Hosmas.

Last year, on a lovely Thursday afternoon at Kauffman Stadium, the afterglow of a victory against the Indians that ended a 7-game losing streak was interrupted just minutes after the game ended, when the Royals announced that Trey Hillman had been fired.

Once again this year, the Royals chose the sleepy aftermath of a Thursday home game – just like last year, it was the annual “School Day at the K” promotion that brought in a crowd of almost 30,000 – to announce another thunderbolt. This time, it was Kila Ka’aihue getting the axe, and this time, the news wasn’t about who was departing Kansas City so much as about who was arriving.

(And by happy circumstance, both moves came just hours before my radio show. If you want to listen to my immediate reaction to the news, you can listen to the podcast of the show at 810 WHB’s website – look under “additional programming”.)

With any luck, we may look back at the day that Trey Hillman was fired as the nadir of the Dayton Moore Era, the day a clueless manager running a listless team going nowhere was shown the door, and the day the Battleship U.S.S. Royal started to turn around. And with any luck, we may look back at Thursday’s announcement as the day the battleship perfected its bearings, and opened its throttle.

Eric Hosmer is now a Royal, the future is now the present, and The Process is now being judged by results at the major-league level.

The excitement at Kauffman Stadium for Hosmas yesterday rivals that for any Royals prospect debut in a generation. Alex Gordon’s debut may have been equally anticipated, but his debut came on Opening Day, with a crowd that would have been a sellout under any circumstances. With respect to a mid-season call-up, Zack Greinke’s home debut (his first start was on the road) drew 30,614 to Kauffman Stadium on a Friday night – but there was a week’s notice that he’d be starting that night. Johnny Damon debuted on a Saturday afternoon at the K, on August 12, 1995. He was accompanied from Omaha by Michael Tucker, who had made the team out of spring training but was demoted mid-season, and a one-time prospect named Brent Cookson who had hit .401 in Omaha. That game drew only 20,572.

Last night’s game drew 30,690, and according to the Royals, about 10,000 of those tickets were sold on the day of the game. When Jeff Passan writes that Hosmer’s debut was the most anticipated debut in Kansas City since Bo Jackson, he’s not exaggerating.

The hyperbolic reaction to Hosmer’s debut – “Eric Hosmer” was one of the ten most-tweeted terms in the world last night, and even Bill Simmons got in on #hosmerfacts (“Justin Bieber wears an Eric Hosmer backpack”) – is not simply about Hosmer. Six weeks ago, it wasn’t even a consensus that Hosmer was the best prospect in the Royals’ system. The majority of the Top 100 Prospect lists I saw had Mike Moustakas slightly ahead of him. I disagreed with that assessment because of concerns about Moustakas’ plate discipline and ability to hit left-handers, concerns that are being borne out in Omaha right now, but I wasn’t certain whether Hosmer or Wil Myers was the better prospect.

The celebration that we saw at the ballpark last night over Hosmer’s debut was not simply about what he did in the last six weeks to cement himself as the best prospect in the system. Which isn’t to discount his performance in Omaha, which quite frankly put him in the discussion as the best prospect in all of baseball. The hype about Hosmer started in spring training, when everyone wanted to get a good look at this supposedly-historic cache of talent the Royals were building. No one impressed more than Hosmer, who according to multiple scouts was even better than advertised. Baseball Prospectus’ Jason Parks proclaimed him ready for the major leagues right then and there.

Hosmer then went to Omaha and proved that assessment true. You can write “small sample size” til the cows come home, but Hosmer hit .439 in Omaha. He drew 19 walks in just 29 games, for an OBP of .525. He hit .500 against lefties with all three of his homers. And somehow, he was just heating up: in his last ten games with the Storm Chasers, he hit .538 (21-for-39) with nine walks and a .612 OBP, a number I’ve only ever seen associated with Barry Bonds before. Here’s a game-by-game breakdown of how many times he reached base safely in his last eight games: 3, 4, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4.

I spoke with a scout about ten days ago who had just seen Omaha in action, and who wasn’t particularly impressed with Moustakas. (He told me, “you know who Moustakas reminds me of? I think he’s going to hit like Shea Hillenbrand with more power.” Fighting words, those are.) But when I asked about Hosmer, the first thing he said was, “he’s going to hit .300 with 30 homers in the majors.”

So yeah, Hosmer is ready. But that’s not why everyone is excited. There are two other subplots hanging over Hosmas that explain why May 6th may be the start of a new era.

The first is that while the Royals broke camp with a couple of prospects in tow, they were all in the bullpen – Tim Collins, Aaron Crow, Jeremy Jeffress, and even Nate Adcock are pieces of the puzzle, but they’re not the guys you build around. Louis Coleman debuted a few weeks later, giving the Royals five rookies in their bullpen – but the only other rookie on the roster is Jarrod Dyson.

But Hosmer is the first member of the Big Six (Danny Duffy has elevated himself into that top tier of prospects with his performance this season) to make it to the majors. He’s not a complementary piece – he’s a future #3 hitter in a championship lineup. And he’s here. Today. He may not be a #3 hitter yet, but he’s better than anyone else the Royals have right now.

And that brings us to the second subplot, which is that with this one unexpected move, the Royals are sending a subtle (or not so subtle) message: we’re going for it – this season. You may not agree with the message. I’m not so sure I agree with it myself. But I can’t help but admire an organization which sees a window of opportunity they weren’t expecting, both because they didn’t think they would be above .500 at this point and because the two teams that were expected to battle it out for the AL Central have both been colossal disappointments, and tries to steal the division a year or two before everyone thought they’d be ready.

It would be one thing if the Royals made a move to win in 2011 that actively hurt their chances of winning in 2012 and beyond. If they had traded from their stash of prospects for a veteran pitcher in the last year of his contract, we’d be storming Dayton Moore’s office like it was the Bastille. If they had started the season with Hosmer on the roster, moving up his free agency date by a year, we would have all screamed bloody murder. (As it is, despite – or perhaps because of – Aaron Crow’s success, I’m still a little perturbed that the Royals needlessly moved up his free agency date. But pitchers have a much shorter shelf-life than hitters, so it’s not quite the same thing.)

If they had rushed a prospect to the majors to fill a hole, Allard Baird-style, I’d be furious. But they didn’t. You can argue the Hosmer promotion was a bad idea from a number of angles, mostly regarding the economic and opportunity costs. But you can’t reasonably argue that he was rushed. Every piece of scouting and statistical data I’ve seen says otherwise.

So at least on the surface, the Royals made a move which improves the major league team immediately, gives a clear signal that they’re going to take their chances of contention seriously until proven otherwise, and gives their long-suffering fan base a glimpse of a brighter future to come. And they did so without compromising their farm system at all.

That’s not to say that Hosmer’s promotion is entirely cost-free, because it’s not. The most obvious cost of promoting Hosmer on Thursday is, well, the cost. Under the current rules, by being promoted exactly five weeks into the season, Hosmer is almost guaranteed to be a “Super-Two” player at the end of the 2013 season. The rules allow players with three full years of service time to be eligible for arbitration, and a limited number of players with between two and three years of service time. The cutoff is generally about two years and four months – which is to say, any prospect promoted before June will typically qualify as a Super-Two a few years later.

That’s not a piddling designation. The binary nature of major league baseball’s salary structure is such that someone who falls even one day short of being a Super-Two is subject to having his salary the following year decided by his employer. You don’t amass the money needed to buy a baseball team without learning how to exploit employees, so this means the player will earn only slightly more than the league minimum. However, a player who qualifies for arbitration can compare his performance to that of other arbitration-eligible players. He won’t earn as much as he would as a free agent, but he’ll earn seven figures for sure.

For the typical, average player, the difference between being arbitration-eligible and not might be a few million dollars. Alex Gordon was a Super-Two after the 2009 season, and settled with the Royals for $1.15 million – so the Super-Two designation was worth barely half-a-million dollars to him. Of course, he was coming off a year in which he played 49 games and hit .232. For a star player, the cost could be a lot more.

If memory serves, the largest arbitration award for a Super-Two player was the $10 million Ryan Howard got before the 2008 season. He earned that money because the year before, Howard had hit 47 homers with 136 RBIs and finished 5th in the MVP vote, and all those numbers paled to his performance in 2006, when he won the MVP behind 58 homers and 149 RBIs.

Tim Lincecum was widely expected to challenge Howard’s arbitration record before the 2010 season, but settled before his hearing for a 2-year, $22 million contract that paid him only $9 million last year. All Lincecum had done over the previous two years was win the Cy Young Award – both years.

So the worst-case scenario for the Royals – which is actually the best-case scenario – is that Hosmer’s premature promotion will add about $10 million to their 2014 payroll. The question I can’t answer – and if there are any baseball business experts out there, please feel free to comment (paging Maury Brown) – is this: does a Super-Two player also get higher arbitration awards in future seasons?

By that, I mean that a player who reaches arbitration for the first time – generally after 3 years of service time – can compare himself to players with similar amounts of service time, between 3 and 4 years, I believe. Players with 4 years of service time – players eligible for arbitration for the second time – can compare themselves to players with between 4 and 5 years of service time. And so forth. As a result, a player will see his salary increase as he approaches free agency even if his performance stays the same.

What I don’t know is whether a Super-Two player gets any additional advantages after his Super-Two season. The following year (when he’s a “Super-Three”), is he treated like all the other arbitration-eligible players with three years of service time, or does he get an additional advantage because it’s his second year of eligibility? If he doesn’t, then his financial advantage is limited to that first year; if he does, then he may continue to reap an increase in his salary every year until he hits free agency.

I am pretty sure he does not get an advantage beyond the first year – aside from the fact that his previous year’s salary is a lot higher, and a player almost literally never sees his salary cut in arbitration. If I’m right, then the absolute maximum cost to bringing up Hosmer on May 5th, instead of June 25th, would be $10 million. And a more realistic cost – assuming he doesn’t compete for MVP awards over the next two seasons – would be about half that. (If he does compete for MVP awards, I’m sure we’ll find a way to deal with it.)

