KC Royals - August

[RoyalShock]

Gordo
Melkman
Painkiller (Lorenzo Cain in Omaha)

[Awesome Sauce Malone]

lmao Its pretty awesome to read Gio's aunt talk about her trip up to the K to watch him.

[SubGod22]

Giavotella brings swagger, talent to KC

KANSAS CITY -- Johnny Giavotella brought everything with him from Omaha -- glove, bats, spikes and self-assurance. Plenty of self-assurance.

That comes with leading the Minor Leagues with a big bag of 153 hits. He's just shifting his venue to the Major Leagues.

And it was a seamless shift as, in his Royals debut in Friday night's 4-3 loss to the Tigers, Giavotella banged two hits including a double, drove in a key run, stole a base and walked.

"I'd say I'm a pretty competitive hitter," he said before the game. "I don't give at-bats away, no matter what the count or the situation or the pitcher. I'm going to go up there with confidence that I'm going to get a hit and I'm going to succeed in the at-bat."

He succeeded at the Triple-A level to the tune of a .338 average along with 34 doubles, nine home runs, 72 RBIs and 67 runs scored

Royals' tough loss spoils Gio's fine debut

KANSAS CITY -- Johnny Giavotella had an excellent Major League debut and aided the Royals in a three-run rally to tie the game. But it was all spoiled by Brennan Boesch.

Boesch drove in the winning run for the Tigers in the 10th inning as the Royals dropped the series opener, 4-3, on Friday night before a crowd of 28,565 at Kauffman Stadium.

Kansas City was shut out over the first six innings, but rallied to tie the game in the seventh -- making the loss harder to take.

"They're tough, especially when you come back like that," Royals manager Ned Yost said. "We've been great all year at holding the fort until we can score. But that's a pretty good club over there. Just didn't happen tonight."

[shockmonster]

Can anyone tell me who the Royals back up SS and 3rd baseman is at this time if Moose or Escobar get hurt? They have to put someone in the game. ;-)

[ShockTalk]

Can anyone tell me who the Royals back up SS and 3rd baseman is at this time if Moose or Escobar get hurt? They have to put someone in the game. ;-)

First guess would be Gio with Getz going in at 2nd.

[RoyalShock]

Can anyone tell me who the Royals back up SS and 3rd baseman is at this time if Moose or Escobar get hurt? They have to put someone in the game. ;-)

Mitch Maier can play rover on the left side! :)

[wufan]

Surely Gordon could cover 3B in a pinch.

[SubGod22]

I was out yesterday and most of the weekend, so I'm playing catch up today. Yost thinks rookie Duffy has ace potential

"Duffy comes out, sees a sign, rares back and fires it. Verlander sees a sign and he rares back and throws it," Yost said. "When you have good stuff like they do, you can add and subtract on your pitches.

"What Verlander's doing is cruising; he's just nice and relaxed, boom, and 92, 93 miles an hour. But when he wants to hump up, he still has the ability to make a pitch. Danny is out there from the beginning just humping up and firing and trying to locate pitches, but not pitching, if you understand what I'm saying. It's the ability to execute a pitch 90 percent of the time."

Gordon sets Royals outfield record for assists

KANSAS CITY -- Alex Gordon strong-armed his way into the Royals' record book on Sunday.

Gordon notched his 18th assist as a left fielder, setting a franchise single-season mark by an outfielder. He shared the old record, 17, with Jermaine Dye (1999) and Mark Teahen (2007).

In the Tigers' fourth inning, Miguel Cabrera hit a line drive off the base of the left-field wall. Gordon recovered the ball and fired to shortstop Alcides Escobar, who made a short throw to Johnny Giavotella covering second base. Giavotella tagged Cabrera for the third out.

Giavotella makes dad proud with first homer

KANSAS CITY -- It was such a wild and wonderful weekend that Johnny Giavotella was hoarse and could barely talk. We don't mean Johnny Giavotella, the Royals' rookie second baseman. We mean his father, Johnny Sr.

The senior Johnny, wearing a light blue Royals T-shirt and a heavy cloak of excitement, greeted the younger Johnny after his son's first Major League home run had made the difference in a 4-3 victory over the Detroit Tigers on Sunday

Gordon got his first Major League ejection by never saying a word... Glad to see Yost have his back. Royals waste Hochevar's gem in walk-off loss

Hochevar held that 1-0 lead, dodging danger in the second inning when Kotchman and B.J. Upton singled with one out. Hochevar ended the inning, though, with two strikeouts, giving him five whiffs in the first two innings to match Hellickson's total.

This hasn't been the most pleasant venue for Hochevar either. In two previous starts at the Trop, he was 0-2 with a big balloon ERA of 21.60, based on 16 earned runs in 6 2/3 innings.

Yet he took a shutout into the seventh inning, although he emerged with the score tied, 1-1.

