To whatever extent that Max Scherzer cares about these things, the good news is that Tigers fans are already preoccupied with worry over Justin Verlander, who was dismantled again on Monday. So Scherzer’s struggles can stay a little more hidden. But the bad news is that, with the Tigers stuck in such a slump, people will be inclined to worry more in general, and so there’s anxiety beyond just Verlander anxiety. There’s anxiety wherever anxiety’s possible, because the Tigers keep losing and the Royals keep winning. The Royals, right now — right now — right now — actually own sole possession of first place in the AL Central. The math keeps saying it won’t keep up, but math has never tucked someone in and read a nice bedtime story. Math doesn’t go to the store to get medicine and a Gatorade when you’re sick.

Tuesday night, the Royals were playing for first place, and they’d have to go through either Scherzer or the Tigers bullpen. They opted for the hard way and made it look like the easy way, sticking Scherzer with a full ten runs. When the second inning began, the teams were deadlocked at zero. About 30 minutes and 30 seconds later, Scherzer looked to the skies and left the mound, with the Royals suddenly up by a touchdown. Though the Tigers immediately countered with a safety, the margin would never get closer than that. A possible pitchers’ duel turned into a one-sided ambush, and in the process, the Royals forced Scherzer to set some new marks.

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Weird things about baseball fascinate me. One of those things is the concept of discarded players. Every once in awhile, you’ll see a player doing well and think to yourself, “Hey, wasn’t he on our team at one point?” David Carpenter is one such player. Watching him face the Red Sox this week, I couldn’t help but think that it would be sure nice if the Sox had him right now instead of Craig Breslow. Sure, the world will keep on spinning, and Carpenter wouldn’t make or break the 2014 Red Sox, but every little bit counts, and the Red Sox gave him away for free after just five weeks on the roster. In situations like these, we often jokingly say (or at least I do), “Hey, I wish we could get guys like that!”

I don’t mean to pick on the Red Sox, because every team does this. If you scan rosters, you’ll find one such player on just about every roster. And originally, my intention was to run down that list and look at them all individually. But then I got a look at this trade. On July 31, 2010, the Atlanta Braves traded Gregor Blanco, Jesse Chavez and Tim Collins to the Kansas City Royals for Rick Ankiel and Kyle Farnsworth. Take a look:

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We’re coming up on Memorial Day, and Mike Moustakas is hitting .152/.223/.320. That’s going to be his line for a while, because the Royals just optioned him out to Triple-A, and are going to hope he remembers how to hit against minor league pitching.

On the one hand, a case could be made that Moustakas’ performance was unsustainable, and a little positive regression would get him back to prior levels. After all, his walk and strikeout rates are right in line with career norms, and his .168 ISO is actually close to a career high. His overall line has been sabotaged by a .155 BABIP, the lowest in baseball for any player with 130 or more plate appearances. While BABIP for hitters has a wider range of true talent levels than BABIP for pitchers, no Major League player is going to run a sub-.200 BABIP for any real length of time. Given a longer leash, Moustakas’ numbers would have improved.

But let’s not kid ourselves; this isn’t just a small-sample BABIP problem. Over the last calendar year, Moustakas has hit just .227/.279/.368, putting up a 75 wRC+ that is only acceptable for an Andrelton Simmons-level defender. For his career, spanning over 1,600 plate appearances, Moustakas has an 80 wRC+. Even regressing Moustakas back to his career norms doesn’t make him good, and it’s not like Moustakas holds no responsibility for that .155 BABIP to begin with. In fact, his career is basically a case study in how to run a really low BABIP.

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Chris Getz announced his retirement yesterday. The former White Sox and Royals second baseman was outrighted by the Blue Jays after 28 plate appearances (16 wRC+). In his statement, Getz makes clear that he is ready to move on with his life. Given his performance on the field the last few years, that life probably would not be enhanced by spending a lot of time floating around Triple-A. There are worse fates than retiring from baseball at 30 after 1574 major league plate appearances, even if they were less than scintillating (.250/.309/.307, 66 wRC+ career).

Although Getz’s talents were quite exceptional relative to the world’s population, they were quite unremarkable in the context of professional baseball. There were not really any moments exciting enough to stand out to people outside of his home fanbases (and maybe not even to them). But Getz’ retirement does provide a good occasion to briefly compare his trajectory with that of the other two players involved in the November 2009 trade between the White Sox and Royals that sent Getz and Josh Fields to Kansas City for Mark Teahen. The far-less-heralded Getz somehow outlasted both Fields and Teahen as a major league player.

