Surprises, Surprises.

A warning to anyone out there considering starting their own blog: this is a 365-day-a-year habit. You may not be able to write every day, but the need, the compulsion, to stay on top of things is not something that you can turn off just because you happen to take a vacation.

Case in point: I’m currently writing you from Vail, Colorado, where my family and I am enjoying our annual ski trip. Except that I spent most of today off the slopes and at my computer, catching up with everything I missed over the weekend. That’s how dedicated I am to you, Dear Reader.

Dedication may be the best I can offer you, given my recent track record of prognostication. For as much as I have confidence in my ability to analyze the Royals’ actions, my ability to predict their actions could use a little work. Two recent examples stand out:

1) On February 5^th, after the Royals announced they would try Mark Teahen at second base, I wrote this: “I think it’s worth a try, and I credit the Royals for entertaining the idea. I also think that come Opening Day, we’ll have already long forgotten the idea that the Royals ever thought Mark Teahen could play second base.”

On March 30^th, Bob Dutton wrote of the battle for second base: “Club officials suggest Mark Teahen is an increasingly attractive option as the starter.”

2) On March 20^th – like, ten days ago – I wrote “Look, if the Royals were really planning to open the season with Ponson in the rotation, this would be cause for alarm.” I was not alarmed.

On March 29^th, Dutton wrote, “Maybe it means nothing and maybe it's mere coincidence, but the Royals have Kyle Davies and Sidney Ponson tentatively scheduled as their starting pitchers for Monday and Tuesday. That positions Davies and Ponson each to get one additional spring start and be on track to work the third and fourth games of the regular season on normal rest behind Gil Meche and Zack Greinke.”

Rany on the Royals! All Predictions True or Your Money Back!

Clearly, I have no idea what’s going on inside the front office. If I did, I’d lose my “outsider” cred, and we can’t have that.

While the Royals have me flummoxed twice, they only have me upset once. I cheerfully admit to the fact that I was skeptical that Mark Teahen, having last played second base sometime around the turn of the millennium, could learn to play the position at a major-league caliber in the span of six weeks – nearly half of which were spent playing third base for Team Canada.

But this is one of those predictions that I’m happy to be wrong about. Teahen appears to have won the job, if not on an everyday basis than at least in the sense of laying claim to the lion’s share of playing time. What’s interesting is that he didn’t win the confidence of the Royals by mastering the nuances of second base faster than anyone expected. He won the position by basically hitting the snot out of the ball ever since returning from the World Baseball Classic, to the point where it doesn’t really matter if he fields the position like, well, like you’d expect Mark Teahen to play it.

I mean, he’s hitting .468/.519/.979 with five homers in 47 at-bats. Make that six – he hit one tonight off of Rich Harden. It’s almost to the point where Matt Wieters notices him.

I didn’t see this coming, but I’m as excited as anyone else to see how this is going to work out. Worst-case scenario, the Royals go back to some combination of Willie Bloomquist and Alberto Callaspo by May. Best-case scenario? I dunno, how about a left-handed Jeff Kent? I know this much: at $6 in a fantasy auction, where defense doesn't matter and he's about two weeks from qualifying at second base, Teahen is a ridiculous steal.

How this affects the lineup is still in question*. I suggested the Royals bat Teahen seventh, but Dutton quotes a front office type as saying “If he’s hitting well enough to win the job, that probably means he’s hitting well enough to bat second or third in the lineup.” That’s one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is that if Teahen really deserved to bat second or third in the lineup, he would have already been guaranteed a starting job at some position.

The permutation that comes up the most is to start the lineup with Crisp-DeJesus-Teahen, with Aviles slotting behind Olivo in the nine hole. This works fine in terms of lineup construction, but I worry about having a lineup that goes R-R-S-L-L from the 8-9-1-2-3 slots. A simple solution to this would be to flip-flop Crisp and DeJesus – DeJesus is a very similar hitter to Crisp, but with less speed (an overrated trait for a leadoff hitter) and more on-base ability. That breaks up the lefties. I’m not as worried about batting two same-side hitters in a row at the bottom of the lineup, because those are the guys you can pinch-hit for against a tough right-hander in a key situation – and Callaspo, if nothing else, makes for a nice pinch-hitter in exactly those situations.