Ben Zobrist drew a one-out walk, took second as Hochevar threw a pitch into the dirt that got away from catcher Manny Pina, and scored on Kotchman's lined single to center.

"That was a bad pitch," Hochevar said. "I was trying to come in and I missed by a foot and a half."

He didn't make many bad pitches as he worked his fifth straight strong game since the All-Star break. He's 3-0 with a 2.18 ERA since then.

"This is who he is," Royals manager Ned Yost said. "Since the All-Star break, he's been unbelievably good."

Hochevar has had isolated brilliant games in previous seasons, but he's beginning to feel the transition to consistent success.

"I've always believed it," Hochevar said. "And it has happened, but not on a regular basis."

In this game, Hochevar finished with seven strikeouts, giving up two walks and five hits in his seven innings

[SubGod22]

Felipe and Ubaldo.

Last night, Felipe Paulino took the mound for the 12th time as a member of the Kansas City Royals, the 11th time as a starting pitcher. After allowing back-to-back triples to start the game, Paulino bore down; he worked into the seventh, and aside from a solo homer in the fifth inning, kept the Tigers off the board the rest of the way. For the fifth time in his last seven starts, he struck out at least seven batters. For his seventh start in a row, he walked no more than two batters. He pitched at least six innings for the seventh time in eight games.

And after watching Paulino once again make a quality start, and once again show glimpses of domination, the strangest question entered my head:

Who would you rather have right now: Felipe Paulino or Ubaldo Jimenez?

On the surface, this question is insane, and you’d have to suspect the same of anyone who poses it. Ten weeks ago, Paulino was waived by the Colorado Rockies with a 5.93 career ERA. Last year, Jimenez went 19-8 with a 2.88 ERA and finished 3rd in the Cy Young vote.

But this year, Jimenez is struggling a little – he allowed five runs in his Indians debut last night, raising his ERA in 2011 to 4.64. Since joining the Royals, Paulino has a 3.56 ERA.

Jimenez has pitched better than his ERA would suggest this year – in 128 innings, he has 125 strikeouts and walked just 49 batters unintentionally. He’s only allowed 11 homers, and that’s actually an uncharacteristically high number for him. (His career high is just 13, which is absolutely astonishing – he averaged 213 innings a year from 2008 to 2010 and pitched in Coors Field.) His xFIP this season is only 3.55.

Of course, Paulino has also pitched better than his ERA this year, as he has throughout his career. Since joining the Royals, he has 70 strikeouts and just 17 unintentional walks in 73 innings. He’s allowed just five home runs. While Jimenez has a history of being an extreme groundball pitcher, this year the two are indistinguishable: Jimenez has a 46.7% groundball percentage, Paulino is at 46.6%. Paulino’s xFIP this year – including 15 lousy innings with the Rockies – is 3.42. He hasn’t been lucky with the Royals – he simply hasn’t been extraordinarily unlucky like he was with the Astros. He’s also cut his walks and homers almost in half. The improvement in his home run rate is probably a little lucky, although it also has a lot to do with the ballpark. The improvement in his control looks like it’s for real.

Jimenez turns 28 in January. Paulino turns 28 in October.

Jimenez’s average fastball this year is 93.4 mph; one of the reasons to be concerned about him is that his velocity is down from years past, as his fastball averaged 96.1 mph in both 2010 and 2009. Paulino’s average fastball this year is 95.0 mph.

Jimenez’s slider averages 83.4, his curveball 76.7, his changeup 86.4. Paulino’s slider is 87.3, his curveball 78.2, his changeup 86.5. Both guys throw their curve about 8% of the time. Jimenez throws his fastball a little more and his changeup a lot more; Paulino relies much more heavily on his slider.

In addition to his effectiveness, one of the things that makes Jimenez so valuable is his durability – he has made at least 33 starts in each of the last three years, and has thrown 199, 218, and 222 innings. Paulino, of course, has no such record of durability. But break down his performance record more closely, and all the signs are there that, left to his own devices, he can be a durable starter.

Start with the fact that he’s thrown at least 104 pitches in seven straight starts, and threw at least 113 pitchers in the first four starts in that run, without any loss in effectiveness.

Then there’s the fact that he seems to be the rare pitcher who might actually be more effective as a starting pitcher than as a reliever. In his career he’s made 32 relief appearances and thrown only 39 innings in relief, but his ERA in that role is 9.15. (Throw out his first appearance with the Royals, when he stepped off a plane and retired 13 of 14 batters, and his relief ERA is 10.29.) In 45 career starts, his ERA is 4.76.

The reason Paulino pitches better in the rotation is twofold: 1) he tends to struggle early in his outings, and 2) he maintains his stuff deep into games. Consider that with the Royals this year, he has a 5.67 ERA in the first three innings of the game. From the fourth inning on, he’s allowed 8 runs in 40 innings – a 1.80 ERA.

