DoolittleBrothers

In today’s Stat Guy, I wrote about the talent disparity between the leagues. In this piece, I’m not trying to make any great argument and, in fact, I made no effort at drawing any hard conclusions. This is just a little ponderous prose, food for thought, about something that I think about from time to time.

In fact, I don’t want the Royals in the National League — in my mind, Kansas City is an AL town and the AL is the AL, the NL is the NL and never between shall the two meet. But this issue has been written about a lot the last year or so and when I read those articles, I often muse about whether the Royals would be better off had they moved to the NL a few years back. I not sure about the answer on that. But I do worry about the club’s spending efficiency.

Consider this: As of about a week ago, when the Royals were 11-25, they were on pace to spend about $1.36 million per win this season. Only the Yankees, who are a lock to finish last in the category in any given year these days, were more inefficient at $2.56 million. The big-league average is $1.03 million (or $0.98 million with the Yankees removed).

To be competitive over the long haul, especially as the team scratches its way upslope on the winning cycle, the Royals need to be well better than average by this crude measure. At $1.36 million per win, the team would have to spend $129.2 million to win 95 games. That ain’t going to happen. At the current non-Yankee big-league average, they’d need to spend $93.1 million for 95 wins — also probably a little outside the realm of possibility.

With the Royals spending $67 million on payroll this season (I’m using AP figures until someone releases some better ones) and assuming that is the current upper limit with the current revenue stream, KC need to be doling out about $.71 million per win. So they’re running at 52 percent efficiency when it comes to spending on the playing roster. We can’t condemn Dayton Moore for anything at this point in his tenure, but in the long term, he’s going to have to do way better than that.

I used that low-water record from a week ago as an illustrative tool. But, of course, the team has won some games over the last week. The Royals are now on pace to win 61 games so you can see how the hole they put themselves in is going to be hard to escape. But at least there is a hint of flickering hope for a run at .500. Hey, I know that is exceedingly unlikely but all fans like to fool themselves into believing in the impossible. All I’m saying is that last season, like this season, the Royals started 10-23. But last year, the team completely tanked, dropping to 10-35 and leaving no room for doubt that they were irretrievably, unquestionably awful and there were no two ways about it.

This year, the Royals have gone 7-5 since that 33-game mark and with a homestand on the horizon, even I — the eternal pessimist — am daring to entertain the possibility of a run at .500. Of course, the Royals have actually played better on the road…

The research I did for this week’s piece (which is buried so far in kansascity.com you’d need a treasure map to find it) confirmed something I’d suspected but hadn’t had the chance to examine: Buddy Bell is arguably baseball’s all-time loser.

There is no joy in writing that last sentence. I realize that you can’t blame Bell for spending most of his playing career on losing teams. It’s not really his fault that none of those teams made the postseason. He played on the Reds teams in the 1980s that were managed by Pete Rose, all of which finished in second place. He played on one team each in Cleveland and Texas that snuck over .500. He never played on a 90 win-team.

As a manager, Bell led the Rockies to 82 wins in 2000. His early managerial reputation was largely made by improving on his 109-loss debut season for Detroit in 1996. The following year, the Tigers won 79 games and finished third — the best finish Bell has had as a skipper.

All the attempts at measuring managerial performance that I’ve seen rate Bell as bottom of the barrell. Those studies include my own, Chris Jaffe’s and Phil Birnbaum’s. Phil’s study was more on the effect of luck but laid the groundwork for Chris’s work. In other words, Phil might look at his own data and say “luck” and I might look at it and say “Buddy Bell”. That’s a matter of interpretation.

Anyway, I’ve been convinced that Bell is a bad manager since before Allard Baird hired him and there has been nothing in my day-to-day observation of the Royals nor in my statistical analysis to alter that feeling. The fact that he’s been involved in more games than anyone ever without experiencing the playoffs might be a fluke stat. And, yeah, I know he was a coach for the Indians when they were winning divisions but, sorry, that means little as far as I’m concerned.

My very subjective opinion is that managers can create an atmosphere of winning. And vice versa. I don’t think that anyone who has lost on the scale of Bell can create the expectation of winning that exists in successful organizations.