That’s not chump change. And even if the cost only winds up being $5 million – Sam Mellinger thinks it could be a lot more – that’s a hell of a lot of money for the next six weeks of Hosmer’s career. But the caveat here is this: the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the players’ union and ownership expires this winter. Everyone expects a new agreement to be hammered out peacefully, but everyone also expects some changes to be made in the agreement. One of the areas where changes may be seen is in the area of Super Two players. There’s probably a 50/50 chance that the rules will be changed substantially, in which case Hosmer either won’t be a Super Two after all, or he would have been a Super Two even if he had stayed in the minors for another six weeks.

It’s still a big risk, and I’m not sure it was risk the Royals needed to take. If they think they can stay in contention all season, then it’s a risk they can justify. But they better be right.

(An excellent analysis of the arbitration implications for Hosmer can be read here.)

I’ll take a moment here to address what I consider to be the most ridiculous argument against bringing up Hosmer, which is that if the Royals had kept him in the minors until mid-April, 2012, they would have delayed his free agency for another season. I understand the temptation to treat players as commodities – anyone who’s ever played fantasy baseball has that temptation. But look – in order for this to have worked out, you’d have to keep Hosmer in Omaha all season AND not call him up in September AND not break camp with him next spring.

Hosmer’s not going to hit .439 in Omaha all season – but frankly, he might well have hit .369, with walks and power and great defense. If he had spent all season in Omaha, he would have had one of the greatest Triple-A seasons by a true prospect in modern history. (That’s a good question – who was the last prospect to play a full season in Triple-A and rake like this? Mike Marshall comes to mind – Marshall hit .373/.445/.657 with 34 homers and 21 steals in 1981, when he was 21 years old. But Marshall had the benefit of hitting in the thin air of Albuquerque. There’s probably a more recent example.)

If Hosmer rakes all season and you don’t bring him up in September, you’re going to have a grievance on your hand, and you’re going to lose. (Hosmer’s agent is Scott Boras, who don’t forget filed a grievance against MLB alleging that his client Pedro Alvarez signed after the deadline in 2008 – a grievance which eventually led to Hosmer being forced to sit out after the Pirates leaked the news that Hosmer also signed after the deadline.) The only way Hosmer can be held down in the minors another 11 months is if he 1) gets hurt or 2) starts sucking. If your financial strategy revolves around rooting for your best prospects to fail, you must be Frank McCourt.

The other cost here is the opportunity cost for one Kila Ka’aihue. Ka’aihue got less than 100 plate appearances to show what he can do, and after he failed his audition, his time with the Royals is now, for all intents and purposes, over. There is no way to spin this as anything other than a massive fail for the Royals.

I’m not saying that Ka’aihue is guaranteed to become a productive major league first baseman. On the contrary, I’ve seen enough from him this year, and spoken to enough scouts whose opinions I respect and who understand what the numbers say, to have some serious concerns about his future. It’s quite possible that he’s another Calvin Pickering, another player who hit for massive power in the minors but whose swing and bat speed was exploited by major league pitchers. But it’s also quite possible he’s a poor man’s Carlos Pena. Pena was a slightly above-average hitter – which is to say he was a below-average hitting first baseman – from 2002 to 2005, and then he nearly washed out of baseball, winding up as an NRI with the Devil Rays in 2007. At which point, at the age of 29, he hit .282/.411/.627 with 46 homers, beginning a three-year run as one of the best first basemen in baseball.

The problem is, we simply don’t know. Ka’aihue has 87 games and 326 plate appearances in his major league career. He’s hit .216/.309/.375, unacceptable numbers for a first baseman. On the other hand, Mike Jacobs hit .228/.297/.401 with the Royals – after accounting for the downturn in offense, Ka’aihue’s OPS+ is actually higher (88) than Jacobs’ (84). Jacobs got 128 games and 478 plate appearances with the Royals.

Ka’aihue deserved – and still deserves – a chance to play everyday in the majors for a full season. The Royals decided they could no longer afford to give him that chance in 2011, because their priorities have been forced by circumstance to change from playing for the future to playing for this year. Their priorities are debatable, but at least they’re understandable. What’s not understandable, and what has never been understandable, are the Royals’ priorities in 2009 and 2010, when they were clearly never in any danger of contending for the playoffs.

Giving up on Ka’aihue this year is frustrating and disappointing – but it’s not inexplicable. It’s not a clear blunder. Waiting until August last year because God forbid we should let Jose Guillen go and deprive ourselves of his speed, defense, and clubhouse leadership – that was a clear blunder. Not letting Ka’aihue prove himself in 2009, and trading a useful reliever in Leo Nunez for an expensive DH that couldn’t muster a .300 OBP – that was a clear blunder. Those blunders are even more clear today, because they led us to this moment, where the Royals gave up on a player who was perhaps the best hitter in the minor leagues the last three years, without ever giving him a sufficient opportunity to play in the majors.

So Hosmas was a bittersweet day. Ka’aihue may one day be a quality regular in the majors, but if he is, it’s almost guaranteed it won’t be with the Royals. And after doing everything in their power to destroy his trade value, it’s hard to imagine the Royals would get anything substantial for him.

So where do we go from here? We saw in Hosmer’s debut just what the hype was about. It started with his defense, when he started a slick 3-6-3 double play to get out of the first inning. Perhaps the most underrated thing about Hosmer is that he’s not just a left-handed hitter, he’s a left-handed thrower – of all the positions on the field, first base is the only position where throwing with a specific arm gives you an inherent advantage. (Well, the only position where you actually see players throw with either hand. Throwing right-handed is such an enormous advantage at the other three infield positions that there hasn’t been a left-handed throwing shortstop, third baseman, or second baseman in modern major-league history.) Hosmer is an above-average defender with a terrific arm for a first baseman; Billy Butler might as well rent a long-term storage facility for his gloves.

As a hitter, I’ve always compared Hosmer to Will Clark, and I think Clark’s rookie season is a terrific approximation for what to expect from Hosmer this year: Clark hit .287/.343/.444 with 11 homers in 111 games. (Not only is my Will Clark comparison no longer considered outlandish, some people think it might undersell Hosmer. Kevin Goldstein said of a comparison to Will Clark that Hosmer is “bigger and stronger” than The Thrill.) While Hosmer has massive power potential, he only hit three homers in Omaha, and it’s expected that his power will take some reps to manifest itself. But as we saw in his debut, Hosmer has a very mature batting eye, and between the walks and his line-drive swing, an OBP north of .350 as a rookie seems possible.

It’s for that reason that, after watching Hosmer steal second base easily after his second walk of the night, that I had a brainstorm: Hosmer should be batting leadoff.

I know it sounds crazy. But the Royals simply don’t have anyone on the roster who fits the leadoff role well. Mike Aviles doesn’t walk at all; Chris Getz doesn’t hit at all; Jarrod Dyson doesn’t play at all. Suddenly, the Royals have added a player who should hit for a high average, knows the strike zone, and has surprising speed. With the 2-through-6 spots in the lineup already largely set, why not put Hosmer at the front of the line? The leadoff hitter gets the most plate appearances on the team – who would you rather see at the plate more often, Hosmer or Getz?

I can’t imagine this will ever happen, simply because Ned Yost is so hidebound by tradition that he would never think of using a first baseman in the leadoff spot. And unless you mix up the heart of the lineup, batting Hosmer leadoff might lead to having Aviles/Treanor/Escobar, three right-handed hitters, batting back-to-back-to-back from 7 to 9. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that the solution to the Royals’ leadoff dilemma might have just presented itself.

Now that Hosmer has arrived, the question becomes whether his promotion is an anomaly or whether it heralds a youth movement that is coming faster than anyone expected. My suspicion is this: Hosmer is a unique case, given how well he was playing, and the Royals would rather not promote anyone else prior to the Super Two deadline. The promotion of Moustakas, which seemed a fait accompli a few weeks ago, is now on indefinite hold, both because of the way Betemit and Aviles are hitting, and because of the way Moustakas isn’t. The Royals can run seven quality hitters out there every day, and the two positions they can’t (shortstop and catcher) are two positions where the farm system doesn’t have any ready-made solutions.

The bullpen can’t get any younger unless the Royals start elementary school auditions. However, the Royals really need a second left-handed reliever, particularly since Tim Collins’ repertoire makes him ill-suited to be a lefty specialist. If anyone gets called up the rest of the month, look for it to be Everett Teaford, who recently moved from the rotation to the bullpen, likely with a promotion in mind.

That leaves the rotation. Mike Montgomery and Danny Duffy are both pitching very well in Omaha, and the rotation is the roster’s weakest link. However, none of the five starters have pitched themselves out of the rotation yet. Kyle Davies, I think, still has a few starts left to prove himself one way or the other. Sean O’Sullivan, who everyone expected to be the first guy out, has actually pitched the best of the five. Furthermore, if one of the five gets bombed or gets hurt, Vinny Mazzaro will probably be first in line.

So at least for the next six weeks, the Royals will probably stand pat. If, six weeks from now, the dream has died, then so be it: maybe Hosmer will have been called up a little early, but on the other hand he’ll be that much more prepared to dominate in 2012. At that point the Royals can promote every other prospect according to a timetable dictated by their development, not by the team’s needs.

And if, six weeks from now, the Royals are still in it? After another six weeks, the Royals will have that much better an idea of what they have in Montgomery and Duffy. They’ll have that much better an idea of which starters in their rotation need to be pulled. And the financial cost of bringing up a prospect will be that much less.

So stay tuned. A playoff berth this season is an improbability, but it’s no longer the impossibility it seemed to be. And keep this in mind: even if the Royals don’t contend this year, the acceleration of the youth movement makes contention in 2012 much more likely. I never bought the talk after the Greinke trade that the window of contention for the Royals had been pushed to 2013. I still thought that 2012 was a reasonable goal if the prospects all developed as expected – but inherent to that development was that the elite prospects had to arrive sometime in 2011. If Hosmer and Moustakas and Montgomery and Duffy all got their feet wet in 2011, I thought, they’d be ready to compete in 2012.

So whether Hosmer’s promotion means the Royals are more likely to contend this season, it’s safe to say that his promotion – and the promise of more promotions over the next few months – makes the Royals more likely to contend next season. In the meantime, just enjoy the ride.