Starting Teahen at second base makes for a fascinating lineup. On the one hand, the Royals have an incredibly productive bottom of the order. The mere fact that Mike Aviles, he of the .325 average last season, is being talked about as the potential #9 hitter is testament to that. The worst hitter is likely to be whoever is catching that day, but man, if Miguel Olivo or John Buck is our worst hitter, I’d call that progress. Jose Guillen might be the seventh-best hitter in the lineup.

On the other hand, the Royals have an awfully weak heart of the order, at least unless and until Alex Gordon and Bam Bam have their breakthrough years. Teahen-Guillen-Jacobs won’t have opposing pitchers quaking in their boots. Basically, the Royals’ projected lineup has nine hitters with very disparate talents but with remarkably similar overall value. You’d be hard-pressed to find a team in recent history with less variance among its starting nine. PECOTA projects no one in this lineup to have an OPS above 800, and no one to have an OPS under 700 except for the catchers (Olivo at 675, Buck at 696).

A lineup of league-average hitters ought to give you a league-average offense, and that sounds fine to me. Combine a league-average offense with a slightly above-average rotation and a very good bullpen, and you ought to get meaningful September baseball at the very least.

Make no mistake, though: this moves comes at a very real defensive cost, one that I’m not sure the Royals can overcome. I mean, this might be the worst defensive infield that any major league team has fielded in a long, long time. Alex Gordon’s defense at third base last season had many observers wondering when the move to first base would come; Mike Aviles’ defense at shortstop was as shocking as his offense, but a year ago he was a guy who was playing most second base and third base in Omaha. First base is a joke, and I mean literally:

Q: What’s the difference between Mike Jacobs and Billy Butler?

A: One of them was the worst defensive first baseman in the major leagues last year. The other one is Billy Butler.

Hey, I didn't say it was a funny joke.

And now we’ve got a converted third baseman/outfielder who will be making his professional debut at second base. Wow. I mean, wow. I know Dayton Moore gets a lot of crap for his devotion to the Braves’ Way, but you can’t accuse him of being a blind follower. Pendleton-Belliard-Lemke-Bream this ain’t.

*: Will McDonald makes fun of my last column here, and I can’t say I blame him: deconstructing lineups is the crutch of any baseball blog, right up there with the “a Google search for ‘A’ and ‘B’ yields X number of results” meme in the pantheon of sportswriters’ clichés. I somehow spent nearly 3500 words on a piece that’s already practically irrelevant. Lesson learned, at least the lesson about picking better subjects to write about – the lesson about using an economy of words may never sink in, I’m afraid.

But since Will compares my piece to pictures of Jenn Sterger – and since Will has a well-documented crush on her – it’s only fair for me to point out that thanks to my friend Will Carroll (a Gladwellian “Connector” if ever there was one), I had the opportunity to dine with her and Carroll at Harry Caray’s Steakhouse a couple summers back. She was perfectly delightful company, friendly and funny and surprisingly unpretentious, and even capped the evening off with an unexpected hug. I’d say more, but I’d feel guilty if I did anything to promote blogger-on-blogger crime. Especially if the second blogger happened to be me.

And on that note, it’s almost midnight, and if I don’t hit the slopes again tomorrow I might as well crawl back into my parents’ basement, so I bid you all adieu. I’m sorry I didn’t get around to commenting on the trailer for Sidney Ponson, Fourth Starter. Let’s save that article for another day, and hope that in the interim the Royals make that post unnecessary.

The Lineup.

So it’s the time of year when I start getting my draft prep together for Stratomatic tournaments – I plan to be playing at the Chicago tourney on April 18^th and 19^th, if anyone is up for a challenge. (I only played once last year, as some of you recall.)

Preparing for a Strat tournament reminds me of the many things I’ve learned about baseball from playing the game, and one of those lessons is how to properly build a lineup. With the identity of the nine starting Royals pretty well cemented (with the exception of second base*), I think it’s time we figure out the best way to arrange those nine players in the best possible fashion.

