I didn’t realize the Royals have lost nine games in a row. When it’s come to disappointing baseball, most of my attention was focused on teams like the Blue Jays, Giants, Mets, and Mariners. Every team mentioned here has under-performed, but sure enough, the Royals stand at 7-16, with baseball’s worst record. The upside, I suppose, is that they were once 7-7, but that’s damning with faint praise, since losing nine straight can derail even a wonderful season. The Royals have had a horrible week and a half.

As you examine things, it’s not like the Royals have experienced some kind of team-wide collapse. The defensive metrics paint a confusing picture, and the rotation has been better than the bullpen, but the Royals’ run prevention has surprisingly been a tiny bit better than average. The Royals aren’t out there just constantly getting smoked. Nearly the entirety of the problem is captured by the headline just above. Hitting. Teams need to hit. The Royals haven’t hit. It’s not unreasonable to suggest they’ve actually hit worse than ever.

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To start, we might as well revisit the difference between command and control, or at least the accepted version of that difference: control is the ability to throw the ball into the strike zone, while command is the ability to throw the ball to a particular location. While we can easily measure the first by looking at strike-zone percentage, it’s also immediately apparent that the second skill is more interesting. A pitcher often wants to throw the ball outside of the zone, after all.

We’ve tried to put a number on command many different ways. I’m not sure we’ve succeeded, despite significant and interesting advances.

You could consider strikeout minus walk rate (K-BB%) an attempt, but it also captures way too much “stuff” to be a reliable command metric — a dominant pitch, thrown into the strike zone with no command, could still earn a lot of strikeouts and limit walks.

COMMANDf/x represented a valiant attempt towards solving this problem by tracking how far the catcher’s glove moved from the original target to the actual location at which it acquired the ball. But there were problems with that method of analysis. For one, the stat was never made public. Even if it were, however, catchers don’t all show the target the same way. Chris Iannetta, for example, told me once that his relaxation moment, between showing a target and then trying to frame the ball, was something he had to monitor to become a better framer. Watch him receive this low pitch: does it seem like we could reliably affix the word “target” to one of these moments, and then judge the pitch by how far the glove traveled after that moment?

How about all those times when the catcher is basically just indicating inside vs. outside, and it’s up to the pitcher to determine degree? What happens when the catcher pats the ground to tell him to throw it low, or exaggerates his high target? There are more than a few questions about an approach affixed to a piece of equipment, sometimes haphazardly used.

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Eric Hosmer is a free agent after this season. Maybe the most interesting free agent of the upcoming winter. If you are an unnamed scout who talked to Jon Heyman back in spring training, you think Hosmer should get far more than the 5 years/$73 million Brandon Belt got as an extension from the Giants, because anyone who thinks Belt is better than Hosmer should “get a grip”. The old $200 million rumor is so ridiculous we don’t even need to bother addressing it, but as Jeff wrote in February, it wouldn’t be that hard for a team to rationalize their way into a deal for more than $100 million if they believed a few things that aren’t entirely unbelievable.

But, as a counterpoint to Jeff’s perfectly reasonable post, I’d like to present a leaderboard that offers another perfectly reasonable position; the one that just acknowledges that Eric Hosmer isn’t very good.

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Terrance Gore can fly. The 25-year-old outfielder is as fast as anyone in the game, and he’s especially lethal on the base paths. Gore has 19 steals in 21 attempts as a Kansas City Royal, and he is 251 for 275 down on the farm. He takes his leads with a green light.

There is one thing holding him back: Gore has yet to invent a way to steal first base.

Hitless in seven big-league at-bats (his thefts have come as a pinch-runner), Gore has slashed .243/.342/.273 in 1,806 minor-league plate appearances. The OBP number in that slash line is acceptable, but given his SLG and his size — he’s listed at 5-foot,7, 165 — anything resembling Giancarlo Stanton-like respect is little more than a pipe dream. To earn ABs at the highest level, he’ll need to hit his way on.

He’s working on that, and — feel free to raise an eyebrow — launch angle plays a part in the process.

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Previous editions: AL East / NL East.

Opening Day is just over the horizon, though we have to navigate the remainder of the World Baseball Classic and the entirety of March Madness first. In the meantime, let’s continue our look at the upcoming season, with the third of our six divisional previews.

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When I interviewed him in April 2013, Jason Hammel was a 30-year-old pitcher yet to hit his stride. Following his previous path, he went on to have a ho-hum season. In 26 appearances for the Orioles — 23 of them of them as a starter — Hammel had seven wins, a 4.97 ERA, and a 6.2 K/9. His two-seamer and slider showed signs of coming around, but for all intents and purposes, he was a run-of-the-mill, back-of-the-rotation righty.

That has changed. Since originally joining the Chicago Cubs prior to the 2014 season, Hammel has fashioned a 3.68 ERA and fanned 8.3 batters per nine innings. Last year, he won a career-high 15 games for the World Series champions. The cerebral 6-foot-6 hurler is now a 34-year-old Kansas City Royal, having inked a two-year, $16 million deal with the AL Central club over the offseason.

Hammel discussed his mid-career emergence, which was fueled by an improved slider and a subsequent confab with a sexagenarian guru, in the waning days of February.