There are a lot of people that feel the issue of who manages the Royals at this particular time is irrelevant. Joe McCarthy himself would not turn this roster into a playoff team, or so goes that line of thinking. To me, however, I think now is the absolute crucial time to determine who is going to be the long-term skipper. There are pieces on this team (Gordon, Butler) that will be centerpieces to what we all hope will be the next contending Royals team. More of those pieces, hopefully, will be graduating to the majors from here on out. As the team grows together, I think it’s crucial that there be a manager in place to guide this growth. And I don’t think Bell is that manager.

More thoughts about today’s Stat Guy piece while eagerly awaiting the next thrilling NBA game in the Western Conference playoffs:

• Did you know… that of 115 managers in baseball history that have at least 1,000 career games under their belts that Buddy Bell ranks #114 in career winning percentage (.413). Only Jimmie Wilson, who was a player-manager for the awful Phillies teams in the 1930s and who managed the wartime Cubs in the early ’40s, was worse (.401).
• When I studied managers for a piece a couple of years ago, I ranked Bell No. 96 of 100 managers in the study. Might be time to reprise that study with some updated methodology. Chris Jaffe also rated Bell as all-time bad in his excellent study last year.
• In the article, I cited one obvious example of when Bell missed a chance to pinch hit for Tony Pena in a key situation. Now, the question I didn’t have space to address is obvious: Who would have played short? The question is key because that would almost certainly be Bell’s autotronic response to such a query. My answer? Anybody. Mark Grudzielanek was on the bench at the time. He was supposedly not available because of injury but he played the next night so surely he could have mustered an inning. Emil Brown had been inserted for John Buck as a pinch runner. Bell could have kept him in, moved Teahen to third, Gordon to short and brought LaRue in to catch in Sanders’ spot (if Sanders had been brought in to pinch hit). There are always options for creative thinkers of which Bell is almost certainly not one.
• The lack of a second guy to play shortstop is certainly a flaw in the Royals’ roster construction and the blame for this goes to Dayton Moore, not Bell. Billy Butler had been recalled by the time of my example in the story which meant that the Royals had TWO righthand-hitting corner outfielders on their bench as well as one in the starting lineup. In these days of oversized pitching staffs, teams simply cannot afford to have too many players with redundant skill sets. Of course, the Royals did foresee this roster problem way back in spring training. Realizing that Esteban German — one of the game’s outstanding utility players — might be needed to fill the six-hole from time to time, the plan was to give German lots of time there in spring games. Then Mark Grudzielanek went down and German became the de facto everyday second baseman — in spring games. That didn’t make any sense to me then and now it really doesn’t. Was it so important to have an everyday second baseman in exhibition games that you scrap a plan in place for maximizing the versatility of your regular-season roster? I’m assuming this was Bell’s mistake, as dunderheaded as that was, but surely Moore could have stepped in.
• Topic for another Stat Guy somewhere along the line: Can a team in today’s run-scoring environment win at a championship level with a Mark Belanger, ie., a player slick with the glove but has severely negative impact with the bat? My suspicion is that they can…if they make up for the lousy bat elsewhere in the lineup. That means impact players that the Royals don’t currently have — but may with the maturation of Alex Gordon and Butler. However, if the model is more of a balanced lineup, then I’d argue that Belanger would not be usable in today’s game. And if you have a shortstop that hits that poorly, then you better have a catcher who can swing it.
• I mentioned Dan Szymborski’s ZIPS projection of Pena. Has he nailed that thing so far or what?
• I’m heading out to the Legends Luncheon in midtown today. These things are great for the diehard baseball fan so check one out this season if you can (if you’re in Kansas City). Al Fitzmorris is entertaining as the host and, this season, he’ll be joined by Willie Wilson. The guests this time around are Shannon Stewart and Milton Bradley of the A’s, who are in town to beat up on the Royals, as well as Mike Norris, one of the pitchers who Billy Martin rode so mercilessly in 1980. Talk about Pitcher Abuse points — 94 complete games for one staff. Since 1960, that’s 17 more than any other team. Since 1980, discounting the 60 complete games Martin’s A’s had the very next season, that’s 46 more than the 1980 Brewers and 1984 Orioles. And, oh yeah, that workload pretty much ruined all of those pitchers. On a bittersweet note, this will be the first luncheon since the passing of Buck O’Neil, who was always the best part of the experience.

