Finally, some speed arrives!

I've been waiting...and waiting....and waiting.....finally - Joey Gathright has made his way back to the big league club. It's time to see what we've got in this guy. Can he lead off? Can he play centerfield? Is he part of the future here in KC???

Don't get me wrong - I love David DeJesus. But I don't love him as a leadoff hitter. I like him better as a #2. DDJ is patient, takes pitches, gets on base. He doesn't have the speed you'd like to see in a leadoff hitter, and he doesn't have the pop you'd like to see in a #3 guy. If Gathright can hit at this level....and that's a big IF (although he's 2-for-2 tonight so far).....he's the perfect leadoff guy. Probably one of the fastest - if not THE fastest - guy in baseball.

I won't be as picky on where he plays in the outfield. DDJ plays a fine centerfield...but....Gathright could play a great center with his speed and range. If he pans out and becomes our man out there, our range in the outfield is instantly improved. Imagine Gathright with his speed in center, DDJ with his pretty good speed in left, and Teahen with his speed (and his laser rocket arm, you know, like Peyton Manning?) in right. Not a bad outfield going into the next few years.

Of course, all of this is coming from the optimist in me. Gathright's never been able to get it done at the plate at this level. He was hitting over .300 at Omaha, but it's a whole different ballgame up here (just ask Alex Gordon).

Regardless of what happens, it's about time they brought him back up. We need to see what we've got, for better or for worse. I'm hoping for the better.


DON'T FORGET! BASEBALL AMATEUR DRAFT STARTS TOMORROW!!!!

The Huber Effect

We've seen this before.....bring a top prospect up from the minors, let him play a little, then sit his butt on the bench. It's hard to say if this slowed the development of Justin Huber, but it couldn't have helped. Now we're seeing the same thing with Billy Butler.

Dayton Moore and his new regime promised the fans we'd see better handling of prospects. Moore seems to understand the value of scouting, minor league development, etc. However....now we're watching Billy Butler, probably the best pure hitting prospect in baseball, being handled in pretty much the same way we've seen Huber handled in the past.

What's the deal????

I'm well aware of Butler's defensive shortcomings....the guy was born to hit, but that's about all he was born to do. He looks awful in the outfield, and has probably embarrassed him self a bit in the process. Now the Royals say they're going to move him to first base. Ok. Great. I'm good with that. So....shouldn't he be in Omaha, logging time at the new position?? Oh. You'd rather have him sit the bench with the big leaguers...improving on nothing. Um.....Ok.

Now, who am I to criticize? Well...just a fan. No, I don't have a master's degree in business or any real baseball background. But I'm a fan who goes to a ton of games every year, and when I'm not there, I'm watching on TV or listening on the radio. Just a guy who studies the game with my free time and recognizes when mistakes are made. A guy who sees when a similar mistake is being made. A guy who's getting really tired of bungled moves with this team.........

I'm not jumping all over Moore. I love Moore. I have all the confidence in the world in this guy. That being said, if Butler's not going to play here, send him back to Omaha. Let him hit every day and continue to improve his game. Let him play first base every day. Let this kid prepare himself to succeed at the next level! PLEASE!

Now that I've got that off my chest....I feel like I'd better mention something positive. How about Meche???? Man....he's come out and proven all the doubters wrong. Where are all these national media guys now? I remember when KC and Dayton Moore were bashed for shelling out the big bucks for him.....time to eat your words boys.

Also - you've got to love the emergence of De La Rosa as a top notch starter. When one of these two guys start, the Royals are 10-7. Maybe we should shave it down to a two-man rotation....

Back after hiatus

I had to take the end of April to get away from this blog. I couldn't handle trying to come up with something to write about, everything was going so terribly for the Royals (and still is, really).

Anyway - I'm back. And Billy Butler is here. Glad to see they finally made room for this kid...he is a hitter. And we can always use one of those.....especially in this weak lineup. Going into the season, I thought our lineup would be great and our pitching would still be the shaky part of the team, but I was wrong.

Let me clarify - I didn't think the pitching would be as horrible as last year, but I thought it would only be slightly improved. Meche and company have proven me wrong, though. The starting pitching has been vastly improved, while the bullpen has still been a sore spot (although Soria is the real deal). However, the bullpen hasn't been as much of a sore spot as our underperforming lineup. Alex Gordon is off to a slow start, which makes the start Shealy is off to completely impossible to describe (thank god he's on the DL now).

