2015 ROYALS—Talkin' Baseball

In which we explore the advantages of shutting the fuck up and listening...

In 2014 the Royals stole 153 bases; this season—after 36 games—they’ve stolen just 23. So what’s up with that?

Not surprisingly, when you lead the league in steals, pitchers take notice and do what they have to do stop you. They deliver the ball to home plate more quickly, they attempt more pickoffs, they hold the ball in the set position and when they finally throw the ball to home plate, they tend to throw more fastballs.

The Royals no longer lead the league in stolen bases, but now lead the league in batting average and they’re second in runs scored. Distracted pitchers, throwing fastballs, are giving Royals hitters pitches to hit.

So while the Royals might be stealing fewer bases, the threat of the stolen base is still helping their offense. While analytics fans don’t like the stolen base, this is why you run.

Rusty Kuntz—2015

One day, Rusty and I are sitting around talking baseball and I ask him what incident led to the creation of the L-screen. An L-screen is just what it sounds like: a protective screen shaped like the letter L. Batting practice pitchers stand behind it and throw through the open slot, but keep their heads behind the upright part of the L.

Rusty doesn’t know exactly when the L-screen was invented, but says when he started in baseball the BP pitcher was given an oil drum to stand behind; if a ball got hit at your head, you better duck.

Next I tell Rusty about talking to Wade Davis and Wade saying he used his glove to protect his “vitals” when a ball was hit back at him. After that I told Wade it didn’t sound like he considered his head “vital.”

So then Rusty asks me how many pitchers on the Royals staff wear protective cups.

They have 13 pitchers so I say I hope the number is 13; Rusty thinks it’s more like four. Catcher Drew Butera walks by, hears what we’re talking about and says it’s more like three. Pitching coach Dave Eiland says it’s two or three, but he doesn’t conduct cup checks and doesn’t intend to start.

Rusty then tells me if I want to know which pitchers wear protective cups—and I’m pretty sure I don’t—I should watch how they finish a pitch. If a pitcher finishes a pitch by falling off the mound and turning sideways, he’s probably not wearing a cup: he’s protecting his “vitals.”

So I’ve now got that stuck in my head—and you do, too.

After I write about this disturbing cup situation, someone who doesn’t have to wear a cup to work everyday (although the way they’re firing people in the newspaper industry, maybe I should start) says they can’t believe how many ballplayers don’t wear cups and if they start wearing them, they’d get used to it.

Spoken like somebody who never wore a cup for 162 games.

Wearing a cup get more uncomfortable, not less.

Wade Davis—2015

If you have a specific question you’ll get a specific answer, but just pass the time of day with a ballplayer—let the conversation go where it will—and you might learn something you never would have thought to ask about, like which pitchers are wearing cups.

One day I’m asking Wade Davis about reading swings and reading takes: what does a hitter tell you when he doesn’t swing at a pitch?

Minnesota Twins catcher Kurt Suzuki once told me the way a hitter takes a pitch tells you what’s in his mind. If you throw a hitter a curveball and he leans out over his front foot as he takes it, he wants that pitch; throw it again. But if a guy stays back as he takes that curveball, be careful; the hitter’s seeing it well and won’t chase it out of the zone.

Wade confirms Kurt’s curveball theory and says he will not throw Miguel Cabrera a curveball for a strike; Cabrera keeps his head still and sees the pitch out of Wade’s hand. If it’s a ball, Miggy takes it; if it’s a strike, Miggy crushes it.

I say I won’t write that and Wade says go ahead—Miggy already knows.

In fact, it’s become a running joke between them: when Wade heads down to the bullpen, Cabrera will get his attention and make a signal with his hand up around the letters on his uniform. Miggy’s asking Wade if he’s going to throw high fastballs again today.

Cabrera will even do it during a game when Wade’s on the mound. Miggy wants Wade to know he knows what Wade plans to do; throw fastballs up above the good hitting part of the zone and try to get Cabrera to pop one up. So what happens when Wade misses with a fastball down?

“He put me in the Rays tank on a down-and-away fastball.”

So if a hitter keeps his head still he’s going to be better at pitch selection, if a hitter lets his head move, he’ll tend to be worse; throw that guy chase sliders and curves. Watch a hitter’s head and he’ll tell you how to pitch him.

BTW: When Miggy asks Wade if he’s going to get high fastballs, Wade sometimes smiles and points at his own head—Wade’s message? Be careful, I might come up and in today.

Everybody’s playing mind games.

May 17, 2015—Yankees

Wade Davis comes out to pitch the eighth inning and has a problem; he’s missing the strike zone on his arm-side and walks two batters. When a pitcher is missing on his arm-side—with the right-handed Davis that would be up-and-in to a right-handed hitter or up-and-away from a lefty—it usually means his front side is opening too soon.

After the game I ask Wade if that was the case and he says, yeah, his front-side was flying open horizontally—toward first base—and that made his throwing arm late. So from Wade’s point of view he was missing his location to the right. I ask how you fix that mechanical flaw in the middle of a game and expect to hear something complicated and complex.

