Trade Time.

First off, thanks to everyone who came out to the Baseball Prospectus event at Kauffman Stadium on Saturday. It was great to meet all of you. Thanks to Kevin Goldstein and Craig Brown and Jeff Euston for being there, thanks to Joe Hamrahi for setting the event up, and thanks to the Royals’ Jin Wong and John Williams for speaking to the group and answering a raft of questions. Their answers were carefully constructed to not be particularly revealing – and I would expect nothing less from them – but the mere fact that someone like Williams (a Yale grad who got his master’s in atmospheric science from MIT) works for the Royals is revealing enough.

As hard as this may be to believe, the Royals may actually be ahead of the curve on statistical analysis now – at least with the new frontier of Pitch f/x data. (One piece of info Jin Wong revealed that surprised me – the Royals have paid to have Pitch f/x equipment installed at Northwest Arkansas, and will likely be doing the same in Omaha at some point soon.) The Royals are also having Field f/x equipment installed at Kauffman Stadium soon – which will give data on the movements of every player on the field on every pitch, allowing teams to determine how quick a first step a fielder gets, how quickly he gets from Point A to Point B, etc.

None of this data is going to be public, unfortunately. But the Royals have the data, and between Williams and Mike Groopman (a former Baseball Prospectus intern) on staff, I have no doubt that they’ll be mining the depths of it. Whether the baseball decision-makers will listen to their analysts is the big question, and one I can’t answer. But it’s reassuring to know that the Royals not only have the data, they have the data guys.

And I can’t say enough about the fanbase. On Friday night, the Royals drew 34,563 paying fans to the ballpark. Yes, there were fireworks, and it was Buck Night, but…still. The Cleveland Indians, who were in first place, drew 25,835 to their stadium the same night. The Royals drew nearly 35,000 fans to watch a team on pace to finish last for the sixth time in eight years. If this team ever turns around, Kauffman Stadium is going to be rocking every single night. The Royals’ incompetence masks the fact that Kansas City is a great baseball town.

The Indians are an instructive example. From 1969 to 1993, Cleveland went 25 straight years without ever finishing higher than fourth place in the standings. In 1994 they opened a new ballpark and started to win. On June 12, 1995, the Indians sold out the ballpark; they would sell out every game they played from that day through Opening Day, 2001, a then-record 455 sellouts in a row. I don’t think that Kauffman Stadium will be a sellout for five-plus years – for one thing, I don’t think they’ll win five straight division titles, and a renovated Kauffman is not quite the same as a brand-new Jacobs Field. But I could see 30,000 at the ballpark every night.

In the meantime, the trade deadline is barely two weeks away, and as usual the Royals are sellers. A month ago, there was so much parity in the sport that it looked like this might be a seller’s market, as very few teams were definitively out of contention and the supply of impact players at the deadline looked small. But there has been a lot of separation in the last few weeks; 13 of 30 teams are now at least 8.5 games out of a playoff spot. So the Royals will have to compete with a raft of other teams in marketing their wares.

Nevertheless, the Royals have a number of veterans who could help a contender, certainly more (and better) veterans than they had last year. Scott Podsednik, Rick Ankiel, Kyle Farnsworth, and Jose Guillen collectively brought back Tim Collins and a bunch of organizational filler. This year, the Royals have the talent to do far better – the question is whether they have the market. Here, in no particular order, are the guys that should be on the auction block this month.

Melky Cabrera: I really liked the signing of Cabrera this winter, which among Royals fans was a deeply unpopular opinion, particularly after the Royals acquired Lorenzo Cain in the Greinke trade just a few days later. The main reasons I liked the Cabrera signing – aside from my belief that he had bounceback potential – were that 1) he was only signed for $1.25 million; and 2) he’s under club control for 2012 as well.

Cabrera has turned out to be a better player than even I expected; he’s hitting .295/.333/.456 with an outstanding OPS+ of 119 (his previous career high was only 95). He’s even stolen 12 bases in 14 attempts. He’s also leading the AL in at-bats and plate appearances. He’s still just 26 years old. For the money, Cabrera might be the best free-agent signing of Dayton Moore’s career.

His success actually complicates the issue of trading him. A few days ago, when I told a friend that I expected Cabrera to be moved before long, he suggested that the Royals could move Cabrera to left field for next year, Gordon to right, and put Cain in center. It was actually the first time I had even considered the idea that Cabrera could be a viable solution for the Royals in 2012. As well as he is hitting, Cabrera is a poor defensive centerfielder. Moving him to a corner and letting Cain (or some combination of Cain and Jarrod Dyson) take over in center next year would be a huge defensive upgrade. And if Cabrera continues to hit as well as he has, he’ll have more than enough bat for a corner outfield spot.

I still consider that to be a suboptimal outcome. Cabrera’s performance at the plate might represent genuine, long-lasting improvement. But if it isn’t, he’ll be useless in an outfield corner, and the Royals simply have to make room for one of their centerfield prospects. The optimal outcome is that some contender will look at Cabrera’s performance, his defensive versatility – he should be even more appealing to a team that needs a corner outfielder – his salary, and the fact that he’s a 15-month, not a 3-month solution, and pay accordingly. In an efficient market, Cabrera should have the most trade value of any of the Royals’ veteran players. If he can’t bring back a borderline Top 100 prospect, he should at least fetch a pair of moderate-upside lottery tickets in the low minors.

But if we’ve learned anything from the trade market these last few years, it’s that the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Twenty years ago, Larry Andersen could get you Jeff Bagwell. Twelve years ago, Heathcliff Slocumb was worth Derek Lowe and Jason Varitek. But last year, two-and-a-half years of Danny Haren only brought back a couple of Grade B prospects and the desiccated remains of Joe Saunders. Teams have become ridiculously protective – too protective, in my opinion – of their prospects. In the case of some of the other guys on this list, the Royals’ best option is to take the best offer. In Cabrera’s case, though, if the right offer doesn’t come along, the Royals are best served keeping him.

Potential destinations: The Legend of Sam Fuld is progressing towards an unhappy ending in Tampa Bay, although I worry that the Rays value defense too much to settle for Cabrera, even in left field. (Besides, they could just bring Desmond Jennings once he heals from his hand injury.) The White Sox are all-in for this year, so if Moore is okay trading Cabrera within the division – which I doubt he is – Cabrera would be a big upgrade over Alexis Rios (.213/.262/.309) in centerfield. The Angels are rumored to be interested in the Pirates’ Garrett Jones, and Cabrera is better than Jones in almost every way, so…and finally, there’s Atlanta, where the Braves are stuck with Nate McLouth in center, he of the .225 average and three homers. Cabrera’s first go-round with the Braves didn’t go well; it’s not clear whether they’d consider a return engagement. But you know Moore has Frank Wren on speed dial.

Likelihood he gets traded: 60%

Jeff Francoeur: One of the first questions that was presented to Jin Wong at the BP ballpark event was, “Why do so many of the contracts the Royals give to free agents include mutual options?” While Wong answered the question frankly – the Royals always start by asking for a club option, but they’re willing to compromise to a mutual option during negotiations – it still left unanswered the bigger question, which is, “what’s the point?” It seems like in any mutual option, either the player will decline if he had a good year – and can get more money elsewhere – or the team will decline if he didn’t.

But in Francoeur’s case, I wonder if he isn’t threading the thin line between “exceeding expectations” and “not meeting expectations”. Francoeur, as Joe Posnanski pointed out a few days ago, is hitting almost exactly at his career averages. The difference is that offense is down so significantly that his performance is considerably more valuable than it was three years ago. Add in solid defense in right field, and an exceptionally accurate throwing arm – he’s reached double digits in outfielder assists in every season of his career – and he’s a viable everyday player. He’s making $2.5 million this year, and his mutual option for next year is worth about $4.25 million. If Francoeur plays as well in 2012 as he has in 2011, he’s probably worth the contract – but just barely, which means it would be a good deal for both sides.

That assumes that he can maintain his seasonal performance, and given that he’s hitting .243/.288/.377 since May 2nd, and his history of hot starts followed by cold middles and ends, that’s quite an assumption. Francoeur’s defense and ability to crush left-handed pitching would make him a nice fit for many a contender’s bench, much like he helped the Rangers in that role last season. Trading Francoeur now wouldn’t preclude the Royals from bringing him back next season, given that he could always opt out of his portion of the option.

I think it would be absurd for the Royals to keep both Cabrera and Francoeur, but I also think it would be surprising if they traded both. Francoeur is unlikely to bring anything substantial in a trade – the Rangers gave the Mets the immortal Joaquin Arias for him last season – and if that’s all the Royals are being offered, they might as well hold onto him. An additional two months of full-time play will make a decision to bring him back next year much clearer.

Potential Destinations: Any team that’s interested in Cabrera might consider Francoeur as a backup plan. The Phillies have reportedly been looking for a right-handed-hitting outfielder for a while now, and Francoeur would fit them well as a platoon outfielder/pinch-hitter vs. lefties/clubhouse guy. His success with Texas last year ought to add to his appeal.

Likelihood he gets traded: 25%

Wilson Betemit: I’ve already discussed how ridiculous it is that Betemit is still on the roster. He’s probably the player most likely to be traded this month, because – now that he’s on the bench – he won’t earn free-agent compensation if the Royals keep him, and his ability to switch-hit, play both corners, and come off the bench gives him broad appeal. He’ll earn less than $500,000 the rest of the season. He should fetch something interesting, whether it’s a teenage arm with projection or a toolsy hitter with age on his side, who if everything breaks right could be the next Rey Navarro.