And remember, while Will Clark didn’t set the world on fire as a rookie, the following year he hit .308/.371/.580 with 35 homers, and finished fifth in the league in MVP voting.

And the Giants went to the playoffs.

A Tale Of Two Outfielders.

Rany’s posts are so long. – Will McDonald, Royals Review.

Guilty. As I’ve said before, I write long posts because I don’t have time to make them shorter.

But I’ll try to squeeze in a quick one today, by writing about two very specific players – our two redemption projects in the outfield, Alex Gordon and Jeff Francoeur – and one very specific question – whether their hot starts are meaningful or not.

Specifically, I want to look at whether their performance in the month of April has precedence in their careers or not. If it has, well, then they may have simply had the good fortune to time their annual hot streak to the start of the season. If it hasn’t, well, maybe it means something more.

First up, Gordon, who in the month of April* hit .339/.395/.541 in 119 plate appearances, albeit with 21 strikeouts against just eight walks.

*: As per standard baseball convention, “April” includes the stray regular season game played in March. Take out Gordon’s 0-for-5 on Opening Day, and his April line was actually .356/.412/.567.

Thanks to injuries and demotions to Triple-A, in his four previous seasons in the majors, Gordon had batted 70 or more times in a month on just 13 different occasions. Here are the five best months (min: 70 PA) of Gordon’s career:

Apr 2011: .339/.395/.541, 936 OPS

Jun 2007: .327/.383/.500, 883 OPS

Sep 2009: .279/.359/.471, 830 OPS

Aug 2007: .271/.320/.490, 810 OPS

Apr 2008: .301/.363/.447, 809 OPS

This past month was pretty clearly the best month of Gordon’s career. He not only had an OPS more than 50 points higher than in any previous month, but he set career highs in batting average, OBP, and slugging average. And for all the talk about how Gordon is sacrificing power for average, it’s notable that in only one of the other four months listed above did Gordon have more isolated power (slugging average minus batting average) than he did this April.

However, this is not the best stretch of Gordon’s career. He finished the 2008 season on fire, but he missed three weeks from August 21st to September 14th that season with a mild injury (an oblique pull, if I remember correctly.) So he only batted 69 times in August, and 49 times in September. But he hit .268/.377/.500 in August, and .311/.367/.556 in September.

If you go back to July 27th, from that date until the end of the season, Gordon played 33 games and batted 133 times – a little more than a full month’s worth of action. Compare his numbers then with his numbers this April.

2011: .339/.395/.541

2008: .301/.400/.549

2011: 12 doubles, 2 triples, 2 HRs

2008: 11 doubles, 1 triple, 5 HRs

2011: 8 walks, 21 Ks

2008: 20 walks (3 intentional), 25 Ks

Gordon is rapidly approaching the point at which we can say that he’s never played so well for so long. But he’s not quite there. For the better part of two months in 2008 – his best season – Gordon had a better performance, and a performance that was not nearly as reliant on a high batting average. He hit for more power, and drew a lot more walks. It’s worth noting that Gordon was rarely healthy in 2009 and 2010, and in some ways he may be picking up in 2011 where he left off the 2008 season.

Verdict: I don’t think what Gordon’s doing is sustainable, in the sense that he’s going to hit .339 all year. But I think that, if he stays healthy, the odds that he regresses back to the Gordon of the last two years is remote. He might only be as good as he was in 2008, but the Gordon of 2008 was a pretty good player. If he starts walking more as pitchers realize they have to pitch him more carefully – and I think he will, as patience has always been a signature skill of his – I think he could be even better than that.

And now Francoeur, who in April hit .314/.357/.569, and perhaps more impressively given his reputation, drew 7 walks (one intentional) against 18 strikeouts.

Unlike Gordon, Francoeur has been a very durable player throughout his career, and after debuting in July, 2005, batted at least 70 times in every calendar month from August 2005 until last September, when he batted only 56 times as a bench player for the Rangers. Here are the best months of Francoeur’s career:

Apr 2011: .314/.357/.569, 926 OPS

Apr 2007: .306/.367/.541, 908 OPS

July 2007: .330/.371/.519, 890 OPS

Apr 2010: .284/.355/.531, 886 OPS

Aug 2005: .312/.364/.514, 878 OPS

As streaky a hitter as Francoeur has been in his career, I’ll admit: I expected to find at least one calendar month in his career where he better than he did this April. I did not find one. He has certainly played at close to his April level in the past; it’s not hard to find a month where Francoeur hit over .300 and slugged over .500. But his performance this year is at the top of the list, and when you consider the historically low offensive levels (as Joe and I discuss in this week’s podcast – go to iTunes now and download “The Baseball Show With Rany And Joe”!) so far this season, his numbers are even more impressive.

Like Gordon, though, this is not the hottest stretch of Francoeur’s career. That remains – and probably will always remain – the first six weeks of his career, the six weeks that put him on the cover of Sports Illustrated. In July 2005, he hit .413/.413/.913 in 46 plate appearances. He debuted on July 7th; from that day until August 20th, he hit .379 and slugged .734 in 33 games. He hit 10 homers and 12 doubles in 124 at-bats.

He also did not walk a single time.

Naturally, pitchers adjusted. Obviously, given his track record, Francoeur could not adjust back.

What I think is fascinating about Francoeur’s track record is that he always starts hot. You’ll notice that three of his five best months listed above are Aprils, and one of the remaining two was his first full month in the majors. He hit well in his first two months with the Mets, and in his only month with the Rangers. Francoeur’s career line in April is .278/.321/.483, easily his best line of any month. It’s almost as if, every winter, pitchers forget that Francoeur can’t hit any pitch with a bend in it, and it takes them a few weeks of getting their fastballs crushed to remember.

Whether Francoeur can make the adjustment this year depends on whether he can maintain some semblance of plate discipline. His 6 unintentional walks in April were encouraging, but relative to his history, not unprecedented. He has drawn more than six unintentional walks in a calendar month five times in his career. (He has never drawn more than eight walks of his own accord in a month, however.)

Verdict: It’s been a nice month for Frenchy. But if you don’t mind, let’s hold off on offering him a long-term contract a little while longer.

Programming note: “Rany on the Radio” makes its triumphant return this Thursday at 6 PM. Here’s the setup, basically: unless the Royals are playing at 6 PM (which happens only twice the rest of the season, I think), I will always be on 810 WHB at 6 PM. If the Royals are playing at 7 PM, then I will be on with Danny Clinkscale as part of WHB’s standard pre-game show. If the Royals are off that day, or playing an afternoon game, then I will host “Rany on the Radio” – alone. (My partner in crime the last two seasons, Jason Anderson, now hosts an afternoon show in Louisville, where presumably he’s forced to discuss horse racing or college basketball all the time. The poor thing.)

Rob Neyer has graciously agreed to be my first guest this Thursday, and we’ll – I’ll – probably take callers in the final segment. So those of you who complained that there wasn’t enough Rany on “Rany on the Radio” – well, be careful what you wish for.

Mayday! And It's Not Even May Day.

On Thursday night, the Royals lost their sixth game in a row, and this game was over even quicker than the previous five: the Indians pounded Kyle Davies for four homers and eight runs before he departed in the fourth inning. The Royals scored a pair of runs in the seventh, but they still lost, 8-2, their biggest margin of defeat of the season.

After not getting blown out once (a blowout defined as a loss of five runs or more) during their 12-7 start, the Royals were blown out four times in their six-game losing streak. When the Royals were 10-4, we had hopes that they might play .500 ball all season. Instead, they couldn’t even wait until May to fashion a losing record.

You might call this a disappointment, or a collapse, or claim that the Royals are destined to crush our hopes every season. I call this a dose of reality. Even when the Royals were flying high, their starting rotation was a time bomb waiting to go off. It went off, and when the bullpen hit a rough patch as well thanks to some command issues, a long losing streak was inevitable.

The Royals actually scored 22 runs in their six losses; they averaged more runs per game during their losing streak (3.67) than the A’s have averaged all season (3.30) even as the A’s are 13-13. But the pitching staff allowed 46 runs, surrendering at least seven runs in all but one game.

You’d think that as Royals fans, we’d be used to losing streaks. I mean, six games is nothing. Since the beginning of the 2004 season, this was the 24th losing streak of six games or longer. Here’s how they break down:

6-game losing streaks: 7

7-game losing streaks: 6

8-game losing streaks: 5

9-game losing streaks: 1

10-game losing streaks: 1

11-game losing streaks: 1

12-game losing streaks: 1

13-game losing streaks: 1

19-game losing streaks: 1

The Royals at least three losing streaks of 6 games or longer every year from 2004 to 2009. Last year, the Royals had only two. Progress!

Meanwhile, the Royals have had three winning streaks of 6 games or longer from 2004 until today combined. After winning their first 9 games of the 2003 season, the Royals went over five years – until June, 2008 – before they again won six games in a row.

Last year, the Royals didn’t even win FOUR games in a row at any point during the season. That is almost unheard of…except that the Royals also played the entire 2004 season without a four-game winning streak.

(My favorite Royals-related losing streak stat: in 2006, the Royals had an 11-game losing streak, a 6-gamer, and a 13-gamer – all before the end of May.)

So yeah, you’d think that we would know how to take a six-game losing streak in stride. But I understand: it’s April. Everything’s magnified early in the season, especially when you start 12-7 and Alex Gordon is hitting .350 and Jeff Francoeur looks like the guy in the catalog.

So it’s understandable that the fans might panic a little. But the manager?

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened on Wednesday, when Ned Yost decided to bench two of his starting players, Chris Getz and Kila Ka’aihue. It’s not fair to lump those two together. Benching Getz – or at least adding him to the musical chairs game that Mike Aviles and Wilson Betemit are playing – makes a lot of sense. Getz plays good defense, has excellent speed, and can take a walk. He’s also slugging .268. Both Aviles and Betemit are slugging .500. That’s a lot of power to sacrifice for a defensive upgrade. I know the concept of platooning has virtually disappeared from modern baseball, particularly in the middle infield, but it would make a ton of sense for the Royals to sit Getz vs. southpaws.

