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Royals Rumblings - News for June 19, 2014

Joe Posnanski says the Royals' success is bringing us back to the future. GREAT SCOTT!

So, yes, the Royals’ season was playing out like normal, the longest running tragic opera in America. You would have to say that, the Royals actually were AHEAD of their usual pace — hey, three games under .500 in June is almost parade-worthy in Kansas City. But it felt worse than normal because the Royals had been pointing to 2014 for a long time. This was to be the year it all turned around, the year their almost unprecedented crop of prospects blossomed, the year the Royals finally gave Kansas City a real pennant race to enjoy and endure.

Eleven days ago, that seemed impossible.

Today, at least, it not only seems possible but very real.

Yes: The wonder of baseball. The Royals have had brief moments of sunshine before –particularly back in 2003 when Tony Pena was handing out "We Believe!" T-shirts and the late Jose Lima was floating change-ups past the world. The Royals were in first place into late July that year. But it was different – 2003 was this strange oasis between 100-loss seasons. That team wasn’t any good, and everyone knew it wasn’t any good. The season was spent waiting to see how long it took the players to figure it out (answer: September 1). But this Royals teams IS good, or at least they have some good young players.

Jon Heyman writes the Royals can actually win the division.

The biggest question is whether the Royals can supplant the Tigers. And while that isn't going to be easy, Detroit has had a very unfortunate spring training, which has left it with some serious questions, including one at shortstop, so the Royals and Indians have their best chance in years to surpass the perennial class of the division. By my estimation, there's a chance both do. I'll take the Royals to win the division, the Indians to finish second and the Tigers third.
Fans are taking notice.

Dayton Moore acknowledges that while the winning is nice, the team hasn't won anything yet.

"We haven't accomplished anything yet," Moore told me by phone Tuesday night. "Lots of teams go through runs for two or three weeks. You have to sustain it for a while and then you have to win games where you might not be hitting well. That's what good teams do.

"Look, I appreciate what we have been doing. I appreciate it because I know the history, and I know the times in the past where we weren't competitive. So this is good. "But like I said, it's June, and we haven't accomplished anything yet. We have to keep playing hard."

In a small way, they haven't won the World Series.

Sam Mellinger thinks thinks that even after this hot streak is over, the Royals' success can be sustainable:

The Royals have won 13 of their last 17 through Tuesday, and are scoring 5.5 runs per game with a cumulative on-base-plus-slugging percentage of .773. Oakland leads the American League with 5.13 runs per game, and Toronto is tops with a .765 OPS. Before the surge, the Royals were scoring 3.8 runs per game with a .654 OPS.

So, obviously, this isn’t going to keep up. But the thing is, the Royals don’t need to lead the league in scoring to be a playoff team. They just need to be average, or even close to it.

Jonathan Bernhardt looks at how the Royals go so good, and argues they should look to acquire Chase Headley, Alexis Rios, and lock up James Shields to a long-term deal.

Being in first place by half a game in mid-June may not mean a whole lot to some, but it's time to see if the team Kansas City spent so much time and effort putting together can get to October from here. The Royals have the best group of pitchers in the American League outside of Oakland and the AL Central is wide-open space. Slap a tire patch on third base, find one more bat you trust, and go.

The Royals have scored the most runs in the league since Dale Sveum became hitting coach, attracting the attention of Peter Gammons Daily.

Even Denny Matthews is buying in.

"The Royals are playing very loose. I mean this in a good way – The Royals are playing like a bunch of wet noodles! … They’re playing flawlessly, really!

Defensively, pitching – everything is clicking. When you’re playing this way – and I was being facetious when I said, ‘Will they ever lose again?’ – but that’s the appearance that they give, that they’re never going to lose."

If anyone deserves a fun year, its the man who had to sit and broadcast year after year of 100-loss seasons. Let's win one for Denny.

Re-live that glorious second inning on Tuesday night against Max Scherzer with Fangraphs. It took 51 pitches and over half an hour.

Over a 30-minute second inning, the Royals handed Max Scherzer his ass and put themselves in position to coast into first place.

As of right now, we still project the Tigers to win the division two-thirds of the time, with the Royals and Indians combining for the rest. Most people around here are familiar with the value of the projections, but I suspect many of them hold different odds in their heads. It could be, that’s being too easily biased by recent events. It could be, it’s not that.

The Royals are real rock and rollers now - even Rolling Stone magazine has taken notice.

