Royals

I liked "Devil Rays" better. "Tampa Bay Rays" sounds awkward and the Rays comes out too short sounding.

For today's battle it's Brian Bannister (4.88 ERA) versus Edwin Jackson (4.33 ERA) o the 4th of July. Why are so many young Rays good now? I thought that was supposed to take years? Evan Longoria is hitting .275/.348/.528. While I'm pulling hard for the Rays in the AL East, I'm also a bit resentful than they became good before the Royals ever did, and in fact look much much stronger. Just thinking about it informally, the Royals are probably three good no-miss draft picks away from where Tampa is right now.

Since my research area is American poetry 1770-1800, nearly all of which is essentially patriotic propaganda, I really wanted to post something from one of my guys today on RR. Unfortunately, I'm just too overwhelmed by all the nearly identical choices, most of which are actually fairly long and hard to quote in a short snippet. Oh, well.  A good book on the history of patriotic celebrations and festivals in the United States is David Waldstreicher's In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes- The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820. (Amazon link) Fetes describes the battles between the Federalists and Republicans/Anti-Federalists to define and claim various early national holidays, parades, odes, toasts, etc. My loyalties, of course, are with the guys who lost, the Anti's. Although the Federalists did get a nice beat-down in 1800, with the Jefferson landslide.

But we have Rays-Royals, so none of this matters.

 
Nice little roller coaster fangraph.  The Royals build a nice little lead, Davies gives it up bigtime and then the Royals get a huge inning and the bullpen takes us home.  I guess sometimes a bunch of singles can get you seven runs.

Funny story, I ate some pizza with mushrooms on it for dinner during the game and someone at the pizzeria must have put some psychedelic mushrooms on my pizza because I had this weird hallucination early in the game that TPJ got a home run.  Weird.

But we will come back, of course, because we are the Greatest Team That Ever Lived. I fully expect an Avilance pinch hit Grand Slam off Sherrill.

Um.. I'm not good at math, considering I labeled yesterday's game "#87".

There's a huge difference between a 2-2 split and a 1-3 series lost, but to earn that split the Royals will have to top those unstoppable Orioles.

With 15 games under their belts, the Pride of Some Small Part of North Carolina, the Burlington Royals, in what we can only hope is a small-sample-size-influenced anomaly, have quickly established themselves as the without-a-doubt worst offensive squad in the Appalachian League (I’d say it’s all of minor league baseball, but I’m simply not willing to do that much work to look it up).  The team is last in the league in BA (.204), OBP (.275), SLG (.265), which amounts to an anemic .540 OPS, hits (99), runs(55), triples (2), HR (2), and total bases (129)—two teams in the league already have at least twice as many TB as the Royals.  They’re slightly better in doubles (20) and walks (43), placing eighth out of ten teams.  They’re also not making up for it on the basepaths, stealing only 8 of 17 (the only two teams with worse percentages have only tried to steal 10 and 14—oh, and those are the best two offensive teams in the league, so they don’t really need to create “havoc on the basepaths” to “get in the pitcher’s head”).  The only bright spot is that they are holding their own in Ks, striking out a third-best in the league 129.  A turnaround may be around the corner—Lil’ Burlington owns a 1-game winning streak, raising their season record to 2-13.

 

Here’s some of the individual “highlights”:

 

 

C Salvador Perez:  Establishing himself as the early team MVP candidate by virtue of actually doing some hitting, Perez leads the team with a pretty good line of  .286/.364/.357/.721 in 9 games.  Impressively, his K/BB ratio is 3/3, showing some a good eye for a young guy.

 

DH/1B/3B Jason Morales:  Morales owns one of the team’s two home runs and, along with two doubles, leads the team in slugging, showing a total line of .212/.316/.364/.679 with 5 walks and 8 strikeouts.

 

OF Hilton Richardson:  Second-year guy out of HS is still learning how to lay off a bad pitch, picking up 17 strikeouts so far.  He is learning, however, as his 5 walks is tied with Morales for second on the team and contributes along with his team-leading 15 hits to his second-place OBP, with a line of .291/.333/.291/.624.

 

C Miguel Moctezuma:  Miguel has been in two less games (7) than Perez (9), possibly showing a team preference for Perez, who has more upside.  “The Revenge” only has 6 hits so far, 3 of them doubles, and has not yet walked while picking up 5 strikeouts.  His line shows the unusual trait of having an OBP lower than his average:  .240/.231/.360/.591.