On a positive note, we did just split a four game series with the Angels, so that's nice. And even though we sit with a record of 10-20, there is a different feel to this team....I never feel like they're just completely overmatched, and that's a nice improvement from 2006. Another positive - Butler looks like the real deal, and I do see signs of improvement from Gordon - he's patient, and although he's only batting about .170, his OBP is over .300, so he's getting on base, just not getting hits.

Heading out to The K tonight to watch game two of the Detroit series, so hopefully will see a good game. Looking forward to seeing Butler in person.

I'll be posting more regularly (hopefully) throughout the rest of the season, and will try to have some fun new features for you guys, so stay tuned......

Bullpen is major weakness

It appears that once again, our bullpen is a major weakness on this team. We have definitely seen improved starting pitching this year (which was another weakness last season), and the bats are starting to wake up a bit....but we can't hold a lead.

Last year, we had 28 save opportunities blown (according to the official team page). This year, we've already had five blown opportunities - in only 21 games. Basically an eighth of the way through this season, we're on pace to blow 40 saves. Ouch.

A lot of this problem has been attributed to the injury of our new closer Octavio Dotel. After showing pretty good stuff in Surprise, Dotel was injured and placed on the DL at the beginning of the regular season, and has yet to see any game time in 2007. Another major blow to the pen came with the injury of John Bale, a lefty setup man.

Some good news/bad news - First the good: We finally have a timetable on the return of both pitchers. Now the bad.........it's not until mid-May. Hopefully the starting pitching can keep doing their job for another month, getting the team into the sixth and seventh innings of most games and not making this team rely on it's shaky pen as much. Once these two return, it could help the rest of the guys a lot, as they will all fall back into places they are probably more comfortable with....which will hopefully translate into a better late inning look for our pitching staff the rest of the way in '07.

Other than that....looking forward to seeing Greinke go today, hoping he shows the ability to bounce back after one horrible start and one so-so start....he needs to show that kind of resiliency at the big league level before he can take the next step to becoming a top of the rotation guy.

Same old Royals?

Well, here we are...14 games into the new season, and we sit at 3-11. The Royals have now dropped 6 straight and are 1-7 on the current road trip. Not pretty. At all. I'm looking for the silver lining, and it's really hard to find right now.

I know what you're thinking: "It's only 14 games. You can't give up yet". Well....I'm not really "giving up", but I've been through this before. If you're reading this, you're most likely a Royals fan and have gone through this as well. It happens every season (or at least every season in recent history). The Royals take the field, get slapped around like a high school team trying to play in the big leagues, and we're out of the race by May. I'm tired of it. This team seems to be looking for ways to blow games, and they always find a new and interesting way to do it. So....here's my look at our biggest problem right now, and some comments on whether or not it can be solved.

Problem: Our offense stinks right now. Most fans thought our offense would be just fine. With bats in our lineup like DeJesus, Grudz, Teahen, Sweeney, Gordon, Brown/Sanders, Shealy.....we looked to be okay. Actually, scratch that, we looked like we'd be really damn good!

Out of the group I just mentioned, only two are hitting worth a damn right now - DeJesus and Sanders (who plays part-time) and Grudz has been banged up (average is around .230 right now). Teahen, Sweeney, Gordon, Brown and Shealy are lousy at the plate right now.....none are hitting over .200 (Teahen is right at .200, the rest are below).

Along with Sanders, we've had a nice surprise in John Buck, who is currently hitting .429 with an OBP of .520 and a .905 slugging percent. This is way more than we thought we'd get from Buck, who is currently in a platoon at catcher with Jason LaRue (who is only batting .154).

Solution: There's not much we can do, really. Maybe Buddy Bell should juggle the lineup a bit, moving some guys into different slots. Teahen's our number three hitter, and he's batting .200. Maybe he should slide down to fourth or fifth, move Sanders up to three on the days he plays. I don't know what the answer is, but the bulk of our heavy hitters are in a terrible slump right now.

I'm sure they'll break out of it soon...but in the meantime, can we try something (anything) different? Of course, this opens up another can of worms....with most of these guys hitting poorly, you move a guy down and replace him with who? Another thing to consider: maybe we don't need to platoon Buck right now....he's currently hitting the cover off the ball and he's got the least amount of at bats on the entire team. Ummmm......what's the logic here, again?

I understand that for hitters, baseball is essentially a game of failure - If you hit .300, you're only succeeding at a rate of 30 percent, which, according to our education system, is a big fat "F". Players are going to have slumps, I get that.....but what do you want to bet when the bats come around, the pitching will stink? Just seems to be the way the ball bounces here in KC.

Hopefully my next post will have at least a hint of positivity to it.