The Stat Guy piece on quality starts is out today in a KC Star near you or online. The original study I mentioned, from David W. Smith, whom we all know from the indispensable Retrosheet.org, was more in-depth and I highly recommend it. Thanks also to Garth Sears to pointing my way to that article.

A couple of other quality start links:

* Rob Neyer wrote about the same topic just about a year ago and chatted with the stat’s inventor, John Lowe.

* I recently mentioned stat-savvy Cubs announcer Len Kasper. Well, he sounded off on the quality start recently as well.

To gather the data for this piece, I used the PI machinery at Baseball-Reference.com to create a spreadsheet of every start since the beginning of the 2002 season — over 24,000 lines of data. Hopefully, I can put that to good use in the near future. Those with better programming and database-management skills would have probably just parsed Retrosheet game logs to cull the necessary data. I have to admit, I haven’t got a clue how to manipulate those files and I haven’t found a parser that I can make heads or tails of. I’m a virtuoso with Excel but the longer I do baseball analysis, the more it annoys me that I can’t parse the Retrosheet files. Any advice on that topic would certainly be welcome.

Here’s the full list of quality start percentage by team for 2002 to 2006:

Slow night at the office tonight. A rainstorm is pelting the KC area with a little hail mixed in for good measure. The Royals are doming in up in Minneapolis tonight so, for better or worst, they’ll be playing. KU was supposed to play MU at Kauffman Stadium tonight. Last I heard, it’s delayed so it might not come off. I suspect a nefarious Jayhawk fan seeded the clouds for fear of being embarrassed in a big-league venue. Anyway, some miscellany cluttering up my head:

KC fielders blow

The other day in the postgame show, Buddy made a comment about the Royals’ defense and how it’s been pretty good so far. The Royals have been the worst defensive team in baseball so far in terms of DER and also have allowed the most unearned runs in the majors. I fail to see how that qualifies as “pretty good.” The pitchers have been complicit in the poor DER standing because of a high line-drive rate but the DER is so low, that can only be partially blamed.

Buck up little Buddyroos

The bullpen problems have really gotten people down. Already I hear grumbling about “not being able to take another 100-loss season.” This is the end result of getting off to a bad start. I didn’t expect the Royals to be good this season. Not many did. But fans want something to believe in, to paraphrase the mighty REO Speedwagon, and I was actually admonished by several readers of my various Royals preview pieces for not being optimistic enough. Hell, I thought I *was* being optimistic, especially when I forecast a 68-win team. I still like the overall direction of the team but, more and more, I think Buddy “We need to be cautious” Bell’s continued employment by the franchise is counterproductive.

UR follow

I think there are a few readers who misinterpreted my UR statistic introduced yesterday. That is, obviously, my fault. I didn’t do a good enough job of explaining it. UR is in no way a measure of a pitcher’s performance. In fact, it’s not a measure of a pitcher at all. It is instead a metric that suggests whether or not a pitcher has been used appropriately. It measures a managerial skill, not a pitching skill.

Crazy people

Have you ever dealt with a crazy person? I’m talking truly, undeniably crazy.

There’s a little of that strain that runs in the family blood so I don’t want to be flippant about it but this morning, there was a crazy woman in my backyard which, amazingly enough, wasn’t nearly as much fun as it might sound.

When I woke up today, I went downstairs with my dog to let him outside and when I opened the door, he started growling. I looked and there was this (to put it kindly) heavyset woman standing in my driveway (which loops in behind the house). She was leaning on my car and appeared to be staring into the backseat.

“Can I help you with something?” I asked.

She made no sign of having heard me.

“Do you want to get out of my backyard?” I asked.

Still, no stir.

“Can you hear me? Hello! Hello! Hello!” I offered.

Silence. She just kept leaning there on my car, staring in the backseat.

I went back inside to mull over my options.