Potential Destinations: Both the White Sox (Brent Morel/Mark Teahen) and Tigers (Brandon Inge) have gotten next to no production from their third basemen this season. In particular, the Tigers’ lineup leans heavily to the right side, so picking up Betemit’s switch-hitting bat has additional tactical use for them. This would require Moore to be willing to trade in the division. In Betemit’s case, since he’s a free agent at year’s end, I don’t see why he wouldn’t, but you never know.

The Brewers are hanging in the playoff chase even though Casey McGehee has turned back into a pumpkin. The Brewers’ farm system is barren, but it’s not like Betemit was going to fetch a premium prospect anyway – there’s someone in that farm system the Brewers can trade for him. Like the Tigers, Milwaukee needs some balance in their lineup – Prince Fielder and Nyjer Morgan are their only left-handed bats in the lineup against right-handed pitchers.

The Cardinals would be a good fit, assuming they can forgive Betemit for breaking Albert Pujols’ arm – with his ability to switch-hit and play both corners, Betemit’s versatility makes him the perfect Tony LaRussa bench player. And if the Pirates decide to be buyers instead of sellers, Betemit would be a big upgrade over Pedro Alvarez or Brandon Wood or whatever prospect bust currently mans third base.

Likelihood he gets traded: 85%

Jeff Francis: On the surface, Francis doesn’t appear to be pitching all that well – he’s 3-10 with a 4.60 ERA, and opponents are hitting .289 against him. He’s better than that. He’s had fantastic control – he’s walked only 22 batters in 19 starts. His strikeout rate (just 56 Ks in 115 innings) is the lowest of his career, but with a new offensive ice age upon us, there’s more margin for error for a pitch-to-contact guy like Francis than there was a few years ago.

Francis is far more dependent on his defense than the average pitcher. For all the hype given to Alcides Escobar this season, the Royals’ defense as a whole is still lousy – they rank 28th in the majors in defensive efficiency, ahead of only the Cubs and Astros. Francis would look a lot better pitching in front of a strong defense – which most contenders have. He’s managed to stay healthy all season, and has gone at least 6 innings in 14 of his 19 starts, including 10 of his last 12. He’s also pitching much better of late – in his last four starts he’s allowed 21 hits in 24 innings, and walked just two batters against 13 strikeouts.

He’s not worth a heavy ransom, but he has the ability to take the ball every fifth day, throw strikes, and there’s still some upside here as he moves farther away from his shoulder surgery. He strikes me as someone who would also benefit greatly from a move to the inferior, i.e. National, league.

Potential Destinations: If the Reds decide to go for it this year – and despite being in fourth place, they’re the best NL Central team on paper – Francis would make a ton of sense. Their fifth starter at the moment is Dontrelle Willis, and if that’s not a cry for help, I don’t know what is. Francis’ groundball tendencies would play well in the bandbox that is the Great American Ballpark, and the Reds have a fantastic defense –Scott Rolen, Brandon Phillips, Jay Bruce, and Drew Stubbs are all elite defenders – which will make Francis look a lot better.

Likelihood he gets traded: 40%

Bruce Chen: In some ways, Chen is similar to Francis – they’re both left-handed starters with a checkered injury history, and neither of them can break 90 anymore. And in some other ways, Chen is quite different. While Francis is more of a groundball pitcher who throws strikes and hopes for double plays, Chen is an extreme flyball pitcher who succeeds by nibbling and never giving in. And unlike Francis, Chen has pitched very well over the last two seasons, at least by traditional metrics.

Since the start of last season, Chen has thrown 206 innings, and in that span he’s 17-10 (with the Royals!) with a 3.98 ERA. He’s allowed 74 unintentional walks, and struck out 138 – his strikeout rate is a little below-average, but much better than you’d expect for a guy with his velocity. He’s allowed 25 homers, which is an acceptable rate.

Since the beginning of 2010, Francis is 7-16 with a 4.79 ERA, and yet advanced metrics will tell you that Francis has actually pitched better than Chen over the last two years. Francis’ xFIP, which is basically ERA stripped of all the luck, was 3.79 last year and 4.01 this year. Chen’s numbers are 4.79 and 4.45.

In the end, I suspect Chen and Francis have roughly the same amount of trade value – they’re roughly comparable in terms of performance, they’re making roughly the same amount of money, and they’re both free agents at the end of the year. While I could see both getting traded, I suspect the Royals will want to hedge their bets by keeping one around in case they want to re-sign him this winter. I would probably lean towards keeping Chen, simply because I worry that Francis’ shoulder is a ticking time bomb. (Chen is a Tommy John survivor, which isn’t nearly as worrisome.) But I certainly wouldn’t go out of my way to bring back either pitcher, and if a decent offer is made, I’d happily move both of them.

Potential destinations: Any team interested in Francis will likely be interested in Chen, with the caveat that Chen is more of a fit for a pitchers’ park. The problem is that far fewer contenders seem to be desperate for starting pitching – or at least non-elite pitching – than you’d think. This is a pitcher’s era, and it shows in the rotations of good teams. The Diamondbacks, maybe? But they play in a good home run park either. Chen’s 3.56 ERA simply isn’t as special as it would have been three years ago, and there may not be much of a market for him.

Likelihood he gets traded: 20%

A reliever – pick one: You would think that the Royals would be looking at trade offers on Joakim Soria in a new light now. Much like having a heart attack and a near-death experience might cause you to change your eating habits, watching Soria’s career go through a similar near-death experience might have reminded the Royals of the fickleness of relievers and encouraged them to trade Soria for the best possible package.

I still don’t think that’s likely. While Soria has quieted some of the concerns about his performance, he hasn’t silenced them yet, and the offers are no doubt less generous than they would have been six months ago. And I think that having Soria as a security blanket for the ninth gives the Royals the breathing room they need to get creative with their other relievers – specifically, it gives them the cover to move Aaron Crow back into the rotation, either late this year or next year.

The irony is that Soria’s repertoire and history suggest that he would be far more suited for the rotation than Crow. But when Soria arrived on the scene in 2007-2008, the Royals had few good options for the closer’s role, and meanwhile they had a healthy Gil Meche and Zack Greinke in the rotation – and guys like Kyle Davies and Brian Bannister and Luke Hochevar looked better then than they do now. Today, the Royals have arguably their deepest bullpen ever, and the worst rotation in the majors, and as a result the Royals are not condemning Crow to a lifetime in relief like they did with Soria.

Maybe I’ve been so beaten down by the Royals that I’ve developed Stockholm Syndrome, but I don’t really mind if they keep Soria. As overrated as the closer’s role is, if having Soria around frees the Royals to use their other relievers in a more optimal fashion, then there are fringe benefits to keeping him. And while he is underpaid, he’s not nearly as underpaid as he was a year or two ago – he makes $4 million this year, but options for $6 million in 2012, $8 million in 2013, $8.75 in 2014 are only modest bargains.

That said, I absolutely think the Royals should trade a reliever, and maybe two. Relievers are probably the most commonly traded commodities this time of year, partly because there are so many of them, but also because virtually every contender could use help somewhere in their bullpen. The Brewers were so desperate for relief help that they just traded for Francisco Rodriguez and the ticking time bomb of his vesting $17.5 million option for next year. Suitors are lining up for Heath Bell like ABC had just announced he was the next Bachelorette.

The thing is, all the big names on the trade market are guys who are free agents at the end of the year, or next year at the latest. And they’re all guys making a market salary. That’s the way the market works, obviously; teams out of contention are willing to trade players who are no longer going to be with the team by the time they’re ready to contend anyway.

But what if a team is willing to trade a reliever – a good reliever – who won’t be a free agent for five or six years? And what if he’s a reliever who’s making the major-league minimum salary? Don’t you think a contender would be willing to pay a higher price for such a reliever than a three-month rental? What would you rather have – a half-season of Heath Bell (who’s making $7.5 million this year), or five-and-a-half seasons of Greg Holland, who’s making $400,000 this year and won’t even be arbitration eligible until 2014?

The Royals, more than at any point in their history, have a true excess of relievers on their roster. They can afford to trade a reliever, even a rookie reliever who won’t be a free agent until 2016 or 2017. Consider:

Holland, a rookie, has allowed 4 runs in 26 innings, with a ridiculous 32-to-7 strikeout-to-walk ratio.

Louis Coleman, a rookie, has a 1.97 ERA and has allowed 18 hits in 32 innings. He also has 39 strikeouts and 10 unintentional walks.

Blake Wood, a sophomore, has a 2.89 ERA in 37 innings. He has 33 strikeouts and 10 unintentional walks. (Late note: scratch Wood from this discussion after last night’s meltdown, when he threw just five of 20 pitches for strikes. His ERA is now 3.82; his K/BB ratio is 33 to 13.)

That’s three guys, two of whom have ERAs under 2 and more than 3 times as many strikeouts as walks, and all of whom are under club control for at least five years. And all three guys function as middle relievers; the Royals already have a closer and a set-up man in place.

That’s a lot of freaking talent for the middle innings of a ballgame. (And I’m not even including Tim Collins, who by virtue of being left-handed is a rarer commodity and one worth keeping.) It’s also sort of superfluous, particularly for a team with as many needs as the Royals have.

Furthermore, the Royals have yet more bullpen arms that are already pushing for an opportunity. Right-hander Kelvin Herrera (1.64 ERA, 49 Ks, 5 BBs in 44 innings) has been one of the breakout stars of the system, and was named to the Futures Game on Sunday (granted, he took the loss). Left-hander Kevin Chapman, the Royals’ fourth-round pick last year, has struck out 64 batters in 41 innings. Both are in Double-A right now, and will probably be ready by this time next year. In the meantime, well, the Royals are still paying Robinson Tejeda $1.55 million to pitch in Omaha, and his fastball seems to have come back – he has 26 strikeouts in 24 innings, against just six walks.