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hardballtalk.nbcsports.com
Back to the Future

Well, for at least a few days, Reagan is meeting with Gorbachev again, Sly Stallone is boxing Russians and looking for POWs, Madonna is a material girl. For a few days, the Commodore 128 is cutting-edge technology, Coca Cola tries a new recipe and the worst rock song ever recorded, Starship’s “We Built This City,” makes our ears bleed. It is 1985 again. The Kansas City Royals are in first place.

True, they could be out of first place as soon as this weekend. But they are in first place now, and providence demands that small miracles be noticed and cherished. The Royals have been, almost without exception, a nightmare team to love since 1985, when a scrappy bunch of kids and veterans won a World Series. The dreary years since are well-covered ground. And for the first two months of this season the Royals gave every indication that this would be as disappointing and disheartening a season as any of them.

Then they won 10 in a row.

And now, for this moment, they’re in first place.

That’s the wonder of baseball. No other sport offers this chance to go from a nothing team to a thrilling one in just 11 days. On June 7, the Royals were in last place in the uninspiring American League Central. They were three games below .500. They were last in the league in home runs, in slugging percentage, in OPS and, most importantly, in runs scored.

They were so thoroughly out of ideas that they canned hitting coach Pedro Grifol – that’s what the Royals ALWAYS do when they can’t hit. Grifol was the fifth hitting coach to disappear in three years. May in Kansas City is that time of year when hitting coaches (and, occasionally first-base coaches) are best served hiding under beds because they often spontaneously combust or have bizarre gardening accidents the authorities decide are better left unsolved.

So, yes, the Royals’ season was playing out like normal, the longest running tragic opera in America. You would have to say that, the Royals actually were AHEAD of their usual pace — hey, three games under .500 in June is almost parade-worthy in Kansas City. But it felt worse than normal because the Royals had been pointing to 2014 for a long time. This was to be the year it all turned around, the year their almost unprecedented crop of prospects blossomed, the year the Royals finally gave Kansas City a real pennant race to enjoy and endure.

Eleven days ago, that seemed impossible.

Today, at least, it not only seems possible but very real.

Yes: The wonder of baseball. The Royals have had brief moments of sunshine before –particularly back in 2003 when Tony Pena was handing out “We Believe!” T-shirts and the late Jose Lima was floating change-ups past the world. The Royals were in first place into late July that year. But it was different – 2003 was this strange oasis between 100-loss seasons. That team wasn’t any good, and everyone knew it wasn’t any good. The season was spent waiting to see how long it took the players to figure it out (answer: September 1).

But this Royals teams IS good, or at least they have some good young players. The sluggish start was particularly painful because there had been real hope entering the season. The Royals signed pitcher Yordano Ventura for $28,000 when he was 16 years old – six years later, he’s a rookie throwing 103 mph. The Royals had high hopes for a left-handed pitcher named Danny Duffy, and then one day a few years ago he called up the Royals director of player development J.J. Picollo and said he was quitting baseball. He came back and, not long after, blew out his elbow. He came back again and this year has been mostly fantastic.

The Royals drafted Greg Holland in the 10th round out of Western Carolina – he was a 5-foot-10 non-prospect. Best I can tell, he never once made Baseball America’s list of the Royals top THIRTY prospects. The last two years, he has 67 saves, a 1.25 ERA and he has struck out 143 in 93 innings.

And so on. Once promising starter Wade Davis has become the Incredible Hulk as a setup man — he has struck out 49 batters in 30 innings and, you won’t believe this, has not allowed an extra-base hit all year. Veterans James Shields and Jason Vargas have been very good. Like I say, this team IS good, or as good as Royals teams get, and when they were stuck in last place and playing uninspired baseball, it felt like a new way for them to cause suffering.

Then again, you notice all the players I mentioned above are pitchers — the Royals’ lineup was unbearably awful. For two months they did almost nothing well. The only skill they displayed the first two months of the season was the ability to avoid strikeouts — a skill that doesn’t add up to much when you spend most of your effort grounding balls to second base.

Then, for the last 11 days, the Royals have started crushing baseballs. It’s just a small sample, of course, but it happened so quickly and so unexpectedly that it’s worth celebrating. Since June 7, they have 13 homers in 10 games. They have scored 24 runs in their last three games against top dog Detroit – Tuesday night they crushed last year’s Cy Young-winner Max Scherzer. Catcher Salvador Perez keeps on hitting. Their best hitting prospects of the last few years, Mike Moustakas and Eric Hosmer, finally started hitting. Hey, maybe firing the batting coach worked this time.

