We're Going Streaking!

If you want to understand why the Royals fan base is so jacked up, it boils down to one thing: This is the team Dayton Moore wanted. This is the team Moore promised was the payoff for our patience. The 2014 Royals, the culmination of The Process, are in first place at the 72-game mark of the season for the first time since 1980.

A lot can happen in three weeks of baseball, but what has happened in the last three weeks of baseball is almost unprecedented in Royals history, which is why I can take the lede to a column I wrote for the Kansas City Star on June 1st and tweak a few words to make it mean the exact opposite of what it meant then. I’ve written many things that look ridiculous in retrospect – but it usually takes a lot more retro than this.

You might recall that as a sop to the organization I finished my column with a caveat – “Moore deserves a little more time to turn this season around — if the team goes on a stretch where it wins 15 out of 20, as the Royals did last year, they might lead the wild-card race and quiet their critics.” The team didn’t go on a stretch where it won 15 out of 20 – it was already in such a stretch, starting the day that Dale Sveum was hired as the team’s new hitting coach on May 29th.

Along the way they won 10 games in a row for the first time since 1994, the second time since 1978, and the fifth time in franchise history. (By comparison, the Royals have lost ten games in a row six times – just since 2005.) I wouldn’t argue that it’s the most unlikely winning streak in team history; I think the 9-0 start to the 2003 season was more unlikely, coming from a team that had lost 100 games the year before. But I don’t think any winning streak in the history of the Royals has changed the narrative of the franchise quite like this one has. On the morning of June 7th – 13 days ago! – they were 29-32 and tied for last place. Yet tonight I’m writing this column from the press box at Kauffman Stadium, looking out at what I believe is the first sold-out crowd I have ever witnessed here – a sold-out crowd to watch a first-place baseball team.

And it’s time for me to acknowledge that…well…I’m not saying I was wrong – about the Royals, the Shields trade, Jason Vargas, a lot of things. It is June, after all, even if the deliriously festive mood among Royals fans – and the incredulous reaction from the rest of baseball – would have you believing it’s late September. But I have to acknowledge at least the possibility that I was wrong. Very wrong.

The funny thing is that the standings are not all that different from what I (or a lot of observers) expected before the season began.

Team          W   L  Pct.   GB

Kansas City  39  33  .542  ---

Detroit      37  32  .536  0.5

Cleveland    37  36  .507  2.5

Chicago      35  38  .479  4.5

Minnesota    33  38  .465  5.5

I projected the Royals to win 85 games before the season, which at the 72-game mark would project to a 38-34 record – they’ve literally won one more game than I would have expected. The Tigers are two or three games behind where I expected them to be, but I thought they were vulnerable before the season – I saw them as maybe a 90-92 win team. Honestly, the most surprising part of the AL Central standings are that the White Sox and Twins are so close to .500.

But of course here are the standings on the morning of May 19th:

Team          W   L  Pct.   GB

Detroit      27  12  .692  ---

Kansas City  22  21  .512  7.0

Minnesota    21  21  .500  7.5

Chicago      21  24  .467  9.0

Cleveland    19  25  .432 10.5

It’s when you look at the standings from a month ago that you realize the real story of the AL Central isn’t the rise of the Royals – the Indians have actually played better (18-11) than Kansas City (17-12) in that span – but the collapse of the Tigers. Detroit has followed a 27-12 start by going 10-20 since. That, to me, might be even more surprising than what the Royals have done. I didn’t expect the Tigers to play .692 ball all season, but I also didn’t expect the three-time defending AL Central champions, who had the best record in baseball a month ago, to lose two-thirds of their games for the next month.

And so here with are, 90 games left in the season, the Royals and Tigers essentially tied. The two teams represent a fascinating contrast of styles, both in terms of the way they were built – the Royals largely from within, the Tigers mostly through trades and free agent signings – and in terms of strengths and weaknesses. The Tigers have the two-time defending AL MVP in Miguel Cabrera, an almost equally terrifying Victor Martinez, and an excellent rotation in which Justin Verlander is suddenly, and clearly, the worst starter. The Royals have a good rotation that looks great because it’s backed by the best defense in the game; excellent team speed; and a bullpen that has been as impervious as the Tigers’ bullpen has been leaky. This could be a fascinating pennant race because it’s as much a referendum on baseball philosophy as it is a clash of two equally-matched baseball teams. (Just watch: the Indians will wind up winning it.)

There are still reasons to think the Royals are the underdog here, for the simple reason that, objectively speaking, they’ve been a little lucky. I’m not just referring to the first win in this 15-of-20 stretch coming after Jose Reyes made a bad throw to first base on what would have been the final out, or the last win in this stretch coming when Alex Gordon’s routine grounder hit the second base bag and took a crazy bounce, allowing Eric Hosmer to score in what turned out to be a one-run win. Although those certainly count.

What I mean when I say the Royals are lucky is this:

The Royals are hitting .261/.314/.372. They’ve scored 304 runs.

The Royals’ opponents are hitting .252/.315/.383. They’ve scored 286 runs.

The Royals are allowing more offense than they’re generating – pretty much the same OBP, and a touch more slugging. (The Royals have hit for a higher batting average, but once you’ve accounted for OBP and slugging – remember, batting average figures into both of them – there’s no advantage to a higher batting average.) Yet they’ve outscored their opponents by 18 runs. Some of that may be team speed; the Royals have stolen 31 more bases than their opponents while being caught only five more times. But that’s a difference of three or four runs, which might make up for the slight edge in power but no more. The Royals are, on paper, a .500 team.

The Tigers, meanwhile, have hit .272/.325/.431; their opponents have hit .259/.322/.409. Again, the Royals have an edge in speed, and these numbers don’t take into account the Royals’ amazing ability to throw out baserunners from the outfield. But at least on paper the Royals are the slightly inferior team.

But they don’t play games on paper, and they’re only slightly inferior. And the Royals have one additional asset the Tigers lack – a farm system capable of bringing back premium talent. I don’t get the Jeff Samardzija rumors at all; it’s not just that it might take someone like Ventura or Duffy to get the deal done, but that I’m not even certain Samardzija would represent that much of an upgrade on the five starters the Royals have now. (Keep in mind that I still consider the NL to be an inferior level of competition, and am always leery of players who move to the superior league.)

If David Price is available, then yeah, everything is on the table. I just don’t think the Royals need to waste valuable farm system resources on pitching when they still have an acute need for a hitter. The Ben Zobrist rumors intrigue me; Zobrist is arguably the most underrated player of the last decade, and from 2009 to 2013 ranked third in all of baseball in bWAR. They also frighten me – he’s 33, having an off-year that may or may not signal a real decline, and you know how I feel about the Royals trading with Tampa Bay. But he would fill a need at the one position the Royals seem willing to upgrade – right field, with the added benefit that 1) he could fill in at third base if Moustakas continues to hit .170, or second base if Infante gets hurt again, or pretty much anywhere else on the diamond; and 2) he has a club option for 2015, which would give the Royals another year to develop a long-term solution (hopefully Jorge Bonifacio, who is hitting .225/.295/.332 in Double-A but is only 21) at the position.

Dayton Moore has indicated the Royals are still a few weeks from making any big moves to upgrade the team. That makes sense if the Royals need more time to figure out where their needs are – but it’s pretty clear what this team needs, and it’s pretty clear that even one less win that is the result of waiting a month to pull the trigger on a trade could make the difference between playing in October and going home early.

But at least we’re talking about who the Royals need to acquire instead of who they need to deal. A few weeks after we were talking about what we could get James Shields, we’re talking about who the Royals would have to give up for David Price. Yeah, it’s only June. But if you think being in first place in June doesn’t matter, you need to see what I’m seeing right now, a packed house at Kauffman Stadium watching a first place team. Thanks to Alex Gordon, Danny Duffy, and yes, the Tigers, this season is turning out to be a hell of a lot more fun than we thought it would be a month ago. I’m going to hold off on proclaiming the Royals’ greatness, or flogging myself for daring to question the wisdom of the Shields trade, for a while longer. Let’s just enjoy being in a pennant race for now. For now, that’s enough.

Turnaround.

If you can figure out the 2014 Royals, well, you’re smarter than I am.

Two weeks ago the Royals hit their low point of the season, what Alcides Escobar called the low point of his time in Kansas City. They got swept at home by the Houston Astros, a team that had lost 106 games each of the last three years, which meant one of two things: 1) the Royals got swept – no, dominated – at home by a terrible, terrible team; or 2) the Astros are not a terrible team anymore, which meant that in his third year as general manager, Jeff Luhnow had accomplished what it took Dayton Moore until his seventh full season to do. The Royals then proceeded to fire their hitting coach, moving on to their sixth hitting coach since the end of the 2012 season.

