The Kansas City Royals have lost 11 consecutive games, and at 3-13, they have the worst record in baseball. Even their most ardent supporters are walking away. Whatever optimism their farm system had generated before the season began has been washed away in a sea of losses, and now, the Royals just look like the same old last place team they’ve always been.

That’s the story if you just look at wins and losses, anyway. If you look a little deeper and ask why the Royals are currently 3-13, though, the story becomes a lot more interesting.

At the plate, the Royals are averaging just 3.56 runs per game – AL average is 4.47 – third worst in the American League. They are just 0.03 runs per game better than the vaunted Mariners offense. So, the offense has been a problem, right? Well, sort of, but not in the way you might think. The Royals overall line on the season is .255/.315/.413, good for a .316 wOBA. The average AL team is hitting .253/.320/.412 with a .320 wOBA, so overall, KC has been just slightly below average at the plate in their first 16 games. So, how does a team with an average batting line score nearly a run less per game than expected?

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Over the weekend, Philip Humber had the game of his life, throwing the 21st perfect game in baseball history against the Seattle Mariners. While the Mariners have a lousy offense and Safeco Field is a fantastic place to pitch, those factors shouldn’t diminish what Humber accomplished. A lot of good pitchers have faced a lot of lousy offenses over the years, and only 20 men before Humber had managed to go 27 up, 27 down. This is the apex of a single game performance in the sport, and Humber has now etched his name into the history books.

He’s also serving notice that last year’s breakout season may not have been a fluke.

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The quality of Yu Darvish’s stuff is glaringly obvious. His fastball sits between 91-95 MPH and has serious run, while he throws a pair of breaking balls that dive differently and works in an 89 MPH cutter with late action. And, he’s got a wide enough variety of options to give hitters a lot of different looks.

As you can see, there are no distinct clumps there. He’s thrown curveballs at 66 MPH, curveballs at 80 MPH, and pretty much everything in between. His slider has been between 80 and 86, and then his three fastballs give him the ability to go anywhere between 88 and 95. This is the repertoire of a guy who should miss a lot of bats.

And yet, after three starts, Darvish just isn’t fooling anyone. 333 pitches into his big league career, and opposing batters have made contact on 81.6% of the pitches he’s thrown. Major League average for a starting pitcher in 2012 is 81.7%. For comparison, the other pitchers with contact rates between 81.0-81.9% include Doug Fister, Felix Doubront, Jake Arrieta, R.A. Dickey, Ervin Santana, Mark Buehrle, Jamie Moyer, Jaime Garcia, Ryan Vogelsong, Jonathan Sanchez, Ian Kennedy, and Freddy Garcia.

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We already talked about Cliff Lee and Matt Cain’s pitcher’s duel for the ages last night, but that wasn’t even the most remarkable thing that took place last night. Over in Anaheim, Bartolo Colon was doing something that we might not see done again in our lifetime.

In the fifth inning of last night’s game, Colon threw a first pitch ball to Maicer Izturis. He wouldn’t throw another pitch that was called a ball until he faced Bobby Abreu in the eighth inning. Between Izturis and Abreu, he faced 11 batters and didn’t throw a single ball to any of them. His all-strikes, all-the-time approach lasted a remarkable 38 pitches. You can see all 38 of them in this video compiled by MLB.com.

How unlikely is that? Well, we can estimate the chances of an event occurring 38 times in a row using a mathematical tool called binomial distribution. Essentially, binomial distribution takes the probability of an event occurring and then extrapolates how often you’d expect that event to happen a certain number of times given a number of opportunities. In this case, the probability of Bartolo Colon throwing a strike on any given pitch is roughly 67% percent. In other words, out of every three pitches Colon throws, we’d expect two strikes and one ball.

Last night, we got 38 consecutive strikes without a ball. Binomial distribution tells us that the odds of that occurring, given what we know about Colon’s career strike percentage, is about 0.000000246. In other words, you’d expect to find one string of 38 consecutive strikes if you had a population of approximately 4.1 million strings of pitches thrown by Bartolo Colon. One in 4.1 million.

Yeah. What Lee and Cain did was downright ordinary compared to what Colon did.