And a few words should be written about Alex Gordon. He’s only 30 but he has lived a full baseball life. In 2005, the Royals drafted him with the second-overall pick — it’s hard to describe how much excitement he triggered. Gordon was not only the top college hitter in the America, he was a true Midwesterner — born and raised and college-educated in Lincoln, Neb. — and he grew up in a Royals family. One of his brothers was actually named after George Brett. Even more , Gordon’s swing was obviously patterned after Brett’s. Everything seemed so right, and then Gordon had a brilliant season in the minors — he was named Baseball America’s minor-league player of the year — and stardom was assured.

Only, it wasn’t. Gordon came up to the major leagues and, for all the calm he tried to display for the masses, he was entirely spooked. He was hitting in the .170s in early June. His defense at third base, which was expected to be solidly average or above, was frightening Royals management. He was the all-but unanimous preseason Rookie of the Year, but instead he hit .247, struck out 137 times. Gordon was only moderately better the next year.

Then the injuries began, and whatever confidence was left seemed shattered. The Royals sent Gordon down to the minor leagues to learn how to be a left fielder. Through age 26, Alex Gordon was hitting .244/.328/.405 and was basically unplayable at third base. It could not have looked more dire.

Then Gordon did what very few can do. He rebuilt himself. He embraced the role of a left fielder, he worked hard on finding his swing. In 2011 and 2012 he was a great player. He hit .298/.372/.478 those two years, led the league in doubles in 2012, won well-deserved Gold Gloves for his play in left field. People had more or less stopped noticing him, but Gordon had become one of the best players in the American League.

This year, he’s again up there, having a quiet MVP-type season. At the moment, the Website Fangraphs puts Gordon’s Wins Above Replacement at 4.1 – second in the league behind only Mike Trout. People feel all different ways about the WAR stat but the point is not the number but that Gordon is doing everything well — he’s hitting, he’s throwing in a little power, he’s one of the best baserunners in baseball.

And, perhaps most of all, he’s playing spectacular defense. Gordon has been the best defensive left fielder in baseball for a while now. These days, he’s making a case for best defensive player in baseball PERIOD, any position. According to John Dewan’s fascinating “Runs Saved” statistic, Gordon has saved the Royals 16 runs this year with his defense. For the moment, he has saved more runs with his left-field defense than Braves shortstop Andrelton Simmons or Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina.

Look, you don’t have to tell Royals fans that all this can disappear in a moment. There are stats that suggest the Royals have had a lot of luck this season, and luck rarely lasts all the way through. There are reasons to believe the Tigers are much better than the Royals, and that the Royals’ bullpen will not continue to dominate, and that the lack of power in the Royals lineup will lead to some bad stretches and that the starting rotation won’t hold up. You don’t have to tell Royals fans any of that because they’ve been living it for almost 30 years.

But right now: The Royals are in first place. They are wearing their raspberry berets and listening to the cheers and going back to the future. You don’t question these things in Kansas City. You relish in them. Maybe it’s a dream. But if it is, let us sleep for a little while longer. But, yes, please do wake us up before you go go.

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mweb.cbssports.com
Royals flush: Six reasons why it will be Kansas City's year

Omar Infante shores up a nagging need at second base for the Royals. (USATSI)

Omar Infante shores up a nagging need for the Royals at second base. (USATSI)
More: Spring Training | Scoreboard | FA tracker: position players | FA tracker: pitchers

Are the Royals really such a crazy pick as American League pennant winners?

Not from here they're not.

The Royals nearly broke through and made the playoffs last year, and there's reason to think they take another big step forward to win an increasingly tough AL Central this year. This should be their year for a variety of reasons, and here are a few …

1. They filled a longtime need at second base by signing dependable, versatile veteran Omar Infante, shoring up a perennial issue with a very solid answer.

2. They bolstered their rotation by adding crafty veteran starter Jason Vargas.

3. They had the best ERA in the AL last year (3.45) and have a chance to do even better with the arrival of young right-handed pitching stud Yordano Ventura, who's been compared to a young Pedro, mostly because of his lack of height but also because of his vast talent.

