I have no choice and because it’s important for a major league team to go into a season with at least six quality options for the rotation. The Royals had a remarkably healthy rotation last season, and they still suffered two significant injuries, one to John Bale (which, in all honesty, was predictable) early in the season, and one to his replacement, Luke Hochevar in August. (Kyle Davies replaced Brett Tomko at the end of May, but the only injury involved was the one to the ego of the scout that told Joe Posnanski last spring that Tomko could win 15 games.)

Three-fifths of the Opening Day rotation (Greinke, Meche, Bannister) stayed healthy all season, and the Royals still needed eight starters to get through the year. Starting the year with Bannister stashed away in Omaha, waiting for a spot to open up, is hardly the worst idea in the world – particularly since the Royals don’t have any imminent help ready on the farm. (No, Brandon Duckworth does not qualify as “help”. Carlos Rosa is a reliever now. And Daniel Cortes is not anywhere close to being ready, and is one pitcher I really hope the Royals do not rush.) But this is all predicated on Ramirez actually getting people out.

I’m rooting for perfect health, but that’s like rooting for 162 wins: it will never happen, and even dreaming about such an outcome just distracts from preparing for the alternative. This year, for the first time in many years, the Royals appear prepared for the inevitable. Hope is not a strategy, but roster depth is. And it’s one reason why I think the Royals could make this a very interesting season.

Addition. By Subtraction.

I’m not going to argue the point that some of my pre-season optimism in the Royals is not entirely grounded in reality. It’s March. Hope Spring Eternal, and all that jazz. My playoff hopes notwithstanding, on paper this team looks like about a 78-81 win team to me, which is actually quite an improvement from last season.

(The Royals won 75 games last year, but based on their run differential – they were outscored by 90 runs for the season – they should have finished around 72-90. Give the Mexicutioner credit for those extra three wins. The Royals lost just one game all season that they led after eight innings – you might remember it – after losing at least three such games in every season since 1995. More to the point, they were 20-18 in one-run games, continuing the turnaround in that category since Joakim Soria was acquired. They were 21-22 in one-run games in 2007, which doesn’t sound great, but remember: from 1996 to 2006, the Royals were the worst one-run team over an 11-year span in the history of major league baseball.)

I see the Royals improving because I think that we’ll see an across-the-board improvement from the trio of Zack Greinke, Alex Gordon, and Billy Butler, more than enough to make up for the inevitable regression from Mike Aviles, and that the rest of the roster should perform at roughly last year’s level.

So you figure two-game improvements from each of the young’uns (we need a nickname for those three), and you can tack on six more wins to last season. That’s 78 wins if you think that the Royals were really a 72-win team last year, or 81 wins if you think the bullpen will help them play a little above their talent level again.

But here’s the thing: the greatest improvement the Royals can make this season won’t come from their good players playing better, it will come from their bad players playing less. Last season, the Royals gave 892 at-bats to the trio of Ross Gload, Tony Pena, and Joey Gathright. In return they got a .241 average with four homers, three triples, 25 doubles, and 49 walks. The Royals gave over 15% of their playing time to three guys who combined for a .289 slugging average and a .284 OBP.

If they can find a way to avoid writing off nearly two full lineup slots the way they did last year, the Royals are going to benefit from a mighty case of addition-by-subtraction. It’s not a coincidence that in September, when those three guys combined for just 62 plate appearances, the Royals went 18-8.

Here’s how big an impact a Pena-free season can make:

Last season, Mike Aviles hit .325/.354/.480 in 102 games. Of the 27 men who played at least 80 games at shortstop last season, Aviles ranked first in batting average and third in OPS, behind only Hanley Ramirez and (by one point) Stephen Drew. As terrific a season as it was by major league standards, by the standards of Royals history it was unprecedented. Of the 39 times a Royal has played 80 games or more at shortstop for the Royals, Aviles’ .834 OPS ranks #1 overall. The only player within 40 points of his total is Jay Bell, who hit .291/.368/.461 in his one season in KC.

In 2008, Aviles had one of the finest seasons by a Royals shortstop in the team’s history. But in 2009, PECOTA projects a rather massive decline in Aviles’ performance, projecting that he hits just .268/.309/.409 this year, a decline in OPS of 115 points. Aviles’ 90^th percentile projection is still lower than last year’s numbers at .301/.344/.478, which means that Aviles has less than a 10% chance of matching last year’s performance. This isn’t all that surprising, really; Aviles’ performance was as unexpected as it was terrific, and furthermore it was largely batting-average driven. Aviles is a better player than any of us thought, but there’s no question that last season he was propelled by a tailwind of good fortune.

It’s not all that surprising, and it may not be all that relevant either. Why? Because if the Royals get a line of .268/.309/.409 from their shortstops in 2009, it will still be an improvement over last year. That’s how bad Tony Pena was last season. The Royals had the benefit of the best-hitting shortstop in their history 58% of the time – but the other 42% was so bad that for the season, Royals shortstops hit just .249/.281/.351.

That’s how bad Tony Pena was – he was last on both those lists by an embarrassing margin – and that’s how much better the Royals can be if they can find a way to keep him off the roster.

First base wasn’t nearly that bad, but thanks to Gload the Royals had a combined line of .277/.324/.396 with just 14 homers – and seven of those came from Ryan Shealy in September alone. Mike Jacobs is overrated, but he’s just as clearly an upgrade – particularly if the Royals bench him against the tough left-handers.

As important as it is for the Royals to get some true breakthrough seasons from the likes of Gordon and Butler, and a rebound season from Jose Guillen, it’s just as important that they find a way to keep the roster free of guys who have no offensive ability whatsoever. Gload is still around, but even if he makes the roster he’s unlikely to get a lot of playing time. Pena is a longshot to make the roster, and Gathright’s a Cub. From where I’m sitting, while the Royals don’t have a lot of above-average hitters on their roster, everyone on their projected roster (yes, even Willie Bloomquist) has some offensive talent.

The Royals have exactly one winning April in the last 19 seasons, in large part because they go into every season with at least a few regular players who have no business being regulars, and it takes a few weeks of getting their butts kicked before the Royals wake up. Last year Ross Gload was at first base and Tony Pena was at shortstop on Opening Day. This year, the Royals may actually have nine major league hitters in their lineup to start the season. (I said they may – the Spork may put an end to that dream.) If the Royals are serious about contending this year, they can’t afford to spend April learning what the rest of us already know: it’s hard to win with only seven hitters in your lineup.