Zack Greinke - Looking Like the Real Deal

Zack Greinke got his first big league win in a long time last night against the Blue Jays, and looked damn good (for the second straight game) doing it.

This is Greinke's second outing of the year, both of which have been great starts. His first outing was against the Red Sox in the third game of this season. He went up against Dice-K, so most of the attention wasn't on Zack that day, but he forced himself into the spotlight as well - going pitch for pitch with the Red Sox import. That day, Greinke showed tremendous stuff, going seven innings while ringing up seven strike outs and allowing only one earned run. Pretty good numbers against one of the best lineups in baseball.

After his first start for the Royals since 2005, the media sat up and took notice of Greinke. Of course, the local media was already paying attention, but now the national media was buzzing as well. Everyone already knew about Greinke and his amazing potential, but most were sitting back and waiting to see if he'd worked things out as far as his bouts with depression. It appears he has.

Greinke followed up the Red Sox game with a start on the road in Toronto last night - registering a win and looking every bit as good as he did against Boston. He struck out Frank Thomas not once, but twice - and had Big Hurt frustrated and grumbling to himself (and at the umpire). In his second start, Greinke went six innings and struck out five. Through two starts (and 13 innings) he has allowed 14 hits, two earned runs, one walk and has struck out 13.

I love Greinke and have been following him since we drafted him. I was at his first major league game (which he won) and have had high hopes that he'll become our next ace. You can imagine my disappointment when I heard he left spring training last year.....however, I stuck with Zack, hoping that he'd get his problems worked out and at some point come back to pitching. I had no idea what to expect from him as a pitcher when he returned, but this spring, he was dominant. Batters were buzzing, saying he had the best stuff out of all the pitchers in camp down in Arizona. They may have been right, and it looks to have carried over to the regular season.

The one thing I've noticed more than anything this year with Zack (even more than his pitching) has been his demeanor on the field and in the dugout. It seems to me that he's beaten his depression. He looks happy out there, and looks like he's one of the guys....like he fits in. On the mound, he seems to be enjoying himself - he even seems a bit cocky out there, which is exactly the attitude an ace needs to go out there and make hitters like Frank Thomas and David Ortiz look bad.

I remember the excitement around Greinke on his rise through the minors and during his first big league season....and I think that pitcher has finally returned. I, along with many other fans, cannot wait to see where Greinke goes from here. The sky is the limit.

Two Days at The K

Just wrapped a pretty good two day run at Kauffman around 8:00 pm Monday night. Started off Sunday heading out to the open practice at 2:30 with the wife and kids, we met up with a friend and his family and got great seats right behind the third base dugout, about even with the bag. Nice and close to Alex Gordon, who looked pretty smooth in fielding practice. The Royals started rotating through the batting cage and Sweeney looked good (which I'd expect). Gordon looked GREAT - he hit a couple of absolute BOMBS. One thing my buddy and I both noticed and commented on was that Tony Pena, Jr. had a really smooth swing going, and he was hitting some hard line drives around the field. Maybe Dayton Moore saw something click last year in Atlanta......we left excited for opening day.

Monday morning - I had to work until 11:00, then met up with my buddy and got the stadium right around noon. By the time we got there, the lots were already filling up with tailgaters. Nice to see such excitement around the Royals this year. Opening day is always a big deal....but this year, there seems to be just a little more buzz than usual. With Gordon on the big league roster, Greinke coming back strong from his issues, a new ace pitching for us, and the Red Sox in town.....we knew it was going to be a heck of a day.

I expected Meche to look shaky for an inning or two, and in the first....he didn't look all that good. But after that - WOW. Six strikeouts. Went deep in the game. Only walked one. I thought that's what we'd see out of Schilling....but....the Royals were all over him, and he only lasted four innings. If Meche has that kind of game in about 70% of his starts, then he truly is peaking and is ready to be a top-notch pitcher in this league.

Alex Gordon couldn't manage a hit...but you've got to think he was a bit nervous - being the savior of a franchise and all. Just the fact that he's on the field makes you feel better about the direction of this team, though - and his hits will come. I still say he's the AL Rookie of the Year this season.

Oh....and remember what I said about Pena at the open practice??? Well...that swing carried over to Monday as he ripped two very hard-hit triples. He's got great speed, looked really smooth in the field...and best of all - HE'S NOT BERROA.

It's only one game, but I think we saw a bit of foreshadowing today.....the Royals are moving in the right direction, and we're ready to relinquish our yearly position as the league laughing stock. KC is on the way back to being a respected franchise, and it's going to be one hell of a ride.