Frankly, they could give Vinny Mazzaro the last spot in the bullpen and it wouldn’t have a material impact on the team’s performance – we’re talking about the seventh reliever on the team, a guy whose job will solely be to pitch in games whose outcome has already been decided.

It would be an incredibly unconventional move for a team that is building for the future to trade a young player. But in this case, it is absolutely the right one. The Royals need to shift their priorities from stockpiling talent to arranging that talent in the mold of a contending team. The Royals have more relief talent than they need. They have a need for more talent in their starting rotation and in up-the-middle offensive players. This is the perfect time for them to trade from a position of strength to a position of weakness.

It will never happen, of course.

Potential destinations: Virtually every contending team in baseball.

Likelihood one gets traded: 5%

Others: Matt Treanor has value, as he’s given the Royals exactly what Jason Kendall was supposed to give them – enough OBP skills to make up for a lack of power, and a veteran catcher to help develop both Brayan Pena and the pitching staff – at a fraction of the cost. The Royals may want to bring back Treanor as Pena’s caddy again next year, and the only replacement for Treanor in-house would be Manny Pina, so I don’t see a trade as being likely. (Although I’d be in favor of it – as good as Treanor has been this year, this is him at his absolute best, and I’d rather scour the bargain bin again than expect a repeat performance.)

Chris Getz might be traded, in the unlikely event that a contending team has a pressing need for a second baseman who makes up for his complete lack of power with a .320 OBP. Billy Butler is a perennial subject of trade discussion, but aside from the fact that the Royals would be selling low, he’s not the kind of player who gets traded mid-season. The Royals would only trade Butler for guaranteed help in the starting rotation, and “guaranteed” means “already established in the majors”. A team in contention isn’t about to rob Peter to pay Paul. Mike Aviles has been mentioned as a trade candidate; he’s hitting .303/.325/.597 in Omaha, with nine homers in 30 games. Having worked tirelessly to destroy his trade value, Dayton Moore may finally cash him in for pennies on the dollar, but you’re not getting anything of value for a 30-year-old in Triple-A. Kyle Davies has good stuff, and he has the stuff to win 15 games in the majors, and he has good stuff, and if you’re laughing right now, you clearly don’t work in the Royals’ front office.

Conclusion: In researching possible destinations for the Royals’ most appealing veteran players, I was really struck by just how few contending teams have a pressing need at the positions the Royals can help them fill. That was even before I read this article. I still think the Royals will be aggressive in marketing their players; I’m just a little pessimistic that they’ll be able to trade all of them, or even most of them. Betemit seems like a no-brainer, simply because he’s seen as more of a super-utility guy than an everyday player, so even teams without a pressing hole will have interest. But beyond him, there are no sure things. If the Royals can move Betemit and Cabrera or Francoeur – they have to open an outfield slot for Lorenzo Cain, now hitting .319/.383/.535 in Omaha – anything else is gravy.

A lot can happen in the next two weeks; a starting pitcher might go down and a team that thought it was set suddenly isn’t. But right now, it looks like the Royals are unlikely to get more than a marginal prospect for Chen or Francis, if they’re able to trade them at all.

Double-A Scouting Report.

As many of you know, I’m in Kansas City this weekend to attend the Royals series. While I’ve spent most of the last two days doing a lot of media engagements – including my first-ever Kansas City TV appearance on the pre-game show today – tomorrow is dedicated to the fans. We’re having our first-ever Baseball Prospectus event at Kauffman Stadium tomorrow; while it’s sold out, if you happen to be at the game, feel free to stop by the right field stands in front of Rivals restaurant and say hi. I’ll be the guy wearing the 90s-era gray Royals cap.

I figure I owe you guys a column, and since the alternative is paying more attention to Kyle Davies on the mound – he’s not fooling anyone, well besides the Royals – here you go.

I have a friend I see who works as a scout for a major-league team, who I see every now and again in a social setting. I happen to run into him on Wednesday, and casually asked if he just got back from the road.

“Actually, I just came back from seeing Northwest Arkansas play,” he said.

So the following is a distillation of his comments about some of the Royals’ prospects. I wasn’t taking notes, so this isn’t a verbatim recollection. But it’s accurate enough.

On Christian Colon: “Yeah, he’s a utility player for me in the end. I guess you could compare him to a guy like Alex Cora – he’ll have a long career in the majors, he’s just not an everyday player.”

On whether, in a perfect world, Colon could turn into someone like Placido Polanco: “The problem with that is that Colon at 22 has the same speed that Polanco has today – and Polanco is 35.”

On Wil Myers: “That guy is going to hit, and hit for power. He’s just 20 years old, and I have no concerns that his doubles are going to turn into homers. [I mentioned some reports that he had a hitch in his swing.] I didn’t see that at all. My only concern with him is that he looked disinterested in the outfield – like maybe he still wants to be a catcher. But he definitely has the arm for right field.”

On Chris Dwyer: “Yeah, he’s a future reliever.”

On Kelvin Herrera: “Great arm. I had his fastball anywhere from 96 to 100. [100?] Yeah, 100. Really good curveball too. On the mound he sort of reminds me of the Nationals' Henry Rodriguez, but with much better control [4 walks in 41 innings this year]. The main issue is that he has control but not command yet. He can pump strikes in there all day, but they’re not always quality strikes.”

On Kevin Chapman: “Like Herrera, the report I filed is that he’s a future bullpen piece in the majors. Good fastball, and a really tight downer curveball. [Note: the report on Chapman when he was drafted was that he was fastball/slider; I don’t know if the curveball is new.] I saw Tim Collins in spring training and put a “50” on him [a 50 on the 20-80 scouting scale means he’s an average major-league player], and I just put a “55” on Chapman.”

On Salvador Perez: “I think he’s better than a backup catcher in the majors, but not quite an everyday guy. He’s a free swinger, and my experience is that guys who are free swingers, even as young as he is, aren’t going to change.  But he has power that pitchers will have to respect.”

On my comparison of Perez to Yadier Molina: “The guy I’d compare him to is someone like Rod Barajas. He’s got a great arm behind the plate and will be a plus defender; I just worry that he’s not disciplined enough to be an above-average hitter.”

Royals Today: Mid-Season Update.

Exactly halfway through the season, the Royals are 33-48, on pace for a 66-96 record, and all you need to know about this franchise is that the Royals have averaged a 66-96 record for the past 10 years. Honestly, a 33-48 record is about where I expected the Royals to be at this point in the season; I predicted that they would win 69 games, but I also expected them to be a better team in the second half of the season. If they pick up the pace even a little, they could win 70 games, something they’ve accomplished just twice in the last decade.

The shape of the team’s performance has to make you skeptical that they can accomplish even that. The Royals started 10-4, which means they’re 23-44 since – they’ve lost essentially two-thirds of their games for the last two-and-a-half months. Not even their annual dose of NL competition has helped; the Royals are 4-11 against NL opponents with this weekend’s series in Colorado left to play. From 2005 to 2010, the Royals were 58-50 in interleague play. In 2005 and 2006, the Royals went 19-17 against NL opponents even though they lost 100 games each season.

So yeah, there’s reason to worry that the Royals might be trending in the wrong direction. Then consider that the Royals have played 47 home games and just 34 games on the road so far. Then remember that the Royals have yet to play the Red Sox or Rays. Another 100-loss season is still in play. On the other hand, the Royals are playing much better than their 33-48 record. They’ve only been outscored by 49 runs all season; take out the Mazzaro game and their run differential is -32. Of their last 13 losses, ten of them have been by one or two runs. A preponderance of close losses is sometimes the fault of a leaky bullpen; in the Royals case it’s simply a matter of having rallies fall a run or two short.

Regardless, this season is less about wins and losses than it is about problems and solutions for 2012 and beyond. On that scoreboard, the Royals are doing a lot better than 33-48. While the well-documented problems with the Royals’ left-handed pitching prospects have people worried about the near future, let’s not forget that a pair of unexpected solutions have also presented themselves.

- Solution #1: Alex Gordon is hitting .293/.363/.479, in a down year for offense. He has 24 doubles, four triples, and nine homers – double those numbers, and you can see how impressive a pace he’s on. Thanks to Gordon, the Royals rank third in all of baseball in OPS from their left fielders, and they lead the AL by a country mile – the Yankees are second with a line of .264/.343/.418.

Gordon has also been a revelation defensively. His range has been fine – not outstanding, but certainly at least average. And his arm, of course, has been an absolute weapon. Gordon has 13 outfield assists in half a season. Thirteen assists is a good full-season total for any outfielder – in left field, it’s fantastic. In fact, Gordon has already tied the all-time Royals record for assists by a left fielder. Assuming my research is accurate, Gordon has tied Lou Piniella (1969) and David DeJesus (2009) with 13 outfield assists from left field. And there’s still half a season left to play.

Most importantly, Gordon has been healthy all season, missing only three games, all of them by manager’s choice. He leads the Royals with 2.8 WAR, and absolutely should be the team’s All-Star representative.

There’s always the chance this is a fluke half-season, but we’re talking about Alex Gordon here – the surprise isn’t that he’s playing so well, but that it took him until his fifth season in the majors to do so. Unlike his outfield mate Jeff Francoeur, Gordon has already shown the ability to fight his way out of a slump:

Opening Day – May 1st: .339/.395/.545

May 2nd – May 19th: .153/.219/.254

May 20th – Today: .315/.395/.521

There was some concern early on in the season that Gordon’s new-found production was coming at the expense of his plate discipline, and that once pitchers exploited his new-found aggressiveness he’d be in trouble. But Gordon’s patience has returned as the season has gone on  – he drew just eight walks in April, but 11 in May, and 14 in June.