Ka’aihue, on the other hand…look, I get it. Ka’aihue is 27 years old, he’s in a terrible slump, and the Royals have two different first basemen in Omaha with an OPS over 1000. Kila’s two hits last night finally got his batting average over .200. The affect of his slump is magnified by the fact that for most of the season, he was sandwiched between a resurgent Gordon and Billy Butler ahead of him, and an out-of-body Francoeur and a hot-hitting (when in the lineup) Betemit behind him. The most efficient way to score runs in baseball is to bunch your best hitters together, so that the guys at the front of the chain are on base for the guys at the back of the chain to drive them in. Ka’aihue was the weak link in that chain for the first three weeks of the season, so I get the frustration with him.

But I don’t get the obsession with Clint Robinson from some people. Robinson won the Texas League Triple Crown last year, hitting .335/.410/.625, and is hitting .342/.425/.697 in the early going in Omaha. Which is to say, he’s simply following the path that Ka’aihue already blazed. In 2008, Ka’aihue hit .314/.456/.628 between Double-A and Triple-A. Last year, Kila hit .319/.463/.598 in Omaha before he finally made it to Kansas City for good.

Meanwhile, Kila is barely 10 months older than Robinson. Ka’aihue does everything Robinson does except hit doubles – only Ka’aihue walked twice as often in the minors, without striking out any more frequently.

More to the point, the Royals have belatedly invested a half-season of playing time for Ka’aihue in the majors to get to this point…the point where pitchers have adjusted to him, and he needs to prove whether he can make adjustments back. If the Royals give up on their investment now and promote Robinson, we’re going to be back in this same situation in three or four months, at which point you’ll have no idea what you have in Ka’aihue or Robinson, and meanwhile it’s too late to find out about either because Eric Hosmer is at the door and he’s threatening to split it in half with his bat if we don’t open it.

My friend Kevin Goldstein wrote about this specific situation with Clint Robinson here, and his conclusion is the same: everyone simmer down. Robinson has great numbers, but like Ka’aihue, there are significant scouting concerns with him, which is why they were both late-round picks to begin with.

I’m not saying that Clint Robinson won’t have a career. What I’m saying is that it’s not clear he’ll have a better career than Ka’aihue, and until there’s a clear separation between the two, you have to dance with what brung ya. The Royals don’t seem inclined to get rid of Kila completely at this point, but it was disconcerting to see him on the bench for two straight games. He went 2-for-4 last night, getting a gift hit when Wilson Betemit shielded the shortstop on a groundball that set up the winning rally in the eighth, but he’s supposed to be out of the lineup again tonight against a lefty.

As a result of these machinations and the desire to get Jarrod Dyson into the lineup, Yost moved Alex Gordon to first base on Wednesday and Thursday, an equally frustrating move. Here you have a one-time phenom who was written off by almost everyone after four progressively more disappointing seasons, who is having a miraculous, if fragile, rebirth this season. Is this really the time to have him change positions?

I understand the desire for flexibility, and I think moving Gordon to first base in the late innings when Dyson comes in for defense – as he did last night – makes perfect sense. But Gordon, in addition to hitting the crap out of the ball, has been a revelation in left field. He’s making diving plays; he’s throwing runners out at the plate; most important of all, it seems like he’s actually enjoying the game of baseball for the first time in years.

Gordon has frustrated fans for years because of his body language – he’s almost like a poor man’s J.D. Drew, in that he doesn’t give off the vibe that he actually enjoys what he’s doing. But my take on this isn’t that Gordon doesn’t enjoy baseball – it’s that he doesn’t know how to handle failure, and if anything he’s guilty of trying too hard when things go poorly. This year, for the first time, he’s come out of the gate like a house afire, the fans are on his side, they’ve gone from cheering his every hit to cheering his every at-bat. And he’s playing inspired baseball.

Why mess with that? Why add to his burden by having him start at first base? Why take the chance that he might make an error at an unfamiliar position – as he did on Wednesday night – and put his mental state in even the slightest bit of risk? Even if you want to play Dyson, you could keep Gordon in left field and DH Melky Cabrera, or you could – perish the thought – let Billy Butler play first base again and DH Gordon. Instead, Yost moved two players out of position and took the Royals’ breakout player out of his comfort zone.

Coincidence or not, Gordon went hitless in both his starts at first base, after coming into Wednesday’s game with a 19-game hitting streak. Last night, he returned to left field, and he doubled, tripled, and walked. He already has 12 doubles in the month of April; I don’t know if that’s a Royals record, but if it isn’t, it’s awfully close.

The upside of all this maneuvering is that it got Jarrod Dyson a pair of starts in centerfield, in which he managed an infield single in nine at-bats. Look, I like Dyson, perhaps more than most people, as I wrote here. But it’s clear that his bat is not ready. If the Royals want to keep him on the roster as a pinch-runner and defensive replacement extraordinaire, that’s fine. As I wrote last season, ironically, Dyson would have more value to a team in contention, because his talents off the bench can win a game, and that’s worth hampering his development for a team trying to win now.

(Last night, Dyson had more impact than any pinch-runner I’ve ever seen before. With men on first-and-third, one out, Dyson pinch-ran for Ka’aihue at first base. He was off with the first pitch; the throw bounced into centerfield, allowing Dyson to take third and Betemit to score the tying run. And then Dyson scampered home on a 150-foot pop-up to the shortstop. If Dyson doesn’t pinch-run, the Royals probably don’t score in the inning at all; instead, they score two, and win the game by one run. Dyson may not have single-handedly won the game for the Royals. But he won the game for the Royals.)

But for a rebuilding team, having Dyson on the roster makes no sense, because at this point in his development, he doesn’t have the bat to warrant regular playing time. So long as the Royals are playing .500 ball and ostensibly in the pennant race, you can make an argument for Dyson to stick around. But if and when the Royals find themselves 8 games out of first place, I hope the front office will realize that the future interests of the team are best-served by sending Dyson down to Omaha, perhaps in exchange for Lorenzo Cain, who will probably have earned an opportunity at that point.

In the meantime, if the cascade effect of starting Dyson is that Gordon has to play first base and Ka’aihue rides the pine, I’d just as soon keep Dyson back behind the “Break Glass In Case Of Tying Or Lead Runner On Base” sign.

The irony of all these moves is that on Wednesday morning, when Yost decided he needed to shake up his lineup, the Royals were second in the American League in runs scored. (They’re down to fourth now.) Think about that. The Royals, relative to the league, are on pace for their best offense in years, if not decades. It’s not a fluke…the Royals are third in the league in average, fourth in OBP and slugging, fourth in walks, first in doubles, and first in steals (with a remarkable 33-for-38 success rate). The only offensive measure they’re below average in is homers, where they rank 10th.  Meanwhile, the pitching staff is flirting with the worst ERA in the league. And Yost’s solution to this dichotomy is to…mix up the offense.

In fairness, that might be the only thing he can do. As strong as the offense has been, the Royals regularly start three players – Getz, Escobar, and Treanor – with an OPS+ of under 75. The opportunity to upgrade the offense at these three positions – either through regression, replacement, or (hopefully) genuine improvement – ought to make up for at least some of the expected regression from guys like Francoeur and Gordon. Meanwhile, unless the Royals want to rush Mike Montgomery or Danny Duffy to the majors, there’s little Yost can do with the pitching staff.

I know that Kyle Davies has replaced Jason Kendall as the roster piñata, but I’m not even willing to give up on him just yet. Davies is actually throwing more strikes than he ever has in his career – his walk rate is just 3.1 per nine innings. Throughout his career, Davies’ ultimate problem is that he doesn’t throw enough strikes for a guy with just okay stuff. So far this year, Davies has cut his walks (his career rate is 4.3 BB/9) while also increasing his strikeouts; he has 7.1 Ks per 9 this year compared to a career average of 6.3 per 9. He gave up four homers on Thursday, but prior to that he had allowed just one homer in his first five starts. Davies’ struggles this season are pretty simple to explain – he has a .380 BABIP.

That’s fluky and unsustainable, and uncharacteristic of Davies. The last three seasons, Davies’ BABIPs were .307, .286, and .316 – and with a worse defense behind him. If Davies’ ERA is still hovering around 8 a month from not, I’ll pick up a pitchfork and a torch along with everyone else. In the meantime, as boring as it might be to say this, I think the Royals should just stand pat. I’m not giving up on this season by any means – the Royals are still in second place, and I’m still not sold on the Indians – but I think it’s a touch too early to be going all-in for this season.

Meanwhile, if you want to see a team that wins every night, keep an eye on Omaha. On Thursday night, while the Royals were losing their sixth in a row, the Storm Chasers won their ninth straight. Danny Duffy pitched six innings, allowed a single baserunner (a single off the glove of a diving Johnny Giavotella), and struck out eight. Mike Moustakas hit two homers. Eric Hosmer hit only one homer – and a double, a two singles. Giavotella had three hits and a walk. Cain chipped in with two hits. Last night, while the Royals were breaking their streak, Omaha saw their winning streak end – when non-prospect Luis Mendoza gave up three runs in the ninth. That didn’t take away from Montgomery’s six inning, one-run performance. Monty has a 2.67 ERA, which pales in comparison to Duffy’s mark of 0.90. Hosmer, with two more hits last night, is hitting .412.

Soon enough, all these guys should be in Kansas City. By “soon enough”, I’m no longer talking about numbers like “2012” or “2013”, I’m talking about words like “June” or “July”. But not yet. This is shaping up to be a more interesting season than most people expected, but it would be foolish to let one so-so month alter the franchise’s long-term goals. Now two so-so months…that’s different. But for now: patience. The finish line is coming into view. Let’s not pull a hammy trying to quicken our pace now.

Royals Today: 4/22/11.

You know, if this series were played between these two teams vying for first place in September, this would have been an epic matchup, one that would have lived in Royals lore for a long time. The Royals miss a chance to take the lead in Game 1 when Billy Butler leaves second base, not realizing he’s safe, then lose in extra innings. The bullpen almost blows a 5-0 lead after six innings in Game 2, but with the bases loaded, Carlos Santana watches three straight strikes to end the game. Luke Hochevar goes from hero to zero in impressive time, even by his standards, in Game 3.