*: You could argue that the catching position isn’t cemented so much as it’s been cast in Play-Doh, given that Miguel Olivo and John Buck will probably share the job almost equally. But as I’ve written many times, you’d be hard-pressed to find two players more similar than Olivo and Buck, at least offensively, so which one happens to be in the lineup on any given day doesn’t impact the lineup order at all.

Here’s a list of unofficial rules I’ve developed on lineup construction, and how they apply to the Royals:

Rule #1: Build your lineup from the middle out, not from the top down.

In other words, don’t figure out who your leadoff hitter is first and then the guys after him, decide on your #3 and #4 hitters first, and then fill in the slots around them. The single most important principle in extracting the most runs from your lineup is to bunch the good hitters together; placing your best hitter (even if he would make a terrific leadoff hitter) directly behind the #8 and #9 hitters is a less-than-optimal solution.

The best way to demonstrate this principle is to look at what the Royals are doing with David DeJesus. In the abstract, if you were to look at each member of the Royals individually and then decide who would make the best leadoff hitter, you’d almost certainly hit on DeJesus, who after all has the highest OBP on the roster (career .360 mark) and doesn’t have a ton of power.

But DeJesus might also be the Royals’ best #3 hitter, because he’s a high-average hitter who drives the ball in the gaps, with a relatively modest platoon split for a left-handed hitter (lifetime OPS of 722 vs. LHP, 809 vs. RHP.)

The Royals are planning to move DeJesus into the 3 hole, which I think is the right decision, though maybe for the wrong reasons: the Royals appear fixated on the fact that DeJesus hit .419 with runners in scoring position last year, the highest figure in all of baseball and the second highest in Royals history (behind George Brett’s sublime 1980, when he hit .469 with RISP). There’s no reason to think that DeJesus’ performance is anything but a fluke – he had never hit above .300 or below .270 with RISP before – but he does have the profile of someone you want up with a man in scoring position: a line-drive swing, doesn’t strike out a whole lot, not ridiculously patient but not overly aggressive either.

DeJesus isn’t the perfect #3 hitter, just as he’s not the perfect leadoff man, and on another team, one with a nice power core, DeJesus would fit in best higher up in the lineup. For the Royals, he’s the guy the Royals should build the lineup around for now.

Rule #2: The #2 hole is the most underrated slot in the entire lineup.

After the 2001 season, I engineered a massive trade in my perpetual Strat-o-matic league to acquire Barry Bonds. Bonds, as you can imagine, had just been issued a Strat card the likes of which had never been seen before. (Adding to the mystery, there was no player’s name on the card, owing to Bonds’ decision to opt out of the MLBPA’s licensing agreements.) The acquisition of a player that could hit 73 homers and draw 177 walks did create the rather pleasant dilemma of figuring out where he ought to bat in the lineup. With all that power, you wanted him up with men on base; with all those walks, you wanted him up with no one out so that there’d be ample opportunity for the guys behind him to drive him in. Obviously, those two desires conflicted with each other.

The obvious spot for your best hitter is to bat him third, where he can drive in the on-base guys batting first or second, and be driven in by your #4 and #5 hitters. The problem with that edict is that while the third spot in the lineup is the perfect spot to bat when the lineup is humming, it’s the worst spot to bat when it isn’t. Consider this: the #3 hole is the most likely spot in the lineup to bat with two men out and no one on. Assuming your leadoff and #2 hitters have an OBP of .350, the odds that both will make outs their first time up is (1-.350) = .650 squared, or 42.25% of the time. So right out of the chute, your #3 hitter is going to bat in the least useful situation almost half the time his first time up. By comparison, it is impossible for the cleanup or #5 hitters to bat in that situation in their first plate appearance.

(In major league baseball’s primordial past, teams were not required to announce their lineups before the game started. Cap Anson, who when he wasn’t enforcing Jim Crow laws was one of the 19^th century’s greatest players, took advantage of this rule as player/manager: while he normally batted third, if the first two players made out in the first inning, he would send up someone else to bat third instead rather than waste his best hitter – himself – in a low-leverage situation.)

