The Offensive Philosophy of the Royals

            There are two major aspects of winning a baseball game: scoring runs and preventing runs.  There are obviously many different components of each of these aspects, but everything in baseball comes down to one of these two things.  Given that the Royals pitchers are doing their share of run prevention so far, I am going to write about scoring runs.  However, since the season is only 17 games in, I am going to write about the Royals run scoring capabilities since 2002, giving me a much larger sample to analyze such that conclusions may be more meaningful.

            In this analysis, I will be looking at some of the components of scoring runs, but certainly not all.  These are ones that jumped out at me whilst perusing FanGraphs.

What's Wrong with Mike Moustakas?

           As Dayton Moore’s Process matures, the Royals need their young players to develop into stars, or at least above average players, in order to make the playoffs.  Mike Moustakas, one of the most prominent alumni of the Best Farm System in the History of the Universe and Everything, is one of the young players who MUST improve for the Royals to have a shot.  There’s just one problem with that so far.  Over 1,000 major league plate appearances, Mike Moustakas’ offense has been terrible.  I’m going to show you some career numbers to back up that statement while comparing them to the league average numbers for third basemen in 2012.  Keep in mind that league averages fluctuate from year-to-year, so the comparisons might be slightly different if I compared his career numbers to all third basemen in 2011.

Evaluating the New-Look Starting Rotation

             In 2012, after 10 games, I looked at how the starting pitching was doing using various statistics.  In 2013, after 10 games, I'm going to do the same thing, since that will give an interesting comparison to how the starting rotation has improved since last year.  Keep in mind that the small sample size rule applies here, and one game can change statistics drastically.  Like Mendoza's start last night.

Thoughts on Ervin Santana

            In their quest to improve the starting rotation, the Royals traded for Ervin Santana and his $13 million contract.  The Royals gave up Brandon Sisk, a AAA reliever who did not factor into the Royals’ plans.  In addition, the Royals are on the hook for $12 million of his contract.  Santana was arguably the worst starting pitcher in baseball last year*, and reportedly the Angels were going to cut him if they couldn’t swing a trade.  In their desperation, the Royals obliged the Angels.  If you couldn’t tell, I’m not a big fan of this trade.  Santana likely would have gotten less on the open market, but Dayton Moore feels the need to make moves early in the offseason period before the market develops.  Regardless, the move was made and Santana will pitch.

*And Francoeur was arguably the worst position player in baseball last year.  The new market inefficiency; collect them all!

Predicting Home Runs

            So after a very long hiatus due to graduate school (which is almost over!), I have come back to this blog.  The fact that Opening Day has just passed has really renewed my interest in statistical analysis of baseball, so I hope not to have another 7 month layoff between posts.

Also, my NCAA brackets aren’t doing well, so there’s less interest in that…