From May 1st to May 28th, against a relatively easy schedule, the Royals had gone 10-16. They headed to Toronto to play the first-place Blue Jays, the beginning of a much more difficult part of their schedule.

Naturally, they’ve gone 9-4 since.

Which means I really should revise that opening sentence to read: if you can figure out the 2014 major league baseball season, well, you’re smarter than I am. Because if there’s one thing that the first 10 weeks of the season have taught us, it’s that you can throw out all your preconceived notions from before the season of which AL teams are good and which teams are bad, making my distinction between the easy and hard parts of the Royals schedule meaningless. About all we know is that the A’s are really good, the Blue Jays are better than expected, and that the Rays are a mess. Everything else is arguable.

Going into last night’s games, every AL Central team except the Twins had exactly 33 wins; 3.5 games separated first from last. Twelve of the 15 AL teams are within 3.5 games of .500. To put it another way, the 14th-place Boston Red Sox are just 6.5 games behind the 3rd-place L’Anaheim Angels. No one knows anything. The Astros aren’t that bad. The Tigers aren’t that good.

Ah yes, the Tigers. The Tigers, who started the year 27-12 and had me writing off the Royals – or any other AL Central team’s – divisional title hopes completely. It’s not that I expected the Tigers to play .692 ball the rest of the way – it’s that they had built such a lead that, if they were to simply go 62-61 the rest of the way, they would win 89 games. And I figured that a team that starts 27-12 – and has won the last three AL Central crowns – is probably going to do better than 62-61.

Instead, the weaknesses that were apparent in their roster prior to the season – and that they somehow rendered irrelevant for 39 games – finally showed up expecting payment with interest. The kryptonite of Dave Dombrowski’s SuperGM act – his inability to build a bullpen, and his strange willingness to overpay for veteran closers – has been brought out of hiding. Joe Nathan, who had a 1.39 ERA last year and got a two-year, $20 million contract this winter, has an ERA over 7. The Tigers’ bullpen as a whole has a 4.68 ERA, which is the worst in baseball. And their inexplicable hubris after Jose Iglesias went down – content to completely punt the shortstop position rather than sign the Stephen Drew that was just sitting there – has burnt them badly. Their shortstops have combined to hit .204/.267/.277 and are 8 runs below average defensely according to Baseball Info Solutions. Last week they turned to Eugenio Suarez, a prospect of modest status, after just 13 games in Triple-A. It might work; knowing the Tigers, it probably will.

But in the meantime, after starting the year 27-12 the Tigers went 6-16 before winning last night. Put it this way: if the Royals had won just one of the five games between the two teams, they would have been tied for first place before last night’s game. Against the other 28 teams in baseball, the Royals are 33-27 and the Tigers are 29-28.

Beyond the wins and losses, the Royals look to be in a much stronger position than they were two weeks ago. When Yordano Ventura walked off the mound on May 26th, I didn’t expect to see him on a mound again until July of 2015 or so. The Royals waved off the injury with almost shocking insouciance, and it was fair to be skeptical of their claims that Ventura only needed to miss one start. This is a franchise that has downplayed setbacks to minor league pitchers like John Lamb and Kyle Zimmer over and over again.

But if there are two guys in the organization who I trust, they are Nick Kenney and Kyle Turner, and sure enough Ventura was back on the mound ten days later. He’s won both of his starts since, although I think it’s relevant to point out that 1) he has struck out just four batters in 13 innings since returning and 2) according to his velocity charts, his average fastball velocity is down about 1 mph compared to before his elbow hurt. If that’s just a case of Ventura being a little more careful about airing out his arm, it’s no big deal. If that’s a sign that his arm isn’t 100%, that’s a problem. For now, it merits watching.

Equally concerning was Danny Duffy’s arm after he got bombed on May 28th with a fastball that dropped from his usual 94 mph average to around 92 mph. The Royals once again downplayed it as a “dead arm”, and once again subsequent events have proven them right – Duffy’s velocity returned to normal his next time out, when he allowed one hit in six innings. As important as this 9-4 stretch has been to the Royals, having their two best young starters apparently healthy – when the health of both of them was very much in question the last time I wrote – is even more important in the long run.

And while Ventura and Duffy appear healthy, they were healthy before their last start of May and the Royals were still 24-28. What’s made the difference is that the lineup, starting the day Dale Sveum was hired, has actually resembled a major league caliber offense. The Royals have scored 60 runs in 13 games with Sveum as their hitting coach, or 4.62 runs per game. In their 52 games before that they had scored just 197 runs, or 3.79 runs per game. I’m certainly not attributing improvement in that small a sample size to Sveum – but it’s a happy coincidence for the Royals, at least.

The end result is that a franchise which was teetering on a revolution two weeks ago – forget the fan base or deranged bloggers, even Ken Rosenthal had written an article hinting that a major shake-up might be necessary soon – has righted the ship. It’s symbolic that after enduring a six-game losing streak by Memorial Day for each of the previous ten years, the Royals have so far avoided such a fate this year. They came right up to the line – they lost five in a row and then needed extra innings in San Diego to avoid a sixth straight loss – but so far they’ve been able to stop the bleeding.

The Royals might be surprised to learn that the #1 complaint I received to my column in the KC Star was that I didn’t go far enough. When I wrote that, “Moore deserves a little more time to turn this season around — if the team goes on a stretch where it wins 15 out of 20, as the Royals did last year, they might lead the wild-card race and quiet their critics,” I heard from a lot of people that I was being soft on the front office for not demanding they clear out their desks immediately. The criticisms were neatly summed up by Scott McKinney’s comment at the very end of this thread:

“So at the end of June, the Royals will probably be a little higher in the standings than the[y] are now, and Rany will still not be calling for Moore to be fired. I admire his restraint.

In all honesty, Rany is being as patient, and thus as incompetent, with regard to Dayton Moore as David Glass has been.”

Well, it’s not even the middle of June yet, but the Royals are alone in second place, 2.5 games out of first place and a game out of the wild card, and guess what, Scott? I’m still not calling for Moore to be fired yet. And you know why? Because they’re alone in second place, 2.5 games out of first place and a game out of the wild card. That’s the way the world works. After eight years, Moore needs to be judged by the performance of his team today rather than the potential of his team tomorrow. But at least at the moment, the performance of his team doesn’t merit a housecleaning.

I’m not entirely convinced that will remain the case. The Royals are above .500 but have been outscored by eight runs on the season; more concerning, they have scored more runs than expected from their underlying performance and they have allowed fewer runs than expected from their underlying performance. According to Baseball Prospectus’ adjusted standings page, the Royals second-order winning percentage – what their winning percentage should be based on the number of singles, doubles, homers, walks, etc. they’ve both scored and allowed – is .444. That’s terrible – the equivalent of a 72-90 record. There may be good reasons for the discrepancy between how the Royals have played and how they should have played, but I remain leery that the Royals can play better than they have, which is something they’ll need to do if they want to reach the playoffs.

But for the moment, at least, they’re in it to win it. Talk of trading James Shields has stopped, although there are still seven weeks until the trading deadline. Speaking of Shields, as I am legally required to bring up The Trade at every opportunity, I should link to Sam Mellinger’s excellent piece here, which I almost entirely agree with. To wit: it’s still too early to declare a winner. If the Royals go to the real* playoffs this year – with Shields starting Game 1 of the playoffs (or winning the Wild-Card game) and Wade Davis the eighth-inning shutdown option, I will happily declare victory for the Royals. Ending a 29-year playoff drought is a legacy no one can take away from Dayton Moore.

*: As I’ve said before, if the Royals reach the Wild-Card game but lose – particularly if Shields starts the game – the legacy of the trade becomes much more ambiguous. Is half a playoff spot still a playoff spot? How you answer that will determine how you view the trade.

But can I just say that people who keep harping on Wil Myers’ performance (or lack thereof) this season are missing the point? If Myers were raking, but the Royals were running away with the AL Central, most people would say that the trade was worth it – and they’d be completely justified. The Royals made the trade not to get rid of Myers, but to acquire Shields, and they acquired Shields with one purpose: to make the playoffs in 2013 or 2014. That’s why I get so rankled when the Royals distance themselves from those playoff expectations. Myers didn’t hit well at all this year – although he still has a higher OPS than Nori Aoki! – and then hurt his wrist, so 2014 may well be a lost season for him. But in 2015, he’ll be a 24-year-old starting right fielder for the Rays, and the Royals’ starting right fielder will be…uh, we’ll get back to you on that.