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If one were to review the data for pitchers with the highest strikeout rates in baseball (at start of play Thursday), they would rightly expect to see names like Kenley Jansen, Jose Fernandez, and Max Scherzer near the top. All three are in the top 15, but a surprising name owns the top spot on that leaderboard – Wade Davis.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Summary
A small Venezuelan southpaw, Lopez has command of three solid pitches at a young age.

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Eric Hosmer is still sitting on one home run as we approach the one-fourth point of the regular season. He hasn’t hit fewer than 14 dingers yet in a year, so it’s clear that Hosmer’s still looking for his power stroke. But don’t make the mistake of believing that Hosmer has yet to make a positive contribution — he’s got a 120 wRC+, which is basically right on what he did a year ago. Let’s keep doing that, comparing last year to this year. The offense has been identical, overall. Hosmer last year was nine runs below average defensively. Hosmer this year is on pace for about -7. So in a sense, Eric Hosmer has been just as good a player. But, last season, Hosmer was worth just over three wins. This season, he’s on pace to be worth just over one win. How do you explain that, when a guy’s been hitting the same and fielding the same? Is WAR losing the mind that it doesn’t have?

That’s one option. Or you could look at WAR’s other, oft-forgotten input. You think about baserunning value when it comes to burners like Billy Hamilton and Jacoby Ellsbury. It’s easy to kind of forget about it when you’re dealing with a first baseman or a DH. But, to this point, according to our leaderboards, Hosmer has been the worst baserunner in baseball, at almost five runs below average, already. That puts him on pace for -21, eclipsing Kendrys Morales‘ recent record of -14 in 2009. Hosmer, presumably, won’t keep up this impossible pace. Previously, for his career, he was actually above average. But how did things get to this point? How has Hosmer already cost his team that many runs in such a small sample of games?

There are .gifs, and, unfortunately, they are big.

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The main story of the last night’s installment of the Battle for Grass Creek between the Royals and the Mariners was Hisashi Iwakuma. Iwakuma shut down the (admittedly less-than-intimidating) Kansas City bats with an eight-inning effort, during which he allowed only four hits, no walks and no runs, and struck out seven. The Mariners needed all Iwakuma could bring, because the Royals themselves only allowed the Mariners one run. The Mariners’ lone run came right after Royals’ manager Ned Yost made the questionable decision to have left-handed starter Danny Duffy walk the left-handed hitting Robinson Cano to pitch to right-handed Corey Hart. The problems with that decision have been discussed elsewhere. My own short summary: some intentional walks might make sense, but this was not one of them.

Yost made another interesting decision in the bottom of the ninth. With none out, a runner on first and the Mariners’ closer, Fernando Rodney, on the mound, Yost had Norichika Aoki lay down a sacrifice bunt. Aoki did so successfully, but after an Eric Hosmer walk, the Royals made two more outs and it all came to naught. After the game, Yost explained his decision:

Because I want to take a shot at tying it. My ‘pen was strong enough where I felt like I could go ahead and go for the tie. Some nights you don’t. Some nights you play for the win.

Like intentional walks, not all bunts are bad. Sometimes they are the smart play, sometimes they are not. It is not always easy to say one way or the other. Yost’s teams have sometimes bunted in situations where it made sense. Was this one of those situations?

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Raul Mondesi, SS, Kansas City Royals (Profile)
Level: High-A   Age: 18   Top-15: 3rd   Top-100: 46th
Line: 89 PA, .304/.382/.430, 1 HR, 9 BB, 23 K

Summary
One of the game’s top shortstop prospect is holding his own against much older players.

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The Royals, as you most likely know, are something far from a powerful team. It took them until April 9 to hit their first homer of the year, an Alex Gordon shot that likely wouldn’t have made it out of any ballpark in the big leagues had it not been wind-aided. It took them until April 15 to hit their second. Even now, 24 games into the season, they have only 10, four coming in the span of a week from Mike Moustakas, who has just 13 total hits — and a .159/.213/.354 line — all year. They have as many homers as a team as Jose Abreu does on his own. Their isolated power is .001 better than that of the Mets, and is in shouting distance of the worst mark we’ve seen in decades. They’re on pace for 67 homers. No one has hit fewer than 70 since the 1991 St. Louis Cardinals, who had only Todd Zeile break into double-digits with 11.

This isn’t a surprise. The Royals hit the fewest homers in the American League last year, and they tied with Minnesota for the fewest in 2012. This wasn’t built to be a powerful team, and it’s not.

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