Wade says: “Aim left.”

Thinking like this is a big part of what makes Wade Davis Wade Davis.

May 18, 2015—Off Day

The Royals have both Monday and Thursday off the week they face the Cincinnati Reds and that gives them the chance to reshuffle their starting rotation.

If a team can wait until the last possible moment to reveal which pitcher is starting which game, they make it harder on the other team; the other team has to do scouting reports on every possibility. If the other team knows who’s starting which game, they can concentrate their efforts on one guy and do a better job preparing.

The media gets cranky when a manager is vague about his future plans, but there might be a good reason the manager won’t give us a straight answer: why make things easier for your opponent?

Rusty Kuntz—2015

One of the chief pleasures of my job is wandering around, talking baseball and learning something new. And most of the time, when you learn something new, you hit yourself in the forehead because it’s so obvious and logical that you’re embarrassed you didn’t figure it out on your own.

Rusty’s talking about backup catchers and why they need to be good catch-and-throw guys. If you give your starting catcher the day off, you don’t want to be forced to bring him in to handle the backend of the bullpen late in a game.

I ask why you’d need to bring your starting catcher back in the game to handle the set-up man and closer and turns out, the answer is obvious: if pitchers are hard to hit, they’re hard to catch.

Pitches with a lot of movement make guys swing and miss and they can also make a catcher look bad.

Catchers want to set up in their stance, give the pitcher a target and receive the ball quietly and without much movement. If the pitcher hits the mitt, the umpire is more likely to call that pitch a strike, even if it’s off the plate. If the catcher has to jerk his mitt around and stab at the ball—which can happen on pitches with late movement—the umpire is more likely to see that pitch as a ball.

And if Salvador Perez gets a hit in his last at-bat and his run matters, Ned’s going to pinch run for him. Which means Drew Butera has to be able to handle the back-of-the-bullpen guys with “nasty-nasty” stuff.

See? Once somebody explains it to you, it seems pretty damn obvious.

May 19, 2015—Reds

Yordano Ventura throws seven innings of four-hit, shutout ball against the Cincinnati Reds and after the game Ned Yost is asked about Ventura’s composure. Ned says that Yordano is the same steady guy he’d always been, which brings up a question: are we talking about the same Yordano Ventura?

Managers are often required to spout the party line; it’s up to the reporters covering that manager to know what’s real and what’s BS.

This is clearly BS.

May 22, 2015—Cardinals

The Royals beat the Cardinals 5-0 and Chris Young throws six shutout innings and wins his fourth game. The guy who was considered an add-on in spring training is coming up big for the Royals.

Two Kansas City base stealers tell me that Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina will occasionally widen his legs and show the sign to a base runner. Base stealers want to run on off-speed pitches and Yadier’s showing the runner that he just called a slider; Molina is actually daring base runners to take off.

I ask one of the players if he stole when Molina showed him the signs and the player says yes and successfully stole second base.

After that Yadier quit showing him the signs.

Royals DH Kendrys Morales goes 3-for-4, raises his average over .300, hits two home runs, has five RBIs and takes over the league lead in runs driven in. There are 37,379 people in attendance and the ones wearing blue roar their approval.

Which makes me wonder: 41 games into the 2015 season, signing Kendrys Morales seems like a pretty smart move—but what were people saying at the time the deal was made?

I go back and take a look. I visit several websites and look at hundreds of comments left by baseball fans and hardly any of them liked the Morales signing. I’d say well over 90 percent of the people who cared enough to express an opinion thought it was a horrible move by Dayton Moore and the Royals.

For example:

• “I just think this is a terrible signing, because Morales won't provide the Royals with any value whatsoever. He will perform very badly, and it will have been a waste.”

• “I just think the Royals should have been smart enough to realize how terrible he's going to be”

• “Dayton def misread the market which is ridiculous when your a GM of a professional team.”

• “royals won't even finish at .500 next year, book it”

• “Terrible signing.”

• “Don't kid yourself and try to be positive. This is a horrible pickup and a huge waste of the little money that Glass allows Dayton to spend. This signing ruined the majority of KC fans day!!!”

• “Indefensible”

• “This sucks”

• “Just terrible. Borderline god awful”

• “Worst free agency signing EVER”

• “This kind of kills the "Dayton Moore has learned from his mistakes and is improving" argument”

• “Dayton has re-announced his incompetent presence with authority”

After putting these comments online I find out that most of the Royals front office read the article and the “re-announced his incompetence with authority” comment made Dayton laugh out loud.

Remember: Royals fans were saying those things after Dayton Moore took their team to the 2014 World Series. I wonder how negative they would have been if the Royals had lost that Wild Card Game. As the people who hated the Morales signing show, predicting the future is hard.

Small-market teams with limited budgets have to look for bargains and that includes bounce-back players: guys who once played at a high level, then for one reason or another have a bad year (like injury) and are looking to bounce back. Pick the right guy (like Kendrys Morales) and you have a talented, motivated player with something to prove.