Wade Davis has been as dominant as any reliever in baseball this year…but keep in mind that to acquire Aoki – to replace Wil Myers’ bat in the lineup for just one season – the Royals surrendered Will Smith, who has a lower ERA (0.88) than Davis (1.23). I’d rather have Davis too – but after this season, the Royals will have to pay Davis $25 million for the next three years if they choose to keep him. Smith, meanwhile, won’t be arbitration-eligible until 2016. I highly doubt that the Brewers would trade Smith for Davis straight-up today.

We’re getting deep into the weeds here, and we haven’t even mentioned Jake Odorizzi. I’m not trying to build a trench around my position that the Royals got screwed in the trade. On the contrary: I’m acknowledging that if they make the playoffs this year, and if (as is likely) they would not have made the playoffs with Myers and Odorizzi, the trade may prove to be everything the Royals expected it to be, and I may owe Dayton Moore a huge apology. But that depends very little on what Myers is doing in Tampa Bay, and very much on what the Royals are doing in Kansas City.

Two weeks ago, what they were doing was getting their ass kicked by a team that’s five years behind them in their rebuilding process, and harsh criticism was warranted. Today, it’s not entirely clear what the Royals are doing. Which is a good thing. They’ve got a little more than three months to justify the trade. More importantly, they’ve got a little more than three months to bring playoff baseball back to Kansas City for the first time in a generation. If they do the latter, I’ll suck up my pride and admit I was dead wrong about the former.

Year Nine.

I may not have the time to write about the Royals nearly as often as I used to, but when the Kansas City Star asks me to write for the Sunday paper 1200 words of hot fire (^TM, Sam Mellinger) on the developing nightmare that is the 2014 season, I’m there. If you haven’t read it already, you can do so here. I hope you like it.

Because newspapers are not printed on scrolls, I didn’t have the time to expound on every little detail about the Royals; fortunately, that’s why I have this blog. Let’s talk about some those other issues.

- To be completely fair, it’s a little early to characterize this season as a disaster quite yet, which is why I stepped just short of the line of calling for Dayton Moore to be fired this instant. The 2014 AL is just crazily compressed, more than I can ever recall a league being at the beginning of June. 

Yes, the Royals are in last place in the AL Central as I write this, but they’re also just two games out of second place. They’re in 13th place in the American League (!), but just 3.5 games out of the wild-card spot. Call it the 15-out-of-20 rule, in honor of Moore’s drop-the-mic moment from last year: so long as the Royals can reasonably expect to lead the wild-card race if they win 15 of their next 20 games, it’s premature to give up on the season – and the front office – entirely.

But I am becoming more and more skeptical that such a thing is possible by the moment. It’s not just that the longer the season goes on, the more likely it is that Eric Hosmer and Billy Butler and the newly-returned Mike Moustakas are not just in an epic early-season slump, but that this is simply who they are. It’s not just that the longer the season goes on, the more likely it seems that the Royals may in fact finish with fewer home runs than Barry Bonds hit by himself in 2001.

For one, there’s the schedule. As I wrote back in early April, the Royals actually had one of the easier early-season schedules in baseball, easy enough that it was entirely reasonable that they would be 34-22 at this point. Instead, they’re 26-30, and now it gets harder – with the necessary caveat that it’s not entirely clear which teams are good and which teams are bad this year. They’ve finished their entire season series with the Astros, for instance – and didn’t that go well! – but have yet to play the Yankees or Red Sox at all. If you believe the current standings, that doesn’t sound so bad. If you believe that there’s some relevance to the Red Sox being defending world champions, it doesn’t.

They just played a Blue Jays team which looks like it will be a force in the AL East all season, and were lucky to get a split – if Jose Reyes simply completes a routine throw from shortstop to end Thursday night’s game, the Royals would have lost three of four. From now until June 30th, the Royals play the Cardinals, Yankees, Indians, White Sox, Tigers, Mariners, Dodgers, and Angels. There are no patsies in that bunch. They could easily repeat their 12-17 May with a 12-16 June, in which case they’ll be 38-45 and the pressure will be on the front office to sell as the trading deadline approaches. Specifically, the pressure will be on them to trade James Shields. For a lot less than they acquired him for. It’s a lot to ask your general manager to make a move that almost by definition will acknowledge that the signature transaction of his tenure was a mistake.

Beyond that, there’s the stark reality that there ain’t no cavalry coming from the minors this season. While the farm system is pretty good overall, let’s not mince words: most of the Royals’ prospects have been disappointing this season, and the best of them are still in A-ball. The one who hasn’t, Yordano Ventura, gave us all a frightful scare last week, and while reports couldn’t be better – he might well be back on the mound this week – the reality is that the Royals are 26-30 with Ventura, and his availability the rest of the season is not entirely certain.

Kyle Zimmer, who was supposed to lead the cavalry, may not be on a mound until August after a strained lat muscle further delayed his recovery from “minor” arm soreness – and once again raised the question of whether the Royals are being entirely straight with us. Who else can the Royals call on? We’ve already seen their options in the lineup – Johnny Giavotella, Jimmy Paredes, Pedro Ciriaco – which are collectively so appealing that when Danny Valencia had to go on the DL today, the Royals brought Mike Moustakas back after eight whole games in Omaha and declared him fixed. (And it speaks volumes that through all this, Christian Colon – who’s hitting .280/.333/.372 – is the one guy we haven’t seen in Kansas City.)

And on the pitching side…um, did you see Aaron Brooks’ start on Saturday? Actually, maybe it’s better if you didn’t. If you’re thinking of jumping someone from Double-A, the Northwest Arkansas Naturals are 18-36, so don’t. (Actually that’s not fair – Angel Baez could be the Royals’ next fire-breathing reliever, and it’s entirely possible that Orlando Calixte could be the Royals’ best option at third base by September. But no one's going to help right now.)

Realistically, the only way this roster is going to be upgraded is from outside the organization…which means doubling down on trading future prospects for present talent. That’s a fine thing to do if the Royals are in the thick of a wild-card race. Right now, it’s Russian Roulette with only one chamber that doesn’t have a bullet.

Making this season particularly frustrating is that, once again, the Royals can’t blame injuries – they’ve been pretty healthy ever since Luke Hochevar went down with Tommy John surgery. Lorenzo Cain has been on the DL, but that’s what you get with Cain, and the Royals are well covered there with Jarrod Dyson. Omar Infante has been on the DL, but that’s what you get with Infante, and the Royals got him back as fast as they could. And now Valencia is on the DL, but if the Royals’ chances come down to a healthy Danny Valencia, they might as well pack it in right now. And on the pitching side, Tim Collins and Francisley Bueno were on the DL, and Bruce Chen is on there now, but that’s it – the Royals’ #5 starter and two situational relievers.

Maybe the Royals’ individual players will show improvement, but that improvement is likely to be counteracted by injuries to core players. Losing Ventura for just one start showed how little pitching depth the Royals have right now. The Royals didn’t make much of it, but Danny Duffy’s velocity was way down his last time out, and forgive me if I don’t accept Ned Yost’s excuse of a “dead arm” until I see that velocity come back. And if Gordon or Alcides Escobar or Salvador Perez goes down for an extended period of time…God help us.

So I’m not convinced that the Royals can play that much better than they already have – and I’m fairly convinced that given their schedule, they’ll have to play better just to maintain their disappointing record so far. They’ll have to play a lot better to get back into the wild-card race, because eventually one of the other nine teams ahead of them will get really hot. The Tigers and A’s will almost certainly win 90 games; I think the Blue Jays have a good chance to get there too, particularly if they make a move to pick up a pitcher (you may have heard that James Shields would look awfully good there). The Angels strike me as a team that could get hot awfully fast, especially now that Josh Hamilton is ready to re-join their lineup. That just means one team – the Red Sox, Yankees, Rangers all seem like good candidates – needs to go on a tear, and the Royals will be left in their wake.

Even if it takes just 88 wins to make the playoffs in the AL this year (it took 92 last year,) that would require the Royals to go 62-44 the rest of the season. I’m not saying it can’t happen – they did go 43-27 after the All-Star Break last year. I’m saying that betting on another second-half rebound is betting on hope. And as the Royals have demonstrated year after year after year, hope is not a strategy.

David Glass doesn’t have to make any decisions now. He shouldn’t, quite frankly; the draft starts in a couple of days, and you might recall that Moore was hired just before the draft the last time around, and the lack of clear leadership in the war room led to Luke Hochevar #1 overall, and (nearly as damning) not a single major leaguer of note drafted between Hochevar and their final pick, Jarrod Dyson. For that reason alone the front office should be left alone for the next week or two.