Royals Today: 3/5/2009.

Thirty-two days. Thirty-two days until Coco Crisp steps into the batter’s box here in Chicago. (If anyone has access to some quality tickets to Opening Day, by the way, please let me know.) It’s still too early to take spring training results seriously, but it’s not too early to start talking about how the roster is shaping up. Which means it’s time for the first Royals Today of the new season.

- Royals fans have become quite accustomed to the fringe benefits of being a bad team: an early draft pick (and the accompanying opportunity to blow that pick by passing on the best player available to save money – I’m so glad we took Jeff Austin instead of J.D. Drew ten years ago), a plum spot in the Rule 5 draft, first dibs on the waiver wire. To that, we can add the fact that bad teams don’t have to worry about having their roster disrupted by the World Baseball Classic. Three years ago, I don’t recall a single significant member of the Royals that participated.

This year things are different, which is yet another sign that the Royals are slowly pulling themselves out of the morass of the post-strike era. The Mexicutioner will close for Mexico, and would have made any team’s roster. You obviously have to worry about Soria’s health; this is one instance where the Royals’ insistence on keeping him in the bullpen is unassailable. Working one or two innings at a time, there’s little reason to think that he’s going to get hurt (although his Mexican teammate Luis Ayala blew out his elbow in the 2006 WBC, and has never been the same.) Ayala excepted, the WBC hangover primarily hit the starting pitchers, who were throwing five or six innings in game conditions at a point in the spring when they were used to throwing three or four innings in an exhibition setting.

Jose Guillen and Miguel Olivo will be playing for the Dominican Republic, which should have no impact on the Royals, both because their starting jobs are fairly secure, and because it’s not clear that an injury to either player would hurt the team at all. Mike Aviles is the starting shortstop for the Puerto Rican team – he’s come a long way, baby – but I can’t imagine that his absence will endanger his starting role on the Royals one bit. And then there’s Lenny DiNardo, working as a ringer for the Italian team but otherwise irrelevant. (I’m guessing that my brother and I could make the Syrian national team right now. We’d have a sizeable advantage on the other applicants: we’d know the rules of the game.)

Finally, there’s Dylan Lindsey, the 17-year-old South African pitcher who’s most famous for the fact that no one in the Royals organization – other than the scout who signed him – has even seen him pitch. (Strangely, this is the second straight WBC featuring a Royals pitcher on the South African team – Barry Armitage was one of the team’s most prominent members three years ago, and if he could have held onto a ninth-inning lead, South Africa would have pulled off a hellacious upset of the Canadians.)

The most impactful spring training desertion is Mark Teahen, who will be playing third base for Team Canada instead of working on second base for the Royals. (Then again, maybe that’s for the best. I didn’t expect it to take long for the second base experiment to go sour, but I thought it would take more than one inning.)

The WBC is to be played every four years, but after the first one was hurriedly put together in 2006, it was agreed that the second one would be held three years later before starting the quadrennial pattern. This may have been a lucky break for the Royals. A year from now, Alex Gordon might have spent a few weeks backing up David Wright at third base, and more importantly, Zack Greinke might have been in Team USA’s rotation. This year the WBC goes on with no impact to the Royals’ rotation, and it will be four years – and another Greinke contract – before we have to worry about this event again.

- If there’s one player on the roster that you have to root for to have a huge March, it’s Alberto Callaspo. Unless Teahen magically learns how to play second base from ninety feet away, second base is going to come down to Bert vs. the Spork. Sam Mellinger has already set his over/under on Bloomquist’s starts at second base at 100, and while I’d take the under on that, the fact that 100 starts is even theoretically possible scares the hell out of me.

Joe Posnanski has written of "The Gloaden Rule", which states: "1) Use Ross Gload correctly, he will help your team win games. 2) Use Ross Gload incorrectly, he will get you fired." That rule applies doubly so for Bloomquist. Used as a backup at seven different positions, as a defensive replacement at second base, as an early-inning pinch-hitter when you need baserunners more than you need power, he’s a near-perfect 25^th man. As an everyday starter, he’s a whirling vortex of suck that threatens to bring down every offensive rally he comes into contact with. If you could commune with the future and have access to the number of starts made by a single member of the Royals in 2009, Bloomquist is the guy I’d pick. If he makes 30 starts this year, the Royals have a chance. If he makes 130 starts, they don’t.

- Speaking of Gload, am I being unreasonably optimistic when I say that there’s actually a chance the Royals might cut their losses with him? He has a guaranteed contract for 2009, but I have yet to see any clear-cut evidence that he’s guaranteed a spot on the roster. The roster math for the Royals is pretty daunting, particularly since Hillman is committed to keeping 12 pitchers. DeJesus, Crisp, and Guillen man the outfield; Gordon and Aviles lock down the left side of the infield. Olivo and Buck share catcher duties. Jacobs will play at either first base or DH, and Teahen and Bloomquist are roster locks.

That leaves all of three roster spots for Butler, Callaspo, Brayan Pena, Shealy, Gload, Tony Pena Jr, or anyone else. If Butler or Callaspo fail to make the roster, something has gone terribly wrong, and for the third spot, I’d argue that Brayan Pena or Shealy – both of whom are out of options – are a better use of that roster spot than Gload. (And that doesn't account for the possibility of another acquisition this month, which wouldn't surprise me at all.)

Giving Gload a two-year contract for no reason (Gload wasn’t eligible for free agency any time soon) remains one of Moore’s most inexplicable decisions, and the cost of that mistake is coming due. Cutting Gload would force the Royals to eat $1.9 million. Nonetheless, it’s the right move to make. Gload’s salary is a sunk cost, something they’re going to have to pay either way. Better for the Royals to not also pay by keeping him on the roster.

As Bob Dutton reports, the Royals may be considering just that. It may be a small decision in the grand scheme of things, but if the Royals do release Gload, the implications are fairly significant: it means that Moore understands the concept of a sunk cost, that he’s willing to admit when he’s made a mistake, and that he’s able to convince David Glass to pay a player to not actually play. Stay tuned. If Gload gets cut before Opening Day, it will be a very welcome sign that the Royals are hellbent on contending this year, and neither sentiment nor the ghosts of decisions past will get in their way.