Update: As pointed out in the comments, I should have clarified that the binomial distribution assumes independence of events, where the results of one test do not affect the probability of the next test. It is not clear that balls and strikes are independent from the previous pitch, as batters are more likely to chase pitches out of the zone when they are behind in the count. Of course, pitchers are also less likely to groove one down the middle when they’re ahead in the count, so these effects may cancel out to some degree, but it’s not clear that the probability of balls and strikes on each of those 38 pitches was indeed .67. So, consider this more of a rough estimate based on one model’s assumptions, which may or may not hold precisely true in an MLB game scenario.

Last night, Cliff Lee and Matt Cain put on a pitching duel for the ages. Cain threw shutout nine innings on just 91 pitches before Bruce Bochy pinch-hit for him, while Lee managed to go 10 scoreless innings and still only throw 102 pitches on the night. They combined to allow just 10 baserunners in 19 innings pitched, and after Brett Pill’s leadoff double in the fifth, they put down 24 consecutive batters between them.

You just don’t get two dominating performances in the same game all that often. In fact, you could make a case that this was the best pair of performances in a single game in the last 10 years.

The last time two pitchers faced off and both threw nine inning shutouts was last May, when Jason Vargas and Zach Britton squared off in Baltimore. Both were extremely effective and efficient, but neither of them pitched into the 10th inning, and they only combined for nine strikeouts on the night – plus, even with the offensive struggles SF and PHI have had this year, neither of them can match the 2011 Mariners for futility at the plate, so Britton’s performance is slightly diminished due to the quality of his opponent.

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Forgoing free agency is the new hotness. After already locking up his double play partner Howie Kendrick back in January, the Angels gave Erick Aybar a reported four year, $35 million contract extension today. Aybar is under contract for 2012 at just over $5 million, so this represents a pretty nice raise in annual average value, and assuming that the contract covers 2013-2016, it will keep Aybar in Anaheim through his age 32 season.

This also represents a pretty significant commitment from the Angels towards a player whose skills aren’t generally valued all that highly on the open market. While Aybar has averaged +3.2 WAR per season over the last three years, most of that value has come from his defense and baserunning abilities, as he’s hit just .280/.327/.391. Those aren’t terrible offensive numbers from a shortstop, but they came during his expected peak years and put him in the same category as guys like Jimmy Rollins, Stephen Drew, Jhonny Peralta, J.J. Hardy, and Cliff Pennington. There’s nothing wrong with any of these guys, but this class of ballplayer has traditionally not struck it rich in free agency.

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After getting drilled for four runs in the first inning by the Phillies last night, the ever-growing worry surrounding Tim Lincecum reached a fever pitch. As Chris Cwik noted last week, his velocity continues to trend downwards in a pretty dramatic fashion, and he’s now getting hit on a regular basis while throwing 90 MPH fastballs. The combination of diminished velocity and poor performance are assumed to be signs of a larger problem. As the theory goes, they might not be conclusive by themselves, but together, they suggest that there’s something seriously wrong.

History, however, suggests that jumping to that kind of conclusion may very well be premature.

Tim Lincecum is not the first pitcher to start the season without his best fastball, and he’s not the first pitcher to get hit hard while showing reduced velocity. To look at how predictive previous situations have turned out to be, I went back to our monthly leaderboards starting in 2008 and looked for situations where a pitcher posted high BABIP and/or HR/FB rates in April while also showing significantly reduced velocity, and yet had posted BB/K/GB numbers that suggested that they were still capable of getting Major League hitters out. In other words, pitchers who were pitching like Lincecum is now. Here’s what I found.

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This morning, I did a quick story for the Wall Street Journal on pace between pitches. So far, the Cleveland Indians look like the stars of working quickly, as all five of their starters have taken less than 20 seconds between pitches. Derek Lowe and Justin Masterson actually rank second and third in baseball in pace so far this year, behind only Roy Halladay and his Two Hours Of Doom approach.

You know who the slowest working pitching staff in baseball is to this point of 2012? The Boston Red Sox, who have taken an average of 24.6 seconds between pitches this year. You know who was the slowest working pitching staff in 2011? The Red Sox. 2010? The Red Sox. 2009? The Red Sox. 2008? The Red Sox.

The last time that Boston didn’t have the slowest working pitching staff in baseball was 2007. That year, they had the second slowest staff, getting edged out by the Yankees by 0.3 seconds per pitch.

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