But I don’t think I’m being unreasonable when I say that if 2014 was the make-or-break year for Moore, then June is his make-or-break month. If the Royals can climb back to .500 by month’s end, then maybe the grim reaper should be held back for a little while longer. If they get over .500 and are a serious threat in the wild-card race, maybe it will even be best to let the season play out, even if it means holding onto Shields and taking the draft pick the way the Royals did with Ervin Santana last year.

But if the Royals aren’t any higher in the standings at the end of June than they are at the beginning of it, it’s time for the owner to do what only the owner can do. I was 30 when Moore was hired; I turn 39 in two weeks. I’ve come to the realization that I may have wasted my 30s rooting for a payoff that never came. I have no intention of wasting my 40s the same way.

A Tale Of Two Narratives.

We’ve reached Dayton Moore’s mythical 40-game mark, a quarter of the way through the season, the point at which we’re finally allowed to make an assessment of the Royals. Given that they are exactly a .500 team right now, there are really only two things which we can say with any degree of confidence about the Royals, and what’s interesting is that they play to two entirely different narratives:

1) The Royals are quite unlikely to contend for the AL Central crown;

2) The Royals are quite likely to contend for a wild-card spot.

Point #1 is pretty clearly true, not because of anything the Royals are necessarily doing right or wrong*, but because the Detroit Tigers are once again playing like one of the best teams in baseball, and Dave Dombrowski is once again showing why he’s the most underrated GM in baseball.

*: Except beat the Tigers, of course, against whom they’re 0-5. If the Royals had won 3 of those 5 games, they’d be tied for first place right now.

I wrote about Dombrowski for Grantland when the season began, and broke down his trade record since he joined the Tigers. I knew that he had a formidable track record, but even I was surprised by just how lopsided his overall trade performance was. By a very approximate method, I estimated that the Tigers had won more than nine extra games a year since he was hired because of his trades.

The Tigers looked like they would be down in 2014 in part because of two trades they made this winter, one that made financial sense (Prince Fielder for Ian Kinsler), and one that made no sense at all (Doug Fister for Robbie Ray and Ian Krol). No sense, that is, except that Dombrowski was the one making it.

Sure enough, as I write this Kinsler is hitting .303/.337/.441 while playing second base, and Fielder is hitting .252/.366/.367 as a 1B/DH. The trade allowed Miguel Cabrera to move to first base and installed rookie Nick Castellanos at third base, which upgraded the team’s infield defense, and sure enough, groundball/contact-oriented Rick Porcello is having his best season (3.22 ERA, 3.09 FIP). And while it’s way too early to weigh in on the Fister trade, the fact is that Ray – who wasn’t a Top 100 prospect before the season – has already reached the majors and was terrific in his first two starts. Yes, those two starts were against the Astros and Twins, but put it this way: Ray has already had more major league success than Mike Montgomery, John Lamb, and Chris Dwyer combined.

Anyway, the point is that even with his relatively poor player development record, as long as Dave Dombrowski is running the show in Detroit, the Tigers will be formidable. A team that had him in charge of the major league roster and Dayton Moore in charge of player development (particularly in Latin America) might win 100 games a year.

The Tigers are 24-12 with fundamentals to match; while it’s always possible they could go into a tailspin, the odds that the Royals catch them already seem formidable. (Particularly since their biggest weaknesses are their bullpen, which is easy to upgrade – they already signed Joel Hanrahan, who should debut soon – and shortstop, a spot which Stephen Drew may fill as soon as the draft is over in three weeks.)

And yet…if the season ended today, the Royals would be a game behind the second Wild Card spot. They are tied for the sixth-best record in the AL…and that’s not a fluke, as they have the sixth-best run differential in the AL as well.

So with three-quarters of a season left, we’re looking at a situation in which the Royals have very little shot at a playoff spot – but an excellent shot at half of a playoff spot. It’s quite possible that the Royals will come out of the All-Star Break with no chance at winning the division, but will spend the entire last half of the season chasing – and understandably so – the right to play in a single winner-take-all game that might well serve as a referendum for not just this season, but for the entire Dayton Moore era.

If the Royals sneak into the Wild Card game but lose it, were they really in the playoffs? Technically, yes, and the Royals will no doubt spin the experience as a huge success, as they absolutely should given not just the history of the franchise but the emphasis they put on this season* when they traded for James Shields.

*: An emphasis they are, naturally, backing away from now that 2014 is here. Maybe they haven’t been contenders on the field in a long time, but when it comes to moving the goalposts, the Royals are a dynasty.

But if three glorious hours constitutes the entire Royals’ playoff experience, and if they don’t build upon that success in the next year or two, can anyone with a straight face define the Moore Era in Kansas City as a success? Maybe the Royals should ask their neighbors across the parking lot what a series of three-hour playoff appearances is worth. As professional sports leagues insist on letting more and more teams qualify for the playoffs, they have to accept that they’re cheapening the experience. Making the playoffs in 1993 was tremendously meaningful even if you got swept out of the LCS. Making the playoffs in 2014 only means that you were in the top third of 30 major league teams. By definition, that’s something the average team accomplishes every 3 years, so if that’s the pinnacle of the Dayton Moore Era, then the Era was a huge disappointment.

It’s not fair to judge a team by what happens in a single game, but if you don’t want your legacy to be defined by a single game, you can always win your division. And if the Royals do win that game, the season will be judged much more favorably even if they lose in the LDS round. The Pittsburgh Pirates won their Wild Card game against the Reds last year, and even though they fell to the Cardinals in five games in the LDS round, I think Pirates fans all agree that they had a legitimate playoff experience. (It helps that they hosted the Wild Card game. If you lose the Wild Card game on the road – if Kauffman Stadium doesn’t host a single playoff game – it’s much harder to call that a true playoff team.)

So – barring a Tigers collapse, which is certainly not impossible, given their second-half swoons in 2006, 2012, and 2013 – the Royals’ best-case scenario is to get into what Joe Sheehan derisively calls the Coin Flip Game, and then hope the coin turns up heads. If it does, no matter what else happens, this front office will have accomplished more than its two predecessors do. If they win that game behind a dominant performance by James Shields, they might win The Trade in the process.

But first they have to get there. And there’s where the Two Narratives come into play. The Royals look for all the world like a .500 team, in a season where playing .500 might just keep you into contention into September. If you assume that the Tigers and A’s will win their divisions, and if you assume the Red Sox will eventually get in gear and win the AL East, you’re looking at a bunch of incredibly flawed competitors:

The Orioles are 13^th in the AL in runs – just ahead of the Royals – despite playing at Camden Yards, and they don’t know how long they’ll be without Matt Wieters, their second-best hitter this season as a catcher.

The Yankees have been outscored by 13 runs this season, and have basically one effective starter (Masahiro Tanaka) in their rotation right now. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Yangervis Solarte doesn’t continue to hit .325/.403/.504 all season, in part because I had literally never heard of Yangervis Solarte before the season started.

I committed sabermetric heresy before the season by saying that I wasn’t all that high on the Rays this year, for one simple reason: I didn’t think their offense was all that good. Their offense hasn’t been that bad, but their pitching hasn’t been its usually stellar self either, and Matt Moore is out for the year after Tommy John surgery.

I’m rooting for the Blue Jays, not just because of the Kevin Seitzer connection but because they’ve gone longer without a playoff berth than any professional sports team other than the Royals. But that’s not a good pitching staff, and that bullpen is a HAZMAT zone right now.

The White Sox lost 99 games last year. The Twins lost 96 games last year. I think they’re both better, maybe significantly better, but in the history of baseball, no team that lost more than 97 games the year before has ever made the playoffs. Both teams face tough odds based on that alone.

The Indians just sent down Danny Salazar, who some were trumpeting as a bigger phenom than Yordano Ventura before the season started.

The Angels have a weak pitching staff that’s covered up by their ballpark some. Raul Ibanez, who is hitting .152/.268/.276, is their starting DH.

The Mariners are run by Jack Zduriencik.

The Rangers are 20-21, but they’ve been outscored by 33 runs (!) – only the Astros have a worse run differential in the league. Martin Perez is out for the year, and Matt Harrison is too.

I have no doubt that one of these teams is going to get hot and win 90 games or more. But I’m not so certain that two of these teams will do the same. This could be a year where 87 or 88 wins gets you into the Wild Card game. If that’s the case, the Royals will have no one to blame but themselves if that team isn’t them.