In short, there’s every reason to think that Gordon’s performance is for real. Which means there’s every reason for the Royals to start thinking about offering him a long-term contract. The Royals have a policy of not offering contract extensions during the season, and in Gordon’s case I think that’s fine; even I would like to see him keep this performance up for a full season before I’m completely convinced. But if his final numbers are within range of where they are today, then locking up Gordon has to be the Royals #1 off-season priority.

Gordon is under team control for 2012 and 2013 as it is, but locking him for 2014 and 2015 – either through a 4-year deal or a 3-year deal with a club option – is imperative. Gordon will play the 2015 season at the age of 31. He’s a good athlete and takes very good care of his body, so I’m confident he will maintain his peak performance into his early 30s. The Royals have plenty of payroll space and can easily afford the 8-12 million dollars a year (depending on the length of the deal, options, etc.) that it will take to lock him up.

There’s another reason why the Royals need to keep Gordon around for the next several years, one that hardly ever gets talked about: he bats left-handed.

With Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas headlining the Royals’ farm system the last few years, the Royals seemed focused on getting right-handed hitters to protect Hosmer and Moustakas in the lineup. Two days before the Greinke trade, Moore was on radio talking about what they were looking to acquire, and while talking about the up-the-middle positions the Royals were trying to fill (catcher, shortstop, centerfielder), he specifically mentioned a “right-handed-hitting centerfielder”. This is why I took the Greinke rumors so seriously when Bernie’s Crew broke the trade – Lorenzo Cain fit Moore’s stated desire perfectly, and made me think the trade was nearly finalized when Moore was being interviewed.

The problem is that, aside from Hosmer and Moustakas, every other top hitting prospect in the system is right-handed. Alcides Escobar is right-handed. Billy Butler is right-handed. At second base, both Johnny Giavotella and Christian Colon (if he moves there) are right-handed. Salvador Perez is right-handed. Cain is right-handed. Wil Myers is right-handed. Even the low-level prospects with high ceilings, like Cheslor Cuthbert and Brett Eibner, are right-handed. Bubba Starling? Right-handed.

The best hitting prospects in the system who don’t bat right-handed? David Lough, who might be a fourth outfielder in the end. Jarrod Dyson and Derrick Robinson, who might be fifth outfielders in the end. Kila Ka’aihue and Clint Robinson, who are blocked with the Royals and no one takes seriously as prospects anyway. Finally, there’s the suddenly-interesting Rey Navarro, a switch-hitting middle infielder who just got promoted to Double-A the other day. And that’s it – you have to go down to the rookie leagues to find even a borderline prospect who doesn’t bat right-handed.

If you put together a projected Royals lineup for 2013, every hitter in the lineup is right-handed except for Hosmer and Moustakas. And Gordon.

C: Perez (R)

1B: Hosmer (L)

2B: Colon or Giavotella (R)

3B: Moustakas (L)

SS: Escobar (R)

LF: Gordon (L)

CF: Cain (R)

RF: Myers (R)

DH: Butler (R)

All things considered, you’d rather have more left-handed hitters in your lineup than right-handed hitters, simply because most starting pitchers are right-handed, so you’d rather have the platoon advantage more often than not. (Besides, most of the left-handed starting pitchers play for the Royals already.) You can survive with six right-handed hitters in your lineup, but it’s not ideal. Starting seven right-handed hitters is an invitation for abuse – every team in the AL Central will carry some low-slot right-handed specialist with the express purpose of carving up the Royals’ lineup.

There’s two take-home points from this:

1) The Royals need to figure out a lineup that splits up their three left-handed hitters, because it makes absolutely no sense to bat, say, Hosmer and Moustakas back-to-back followed by five right-handed hitters. At the same time, you don’t want any of them batting seventh. When you think about it, having Gordon in the leadoff spot makes a ton of sense. Gordon leads off, Hosmer bats third, Moustakas bats fifth, and you fill in the other guys as needed.

2) The Royals really can’t afford to let Gordon get away in two years.

- Solution #2: Five weeks ago, Felipe Paulino was a 27-year-old journeyman who had been traded for a washed-up veteran (Clint Barmes) and waived in the span of a few months. He had a career 5.93 ERA in the major leagues.

Today, if my life was on the line and I had to pick one Royals starter to win a game for me, Paulino wouldn’t just be my choice – he’d be the only choice.

It’s hard to overstate just how impressive Paulino has been. He entered the game on May 27th just minutes after he arrived at the ballpark to join his new team; he retired 13 of the 14 hitters he faced that night and the Royals won in extra innings. He’s made six starts since, and all of them have been impressive in their own way.

His last two starts may have been his finest work, even though he gave up nine runs in 15 innings. On June 23rd against Arizona, he gave up runs in each of the first four innings – and then retired twelve straight batters from the fifth to the eighth inning before tiring in the ninth. On Tuesday against San Diego, he gave up hits to five of the first eight batters he faced, and allowed three runs in the first two innings. He then pitched five more innings and allowed only an unearned run.

In the two starts, he walked just two batters, while striking out 15. If that’s how he performs when he’s struggling, sign me up for more struggles.

Since joining the Royals, Paulino has thrown 42 innings, and has allowed just 10 walks (one intentional) and two homers, while whiffing 36 batters. His peripherals are even better than his 3.21 ERA, and his ERA is easily the best in the rotation.

And like Gordon, there are very good reasons to think Paulino’s performance isn’t a fluke. That’s because there are very good reasons to think that Paulino’s 5.93 ERA before joining the Royals was the product of terrible luck more than terrible pitching. In 223 career innings, Paulino had walked 90 batters unintentionally – not great, but not terrible – and had struck out 201. He had allowed 32 homers, but he wasn’t a flyball pitcher – his groundball percentage of 42% is about league average.

The bottom line: Paulino’s xFIP – which is basically a measure of what his ERA should have been, given normal luck – was about 4.25. And there was reason to think that he was capable of improving on that mark – his average fastball velocity has been over 95 mph every year of his career. Last year, only Ubaldo Jimenez and Stephen Strasburg threw harder among starting pitchers.

Since joining the Royals, Paulino hasn’t been lucky; it’s just that he’s finally pitched the way you’d expect a man with his stuff to pitch, and his ERA finally reflects the way he has pitched. After barely a month with the Royals, Paulino looks like Dayton Moore’s greatest find since at least Joakim Soria. Oh, and he’s under club control through the 2014 season.

Paulino’s emergence goes a long way towards making amends for the struggles of Mike Montgomery and Chris Dwyer and the injury to John Lamb. Combined with Danny Duffy’s step forward this season, the Royals now have two potential above-average starters for their 2012 rotation. Luke Hochevar drives us crazy, but he’s at least worthy of the #5 starter’s role, with some upside.

There’s a big difference between having three holes in your rotation and two. The Royals need to be aggressive in acquiring an established starting pitcher between now and next spring, whether it’s on the free-agent market (which is incredibly weak, but does include Edwin Jackson, who I like) or on the trade market (which I plan to talk about in a future column.) But Paulino allows the Royals the flexibility of only having to fill one rotation spot with a high-end acquisition, as the remaining rotation spot can either be filled internally (if Mike Montgomery rights himself over the last two months of the season, or if Aaron Crow gets an audition in the rotation and nails it) or externally by means of another low-cost low-upside signing along the lines of Jeff Francis or Bruce Chen.

Meanwhile, the Royals have more relievers than they know what to do with – Nate Adcock is the only guy in the pen who isn’t dealing, and guys like Kelvin Herrera and Kevin Chapman are already dominating in Double-A. The lineup features five obvious solutions (Gordon, Butler, Hosmer, Moustakas, Escobar), and in Giavotella and Cain, the Royals have two major league-ready hitters who could step in tomorrow and provide average production at second base and in centerfield.

I know it’s hard to look past the wreckage of another 95+ loss season. But the Royals are still well positioned to go into 2012 with reasonable expectations of a .500 season, and a shot at contending if everything goes right. They’re still well positioned to ascend to the top of the AL Central in 2013, and stay there a while.

As I write this, the Royals are getting destroyed by Colorado, 9-0. And you know what? It’s still a good day as a Royals fan, because down in Omaha, Mike Montgomery returned to the rotation after skipping a start and responded with 6.2 shutout innings in his best outing of the season. I know things look dim in the here and now. But I’m still convinced that light at the end of the tunnel really is the sun.

Grantland.

I have very few rules in life, but one of them is this: when I get a direct message on Twitter from @sportsguy33 asking for my email address, I give it to him.

This morning, I made my debut over at Grantland, which you can read here. Hold on to your seats, but it's about the Royals. If you're shocked at how short the article is, keep in mind that my original draft was approximately 237,000 words. (Apparently there are these people called "editors" whose job it is to make your articles more concise. Who knew?)

If you're a regular reader of mine, then this column doesn't break a lot of new ground, but it's a good primer for the regular sports fan. And it was worth it if only to confirm that yes, aside from the Expos/Nationals, every other sports franchise in America has made the playoffs since 1986.

(It was cut from the original piece, but even more humiliating is this fact: between the four major sports, there have been 24 expansion franchises which have started play since 1986. EVERY ONE OF THEM HAS MADE THE PLAYOFFS TOO, with the exception of the Houston Texans, who have been in existence for all of nine seasons. All four baseball expansion franchises have been to the playoffs at least twice, and all four have been to the World Series.)

It's too soon to know whether I'll be writing regularly for Grantland or not; if I do, I'm sure I won't be writing about the Royals every time. So you'll still see me here writing regularly.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the piece. Since Grantland doesn't allow for comments yet, feel free to leave your feedback here.

Ballpark Event At The K.