But if all you can do is look at the numbers and say this player sucked last year so why would we want him this year, you’ll never sign that bargain-basement bounce-back guy.

Hundreds of people hated this signing enough to get on the internet and say so; I wonder how many of those people went back on the internet to publicly say they were wrong.

Rusty Kuntz and Mitch Maier—2015

After looking at all those website comments about Kendrys Morales I learn two things:

1.) Generally speaking, people did not like the Morales signing and…

2.) Reading 700 internet comments will give you an extremely dim view of humanity.

For a while people stayed on topic, but then things would veer out of control; insults were hurled, people left comments that made no sense, guys who think Ned Yost is a dummy said so with misspelled words, personal long-standing feuds were conducted, one guy called Dayton Moore a “retard” and then there was a long debate about whether that was OK (it’s not), obscure stats were defended or attacked with even more obscure arguments and one guy said RBIs were a worthless statistic because all they did was measure the ability of the people in front of you to get on base.

When I read that last comment I thought: “Now there’s a guy who hasn’t played much baseball.”

After reading that last comment I decide to ask guys who actually played baseball what they thought of RBIs; did it take any special talent to drive in runs? Were some guys better at it than others?

The first two guys I run into are Rusty Kuntz and Rusty Kuntz, Jr. AKA: Mitch Maier.

(If you’ve reached the point where you’re thinking, “Lee, sure talks to Rusty a lot” just let me say this: NO SHIT, SHERLOCK. If Rusty’s going back to the minors next season I’m either going with him or learning everything I can from him before he goes. I don’t want to go to the minors, so I’m sticking with Plan B.)

So what about it, Rusty; are RBIs a worthless statistic?

At this point Rusty looks me in the eye and shares his words of wisdom: he tells me to get off the grass.

Reporters are allowed to stand on the dirt warning track, but the grass is for players and coaches only. It’s how they get away from reporters like me; they go stand on the grass and if they stand far away from the dirt, reporters can’t talk to them. But lucky for me if you ask Rusty Kuntz a baseball question he can’t help himself; he’ll talk to a lamp post, a fire hydrant or a reporter standing on the grass.

Rusty asks me if a guy has 100 RBIs in a season, how many home runs did he hit?

Rusty says if a guy has 100 RBIs, he probably hit at least 20 home runs. So I go back and look at the 2014 season. Here are the American League players who had at least 100 RBIs, followed by their RBIs and home run totals:

• Mike Trout: 111 RBIs/36 Home Runs

• Miguel Cabrera: 109 RBIs/25 Home Runs

• Nelson Cruz: 108 RBIs/40 Home Runs

• Jose Abreu: 107 RBIs/36 Home Runs

• Albert Pujols: 105 RBIs/28 Home Runs

• David Ortiz: 104 RBIs/35 Home Runs

• Victor Martinez: 103 RBIs/32 Home Runs

• Jose Bautista: 103 RBIs/35 Home Runs

• Yoenis Cespedes: 100 RBIs/22 Home Runs

So if it takes skill to hit home runs and home runs make up a decent percentage of high RBI totals, doesn’t it take skill to rack up RBIs?

Rusty then says the toughest run to drive in is a runner on second base with two outs. At this point Rusty asks Mitch if he got pitched differently with a runner on first base than he did with a runner on second base.

“Totally.”

With a runner on first base the run is still two singles away from scoring and pitchers will be more aggressive; they throw more fastballs in the zone because a ball in play turns into an out most of the time.

With a runner on second base—especially with first base open—the hitter will see more off-speed stuff out of the zone.

The pitcher is counting on the hitter being more aggressive; the hitter’s got a runner in scoring position and lots of hitters will expand their zone and chase those off-speed pitches because they really want that RBI—RBIs make you money. Guys who are good at driving in runs will refuse to chase bad pitches and either take their walk or wait for a good pitch to hit and smoke it once they get it.

Once again, this sounds like it takes skill.

I then ask if good RBI guys are also good situational hitters; guys who understand what pitch and what ball in play it will take to get the job done.

Scoring a runner on third with less than two outs might require a ball in the air to the outfield, so the hitter needs to get a pitch up in the zone. Same thing if there’s one down and runners at first and third: a groundball might be an inning-ending double play. But with a runner on third, less than two outs and the infield back, a groundball up the middle will drive the run in.

Knowing what will get the job done and waiting for the right pitch once again sounds like a skill.

Mitch says some guys have it and other guys don’t; he asks how many times we see bases loaded, nobody out and a run still doesn’t score. That’s probably because a couple guys who aren’t very good at driving in runs came to the plate.

So guys who have played the game at a high level think driving in runs takes some skill; at least one guy who spends time leaving comments on the internet doesn’t. I think I’m going with the opinion of the guys who have played the game.

Even if I have to walk out on the grass to hear it.

Next Up: Why it’s easy to get swept in New York, how player agents start slumps and why teams need to be able to play Small Ball.