So which narrative do you prefer? The Bad Narrative says that the Royals have scored the second-fewest runs in the AL.

The Good Narrative says that the 1985 Royals also scored the second-fewest runs in the AL.

The Bad Narrative says that the Royals have hit 18 home runs in 40 games, a near-historically bad pace.

The Good Narrative says that the Royals have also allowed the fourth-fewest homers (34) in the league, and they have more hits (350 to 327) and doubles (78 to 61) than their opponents.

The Bad Narrative says that the corner hitters – and core hitters – on the roster are horrendous this season. Moustakas is hitting .161. Hosmer is hitting .302 but with one homer. Alex Gordon is hitting .261/.317/.366, also with one homer. Billy Butler is hitting .232/.291/.296, also with – you guessed it – one homer.

The Good Narrative says that the Royals are getting better-than-average production from up the middle positions. Salvador Perez is hitting .277/.338/.447, which isn’t a surprise; Alcides Escobar is hitting .285/.336/.409, which is. Lorenzo Cain is hitting .319/.367/.403.

The Bad Narrative says that the bullpen isn’t nearly as good as it was last year – their ERA has jumped 90 points to 3.45.

The Good Narrative says that the bullpen is still pretty damn good, and the rotation actually has a better ERA (3.43) than the bullpen – the third-best rotation ERA in the league.

The Bad Narrative says that the Royals are six games behind the Tigers, and it’s only May 16.

The Good Narrative says that the Royals are in the thick of the wild-card race.

How we cover this team over the next four months depends on which narrative you prefer. To this point, the narrative that most in the media – myself included – have leaned on The Bad Narrative, not because we’re haters, but because this was supposed to be the year. The Royals’ front office has been building to this season for eight years, and they were supposed to be better than this by now. They weren’t supposed to be six games behind the Tigers in the middle of May already. The fact that we’re already focusing on the Wild Card game just a quarter of the way into the season is reason enough to favor The Bad Narrative so far.

Also, there’s the matter of the Royals having one of the two cornerstones of their rebuilding project, the first official draft pick of the Dayton Moore Era, the #2 pick overall, hitting .161. It’s not simply that Mike Moustakas has played so poorly, but that it’s Mike Moustakas. If, I don’t know, Omar Infante was hitting .161, it would be a huge disappointment and it would call into judgment Moore’s ability to identify major league free agents, but it wouldn’t be an indictment of the organization’s entire mission statement. But from the moment Dayton Moore was hired, he has emphasized scouting and player development above everything else. He was absolutely right to do this, because it works, and for a small-market team, developing talent from within is almost the sine qua non of a successful franchise.

But you have to develop the talent. And that’s why Moustakas has become such a lightning rod for this team – not simply because he’s played so poorly, but because he’s supposed to be (along with Eric Hosmer) the best of what the Royals can develop from within. It doesn’t help that Hosmer, who is a success only by relative standards, has turned into a singles hitter. He’s basically Hal Morris. Actually, that’s not fair to Morris:

Eric Hosmer, 2014: .302/.341/.414, 106 OPS+

Hal Morris, career: .304/.361/.433, 111 OPS+

It also doesn’t help that Moustakas, unlike Alex Gordon, or Billy Butler, or Mark Teahen, hasn’t been sent to Omaha. For years, critics of the organization – I’m not exclusively referring to myself here – have pointed out how the Royals front office is so unwilling to admit mistakes that they keep giving the players they acquired opportunity after opportunity that they wouldn’t give to players they inherited. Well, Gordon, Butler, and Teahen were all acquired by Allard Baird. Moustakas was drafted by Moore. When the Royals continue to find excuse after excuse* not to send Moustakas to Omaha – even though he’s hit considerably worse than all three of those players – they simply feed into that narrative.

*: Pick your favorite: “We don’t have any alternatives!” (Whose fault is that, Dayton?) “He helps our team in other ways!” (Enough to make up for a .161 average? Hardly.) “He’s still driving in runs!” (Really, Dayton? It’s 2014 and you’re still using RBIs as a defense?)

Going forward, if the Royals can stay above .500 and if the AL continues to be a bastion of mediocrity, the Royals have the power to change the narrative. They’ve done a legitimately good job in building their pitching staff. Their bullpen isn’t as good as last year’s, but it’s still one of the best in baseball, and given the variability in bullpens from one year to the next, that’s an accomplishment worth celebrating. Shields has been everything the Royals expected him to be. Yordano Ventura is the Royals’ first pitching phenom since Zack Greinke 10 years ago, and he’s having the kind of immediate success that Royals’ prospects so rarely have. Jeremy Guthrie keeps living on the right side of the dagger’s edge. Jason Vargas has shut my trap – even if I still like to yap about Phil Hughes – awfully fast. If Danny Duffy can just harness his control a tiny bit more, this is a championship-caliber pitching staff.

And maybe, in a year of flawed contenders all over, that’s all the Royals need. Maybe they don’t need their offense to live up to its long-lost potential; maybe they don’t even need an average offense, just one that isn’t one of the worst in baseball. Maybe they can dip into their still-fertile farm system to trade for a hitter who would fill one of the holes in their lineup. (I’m thinking specifically of Chase Headley here, who would be a huge upgrade at third base, and is a free agent at the end of the season. However, given that Headley is hitting as poorly as everyone else in San Diego – he’s hitting .195/.278/.368 right now – I understand if the Royals want to wait a few more weeks to see how things shake out.)

If the Royals can ride their excellence at half of baseball to take command of the wild-card race, then more power to them, and The Good Narrative will take over at least until that game in October. But in the meantime, if I may make a suggestion to the Royals, it’s this: STOP WORRYING ABOUT THE NARRATIVE. Stop worrying about what the media thinks. Stop being defensive about our criticisms. We have every right to be skeptical, and the only way to quell our skepticism is to win games.

The Royals have reached the point where we, as fans, are less critical of the team on the field than of the excuses that the front office keeps proffering. The Royals have been a solidly average team for the last season-plus. They are no longer an embarrassment on the field or anything close. But the front office seems to keep forgetting something: THEY WEREN’T HIRED BEFORE LAST SEASON. The six-and-a-half seasons before that still count. If Dayton Moore and friends were hired after the 2012 season, immediately decided to go for it by trading for James Shields and led the Royals to their winningest season in a quarter-century, they’d be hailed as geniuses by the fan base. But they weren’t, and their feigned innocence is irritating. YOU DON’T GET TO ACT LIKE THOSE SIX YEARS DON’T COUNT. I mean, Jack Zduriencik won 85 games in his FIRST season as the Mariners’ GM. Mariners fans are sick to death of him, and he was hired MORE THAN TWO YEARS AFTER Moore was hired in Kansas City.

Given long enough, any front office is going to be able to point to occasional episodes of success. We’re all .500 teams in the infinitely long run. A .500 record is supposed to be the natural order of things – not a reward for six seasons of sucking. I mean, Dayton, Cubs fans are already getting restless with their front office after just TWO years of sucking, and their President and GM have two World Series rings. Astros fans are getting restless – what few of them remain, anyway – and their GM was hired less than three years ago. I can guarantee you: if the Cubs remain under .500 until 2018, and that year they win 86 games without a playoff appearance, and in 2019 they’re a .500 team – Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer are going to feel the heat if they haven’t been sent out of town on a rail. If the Astros are still losing 100 games a year in 2017, Jeff Luhnow isn’t going to be able to keep talking about the future. So what makes you so special? What makes your front office immune to criticism?

So a word of advice (because I know how much the Royals heed my advice): stop complaining about the fan base. Stop telling us what the industry thinks of your rebuilding movement. Other front offices aren’t going to criticize the Royals any more than I’m going to criticize the guy in my fantasy league who keeps drafting poorly and making bad draft picks. National sportswriters aren’t going to be as critical as local sportswriters because they don’t have anything invested in the Royals. Stop telling us that you inherited a franchise with “sub-expansion-team-level” talent and infrastructure and please don’t notice Gordon and Butler and Zack Greinke behind the curtain. Stop telling us that the rebuilding project will take five years, no, six, no, eight-to-ten. Stop telling us that we’re going for it in 2014 when we trade for James Shields, but we really didn’t mean going for it in 2014 now that it’s actually 2014 and Shields will be a free agent after the season.

