Winning a championship is great — for about 48 hours or however long it takes for the parade to end. Then the page turns to the next season and it’s time to figure out how to win all over again. The Kansas City Royals just won their first championship in 30 seasons less than a year ago, but right now, it’s not enough. If the 2015 championship is the only one they win with this current core of players, they’ll eventually be able to look back with fondness on the achievement. Now isn’t the time for reflection, however: it’s the time to make every effort to add even more glory to this era of Royals baseball.

Unfortunately, the Royals haven’t put themselves in a strong position to contend in 2016. They’re at an even .500 record despite a negative-33 run differential and currently sit nine games behind first-place Cleveland. Our playoff odds currently give them just a 1-in-50 chance of making it to the divisional series. If they “buy” over the next week and a half, it stands to reason they can increase their odds slightly, but they face an unavoidably great uphill climb. In order to claim a wild-card spot, they’ll have to leapfrog five other teams.

It’s certainly possible that they can pull off a surprise run in the second half – the Royals have made an impressive habit of foiling projections in recent years, after all — but if I were the one calling the shots in Kansas City, I’d find it irresponsible to make moves focused solely on 2016 success.

Note how I phrased that, though: I didn’t say that I wouldn’t be a “buyer” this month, only that I wouldn’t focus on 2016.

There’s a maddening and inaccurate oversimplification which inevitably occurs each July that there are two groups of teams: those trying to win now and those who should sell off all players without long-term value. The Royals shouldn’t be buying for 2016, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be “buyers” in the current trade market.

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There’s another disagreement regarding the Kansas City Royals and advanced metrics. If you’re still standing, you may take another drink.

This time, it’s Eric Hosmer and the defensive metrics. The Kansas City Star’s Rustin Dodd penned a column over the weekend regarding the disconnect between the perception of Hosmer’s defense and the evaluation of Hosmer’s defense. It’s a well-written and well-researched piece that’s worth your time, but I wanted to dive a bit deeper. And it’s probably about time we had the talk anyway — it’s been an elephant in the room each of the last three seasons, while Hosmer’s won a trio of Gold Glove Awards despite grading as nothing more than an average defender.

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Dillon Gee isn’t a Met anymore. Nor is he a starter (at least not as his primary role). The 30-year-old right-hander is working out of the bullpen in his first season with the Royals. No longer needed in New York, he inked a free-agent deal with Kansas City over the winter.

Gee was a solid, albeit unremarkable, starter for the Mets from 2011 to -14. Then the deGroms, Harveys and Syndergaards burst onto the scene (the ageless Bartolo, too). That made it time to move on, and Gee is now a long reliever making spot starts for a new team. He’s adapting well. In 12 appearances for the defending World Series champs, he has a 3.98 ERA and a career-best 8.2 K/9.

Gee talked about his transition earlier in the season.

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Gee on transitioning to the Royals and a relief role: “I’m probably a better pitcher now than I was in my earlier years. This is just the role I have now. I kind of got phased out in New York. They obviously had some young studs coming up, and I lost my spot there. I had a few opportunities to remain a starter with other teams, but I chose to come here and contribute out of the bullpen for a winning team.

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Let’s make one thing absolutely clear: The Royals don’t have an ace, not by major-league standards. By whichever measure you pick, the Royals have had one of the worst starting rotations in the game, and the closest thing they have to an ace starter is probably their group of pitchers who aren’t starters at all. Each and every game is almost like a race to the bullpen, and the Royals are aware of it. This is part design, and part bad luck.

It’s also part bad Yordano Ventura. For what we can term a variety of reasons, Ventura has yet to ascend to the performance level his repertoire would suggest. If any Royal were to blossom into a relative ace, you’d think Ventura would be the one. And he might still get there, but he’s not the guy presently on course. No, the guy emerging right now is Danny Duffy, and though Duffy isn’t the only respectable member of the staff, he’s become perhaps the most exciting. That is, if you find good pitching more exciting than brawls.

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If you woke up this morning, looked at the WAR Leaderboards for position players and saw Mike Trout, Jose Altuve, and Manny Machado near the top, you might have had an inclination that all is right with the world. After all, those three players are some of the very best in major-league baseball, and we would expect to see them at the top of the list. Of course, when you look closely at the leaderboard, it’s important to note that there are 171 qualified players. To regard the WAR marks as some sort of de facto ranking for all players would be foolish. For some players, defensive value has a large impact on their WAR total, and it’s important, when considering WAR values one-third of the way into the season, to consider the context in which those figures.

“Small sample size” is a phrase that’s invoked a lot throughout the season. At FanGraphs, we try to determine what might be a small-sample aberration from what could be a new talent level. Generally speaking, the bigger the sample size, the better — and this is especially true for defensive statistics, where we want to have a very big sample to determine a player’s talent level. Last year, I attempted to provide a warning on the reliability of defensive statistics. Now that the season has reached its third month, it’s appropriate to revisit that work.

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Mike Moustakas is out for the rest of the season on account of a torn ACL, which he sustained in a foul-territory collision with Alex Gordon, which also injured the other guy. Gordon is out for a few weeks, himself, and though the collision isn’t quite as costly as Mike Trout running into literally anything, the Royals have been pushed into a difficult spot. Gordon is good! They won’t have him for a bit. Moustakas is good, too. They won’t have him for a longer bit. What they will have is Cheslor Cuthbert and Whit Merrifield, and I just had to look those names up two times each.