So I could have batted Bonds cleanup, but the lower down you bat in the lineup, the fewer opportunities you’ll get to bat in a game – to the tune of 18 plate appearances a season for every spot you drop down the lineup. With a performance that good, I wanted Bonds up there more often, not less. I toyed with batting him leadoff – call this the Bobby Bragan Theory – but I couldn’t stomach the thought of all those bases-empty homers.

So I batted him second, and kept him in that spot for the next four years. This worked out wonderfully – he was far less likely to bat with two outs, but he also had the opportunity to bat with a man on base in the first inning.

All this might be just an interesting anecdote, but this article over at Beyond the Box Score (which itself quotes from “The Book” by Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, and Andy Dolphin) corroborates this concept: you should put one of your best, if not your best, hitter in the #2 hole.

(I’ve always felt that the best lineup slot for Ichiro Suzuki, who is in his own way as unusual a player as Bonds was, is the #2 hole. There’s nothing wrong with him leading off, given his ability to get on base and run, but his ability to reach base is disproportionately the result of singles rather than walks. Those singles have the advantage of advancing runners, something walks rarely do – so Ichiro’s talents are particularly useful when there are men on base ahead of him. Just ask the Koreans.)

Which is a long-winded way of saying that in a perfect world, DeJesus wouldn’t bat first or third – he’d bat second.

Rule #3: Stolen bases are most useful when they come in front of your worst hitters, not your best ones.

I think these are the two biggest misconceptions about building a lineup:

1) The #2 hitter should be a “bat-control” guy who may not be a great hitter, but can bunt, hit-and-run, make productive outs, and otherwise find ways to disrupt the link between your best on-base guy and your best hitter. (See Rey Sanchez in 2000, batting between Johnny Damon and Mike Sweeney.)

2) Your leadoff and #2 hitters should have the ability to steal bases, because it’s soooo important to move from first to second base when you’ve got a home-run hitter at the plate.

I’ve never understood this concept. When you’ve got a power hitter at the plate, what’s the point of risking an out – and losing a baserunner – in order to move that runner 90 feet closer to home plate. Isn’t the whole point of a power hitter that you can drive in runners from first base? Your traditional middle-of-the-lineup hitter isn’t any better at hitting singles than the average hitter – he’s just better at hitting doubles and home runs. (Albert Pujols, the best player in baseball, hit singles in 20.2% of his at-bats last year. His teammate Adam Kennedy, he of the .280/.321/.372 line, hit singles in 21.2% of his at-bats.)

So why on earth would you risk losing a baserunner (and making an out) with your best hitters at the plate, particularly since your best hitters ought to be quite capable of driving in that run from first base?

(The argument for speed at the top of the lineup has always included the notion that fast runners are more likely to take the extra base, to score from second on a single or from first on a double. That’s an argument (albeit a weak one) for good baserunners, but not necessarily good basestealers. That might seem like a subtle difference, but in the Royals’ case they have two excellent examples of players who are the former but not the latter: DeJesus, who is a lifetime 56% basestealer but a very good runner, and Mark Teahen, who despite a good success rate (77%) has just 34 steals in four seasons, but is one of the smartest baserunners in the game.)

On the other hand, when the 7-8-9 hitters are up, a single is frequently the best outcome you can realistically hope for, in which case the difference between having a baserunner on first and a baserunner on second is significant. Looking at Kennedy again, he hit singles in 21.2% of his at-bats, but had an extra-base hit in just 6.8% of his at-bats. He’s roughly four times as likely to drive a runner home from second than from first (assuming the runner always takes the extra base) – making a stolen base look awfully tempting.

The overall break-even rate for the stolen base is about 70%; in other words, if the odds that you’ll steal second base safely are less than 70%, you’re better off not making that attempt. But the break-even rate is much higher in the leadoff or #2 spots, maybe on the order of 75%, and much lower in the #6 and #7 spots, maybe around 65%.

The ability to steal bases is actually more valuable for a #5 hitter than the leadoff hitter, even though I’d wager that more than 97% of all major league baseball teams have had a more prolific basestealing threat in the leadoff slot.

Rule #4: Put the guys who get on base ahead of the guys who hit for power.