Don’t tell us it takes 1500 plate appearances to judge a hitter when it didn’t take even 500 plate appearances to judge Miguel Cabrera or Austin Jackson or Ian Kinsler or Joe Mauer or Brian Dozier or Juan Jose Abreu or Alexei Ramirez or Jason Kipnis or Asdrubal Cabrera or Carlos Santana, to pick just other players from the AL Central. PLEASE don’t tell us it takes 1500 plate appearances and then, when one of your top prospects reaches 1500 plate appearances and hasn’t hit worth a damn in two years, you STILL refuse to send him to Triple-A. (Oh, and don’t tell us it takes 1500 plate appearances to judge a minor-league hitter when Bubba Starling is hitting .156, and every non-Royals scout in America thinks he’ll be lucky to make it as a fourth outfielder.)

Don’t piss down our legs and tell us it’s raining, is what I’m saying. If you win, everything will be forgiven; if you lose, all the spin in the world isn’t going to change our perception of you. You alone have the power to change The Narrative. As hard as this may be for you to believe, we’re all rooting for you to do so. But we’re also waiting with pitchforks if you don’t.

Royals Today: 4/26/14.

Few things in baseball analysis are more difficult than talking about early-season trends. This is why my friend Joe Sheehan tries to write as little as possible about what’s happening on the field in April. Small sample sizes swamp everything. Anything can happen in five games, 10, 15, but it’s human nature to assume that what happens in those games is somehow real, and meaningful. (Let’s not even get into what this says about postseason coverage.)

And try as I might, I still struggle to avoid seeing trends in April data. Case in point: our friend and hero, Salvador Perez. When last we wrote, eight whole games into the season, Perez was hitting .458/.594/.625, and led the majors in OBP. He had drawn eight walks (one intentional), including walks in six straight games. As much as I knew it was a small – tiny, really – sample size, I also knew that walk rates tend to stabilize faster than batting average, and Perez was young and ever-improving and…who knows?

Two weeks later, Perez hasn’t drawn another walk. He’s barely had another hit. He’s gone 5-for-55 since, for an .091 average and an .091 OBP. He’s in the worst slump of his career, and is hitting just .203/.276/.329 for the season.

So for the thousandth time I remind myself most of all, and the rest of you as well: don’t read too much into early-season stats. Don’t read anything into early-season stats if you can.

Much has been made of Ned Yost refusing to give Perez a day off until finally, grudgingly resting him this past Thursday. I have certainly questioned this decision myself on Twitter. But the reality is that Yost hasn’t been abusing his young catcher that much, because Perez has had several days off – they’re called off-days. He had one on April 1st, and April 3rd (rainout), and April 10th, and April 14th. My general rule of thumb is that catchers are best treated as if they observe the Sabbath – they need one full day of rest out of seven. Perez started six days in a row April 4-9 before a day off, and then started nine days in a row April 15-23. He’ll get an off-day on Monday after three starts in a row, and then the Royals play 12 straight days from April 30-May 11, so he’ll need a day off in there somewhere. But as long as he’s managed appropriately, Perez could start somewhere between 145 and 150 games without setting off too many alarm signals.

But I thought Yost waited too long to give Perez a day off anyway, not because he was in danger of breaking Perez, but because Perez wasn’t hitting. Perez didn’t need a day off physically – he needed a day off mentally. If your first baseman goes 4-for-34, as Perez did from April 11 to April 19, most managers are inclined to give him a day off just to clear his head. Yost didn’t – and Perez went 0-for-13 from April 20 to 22. He homered In his first at-bat on Wednesday night, then struck out three times, and came back after his day off with another 0-for-4.

Perez is too good and too impervious – so far – to the maddening development crises that have struck virtually every other hitter developed by this regime, so I’m not too worried in the long term. But yeah, maybe it’s too soon to say that he’s figured out how to command the strike zone.

Then again, even if he doesn’t draw another base on balls between now and Wednesday, he’s still set a career high for walks in a month.

- Small sample sizes or not, the story of April for the Royals has been Yordano Ventura, or Yordano Targaryen as I’m calling him*, because 1) in his own words, Yordano throws fire and 2) I’m on a Game of Thrones kick right now.

*: Yes, I realize this has as little chance of catching on as every other nickname I’ve coined, but this is my blog, dammit, so deal with it.

For all talk of small sample sizes, when it comes to Ventura, a sample size of a single pitch is enough to explain the excitement around him: the fastball that he threw 102.9 mph, breaking his own Pitch f/x record for the fastest pitch ever delivered by a starter. Or the 13 other pitches he’s thrown this month that broke 100 mph, the most triple-digit pitches ever thrown by a pitcher in the month of April. Or his 95.9 mph average fastball velocity this year, 0.1 mph behind Garrett Richards for the title of the fastest average fastball.

His fastball is actually down about 1 mph from last year, but here’s the thing: it’s April. Fastballs are usually around 1 mph slower in April than they are in late summer, when the weather is warmer and pitchers have had several months to stretch out their arms. So if Ventura’s radar gun reading have made your heart go all a-flutter so far…just wait.

Frankly, his fastball isn’t what’s gotten my attention – we already knew he threw as hard as any man in the world. It’s his changeup, which continues to get better and better, and his curveball, which when paired with his fastball makes grown men weep – especially when they're standing 60 feet away.

Last night he topped out at 98, but had probably his most impressive start yet, because he seemed to be getting the notion that he can be even more effective throwing 94-95 with command than 99-100 without, and his off-speed stuff just made the Orioles look silly. The Orioles rank fifth in the league in scoring, and for most of the night they looked like they had no chance.

Yost opened some eyes by letting Ventura come out to pitch the 8th, and letting him throw a career-high 113 pitches despite a four-run lead. I probably wouldn’t have done it myself, but I have no real qualms with it. 113 pitches just aren’t that many. Fifteen years ago, when pitch counts were perhaps the #1 flashpoint in baseball between the analytic community and the industry as a whole, you’d see rookie starters throw 123 pitches all the time, and 133 pitches wasn’t unheard of. That we’re now in a world where 113 pitches raises eyebrows tells you just how much the game is changed. I’d be more concerned if Ventura was a 20-year-old phenom, like Jose Fernandez was last year, but Ventura is actually not that young for a rookie – he turns 23 in June. Thanks to an off-day on Monday, he’ll get five days off before his next start. And perhaps most importantly, his stuff showed no degradation as the start went on – I believe he threw more 98 mph pitches in the eighth than any other inning.

The Royals will need to be careful with Ventura’s arm going forward, but they know that. The days of Tony Muser letting a gassed Jose Rosado throw 135 pitches in a hopeless cause are a distant memory. Thank God.

I don’t know where Ventura goes from here. As I tweeted last night, I’ve never seen a Royal rookie with this kind of stuff before, probably because there hasn’t been one. Zack Greinke probably had this in him, but it took five years before he was willing to unleash the beast. Kevin Appier had a very different repertoire, with that funky delivery and hellacious slider, but I’m not sure he threw a pitch 98 mph in his life. Bret Saberhagen probably comes closest; while he didn’t throw quite this hard, he combined nasty stuff with preternatural control.

We’re Royals fans, so we know this can end badly. It can end on a single pitch and Ventura walking off the mound holding his arm, or it can end in an endless string of six-walk outings followed by a demotion to Omaha. But right now, Ventura’s the most compelling reason to tune into a game. Not into a Royals game – into any game. He’s turned Royals games into must-watch TV for the entire country. That’s a hell of a trick he’s turned. It’s almost hard to believe that last summer some moron wrote that he’d consider trading Ventura for Howie Kendrick.

- Speaking of bad decisions on my part, my constant needling of the Royals’ decision to sign Jason Vargas looks like another bit of inspired genius. Vargas is currently second in the AL with a 1.54 ERA, throwing a quality start in all five of his starts so far.

I remain unconvinced that this is indicative of a new and improved Jason Vargas. In 35 innings this year, he’s struck out 18 batters. Among the 108 pitches that currently qualify for the ERA title, Vargas’ strikeout rate of 4.63 per nine innings is the fifth-lowest in the game. (He’s behind Jeremy Guthrie, for goodness’ sake.) His FIP, an estimation of what his ERA should be, is 3.94. By comparison, Phil Hughes, who…um…has gotten off to a slow start, has a FIP of 4.04.

You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to, but in terms of the three things that pitchers control – homers, walks, and strikeouts – Vargas and Hughes have been almost identical. Hughes has more Ks (20 to 18), fewer walks (6 to 8), and the same number of homers (3) allowed. The difference between them has been a bit of skill, a fair amount of luck, and a lot of defense.

That’s the one thing I’m taking away from Vargas’ start so far – that the Royals’ defense might be as good as it was last year. While defensive metrics are sketchy even in large sample sizes, it’s worth pointing out that our friends at Fangraphs – who ranked the 2013 Royals defense the second-best defense of the last dozen years – currently rank the 2014 Royals defense as the best in baseball so far.