1) I could go running out into the driveway with a broom, yelling, cursing and just generally menacing her. At that point, I wasn’t so much concerned with her presence as I was about the fact that she was so freaking unresponsive. It was unnerving.

2) I could assault her. This seemed highly unnecessary.

3) I could ignore her. After all, she wasn’t really hurting anything.

4) I could call the cops.

At first, I opted for No. 3. I made some tea and my lunch and kept an eye on her. After 25 minutes — and she had not moved a muscle — I decided to call in KC’s finest. The woman was clearly wrong-headed and I’m not especially equipped to deal with such individuals, especially before I’ve had my cup of Earl Grey.

So two cop cars pull up on the street out front so, naturally, all the neighbors saunter outside and start watching. People driving by crooned their necks to see the episode of “Cops” that had broken out.

The police cars went around back. I went with them and kept my distance but stayed close enough to hear. As soon as the cops appeared, the woman finally stirred. The look on her face was like just was expecting them. It was like, “You’re finally here.” At the same time, she kept trying the handle of one of my car doors, as if she wanted to get into the backseat.

Here’s a sampling of some of the things I heard her say:

“I was talking to the police officers in the backseat…There was a woman with the exact same name as mine that was wanted for manslaughter. I was trying to tell them it wasn’t me…They wanted to take me downtown so I could clear my name.”

O-kay. As it turns out, the woman (whom I had regrettably described to the dispatcher as a “street person”) lived in the rental place next door. There is somewhere between six and 97 people who live in that thing which is no bigger than my house. I can never keep track of who lives there but I felt bad about ratting out my neighbor like that.

Turns out — big shock here — she’s a schizophrenic who had gone off her meds. She was harmless enough but I have my fingers crossed that she’ll keep to her perscription from here on out. Once those bad chemical get flowing, there’s no telling what could happen.

In today’s Stat Guy piece for the KC Star, I tackled the subject of bullpen usage. Namely, I wanted to use win probability data, which is situation oriented, to measure how effective big-league managers have been at getting their best firemen in the game at the most important moments.

Of course, there was a Royals-related reason that I wanted to do this. I suspected strongly that Buddy Bell’s bullpen usage was the worst in the Major Leagues. It’s not a matter of quality — it’s not his fault that without Dotel the Royals just don’t have enough arms in the pen — it’s a matter of resource management.

Alas, the limited data for the season to date doesn’t bear out my suspicions. In retrospect, that shouldn’t have been a surprise. Only Joakim Soria has pitched with any consistent success in high-leverage situations. Other than that, it’s been a pretty dismal performance by the bullpen. As I mentioned in the article, Ryan Braun has pitched well enough to get some higher-leverage assignments and, indeed, he got the Royals out of a jam in the eighth inning of last night’s game.

Of course, Braun’s success came only after another bad outing from David Riske. In the data I ran yesterday, Riske also stood out as being misused only for the opposite reason — his performance has not dictated such a high leverage index. But it’s early and Riske has a solid track record behind him. The Royals signed Riske to be the eighth-inning pitcher and in the absence of other options, I don’t really see how Bell can demote him to mop-up duty just yet.

(Braun walked the first two batters in the ninth before getting yanked, demonstrating why Buddy might be using him in low-leverage spots to begin with. Hey, I just said he deserved an opportunity. I can only show him the door. It’s up to Braun to walk through it.)

I’ve grumbled about Bell’s bullpen usage as much as anybody watching on a game-by-game basis. But, overall, I don’t think you can say that Bell has hurt or helped the situation. He just hasn’t had any reliable options out there. For now, at least, I don’t think you can lay much blame about this on Bell’s doorstep. (Still, it’s only April. Maybe when I run last year’s numbers, I’ll get a different story. And now I at least have a way to track an issue that always gnaws at me.)

The method

OK, now for the methodology.

Since what we need more than anything is another statistic, I came up with Usage Ratio (UR) which I named before the statistic ceased to be a ratio. Oh well.

Here is the history of UR: Yesterday, I realized that to write the column that I wanted to write, I needed to go t1o the ballpark to get a couple of quotes. But since I had to work on the sports desk Monday, there was no time for that and that story went back in the drawer. So I pulled open my Stat Guy file where I jot down article ideas. The one that I called “Buddy’s Bullpen Blunders” caught my eye and so I was off.

