All My Fears Were for Naught

So apparently I was just the tiniest bit too hasty in my progression into fear that the Royals were not going to make any major moves this offseason. Clearly, I was wrong. I believe it was just a day after my last post that the Royals went out and signed Alex Rios and followed that up by signing Edinson Volquez. This left me very pleased, but within the day they had also signed Kris Medlen, which may be the best buy-low signing of the offseason. Since I have nothing better to do this morning, I'm going to break down where I stand on these three players and how I anticipate them performing next year in Royals blue.

Let's start with Alex Rios. Rios is going into the 12th year of his major league career that began when he was 23. Since his birthday is in the summer, this means he will turn 34 this year. That is not horribly old for a player who has as much experience as Rios does. Though age does become a problem when you are in your thirties, Rios has not had a noticeable decline in his performance, aside from a down year last year. The two years prior to that he averaged .291/.329/.473, which was good for a .802 OPS and 115 OPS+. These are very good numbers. Only Billy Butler and Alex Gordon had any comparable track record last year. It must be noted, however, that he has been prone to fairly down years in the past. The key appears to be in his batting average. When it is low, he struggles mightily. This could be due to high BABIP in his good years or bad luck in his bad years. I don't have the time or sufficient resources to determine this. Rios also has a fair amount of speed, so stolen bases and relatively good defense should be expected. In a best case scenario, Rios will hit 25 home runs, steal 30 bases and bat around .300 with a .340 OBP. That is not a player that you will be ashamed of, so the one year deal that he signed doesn't scare me. Sure, it is for a high salary, but it is better to get a player you want who won't hold back any prospect development than to just grab from the bargain bin. While I wanted Colby Rasmus to fill this position, there seemed to be little interest in him for one reason or another. I don't know if it was his low batting average numbers or his slightly greater tendency to strike out, but he remains unsigned while Rios has a new home. I think Rasmus has higher overall potential and is more apt to achieve that potential still, given that he is six years younger than Rios. But Rios should be stable force that you will be able to pencil into the lineup somewhere in the middle to give protection to our useful hitters such as Hosmer, Gordon, Perez and Cain. He also provides a much greater power potential than Nori Aoki, who apparently resigned himself to playing slapball at Kauffman after hitting 10 home runs the previous year as a Brewer. I think he is going to have a better year than last year, but probably not as good as he was in 2012. Something along the lines of his stats over his White Sox tenure in 2013 seems about right, which was .277/.328/.421. That puts him at a slightly below his average OPS of .759. In the ever-challenging goal of baseball hitting, that would be very respectable. Something a touch lower may also be possible. Essentially, he should be around Lorenzo Cain's numbers.

Edinson Volquez is a bit more of a mystery to me. I haven't had the opportunity to watch him like I have with Rios. The career numbers for Volquez are very odd. He has some years of very low ERA and some years of just horribly exorbitant numbers. The Royals, I am betting, are counting on him to play like his good numbers indicate. The most interesting thing about Volquez is that his career ERA is higher than his career FIP. This is interesting because FIP is almost always higher than ERA. For the Royals starting five last year, every single one of them had a higher FIP than ERA. This was true for Volquez too, but had not been true in the past. This means that he was either getting unusually unlucky or that he was playing behind a bad defense. In the Royals, he will now pitch for a team with an above average to excellent defense at nearly every position. His FIP should be much higher than his ERA again, though perhaps not as much as it was last year. He seems to have gotten very lucky last year. I do not expect that to happen again. In 2013 he was atrocious, while 2012 was not bad. He can be all over the board, but Eiland has shown himself to be an outstanding pitching coach. I believe that Volquez will regress to somewhere in the 3.5 to 4.2 ERA range, which would be perfectly adequate for a number four or five starter. If this is the worst any of our pitchers do, we are in great shape. Our offense, once again, underperformed stupendously. We have a chance to get much better on offense with very minimal change in every other department. I think the Royals of 2015 could be just as good as those of 2014, though perhaps not as lucky. We shall see.

Now I get to talk about Kris Medlen, and man does that make me excited. This is just an interesting, awesome case. There are few players like Kris Medlen that truly make me excited, but this is exceptional. This is a reliever who was converted to a starter midseason of 2012 and proceeded to take 20th in the MVP vote. His numbers were just silly. He follows that up with his only full season as a starter in 2013 with 197 inning of 3.11 ERA ball. Then he gets Tommy John for the second time and misses all of last year. The Royals signed him to two years and $8.5 million with massive incentives. He could potentially have Cy Young stuff, but he needs to prove that his second Tommy John was completely successful. The success rate on the second surgery is not as good as the first, but if it works out, this could be a huge steal. The guy is a legitimate number one or two starter and when paired with Ventura and Duffy, could be a ridiculous starting rotation that could be made even more impressive if Cueto or one of the young guns (Zimmer, Manaea, Finnegan, Almonte or even Binford), is able to step into the void left by Guthrie's departure next year or an injury to Vargas/Volquez and just dominate. The Royals are set for pitching for the future even if none of those prospects develop, but if one of them does develop into what the Royals think they can be then the team is going to be Braves-esque.