For years Baseball Prospectus has conducted events at major-league ballparks around the country, giving fans a chance to come out and meet their favorite writers, hear from executives from their local team, and enjoy a great game of baseball all in one evening. However, until now, no event had ever been held at Kauffman Stadium.

That is about to change. For the first time ever, Baseball Prospectus is holding an event in Kansas City. On Saturday, July 9th, you can come out to the ballpark early and meet your favorite Baseball Prospectus writers, including minor-league expert Kevin Goldstein; Craig Brown (also of Royals Authority); Jeff Euston; and Joe Hamrahi. You can also meet me.

You'll hear from us, and you'll also hear from someone in the Royals front office who will talk about the organization and answer questions. You'll also get a ticket to that evening's game against the Tigers; we'll all sit out in right field in front of Rivals during the game and continue our conversations, while waiting to fight over a home run ball from Hosmer or Gordon.

The game is a 6:10 start, but the fun begins around 4 o'clock. The cost of the entire event, including your ticket to the game, is $30. And if you are a current or prospective subscriber to BP, you'll get half of that money back in a $15 rebate to a BP subscription.

I'd love to meet as many of you as possible that evening, so if you can make it, please sign up here. Please note that registration for the event ends on Monday, so please sign up as soon as possible.

Bubba.

For better or for worse, whether Bubba Starling winds up in the Hall of Fame or winds up ahead of Roscoe Crosby on the list of “Five-Tool High School Outfielders Who Went Bust” – he is a Kansas City story now. The highest-drafted high school player in the history of the state of Kansas, and the highest-drafted player of any sort from the Kansas City area, was selected by his hometown team. With the fifth pick in a loaded draft, the Royals bypassed numerous other options, including Baseball America’s consensus #1 prospect in the draft, Anthony Rendon, in order to take the local kid.

It’s a fairy tale story, even if we’re still on chapter one, and even if we have no idea whether the story has a Disney ending or a Tim Burton one. Decades from now, stories will still be written about the day the local kid fell in love with the local team, and the team fell in love with him, and how these two entities were destined to wind up together in lifelong bliss or heartbreak or War of the Roses-like acrimony or however the story turns out.

What might be lost to history, or buried as an inconvenient truth, is this: the Royals didn’t really want Bubba Starling. He wasn’t the love of their life; he was their BFF who was still standing there when all their true loves were spoken for.

The Royals will never state this publicly, but multiple sources – most recent Baseball America’s Jim Callis, who joined me on my radio show last Thursday – have indicated that the Royals had their eye on four players, and Starling wasn’t one of them. Eyeing their short-term needs for starting pitching, the Royals wanted a close-to-the-majors pitcher. By that, I mean they wanted a college pitcher or an unusually polished high school pitcher (cf. Zack Greinke) who might be ready for the majors within two years.

There were three elite collegiate pitchers in this draft, UCLA’s Gerrit Cole and Trevor Bauer, and Virginia left-hander Danny Hultzen. Meanwhile, Dylan Bundy emerged out of an Oklahoma high school with the rare combination of power stuff and uncanny poise for an 18-year-old kid. The Royals drafted fifth, and until 15 minutes before their pick, they were fairly certain they were drafting one of these four guys.

And then the Mariners, who were widely presumed to have their eye on Rendon (and if not Rendon, a high school hitter like Starling or Francisco Lindor), blew up everyone’s draft board by taking Hultzen. The Pirates had already selected Cole #1 overall; Arizona and Baltimore followed with Bauer and Bundy. Drafting fifth, the Royals had their eye on four pitchers. For the first time in the history of the draft, pitchers were selected with each of the first four picks. Figures.

So no, Bubba Starling wasn’t the player the Royals had pined for all season long. But man, he is one hell of a consolation prize.

This was not a charity pick, or a selection made by the team’s marketing department. Bubba Starling was pretty clearly one of the top five talents in the draft. At least one analyst, my friend Joe Sheehan (and with the caveat that Joe isn’t a draft expert), felt Starling should have been the #1 pick overall. The fact that Starling went to high school 40 miles away from Kauffman Stadium is a wonderful fringe benefit, but I doubt that factored into the pick in any significant way.

In the history of the franchise, the Royals have drafted only two players who have gone on to display true five-tool talent in the major leagues. The first was Bo Jackson, and I’m stretching the definition of “five-tool” with Bo, because one of the five tools is hitting for average, and not even Art Stewart probably thought Bo would make enough contact to be more than a 50 hitter. (I’m using the 20-80 scouting scale here, where 50 is major-league average.)

But I’m listing Bo anyway, because when he was drafted, he had legitimate 80 power. A tool of “80” is absolutely elite; there might not be ten players in the major leagues with 80 power at any time. Bo also had 80 speed. He also had an 80 arm. If I understand things correctly, Bo Jackson is the only player of the draft era who had an 80 in all three of those categories. He was a freak when he was drafted in 1986, and he’d be a freak today.

(While Bo is the only player with 80 power/speed/arm, he’s not the only guy with an 80 grade for three of the five tools. Call me crazy, but when Ichiro was a rookie you could argue he had an 80 hit tool (he led the league in batting average), 80 speed (he led the league in steals), an 80 arm (ask Terrence Long), and an 80 glove (he won a Gold Glove as a right fielder). That’s pretty damn impressive.)

The other five-tool talent, who did a much better job of actualizing his tools than Bo did, was Carlos Beltran. I don’t know that any of Beltran’s tools were 80-grade, but he was an above-average hitter and well above average in the other four categories.

Bubba Starling has a chance to be the third. Even those draft experts who didn’t think he was the best player in the draft agree that he had the highest upside in the draft. He has crazy power, well above-average speed, terrific defensive instincts, a cannon for an arm. There’s nothing he can’t do on a baseball field.

Of course, most of the baseball fields he’s played on have been in Kansas, and meaning no disrespect to my homeland, many of the pitchers he faced in high school would struggle to make the JV team in southern California. The history of the draft is littered with high school outfielders who could run like the wind, hit balls into parking lots, got drafted in the top half of the first round – and whose knees buckled the first time they saw a professional-grade curveball.

Roscoe Crosby, the Royals’ second-round pick in 2000 (and who got top-15 money to sign), played high school ball in South Carolina, also not a baseball hotbed. We’ll never know if he could hit a curveball, because he never saw one – at least not in a game. Crosby never played a game in his career. Not a major-league game – a minor-league game. Starling is no Crosby, but he is baseball’s version of Mauna Kea – his ceiling is in the stratosphere, but his floor is buried a few miles under the ocean waves.

That said, the risk level with Bubba Starling is a lot lower than it would have been 20 years ago, for the same reason that the risk level for high school players in general is lower. We don’t have to evaluate Starling based on his performance against Kansas high school pitching. Like most elite high school players, Starling has faced off against some of the nation’s other high school players in showcase events.

He also played for Team USA’s Under-18 team last summer at the IBAF World Junior Baseball Championships. He not only held his own, but for a player facing the best pitchers he had ever stepped in against, he dominated. In 19 games, he hit .339 with a .532 slugging average, and most impressively, his OBP was .474 – suggesting that even against the best teenager pitchers in the world, he was able to control the strike zone. The vast majority of first-round tools guys who don’t pan out are done in by their plate discipline. Starling stands a much better chance of converting his prodigious tools into stardom if he doesn’t undermine them by swinging at unhittable pitches.

Two years ago, the San Diego Padres used the third pick in the draft on a similar tools-heavy but raw high school outfielder named Donovan Tate. To this point in his career, Tate has been a bust – owing mostly to the fact that he can’t stay healthy, but also because he simply hasn’t hit enough to bring his other tools into play. The consensus in the industry, though, is that even before he was drafted, there were very genuine concerns about Tate’s bat – much more so than there are with Starling.

My biggest concern with Starling is a concern I have with more and more draft picks – his date of birth. Starling was born August 3rd, 1992 – meaning he’ll already be 19 years old by the time he signs with the Royals. This is a societal trend, not a baseball trend – whereas a generation ago, parents wanted to get their kids into kindergarten as soon as possible, parents are more and more inclined to hold their children back from kindergarten a year so that they’ll be more mature and ahead of the other children in their class. (This process has become so prevalent that they call it “redshirting”.) Starling turned six before he even started kindergarten*. If he had started kindergarten when he was five, as many kids still do, he would have been eligible for the draft last year. (And come to think of it, the Royals probably would have drafted him last year as well.)

*: I’m assuming here that Starling wasn’t held back at some point in his academic career.

I talked about this on The Baseball Show with Joe Sheehan, but I’m willing to bet – and would love for someone to do the research – that high school players taken in the first round are older, as a group, than they were 10 or 20 years ago. It seems like more and more drafted players turn 19 the summer after they are picked. It might be a faulty perception on my part, but I’d certainly love to know either way.

While Starling turns 19 soon, the second-best high school hitter in the draft, Francisco Lindor, was also one of the youngest players in the draft – he doesn’t turn 18 until November. It’s worth noting that the two biggest high school phenoms of the draft era – Ken Griffey Jr and Alex Rodriguez – were both 17 when they were drafted. Every high school hitter taken #1 overall in the last quarter-century was either 17 or a very young 18 when he was picked – Joe Mauer and Chipper Jones were born in April, Josh Hamilton and Adrian Gonzalez in May. Justin Upton was still 17 when he was picked. Mike Trout, who was the #25 pick in 2009 but quickly made the 24 teams that passed on him look foolish, was just 17 on draft day. And Bryce Harper is in his own category.

Starling’s older than all of those guys. Particularly given the lack of reps Starling has taken against elite competition, the Royals have to hope that he is more refined than he looks, because the clock is already ticking. It’s hard to overstate just how important another year of development is at that age. The difference in future potential between a 25 and a 26 year old is minimal. Between an 18 and a 19 year old? It’s massive.