This isn’t really a rule I picked up from playing Strat; I think every baseball fan figures this out on their own by the time they’re 12. I only bring it up here because Trey Hillman seems to think it makes since to bat Mike Jacobs fifth and Alex Gordon seventh, instead of the other way around.

Jacobs and Gordon are both left-handed hitters. They both have power; Jacobs has shown more to this point, but had never hit more than 20 before last season. I’m willing to bet that Gordon hits more homers than Jacobs this year, but let’s concede the point that at this moment, Jacobs is the more established power threat. Gordon is clearly the more established on-base threat. Why on earth would you bat the guy who’s an all-or-nothing hitter ahead of the guy for whom walks are a key part of his arsenal?

The answer is because Jacobs fits the caricature of the #5 hitter – the slow, oafish, free-swinging lout who parks balls in the upper deck and then trots home behind the two guys on base when he bats. The problem with the traditional concept of the #5 hitter is this: guess who’s most likely to lead off the second inning? That’s right – the one guy in the lineup most ill-suited to lead off.

Rule #5: Other things equal, put your worse defensive players higher in the lineup, so that they can get their full allotment of at-bats and then get removed for defensive purposes earlier in the game.

I can tell you from experience: few things are more annoying to your Strat opponent than when you get away with starting a terrible defensive player with a big bat, because you’re able to pull him out of the game for a defensive replacement before a difficult fielding play comes his way. In the tournament I won last season, I started Jack Cust in left field, but by batting him 2^nd in the lineup, I was typically able to get three at-bats from him and still get him off the field in favor of a real outfielder by the sixth inning.

This isn’t a very useful rule in 21^st-century baseball, when teams don’t have the roster space for defensive replacements. In the Royals’ case, the only instance where I see this rule being useful is in the event that Mark Teahen is playing second base.

Rule #6: Avoiding runs of same-sided hitters trumps all the other rules.

In modern baseball, you simply can not afford to bunch right-handed or left-handed hitters in a row. As recently as 20 years ago, this wasn’t the case; as recently as 10 years ago, you could get away with it against most teams. Today, every team in baseball has a LOOGY or LOOGY wannabe, and most teams have a ROOGY as well.

Lineup balance is important. It doesn’t matter how strong your lineup is, if you’re running seven right-handed hitters out there, as the Tigers were for much of last season (Carlos Guillen and Curtis Granderson were the only left-handed hitters in the lineup many times), you’re going to be vulnerable in the late innings.

That’s an Achilles’ heel which can be exploited on even the best of teams. The Cubs’ lineup was so potent that they led the National League in runs (and wins) during the regular season – but against the Dodgers in the NLCS, they faced a right-handed starter in each game and still started six right-handed hitters (and that’s not counting the pitcher.) In game 2, their 1 through 5 hitters were all right-handed. They scored six runs in three games.

Fortunately, the Royals have a lot more lineup balance than that. Last year the Royals had remarkable success against left-handed pitching – they went 36-24 when a southpaw started, and just 39-63 against right-handers – which is made even more remarkable by the fact that the lineup was actually a little more left-handed than average. The Royals got 54.1% of their plate-appearances from right-handed hitters last year; the AL average was 55.4%.

The reason for the Royals’ success against lefties was that the right-handed hitters they did have put up enormous splits. Against RHP, all the right-handed batters on the team hit .247/.281/.358; against LHP, they hit .302/.359/.491. For that, you can thank guys like Jose Guillen (.305/.361/.575 vs. LHP, .248/.274/.382 vs. RHP), Billy Butler (.340/.395/.590, .244/.290/.308), Mark Grudzielanek (.395/.459/.523, .265/.301/.355), Mike Aviles (.348/.392/.574, .313/.333/.432), and Miguel Olivo (.262/.296/.534, .251/.268/.399).

So while the Royals had a pretty balanced lineup last season, there’s no question that they need to figure out a way to hit right-handed pitching. (Although amazingly, given how successful the Royals were against southpaws last season, they actually saw more left-handed pitchers than any other AL team.) The addition of Coco Crisp and more playing time for Alberto Callaspo, both switch-hitters, may help with this problem – and looked at in this light, the addition of Jacobs almost makes sense.

