Archive for Kansas City Royals

Chris Young, of the Kansas City Royals, is known for both his Princeton pedigree and his height. The 6-foot-10 right-hander is also known for getting outs up in the zone, with a slow fastball. Young’s four-seamer averages 86.4 mph, and he has the highest FB% (58.2) and the lowest BABiP (.217) among pitchers who have thrown at least 100 innings. The velocity and fly balls are in line with his career norms; his probability defying BABiP is even more striking than the .248 he’s registered during parts of 11 seasons.

Thanks in large part to his frame, Young has a deceptive delivery. He also has a high spin rate on his lukewarm heater. It’s not elite, but it ranks among the top 20% of hurlers and contributes to his above-the-belt success. The 35-year-old has appeared in 32 games this year — half of them starts — and has a 10-6 record to go with a 3.29 ERA and a 4.71 FIP. Read the rest of this entry »

Junichi Tazawa is satisfied with his current role. Sort of. The 28-year-old set-up specialist would rather start or close, but he’s comforted by the knowledge that outs in the seventh and eighth innings can be every bit as valuable as outs in the ninth. And he gets a lot of them. Tazawa made 71 appearances for the Red Sox this season and logged a 2.86 ERA over 63 innings.

His job isn’t simple. Along with frequently facing high-leverage situations, he doesn’t have one designated inning. Tazawa pitched in the eighth inning 45 times this year, and 16 times in the seventh. He also made appearances in the sixth, the ninth, and in extra frames.

Further impacting Tazawa’s preparation has been his usage relative to the scoreboard. He entered 29 games with the Red Sox trailing. On 28 occasions he entered with a lead.

“My job doesn’t really depend on whether we’re winning or losing,” acknowledged Tazawa, through translator C.J. Matsumoto. “There is the possibility I will get into either situation, so I’m looking at the pitch count and trying to get my blood flow going. I need to be able to step right in there.”

One of the questions I asked Tazawa at season’s end was whether his ready-at-any-time role is more challenging mentally or physically. Read the rest of this entry »

There were 46,912 fans at Oriole Park at Camden Yards today/tonight. Between print, radio and TV, there were just over 800 credentialed media. As for the 31 players who performed on the field, they put on another good show. This game wasn’t as wild and wacky as the one that ended just before one o’clock this morning, but it was still a doozy – a doozy that last 4 hours and 17 minutes. The Royals scored twice in the ninth inning on a double by Alcides Escobar and a single by Lorenzo Cain to win 6-4.

As usual, I won’t write much here about what you just saw on TV. What I will do is supply some color in the form of post-game quotes and fold this over into my weekly Sunday Notes column.

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Mike Moustakas on homering for the third consecutive game and executing a sacrifice bunt in the ninth inning: “That’s how we’re playing the game right now. Any way we’re going to score runs, we’re going to score. If that means sac bunting or hit-and-running – anything to generate runs – we’re fine with it. But I’m seeing the ball good right now. I’m getting good pitches to hit and I’m not missing them.”

Lorenzo Cain on making a spectacular diving catch in right-center field: “Zone in and make the play. I don’t think about messing up. I’m not a guy who is scared or fearful about making a mistake. I’m willing to lay out and do whatever it takes to make a play. I’m going to continue to play that way. I’ve played that way my entire life.”

Ned Yost on the Royals benefiting from some soft hits: “That’s good hitting, yeah. I’ll take bloop hits all day long. They get bloop hits, too. They’re a little bit aggravating.”

Buck Showalter on decision-making and being down two games to none: “I could go over about a hundred decisions Ned and I have to make, and the players, more importantly, have to make. It can be kind of maddening if you let it, but you trust your instincts and know your guys. You’ve got to win four games. You’ve got to keep from losing more than three. That’s obviously oversimplifying it.”

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A lot has been written about Buck Showalter in recent weeks, and deservedly so. The quotable manager has achieved cult status in Baltimore, and if he leads the Orioles to the promised land – a more daunting task than it was 24 hours ago – Earl Weaver might eventually have company in Camden Yards statue land.

Less has been written about Ned Yost – at least in regard to positive print – so let’s spill some cyberspace ink on the much-maligned Royals skipper. After all, his holy-crap-they-might-win-it-all team is currently in the driver’s seat against Showalter’s squad in the ALCS.

Let’s start with some words from outfielder Lorenzo Cain, who has been setting the world on fire since I spoke with him at the outset of the series.

“I would say he was kind of conservative to start the season,” Cain told me. “Toward the end here he’s been a lot more aggressive, changing pitchers and making moves. He changed the lineup – one, two, three – and that’s definitely an aggressive move. You have to take risks in this game to be successful and that’s what he’s doing.