- Some of you may have read Christina Kahrl’s column on the Royals’ small but very real playoff hopes. She makes many of the same points I’ve made – that the AL Central is a very compressed division, that even the division favorite Indians have holes, and that if the Royals are going to pull this off, it’s going to be on the backs of their talented young players, and not on the veterans that they’ve thrown millions of dollars at over the last two seasons.

I’ve been rooting for an underdog for so long that part of me resents Kahrl for giving the Royals as much credit as she does. I don’t want anyone to believe in us – it will make the inevitable victory that much more satisfying.

Obviously, that’s juvenile. It’s very, very hard – nearly impossible – for a team to suddenly reach the playoffs without having someone believe in them first.* The Rays had their believers last year. Even the Braves had a bandwagon of supporters back in 1991 – the Braves were just 39-40 to start that season, but a lot of people (myself included) looked at the team during the first half of the season and said, man, there’s some talent on this squad.

Talent doesn’t just materialize out of thin air, and you’re not going to win without talent. The Royals tried that before in 2003 – I don’t know anyone who was talking them up before that season – and it didn’t work. You need a foundation of talent to dream. The Royals have that foundation now, and suddenly people who don’t bleed blue and white are starting to take that dream seriously.

*: I have no explanation for the 2008 Arizona Cardinals. I’m not sure anyone does.

The latest to do so is Bill Simmons, who not once but twice this week talked up the Royals on "The B.S. Report." In his March 2^nd podcast – flip to the 48-minute mark – he starts by talking up the Chiefs as the biggest sleeper in the NFL next year, but around the 52-minute mark goes out of his way during a football discussion to hitch his train to the Royals this summer. “You might be looking at The Year of Kansas City.”

The next day he goes even further during a discussion with Matthew Berry - again, forward ahead to the 48-minute mark. “I love the Royals in general – I think that whole team is going to take off this year. I like Cruz, I like Soria, I love Mike Aviles. Gordon – this is his third year, he’s due to make the third-year leap. I like Billy Butler. I just like that team.” This podcast is worth listening to, if only to hear Berry – ESPN’s Senior Director of Fantasy – laughably mispronounce Mark Teahen’s name and briefly claim that Joey Gathright was in the outfield mix.

So obviously, not everyone has taken notice of the Royals. But Simmons has, and there are few, if any, sportswriters more popularly read than him. (And Simmons isn’t just blowing smoke. I have it on good authority that he stands to make some money if the Royals win the division. Or he would, if gambling were legal.)

I guess we’ll just have to accept that the bandwagon isn’t solely made up of die-hards. But hey, if the Royals go to the playoffs this year, none of us are going to complain or even remember that a few national observers thought this was a possibility. And it’s fun to go into the season talking up the Royals’ chances of a playoff run without being openly laughed at for a change.

We ought to prepare ourselves for a different kind of heartbreak this year, though. The saving grace of the Royals the last 20 years is that they’ve been so bad that they don’t have any near-misses on their resume. The Royals have been eliminated from playoff consideration with at least four days to go in every season since 1986, and they haven’t been more than mathematically alive in any season past about September 15^th. This could be the year the Royals fall two or games short, and if that happens, I guarantee that we’ll be bitching about the money wasted on Kyle Farnsworth or Horacio Ramirez, or the playing time given to Gload or Bloomquist, or the one-of-a-kind event that is the Jose Guillen Experience, as the difference between missing the playoffs and making it. I might as well bookmark this column now, because if that’s the case I’ll almost certainly want to quote from this paragraph six months from now.

But you know what? I’ll take that risk, and so will every one of you. If the Royals go out there and challenge for first place all year long, and come up a game or two short, or if they collapse in September and cough up a division title that was in their grasp, we’re going to feel a hurt that, for many of us, we’ve never felt before. But at least we’ll feel something. We’ve been beaten down as Royals fans for so long that we’ve become numb to the pain. To feel pain is to feel alive, and Royals fans have endured two decades worth of dead Septembers. I don’t know if the season will end in agony or in ecstacy, but I’ve got a good feeling that this year, at least it won’t end with a sense of relief.

You Snooze, We Sign Juan Cruz.

Jeez, a busy day for Kansas City sports today…

The usual apologies for my prolonged absence apply. We’ve spent the last week moving my main dermatology office to a larger location across the hall, while simultaneously preparing to open a new office location in Sycamore, Illinois on Tuesday. (Taking appointments now!) Fortunately, the economy is so robust and vibrant that I should have no problems making this investment pay off. I mean, there’s no way I’d try to expand my business while our country is in the grip of a huge recession. That would be insane.

Anyway, the workplace distractions really just served as a convenient excuse, because I was loathe to spend a lot of time commenting on the first week or two of spring training, when everyone shows up in the best shape of their life and every development is scrutinized to a pulp. The main goal of Spring Training is simply to keep everyone healthy, and that goes double for the parts of Spring Training that occur in February.

But this morning I finally got off my duff and wrote a couple thousand words on the state of the Royals. I was without internet access at the time, but planned to post this afternoon…only to come home and find a press release in my email box.

Wow, Juan Cruz, huh? I find it hard to argue with this acquisition from either a talent perspective or a financial perspective.

Cruz was a top prospect with the Cubs at the dawn of the decade, but struggled to find his niche in the major leagues. He bounced to the Braves and A’s before finally landing with Arizona three years ago, quickly settled into the bullpen, and has been lights out ever since. His career ERA is 4.00, but that’s unfairly weighted by two terrible seasons in 2003 (6.05 ERA) and 2005 (7.44 ERA in 33 innings). His next-highest ERA after that is in 2006, with a 4.18 ERA. In 2007 his ERA was a tidy 3.10; last year it was just 2.61.

It’s not just that Cruz is effective, it’s how he is effective. Remember when Dayton Moore was defending the Kyle Farnsworth signing by talking up the Royals’ need for a reliever who can get the big strikeout when necessary? He might have been – should have been – talking about Cruz instead. It’s not that Farnsworth is a stranger to the strikeout – he’s averaged over one per inning in his career – but Cruz is even better in that category, with 535 whiffs in 515 career innings (9.35 Ks per 9 IP). Moreover, Cruz combines a power strikeout rate with actual effectiveness. Farnsworth’s strikeouts come at the cost of homers (1.37 HR per 9), while Cruz, despite being a flyball pitcher, has surrendered just 0.97 HR per 9. Cruz is a little more prone to the walk (4.38 UIBB per 9, Farnsworth is at 3.66 per 9), but it’s a worthwhile tradeoff.

