Tag: Kansas City Royals (Page 9 of 14)

I guess it’s time to write about baseball. The Royals are in first place and begin a series with division favorites Detroit tonight.¹ In years past this would be a moment for celebration and excitement. “Can they keep it going?” “Is this real?” Fun questions that present themselves as the first month of the season winds down and the standings begin to take shape.

The hopeful fan looks at this year’s team and thinks, “The pitching has been great. It’s going to normalize a bit, but I think the rotation, and bullpen, are capable of pitching well all season. Now if we can just get some hitting, and that’s bound to happen, this team will stay in contention through the summer. And then if we get Duffy and Paulino back, maybe make a move for another bat, anything can happen in September!”

But my excitement is tempered this year. I’ve finally been worn down by the 25+ years of failure and cynicism has replaced hope. I look at this team and think, “The starters can’t sustain this early success, and aside from Alex Gordon and Billy Butler, I have no confidence in any of the hitters. Hosmer and Moustakas are well on their way to being busts. Sal² Perez swings at too many pitches. Alcides Escobar and Lorenzo Cain won’t keep hitting this well all season. And Getz and Frenchy suck. Once the pitching fades, it’s going to get ugly.”

Argh.

If any sport is built for hope, it’s baseball. The long season, where any team can win any single game, turns every fan into an optimist. At least until they’re double digits back in the standings. Even when long-term success is not realistic, a good run in April should put a bounce in your step and have you dreaming of warm summer nights following games that matter.

But I can’t do it. It’s not that I’m not interested, I am. I’m listening to just about every Royals game. I want them to be good. I want the young guys to develop into stars. I want the reclamation projects (Santana, Guthrie) to continue to turn back the clock. But the part of my brain that bought into hot starts in 2003 and 2009 just can’t get going this year.

If they can keep it going two, maybe three more weeks, I’ll be ready to hop on board. But I’m remaining dubious and cranky until then.

ↁ

The columns always come this time of year. The celebrations of baseball’s return, somewhere in which each writer must suggest that Opening Day¹ should be declared a national holiday so no one has to miss their favorite team’s opener.

Apparently whoever makes the schedule at St. P’s is a baseball fan, because M. and C. were off yesterday. Oh, some of you might suggest that the combination of Easter Monday and a Catholic school had more to do with it. But I know the truth. The good folks in the office wanted to make sure they, and the kids, could all watch the Cubs or Reds or whoever play uninterrupted yesterday.

In this endless winter² it felt very good to fire up MLB.TV on the Mac and MLB At Bat later in the day on the iPad and iPhone to follow games. I watched some of the Marlins-Nationals game early, somehow missing both Bryce Harper home runs, and then listened to much of the Royals-White Sox game. We went out for dinner and after returning I was able to watch the final two innings of the 13-inning contest between the Angels and Reds on our local FSN affiliate. After that I caught a couple innings of the Phillies-Braves on ESPN and then watched the first inning of the Cardinals-Diamondbacks before heading to bed. That, my friends, is a good day.

I’d love to write that this was the season in which the Royals are finally going to break through. But, as I wrote after the big trade with Tampa back in December, I don’t think they’ve made the right moves since last season. They will be better, yes. But between their schedule, which is incredibly tough for the first 2+ months of the season, and the truth that they are still far behind the true contenders of the American League, I think it’s going to ultimately be a frustrating year. They may win more games than they’ve won in 20 years, but I don’t think it will be enough to crack the post-season.

And now my obligatory, barely researched picks for who will be playing in the post-season next October.

American League

East: Tampa Bay
Central: Detroit
West: Texas
Wild Cards: Anaheim, Toronto

Toronto over Anaheim
Detroit over Toronto
Tampa Bay over Texas
Tampa Bay over Detroit

National League

East: Washington
Central: Cincinnati
West: Los Angeles
Wild Cards: Atlanta and St. Louis

Atlanta over St. Louis
Washington over Atlanta
Cincinnati over Los Angeles
Washington over Cincinnati

World Series

Washington over Tampa Bay

Who would have expected that to be a reasonable pick five years ago?

ↁ

I knew it was coming.

For two weeks, as rumors swirled, I expected that one night, probably late int the evening, word would come that the Royals had traded their top prospect, outfielder Wil Myers. Likely for a starting pitcher. Almost certainly for one that had value, but still was too flawed to be an ace for the Royals.

So it was no surprise when, last night, as I was checking Twitter one last time before bed, the news was just breaking that Myers and others were headed to Tampa for James Shields and Wade Davis.