I put this together pretty fast and suggestions for improvements on this methodology or for a better approach to this problem are more than welcome. Drop me a line.

I knew that win probability added (WPA) and leverage index (LI) would be key components for the study so I headed for FanGraphs. In fact, all the source material for this story was taken from FanGraphs so a big thanks to Appelman for that. I also needed a context-neutral performance metric and since Appelman’s BRAA was right there, I decided to use that.

UR is simply the difference between a pitcher’s expected WPA and his actual WPA, prorated for 75 innings to give everything that full-season shine. Calculating the expected WPA (xWPA) is the only bitch of the bunch and that is where I’d welcome input.

Here’s how I figured xWPA: First I calculated the average LI for a relief pitcher. (I came up with 1.11). Then I figured the average ratio of BRAA to WPA (8.02). xWPA is then figured by taking actual BRAA times the average LI (1.11) and dividing by the average ratio of BRAA to WPA (8.02). (Remember, all of this has been prorated to 75 innings.)

So for Justin Speier, his BRAA is 9.32 in 11.1 innings for a 61.68 BRAA75 _ a great pace. His xWPA is 61.68 times 1.11 divided by 8.02, or 8.51. His WPA, prorated to 75 innings, is 6.49. The difference (WPA75 minus eWPA75) is -2.03. Speier has been underutilized and his 1.02 LI reflects that. He’s thrown plenty of innings — he’s in the top 15 in baseball in relief innings — but too many of those frames have been squandered in low-leverage spots. (That’s assuming his rate of BRAA remains steady which is another issue altogether. For the time being, this is strictly a backwards-looking stat. At this point in the season, using some kind of projected BRAA would certainly be preferable.)

UR is WPA minus xWPA. To calculate team UR, I weighted each pitcher’s UR for the number of innings he has pitched, figured the average team UR per inning and took it times 500 to suggest a full-season total.

The output of all this nonsense made intuitive sense up and down the line so I was satisfied with the method, though my lack of a statistical background leaves me with a huge blind spot for methodological pitfalls.

Let’s look at the two teams on the extreme ends of the results. I put all the results on this page. I’ll try to update it periodically as the season progresses. Next step in all of this: expressing UR in terms of wins added and integrating it with my manager-rating system that I’m tweaking for an upcoming revival.

One final thing I want to throw out there is a reminder of my comment in the article about removing closers. I guess some managers are more skilled than others when it comes to extracting maximum leverage from their closers but, by and large, I think leaving them in skews the results. Teams with efficient closers are going to rank towards the top; vice versa for teams with struggling closers. This largely accounts for the low ranking by the Yankees — Mariano Rivera has been awful but can you really blame Joe Torre for running him out there so far? Leaving in the closers means’ that we’re not quite measuring what we want to measure here: the manager’s ability to properply leverage his bullpen. Alas, the closers are still in there for now.

The Brewers

All hail Ned Yost, the best bullpen manager in the season’s early stages. Some examples: Elmer Dessens is on pace for a -50 BRAA per 75 innings. His bad pitching suggests a xWPA per 75 IP of -6.87. But he’s on pace for a 0.38. He’s been a little lucky and, more importantly, Yost has limited him to a 0.47 average LI. Yost’s best relievers, Francisco Cordero (3.35 UR) and Derrick Turnbow (2.91), have been properly leveraged. He’s been a little lucky with Greg Aquino and Matt Wise has been slightly underutilized but the only pitcher who’s been truly overexposed has been Brian Shouse (-2.28).

The Mets

The Mets are an interesting team. We knew coming into this season that offense and fielding was going to have to carry them. The rotation looks thin and the bullpen beyond Wagner was questionable. That’s been the case — the Mets are on pace for 30 hitting wins added and 20 fielding wins added but a -10 in pitching wins added. We also know that Mets skipper Willie Randolph has a bit of a stubborn streak and if he’s assigned pitchers to specific roles then, darn it, that’s the roles they’re going to pitch in.