 

1B Diego Cruz:  Cruz has the team’s other HR and a double in his 6 hits in 8 games, and boasts Moctezuma’s K/BB ratio of 5/0.  He’s hitting .214/.214/.357/.571.

 

OF/DH  Allen Caldwell:  Showing Hilton Richardson that he can do anything Hilton does, only one better, Caldwell has the most strikeouts with 18 and the most walks with 6.  His low average contributes to his line of .176/.288/.255/.543.

 

I really can’t bear to go on—only two other player have an OPS over .500 so far.  While 2B Angel Franco has already walked 7 times to lead the team, he might have to compete for more playing time now, as the Royals have added 4 to the roster since the start of the season, including another 2B:

 

2B Yeldrys Molina:  Yeldrys, a 2005 free agent from Venezuela, played for Lil’ Burlington all of last year, posting a line of .209/.242/.281/.523 with 32 Ks/6 BBs.  He started nicely in Idaho Falls, going .289/.364/.447/.811 before getting sent down/over/back to Burlington, playing in his first game last night.

 

1B David Wood:  Wood, an 2007 undrafted free agent from Texas State who wound up being the AZL Player of the Year last year played a brutal 37 games for A+ Wilmington, going .156/.179/.188/.367 with 34 Ks to only 4 walks.  He has yet to play a game in Burlington.

 

1B/DH Josh Vittek:  A 2008 undrafted free agent out of Mount St. Mary’s, Vittek was the Northeast Conference Tournament MVP and broke a number of school records at the Mount.  (Interestingly, Idaho Falls P Ivor Hodgson was a teammate last year at the Mount—okay, I don’t know how interesting that really is).  Vittek hasn’t done much in 4 games so far.

 

OF Warren McFadden:  A four-year junior from Tulane (medical redshirt his first year), McFadden signed as an undrafted free agent last week (getting a $5000 signing bonus, or 5 times more of a signing bonus than Mike Aviles).  To the extent they know anything, NewOrleans.com was a little negative on the current McFadden:   “A freshman All-American 2 years ago, McFadden never regained the form of his first year with the Wave. He played in 53 games in 2008 starting 50 of them while batting .308 with two homers and 33 RBI.”  He played one game in Arizona and now one game in Burlington, where he has no average but a OBP of .400 thanks to 2 walks in his first game.

First, the numbers from Hiram's first four starts with the Royals this season:

 

	IP	BAA	SLG-A	K/BB	ERA
Good Davies	24.2	.256	.344	1	1.46

 

While Davies walked as many men as he struck out (12 each) over his first four starts, he found success thanks to a low BAA and a clean slate regarding home runs. He wasn't terribly efficient (Gil meet Hiram) with his pitch count until, roughly, his fourth start, when he went seven strong against the Cardinals, and needed only 106 pitches to do so. By way of comparison, he hit 100 pitches exactly in his first start of the season against the Indians. In five innings.

Now, the data from his last two starts:

	IP	BAA	SLG-A	K/BB	ERA
Bad Davies	7.2	.371	.514	0.75	9.39

You don't need to have Buzz Bissinger's impeccable integrity and wisdom to see that when your BAA rises from .256 to .371, your ERA is going to explode proportionally. In his last two starts Davies was more or less the same guy: not many walks or strikeouts. Only against the Giants and Cardinals (a second time) more balls found grass.

What's interesting is his performance this season, both good and bad, goes against what Davies has always been: a great stuff guy with control issues (you've probably heard that before). Last year with the Royals, Davies struck out forty batters in just fifty innings, but still allowed a devil's ERA (6.66) thanks to ten homers allowed and twenty six walks. Some of that high ERA was a bit of bad luck, but wholly in line with his career numbers at the Major League level. This season, he's gone from a JDLR-type to a Brian Bannister-type, and it seems likely that this is reflective of a change in approach.

Here are Hiram's career K/9 numbers:

	K/9
2005	6.37
2006	7.25
2007	6.55
2008	4.18

To this point, although the data isn't without issues, according to one measure, Davies has essentially abandoned his slider, a pitch he threw 14.1% of the time in 2007, but only 1.2% of the time this season. Taking its place has been the Bannyrific change up, which Davies has thrown 21.2% of the time.

Despite the headline, it isn't really a critical start for Davies tonight. I don't think he can have much long term success on the Bannister model (don't think Banny can either, by the way) and I'll be interested to see how he does tonight.

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Not to be outdone, but Mike Aviles has produced twelve outs the last two games.