And as long as the Royals’ defense continues to play at this level, Vargas should continue to pitch well. Mind you, that’s true of any pitcher the Royals throw out there – it’s important to separate pitching from defense, and not to give Vargas credit for having great defenders behind him. But by being a pitch-to-contact kind of guy, Vargas is going to benefit a little more than your average pitcher from that defense. As Jeremy Guthrie showed last year, you can survive in the majors even with a terrible strikeout rate if your defense is good enough.

And even if Vargas tails off the rest of the season, his first five starts were so good that they’ll elevate his overall numbers. If he has a 4.50 ERA the rest of the season and winds up with 200 innings, Vargas’ overall ERA will be 3.98 simply by how well he’s pitched to this point.

I remain skeptical about his contract overall, given its length and my concern for his ability to continue to fool hitters, particularly in seasons where the Royals’ defense isn’t as good as it is now. But at least for 2014, he looks like everything the Royals expected him to be.

Of course, it’s still April, and remember what I just said about sample sizes.

- Even with Ventura and Vargas pitching this well, the Royals are just 11-11. The Royals’ rotation, which I (and most everyone else) thought would be their Achilles’ heel, ranks second in the league with a 3.08 ERA, and yet they’re only .500. (By the way, after a terrible start, the bullpen ranks fourth in the league with a 3.34 ERA, which seems a reasonable expectation for where they’ll finish up.)

The problem is pretty simple: after all these years, the Royals still can’t hit. I’ll spare you my Kevin Seitzer hagiography for now, but just remember: three years ago, the Royals finished 6th in the AL in runs scored, fifth in OBP, and fifth in slugging average, with a 21-year-old Eric Hosmer, a 21-year-old Salvador Perez (who didn’t come up until August), a 22-year-old Mike Moustakas, a 24-year-old Alcides Escobar, a 25-year-old Billy Butler, and a 27-year-old Alex Gordon.

The next year, they finished a disappointing 12th in runs scored, 8th in OBP, and 10th in slugging, and Seitzer got fired. Last year they finished 11th in runs, 9th in OBP, and 12th in slugging. So far this year, they’re 14th in runs, 13th in OBP, and 15th in slugging.

Whether it’s the loss of Seitzer or something else, the fact is that three years ago, the Royals had a lineup which was 1) the youngest in baseball by a wide margin and 2) above-average. It would have been disappointing enough had the offense simply not improved – but instead, it’s regressed massively. Their league ranks in OBP and slugging average have declined three straight years. And that, despite all of the organization’s many savvy (I mean that without a hint of sarcasm) moves on the pitching side of things, is why they remain a mediocre ballclub.

A year ago, the Royals were 64-13 when they scored four or more runs, but just 22-63 when they scored three or fewer. I think too much emphasis was put on those splits – the reality is that the fourth run isn’t that much more important than any other run, but the way those numbers are spun make it look that way. For instance, the Royals were 46-74 when they scored FIVE or fewer runs, but 40-2 when they scored six or more. That doesn’t make the sixth run magical any more than the fourth run was magical.

But this year, the fourth run really is magic. Eleven times the Royals have scored three or fewer runs, and they’ve lost every game. Eleven times they have scored for or more runs, and they’ve won every game. The season is not even a seventh of the way over, but still – that’s a wacky statistic.

And it tells you – or should tell you – that scoring runs is just as important as preventing them. When the Royals allow four or more runs, they are 3-9; when they allow three or fewer, they are 8-2. The Royals have won on days when their pitchers weren’t great, but they have yet to win on a day when their lineup wasn’t clicking. It’s yet another reminder that the conventional wisdom of pitching uber alles is a misguided one.

Royals Today: 4/11/14.

There’s nothing boring about being average. The Royals have won four games and lost four games; they’ve scored 27 runs and allowed 25. They are, 5% of the way through the season, a .500 team. But that hardly means nothing interesting is happening. Let’s dive in.

- A 4-4 record at this point is nothing to complain about, given that the Royals have played five of their eight games so far against teams that made the playoffs last year (and are favorites to make the playoffs this year). By not getting buried in the season’s first three series, the Royals are now well positioned to make their move.

The Royals’ next nine games come against the Twins and Astros, who combined for 207 losses last year. They won’t be that bad this year, but this is a much easier slate of games than the ones the Royals just finished, particularly for the Royals’ beleaguered offense. After facing the likes of Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, Chris Sale, Matt Moore, and Chris Archer in their first eight games, the Royals will be facing the likes of Kyle Gibson, Kevin Correia, Lucas Harrell, and Dallas Keuchel in their next five games. Yum. If the offense still hasn’t come around at that point, then we can start getting worried.

Looking longer term, the Royals follow this nine-game stretch with series against the Indians, Orioles, Blue Jays, Tigers, Padres, Mariners, Rockies, Orioles again, White Sox, Angels, Astros, and Blue Jays again. Their next 48 games, taking us to June 2nd, include just three against a team (Detroit) that I projected to make the playoffs before the season began. That is an incredibly favorable schedule, and the Royals could well go, I dunno, 30-18 in that stretch, and at 34-22 they’ll be the talk of baseball as well as the talk of Kansas City, perfectly positioned to attract enormous crowds to the K once school lets out.

Schedules are designed to even out, of course, and it gets harder from there. In September alone, the Royals face the Rangers, the Yankees, the Tigers, the Red Sox, and the Tigers again. They need to go 30-18 if they want to stay in the race all season long. If they go 24-24 in this stretch, they’ll have a respectable .500 record, but be behind the 8-ball when it comes to making a playoff run in the second half. And if they replicate last year’s May this year…turn out the lights.

But they shouldn’t. They should be comfortably over .500 going into June. So it’s okay to get excited about where the Royals might be in two months. Just don’t forget that just as they have the wind at their backs in April and May, they’ll be running into a headwind after that.

- The unfortunate thing is that while the Royals are a respectable 4-4, they could be 5-3 or 6-2 very easily. I’m not going to get into every tactical decision that Ned Yost has made – I could, and have, written thousands of words on a single decision in the past, and there are only so many hours in the day. And truthfully, Yost’s reputation makes it easy for people to rip on him even when he’s done nothing wrong – or at least, nothing that 90% of the other managers in baseball wouldn’t have done as well.

That’s an interesting philosophical question to ask: if a manager makes a decision that is demonstrably wrong – but is the same decision most of his compatriots would make – how much should we criticize him for it? It’s demonstrably a bad idea that Yost went to Tim Collins in the tenth inning of a tie game against the Tigers instead of going to Greg Holland – but probably 25 of the other 29 managers in baseball would have done the same thing. Maybe more than 25. Managers just don’t go to their closers in tie games on the road. It’s maddening, and it deserves to be called out, but I don’t think Yost deserves to be criticized any more than Mike Matheny or Bruce Bochy would in the same situation.

I’m more critical of Yost’s decision to not pitch Holland in a tie game in the ninth inning on Opening Day, choosing to stick with Wade Davis for a second inning, because once there were runners on first and third with one out, then Yost called on Holland with no margin for error. The lack of consistency bothers me. If you don’t want to “waste” Holland to start the inning in a tie game because you want to save him for a lead that he can close out, then how you can justify wasting him later in the same inning? And if the answer is, “because the game was on the line in that situation”, well, the game was on the line when the inning started. It was a tie game. In the bottom of the ninth. I don’t understand how Yost can acknowledge the former situation calls for your best reliever, but not the latter.

But the decision that got Yost the most attention – it’s never a good sign when your tactical decisions are inviting controversy two games into the season – was the decision to let Alcides Escobar bat in the eighth inning of Game 2, with the Royals down a run and the tying run at second base. I don’t want to rehash Yost’s ridiculous “Pinch-hitting for guys gets in their dome” comments – because Yost has shown faith in Escobar in these situations for the last three years, and it’s been so helpful in developing his bat – I just want to focus, once again, on the lack of intellectual consistency here.

Jarrod Dyson was on second base at the time, because Dyson had pinch-run for Salvador Perez after Perez led off the inning with a double. Was Yost not worried about getting into Perez’s dome? An inning later, after Omar Infante hit a one-out single, Yost pinch-ran for Infante with Pedro Ciriaco. After Eric Hosmer walked, Billy Butler also walked, putting the tying run at third base and the winning run at second – and Yost pinch-ran for the runner at first base, because that runner was Billy Butler and Yost is apparently contractually obligated to pinch-run for Butler at every opportunity.