Only Pedro Feliciano shows as being properly leveraged in the Mets’ pen. But here’s the thing: the Mets have pretty low leverage indexes pretty much across the board. They’ve just haven’t played many of tight games and leverage indexes are low in blowouts. The only high-leverage pitcher so far has been Aaron Heilman, and that includes Billy Wagner. Heilman has a negative WPA and a positive BRAA which suggests that he’s pitched OK in low-leverage spots and melted down when the game is on the line. And, in fact, a check of Heilman’s game log shows this to be the case. He’s been nearly perfect in 5 of his 7 appearances but was charged with five runs in tight games in the other two, driving down his WPA. What’s more, in the latter game, the three runs charged to him were unearned, making his 3.18 ERA deceptive.

The neowinter has finally lifted and it’s a warm, sunshiney day in Kansas City. Now will somebody please tell the bushes and trees in my yard that it’s not autumn? Ah, yard work. I’m pretty bad at it. I just am not an outdoors person. If we lived in the suburbs, I surely would have been ejected by now. Nonetheless, with all weather-related excuses now expired, looks like I’ll have to push the mower today. The yard is bad enough that even I am embarrassed.

Royals mercifully had a day off but now are in Detroit, where they’ll face Verlander, Maroth and Bonderman. Sneaky how Leyland slips Maroth between those two young fireballers. The Royals counter with Greinke, De La Rosa and Meche, who have pitched pretty well this season. (Actually, my wins-added metric has Greinke second to King Felix.) The free-swinging Tigers aren’t a terrible matchup for De La Rosa but his bubble will burst sooner or later. The guy just doesn’t know where the ball is going from one pitch to the next. But I’m rooting for Jorge — we have the same barber.

My “Stat Guy” series returns to the KC Star in tomorrow’s editions, unless I get squeezed out because of more Chiefs retiring. I hate NFL news this time of the year. The first installment of SG this season will focus on FanGraphs.com. I was a little slow to get on board with David Appelman’s creation, but now that I am, I can’t believe I ever watched baseball without it. I’ll link to the column tomorrow and post a Q&A with David that we did this weekend via the miracle of e-mail.

Finally, I want to link to this entry in Joe Posnanski’s blog. In particular, I want to direct you to his comments about Statis-Pro baseball. Brian and I were Statis-Pro fanatics, especially the basketball version. We played the baseball version as well. I remember the game as being obviously flawed (no real platoon splits, no playing time limits though I probably artificially introduced some because I’ve always been like this) but very fun and quick to play. The basketball version, which we modified to suit our tastes, is still produced by a guy here in Missouri, Springfield I believe. Just go to E-Bay and search on Statis-Pro. He has every ABA & NBA season ever played for sale.

Alas, Statis-Pro, which was produced by the Avalon Hill Game Company, went by way of the T-Rex when personal computers began their swift assimilation of the American culture. Unlike Strat-O-Matic, who made the necessary adaptations to survive, Avalon Hill was unable to produce computer versions of their sports games and they died out. (Other sports games they made included Paydirt, Statis-Pro Football and a college version of Paydirt that I can’t remember the title of.) But to this day, I am still running the same basketball league that I created for Statis-Pro Basketball in the early 1980s. (I use Strat-O-Matic these days.)

Listening to the Royals and Orioles right now. KC has actually put up three runs through four innings — with a lot of help from the Orioles. It’s raining at Camden Yards and the tarp handlers are standing by on high alert. A washout would seem strangely appropriate as this lousy roadtrip drones on.

I projected the Royals to score 767 runs (or 96.7 percent of the league average) this season. Through Friday, they were on pace to score 471 runs (or 67.0 percent of league average). Not good. The bats should get better but meanwhile several decent pitching performances have been squandered and no matter how many positive signs you see around the ballclub these days, KC is 3-8 — a 44-win pace.

Obviously offense ebbs and flows through the course of a season. Since we know the Royals’ roster profiles out better than this, then it’s a pretty sure bet that they’ll get going sometime soon. Plus the Royals have faced what seems like an inordinate number of top-flight pitchers in the first two weeks. When you’re not swinging the bats well anyway, that sure doesn’t help.