I did not like it.

And then it got worse.

In all the royals sent four players, two who are Major League ready, for one pitcher who is 31 and has been successful largely due to his home park and another who failed as a starter in that same park.

Ugh.

Twitter did not help, as pretty much every MLB analyst I follow, and I follow a lot, destroyed the Royals for making the deal. I stayed up way too late reading these reactions and got almost no sleep. All for a 90-loss team.

I (in)famously abandoned the Royals in December 1990, when they chose to sign Kirk Gibson, who was old and had never hit in Kansas City, over local native Joe Carter. We may have reached another of those moments in my support of the team.

I see value in Shields, but when you have one of the top five prospects in the game, who is under control for six cheap years, you have to do better. If you’re moving a chip like Myers, you must get a true #1. Not just a guy who is only a #1 because your staff is heinous. And you avoid like the plague guys like Davis, who seems an awful lot like Luke Hochevar or Kyle Davies, two other guys that could never figure it out no matter how many chances the Royals gave them.

The Royals settled. Even if Myers never turns into a star, if Jake Odorizzi never becomes a decent starter, if Mike Montgomery never figures it out, if Pat Leonard fizzles out in AA, this trade will likely be a loss for the Royals. Their rotation is better than last year. But that’s mostly because it was epically bad last year. The reboot has come with three starters over 30, one who is coming from an extreme pitchers park, one who has a bum wing, and one who was awful the first half of last year. The fourth new starter was an utter failure in two attempts to be a big league starter. And Hochevar might still get the ball every fifth day. For a team that was 16 games behind division champ Detroit last season, this isn’t enough to span that gap, or stay in the running for the Wild Card spots.

I will give Dayton Moore some credit for at least trying. And there are some baseball people who don’t believe this trade is as one-sided as I do. But it feels like, at best, a missed opportunity. And at worst, just the latest wrong move by a franchise that has had precious few right moves over the last 30 years.

I’m not running out to buy a Cincinnati, Detroit, or Washington hat yet. But it might be time to give my list of alternatives a closer look.

ↁ

I’ve been promising this post for nearly two months. Time to share it, I guess.

As promised, here is my accounting of how I would evaluate each major league franchise were the Royals ever contracted/moved away from Kansas City and I was in the market for a new team.

There are several factors that would go into selecting a new team. The team would need to be competitive. Not necessarily a shoe-in for the post-season, but at least in the running for a division title more often than not. They need a history I could glom onto. And they would need to have cool hats/uniforms. If I’m jumping on a bandwagon I need to look good when doing so.

I crunched the numbers and divided the league into these groups:

The Definite Nos:

The entire AL East. I’ve hated no team in any sport in my life more than I’ve hated the Yankees. Part of that hate made me jump on the Red Sox bandwagon for several years, but unless we move to Boston, I can’t see myself ever being a true Sox fan. I’ve been on the Baltimore bandwagon before, and that will never be as good as it was in the 1990s. Tampa Bay is a great story, but odds are they’re going to fall back to mediocrity, and remain there, soon. And while there are many things to like about Toronto, you kind of have to be a masochist to pick a non-NY/BOS team from the East.

White Sox: Blech. Why would you ever pick the Sox if you were jumping on a Chicago bandwagon?

Colorado: I’ve never had strong feelings for this franchise. I have relatives and friends in Denver, but they still aren’t compelling to me. Bad colors, too.

San Diego: Great city, but a thoroughly uninteresting team with a long history of heinous uniforms.

Philadelphia: They made me cry in 1980. And they’re beginning an epic fall from grace.

Atlanta: Never liked them. No reason to now, especially since you can’t see all their games for free anymore.

NY Mets: I can’t be liking a New York team.

Miami: There is a certain romance in liking what should be MLB’s most Latin franchise. But their owner is an ass and their uniforms are hideous.

Arizona: Bad uniforms, bad park.

Houston: See Arizona.

Fatally flawed:

Minnesota: Great new park, nice uniforms, some likable players, friendly Midwestern fans. But they seem destined to fall from their success of the last decade and only be in the pennant chase occasionally.

Pittsburgh: They’re a great story this year, Andrew McCutchen is a joy to watch, and the Indianapolis Indians are their AAA affiliate. Great park, great uniforms, great history. But a tiny market in a division that also has St. Louis and Chicago does not make for a promising future.