Cruz, remember, has pitched in the cozy confines of Bank One Ballpark/Chase Field/whichever soon-to-be-bankrupt financial services company their stadium is named for at the moment. I don’t want to make too much of this, because Cruz actually pitched better at home than on the road the last three years – he gave up just six homers in Arizona, thirteen elsewhere. But on the whole, his flyball tendencies should play even better in Kansas City than they did in the desert.

But here’s what I really like about Cruz: he’s a strikeout machine unlike any reliever the Royals have ever had. I was recently thinking about how unique it is that the Royals have had three truly signature closers in their history (Dan Quisenberry, Jeff Montgomery and Joakim Soria), and yet have never had a prototypical flamethrowing reliever in any role. Quisenberry famously has one of the lowest strikeout rates of the modern era – certainly for a pitcher as effective as him. Montgomery and Soria have/had good strikeout rates, but not stellar ones, and in any case owe their strikeouts to deception more than to overpowering stuff.

No pitcher with even 200 innings in a Royals uniform has managed to whiff a batter an inning, something both Farnsworth and Cruz have done over the course of their career. But more than that, in the history of the Royals, the highest strikeout rate in a single season for anyone with 40+ innings is 10.58. (A hundred guesses and you’ll still be wrong: it was Brian Bevil, in 1998. All those strikeouts were good for a 6.30 ERA.) Cruz has exceeded that rate in both 2007 and 2008: in 2007, he struck out 87 batters in 61 innings (12.84 per nine), and last year he whiffed 71 in 51.2 (12.37 per nine).

So I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say that this signing completely changes the complexion of the Royals’ bullpen. Salaries notwithstanding, Cruz is clearly a better pitcher than Farnsworth, and should be treated as such. If he moves into the 8^th inning set-up role that was tentatively (and terrifyingly) handed to the Professor, who then moves into the middle innings role that he’s more suited for, this strengthens the entire chain of relief in front of Soria.

Twenty-four hours ago, the bullpen looked like a potential weakness for the Royals, simply because the potential for Farnsworth to suffer repeated eighth-inning meltdowns was so great. Now? Suddenly you’re looking at breaking camp with the following four right-handed relievers: Soria, Cruz, Farnsworth, and Robinson Tejada. This means that Soria would have the lowest strikeout rate in 2008 of any right-handed reliever on the team, with a mere 66 Ks in 67.1 innings (8.82 per nine). (In Soria’s defense, if you look at strikeouts as a percentage of batters faced – the more accurate method – he ranks behind only Cruz.)

Throw in a complement of crafty left-handers in Ron Mahay, Jimmy Gobble, and John Bale if he recovers from thyroid surgery in time (get well soon, John!) That’s a deep and formidable bullpen, maybe one of the best in baseball. That’s a hell of an upgrade for one pitcher to make.

And then we get to cost: Cruz will get paid $6 million over the next two seasons (counting his 2011 buyout), with a third-year option for $3.5 million. Wow. I mean, wow. It’s easy to make a crack about how Cruz should have Farnsworth’s contract and vice versa, but look at it this way: the Royals are paying Cruz the same amount of money over the next two seasons as the Milwaukee Brewers are paying Trevor Hoffman – who’s 41 years old and threw 45 innings last season – just in 2009. That’s a steal, folks. Grand Theft Reliever.

It’s not that simple, because the non-financial cost of signing Cruz was significant: the Royals gave up their second-round pick in the draft as compensation. This goes against Dayton Moore’s general principles of focusing on building from within, and also goes against over 15 years of Royals history. The last time the Royals gave up a draft pick – in other words, the last time the Royals signed a Type A free agent – was in 1993, when they signed David Cone.* Before that, you have to go back to 1990 and the Davis Brothers, who in addition to all the other damage they wreaked on the franchise, cost the Royals their first and second-round picks that June.

*: I just learned that with the compensation pick they got from the Royals, the Blue Jays drafted Anthony Medrano. I’m stunned by this, because two years later the Royals traded Cone to the Jays for three players…and one of them was Medrano. Has any other player signed as a free agent with a new team, then been traded for the same guy who was drafted with his own compensation pick?

So from a player development standpoint, this is going to hurt a little. But just a little. For one thing, it will hurt the Royals less than it would have hurt almost any other team that would have signed Cruz. Any team that finished with one of the 15 best records in 2008 would have had to surrender their first-round pick. The Royals, by virtue of finishing with the 11^th-worst record in baseball, only surrender their second-round pick – a pick which comes after the second-round pick of ten other teams. In other words, had the Royals finished with a worse record, the pick they surrendered would have come earlier in the second round, while if they had finished with a better record, they likely would have had to surrender their first-round pick. Only the four teams drafting immediately after them would have given up a lower draft pick as compensation. The difference in draft pick compensation may be a big factor in why the Twins, who were the last team rumored to be in on Cruz (and who would have had to surrender a first-rounder), ultimately dropped out of the bidding.

It’s possible that in the long run that second-round pick would have been more valuable to the Royals than Cruz, although recent history is not favorable in that regard. The Royals did draft Carlos Beltran in the second round in 1995, but since then, the most successful second-round draft pick is probably Shane Costa. (Wow, that’s sad.) And not only do the Royals have Cruz, but they have the opportunity to cash Cruz in for prospects at the trading deadline this year or next, or possibly obtain draft-pick compensation of their own if Cruz walks away as a free agent after 2010 or 2011. This may not be a draft pick denied so much as a draft pick deferred.

Beyond that, there’s reason to think that the Royals will simply take the resources they would have spent on that pick and use them on amateur talent elsewhere. Moore was on Soren Petro’s radio show a few days ago, and while I can not vouch for this 100% as it comes to me secondhand, Moore insinuated that the Royals were not as active in Latin America in 2008 compared to 2007 partly because they blew the budget for Eric Hosmer’s $6 million bonus. This is corroborated by a statement Moore made to Bob Dutton: “So when times like this occur, we feel like we can compensate through our international scouting.”

(Oddly, that last statement was originally in this column, then I checked back an hour later and it was gone. The quote above appears in a Google search, but then disappears when I click on the link. Someone at the Star is messing with me.)

The Royals were rather quiet on the international market last summer, but I predict that will change this year. If Grudzielanek doesn’t get off the couch and sign with someone soon – remember, the compensation for Grudz would be a supplemental first-rounder, a better pick than the one we just lost – I’d expect the Royals to be very active in Latin America this year.