“Buck Showalter is a really good manager, but we have a really good manager as well. Managing and making moves is definitely going to come into play in this series, but as players we understand we have to get it done on the field. A manager can make moves, but at the end of the day, we have to go out there and perform.”

So far, Cain has held up his end of the bargain. He’s 6 for 8 with a pair of walks, and his defense in center field has been immaculate. Read the rest of this entry »

The story lines have been the same all week. The Orioles hit home runs and the Royals steal bases. Both teams have deep, lock-down bullpens. One manager is sly as a fox and the other is a tactical error waiting to happen. That pretty much covers it.

Actually, one other notable theme crept in: According to FanGraphs odds, the Royals came in with a 63 percent chance of winning the ALCS. Meanwhile, the betting line in Las Vegas favored the Orioles. Baltimore reliever Darren O’Day had a great take on the contradiction.

“My wife told me something about our odds to win the World Series,” O’Day said prior to the game. “But the four teams who had the best odds [coming into the playoffs] are now at home, so I don’t know that the odds mean much.”

Odds were that tonight’s game wouldn’t go as scripted – it seems they rarely do in the postseason – and to say it didn’t would be stating the obvious. Any script it may have followed was implausible. This was an unpredictable baseball game, which lends credence to O’Day’s words.

Another thing the Baltimore sidewinder said about the series stands out, and it ended up being irony in its highest form.

“Juxtaposed are the speed and the power,” said O’Day. “It will be exciting to see how we control the running game and how they keep our guys in the park. Two different styles.”

The Royals adapted their opponent’s style and won – the final was 8-6 in 10 innings – not because of their running game, but because the Orioles couldn’t keep them in the park. That didn’t fit the supposed story line, but it was less surprising than one might think. The Kansas City lineup is by no means power-packed, but Camden Yards isn’t Kauffman Stadium. It’s a veritable launching pad.

“People say they’re not a home-run-hitting team, but that’s because they play in a huge ballpark,” said Orioles first baseman Steve Pearce. “We probably wouldn’t be a huge home-run-hitting team if we played there either. They’re fast, but they can also play a little bit. They can hit.”

Hit they did. In the top of the third, Alcides Escobar homered. Later in the inning, Alex Gordon cleared the bases with a double. In the 10th, Gordon took O’Day out of the yard to give the Royals the lead. Three batters later, Mike Moustakas went deep as well.

“This is a park that’s a lot more conducive to hitting home runs than our ballpark is,” Kansas City manager Ned Yost said after the game. “If you put our club in this ballpark, we’d hit a lot more home runs than we ended up hitting. It showed tonight.”

Buck Showalter was also asked about Kansas City’s power surge, and likewise offered little sign of surprise. He did show some matter-of-fact disappointment regarding the outcome, as well as appreciation for great theater.

“They’ve been hitting home runs lately,” said the Orioles skipper. “It is what it is. It was a good ballgame, except the Orioles didn’t win. It was entertaining.”

With the regular season coming to a close – man, did that go fast — it’s time to take stock of what I predicted prior to opening day. As one might expect, there were both hits and misses. Such was the case for all FanGraphs writers, who shared their prognostications here and here. This week’s Sunday Notes column begins with a look at what my often-cloudy crystal ball told me in late March.

AL East: Tampa Bay Rays: I whiffed on this one. The perennial overachievers underachieved despite their pitchers’ striking out a big-league-record 1,430 batters [through last night]. The Indians, with 1,442, also broke the mark set last year by the Tigers [1,428]. Rays batters fanned 1,116 times, third least of the 30 teams.

AL Central: Detroit Tigers: This was supposed to be easy. Instead, the team Brad Ausmus inherited from Jim Leyland has a tenuous grasp on first place on the season’s final day. Those abandoned lots dotting Detroit? There’s a bullpen analogy there if things fall apart in October – assuming the Tigers actually make it to October.

AL West: Oakland A’s: For a long time, this looked like a smart pick. Fortunately for Bob Melvin’s team, the collapse was short of calamitous – assuming they win today [or Seattle loses] and again on Tuesday to advance to the ALDS. I have no plausible explanation for not picking the Angels to make the postseason. Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan O’Hearn is making it look easy. Forty-six games into his professional career, the 21-year-old Idaho Falls Chukar first baseman is crushing the Pioneer League. Swinging from the left side, O’Hearn is hitting .380/.455/.604 with nine home runs.