Cincinnati: On TV here in Indy, and Great America Ballpark is two hours away, so they would be the easiest team to follow. It would be fun to sit down with the girls each night to watch the Reds and explain the details of the game. But, even with their recent spending binge, a small market team destined to be looking up at the Cardinals and Cubs most years. Plus, everyone in Cincinnati thinks Pete Rose is great.

Oakland: The most unsettled franchise in the game. If they stay in Oakland they’re going to be awful. If they move, there’s no guarantee that they’ll get better. And they abandoned Kansas City in the 60s, so it would be tough to get onboard with them. Keep in mind my summer 2012 hat is a 1955 A’s hat.

LA/Anaheim/California Angels: Some of their uniforms have been cool over the years. Others awful. And I think going to a game in Anaheim would be nice. I like several of their current players. But there are better choices if I pick a West Coast team.

Milwaukee: Shitty uniforms and the foul stench of Bud Selig is on the franchise. If they brought back the Harvey’s Wallbangers unis, I’d reconsider.

The Pool:

St. Louis: I’ve long had a love-hate relationship with the Cardinals. I’ve been to many games in St. Louis, and they’re always a good time. I have lots of friends, in several cities, who are Cardinals fans, so that would be cool. I can be at Busch Stadium in four hours. But, having spent most of my life in Western Missouri, it would be difficult for me to fully get on board with an Eastern Missouri team. They would get a long look, though.

Detroit: Historic franchise, great uniforms, Midwestern and in the American League. You don’t think I’d like wearing that old English D hat? The bonus of cheering for them to beat up on the ex-Royals if the franchise left KC.

Cleveland: GREAT uniforms, with one notable exception. Midwestern and AL. Have a history of understanding how to build with youth. At least when they invest in a rebuilding process there is hope that it will show results within eight years. Not a ridiculous drive from Indy.

Seattle: I like the Pacific Northwest. I dig their hats. They’re not likely to contend, but I think it would be cool to be a Mariners fan for some reason.

Los Angeles: Tons of history, so I could get away with wearing sweet, old school Brooklyn hats. Eventually they’re going to turn it around and be a player again. Yet, even with their recent struggles, it seems a little douchey to become a fan of a club like them.

Texas: Popular bandwagon pick #1. A franchise that seems to be headed in the right direction, both short and long-term. If you’re going to hop on a bandwagon, might as well be them rather than the Yankees or Red Sox. Of course, once they finally win a World Series, it’s going to be like 2004 was for the Red Sox bandwagon and everyone will suddenly be a Rangers fan.
(Update: I saw the Rangers in KC earlier this month. The bandwagon appears to be full, as there were tons of Rangers fans in the house, something that was unthinkable not too long ago.)

Washington: Popular bandwagon pick #2. I should have jumped on this one a couple years ago, before it was cool to do so. A definite up-and-coming franchise, but as they’re based on so much youth, there’s no guarantee they’ll ever capitalize on their potential. Hmm, sounds familiar.
Would also provide excellent conversation shifters:
“Can you believe what’s going on in Washington? Somebody needs to clean that town up.”
“No kidding. I can’t believe how much money they gave Jason Werth!”

San Francisco: I lived there briefly, so have some geographic claim to them. Great hats. Some pretty big history. Fantastic ballpark.

The Wild Card:

Cubs: I’ve hated the Cubs most of my life. But becoming a Cubs fan in Indianapolis would be pretty easy. Quick road trips to Wrigley. Lots of other fans to commiserate with. Tons of cool hats. And odds are Theo Epstein is going to get the franchise turned around. Whether he breaks their curse or not is another story, but I expect the Cubs to be good again soon.

All that said, aside from random people who are Yankees and Red Sox fans, there may be no douchier team to follow than the Cubs. And when I mentioned this to my buddy here who is a life-long Reds fan, he said he would no longer be my friend if I ever became a Cubs fan. So they’re a mostly no, but with the tinniest glimmer of hope.

ↁ]

We’ve reached the time of the year when the Royals completely fall apart, before their inevitable signs of life in September that we will cling to over the off season in hopes it was a sign that the team’s fortunes are finally changing. I’ll call it now: Eric Hosmer is going to start hitting again in mid-August. Luke Hochevar will do his annual ‘pitch solidly when no one is watching’ thing. Starting pitching as a whole won’t be great, but will be more consistent than in the first four months of the season. The team will string together hits and score runs like we expected them to.