Anyway, while I’d love to have that second-round pick back, let’s be honest: if it wasn’t for the issue of draft pick compensation, the Royals never would have signed Cruz. And they sure as hell wouldn’t have signed him for such a ridiculously low price. Signing Cruz may not have fit the Royals’ overarching philosophy of player development, but so what? The real philosophy of a winning team is to, you know, win – by any means necessary. This move helps the Royals do just that, in a year when even a few more wins might be the difference between October baseball and October golf. On a day when most in Kansas City were focusing on the other players acquired for a second-round pick, don’t be fooled: this move was every bit as important when it comes to getting a KC team into the playoffs in 2009.

I’m happy to see that Moore has the flexibility to suspend his principles for a moment when a bargain of this magnitude presents itself. Ultimately, what matters is that Juan Cruz helps this team, and does so without appreciably raising payroll. He only makes $2.25 million this year, and half that money was saved by cutting Esteban German. (Let’s take a brief moment to acknowledge German, who was a terrific utility player for two years, but whose bat regressed mightily last season while his glove became an even more serious liability.)

I’m just as happy to see that Moore is willing, in essence, to admit he made a mistake when he signed Farnsworth. He misjudged the market badly by moving to sign Farnsworth early, to what proved to be one of the most lucrative contracts signed by a non-closing reliever this winter. By signing Cruz, a better pitcher by any metric you choose, for $6 million over two years (a less expensive contract by any metric you choose), Moore is tacitly admitting that he goofed the first time around. Moore didn’t let the money wasted on Farnsworth intimidate him away from spending money much more wisely on a superior pitcher. Farnsworth is a sunk cost, and the investment in Farnsworth shouldn’t have factored into whether Cruz would be a good investment or not. Kudos to Moore for not letting it do so.

Most of all, I’m happy because Moore is taking the Royals’ chances in 2009 as seriously as some of us fans are. The division is there for the taking, and a little improvement could go a long way this year. Moore saw the opportunity to improve the team by more than a little, and he took it. Let’s see if the Royals follow suit with their own opportunity.

The 1984 Cubs, Binomial Distributions, and Orlando Hudson.

“If I have ever seen a dead giveaway set-up for a miracle, this is it.” – Bill James, in the Chicago Cubs essay, in the 1984 Baseball Abstract.

In the history of sabermetrics, there has probably never been a more gutsy, anti-conventional-wisdom, and bullseye-accurate prediction than that one. Or at least, there wasn’t until Nate Silver wrote this last spring. It’s appropriate that James and Silver, the man who literally coined the term “sabermetrics” and the man who applied the process to another field of study with equally seismic impact, also share a history of transmuting their analytical iron into prognosticative gold.

(My own best effort in this category came back in the 1997 Baseball Prospectus, when I wrote at the conclusion of my essay on the Marlins – for whom the consensus opinion was that they’d finish under .500 once again – “Last year in these pages, I wrote the Marlins ‘have everything in place to battle the Braves for dominance of the NL East for the rest of the decade.’ I believe that even more strongly this year. The Marlins went through growing pains last year, but they have too much talent to lie dormant any longer. This is the year the Marlins should reap the benefits of their patience, and prove that they had the right blueprint for success from the beginning”. The problem was that BP had not registered even a blip on the publishing radar at that point, which limited my ability to gloat. That, and the fact that Wayne Huizenga then turned the franchise from World Champions to a laughingstock in one off-season.)

But back to James’ original statement. In his essay, James went on to give a number of reasons why he felt like the Cubs had a much better chance to win the division than almost anyone realized. One of those reasons has a lot of relevance for the 2009 Royals.

“3) Miracles usually happen in compressed leagues, in leagues where the difference between the best teams and the worst teams is not too wide…there have been many moments in the history of baseball when there was no great team, no dominant team. It is in those times that miracle teams come forward. The National League in 1968, the year before the Miracle of Flushing Meadow, was only 25 games from top to bottom and had a standard deviation of 7.56 wins; the expansion spread that out artificially in 1969. The American League in 1966 was 26 ½ games top to bottom; the 1966 Red Sox finished ninth at 72-90, and the standard deviation was 8.96 wins…I certainly don’t see the Cubs as having the potential to be a great team, a dominant team over a period of time. But that’s not really germane; miracle teams are never great teams. They’re teams that have a moment, teams that slip through a window of dominance.”

I don’t think this revelation is going to astound anyone – compressed divisions, divisions which lack any obvious doormats but also lack any clearly dominant teams – are divisions that are open for anyone to win. And I don’t think anyone would argue with the notion that the AL Central is a compressed division. But what I think is being missed by the national media is that for the first time in a while, when we say “anyone in the AL Central”, we don’t mean “anyone but the Royals.” Tim Kurkjian didn’t get the memo. “Four teams, none of them great, have a legitimate chance to win the division in 2009. And a fifth team, the Royals, who didn't even finish fifth in 2008, “could have our best club since 1994 [their last season as a contender],” Kansas City general manager Dayton Moore said.” There is still this perception, and not an unfair one, that the Royals are still a cut below the other four teams in the division.

We can rebut this pretty easily by pointing out that last year it was the Tigers, not the Royals, who brought up the rear of the division. Better still, we can point to the (preliminary) PECOTA projections for 2009, which predict the Royals to finish with their exact same record, 75-87, and to once again finish in fourth place, two games out of the cellar – only this time, PECOTA projects the White Sox to finish last with 89 losses.

(It’s beyond the scope of this article to address the long-simmering feud between Kenny Williams and a computer algorithm. Even Silver will tell you not to hold too much water to the fact that PECOTA holds no love for the Pale Hose; while sometimes PECOTA is dead on about the Sox (see 2007), sometimes it’s dead wrong (2005, and to a lesser extent 2008). Williams is an unconventional GM, but I have a lot of respect for his fearlessness, and wouldn’t want to bet against him making a Commodore 64 out of PECOTA once again.)

What really stands out about the PECOTA projections is that PECOTA has confirmed my two main suspicions about the division: 1) the Indians are the best team in the division on paper; and 2) that says less about the Indians than it does about the rest of the division. PECOTA has Cleveland at 83-79, and the other four teams with between 73 and 79 wins. From top to bottom, that’s a ten-game swing. Now a computer projection is, by its nature, going to regress teams towards .500 and possibly make a division look more compressed than it is. But still, no other division in baseball has a ten-game swing from first to worst. The AL West is 14 wins top to bottom (but there are only four teams in the division), while every other division has a spread of 19 wins or more.