I don’t want to make too much of the age issue – after all, Delmon Young was also a #1 overall pick who was just 17 when he was drafted. Four years ago, the Royals elected to take Mike Moustakas, who turned 19 the September after the draft, instead of Josh Vitters, who turned 18 the August after the draft. The 11-month gap between them worried me greatly – but in the case of those two specific players, the Royals seem to have made the right move. Let’s hope they once again made the right decision that Starling, despite being 15 months older than Lindor, is still the better prospect.

Tactically, yes, the Royals’ failure to land an elite starting pitcher hurts them in the short term. The Royals’ youth movement has taken over the bullpen, and the offense is settling into place nicely – not only are Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas already in place, and not only has Alcides Escobar been possessed by the ghost of Arky Vaughn, but the Royals already had two key pieces of the future lineup in place in Alex Gordon and Billy Butler.

But on the pitching side, the Royals were essentially starting from scratch at the start of the season. The only member of the Opening Day rotation who might figure in the team’s long term plans was Luke Hochevar, and even that is debatable. While Danny Duffy arrived ahead of schedule and struck out an astonishing nine batters in 3.2 innings yesterday*, John Lamb is out for the year, Chris Dwyer’s ERA in Double-A is over 6, and last night, you could almost hear the warning sirens going off on the mound as Mike Montgomery gave up nine runs and four homers in three innings down in Round Rock.

*: Despite leaving the game in the fourth with a leg cramp, Duffy became just the fourth pitcher in Royals history to strike out nine or more batters in one of the first seven appearances of his career. Two of the other three are Steve Busby – the only guy to strike out 10 – and Paul Splittorff. The third is Runelvys Hernandez.

It’s not true that prospects are designed to break your heart. But it is true that pitching prospects are designed to break your heart. The Royals had three elite hitting prospects at the start of the season; two are in their lineup, and Wil Myers, who qualifies as a “disappointment” relative to the other two, is hitting .281/.347/.407 in Double-A and is just 20 years old. But the pitchers…oh, the pitchers.

If the best way to develop two good starting pitchers is to start with ten pitching prospects, then the only solution to the Royals pitching problems is more pitching. Before the draft, Soren Petro had an extended conversation with Joel Goldberg about this very subject on 810 WHB, arguing that the Royals simply had to draft more pitching because, as we’re seeing with the Royals’ farm system, the failure rate with pitching prospects is so high.

I’m not so sure I agree. Yes, most pitching prospects don’t pan out, and the Royals need more pitching prospects if they think they can build an entire rotation out of their farm system. But precisely because most pitching prospects don’t pan out – even the best of them – is the answer really to spend a precious top-five draft pick on yet another pitching prospect who might not pan out? That’s sort of like saying that since most penny stocks wind up being worthless, the key to amassing a fortune is to buy as many penny stocks as you can.

Or you can diversify and invest in a blue-chip stock instead. That’s what Bubba Starling is, relatively speaking. No, he’s not a safe college hitter like Rendon is, but in addition to his upside, Starling plays a key up-the-middle position, and the one weakness of the Royals’ farm system is the lack of elite prospects up the middle. At shortstop (Escobar) and catcher (Salvador Perez) the Royals have, at least, elite defenders. Starling gives them a potential up-the-middle player who’s a star in both halves of the inning.

As for the solution to the pitching problem, there is a solution other than “draft more pitching”. The solution, in two words, is: Felipe Paulino. It’s early, but Dayton Moore may have struck gold here.

The problem with pitchers isn’t that none of them are any good, obviously – unless we’re playing on the other side of Lake Wobegon, some of them have to be above-average. The problem with pitchers is that it’s so hard to figure out which ones are going to be good. This is a crisis when dealing with draft picks or minor leaguers. But it’s an opportunity when looking for pitchers in other places, like the waiver wire. Show me a great offense, and I’ll show you an offense where nearly every player was expected to be good – meaning they were either developed internally, traded for in kind, or signed for big free agent dollars.

But show me a great rotation, and that’s not always the case. Sure, the Phillies’ Fab Four were expected to be great, but most rotations have at least one surprise pitcher, someone who was acquired for next to nothing. I mean, where would the Yankees be this year without Bartolo Colon?

The 1991 Braves, who I’m contractually obligated to bring up every couple of months when writing about the Royals, had drafted Steve Avery and Tom Glavine. But John Smoltz was in Double-A and going nowhere when the Braves snagged him in the famous Doyle Alexander trade. And the veteran that held the staff together was Charlie Leibrandt, who was given up for dead by the Royals after the 1989 season, when he almost single-handedly killed the team’s playoff hopes with a 5.14 ERA. (This was back in the days when a 5+ ERA was grounds for dismissal in Kansas City. Today, he’d be the Opening Day starter.) The Royals traded him to Atlanta for the immortal Gerald Perry – and it turns out Leibrandt had three more great seasons left to give.

The 1985 Royals had one of the great collections of young homegrown pitching talent ever – Bret Saberhagen, Mark Gubicza, and Danny Jackson were all rookies together in 1984. But they also had, well, Charlie Leibrandt, who had been acquired from Cincinnati for Bob Tufts in the summer of 1983 – Tufts would never again pitch in the majors. The fifth starter, Buddy Black, had been acquired as a player to be named later from Seattle in exchange for a guy named Marty Castillo.

Even the 2008 Rays, who won the AL pennant without ever starting a pitcher more than 26 years old, relied on shrewd player acquisition more than development to build their rotation. Their only two homegrown starters were James Shields (16th round pick) and Andy Sonnanstine (13th round pick). Matt Garza was acquired in the blockbuster deal that sent Delmon Young – who had just finished second in the Rookie of the Year vote at the age of 21 – to Minnesota. Edwin Jackson had been pilfered from the Dodgers for a couple of middling relievers in Danys Baez and Lance Carter. And Scott Kazmir had been stolen…well, “stolen” isn’t the right word. I’d say “taken at gunpoint”, but the Mets were pointing the gun at themselves. Anyway, the Rays got Kazmir for Victor Zambrano in the greatest WTF? trade of the 21st century.

The point is that while it’s great if you can build a rotation entirely from within, a failure to do so isn’t damning, so long as you can find a starter or two off the waiver wire or trade for them on the cheap.

Moore has certainly tried to find diamonds in the rough for his pitching staff, and in the bullpen he’s done great work – Joakim Soria was a Rule 5 pick obviously, and Robinson Tejeda was picked up off the waiver wire. But he let Jorge de la Rosa slip through his fingers, and while it took a few seasons, de la Rosa blossomed into an above-average starter with the Rockies (before blowing out his elbow this year.) But in Paulino, Moore might have finally found the gem he’s been looking for in the starting rotation.

Look, if Cole or Bauer or Bundy had been available, I would have preferred them to Starling. (Not so much Hultzen, who’s a safe, polished lefty without much upside. I’m not sure what the Mariners were thinking, to be honest.) But the pitcher they wanted wasn’t there, and you have to let the draft come to you. All things equal, maybe you draft for need, but things weren’t equal when it came to the Royals’ pick.

There were two players that stood apart from the rest, Starling and Rendon. If Starling bombs, they’ll be plenty of regrets that they didn’t take Rendon, who could be in the majors by this time next year if his shoulder doesn’t need surgery. (No, the Royals didn’t need a third baseman. But you know who really didn’t need a third baseman? The Nationals, who have Ryan Zimmerman locked up through 2013, and took Rendon anyway. When you have the opportunity to get a #1 pick-caliber player with the #6 pick, you draft first and ask questions later.) But if Starling hits, he’ll give the Royals something Rendon couldn’t – an elite hitter and defender at an up-the-middle position.

There’s still the matter of getting him signed, and yes, he’s a Boras client, and yes, he has a scholarship to play quarterback at Nebraska waiting for him. But the Royals have drafted Boras clients with their first pick three times in the last four years, and signed them all. And while Starling can play quarterback, he’s more of an option quarterback than pro-style passer – his NFL future pales to his MLB one. His two-sport status allows the Royals to spread out his bonus over five years. Expect him to sign a few minutes before the deadline on August 15th. I predict a bonus of between $7 and $7.5 million – the highest draft bonus in franchise history. I also predict that he will not get a major-league contract that would put him on the 40-man roster, which is important given that the roster is stuffed to the gills as is.

As for the rest of the story, we’ll just have to wait and see. As Alex Gordon can attest, when a player signs with his local team, not even an elite minor league career guarantees a happy marriage. As Jeff Francoeur can attest, not even a standout rookie season can offer protection against a nasty break-up. I have no doubt that Starling and the Royals will have their ups and downs, they’ll make mistakes and have regrets. All relationships do. But I choose to believe that they just might live happily ever after. What can I say? I’m a sucker for fairy tale endings.

***

The Royals got back to their roots after picking Starling, selecting high school players with each of their first five picks. After Starling, they took Cameron Gallagher, a prep catcher out of Pennsylvania; Bryan Brickhouse, a pitcher from the same Texas high school as rookie Kyle Drabek and last year’s #2 overall pick Jameson Taillon; a short but athletic right-hander from Florida named Kyle Smith, and a power-hitting shortstop from Texas named Patrick Leonard.

The Royals’ draft was most notable for not being notable. In the last three drafts, the Royals took advantage of other team’s penurious ways to grab players with signability issues in the middle rounds. In 2008, they took Tim Melville, a first-round talent, in the fourth round, and gave him $1.25 million to sign. In 2009, they grabbed Wil Myers (who they almost took with their first pick) in the third round and gave him $2 million; they took borderline first-rounder Chris Dwyer in the fourth round and gave him $1.45 million. Last year, they gave second-rounder Brett Eibner $1.25 million, and they snagged local high school right-hander Jason Adam in the fifth round, paying him $800,000 to sign.