But unless the Royals move some players, get Jake Odorizzi into the rotation (which I think will happen), and get Wil Myers 100-150 ABs I’m not going to get excited about anything that happens over the next two months.

If the Royals do close the season on a decent run, I expect the official message from the organization to be a reminder about how Sal Perez and Lorenzo Cain missed much of the season; Danny Duffy, Joachim Soria, and Felipe Paulino will all be back next season; the team really could have contended this year, and thus doesn’t need a major rehaul to contend in 2013. Trust the process and all.

Sigh.

I was out of Internet contact over the weekend and missed the glorious news that the Royals had shipped Jonathan Sanchez to Colorado for fellow suck pitcher Jeremy Guthrie. I’m not sure why I, and many others, hated Sanchez so much. He sucked, no doubt, but there have been plenty of shitty pitchers in KC in the last 25 years. But I’m glad he’s gone.

Ichiro to the Yankees? Holy out of nowhere! Nice that he could play his first series as a Yankee in Seattle, so his old fans could pay their respects to his time as a Mariner. I don’t get worked up about the “Player X in Team Y’s uniform” thing much. But it will be odd seeing him in pinstripes. It would have been odder if he was still a decent player, though.

I mentioned earlier this year that most summers I end up working up a list of what team I would adopt should the Royals ever be contracted. A couple people said they’d like to see that list, so I’ve been putting it in written form over the past few weeks. I expect to post it next week.

Here’s a nice use of Internet bandwidth: the current walkup song(s) for every MLB player.

ↁ

For a crappy game, the 2012 All Star Game will certainly go down as one of the more memorable All Star weeks in recent memory.

Thanks to the mini-controversy of Yankee Robinson Cano not selecting Royal Billy Butler for the Home Run Derby, the event turned into an opportunity for Kansas City baseball fans to unload 25 years of frustration on the best player on the best team in the league. And then, since this is 2012, everyone with any perspective on Boo-gate got to completely overreact to it.

I’m firmly in the “This Was a Silly Little Thing That Too Many People Took Too Seriously” camp. Cano was silly to say that he would include a Royal on the AL HR Derby squad earlier this year if he didn’t mean it. Royals fans were silly for acting like it was a black mark on the game that Billy Butler was not included. The national media was silly for not talking about Cano’s promise or realizing the reaction to him got stronger the longer he struggled in his Derby at bats. Had he knocked one out early, I think it never becomes the big deal it ended up being.

In this whole silly mess there was some stupidity, though. It was stupid for anyone to take the ire of the Royals fans, at least on Monday night, too seriously. It was stupid for any Royals fans that were rude and abusive to Cano’s family Tuesday. Not that it excuses such behavior, but it was stupid for the national media to act like Monday and Tuesday were the first time a home crowd ever reacted strongly towards a player. As Derek Jeter said, the reaction he received in Boston in 1999 was much worse. And it was stupid for some writers, a couple who are even pretty good ones, to assert that the performance of the KC fans will somehow keep them from ever signing a free agent again.

I was in the strange position Tuesday night of actually agreeing with most of what the Fox team of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver said about the ‘controversy’. They seemed to understand it was mostly light hearted and good natured and there was no menace behind it.

It’s a cliché to say that the All Star Game has lost its luster. Baseball hasn’t been America’s favorite sport in decades. When I was growing up, Little League baseball was done right around the time the All Star Game rolled around. Now leagues last all summer, and countless other kids who used to be sitting around are instead at camps or in summer leagues for other sports. We have a million crappy TV choices and the firehose that is the Internet. There are a lot of things to do other than sit down and catch up with what’s been going on in baseball for the first half of the season during the Mid-Summer Classic.

Even in its glory days, each year’s All Star Games blended into each other. Only the ones with big moments stood the test of time. There was Pete Rose running over Ray Fosse, Dave Parker’s throw, Bo Jackson’s home run, Randy Johnson zipping one behind Jon Kruk’s head, and, of course, The Tie. Those are the All Star Games everyone remembers. Thanks to Robinson Cano and angry Royals fans, though, the 2012 All Star Game is now on that list.

Aside from that, it seemed to be a pretty good time in Kansas City. Which makes the Midwest 2-for-2 in hosting big sports events this year after Indy’s fine performance with the Super Bowl earlier this year. People were properly enamored with the food and people in the city, and Kauffman Stadium got a rare moment in the national spotlight.