As the hitting woes perpetuate, the collective approach of KC’s batsmen has gone into the proverbial toilet. The Royals have walked in seven percent of their plate appearances which ranks 13th in the AL. They’ve struck out 22 percent of the time, which is the worst rate in all of baseball. When you’re striking out more than three times the rate at which you’re drawing walks, well, it makes you certain that Angel Berroa must still be in the lineup.

Check out the following numbers:

KEY: XR600 — extrapolated runs per 600 plate appearances

The chart looks at strike zone indicators and overall production. So far, only Reggie Sanders and John Buck, who aren’t full-time players, are really outperforming expectation. [ INTERLUDE: Do the Royals even have any full-time players with the way Buddy Bell has been rotating his roster willy-nilly this season? Another post... ]

David DeJesus, Ross Gload, Esteban German and Tony Pena are right on target in both strike-zone categories and overall production. (OK, DeJesus is a little ahead of pace — more on that in a second.) But seven regulars are way off projections in both stike-zone command and production. Three of them — Ryan Shealy, Alex Gordon and Emil Brown — have contributed virtually nothing. Hopefully, most of this group will come around but if I’m Royals hitting coach Mike Barnett, I’m preaching patience.

Unfortunately, that would clash with Buddy Bell’s sentiments on this subject. Buddy thinks the hitters are too tentative. To me, the righthanded hitters who flailed away at Erik Bedard’s curveballs last night weren’t suffering from apprehension. They were clearly swinging at one non-strike out of another. This is not the way to snap out of a slump.

Meanwhile, the team’s isolated power number of .139 is actually not bad — 13th in the major leagues and better than elite AL teams such as the Yankees, Red Sox and Tigers. David DeJesus’ isolated power right now is .267. He was projected at .135. His strike-zone indicators are right on the money. DeJesus is in his age-27 season and, personally, I always felt like he would have a Johnny Damon-like power spike in his career. So his performance may be for real and he could be headed for a big season.

Hopefully this funk will end soon. Like before they’re like 4-18 or something. Not many of us expect the team to contend this season but it would be nice for once if the Royals weren’t irretrievably buried in the AL Central cellar by the end of April.

Added later

After a 6-4 loss, the Royals fall to 3-9. The offense was cold again Saturday. The four runs is actually an improvement but KC had just two RBI, a sure indication that the opponent was complicit in the run scoring. And the strike-zone issues were worse than ever: 13 strikeouts; 1 walk. Ugh.

Even so, the Royals lost 6-4 thanks to a sixth-inning grand slame by Baltimore’s Chris Gomez off of Buddy’s favorite bullpen stopper, Joel Peralta. Bell’s deployment of his bullpen has bothered me — and many others — a great deal this season. He really has no clue how to run a pitching staff. I’ve got some data to demonstrate this but I’m holding it back for a KC Star piece. I want to wait until the Royals are back in town, though, because I want to throw some of the numbers at Buddy and see what sticks.

Scoring in baseball is way down so far this season. Much of the nation has been experiencing well-below-normal temperatures for most of the season’s opening month. Here in Kansas City, we’ve been freezing our keisters off since the beautiful weather on Opening Day and the Royals’ pitching staff has a 3.96 ERA which, if maintained, would be the team’s best since 1992. Yet, that ERA ranks only seventh in the American League. Last night, there were 33 total runs scored in six games.

Studies have shown that temperature does have an impact on run-scoring levels. (I couldn’t find a specific one to cite. If anybody knows of one, drop me a line.) So it’s reasonable to believe that the cold weather has been the primary drag on scoring. At the same time, the lowest home ERAs in baseball right now are owned by warm weather teams: the Angels, Dodgers and Athletics. The Reds and Diamondbacks just combined for 19 total runs in a three-game series in Phoenix.

So what’s going on? Beats me. There may be non-weather factors keeping run totals down, such as the newly-enforced standards for storing baseballs in humidors similar to the ones used at Coors Field. Because of that reason and that reason only, it wouldn’t surprise me if offense remains a little down even after the temperatures go up. But it wouldn’t surprise me if scoring goes right back to last year’s level. There’s just no way to know.