I'm excited about these moves. I think Dayton Moore did a good job of acquiring proven talent at each of the needed positions. There are some buy-lows in the group, such as Medlen, Morales and Rios, but even these guys are not truly over the hill and have legitimate ability to improve, rather than just my idiotic hope that they will. Volquez is somebody you don't want to regress to their averages. I think that all of these players will come back closer to their averages, but I do believe that the Royals coaching staff is at least as good as many others and will be able to get good results out of these players. Maybe this will be the first time in three years that we won't fire our hitting coach halfway through. The season is long and spring training starts in less than two months. I'm ready for some baseball.

Requiem for a Dream (Royals Edition)

Well, it was a magnificent season. I started out with so much hope that I could write 162 game summaries. I was very wrong, obviously. It didn't even last a month before my spirits were broken. That pretty much summarizes the first half of last season. I came in with the expectation that the offense, after a dismal 2013 season that followed a pretty good 2012 campaign would return to their 2012 numbers, or at least close to it. That did not happen. The Royals were, in fact, so bad that they once again fired their hitting coach. This time they replaced him with Dale Sveum. I never looked at the final numbers, but it certainly seemed like the offense was able to perform better under Sveum than they ever did under Pedro Grifol. No matter what the cause was, the important thing to remember is that everything changed. I was almost ready to give up on the Royals when they went on their first big streak to catch the Tigers. When they finally took over the division lead, I was so incredibly giddy that I spent a good fifteen minutes giggling to myself  as I my girlfriend and I exited the movie theater where we had been while the game was going. Then they sucked again, which threatened to kill my spirit once more. But this is baseball. You can either win seven out of ten by winning two out of three in a series a few times and three out of four in another or you can just win seven in a row. The Royals, it seemed, were the type of team who did the latter. They would go on a big streak and then lose a single game and then win five or six more and then lose seven out of ten to fall back to the mean. But late in the season something changed. The team that had been so nervous in big situations stopped being afraid. They became what we, or at least I, had always imagined that they could be. They became a team that competed every single night. They had a pitching staff that could bring it every single night and a team that excelled at preventing runs and taking advantage of the other team's mistakes. I guess you could say that the team found their identity. They were not a team that was going to take a walk, get a single and then blast one to take control of the game. Not to say this didn't happen sometimes, but it was not the norm. The Royals became a team that swung at almost everything and then made you work to get them out. They may have gotten lucky more times than I can think of, but the idea of making the other team get you out is truly one of the greatest in baseball. Giving away free outs, like striking out, which the Royals did less than anybody, is a good way to lose. No, this team wanted to run. They wanted to put pressure on you to make that easy play a little less than routine and hope that you rushed your throw or misplayed the carom of the ball, allowing them to press their advantage. That was this team's mantra. Do all the little things right, like base running and defense, and wait for the other team to make the mistake's that you systematically avoid. The shocking thing is that this became a viable system. They started winning series 2-1 and 3-1 consistently instead of performing at the extremes. They were just a legitimately good baseball team. As the season wound down, it became clear that they were very likely to make the playoffs. When the A's faded down the stretch, we even got the opportunity to host the AL Wild Card Game. I had the privilege of attending the first playoff baseball game in Kansas City since 1985.

My girlfriend bought me quarter-season tickets for Christmas last year. At the time, I was hesitant about the idea because my work schedule necessitated that I work alternating evening and day shifts in two week increments. I figured that many of the games would be happening on days that I had work, but I discovered that I was wrong. Out of sheer luck, all the days but one fell on days that I either did not have work or was working the day shift. With this in mind, I decided to keep the tickets. Nine months later, another decision needed to be made. With the Royals still in playoff contention, the team sent out an email that season ticket holders needed to reserve their playoff tickets or else they would have to buy single game tickets like everyone else. The investment was substantial as our two seats cost nearly $2,500 for all the way through the World Series. We decided that we should do it anyway, since the Royals would probably lose in one of the earlier rounds and we would get a discount. It would be silly to miss what was clearly a generational event because we were too afraid to spend a little money. Besides, we thought, it's not like they are going to make the World Series and that is where the tickets get really expensive.