Which was bittersweet for me. I remember when the K (then Royals Stadium) was always in the middle of important events in baseball. Once upon a time NBC came to town a few times a year for the Game of the Week, Monday Night Baseball would make a couple visits, and October usually meant more network coverage. It’s been a long time since Kansas City baseball mattered and when the game ended, it didn’t feel like we were that much closer to it being a big deal again.

Joe Posnanski wrote a wonderful ode to Kansas City before the game which also touched on the rarity of this moment.

Kansas City gets the All-Star Game, and it’s likely that this will be the last time Kansas City will be in the national sports spotlight for a long time. Kansas City used to be in the spotlight with regularity. But times have changed. Unless something dramatic changes – and it almost certainly won’t – there won’t ever be a Super Bowl here, a U.S. Open here, another Final Four here. There’s a beautiful arena downtown that was built largely for an NBA or NHL team that almost certainly won’t ever come. Another World Series seems as distant as anything. The All-Star Game won’t come back for a long time.

Lots of George Brett appearances over the week. Which meant several people linked to one of the greatest things ever created on the Internet. Many of you are familiar with the infamous video of Brett describing a particularly nasty night in Las Vegas while on a spring training practice field. I did not know, however, that someone had remixed that video and turned it into a fine little song.

Shitty game, though. Shame it wasn’t Carlos Beltran who got the NL rolling instead of the other former Royal in the NL outfield, Melky Cabrera. When Tony LaRussa started treating it like a real game, despite being up eight, by swapping pitchers late in the game, I sat on my couch with my middle finger raised at the TV. Please keep your word and stay retired, Tony.

Now we can go back to complaining about how the Royals still suck, how Dayton Moore needs to go, and how the Glass family needs to sell. July baseball!

ↁ

Are the Royals, in a rather passive-agressive manner, trying to suck us fans back in? While they’re still generally mediocre, they’ve won enough games over the past month to get within spitting distance of both .500 and first place. As I write this they are 31-36 and just 4.5 games behind Cleveland. Far better than they were six weeks ago, when they wrapped up a brutal April.

I say passive-agressive because of how they’ve reached this point. It hasn’t been because of a good, old-fashioned hot streak. They haven’t played .600 ball over a month on the strength of shut-down starting pitching or a ferocious offense. Nope, they’ve surrounded a few really bad starting efforts with some decent ones, continued to get terrific bullpen work, and have squeezed out enough runs here and there to win a bunch of one-run games.¹ It all feels kind of fluky.

Take Wednesday’s game, for example. They were out-hit 8-4 and survived another adventurous Jonathan Broxton appearance to get a 2-1 win over the lowly Astros. But a win is a win, and once it’s tallied in the left column, it can’t be taken away.

So color me unimpressed, except…

Salvador Perez is likely back this week after a terrific rehab stint in Omaha. Lorenzo Cain might finally be on the mend. Hosmer can’t stay cold all season-long. And while they’re sure to mess it up one way or another, Wil Myers is probably the best minor league player in the game right now and will likely get called up well before September. Better defense at two positions, better hitting at three if Hosmer can get going, and another bat for the bench. They just might be much better a month from now than they are today, and since no one is running away with the division…

Damn it, they’ve sucked me back in. Perhaps my trip to see games in August won’t be a waste after all.

I have to address the Jonathan Sanchez situation. Dude is becoming my least favorite Royal in recent memory. As maddening as Luke Hochevar is, Sanchez might be worse. Whereas Luke seems like he just might not be super smart or just easily distracted, Sanchez often seems like he doesn’t care. At least from my view. How can you miss the strike zone (or first baseman’s mitt) as often and as badly as he does if you do care? There’s a part of me that wonders if he’s just trying to get released so he can get picked up by someone else.

Making matters worse, Melky Cabrera has been phenomenal so far for San Francisco. Other than himself and perhaps the Giants’ management, I’m pretty sure most people didn’t see that coming. It makes Sanchez’s struggles harder to take as Melky sits at the top of the NL batting stats. I thought Sanchez was a reasonable risk, especially with Cabrera likely to regress after his terrific 2011 season. And with Lorenzo Cain expected to be in center field all year, it made sense to move Melky when his value was at its highest.

We have no idea what other offers Dayton Moore had for Melky. Did he offer him to 10 other clubs and Sanchez was the best return he could manage? Or were the Giants the first team he called and he jumped on their offer of a big-league arm without shopping further? Moore has made plenty of blunders with managing the major league roster, so it’s tough to give him the benefit of the doubt. But surely Sanchez wasn’t the only offer he had, right?

ↁ