When I finalized my projected team standings, I used run environments of 793 runs for AL teams and 771 runs for NL teams. These were really just shots in the dark. There is no real way to anticipate flucuations run environments because, in a literal sense, you can’t predict the weather. Anyway, the main thing I want to do with my projections is to establish a win expectancy for each team. I could just as easily have used DiamondMind or PECOTA for this, but compiling my own projections really helps me prepare for the season. Spending time trying to anticipate run environments doesn’t concern me because I’m not promoting my individual projections for fantasy leaguers or anything like that. I just want to predict how many wins each team is going to have because, well, it’s fun.

Scoring may well return to recent norms — there is no way to know at this point. But even if it does, the severity of the scoring dip during the last two weeks probably means an overall decline in offense for the season. Here are the per month averages in scoring for the last five seasons, expressed as a percentage of the full season average. (Used ESPN splits to compile these; I can’t vouch for their exactitude.)

APR: 100.3%
MAY: 98.8%
JUN: 100.8%
JUL: 101.8%
AUG: 100.5%
SEP: 97.9%
TOT: 100.0%

Through Thursday, the average AL team is on pace to score 712 runs, which would mark an 11 percent drop from last season. For the NL, it’s 630 runs for a decline of 18 percent. Let’s assume the weather turns better today and scoring returns to last season’s levels for the remainder of the season. If that were to happen, then the AL average would be 799 runs and the NL average would be 763 runs. Barely a blip, nothing outside the range of random fluctuation, but a decline nonetheless.

The real moral to this story is that it’s way too early to make any judgments concerning scoring trends. We knew that already but just keep this in mind when the coming avalanche of mainstream conspiracy theory hits the newstands and the Web.

Meanwhile, I really dig these 1968esque numbers. The average big-league team has a 3.76 ERA this season. Last season, it was 4.53. The last full-season ERA this low was 1992 — the year before the current offensive explosion kicked in. The 1968 composite ERA was 2.98 so that’s a whole other story. But this level of scoring is more reflective of the game most of us grew up with.

Sort of on the topic of changing run environments, I wrote a piece on the evolution of pitching for The Star’s baseball section. Give it a read if you get a chance. My original draft was almost exactly twice as long as what ran in the paper, so I’ll probably post that on a page here one of these days. I just can’t master that brevity trait that is essential to newspaper writers. I’m more in the Marcel Proust vein in that regard and I’m often just as self-indulgent.

K-Willis back in the NBA

Like Brian, I often long for the 1980s heyday of NBA basketball so it warmed my heart to read that 44-year-old Kevin Willis has signed on with the Dallas Mavericks for the rest of the season.

Willis was a rookie in 1984-85, a member of the greatest rookie class in NBA history. They didn’t have a Second Team All-Rookie squad in those days, but if they did, Willis probably would have made it. The All-Rookie team from that season: Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, Sam Bowie, Charles Barkley and Sam Perkins. Other rookies besides Willis who didn’t make it included John Stockton, Otis Thorpe, Alvin Robertson and Jerome Kersey. And, oh yeah, Ken “The Animal” Bannister (right) didn’t make it — the kingpin of the ugliest team in NBA annals: the 1984-85 Knicks.

You go, Kevin.

Blacked out

No not my Thursday night out on the town — though I did push my limits — but MLB.com-variety blackouts. Here in Kansas City, they only black out the Royals. No big deal because the games are all on television locally. But just for kicks, I typed in the zip code of Red Oak, Iowa, where I grew up, to see what I’d be missing out on there. Red Oak is only three hours north of Kansas City. I was stunned: the Royals, Cardinals, Cubs, White Sox, Twins and Brewers would all be unavailable. That’s absurd. Now I understand why there is so much complaining about this subject.

Twins Park

When the Twins released renderings of their new downtown ballpark, I couldn’t help but think again of what could have been last year in Kansas City. That ship has sailed here in Cowtown but congratulations to the good people in Minneapolis-Saint Paul for getting it right.

Some of you might have caught my Opening Day blog that I did live during the Royals game. For anyone interested in reading it, I created a page with all the entries on it then deleted them from the main part of the blog because of the clutter factor. I’ll leave it up there for posterity, especially since things went so well.