Injury analysis? Oh, it doesn’t get much easier than injury analysis. Here’s how this projects to affect the Royals. Moustakas, the rest of the way, was projected to be worth nearly two and a half wins. Now the replacement third basemen are projected to be worth about one win. The difference: call it a win, or a win and a half. That’s the effect. The Royals are competing in a tight Central division, and every win will probably be precious. Down go the playoff odds, by a chunk. What could be simpler to understand? Moustakas was starting, because he was the best option, and now they have to go with another option, and that won’t cripple them, but it will make the situation worse.

Your basic player injury analysis could be crammed into a single tweet. It’s interesting, but only to a point. It’s certainly not worth a number of paragraphs. We already know what this Moustakas news objectively means. But let’s try to spin it! It’s brutal news for any Royals fan to digest, but the sky might not be falling. Considered differently, the sky is just getting closer.

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This is a follow-up post that could practically write itself. Last year, the Kansas City Royals won the World Series in spite of (because of?) weak-hitting shortstop Alcides Escobar leading off each and every game and almost always swinging at the first pitch, even when the opposition was nearly certain it was coming. It became a thing. Broadcasters talked about it every game, we all laughed about it on Twitter, and the Royals rallied around the idea that they’d win as long as Escobar went after that first pitch. He kept doing it, and they kept winning, and I honestly believe that plenty of rational people (myself included, I think) legitimately began questioning whether magic — specifically, Esky Magic — might be real.

And as long as Escobar (inexplicably?) continued to lead off for the Royals this season, his first-pitch tendencies would be worth a review at some point in the year. Escobar has continued to lead off, and so his first-pitch tendencies are worth a review at some point in the year. This is that point.

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We have a number of great ERA estimators on this site. FIP, xFIP, SIERA: choose your favorite, because they all have a place in attempting to better describe outcomes closer to a pitcher’s true talent over a given timeframe. Maybe you’re lazy, or maybe you’re different, but it can also be nice to have a dead simple one — which is where K-BB% comes in. If a pitcher is striking guys out and limiting walks, that’s a fundamentally positive thing, and it turns out K-BB% is actually the best in-season predictor of future performance out of all the ERA estimators on the site (though it’s still not a great predictor, to be honest). Unless a pitcher possesses a signature batted-ball profile, K-BB% represents a nice, handy way of feeling a little better about a guy if his ERA hasn’t been quite up to expectations. Or, you know, feeling worse about a guy whose ERA has been lower than what his peripherals seem to say it should be.

Which brings us to the current K-BB% leaderboard. A casual perusal yields these top-five worst K-BB% rates among qualified starters in the major leagues:

Negative? Negative! These guys all have pretty middling strikeout rates, and the top few have some serious control problems. Just in case you were wondering, no one ran a negative K-BB% among qualified starters last season. It makes sense, given that it’s a hard thing to do while still being allowed to pitch a lot of meaningful innings in majo- league baseball games. But Ventura is currently doing it, and his ERA is “just” 4.62! And yet this next table, of Ventura’s current FIP and xFIP ranks among qualified starters, seems relevant, given his current standing with strikeouts and walks: Read the rest of this entry »

Due to a fractured thumb, the Royals will be without Mike Moustakas for at least the next few weeks. No doubt, Kansas City will miss their three-plus win, All-Star third baseman. But as is often the case in baseball, one man’s misfortune is another’s opportunity. In this instance, the beneficiary is Cheslor Cuthbert, whom the Royals recalled from the minors to replace Moustakas.

Unless you’re a Royals fan or a prospect connoisseur, you might have no idea who Cheslor Cuthbert is, but my nerdily-sorted spreadsheets really like the Nicaraguan infielder. Last year, he hit .277/.339/.429 as a 22-year-old in Triple-A. He also struck out in an encouragingly low 14% of his trips to the plate. He already looks like a Royal.

That performance, along with the fact that he plays primarily third base — a somewhat premium defensive position — landed Cuthbert at 74th on KATOH’s preseason top-100 list, placing him tops among Royals farmhands. That was before he opened this season by slashing .333/.402/.624 in 24 games. He was one of the very best hitters at Triple-A over the season’s first month, and was quite possibly the best prospect-age hitter in Triple-A.

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I gave Royals’ right-hander Chris Young a bit of an incredulous look — “You’re throwing the slider a ton this year!” He shrugged. Sure. “It’s okay, you can throw it inside and out, and it’s been good. But it moves a little differently depending on where you throw it.”

Young then mimicked the release point when trying to throw a slider inside to a right-handed hitter, and then he showed where the release point might be when throwing it outside to a right-handed hitter. One was straight to the plate, and the other had more side-to-side finish to it.

If you’ve pitched competitively — or, at least, possess more experience than my own, which is limited to throwing a whiffle ball to my kid while he imitates Julio Franco — this may be old hat to you. But to me, it was surprising and also totally logical at the same time. I immediately wanted to know what this looked like.

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