And in Game 4, the Royals find a way to come back from a 2-0 deficit after seven innings. Ned Yost pinch-runs for Billy Butler with Jarrod Dyson in the eighth, a move that immediately pays dividends when Dyson beats the flip from Asdrubal Cabrera after Cabrera smothered Jeff Francoeur’s grounder up the middle. Butler almost certainly would have been out, and the inning would have ended without a run scored.

And in the ninth, the Royals went from despair (starting the inning down a run) to exultation (men on first-and-third with none out) and back to despair, after Alcides Escobar’s grounder was snared by Jack Hannahan and Mike Aviles was thrown out at the plate. More exultation, when Chris Getz walked to load the bases and put the tying run at third again with one out, then more despair, when Melky Cabrera fell behind 0-2. And then Melky lined one past the shortstop and sent everyone home happy.

A series like this in September would have become part of the firmament of baseball memories in Kansas City. But of course, it didn’t happen in September, because the Royals haven’t played a meaningful series in September in 26 years. What’s the most memorable game the Royals have played since the strike? Maybe this game, when Carlos Beltran saved the game in regulation by taking away a homer, then winning it with a walk-off blast. That game came on July 20th. The other most memorable game? Probably Opening Day, 2004, which also featured a Carlos Beltran walk-off homer.

My personal favorite memory is probably this game in 1994, when the Royals, in the first game of a four-game series against the White Sox that they absolutely had to win in order to stay in the race, blew chance after chance in a tie game. In the ninth, with two on and one out, Greg Gagne was doubled up on Jose Lind’s fly out. In the tenth, after Brian McRae reached third base with one out, the Sox gave free passes to Wally Joyner and Bob Hamelin – and Mike Macfarlane grounded into a double play. In the 11th, Felix Jose tried to go first-to-third on Gagne’s one-out single and was thrown out. And in the top of the 12th, the White Sox got a two-out single from Tim Raines to drive in a run.

McRae tried to bunt his way on to start the 12th and popped out, but Dave Henderson walked, and Wally Joyner singled him to third to bring up the Hammer. Hamelin drove Roberto Hernandez’s pitch to center field, and my first emotion was relief that it was deep enough to drive in the run – and then elation when the ball kept carrying for a walk-off homer. That was the Royals’ third win a row; they would their next 11 games to put them a game out of the AL Central lead. A week later, Major League Baseball closed up shop for the year.

That game was on July 25th. I don’t have a single positive memory of a Royals game played in September or even August.

One of the best reasons to be a fan of a sports team is to avail yourself of the shared experiences and shared memories of that fan base. By sharing powerful memories – good or bad – with a group of people, you can’t help but feel connected with them. I’ve never lived in Kansas City, and have no real connection to the city other than the experiences and memories of watching this team play – and yet those experiences and memories are strong enough to have inextricably bound me to the city for over a quarter-century.

But I’m a special case, and if you’re reading this, so are you. Most of the people who consider themselves “Royals fans” are not connected to this web of fandom that we’ve constructed, the web that gets together on Twitter every evening to watch the Royals and argues over whether the Royals should give up on Kila Ka’aihue. It’s not their fault that they’re not connected to the team – the Royals simply haven’t given them the kind of memories that would bind them. Even bad memories, painful memories – think Lin Elliot, though not for too long – serve as a touchstone for a fan base to come together. Cleveland Browns fans still reminisce with heartache over The Drive and The Fumble, but at least they reminisce.

What do we have to reminisce about? Chip Ambres dropping a routine fly ball? Terrence Long and Ambres letting another routine fly ball drop behind them? The Royals losing 19 games in a row? Tony Pena fleeing the team in the middle of the night? These memories aren’t painful – they’re comical. There’s no real emotion attached to them. We laugh when we think about them – but we don’t really feel anything.

So forgive us if we’re getting a little too worked up over a 12-7 start, or put too much meaning into last night’s comeback. Yes, it’s April. But April memories are better than no memories at all.

I apologize for that rambling and incredibly self-indulgent intro. Now, on with some analysis.

- I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Kila Ka’aihue’s ninth-inning double may have saved his career with the Royals. For one thing, it might be a temporary reprieve. But it certainly pulled him a step away from the abyss.

Ka’aihue went 0-for-4 on Monday, when a base hit at any point might have kept the game from going into extra innings. In the bottom of the sixth, with men on first and second and none out, he tried to put down a bunt – unsuccessfully – and eventually popped out. Francoeur followed with a sharp groundball that turned into a 4-6-3 double play; if Ka’aihue gets the bunt down, a run probably scores, and the Royals probably win. He was 0-for-3 on Tuesday, then capped his day with another bunt – this one was successful – in the eighth inning. Afterwards, Ned Yost went so far as to blame the decision to bunt on a miscommunication caused by the batboy; methinks he doth protest too much. This game brought Kila’s numbers down to a .151/.270/.245 line.

He went 2-for-3 with a walk on Wednesday, but last night he struck out and grounded out to the second baseman twice, the last one into a double play. When he batted in the ninth, boos were audible on TV from the sparse crowd. The natives have grown restless.

And then Chris Perez threw a fastball down Main Street, and Ka’aihue laced a double to the left-center field gap. And the Royals went on to win. It’s just one hit, but we’re starting to reach the point with Ka’aihue where every hit becomes notable.

For everyone who sees that Eric Hosmer is hitting .393 in Omaha and wants a change to be made: hold your horses. It took Ka’aihue three years to get a job; I think he deserves more than three weeks before he loses it. If you pick Hosmer over Ka’aihue now, you’re giving up on Kila forever, and there’s no way to come back from that – his tenure with the Royals is over. If you pick Ka’aihue over Hosmer now, Hosmer just bides his time in Omaha; his chance is coming.

If the scouts were right and Ka’aihue was struggling because he couldn’t catch up to major-league fastballs, I might be more inclined to worry. But his struggles are notable precisely because fastballs are the one pitch he hasn’t struggled against. His problem has been with the slow stuff, which makes me think he’s pressing. He’s drawing his share of walks, but also striking out an inordinate amount of the time – 19 whiffs in 60 at-bats, from a guy who never struck out 100 times in a minor-league season.

Winning is a double-edged sword. If the Royals were 7-12, no one would care that the Royals were sticking with a first baseman who is hitting .181. But they are, and if they continue to win, at some point they’ll have to decide if they ought to prioritize winning today over the development of one of their best young hitters for the future. But that point hasn’t been reached. Hopefully last night’s double bought Ka’aihue some time. He deserves it.

- With full awareness that my campaign to give Royals players nicknames has failed miserably over the years – the only nickname that stuck has now been disavowed by its owner – can we all agree that Alex Gordon should now be known as The Dominator?

If Gordon had come out this season and fallen on his face again, the nickname would have worked as a sarcastic insult to the player who dared to say “I’m going to dominate next year” after four progressively more disappointing seasons. Instead, he’s backed up his rare bravado with an even rarer display of all-around skill. He leads the league in hits, and he’s on pace to hit 85 doubles. His defense in left field has been excellent; while he’s taken bad routes to balls hit into the corner a few times, he’s also made some outstanding diving plays. He also has five outfield assists in just 18 games. (By way of comparison, Johnny Damon had five outfield assists in all of 1996, and again in all of 1997.) Last night, Gordon moved to first base in the ninth inning, and immediately made a diving play to snare a grounder headed to right field.

He’s not a superstar, and three weeks doesn’t change that. But neither is he Alex Gordon, Epic Disappointment anymore. Let’s just enjoy the ride.

- Billy Butler is hitting .353/.476/.500. Just as impressively, he hasn’t grounded into a single double play in 19 games. Last year, he grounded into 32 of them.

- Jeff Francoeur is hitting .329/.363/.534 and leads the league in RBIs, but before you get too excited, consider this:

vs. LHP: 10-for-21 with 3 homers (.476/.478/.952)

vs. RHP: 14-for-52 with 0 homers (.269/.316/.365)

Frenchy is playing well, but it’s almost entirely on the shoulders of his performance against southpaws. Francoeur has always hit LHP pretty well, and deserves a role as a platoon outfielder in the majors on that basis alone. And his performance against right-handed pitchers isn’t bad by his standards; that .316 OBP is actually better than his career OBP (.311) against all pitchers. But I’m not about to proclaim him a new man yet. Let’s just enjoy the ride, and be prepared to jump off at any moment.

- The Royals uncharacteristic embrace of the base on balls continues – they rank third in the league in walks drawn. Last night showed the kind of impact patience can have, as four walks in the final two innings were instrumental in scoring all three runs.

I should give a shout-out here to Chris Getz, who is hitting just .242 and has just two extra-base hits all season, but has drawn 10 walks for a solid .347 OBP. Last night, he walked to lead off the eighth and scored the first run, and in the ninth, after the Royals had the tying run gunned down at the plate, Getz drew a second walk to load the bases and set up Melky’s heroics. Neither walk made headlines in the game recap, but the Royals wouldn’t have won without them.

- I’ve had little reason to mention Mitch Maier’s name this season, so let’s give him a nod here. After getting all of five plate appearances in the first 18 games of the season, Maier comes off the bench to pinch-hit for Matt Treanor in the ninth, and immediately rifles a line drive to center. Yost hasn’t pinch-hit much, but that situation screamed for one – Treanor is hitting .132, and Chris Perez’s slider makes him much more effective against right-handed hitters. Yost has made some strange tactical moves of late, but he pushed all the right buttons last night.

- Wednesday’s start was perhaps the quintessential Luke Hochevar performance. He started with five perfect innings, continuing a stretch of 31 consecutive batters retired. Then Michael Brantley singled to lead off the sixth, starting a stretch where 8 of 11 batters would reach base, and Hochevar would balk twice.

There’s a reason why Hochevar, despite a strikeout-to-walk ratio of almost exactly 2-to-1, has a career 5.56 ERA. Take a look at these career numbers:

No one on base: .246/.305/.405

Man on base: .316/.385/.504

With someone base, Hochevar allows opposing hitters to bat 70 points higher, with an OBP 80 points higher, and a slugging average 100 points higher. There’s a reason I’m breaking out the bold – that’s an unbelievable difference. Those are career numbers, in a sample size of over 400 innings, so you can’t dismiss them as a fluke.