I’m getting off track here…the Royals lineup is likely to include a switch-hitter (Crisp), three left-handed hitters (DeJesus, Gordon, Jacobs), four right-handed hitters, (Aviles, Butler, Guillen, Olivo/Buck), and a second baseman to be named later. Given that kind of balance, there’s no reason why the Royals should ever have to bat two left-handed hitters, or two right-handed hitters, in succession.

So them’s the rules. Ordinarily that should be sufficient to design a lineup, but I have to throw one more monkey wrench into this thing: the order of the lineup obviously depends on your expectations of the players’ performances, and the Royals’ expectations for some of their players (say, Jose Guillen) are markedly different than mine. It’s easy for me to argue that Guillen deserves to bat 8^th; easy, and useless, as there’s no chance in hell that the Royals would consider such a thing. So here’s the lineup I think the Royals should start the season with, based on their expectations of how each player will play.

S Coco Crisp

R Mike Aviles

L David DeJesus

R Jose Guillen

L Alex Gordon

R Billy Butler

L Mike Jacobs

R The Catcher

? The Second Baseman

Crisp isn’t the ideal leadoff hitter given his OBP issues, but really, aside from DeJesus who’s better qualified? Leading off with him allows the Royals to go R-L-R-L the rest of the way. Aviles fits the traditional role of the #2 hitter – the scrappy overachieving shortstop – with the added advantage that he might be able to hit. The 2008 Guillen shouldn’t be batting this high in the lineup – maybe not anywhere in the lineup – but the 2004, 2005, or 2007 Guillen is a decent cleanup option. Gordon gives you power (if he comes up in the first inning) and on-base ability (if he comes up in the second inning) out of the #5 hole. Jacobs' combination of power and low-OBP – I don’t care what the Royals are saying – is perfect in the #7 spot.

The one potential change I could see to this lineup order is to flip Crisp with Alberto Callaspo in the #9 slot, assuming Callaspo shows that last year was no fluke. If Callaspo is really a .300 hitter, he has the superior on-base ability, and I’d much rather have Crisp’s speed ahead of Callaspo's singles than the other way around.

That lineup is awfully bland, in all honesty – the only significant difference between my lineup and the tentative one that Hillman has hinted at is that I’ve swapped Gordon and Jacobs. The advantage is that it’s conventional enough that the Royals might actually take me up on it.

But let’s say, come mid-May, that Gordon and Butler are raking and that they’re ready for a more important spot in the lineup. In that case, I present:

L David DeJesus

R Mike Aviles

L Alex Gordon

R Billy Butler

L Mike Jacobs

R Jose Guillen

S Coco Crisp

R The Catcher

? The Second Baseman

Gordon’s emergence allows DeJesus to move back to the leadoff role. Butler and Jacobs both move up two spots – Jacobs is not optimal in the #5 hole, but it’s the one concession that has to be made to keep the lineup alternating from right to left.

Crisp moves to seventh, where his ability to steal bases in anticipation of all the singles hit by Wilberto Bloomaspo and DeJesus comes in handy. The most controversial part of this lineup is putting Guillen sixth – or at least, it will be controversial to Jose Guillen – but if the rest of the lineup is hitting on all cylinders, that’s where he belongs.

Finally, here’s the lineup I’d put together in the unlikely event that not only are Gordon and Butler hitting, but Mark Teahen has proven he can handle second base:

B Crisp

L DeJesus

R Butler

L Gordon

R Guillen

L Jacobs

R Aviles

L Teahen

R Catcher

DeJesus finds his way into the #2 hole that really seems like the best use of his skills. The need to realign the RH and LH hitters moves Butler ahead of Gordon, but it also puts Guillen in the #5 spot, a slot he might actually accept without a clubhouse mutiny. Teahen bats low in the order, which violates Rule #5, except that I don’t envision Teahen coming out of the game for defense. What I envision is that Guillen gets pulled in favor of Bloomquist, with Teahen moving to right field.

That’s a lineup I can get behind. Even if there’s no chance of it actually coming to fruition.

Royals Today: 3/20/2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Depth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Addition. By Subtraction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Royals Today: 3/5/2009.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Snooze, We Sign Juan Cruz.

Jeez, a busy day for Kansas City sports today…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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