4. They have the arguably the best defense in baseball, and quite likely the only team that has an above-average defender at every spot on the field (at least until Manny Machado returns for the Orioles). Catcher Salvador Perez, first baseman Eric Hosmer and left fielder Alex Gordon were Gold Glove winners while shortstop Alcides Escobar and center fielder Lorenzo Cain were Gold Glove finalists. Third baseman Mike Moustakas, Infante and right fielder Nori Aoki aren't bad, either.

5. Their offense, which lacked a proven leadoff hitter last year, should benefit by the acquisition of Aoki.

6. They may also get a boost in their lineup if Moustakas can hit up to his potential following a very rough 2013 season with the bat. There is reason to think he can.

This is a very good team, there's little question about that.

The biggest question is whether the Royals can supplant the Tigers. And while that isn't going to be easy, Detroit has had a very unfortunate spring training, which has left it with some serious questions, including one at shortstop, so the Royals and Indians have their best chance in years to surpass the perennial class of the division.

By my estimation, there's a chance both do. I'll take the Royals to win the division, the Indians to finish second and the Tigers third.

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www.sportsonearth.com
UNLIKELY LEADERS

royals
A month ago, most people had written off the Kansas City Royals -- but lately they've had plenty of reason to celebrate. (USA TODAY Sports)
And so it comes to pass that on June 17, 2014, roughly a full month after most everyone -- current company included -- wrote the Kansas City Royals off entirely, they take a half game lead in the American League Central over the Detroit Tigers. For those of you keeping track at home, that makes your AL division leaders Toronto in the East, Kansas City in the Central, and Oakland -- the best team in baseball without much competition at the moment -- out West. It'll probably save time at this point if we just start listing the teams that aren't surprising us with their performances this year (Cubs).

Of course, baseball history is full of really funny June division leaders -- on June 17 of last year, for instance, the San Diego Padres were one game out of first place in the NL West. They'd be over eight games back by mid-July and would be looking forward to next season by the time the All-Star Break rolled around.

These next few weeks right now are the regular season at its most narratively unpredictable, because this is the decision-making moment: Are you in or are you out? Right now, about two-thirds of the teams in the league still have very viable paths to the postseason in their eyes; and while some of them will fall by the wayside much like San Diego did last year, there was another California team in the NL West last year that reached a turning point in late June... and responded by going 47-8 from June 22 to August 17, putting them firmly in control of their own playoff destiny.

It is unrealistic to expect any team to ever rip off a stretch of games like the Los Angeles Dodgers did last year, and when it does happen it's worth noting that the Dodgers have just about the most talented roster money can buy. This year's Royals aren't last years Padres or Dodgers, and whether or not they're actually the team that can give the Tigers their yearly run for the Central will depend primarily on two things: first, the extent to which they believe a lineup centered around Alex Gordon, Salvador Perez and a whole lot of praying can continue to pay the bills on offense, and second, the extent to which they value James Shields.

A simple glance at the box scores will tell you the Royals of the last 14 days or so aren't the same squad from the first couple months of the season; the team's .800 OPS over the last two weeks going into Tuesday night's contest is over 100 points higher than the team's season .684 (and if you narrow things down to the last seven days, the Royals have a .900 OPS and are the hottest offense in baseball). Why? Well, who knows why. Sometimes these things just line up: Gordon, Perez and DH Billy Butler are looking like a legitimate middle-of-the-order core, while Eric Hosmer, Omar Infante, and Lorenzo Cain are more than helping the cause around them. Alcides Escobar is right there with them, making it a bit less surreal that the light-hitting shortstop has been the Royals' second or third best hitter on the season. Even Mike Moustakas is back from the minors and hitting the ball all over the field, if still not for much power.

It's easy to argue that Billy Butler -- and to a lesser extent Omar Infante -- were due. Infante's had up years and down years at the plate his entire career, and second basemen do age quickly into their thirties, but not so quickly as to turn a career .717 OPS hitter (92 OPS+) at 32 years old into a .644 OPS guy with no power whatsoever the very next year. The other guys I'm not as willing to give the benefit of the doubt. Hosmer is a rollercoaster ride himself, but the ups are "league-average starting first baseman" while the downs are "cut bait, move on." And Moustakas is Hosmer without the ups.