And it only feeds the perception that Hochevar’s struggles in the major leagues are not physical. I continue to think better times are ahead for him, and I continue to think Ned Yost is handling him well. But it’s clear that there’s plenty more work to be done.

- Speaking of bad pitchers, Craig Brown’s takedown of Kyle Davies has (deservedly) gotten a lot of publicity the last few days. It’s an impressive piece of work; I think we all vaguely sensed that Davies was a terrible pitcher, but I certainly had no idea that his ERA was historically bad.

I have a few small critiques of Brown’s study. Mainly, I don’t see the point in limiting his study to pitchers who have started in 90% of their appearances. By definition, any pitcher this bad is eventually going to be tried in the bullpen out of desperation; Davies simply hasn’t reached that point of desperation yet.

If you look at all the pitchers in major-league history with 700+ innings pitched, Davies does not have the worst career ERA. He does, however, have the 6th-worst ERA, one slot behind Todd Van Poppel and one slot ahead of Pat Mahomes. That kind of historic suckitude does not require embellishment.

(And Davies’ career ERA of 5.54 is two points lower than Hochevar’s.)

With that being said, I still don’t see a better option for the rotation at this point in time. Vinny Mazzaro was hardly more impressive in his second start in Omaha than in his first. Mike Montgomery and Danny Duffy are close, but rushing them to the majors now smacks of desperation.

As unpalatable as it sounds for a team that’s 12-7 and ostensibly in contention, I think the Royals have little choice other than to continue to start Davies every fifth game. A month from now, they ought to have options for the rotation, maybe several options. But for now, their best option is to sit tight.

Game Not On. (Yet.)

So on Saturday, the Royals beat the Mariners 7-0, as Sean O’Sullivan outdueled Felix Hernandez with five scoreless innings, three middle relievers struck out six batters in the last four innings, the defense made several outstanding plays, Alex Gordon (who is leading the league in hits) and Billy Butler played pinball against King Felix, and the Royals remained tied for the American League lead in wins, as they enter a crucial matchup with the Cleveland Indians on Monday between the two best teams in the AL Central, and literally every word of this sentence would have seemed unthinkable three weeks ago.

The fun came to an end today, when the Royals lost 3-2 after Ned Yost made the questionable decision to send Jeff Francis back out to the mound to start the seventh inning. Justin Smoak and lefty-killer Miguel Olivo followed with singles, and both scored on Brendan Ryan’s single (the only baserunner Blake Wood allowed in 2.2 innings.) Even so, the Royals should have tied the game; a blown umpire call at first base in the eighth inning – Chris Getz was called out even though his foot beat Jamey Wright’s to the bag – cost the Royals a run. In the ninth, after Kila Ka’aihue singled, Jeff Francoeur ripped a one-hopper off Ryan’s glove at shortstop, but Ryan made a fantastic play to recover the ball and nip Francoeur at first. With two out, Betemit drove in Ka’aihue with a single, and pinch-runner Mike Aviles stole second before Brayan Pena grounded out.

The Royals lost, but they fought to their last batter, something they’ve done in 14 of their 15 games this year. The Royals are still 10-5, and what might be even more amazing is that four of their five losses could have gone the other way:

Loss #1: On Opening Day, Alex Gordon’s bid for a walk-off homer with two outs in the ninth goes just foul before he strikes out. It would be the last time Gordon would make an out all season.

Loss #2: The Royals lead the White Sox 6-3 with two outs in the ninth and no one on, before the Sox pull off an improbable four-run rally against Joakim Soria. Even so, the Royals tie the game in the bottom of the ninth, and have the winning run on second base with one out. In the tenth, the Royals have men on first and third with one out, but Chris Sale strikes out Francoeur to keep the winning run from moving up; the Sox score two in the 12th to win.

Loss #3: The Tigers score four runs off Kyle Davies in the first, and put the game away early, 5-2.

Loss #4: The Royals tie the Twins 3-3 in the top of the seventh, and have men on first and third with none out – but Gordon strikes out, Butler pops out, and Francoeur strikes out to kill the rally. The Royals don’t get another baserunner the rest of the game, and the Twins win in the tenth when Ned Yost decides to prove, beyond the shadowiest shadow of a sliver of a doubt, that Robinson Tejeda really has lost five mph off his fastball.

Loss #5: See above.

The Royals have played 15 games, and in just one of them did they not have the winning run at the plate in the ninth inning. That’s pretty damn amazing. Granted, they’ve pulled some victories out of a hat; they could be 7-8 right now. But a few fly balls to the outfield and they could be 13-3 or 14-2 as well.

But the Royals are still 10-5, and if they keep winning two out of every three games, at some point we have to take them seriously. The question is, have we reached that point yet?

You know I’m going to say no, and not only because two years ago, after a sample size that was nearly twice as large, I fell for the mirage – and wound up with rotten eggs on my face when the team went 47-86 the rest of the way. But I will say, this year doesn’t feel like 2009 at all. I didn’t go into the 2009 season with high expectations, but I at least acknowledged the possibility before the season that the team could be competitive if they caught a few breaks.

This year (this article notwithstanding) I had no expectations whatsoever. More to the point – the Royals had no expectations of winning. This team, as it was constructed over the winter, was not built to win. In that sense, this team is very much like the 2003 squad. When that team came out of the chute 9-0, there was a level of cognitive dissonance within the media, both in Kansas City and nationally. There was simply no explanation for how a team that looked so bad on paper could be playing so well, and no one knew what to make of it.

It turns out that the 9-0 start wasn’t real, but it wasn’t exactly a fraud either. Let’s try to figure out where the 2011 Royals fit on the continuum.

Pythagorean Theorem: One of the fundamental axioms of baseball analysis – it was discovered and named by Bill James in the early 1980s – is that there is a very strong correlation between a team’s win-loss record and its runs/runs allowed ratio. Specifically, the ratio between a team’s wins and its losses is approximately the square of the ratio between its runs scored and runs allowed (hence the term “Pythagorean.”)

We can apply that theorem to the Royals to see whether their 10-5 record is the product of good fortune or a true reflection of how they’ve played. The Royals have a .667 winning percentage. Based on their run totals – they’ve scored 82 runs and allowed 63 – their winning percentage should be only .629.

That’s not an indictment of the team. Put it this way – the Royals are currently on a 108-win pace. Based on their run totals, they should “only” be on pace to win 102 games.

I’d take that.

Closely allied with how a team performs compared to its Pythagorean expectation is how well the team plays in one-run games. A team that wins a lot of one-run games is going to win more games than you’d expect from their run totals. With their loss today, the Royals are 4-2 in one-run games – and they’re 6-3 in games decided by more than one run. They’re 2-2 in extra-inning games. They’ve only played two blowouts (games decided by 5+ runs), and won both of them. While the Royals may be playing five miles over their heads, there’s simply no evidence of that based on the scores of their games.

Second-Order Wins: A team’s Pythagorean record is what Baseball Prospectus calls “First-Order Wins”, meaning a team’s record once the first layer of luck is stripped out. Second-Order Wins strips out another layer of luck, looking at how a team scores their runs. If a team is scoring a lot of runs because they’re hitting really well with runners in scoring position, that’s unlikely to continue, and their offense is likely to slow down. If a pitching staff is stranding a lot of baserunners, eventually the debt will come due.

When you mine the data this deep, the Royals do come out looking fairly lucky. The Royals are 10-5, but they actually have fewer hits than their opponents (152 to 148), and have been out-homered, 16-11. They do have more doubles (33-29), more steals (19-8), and shocking, their biggest advantage is in walks (57-41).

Overall, the Royals are hitting .275/.341/.408. Their opponents are hitting .272/.323/.421. The Royals have a slight offensive advantage thanks to their higher OBP (!), and we also have to give them a significant edge on the basepaths. But even so, those numbers are the mark of an 8-7 team, not a 10-5 one.

Strength of Schedule: Baseball Prospectus also has “Third-Order Wins”, which adjust a team’s record based on the strength of the teams they have faced so far. Of course, if it’s too early in the season to know how good the Royals are, it’s too early in the season to know how good their opponents are.

But if there’s one thing we know, it’s that the Mariners are a pretty awful baseball team, a team that without Felix Hernandez and Michael Pineda might be historically bad. Their offense already was historically bad last year – the Mariners scored the fewest runs of any AL team in a full season since the invention of the DH. This year’s offense might not be any better; they scored nine runs in four games against the Royals, and three of those came in the ninth inning on Friday night in the kind of weather conditions last seen in the third installment of Pirates of the Caribbean.

This series aside, the Royals went 7-3 against the three teams widely considered to be the three contenders in the AL Central, and the Angels, a team that at least one pundit (read: me) picked to win the AL West, and a team that is 9-2 since they left Kansas City. Frankly, the best case you can make on behalf of the Royals is that the Tigers, White Sox, and (especially) the Twins don’t look nearly as formidable as they did three weeks ago. Of course, the best case against the Royals is that the Indians have the best record in baseball at 11-4, which should serve as a reminder that it’s way too early to be taking records seriously.

Sustainability of Performance: This, ultimately, is all that matters. Can the Royals, on an individual level, continue to play this well? Let’s look at the players who are most responsible for this start:

Alex Gordon: He’s hitting .365/.394/.540 so far, and no, he’s not going to hit .365 all season. But if his breakout is for real, he might slug .540. And if he starts to draw more walks, he might maintain a .394 OBP. I have no doubt that I’m jumping to conclusions with Gordon’s hot start – I’ve been waiting for this opportunity for four years, and I’m not going to let it slip out of my hands now.

I think Gordon is going to cool down. But I think we have to upgrade, perhaps significantly, our expectations of what Gordon will hit this season. (And, perhaps more importantly, what he will hit in 2012 and 2013 as well.)

Jeff Francoeur: He’s hitting .328/.349/.517 so far, and no, he’s not going to hit .328 all season. He’s not going to slug .517 all season. Frankly, even projecting a .349 OBP for him seems overly optimistic, and a .349 OBP is nothing to brag about to begin with.