So don’t look at this projection and say to yourself, “man, the Royals are projected for fourth place again?” or “75 wins again?” Look at the standings and say to yourself, “wow, the Royals are projected to finish just eight games out of first!” Eight games is nothing. Eight games is almost statistically insignificant.

If you flipped a perfectly fair coin 162 times, you’d expect to flip heads 81 times, obviously. But you won’t get exactly 81 heads each time – you might get 77, or 83, or occasionally even 69 or 92. If I remember my binomial theory correctly, the standard deviation on 162 coin flips is the square root of (162 * 50% * 50%) – about 6.36.

By definition, the odds that an outcome will fall within one standard deviation of its mean is 68%. So while a perfectly fair coin – or a .500 team – would be expected to win 81 games on average, the odds that such a team would win more than 87 games – one standard deviation above the mean – simply by chance is about 16%.

Using the binomial calculator I found here, we can say that if the Royals are truly a 75-win team, the chances that they’ll win 83 or more games is about 12%. The odds that they’ll win the division are less than that, because while PECOTA predicts that no team will more than 83 games, odds are that at least one of the five AL Central teams will outperform their projections by a significant margin. Once Clay Davenport has his Postseason Odds updated for 2009, we’ll have a more accurate answer to this question. But for now, let’s say that 87 wins takes the division.

If that’s what it takes, there’s about a 3.5% chance that a 75-win team will in fact win 87 games based purely on the way the coin – or ball – bounces. Those aren’t very good odds, but keep in mind, those are the odds that the Royals would win the division even though the team is fundamentally no better than last year. Those are the odds that a team that by all rights should be well under .500 – a team that is outscored by its opponents by 60 runs – still goes to the playoffs.

We saw this story play out with the 2003 Royals, who were outscored by 31 runs – and were lucky to have a run differential even that close – yet won 83 games. That year the Royals were in the hunt all season because they were lucky – but the underlying talent was poor enough that they needed to be really lucky to win the division.

But here’s the thing – what if the 2009 Royals aren’t really a 75 win team? What if Alex Gordon goes all .300/.400/.500 on the league? Or what if Billy Butler does the same? Or what if Zack Greinke is a Cy Young contender? By being just eight games out of first place on paper, the Royals are in a tipping point of sorts, where even a marginal improvement can lead to a dramatically higher probability of a playoff spot. If we knew for certain that Gordon was going to have a breakout season – and I still stubbornly believe he will – we could probably tack on two or three wins to the Royals’ projection.

The odds that a 75-win team will win 87 games or more is 3.5%. Add an additional three wins, and you’ve got a 78-win team – and the odds a 78-win team will actually win 87+ games is 9.1%. Three more wins on paper nearly triples the Royals’ odds of winning the division.

I’ve said all winter that the Royals need two of those three guys to have All-Star caliber seasons to have a realistic shot at a playoff spot. So let’s say we get two breakout seasons, each worth three wins, vaulting the Royals into a .500 team on paper. Now their odds of winning 87+ games is 19.4%. (This number is a little different from the number above because of fractional wins – the standard deviation is 6.36, but you can’t win 87.36 games.)

A 19.4% chance of winning the division basically means the Royals have the same shot as every other team in the division. That’s a crapshoot, and any Royals fan would be happy to have the season come down to a crapshoot.

So there’s reason for Royals fans to be, if not excited, at least guardedly optimistic about this season. It’s not likely that the Royals will win the division, but it’s a legitimate possibility – something that we could not have said about the team ever since the hangover that was the 2004 season.

This is what makes this off-season so frustrating. The Royals were not a good team last season, but they were approaching mediocrity – and playing in a division in which mediocrity is no impediment to being competitive. It would have only taken one significant addition to the roster to elevate the team to legitimate .500 status, just a breakout season away from true contender status in the division. Instead, Dayton Moore treaded water this winter, adding a whole lot of Kyle Farnsworths and Horacio Ramirezes but no Adam Dunns or Bobby Abreus.

And this is what makes the recent flirtations with Orlando Hudson so intriguing. There are some real downsides to signing O-Dog – if I have time I hope to write a column about him in the next few days – but on the whole, Hudson would undoubtedly help the Royals. He’s just 31, he’s had an OPS+ of over 100 for three straight years, his defense may not be the Gold Glove caliber it used to be but is still good, and – this is key – he’s a switch-hitter who is much better against right-handed pitchers, which would make him a terrific addition to a lineup that was 36-24 when facing a lefty starter last year, but just 39-63 against right-handers. On a one or two-year deal for $5 million a year, Hudson would make a fine addition to the roster.

But the best case for Hudson is this: the Royals can not be considered realistic contenders at this point, because even if they do get a couple of unexpected breakout seasons, they’ll still need some luck to stay in contention. But they’re close enough to that gray zone of quasi-competitiveness that just one significant acquisition could change that calculus completely. Manny Ramirez aside, Hudson is probably the most significant acquisition out there just waiting for someone to acquire him.

I guess if Moore had used his pennies on Dunn or Abreu instead of The Professor, the Royals would have been taken more seriously by the Tim Kurkjians of the world as a possible contender, and we would have lost the element of surprise. But when they hand out postseason spots, they don’t factor in degree of difficulty. You don’t get to hang a postseason flag any higher on the pole because it was so unexpected. Any permutation of events that result in the 2009 Royals going to the playoffs is going to have the word “Miracle” attached it to somewhere. Adding Hudson would make those events a little less miraculous, but a lot more likely. That’s a tradeoff we’ll take any day.

The Future of Disco.

So, is Chris Hayes a prospect? The experts have spoken.

Chris Hayes is nowhere to appear in Kevin Goldstein’s rankings of the Top 11 Royals prospects released today ($$), not that this is surprising at all. What might be surprising is that he is nowhere to be found in Baseball America’s listing of the Royals’ Top 30 Prospects, and in fact, his name has never appeared in the pages of that august publication.