The Kansas City Royals drafted the Sam Houston State Bearkat in the eighth round, and he didn’t waste time showing he was ready for pro ball. O’Hearn homered in his first plate appearance and went 5 for 5 on the day. A little over a month later he was involved in a 16-inning game that featured a bench-clearing brawl.

He’s had more than a fighting chance against opposing pitchers. O’Hearn isn’t cocky, but he is confident.

“I finished my college year pretty good and got off to a good start in pro ball,” O’Hearn told me earlier this week. “My confidence has really built. You end up telling yourself, ‘I can do this, this is no big deal.’ Sometimes guys just click with their hitting, and I’ve been doing that lately, which is awesome.”

O’Hearn’s power potential is a big reason he was drafted. He left the yard eight times in his junior year, and he’s already surpassed that total in Idaho Falls. The 6-foot-3 slugger isn’t surprised. He describes his college ballpark as “what players call a graveyard – a big field where the ball doesn’t carry well because of heavy air.” Read the rest of this entry »

When our other prospect writers submit scouting reports, I will provide a short background and industry consensus tool grades.  There are two reasons for this: 1) giving context to account for the writer seeing a bad outing (never threw his change-up, coming back from injury, etc.) and 2) not making him go on about the player’s background or speculate about what may have happened in other outings.

The writer still grades the tools based on what they saw, I’m just letting the reader know what he would’ve seen in many other games from this season, particularly with young players that may be fatigued late in the season. Often, those will be the same grades. The grades are presented as present/future on the 20-80 scouting scale and very shortly I’ll publish a series going into more depth explaining these grades. – Kiley

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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.

In this piece, I look at three 18-and-under up-the-middle prospects.

Summary
This athletic, projectable glider has made moderate inroads at the plate and has plenty of time and projection to allow for additional progress.

Read the rest of this entry »

For players in 28 of MLB’s 30 organizations, the lowest level of U.S.-based affiliated professional baseball is the complex leagues, the Arizona League and the Gulf Coast League. These leagues feature the rawest of the raw when it comes to professional baseball players, largely including players fresh out of high school or Latin America, with some low-rung college players mixed in.

Two organizations, however, do not have complex league teams. The Rockies haven’t had one since 2000, instead maintaining a Rookie-Advanced team in the Pioneer league and a short-season-A team in the Northwest League. From 2003 to 2013, the White Sox were the other team, but this year, the Pale Hose picked up an Arizona League team and their division rivals in Kansas City became the second club with a complex league vacuum.

The Royals thus lost an entire team’s worth of roster spots in their system in the offseason, and that created something of a backlog in their organization. All the high school draftees and Latin American kids who would normally (or at least often) be assigned to their old AZL team now jumped straight up to the club’s Rookie-Advanced affiliate in Burlington. The squad opened the year with a whopping 38 players on its roster as a result, including four 17-year-olds and six players picked in the top six rounds of the 2014 draft. As you’d expect, the raw Burlington squad resides in last place in the Appalachian League East Division, but also as you’d expect, they are largely considered the most talented team in the circuit. I sat in on seven of their contests this year, and in this piece, I’m going to touch on several intriguing players on this oversized roster.

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The Minnesota Twins have learned to love the shift. According to Baseball Info Solutions, Ron Gardenhire’s club went into the All-Star break having shifted on 251 balls in play, 13th-most in baseball. Last year they shifted just 84 times on balls in play, sixth-fewest in baseball.

Paul Molitor is in charge of Minnesota’s infield defense. The Hall of Famer assumed the role prior to this season, and the modernization of the team’s approach has been in the works since he took over. In January, Molitor told MLB.com’s Rhett Bollinger, “The game has changed so much; we’re seeing more overshifts and people not afraid to give up space based on tendencies, so it’s something I’m excited about learning about and applying to the way we play defense.”

When I talked to Molitor last month, it was apparent he’s learned a lot. And while he was clearly still forming opinions on certain specifics, he seemed pleased with the results he’d seen.

“I discussed it with Gardy [manager Ron Gardenhire] before the season and we decided if it would increase our chances of getting outs, we were going to go ahead and try it,” Molitor told me. “Sometimes it’s a little dicey because hitters are smart and some will react to the defense. They have enough confidence and bat control to counteract what you’re doing. But I’d have to say that more times than not, our shifts have worked fairly well. We’ve been burned a few times, as have most teams, but overall it’s been working in our favor.”

Molitor’s mention of confidence prompted me to ask about the psychological aspect. If a hitter is thinking about – and possibly questioning – his approach, has the defense already gained an advantage? Read the rest of this entry »