I’ll be honest: I have no idea what to expect from Francoeur. As the Kansas City Star reported a few days ago, there is some data to suggest Francoeur is succeeding with a different, more patient approach at the plate. But those of you who have followed the Jeff Francoeur Saga over the years know that this isn’t the first time, or even the fifth time, he’s convinced people that he’s about to turn a corner. It’s not a fulfilling answer, but saying “we just don’t know” is the only honest answer to give.

Billy Butler: He won’t hit .352/.470/.537, but he’s going to hit, and he might well have his best season yet.

Wilson Betemit: He won’t hit .371/.452/.571, but he can hit, and if he does he’s not going to remain a part-time player. His impact has been limited by batting only 41 times in 15 games so far, so even if he cools down he could continue to maintain his value.

Those four hitters – who fortuitously all bat in the middle of the lineup – are the only four hitters who are playing above expectations. Melky Cabrera has been nothing special at .279/.286/.397; Chris Getz, after a hot start, is hitting .269/.333/.288. Alcides Escobar might not continue to make one Gold Glove-caliber play at shortstop per game, but at the same time he can probably improve on his .233/.270/.267 line so far this year. Brayan Pena and Matt Treanor are hitting a combined .200/.297/.327. Mike Aviles has recovered from a tough start, but he’s still hitting .200/.250/.450. And Ka’aihue, most troublingly, is hitting .174/.304/.283.

I have no doubt that Gordon, Francoeur, Butler, and Betemit will cool off. But at the same time, they can expect better production from shortstop, second base, and DH. If either Getz or Ka’aihue don’t pick it up, they’ll see their playing time eaten away by Betemit, with Aviles picking up the slack. They’re not going to continue to score 5.5 runs a game. But they may have a less bumpy descent than you’d think.

On the pitching side of things…

Aaron Crow, Jeremy Jeffress, and Tim Collins have combined for 23.1 innings, and have allowed just 15 hits, walked 11, and struck out 29. They’ve allowed just three runs. That level of performance is, obviously, unsustainable.

But at the same time, none of the three are doing this with smoke and mirrors. They all have power stuff, and they’re all striking guys out in bunches. There’s no position where a rookie is more likely to find immediate success than in the bullpen, so you can’t use their inexperience against them. The walks have to concern you, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that, if they stay healthy, all three pitchers will continue to find success all season.

Kanekoa Texeira and Nate Adcock have combined to throw 8.2 innings, they’ve allowed 14 hits and two walks, and have not a single strikeout – but they’ve allowed just one run. Some serious regression is due here – but at the same time, both pitchers are largely garbage-time guys whose performances are unlikely to decide a ballgame one way or the other.

And that leaves Joakim Soria and Robinson Tejeda, who have allowed nine runs in 13 innings, allowed 18 hits and six walks, and struck out just four. Tejeda is now on the DL, having been replaced by Blake Wood, who is supposed to be throwing harder and better than he did as a rookie a year ago. Soria is a concern given his lack of strikeouts as well as his performance. I reached a personal DEFCON low with Soria after he nearly blew another big ninth-inning lead on Friday, but that was before I was aware of just how bad the conditions were at the time. I can see how it might be hard to throw strikes while trying to pitch through an icy monsoon.

If Soria is healthy – and we’ll have a better answer for that question after his next few outings – I think the bullpen will continue to be a strength of this team. I expected it to be one before the season, and I certainly have seen no reason to change my mind.

As for the rotation…

Jeff Francis has a 3.00 ERA, and in 27 innings has walked 3 batters. If he can keep throwing that many strikes, he’ll be effective, but 1) he won’t be this effective, not in the American League, not with his velocity; and 2) he won’t keep walking a batter per nine innings.

Bruce Chen had a 4.17 ERA last season. I love Bruce Chen, but nothing in his peripheral results or in his repertoire made you think that’s sustainable. This year, his ERA is 2.61. You do the math.

Luke Hochevar has a 4.21 ERA, and I do think that’s sustainable. He has four walks and 16 strikeouts on the year; his bugaboo has been the six homers he’s surrendered in 26 innings, and that’s a little fluky.

Kyle Davies, on the other hand, has allowed 14 runs in 14 innings. He’s not that bad, and if he is, the Royals will soon replace him with someone who isn’t that bad.

The bottom line here is that neither Francis nor Chen can keep this up, and now that the Royals need a fifth starter every fifth game, they’re not going to get five shutout innings from that slot either. The rotation’s ERA as a whole is 3.97, and that’s not sustainable. I’d be happy with a 50-point jump; it might be a lot higher. Let me put it this way: right now, who starts Game 1 of the playoffs for the Royals?

Future Roster Changes: The answer to that question, in all seriousness, is probably Mike Montgomery. If you could see the future and told me that the Royals will make the playoffs this October, and I had to wager on who started Game 1 of the ALDS, I’d pick Monty. (And after he struck out 7 of the 16 batters he faced in Triple-A on Saturday, Danny Duffy might be my pick for Game 2.)

That’s what you have to hope for if you’re a Royals fan. The offense will regress, although I’ve seen enough to posit that it’s a better offense than we thought it would be. The bullpen, which has a 3.28 collective ERA right now, will regress, but will probably still be one of the better units in the American League. But the rotation is going to regress a lot – unless and until reinforcements arrive. However, if the Royals can just find a way to channel 2003 until mid-season, and dodge the laws of probability long enough to remain in contention at the All-Star Break, then unlike in 2003, they will have the opportunity to fix the team’s biggest weakness from within when the second half kicks off.

We might not even have to wait that long. Everyone obsesses about the Super-Two Deadline, but the more important deadline has already passed. Every one of the Royals’ vaunted prospects who are in the minors today are now guaranteed to be under club control through 2017. If Montgomery were called up tomorrow, the Royals would get almost seven full seasons out of him. He might get arbitration a year early, and in a best/worst case scenario that could cost the Royals more than $10 million. (That’s what it cost the Giants when Tim Lincecum qualified for arbitration prior to the 2010 season – after he had just won back-to-back Cy Young Awards.)

But if the Royals maintain their hot start, and the front office decides to go for it, and they deem Montgomery or Moustakas or any of a half-dozen other guys are ready…they shouldn’t hold back. If the future is now, then The Future Is Now.

The Verdict: Eight years ago, in response to the Royals’ 9-0 and 16-3 start, I researched the impact that a hot start had on a team’s final projected record. You can read the results here. Even when the Royals were 16-3, their projected finish was 85-77, a disappointing finish given their record but a reasonable one for a team that had just lost 100 games the year before.

Prior to this season, the simple formula I introduced in the article above would have projected the Royals to go 72-90 this season. Based on their 10-5 start, we can now update our projection for the Royals this year all the way to 79-83. The 10-5 start has been worth about seven wins – four of those are already in the bank (because the team should have won only six of their first 15 games, instead of 10), and three of those are a reflection of the fact that the team might actually be better than we thought.

If you projected the Royals to win 69 games before the season, as I did, then you would project them to go 76-86 now. That’s not good…but on the other hand, it would be the team’s best record since 2003.

So it’s definitely not on. Not yet. But it’s not completely off either. Stay tuned.

(Also, stay tuned to 810 WHB this Thursday at 6. Still finalizing the details, but I should be on the air one way or the other.)

Royals Today: 4/12/11.

The first week-and-a-half of the season has been a little surprising, on a professional and a personal level. The professional surprise is that the Royals have continued to play well, thanks to some surprising offensive performances, less-putrid-than-expected performances from the rotation, and some terrific work by the rookies in the bullpen.

The personal surprise is that unlike in 2003, when the Royals started 9-0 and 16-3, or even just two years ago, when the Royals started 18-11, I find myself remarkably even-keeled about the Royals’ start. Blasé, even. It’s not that I don’t care if the Royals do well or not; in fact, I think it’s the exact opposite. What made 2003 so much fun at the start was that it was completely inexplicable. Even eight years later, I still have no idea how that team played so well. Runelvys Hernandez was your Opening Day starter. Angel Berroa was the Rookie of the Year. Aaron Guiel was an above-average right fielder. Darrell May was a very good starting pitcher all year. Jose Lima was effective.

Going into that season, there was not only no reason to think the Royals would be any good – they had just lost 100 games for the first time the year before – but there was no reason to think their fortunes were going to change any time soon. According to Baseball America, the top prospect in the system going into the 2003 season was Zack Greinke…but Berroa was #2. Jimmy Gobble was #3; Ken Harvey was #4. Mike MacDougal, Alexis Gomez, Colt Griffin, Kyle Snyder, Andres Blanco, and Jeremy Hill rounded out the Top 10.

Needless to say, when the Royals started the season with a nine-game winning streak, I couldn’t help but get caught up in it. Why wouldn’t I? As a Royals fan, what did I have to lose? And what else did I have to get excited about?

The 2009 start seemed a little more real – ahem – because the Royals were coming off a 75-87 season that included an 18-8 September. Also, there seemed to be more substance to the team’s performance; Zack Greinke was the best pitcher in baseball, Gil Meche and Kyle Davies and Brian Bannister were pitching well, and even Jose Guillen was hitting well enough to make his contract tolerable. Luke Hochevar was even dominating down in Omaha, and figured to get called up soon. It was all a mirage – well, everything but Greinke pitching at a Cy Young caliber. But it was hard to hold back, precisely because it looked like Dayton Moore had been building with 2009 in mind. (Why else would he have signed Willie Bloomquist and Kyle Farnsworth?) If the Royals’ front office expected to win, and the Royals were winning, who was I to argue?

But this year, it’s so much easier to take a wait-and-see approach to this team. Having the best farm system in baseball affords us that luxury. The expectation that the Royals are building to something truly meaningful starting in 2012 takes some of the pressure off being a fan in 2011. As Joe Sheehan succinctly put it in his Newsletter before the season, “All things considered, this is going to be the worst Royals team for the rest of the decade.” At this point, we’re playing with house money. If the Royals continue to play well and stay in contention, it’s gravy – but either way, I’m still optimistic about the future.