This year, then, was conspicuous in that there were no eye-catching draft picks of players who deserved to go higher on talent alone. I’m not blaming the Royals for that necessarily; they’ve shown their willingness to pay big bucks to players they felt were deserving in the past, and it’s not like Starling was a signability pick. As more and more teams get religion about the draft and realize how foolish it is to draft a lesser player in order to save a few hundred grand, there are fewer and fewer opportunities to draft elite talents in the later rounds to begin with. True, the Royals could have taken someone like high school lefty Daniel Norris with their second pick; Norris was a first-round talent who reportedly wanted $3.9 million to sign. But given their track record, the Royals deserve the benefit of the doubt that they passed on Norris not because they couldn’t afford him, but simply because they wanted Gallagher more.

The one player who might have gotten away, through no fault of the Royals, is Jason Esposito. Esposito, you might recall, reportedly had a deal in place to sign with the Royals out of high school after the Royals took him in the 7th round in 2008. He (allegedly) agreed to sign for $1.5 million, then had cold feet after the draft and elected to attend Vanderbilt instead. He went into this season as a potential top-15 pick, but struggled a little with the bat and was expected to go in the supplemental first round.

Instead, he made it all the way to the second round – where the Orioles, drafting one pick ahead of Kansas City, snatched him. I have no idea whether the Royals would have taken him – but given their obvious interest in him three years ago, given that he fell in the draft farther than anyone expected, and given that he’s an excellent defensive third baseman, you have to wonder whether the Royals, for the second straight round, were screwed out of the player they wanted with one pick to go.

(Remember Alex Gordon’s two-out walk-off homer of Alfredo Simon last July? If Gordon had struck out instead, the Royals draft fourth ahead of Baltimore, and I might have just spent 5000 words writing about Esposito and Dylan Bundy. This is the Butterfly Effect applied to baseball.)

On paper, the choice of Cameron Gallagher makes me queasy – the last time the Royals took a Pennsylvania high schooler in the second round it was Jeff Bianchi*, and the last time they took a high school catcher in the second round it was Adam Donachie, whose claim to fame was hitting a homer off of the Royals’ first-round pick – Zack Greinke – in high school. Bianchi’s struggling after coming off Tommy John surgery; Donachie washed out years ago.

*: And the last time the Royals took a Pennsylvania high schooler in the first round, it was Chris Lubanski. Before him, it was Jim Pittsley. Oh, the humanity.

Brickhouse is more interesting; he has shown the ability to get his fastball in the mid-90s, but his breaking stuff needs work, and he doesn’t have the smoothest delivery in the world. Kyle Smith, for the round he was taken, is my favorite of these three picks. He throws in the low 90s, but with good secondary pitches, good command, and with more athleticism than Brickhouse. What dropped Smith in the draft is his size – he’s listed at 6’ even, and watching some videos of him online, I find it hard to believe he’s even that tall. I’ve long felt that teams downgrade short pitchers in the draft excessively, ever since the Royals grabbed a 5’9” pitcher with a dominant fastball and curveball in the 6th round in 1986. Tom Gordon was the Minor League Pitcher of the Year in 1988, nearly won the Rookie of the Year award in 1989, and pitched 21 seasons in the major leagues.

While the Royals didn’t get any steals in the draft, none of these guys were overdrafts either; according to Baseball America, they were all drafted about where you’d expect. Gallagher, taken with the #65 pick, was BA’s #64 draft prospect. Brickhouse (drafted #95) was #74; Smith (#126) was #106. The bottom line is that the Royals’ selections weren’t made on the basis of money, but simply on the basis of talent.

Given the front office’s track record, that’s good enough for me. While the Royals get a lot of attention for their willingness to go over slot, which has landed them Melville and Myers and Dwyer et al, some of their best picks have been guys who were drafted where they were expected to be drafted, and who signed for slot.

That 2008 draft? The Royals took Eric Hosmer* with the third pick, even though Baseball America ranked him the #7 player in the draft. With the #36 pick overall, the Royals took Mike Montgomery, who BA had ranked #40. Montgomery was your typically long-limbed projectable left-handed pitcher; no one knew if he would add velocity after he was drafted, but he did. With the #49 pick, the Royals took Johnny Giavotella, shocking everyone both because he seemed a bit of an overdraft (BA ranked him #127) and because a short college second baseman seemed the antithesis of the typical Dayton Moore pick.

The two guys that fell to the Royals were right-handers Tyler Sample (ranked #42, drafted #80), and Melville (ranked #15, drafted #115). While both are still legitimate prospects, the bullpen may be the future destination for both. And after taking Melville, the Royals used their fifth-round pick (#145) a pitcher who missed his entire senior season with a broken elbow, and who didn’t make BA’s Top 200 Draft Prospect list at all, John Lamb.

*: Thank God the Pirates took Pedro Alvarez with the #2 pick that year. Not only because it spared the Royals from the possibility of taking him, but because I’m pretty sure they would have taken Hosmer anyway. That would have provoked one of the most vicious – and in retrospect, one of the dumbest – articles I would have ever written. So thank you, Pittsburgh, for not making me look stupid. Sorry you wound up with the dunce cap instead.

The 2008 draft may go down as one of the best in the history of the franchise – more on that later – and yet their best draft picks were all guys who were drafted no lower than, and in many cases much sooner than, expected. The two guys who appeared to be great value for their draft slot have been the two most disappointing players in the first five rounds.

The point is that shrewd drafting has played at least as much a part in building the Royals’ farm system as the willingness to spend money. My comparison of Gallagher to Bianchi and Donachie is valid only if you think there’s no difference between the crew Dayton Moore has assembled to scout talent, and the skeleton crew that Allard Baird had at his disposal. Given the focus on high school talent once again this year, it will be years before we know how this draft pans out, and years before any of these guys – even Starling – helps the Royals at the major league level.

But if the Royals did nothing to help the team win in 2012 and 2013 and maybe even 2014, they may have done a lot to help the team win in 2015 and beyond. If you believe, as I do, that there’s enough talent on hand for the Royals to contend in the next three years – even with pitchers dropping like flies – then this draft may help elevate the Royals from an occasional contender to a budding dynasty.

Or it may be a total bust. Bubba Starling is a microcosm of the entire draft – the downside is frightening, but the upside is tremendous. Given the franchise’s track record, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

Moose.

Let me start with the good stuff. I think Mike Moustakas was absolutely deserving of a major-league callup, and despite his superficially unimpressive numbers in Triple-A, I feel like his return engagement in Omaha could have hardly gone better.

Let’s go back to what Moustakas did last year. After missing the first couple of weeks of the season with a strained oblique muscle – perhaps a blessing, given his notorious struggles in cold weather in the early part of every season – he debuted for Northwest Arkansas with a bang, hitting two homers in his first game. In 66 games in Double-A, he hit .347/.413/.687, with 21 doubles and 25 homers. (And not that they mean anything, but he had 76 RBIs in 66 games.) His teammate Clint Robinson won the Texas League Triple Crown; Moustakas was on pace to beat Robinson in every category before he was promoted.

Moustakas continued to hit in Omaha, but his weaknesses were more exposed. He hit .293/.314/.564, with 15 homers and 16 doubles in 52 games. But he drew just eight walks, exposing Weakness #1: he’s too much of a free swinger.

After accounting for park effects, Moustakas actually hit right-handed pitching about as well in Triple-A as he did in Double-A; after clubbing right-handers for a .349/.421/.716 line at Northwest Arkansas, he hit .333/.356/.667 against them in Omaha. But after hitting .348/.426/.640 against southpaws in Double-A, Moustakas hit .222/.250/.383 against the more polished, craftier left-handers in Triple-A.

It’s a small sample size – just 81 at-bats – but the stats fit with the scouting narrative of Weakness #2: Moose is vulnerable to left-handed pitching.

Weakness #3 is no secret: Moustakas isn’t the most agile third baseman in the world. He has that squat, low-center-of-gravity body type that made a lot of scouts want to see what he could behind the plate, but doesn’t necessarily make for Gold Glove play at the hot corner. He has a cannon arm that compensates for his lack of range to some degree, but he’s still below-average overall.

So Moustakas returned to Omaha to start the year, and once again the cold weather – or something about the month of April – didn’t agree with him: he hit just .229/.304/.410. He hit four homers, but notably, just one double. With Eric Hosmer ahead of him in the lineup and hitting .439, the contrast was notable – one top prospect was clearly ready, and the other one clearly wasn’t.

But in May, Moustakas turned it on, hitting .321/.382/.560. His homers ticked up from four to five, but he smacked 11 doubles. In seven June games before he was called up, he hit .323 with three more doubles and a homer. His final line of .287/.347/.498 did not represent an improvement on his Omaha line from last season, but the trendline was very promising.

More importantly, look at his weaknesses:

He’s too much of a free swinger. Even in April, Moustakas drew nine walks, a number he matched in May. He drew 19 walks overall in 223 at-bats, after he walked eight times in 225 at-bats in Omaha last year. Not one of his 19 walks was intentional – the product of batting in front of Clint Robinson – so Moose actually had the highest walk rate of his career when he was called up.

This is meaningful. Moustakas is never going to be a 100-walk guy, not unless he hits for so much power that pitchers just refuse to throw him strikes, Sammy Sosa-style. He doesn’t need to draw 100 walks to be valuable. He simply needs to show enough discipline at the plate that pitchers know they need to challenge him. One of Moustakas’ strengths as a hitter is that he doesn’t strike out a lot for a power hitter, but his ability to make contact can make it tempting for him to swing at – and make weak outs on – pitches that other hitters can’t reach.