One minor league expert who has not completely ignored Hayes is my friend John Sickels, whose The Baseball Prospect Book 2009 is now on sale. Hayes warranted an entry in this year’s book:

Chris Hayes went to Northwestern University in Illinois and was quite successful during his junior and senior seasons. But scouts don’t like him very much, as he is a submarine pitcher with below average velocity. He signed up with Windy City in the Frontier League in 2005, pitched well, then signed with the Royals as a free agent in 2006. He continued to pitch well in Double-A last year, throwing strikes and getting ground balls. I don’t like the low strikeout rate, but the other numbers are sharp. If he keeps this up in Triple-A, he could sneak into the major league pen. Stranger things have happened. Grade C.

Grade C is the lowest grade that Sickels gives out to a player worthy of mentioning in his book. Saying “he could sneak into the major league pen” and “stranger things have happened” is not exactly an unqualified endorsement.

So the experts have spoken, and what they’re saying is that Chris Hayes is, at best, a marginal prospect, a future 11^th man if he’s lucky.

I am not a minor league expert, though I played one in the pages of Baseball Prospectus for several years. Nonetheless, I can say with some confidence that I think the experts are wrong and that Hayes is very much a prospect, and that he has a very real chance to enjoy a long and successful career in the major leagues.

I believe the reason why my evaluation of Hayes’ potential differs so much stems from the fact that I don’t think you can evaluate Hayes the same way you evaluate overhand pitchers. Much like the rules that apply to traditional pitchers don’t necessarily work when discussing a knuckleball pitcher, I think that we ought to think of low-arm-angle pitchers as their own breed as well.

Many years ago – I think in one of the “Baseball Books” he published from 1993 to 1995 – Bill James made the point that the sidearm pitchers in the major leagues almost all had the same two characteristics: 1) they came from very humble origins and 2) they were almost universally effective pitchers. This was after the heyday of sidearm/submarine pitchers like Tekulve and Quisenberry, but you still had pitchers like Mark Eichhorn, who had a career ERA of 3.00 on the nose, and in 1986 had one of the most underrated rookie seasons of all time, with a 1.72 ERA in 157 innings. He famously declined the Blue Jays’ offer to let him start on the final day of the season so that he could get the five innings he needed to qualify for the ERA title. If he had taken them up on the offer, not only would he have wrested the title from Roger Clemens, he would have posted the lowest ERA of any AL pitcher in the last 40 years. Going to college in Baltimore in the early 90s, I watched up close as Todd Frohwirth gave the O’s three terrific seasons after he was let go by the Phillies.

There always seems to be a half-dozen guys in the majors who throw from a low arm slot, and they’re almost invariably overlooked because they’re slotted in middle relief, but they almost all do good work. Chad Bradford, obviously, was made famous in Moneyball precisely because of his lack of recognition. Cla Meredith was a throw-in to the Padres from Boston in the Doug Mirabelli trade. Brian Shouse briefly pitched for the Royals in 2002, then – naturally – came into his own with the Rangers as soon as he left, at age 34. I had never heard of Pat Neshek before he was called up to Minnesota. I only knew about Brad Ziegler because he was one of Goldstein’s favorite minor leaguers – all he did was set a major league record with 39 consecutive scoreless innings to start his career.

None of these guys was well-regarded as an amateur (none were drafted in the first five rounds). None of them were well-regarded in the minor leagues – I am almost 100% certain that none of them ever appeared on Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospects list. And yet all of them have been excellent relief pitchers in the majors – sometimes, like Neshek and Ziegler, immediately, but in each case in their first extended opportunity.

(Baseball teams may finally be wising up to the market inefficiency regarding sidearm pitchers – Joe Smith was a 3^rd-round pick out of college by the Mets, and immediately put on the fast track, throwing just 42 innings in the minors before getting called up.)

The biggest knock against Hayes – and I say “biggest knock” in the way that you might say that the biggest knock against Muggsy Bogues was his height – is that he doesn’t throw hard. While we don’t have any Pitch f/x data, the best estimation is that his fastball runs about 79 mph. And if Hayes was a conventional pitcher, the discussion would end there. The list of conventional pitchers who have succeeded in the majors with a fastball under 80 is pretty much zero. (The closest I can think of would be John Tudor, who in his final season (1990) threw maybe 81-82 mph, if memory serves. He had a 2.40 ERA in 146 innings.)

There are two types of pitchers that can survive, and even thrive, in the majors with a fastball in the 70s: knuckleballers and submariners. Among pitchers who threw even 10 innings last season, the slowest fastball (with an average speed of 72.9 mph) was thrown by Tim Wakefield (he only threw his FB 13% of the time; his knuckler averaged 65.1 mph, and his curveball – his curveball? – averaged 59.5.) The second-slowest fastball, at 79.6 mph, was Chad Bradford’s. Third was Brian Shouse, at 80.5 mph.

Interesting, all the other sidearmers came in at 85 or higher – Meredith at 85.1, Ziegler at 85.3, Neshek at 89.0, Joe Smith at 89.4. This goes with a theory I have that the ability for a pitcher to succeed at lower velocities correlates with just how low his arm angle is. Whether it’s the deception that comes with the fact that the ball looks like it’s shooting out of the pitcher’s mound, or the bizarro movement on the pitches, or simply the novelty of facing an underhand pitcher, it appears that throwing submarine-style is worth about 5 mph compared to a sidearm pitcher, and throwing sidearm is worth about 5 mph compared to an overhand pitcher. As Hayes pointed out in his interview, Bradford is really the only true submarine pitcher in the majors. (Shouse throws only slightly harder than Bradford, but he’s a lefty, and lefties always seem to thrive with fastballs a few mph slower than their right-handed counterparts.)

I’m old enough to remember Quisenberry on the mound, but not old enough to remember what the consensus was on how hard he threw. Some of you older hands help out – how hard did Quisenberry throw? I want to say around 80 mph, but it could have been slightly faster – or slightly slower.

The point is, no one seems to take Hayes seriously as a prospect because of his velocity, when in fact we have a lot of evidence that throwing 79 mph is not an impediment to success for a submarine pitcher. On the contrary – 79 mph is exactly in the range of what the best submarine pitchers in recent memory have thrown.

So the scout-based objections to Hayes’ prospect status appear overblown. That leaves us with his performance record. The biggest black mark on Hayes’ stat sheet is his strikeout rate – 137 whiffs in 203 career innings (6.06 K/9) is not particularly impressive for a minor league pitcher, and last season his K rate was just 5.35 per nine. Once again, though, it’s not entirely fair to evaluate Hayes’ strikeout rate as if he’s a conventional pitcher. The whole point of throwing underneath is that, if you do it well, you don’t need to strike batters out in order to be successful. Quisenberry struck out 3.27 men per nine innings in his career. (Read that sentence again.) Bradford’s career K rate is 5.47 per nine.