But this is the roster that Dayton Moore and the Royals have gone to war with, and to its credit it is a strong roster defensively with Escobar and Infante up the middle and some combination of Jarrod Dyson, Lorenzo Cain and Nori Aoki nailing down center and right field with Gordon in left. Perez has emerged as one of the better all-around young catchers in the game, and Moustakas and Hosmer can handle themselves at the infield corners. But this bunch isn't going to continue to OPS .900, or even .800; they'll be lucky if they keep this going long enough to get the team OPS over .700 on the year, even for just a little while -- and the lineup as is needs some serious improvements if the Royals are going to make a real go at this thing. That is to say: if the Royals aren't going to sell at the deadline, they've got to actively buy.

The first thing they need is a third baseman to take over for Moustakas so he can go back down to Triple-A and actually find time to grow there as a hitter, instead of the constant shuttling back and forth he gets. The lack of a back-up plan for Moustakas last year was striking, and while offseason acquisition Danny Valencia certainly can play a bit of third, he's a platoon bat who should only see action against left-handers. He's not a guy a contending team can just hand the job for the entire season, and despite what he's done over the last week, neither is Moustakas.

Kansas City could also use an upgrade in the outfield; Cain and Dyson work well as a centerfield platoon, though Cain has shown enough against right-handed pitching this year that he deserves the shot the team is giving him right now. Ideally Cain would take the starting job over entirely, Dyson would be a good 4th outfielder bench type and the Royals would get someone besides Aoki to lock down right. Complicating matters is the fact that Kansas City has spent a lot of trade chips over the past few years already, and would be well-served to hang on to most of the ones they have left, if at all possible.

No matter how much Wil Myers' poor 2014 may have emboldened the hearts of Royals fans everywhere who thought the James Shields trade with Tampa Bay was a steal, it is probably best if KC stays out of the Ben Zobrist sweepstakes. He's not an especially good fit as an everyday right fielder, and third is just about the only position he hasn't played a significant amount of in the past few years.

Buying low on Chase Headley, assuming the Padres are selling -- and they should be -- would stabilize third base for the rest of 2014. Headley gets a change of scenery and hopefully picks up the pace a little bit going into free agency, and if he stumbles and Moustakas plays his way back into the starting lineup, well… so be it. For right field, Alex Rios is having a very solid season for Texas and shouldn't be the kind of guy that costs a top-level chip. Rios immediately becomes the second or third best hitter on the team, while Headley's .630 OPS is still a decent improvement on what Moustakas has spent most of the season doing.

The Royals are lucky, in a sense, because all their entire deadline checklist involves is rehabbing the lineup into something that could credibly be league-average the rest of the way, and then rely on the pitching staff they've already assembled to do the heavy lifting.

But that brings us to our second pivot point: James Shields.

Shields is unlikely to be a Royal in 2015 even if Kansas City doesn't deal him at the deadline; there will be the usual noises about trying to find the right number of dollars and years, the exclusivity window will expire, the Royals will hit him with a qualifying offer that Shields will gladly decline and he'll go collect his $140 million or so from the New York Yankees while the Royals will nab another first rounder.

That is how things are likely to go. But I'd be willing to bet just about any arbitrary amount of someone else's money that in Dayton Moore's heart of hearts, he would like nothing more than to lock Shields up for the rest of his career. Shields is the kind of pitcher that excites the GM's particular scouting tics -- recall that for all his other faults as an executive, Moore remains one of the best pitching evaluators in the game. Moore was so convinced that Shields was the answer for his team he traded an elite MLB-ready prospect at a position of dire need to get him, willing to bet that he wasn't actually making his team worse in the short or long term.

Obviously one does not trade the staff ace when one is in first place regardless of who the ace is or who the general manager is, but soon the bats will cool down, the Tigers' pitching will stabilize somewhat and this will once again in all likelihood be a chase that Detroit leads and Kansas City follows, trying to fend off Cleveland, Chicago, and the Twins as they go. But at this point, Shields is likely not getting traded regardless of what happens in the standings between now and the deadline.

The pitcher represents not only the guy Moore wants at the top of his rotation but the urgency behind the 2014 Royals, as they face down the prospect of slipping into same amount of nothing after this year as they have all the years prior to it. Being in first place by half a game in mid-June may not mean a whole lot to some, but it's time to see if the team Kansas City spent so much time and effort putting together can get to October from here. The Royals have the best group of pitchers in the American League outside of Oakland and the AL Central is wide-open space. Slap a tire patch on third base, find one more bat you trust, and go.