(The curse of easy contact is what has hamstrung the career of Josh Vitters, the player drafted immediately after Moustakas, and who the Royals were planning to pick until the morning of the draft. For four years, Josh Vitters has been described as having the prettiest swing you’ll ever see from a right-handed hitter, and he rarely strikes out – his career high is 65. But his career high in walks is 21, and he’s still trying to get out of Double-A.)

My worry with Moustakas was that if he reached the majors before his plate discipline improved, he’d be eaten alive. I hoped that another two months in Triple-A would prevent that. It appears that they have.

Moose is vulnerable to left-handed pitching. Small sample sizes and all that, but in 73 at-bats against lefties in Triple-A, Moustakas hit .260/.325/.507, a line not statistically distinguishable from his .300/.357/.493 line against right-handed pitchers. I suspect Moustakas will still struggle against left-handers more than Hosmer will, at least in the short term, but it doesn’t appear to be a crippling problem.

Moustakas isn’t the most agile third baseman in the world. At least from a scouting perspective, there’s no change here; Moustakas is a below-average, but playable, third baseman. There are legitimate long-term concerns with Moustakas, that if he gains any more weight in his lower half as he moves into his mid-to-late 20s, that he’ll have to move off the position. I wouldn’t be offering him any seven-year deals, let’s put it that way. Since his agent is Scott Boras, we’re probably not in any danger of that happening.

From a statistical perspective, though…traditional defensive stats are worthless at best, and misleading at worst. Minor league fielding stats are even worse. The only reason to look at fielding percentage would to make sure the number doesn’t start with an “8”. Moustakas’ career fielding percentage at third is .936; this year’s it .942. Those are low numbers for a major leaguer, but minor league fielding percentages generally improve in the majors owing to better field conditions.

But what strikes me as interesting about Moustakas’ fielding numbers is his range factor, which is simply the number of plays he makes per game. Compared to fielding percentage, range factor is 100 years more advanced; unfortunately, that’s the difference between the 1870s and the 1970s. But it’s something. And after never making more than 2.80 plays per game at third base, Moustakas’ range factor this season is 3.20.

For a third baseman to make 3.2 plays per game is astounding. Ryan Zimmerman and Scott Rolen, to take two Gold Glove third basemen of recent vintage, never made 3.2 plays per game, at either the major or minor league level. I don’t know that it means anything; maybe more balls were simply hit in the general direction of third base. You’d expect that if the Omaha pitching staff didn’t strike out a lot of guys – but they’ve averaged 7.3 Ks per 9 innings. You’d expect that if Omaha started a ton of left-handed pitchers – they’re a little above-average in that regard, as 25 of 66 starts have been made by lefties (mostly Duffy and Montgomery), but nothing exceptional.

Or maybe it’s a stone-cold fluke. Range factor, like RBIs, is subject to a lot of biases. A range factor of 3.20 is like having 65 RBIs in 55 games. You can have all those RBIs without being a great hitter, but you probably can’t have that many RBIs without being at least a good hitter. Moustakas probably can’t have a range factor that high without being at least a decent third baseman.

So anyway, even though the value of his performance in Omaha this year was no better than last year, I think Moustakas is significantly more ready for the majors now than he was at the start of the year. If there were any doubts about his plate discipline, they were dispelled when he drew a walk in each of his first four games. Moustakas is the first player in Royals history to draw a walk in the first four games of his career. Yeah, I didn’t see it coming either. But I’m glad it came.

Having said all that…I still don’t understand why he was called up when he was. As with Hosmer, it’s easy to let the excitement of having another piece of the puzzle on the roster overshadow the very real concerns with the timing.

First off, there’s a chance – a slim chance, but a chance – that Moustakas will still qualify as a Super Two. I take it on faith that the Royals would not have brought him up on June 9 unless they were absolutely, completely certain that he would not get the service time he needs. (It’s important to remember that the season started early this year, on March 31, which would move all the usual deadlines back a few days.) But what was the downside if they had waited another week and brought him up at the start of interleague play, which was apparently the plan? Was it really that important to get Mike Aviles off the roster? If they didn’t want to play Aviles at all, they could have just let him sit on the bench for a week. Mitch Maier could have given him pointers.

That is, I am hoping, a moot concern. What isn’t a concern is this: overnight, the Royals turned Wilson Betemit from an everyday third baseman into a bench player. And on this team, “bench player” means “cheerleader.” I really don’t know what the Royals think of Betemit. On the one hand, he’s an ex-Brave, and Dayton Moore signed him as a minor league free agent when he had washed out of the Yankees and White Sox organizations. On the other hand, all Betemit has done since he was promoted last year is hit, and evidently that has not been enough to impress the team’s brass.

Last season he hit .297/.378/.511 for the Royals, one of the great half-seasons in franchise history. The Royals’ response, from what I have heard, was to give Betemit a $1 million, take-it-or-leave-it offer; they were prepared to release him rather than go through arbitration if he wanted more. Perhaps surprisingly, he took it.

This season, Betemit is hitting .289/.348/.411 – not great numbers, but still well above-average in today’s world. (He was hitting .314/.379/.449 on May 30 before going into a 3-for-24 slide.) Two days ago, Buster Olney wrote, “The Royals' Wilson Betemit is drawing a lot of interest from rival evaluators, because of his positional flexibility, because of his production and because he's damn cheap -- his salary this season is $1 million.”

If rival evaluators are coming to see Betemit play, they’re going to be disappointed. In the first five games since Moustakas was called up, Betemit didn’t get off the bench. The Royals gave him a spot start today, undoubtedly cognizant of the fact that he’s not going to increase his trade value growing splinters in his butt.

Betemit isn’t Jose Guillen here – this isn’t like the Royals refusing to take a look at Kila Ka’aihue so Guillen could pump his trade value enough to fetch…Kevin Pucetas, who was taken off the 40-man roster to make room for Moose. Betemit is a free agent at the end of the year, but he’s an above-average hitter at a key position, he’s a switch-hitter, he’s dirt cheap, and even if he’s not the best defender in the world, that has value. Plus, he might fetch a draft pick at the end of the season – although the odds of that go down with every game he sits out.

Maybe the Royals have been feverishly trying to trade Betemit since December with no luck, and just got tired of waiting. But it feels like the Royals are so committed to their youth movement that anyone who’s not a part of it is treated like an afterthought. Moustakas is ready – promote him! We’ll figure out what to do with Betemit afterwards!

The Royals feel like Betemit is not a part of their future on the field, and that’s fine; while he’s a talented and versatile player, the positions he can play are already spoken for in Kansas City. But Betemit does have a part in the Royals future, in the guise of whatever young talent he can bring back in a trade. Every day he sits on the bench is a wasted day for him, and a missed opportunity for the Royals.

That’s the strategic loss of promoting Moustakas last week. The tactical loss is this: Wilson Betemit is now the Royals’ backup shortstop. He is also the Royals’ backup second baseman. In the last three seasons, Betemit has played 57 innings at shortstop. He has played 16 innings at second base.

Admittedly, he has spent more time at both positions while in the minors. But the reality is that there’s no way Ned Yost is going to feel comfortable playing Betemit at either position, and short of an injury or a 17-1 game, I can’t imagine a situation in which Yost removes either Alcides Escobar or Chris Getz from a game.

Which means the Royals are now locked at not one, but two positions. The Royals have two players in their lineup who absolutely will not come out of a game – and who just happen to be the two weakest hitters in their lineup. The Royals only have three bench players as it is – generally Maier, Betemit, and whichever catcher isn’t starting. When you have only three bench players, and the two weakest hitters in your lineup are sacrosanct, you’re basically sending a message to the opposing team, a message that says, “Bring in any pitcher you want against my ballclub. I won’t retaliate.”

(And yes, I’m well aware that Escobar is 16 for his last 29, raising his batting average 40 points in the process. That doesn’t invalidate my criticism of Ned Yost for refusing to pinch-hit for him. My point was not that Escobar wasn’t capable of improvement – on the contrary, I have repeatedly praised Yost’s track record in developing young hitters. But the Royals can have their cake and eat it too – Escobar’s development as a hitter isn’t going to be hurt if they pinch-hit for him every now and then. No matter how well Escobar is hitting, against a tough right-handed closer with the game on the line, I’d rather have Mitch Maier at the plate. Yost hasn’t made that switch once this season, and with Wilson Freaking Betemit as the backup shortstop, you’re sure as hell not going to see it now.)

With interleague play about to start up, it would seem that the Royals would have to – please?! – send down their 13th pitcher to bring up another hitter, as otherwise they’re going to have four players (counting Butler) they can pinch-hit with, meaning they could easily run out of pinch-hitters in an extra-inning game and be forced to hit with Jeff Francis or something. Jarrod Dyson’s speed and defense would make him a useful player in that role. But unless the Royals recall Mike Aviles after one week (which I’m not sure is even allowed by the rules) or do something crazy like call up Irving Falu, the same problem will remain: Chris Getz and Alcides Escobar will play. Every inning. Of every game.

Is that the sign of a team that takes winning seriously?

Again, in the grand scheme of things, these are annoyances, not catastrophes. Not wringing the most value out of Wilson Betemit because Mike Moustakas was ready to be called up is a wasted opportunity. Mike Moustakas not being ready to be called up in the first place would be cause for alarm. Losing a few extra games this season because you placed the entire lineup in a straitjacket is frustrating. Losing a few extra games each of the next few seasons because your young players weren’t as good as you thought they were would be heartwrenching.

The narrative is the same as always. Dayton Moore & Co. are doing a bang-up job of developing young talent, and everything else is just details. But details do matter. Maybe one day they’ll get them right.