The reason why strikeouts hardly matter for a submariner is that it seems to be a near-universal law that submarine pitchers keep the ball on the ground. That’s not necessarily the case for sidearmers – while Meredith and Ziegler have great sinkers, Neshek is a flyball pitcher who has given up 15 homers in 121 career innings. Byung-Hyun Kim was a sidearmer who threw exceptionally hard, and his penchant for fly balls led to some of the most dramatic baseball moments of this decade. But submarine pitchers, even in the high-offense era we’re in, are relatively immune to the home run.

They also tend to have well above-average control. And if you can limit walks and home runs enough, it takes three hits in an inning to score a run. Even if you don’t strike anyone out, the odds are slim that the opponent will turn five groundballs into three hits. (And even if they do, they still might not score if you can mix in a GIDP.) Quisenberry walked the unfathomably low total of 0.79 batters per nine innings when you strip out the IBB, which as Hayes remarked is the lowest figure since 1926 (and I think he was including the IBB’s – take them out and Quiz might have the best control of any major league pitcher since four balls became a walk.) He gave up just 59 homers in 1043 career innings. I’m not exaggerating when I say that he would have been a successful pitcher if every one of his strikeout victims was given a mulligan and allowed to bat until they made fair contact.

Bradford isn’t Quisenberry – no one is – but his career rates of 1.73 unintentional walks per 9 innings, and 0.48 HR per 9, are both outstanding, and the reason why he has a career 3.24 ERA even though he’s allowed exactly one hit per inning in his career.

A lot has been made of the fact that Hayes’ terrific season in 2008 was the result of a BABIP of just .241, which is not likely to be sustained. That’s certainly true, but Hayes was so successful last year that he could easily regress to .300 and still be effective. Keep in mind, not only did he have a 1.64 ERA last season, but given his peripherals (less than a baserunner an inning, just four homers allowed in 66 innings), his expected ERA was probably even less than that. In 2006 and 2007, his BABIP was in the normal range, he gave up about a hit an inning – and he still had ERAs of 2.78 and 3.10, because he did everything else so well.

For his career, Hayes has walked 43 batters (at least 6 intentionally; I don’t have data for 2006) in 203 innings, a UIBB rate of 1.64 per nine. He’s allowed just 7 homers, for a HR rate of 0.31 per nine. Those numbers are even better than Bradford’s minor league rates: Bradford walked 2.31 per nine (although I don’t have any IBB data for him), and allowed 0.37 HR per nine. I expect Hayes’ HR rates to go up as he spends more time in the high minors, but even so his performance record is every bit as impressive as Bradford’s was.

(For the record, Quiz walked 1.74 batters per nine in his minor league career, and struck out 4.39 per nine. I only have homer data for 1978 and 1979; in those two seasons he allowed just 2 homers in 99 innings.)

There’s one other reason why I think that Hayes can maintain his success in the major leagues. Allow me to quote him directly here:

My advantage in an at-bat is how different I am from your average pitcher. I have yet to see a professional hitter taking batting practice off a batting practice pitcher throwing submarine-style. An experienced hitter has taken a swing at a “normal” back-spinning fastball thousands of times. It's been a while since I've hit, maybe it's more like millions.

They see thousands of 90 mph-plus fastballs per season. Then, enter the “weirdo” stage right, and I throw that all upside down (literally and figuratively). A guy just out of college in A-ball may be used to guys throwing 85 mph on average, and they haven't honed their swing as much as a more salty veteran. The higher up the levels I go, I believe the bigger advantage I have, because I'm that much different from the norm.

For years I’ve made essentially this argument with knuckleball pitchers: that the typical decline in performance that all players endure when they go from Triple-A to the majors is not completely applicable to knucklers. If the typical pitcher with a 4.00 ERA in Triple-A (assume a neutral park, etc.) can be expected to post a 5.50 ERA in the majors, a typical knuckleball pitcher with a 4.00 ERA might expect his ERA to be 4.75 in the majors. Why? In a nutshell – because major league hitters are not selected for their ability to hit the knuckleball.

Sports are the ultimate Darwinian process – at every level, the players who show the most ability advance, and at each higher level they then face players with more ability, and so on. If you can hit an 80 mph fastball in high school, you’ll get the chance to hit 85 mph fastballs in college, then 90 mph fastballs in the minors, then 95 mph fastballs in the majors – provided you succeed at each level. And therefore hitters at each higher level have been selected for their proven ability to succeed against inferior pitchers.

But the knuckleball is such a unique pitch, a pitch that works not because of its velocity but because of its unpredictable and late movement, that the best knuckleball hitters in the world may not be in the majors at all. There might be a guy down in A-ball who can’t catch up to the fastball and can’t lay off the slider, but can follow a 69-mph floater right up until the last moment. And there might be guys in the majors who could hit Sidd Finch if his fastball was straight enough, but are helpless against the mystical powers of the butterfly pitch.

(I’ll pause here to tip my hat to Dave Nilsson, who might have been the greatest hitter of my lifetime against the knuckleball. The Australian catcher was 16-for-25 lifetime against Tim Wakefield, with a slash line of .640/.719/.960. He was just 2-for-10 against Dennis Springer, but with a homer and three walks.)

I made this argument on the internal BP mailing list years ago, and Clay Davenport looked into my theory a little. What he found was that after a promotion to the majors, knuckleball pitchers did appear to require less of a translation to their numbers than the average pitcher. The sample size was small and not necessarily significant, but the theory had promise.

Just as submariners can be lumped in with knuckleballers in the sense that they can survive without velocity, I think that like knuckleballers, their pitching style is so far from the norm (and there are so few of them to practice against) that major league hitters are not much likelier to hit them than their minor league counterparts.

Does that mean Hayes is the next Bradford, or even Quisenberry Jr? Not necessarily. But the Royals owe it to themselves to give him every opportunity to prove otherwise. Some team is going to get lucky and find the next great submarine pitcher. The Royals were lucky enough to sign Hayes out of a tryout camp, but if luck is the residue of design, it’s the team that has designs on Hayes as a major league pitcher that’s going to really get lucky. The White Sox didn’t know what they had with Bradford; the Red Sox didn’t know what they had with Meredith. Let’s hope the Royals know what they might have with Hayes.