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Hammel on what has changed since our 2013 conversation: “A big part of [becoming more successful] was throwing a slider for a strike. It was kind of the idea of pitching backwards. Before, I never had a breaking ball that I could start with. I was throwing a curveball more than a slider, and the curveball is more of a… I get a lot of takes on it, because it’s a bigger break. I had to find something else with spin that I could put in the zone. The two-seamer has been a big, big pitch for me, and the two-seamer and slider complement each other really well, because they’re going two separate directions.

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Here’s the thing about bunting: it can be a good idea if the third baseman is playing too far back. The chance of a hit goes up in that case, and a successful bunt often causes the third baseman to play more shallow in future plate appearances, so future balls in play receive a benefit. That’s one of those games within a game we see all the time in baseball: once the positioning deviates from “normal” by a certain degree, the batter receives a benefit. Then the defender has to change his approach.

This tension created by the bunt illustrates how offenses and defenses react to each other’s tendencies. That same sort of balance between fielder and hitter might be playing out on an even broader scale, however, when it comes to the shift in general.

Too many shifts in the game, and the players begin to adjust. They develop more of a two-strike approach, they find a way to put the ball in play on the ground the other way, or they make sure that they lift the ball if they’re going to pull it. There’s evidence that players are already working on lifting the ball more as a group, pulling the ball in the air more often than they have in five years, and have improved on hitting opposite-field ground balls. So maybe this next table is no surprise.

The league has improved against the shift! The shift is dead! Or, wait: the league has actually improved as a whole over this timeframe, and the difference between the two is still about the same. And every team would take a .292 wOBA against over a .297 number. Long live the shift.

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Over the weekend, Ken Rosenthal wrote that the Royals were not going to simply accept Eric Hosmer’s departure through free agency as inevitable, and were going to attempt to sign him to a long-term extension before he hit the open market. Because Hosmer is represented by Scott Boras, we were treated to the hyperbole of the first baseman as a “franchise player” and the speculation that he might ask for a 10 year deal, a contract which would make the Ryan Howard extension look like the bargain of the century.

Yesterday, in response to that article, Jeff Sullivan gave a good old college try in attempting to justify the idea that Eric Hosmer could be in line for a “mega contract”. Jeff did a good job of showing the ways in which Hosmer could potentially be underrated, and with a big 2017, could be viewed more favorably than he is by the typical FanGraphs reader at this point. I don’t know if he convinced anyone that a 10 year deal for Hosmer wouldn’t be a total disaster, but it was a nice effort.

But in thinking about what a fair contract for Hosmer might be, I began to look for historical comparisons, to see what guys like Hosmer had done in their late-20s and early-30s. In looking for those comparisons, I realized there basically aren’t any, because Eric Hosmer is a historically unique player.

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In the middle of last July, rumors started to spread that, come free agency, Eric Hosmer could seek a 10-year deal. Then, in the second half of the season, Hosmer batted .225, with a 76 wRC+. Now, in a new article from Ken Rosenthal, it’s expressed the Royals believe Eric Hosmer could seek a 10-year deal.

Hosmer is represented by Scott Boras, and you can see here how Boras effortlessly presupposes Hosmer’s significance:

“We all know that Hos is a franchise player, a world champion. He’s done all this at a very young age,” Boras said.

World champion? Sure, that happened. Very young age? Hosmer is still only 27 years old. But, there’s that first thing. We don’t all know that Hosmer is a franchise player. The majority of people would actually disagree with that notion. This is a phenomenally easy idea to argue against.

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Salvador Perez, to me, is one of the more overrated players in baseball.

Defining “overrated” is a largely subjective endeavor, but, to me, he has received praise and exposure in a volume not commensurate with his abilities. Yes, he was part of a world-championship club, and he was of course heavily involved as its catcher. Still, his production is not that of an All-Star.

He’s posted three straight seasons of sub-.290 on-base percentages, wRC+ numbers of 91 or less. He’s a below-average hitter, and he doesn’t stand out at the game’s most challenged offensive position outside of pitcher. MLB catchers combined for a .310 on-base mark last season and an 87 wRC+. Perez posted an 88 wRC+.

In an age when pitch-framing has been quantified and now prized, Perez was rated as the worst framer in baseball last season, according to StatsCorner. Perez, like Matt Wieters, might have a framing problem in part because, at 6-foot-5, he’s unusually tall for a catcher. According to BWARP, which includes framing value, Perez has been worth an average of 0.5 WAR per season since 2014. Half a win! This is a player who has been invited to participate in four straight All-Star games. There’s a disconnect here.

What he does do well is stay on the field and throw out baserunners.

While Perez isn’t highly regarded as a receiver, he does lead all catchers in Defensive Runs Saved (39) since 2013, which accounts for catcher defense without considering framing. Perez led the AL last season by throwing out 48% of attempted stolen-base runners. His 35% rate over the course of his career is well above the league average of 28% over that six-year span.

While health is in part a skill, and while he has a strong arm, the overall profile is not one of an All-Star, let alone a quality regular. Unless, I’m missing something. And I think I might have been missing something. I wasn’t aware how dramatic Perez’s first-half and second-half splits were until watching MLB Network’s top-10 catcher show via DVR the other night.

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