While he hasn’t shown that extreme a pattern throughout his career, consider his career numbers when facing a batter for the first, second, and third times in a game:

First time through the lineup: .292/.357/.482
Second time through the lineup: .306/.359/.493
Third/fourth time through the lineup: .274/.371/.380

I have liked Paulino a lot this year. Maybe it's a fluke, but he's been very good for KC.

[SubGod22]

Better Than Baltimore

Not as good as Detroit.

Those two lines pretty much sums up the past week for the Kansas City Royals. Oh yeah, a guy named Giavotella also joined the team and in three games is basically halfway to surpassing Chris Getz in total extra base hits this year.

I found the various discussions surrounding the Giavotella call up intriguing. Foremost was the assumption that Johnny cannot field..at all…and never will. He will either be an All-Star or won’t last the month and is really just filler until Yamaico Navarro is ready to play everyday. It turns out, for all the loyalty, Royals’ fans are not a very patient bunch.

There was a debate over at Royals Review over the MLE’s of Giavotella: a metric whose creator will tell you is a general performance indicator not one to be used to devine the actual stats a minor league player will produce in the major leagues. Patient fans? Not really. Interested fans? You bet.

In this case, however, the Royals got this one right. In the end, statistics are better at rationalizing what happened than they are at forecasting the future. Scouts have opinions and sometimes those opinions are wrong. Organizations have plans, but sometimes plans change.

When a guy hits .338/.390/.481 in his first year at AAA and .305/.375/.437 for his minor league career while moving up one level each year, you have to find out what he can do in the majors. Maybe he can just plain hit everywhere. While we as Royals’ fans have become jaded by flame-outs of supposed great minor league hitters, it might be wise to remember that there are, right now, one hundred players in the majors who hit in the minor leagues and just kept right along hitting when they reached the majors.

Although drafted in the second round, there was never a lot of talk about Giavotella being the Royals’ second baseman of the future. He was a, dare we say it, gritty kid who played hard, had a quick bat and produced in college. The Royals, I think, did not have great expectations for Johnny and, in fact, traded for a second baseman in his mid-twenties when Giavotella was in Wilmington.

What transpired, however, was that Johnny Giavotella forced the organization’s hand and the organization did what they are supposed to do: promote when the position above is not procuding and then play the guy until he proves he can’t. Can Giavotella field? The Royals, instead of speculating, are actually going to find out and do so in a timely manner.

Luke Hochevar: crazy person or not good out of the stretch?

Consistency. It’s probably the most over used and therefore worthless term used in the baseball lexicon. “If only pitcher X could be more consistent, then he’d really be something.” When used, it’s also the most obvious. Yes, if a pitcher could pitch as well as his best game, every game, then he’d be Roy Halladay. Not surprisingly, there’s only one Roy Halladay because pitching, by it’s nature is an inconsistent art. What can happen from time to time is a pitcher will increase the number of games where he is highly effective and also limits the damage when he isn’t. Luke Hochevar last night pitched another example of his “A” stuff and since the All-Star break, he’s been pretty, well, consistent (seriously, I’m not using that word again, starting…….now).

During the All-Star break there was some rumblings about Luke Hochevar making some adjustments that would make him more effective. The rightly-skeptical public greeted this with a believe-it-when-we-see-it mentality. I’ve been calling Hochevar “Big-Inning Luke” for years now, because that’s exactly what he’s produced. He’ll be cruising along, just mowing down batters and then WHAM, five runs in an inning out of nowhere.

The arm-chair Freud’s out there posited that Luke Hochevar was a mental case. Everyone without a better explanation thought it sounded reasonable and so it became accepted. Many people believed and stated out loud that a guy who had pitched his way to a top College program and then into the Major Leagues, was a mentally strong pitcher until he decided to freak out on the mound in front of the same 30,000 fans he’d been pitching in front of for the four previous innings.

[RoyalShock]

Here's an interesting look at Hochevar before and after "the Adjustment":

         G   H   ER    IP    ERA   WHIP   K  *BB   K/9  *BB/9
Before  19  126  72  118.67  5.46  1.37  60   36   4.6   2.7
After    5   24   9   33.66  2.41  0.95  26    8   7.0   2.1

* Non-intentional walks

Of those five starts, four were "quality" while one wasn't far off (5.1 IP, 4 ER).

If he puts together another good start in his next game, I'm going to entertain the idea that he may fulfill his potential after all. I know he won't ever post a 2.41 ERA over a season, but if he can maintain something close to those K/9 and BB/9 numbers, I could see a 3.50 ERA. That's #2 starter stuff right there.

[Awesome Sauce Malone]

well he has alot more upside than Davies thats for sure.