So we go to the game. It is September 30, 2014. I will never forget this because there were lots of people wearing Royals October gear and I kept thinking to myself that if we don't win this game then there won't be a single Royals game in October. I had reason to worry. The game pitted James Shields, the de facto ace of the Royals pitching staff, against Jon Lester, who had experienced more postseason success than any other active pitcher. We still figured we had a good chance, but things didn't go as planned. Shields just didn't seem to have it. He had poor control and wasn't getting many swings and misses, ballooning his pitch count and letting men on base. The first inning started with Coco Crisp, a former Royal, reaching base on a walk. It looked like the Royals may get out of the inning unscathed, but Brandon Moss quickly put that belief to rest, and silenced the raucous crowd, by sending a long, no-doubt home run into the September night. The crowd was shaken, but when the Royals scored one run in the bottom of the first, we knew that it wasn't over yet. There was still a lot of game to be played and we would only need one more run to tie it up. Shields was able to keep the A's down for the next two innings and when the Royals scored three in the third inning, the 42,000+ at Kauffman Stadium could all taste the promise of the ensuing series against the Angels. The dream was alive.

But, as I got up and walked to get a drink in the 6th inning, Shields began to struggle. Men reached base. Two of them. His night was done and Ned Yost opted to bring in the 23 year old rookie phenom, Yordano Ventura, to pitch his first ever relief appearance. He gave up a home run. The crowd was deflated as three A's crossed the plate and the despair grew as two more Athletics were able to score in the inning. With a 7-3 deficit, the game now seemed out of reach. But we were not done. The Royals had worked too hard to get to this point. Though they flailed through the sixth and seventh innings, they were not done. The eighth inning was a triumph as three Royals scored, bringing the deficit to a mere run. The ninth inning brought up Josh Willingham, who used his only post-season hit to reach first base, where he was replaced by Jarrod Dyson. Dyson was advanced to second by a bunt and then stole third base by a very narrow margin before Nori Aoki hit a deep fly to right that was able to score Dyson from third easily. By now, everyone in the crowd believed that the Royals were going to win this game. No Royals team we had ever seen had fought in this manner to win a game where they seemed so far out of it. It was truly amazing. I considered it a privilege, win or lose, to be at a game where the teams both played their hearts out.

The game kept going until the 12th when the A's regained the lead following a hit and a wild pitch from the Royals. The game looked like it may finally end in disaster for the Royals, but Eric Hosmer would not let it. Hosmer had looked like a batting god all game. He had been taking bad pitches and absolutely crushing the good ones. This was no exception. Hosmer made sharp contact with this violent swing and for more than a second, I was convinced that the ball was gone. It wasn't but it hit the top of the wall and bounced off awkwardly, allowing Hosmer to reach third base. He was quickly pushed home by a bouncing Christian Colon single. Alex Gordon followed, and I was certain that he would end the game, but he merely popped out. Next up was Salvador Perez, who had experienced a miserable night at the plate and had really struggled the entire second half of the season. With Perez batting, Colon stole second, putting the winning run in scoring position for what would be the most dramatic hit of the Royals season. Perez, always willing to swing at anything, swung at a pitch far off the outside of the plate and somehow managed to rip it down the third base line. Josh Donaldson, the A's third baseman, had a chance at fielding the ball, but as soon as it passed his glove I knew that the Royals were heading to the ALDS. Christian Colon trotted home and the celebration escalated into insanity. I headed home happy that I had seen the best baseball game in my life. As I was driving, I realized that the Royals had waiting until after midnight to win. They really were a team that excelled in October.

The rest of the postseason was like a whirlwind. There was essentially no moment that I felt like the Royals were going to lose a series until the World Series. Though they eventually lost to the Giants, thanks to the herculean efforts of one Madison Bumgarner who I will forever loathe, the Royals brought immense joy to this community for a magical month that I wished could go on forever.

I love the Royals and I loved last season, but baseball isn't about living in the past. Baseball is about moving into the future. Though I thought last season was magical, next season could be just as great. The young core of talent is still on the team and they could play even better next year. Though Butler, Shields and Aoki are gone, we will find replacements. Butler was signed by the A's and replaced on the Royals by Kendrys Morales, who is actually pretty comparable. At this point, my major worry is that the team is being too passive this offseason. There have been rumors of the Royals being connected to free agents that I would love them to sign, but nothing has come of them. I worry that the Royals are going to sit and do nothing, but I don't truly believe that is the case. I believe that a trade will be made at some point and that I will be sad to see someone go and hopeful that the new acquisition will be able to prove their worth. I hope everything works out. I want next season to be amazing too.