I mean, seriously: if removing a player from the game in key situations because of a perceived weakness is getting into his dome, shouldn’t Butler have PTSD by now? Yost pinch-runs for him even when his run doesn’t mean anything. Butler represented an insurance run at first base, but Yost pinch-ran for him – and took his bat out of the lineup for extra innings – to remove the remote possibility that a batter might hit a groundball too slowly to nail the batter at first base, but not too slowly to nail Butler – who would have a lead off the base, remember – at second base. The odds of that aren’t zero, but they’re a damn sight smaller than the odds that Escobar would make an out when a pinch-hitter might have driven in the tying run in the eighth inning.

So again: which is it? Is Ned Yost worried about his players’ psyche so much that he’ll take the tactical hit now so that they play better in the future, or is he not? If you’re worried that pinch-hitting for Escobar might destroy his confidence, how can you not be worried that calling for a wheelchair for Butler the second he touches first base will destroy his confidence?

The only thing I can think of is that Yost thinks that hitting ability, unlike running ability, is something you can develop over time. A poor hitter can become a good hitter with practice; a slow runner is a slow runner. Maybe he thinks that Butler will accept being pinch-run for because he knows he’s slow, but if Escobar is pinch-hit for he’ll suddenly realize he’s a poor hitter and this will break him. He might be right. But after three seasons with the Royals, it’s time to accept Escobar for who he is, and it’s time he accept who he is as well.

This obsession with pinch-running combined with disdain of pinch-hitting is hardly new. Last year Yost led all AL managers by calling for 48 pinch-runners, but called for only 79 pinch-hitters, and that was his highest number since joining the Royals. (Back in 2011, when the youth movement started and Yost wanted to give them every opportunity to learn, he only called on 36 pinch-hitters all year.)

By comparison, Bob Melvin used only 14 pinch-runners all season – but called on a pinch-hitter 166 times. Jim Leyland used 40 and 105. John Farrell used 40 and 93 – and didn’t have anyone remotely as bad as Escobar in his lineup. Yost is more aggressive than anyone when it comes to a speed edge – but is utterly uninterested in looking for an edge at the plate.

I don’t know why. But if Yost is worried about getting into Escobar’s dome, after over 2500 career plate appearances and a career .258/.295/.342 line, he has bigger issues than just having Escobar’s bat in his lineup.

- The Royals came up with an elegant solution to the complaints of people who thought they should be willing to pinch-hit for the player with the lowest OPS of any everyday hitter last year: they dropped Ciriaco, leaving them – as rumored all spring – without a backup middle infielder.

And hey, give them credit: it took almost three whole days before this decision may have cost the Royals a game. When Infante got hit in the jaw by a fastball on Monday – an injury which could have been a hell of a lot worse than it appears to be – the Royals were forced to play Danny Valencia at second base the rest of that game, and then started Valencia at second base on Tuesday. The Royals, a team with legitimate playoff aspirations, started a shortstop who can’t hit and a second baseman who can’t field – and had absolutely no one on the bench to substitute for them. They were reduced to making backup catcher Brett Hayes their emergency option at third base; presumably Mike Moustakas would have played shortstop if it came to that.

In the ninth inning of a scoreless game – scoreless even though the Royals had nine hits and three walks in the game – James Loney hit a hard but playable shot to Valencia’s right. Valencia was unable to get his glove on it and the ball rolled into right field, allowing Wil Myers to score the game’s only run from second base. Maybe a real second baseman wouldn’t have been able to get to the ball either – although even keeping the ball on the infield would have kept Myers at third base. Maybe the Royals would have lost the game in extra innings anyway. But it’s distinctly possible that having a real second baseman on the roster might have been the difference between victory and defeat.

I don’t even blame the Royals for starting Valencia for this particular game – once Infante went down, the Royals were still in that ten-day window where they couldn’t bring up a player on the 40-man roster without putting someone on the DL. The very next day, that window expired and the Royals brought up Johnny Giavotella, someone I certainly didn’t expect to see batting second in the Royals lineup on April 9th.

But I do blame the Royals for dropping Pedro Ciriaco in the first place. For what? For Aaron Brooks – a soft-tossing control specialist who hadn’t even pitched in Triple-A yet? The Royals also brought up Michael Mariot and Donnie Joseph when Tim Collins and Francisley Bueno were put on the DL; Joseph and Brooks are back in Triple-A, and not one of the three pitchers have thrown a pitch.

You want to know why? Because the Royals don’t need seven relievers. James Shields led the AL in innings pitched last year, and the Royals are paying Jason Vargas and Jeremy Guthrie millions of dollars for their ability to soak up innings. Even though it’s early April and arms are not fully stretched out yet, in their eight games so far the Royals’ starters are averaging 6.67 innings a start. That leaves seven outs a game for the relief corps, and you don’t need a reliever for every single out.

Just as Yost’s emphasis on pinch-running over pinch-hitting is baffling, so too is the Royals’ collective emphasis on relief options over bench options. This isn’t on Yost specifically; the GM is supposed to have final say on personnel decisions. The Royals were so terrified of running out of pitchers in the 14th inning that they elected to go without a backup shortstop or second baseman in the first inning.

The decision to go with 12 pitchers isn’t atypical in today’s game. But the decision to go without a backup middle infielder is essentially unprecedented. There’s a reason why no team ever does it – because not only does it leave you exposed in the case of an injury, but it forces you to stick with what are typically two of the weakest hitters in your lineup. The Royals decided to defy 140 years of baseball conventional wisdom, and they got burned.

And the worst part is that everyone saw this coming. I mean, I wrote this at the end of January:

With Maxwell, Dyson, the backup catcher, and Emilio Bonifacio, I don’t even see where Valencia fits on the roster unless the Royals go to an 11-man pitching staff. I would support such a move – the Royals don’t need seven relievers – but of course, they have so many good relievers that it will be hard for them to get down to seven, let alone six. So I expect another move at some point, possibly late in spring training after Moustakas has already earned himself back in the Royals good graces. I expect Valencia or Maxwell to be on the move. But I’ll confess that the Royals rarely do what I expect.

Well, I got that last part right: the Royals rarely do what I expect. I said that the roster didn’t fit together then, but I never thought the Royals would go without a backup middle infielder. But they have. Emilio Bonifacio was the odd man out – and oh, by the way, is hitting .452/.500/.524 and leads the NL in both hits and stolen bases.

I am sometimes too certain with my criticisms of the Royals. I am sometimes not willing to entertain the possibility that the Royals might possess wisdom or insight that escapes me. (This is a subject I plan to write about in more detail later in the season.) I am guilty of not always acknowledging the possibility that I could be wrong.

But this is a prime exhibit in why my criticisms sometimes devolve into exasperation and outrage. The Royals refuse to carry a backup middle infielder. This refusal may have already cost them a ballgame. They have deliberately placed themselves in a situation where they can not pinch-hit for one of the game’s worst hitters last season under any circumstances. And they don’t seem to care.

Well, they cared enough to bring up Giavotella, which means they do have a backup second baseman. They still don’t have a backup shortstop. And Alcides Escobar will continue to bat come hell or high water.

- It’s too early to draw any conclusions about individual players after just eight games, so I’m just going to focus on one player and one conclusion: after eight games, Salvador Perez has eight walks.

You might think that eight games isn’t a meaningful sample size, and it’s not. But walk rate stabilizes pretty quickly; impatient hitters don’t look like Gene Tenace over even a week’s worth of games very often. Perez’s career high in walks is 21. He had never before drawn more than six walks in a calendar month. This year, he’s drawn eight walks by April 9th. (One of those is intentional, but he had also drawn one intentional walk in the months where he had six walks in the past.) This seems significant, as does the fact that he’s, you know, leading the majors in OBP.

Perez has drawn walks in six straight games, in fact. That’s not unprecedented for a Royal; it was last done in 2012, by Jarrod Dyson of all people. But it’s certainly not common. And it’s distinctly uncommon for a player who, prior to this season, had walked just 40 times in 989 plate appearances.

Plate discipline was literally the only relevant skill that Perez had not displayed prior to this season – I’m not counting speed, which is both rare and irrelevant for a catcher – and now, overnight, he seems to be the most patient hitter on the team. Yes, he’s been batting ahead of Mike Moustakas, and maybe teams are just pitching around him – but he’s never let being pitched around stop him from swinging in the past.

Anyway, it merits watching. Perez is unlike any Royals player I’ve ever witnessed. I’ve never before seen a Royals player who not only matches, but exceeds, every expectation put on him.