- That doesn’t mean I can’t have concerns about certain individual performances. Robinson Tejeda is showing reduced velocity this year, and while it hasn’t shown up on the scoreboard, it has certainly manifested itself in the box score – Tejeda has struck out just one of the 22 batters he’s faced this season, after striking out just over a quarter of batters faced (184 of 728) since joining the Royals in 2008. Tejeda has compensated by throwing more off-speed stuff – in particular, he’s using his change-up a lot more – but there’s only so much adjusting you can do when your fastball, according to Fangraphs, goes from 94 to 89.

I’m nearly as concerned about Joakim Soria. Unlike Tejeda, there have been no official proclamations about Soria’s velocity. Per Fangraphs, Soria’s fastball has dropped a tick; he’s averaged 89.6 mph this season after averaging between 90.9 and 91.9 each of the last four years. However, this fine article by Mike Fast at Baseball Prospectus last week points out that fastballs are typically 1 to 1.5 mph slower in April than they are in mid-summer, likely due to the cooler temperatures at the start of the year. (And according to the article, Soria was actually throwing harder in Spring Training than he was last September.)

But while Soria’s velocity loss may not be meaningful, it’s been accompanied by a degradation in performance. I’m not talking about his 6.75 ERA in all of seven innings, which is pretty meaningless. I’m talking about the fact that, like Tejeda, Soria is not missing any bats this season. He’s struck out only two of the 28 batters he’s faced, and batters have swung and missed at just 4% of his pitches this season, compared to his career average of 11%. Some stats, like ERA, take a long time to normalize, and seven innings of data mean nothing. But for stats like strikeout rate and swinging strike percentage, the data normalizes much quicker, and small samples are more meaningful. I’m not saying that there’s something wrong with Soria; he did strike out Miguel Cabrera on a nasty hook on Sunday. But I am saying that I’ll be watching him closely going forward.

- I gave some love to Alex Gordon last time out, and he’s continuing to hit – he actually leads the league in hits with 15. The numbers corroborate the theory that he’s adjusted his approach to favor solid contact over a swing-for-the-fences approach; he’s hitting singles but only has one home run. That tradeoff is more than worth it if he keeps hitting like he has, but more importantly, it’s a lot easier for a line-drive hitter to add power to his game than for a pure power hitter to start hitting for average. Gordon’s not suddenly going to turn into Ichiro Suzuki; he has the kind of power you can’t teach, and if he keeps making solid contact, he’ll hit 20 homers just by accident.

- I think it’s kind of ridiculous to bury Mike Aviles on the basis of six games, no matter how poorly he played – both at the plate and in the field – in those six games. Aviles’ career line is .293/.323/.420, and he hit .304/.335/.413 last season coming off Tommy John surgery. He hit six homers last September; it’s absurd to think that he’s suddenly forgotten how to hit on the basis of one bad week.

That said, I can’t say that I’m upset to Aviles on the bench if it means more playing time for Wilson Betemit. I may be Betemit’s biggest fan, but if I am, it’s not because of what I think Betemit can be, it’s simply because of what I think Betemit is right now. He went 4-for-4 with a walk on Sunday, and is hitting .381/.500/.571 in six games. Since joining the Royals last year, he has a line of .303/.387/.515, in 90 games – not an insubstantial sample size. And he plays third base. He’s not a good third baseman; he’s not even a mediocre one. But my God, how bad do you have to play third base to not have value when you can hit as well as Betemit does? Ryan Braun bad? Butch Hobson-adjusting-the-bone-chips-in-his-elbow-after-every-throw bad?

The solution here would be to get Betemit and Aviles in the lineup…except that the Royals want to see what they have in Chris Getz once and for all. And given that 1) Getz is the youngest of the three players; 2) he is the best defender and the best baserunner of the three; and 3) he’s hitting .345 in the early going and has drawn five walks already, well, it’s hard to fault them.

The Royals have found themselves in an unfamiliar situation – they have three deserving players to fill two positions. They have – wait for it – depth. They have options. If Getz reverts back to his 2010 form, they can replace him painlessly. If Aviles has suddenly lost it, or if Betemit goes back to making error a day, they don’t have to put up with it. This isn’t a bad thing, so long as the Royals give each of them sufficient playing time to properly evaluate them.

I don’t expect Aviles’ benching to be any kind of permanent; I think we’re going to see Aviles and Betemit alternate at third base, with Aviles occasionally spelling Getz at second. I think Betemit will get the occasional start at 1B or DH, replacing Ka’aihue against a tough left-hander. (Update: With LHP Brian Duensing pitching for Minnesota, tonight’s lineup does in fact have Betemit in the lineup for Ka’aihue…but Betemit’s at third, and Aviles is the DH. I guess Yost is even more dissatisfied with Aviles’ defense than I thought.) As the season progresses and the Royals play 15 days in a row, Getz or Aviles may give Escobar a day off at shortstop. And in the end, I think that by the end of May all three guys will be playing at least half the time. With any luck, by the time Mike Moustakas is deemed ready, the Royals will have used their time to figure out who he’ll be replacing. If Betemit continues to hit, they might even be able to fetch something of substance for him in trade.

- While Gordon is hitting .357/.400/.548, and Betemit is hitting .381/.500/.471, neither one of them is leading the team in any of the triple-slash categories. That’s because Billy Butler, with a .394/.512/.667 line, leads the team in all three.

I confess to taking Butler for granted a bit myself. We all know he’s a preternaturally talented hitter, but because he’s limited to first base and because he hasn’t shown elite power yet, it’s been easy to focus on the things he can’t do (like stay out of the double play) instead of the one thing he can, which is to strike a baseball with extreme malice.

Over the last two seasons, Butler has hit .309/.375/.480 and averaged 48 doubles and 18 homers a season. If that’s all he is, that’s a hell of a player, a poor man’s Edgar Martinez. But it’s not unreasonable to hope he could be something more. He is still just 24, after all. (Okay, he turns 25 on Monday. But still.)

In the small sample of at-bats I’ve seen from him this year, it seemed to me that he was elevating the ball more. He’s hit two homers already. One was a 3-1 fastball from a lefty (Chris Sale) who touches 100 mph, and supplied all the power. But the other was off a right-hander, a 2-1 fastball that was on the outside corner and a little up, and Butler simply powered the ball a little to the right of dead center field. It was an impressive swing.

So I checked the numbers to see whether Butler was in fact hitting the ball in the air more, and…uh, yeah. His groundball/flyball ratio has hovered between 1.37 and 1.43 in his four seasons in the majors; his ratio this year is 0.83. His groundball%, which has always been between 47 and 49%, is at 33%. And he has yet to hit into a double play.

It’s nine games, and a sample size of just 30 balls put in play. But those are dramatically different numbers than what we’ve seen from Butler in the past. Keep a close eye on how many balls Butler hits on the ground over the next few weeks. If he’s learned to avoid topping the ball while still making hard contact, well, let’s just say that five-year contract would look even nicer than it did when he signed it.

- Luke Hochevar has made three starts so far, and the early returns are looking good. He’s walked just two batters and struck out 12 in 19 innings. On the other hand, he’s given up six homers already.

Hochevar’s groundball/flyball ratio, which has slowly ticked down throughout his career, has dropped further, to 1.17, with a 42% groundball rate. That’s roughly league average. His home run rate is nowhere close to league average, though – one-quarter of the flyballs hit off of Hochevar have gone over the fence, compared to a league average of something like 11%.

Hochevar has been maddening throughout his career in part because his luck is so bad at times that it seems like he’s less unlucky than simply cursed. Two years ago, he threw 143 innings, had a fine strikeout to walk ratio of 106 to 46, and got groundballs 47% of the time – and somehow wound up with a 6.55 ERA. His xFIP – one of the best ways to measure what a pitcher’s ERA “should” be, assuming normal luck – was 4.28.

Maybe Hochevar is one of those weird pitchers for whom the numbers don’t always even out. But for now, I can only assume that he won’t continue to give up two homers a start. If you just look at Hochevar’s xFIP for his entire career, the peaks and valleys even out and you see a pretty steady improvement – from 5.20 in his cup of coffee in 2007, to 4.64, to 4.28, to 4.09 last year. This year, he’s at 3.94.

Which is to say, there’s no reason why he can’t be an above-average starter in the major leagues. No reason except that the laws of probability seem to conspire against him.

- Finally, this wouldn’t be a Royals recap without some discussion of the minor leaguers. The minor leagues just got underway last Thursday, and it’s way too early to make even premature conclusions. The only thing that really matters at this point is whether everyone is healthy or not.

On that note, the Royals got some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that Brett Eibner, a highly-regarded college outfielder who was drafted in the second round last year (and got $1.2 million to sign), and who homered in his first pro game, injured his thumb diving for a ball in his second game. Apparently there’s ligament damage; I don’t know what’s the expected recovery time for this injury, but I’d be shocked if he’s back inside of several weeks, and I wouldn’t be shocked if he’s out for a couple of months. For a guy who’s already 22, who has a ton of tools but also needs some reps – he was a two-way player in college who many teams wanted as a pitcher – this is a tough break.

The good news is that, despite loads of evidence to the contrary, we can now state with some certainty that Noel Arguelles does, in fact, exist. The Cuban bonus baby finally took a mound last night in Wilmington, about 16 months after he signed a 5-year, $6.9 million deal with the Royals. He pitched well, throwing four shutout innings, allowing just two hits and no walks. However, he struck out just one batter. J.J. Cooper of Baseball America was in attendance and reported that Arguelles was throwing in the 88-90 range, mixing in a slow curve for strikes.

That may be the best we can ask for at this point. Arguelles was touted as a southpaw who could throw 94 when he signed, which made him the Target to Aroldis Chapman’s Neiman Marcus. But after missing a full season to shoulder woes and finally going under the knife, it’s not surprising that he’s lost 5 mph on his fastball. Even at that velocity, as a lefty with command of secondary stuff, he’s a definite prospect. But you don’t give seven million dollars to amateur pitchers who throw 89. He’s back on the prospect map, but we have to hope that his fastball velocity rises with the temperature. If it does, well, they say you can never have too much left-handed pitching, but the Royals might put that maxim to the test more than any other team in recent memory.