[SubGod22]

Salvador Perez to make Major League debut?!

ST. PETERSBURG -- Catcher Brayan Pena is leaving the Royals on Wednesday to be present at the birth of his child in Miami and Salvador Perez is expected to replace him, the Kansas City Star reported early Wednesday morning.

Perez, 21, who's on the Triple-A Omaha roster, was expected to join the Royals as a September call-up, but Pena's departure hastened the decision to promote him, according to the newspaper. The team must first clear space on its 40-man roster before Wednesday night's game against Tampa Bay.

Pena's departure on paternity leave would leave the team with just one catcher, Manny Pina, who was called up from Double-A Northwest Arkansas on July 30 when Matt Treanor suffered a concussion. Treanor remains on the disabled list, unable to play until cleared by passing MLB tests

This excites me. I'm thrilled for Pena as well. Having a child is a wonderful thing. Could we be seeing the catching pair of next year?...
Rookie Holland surprising team ERA leader

ST. PETERSBURG -- If you were gazing at the Royals' pitching statistics before Tuesday night's game against the Rays, you might be surprised to see who leads the staff in ERA.

That is, other than Mitch Maier, the outfielder who stands at 0.00 after his one scoreless inning of emergency relief at Boston.

It's right-handed reliever Greg Holland, with a 1.37 ERA which is the best in the American League for a pitcher with at least the 39 1/3 innings he's worked in his first 28 outings. He's done so well that he became manager Ned Yost's primary set-up man for closer Joakim Soria while Aaron Crow was struggling a bit

I still wonder if they trade Soria in the off season.

Outfield assist leader Gordon a stats rarity

ST. PETERSBURG -- Left fielder Alex Gordon leads the Major Leagues with 18 outfield assists and Stats Inc. has dug up another defensive distinction for him.

According to the figure filberts, Gordon is just the fourth outfielder in big league history to have at least 18 assists while committing one or no errors (he has one error). The others are Baltimore's Joe Orsulak (22 assists and one error in 1991), Cleveland's Cory Snyder (18 assists and one error in 1989), and Cleveland's Brett Butler (19 assists and one error in 1985).

Gordon preferred to pass credit to his teammates.

"You could say [it's] a great job on my part," Gordon said. "But you know what a lot of the errors come by for outfielders? It's where you throw to a base and it skips away. So it's been throwing it to home where [Matt] Treanor has made a couple great plays digging it out of the dirt."

Same thing with the infielders taking throws at second base or third, he said.

"Or [Alcides] Escobar picking balls out of the ground and throwing to second and getting an assist that way," Gordon added.

He's been impressive either way.

[SubGod22]

The Process Is A Steamroller

Even though Tuesday’s game lasted under two hours, you need to stay up late if you want to digest all the Royals news of the day, as the brain trust at 1 Royal Way made another roster move in the wee hours announcing the planned call-up of catcher Sal Perez from the Storm Chasers.

The Process not only rolls along, it’s at cruising speed.

Interesting timing on the call-up for Perez, but the Royals are going to be shorthanded as Brayan Pena’s wife is pregnant and will be induced on Wednesday in Miami. Perez has only been in Omaha for a couple of weeks and has put together a fine start, hitting .333/.347/.500 in 48 at bats. He has yet to walk and has struck out just six times. Prior to becoming a Storm Chaser, he hit .283/.329/.427 in just under 300 plate appearances for the Naturals. In that time, he walked just 16 times but had only 30 strikeouts. To say Perez is all about making contact would be an understatement.

Sometimes the best laid plans… I bet you free articles on the internet that the Royals, knowing Pena would leave the team at some point to be with his wife, had planned to call Manny Pina. Of course, Pina’s call was accelerated by the concussion suffered by Matt Treanor. With Treanor still on the seven-day DL, and Pena’s wife set to pop, the Royals hands are suddenly tied. They face the prospect of having to make a 40-man roster move to replace a player that may be gone for just a couple of days. Sometimes the dominoes fall in a different order than you expect.

What’s really interesting about this is the article in the Star says Perez is expected to be the regular catcher. I know he’s supposed to be the catcher of the future, but I guess I’m kind of surprised they would make that kind of statement with Pina just up from the farm himself. Besides, Pena is on baseball’s version of paternity leave. It’s not like the guy is going to be gone for six weeks. If you want to try to read between the lines, it seems the Royals will move Pina back to Omaha (he was in Northwest Arkansas when he was recalled, having swapped spots with Perez) for the remainder of the season. If Treanor is cleared to play, I wonder if the club will decide to keep four catchers on their major league roster once rosters expand on September 1.

Who he replaces on the 40 man will be interesting.

[RoyalShock]

Royals trying to release Davies to make room for Perez.

http://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2011/08/royals-to-release-kyle-davies-.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

(I'm trying to contain my jubilation!)