Sam Mellinger

The Kansas City Star

You know how I know criticism of the Royals feeds on itself? How I know that the Royals have been so bad for so long, with so many wild (if by now outdated) stories of cheapness that just about anything seems fair and nothing seems over the top?

Because I’m actually hearing people say the Royals didn’t do an MRI on Danny Duffy a few weeks ago because they wanted to save the money.

The Royals arrived at this place honestly, of course, wedging a spot next to the Pirates and Lions and the pre-Chris Paul Clippers as one of the worst franchises in sports. The only way they can really stop the criticism is to stop what’s seemed like an endless streak of losing, specifically, to be a success at Kauffman Stadium instead of in the pages of Baseball America.

Like I’ve said a million times, they’re on the right track. But that’s a much different thing than actually doing it.

Also: Happy Birthday to George Brett, Emmitt Smith, John Smoltz, Justin Morneau, Jamie Lynn-Sigler, Josh Beckett, Ray Lewis, and even your favorite floppy-haired asshat.

Yeah, that’s right. I just wished myself a happy birthday on my own blog. Don’t judge me.

Anyway, as you can imagine, a lot of the talk today is about Danny Duffy’s upcoming Tommy John surgery and what it means for the Royals. Let’s get to it:

@bri_goodman How many more TJ surgeries until the #Royals’ punchcard fills up and they get a free one? #TwitterTuesday

OK, that’s not bad.

@Egordz In the end Tommy John was likely inevitable does it really matter about no first MRI? #Croyals

Probably not. I mentioned on Twitter last night that in a quick conversation an expert in this field with no affiliation to the Royals said the team followed accepted protocol, and one of the responses I heard was that the Royals aren’t in a position to just follow accepted protocol.

It’s a fair point in the macro, but not with this. You’re not going to experiment with perhaps your most prized commodity, and for a lot of different reasons — some financial, some image, some common sense.

Dayton Moore is one of a few general managers and a handful of other lifelong baseball people who I’ve heard say that keeping pitchers healthy is the biggest remaining place for teams to gain a big competitive advantage.

The Royals and the other 29 teams are trying new things all the time, from training to rest to mechanics, but obviously nobody’s come close to mastering it.

@mitchopkins I freaked out after hearing this & thought someone should be fired. I’ve since calmed down, look forward to hearing your opinion.

I think this is the reaction of a lot of people. Not the part about looking forward to MY opinion, of course, but the part about reacting with immediate anger before calming down and wanting to know what they hell to think.

Like I said in the column, this is an occupational hazard. And if the Royals are morons for letting Duffy get to this point, then the Yankees are morons for trading for Michael Pineda just before he tore his labrum and the Red Sox are morons for giving enormous contracts to Tommy John patients John Lackey and Daisuke Matsuzaka and, really, every team in baseball is full of morons because they’ve all had important pitchers with major injuries.

Now, I’m not saying this is all nature and no nurture. We’ve seen Dusty Baker, for instance. And even locally, Trey Hillman not having the fortitude to save his $55 million pitcher from himself likely (in my mind, at least) cost the Royals a big portion of that investment.

It’s just that there’s not a villain in every story.

@fancypantsbeer At what point do you bench or send Hosmer down? #twittertuesday

This is, to me, the most puzzling part of this Royals season and right off the top I might mention I’m probably more confident in Hosmer than most of you. I just see a wildly talented young man with a lot of confidence, never looking overmatched, and running into a ridiculous amount of bad luck.

He’s not hitting as many line drives as he should — or as many as he did last year — but his walks are up and his strikeouts are down and the rest of the advanced metrics are vaguely where they should be.

I did this on the blog a few weeks ago, but let’s just focus on his absurdly low batting average on balls in play, a strong indication that he’s running into an awful string of luck.

If you just give him the league average on this — and keep in mind we’re only giving him singles for the extra hits — his numbers go from a .174 average with .243 on-base and .326 slugging percentages to .287/.347/.439. That’s roughly what Nick Markakis and Buster Posey are hitting.

All that said, playing this bad-luck game isn’t going to stand forever.

@LaMar_Matt It doesn’t make any sense to me why the Royals aren’t using Crow in a starter row…why aren’t they doing something about it?

Only explanation I see is that the Royals don’t think Crow can do it. They sure didn’t let his rotation experiment last long in spring training, and I haven’t heard any rumblings of stretching him out even as the rotation initially just blew and now is blowing up.

I mentioned this on Twitter last night, but if there’s a reliever converted to a starter this season, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s Kelvin Herrera.

@SorryRoyalsFan It’s Sunday afternoon and you’re hungover. You get to watch a documentary about one former Royal from 2002-2009. Who ya got?

Emil Brown is the only correct answer, I think, especially if Karen Kornacki would come on camera. This is a man who not only (accidentally) shot a local newswoman in the eye with an air gun, but claimed to be faster than Carl Crawford, a better outfielder than Roberto Clemente, and — true story — spent five minutes before a spring training game once trying to convince me he wouldn’t want to date Beyonce.

“I’m a good-looking dude, doing my thing,” he said.

I was unconvinced.

@ChainsawMartin What is your take on Joel Goldberg’s mortgage commercials? I’ve heard rumors that Hollywood is knocking on his door.

I hope they paid him well.

@a_dorsey03 Can you please help me get the #P90REX drinking game going? Every time he mentions emotions or body language… #TwitterTuesday

Look, this is a mi-casa-es-su-casa situation. If you come up with funny rules, this space is all yours.

@brianhodgekc does david glass attend many royals games? Does he have a house in kc? Always wondered if he is more involved than we think

I’ve been saying this for years. He goes to far more games than most people think. It’s probably fewer now than it used to be, when he was younger, but my wild guess is 50 or 60 home games and that he watches pretty much every pitch of every other game at home. Yes, he has a place here, though his “house” is still in Arkansas.

Ewing Kauffman casts a long shadow in this town, especially with the Royals, but these are very different men in the sense that Glass is never going to be the guy in the blue blazer leaning out the owner’s box window and waving at fans. He’s just a very private guy, something that’s undoubtedly amplified by what the reaction might be if he did lean out the window to wave at fans.

@PhilGarver In OKC for the Lakers game. Artest is the most hated man in OKC. Who is the most hated man in KC?

Honestly, it’s probably Glass, though I’m willing to be convinced on someone else. By now, most of the hate toward Glass is either unfair or outdated, or both, something we’ve gotten into in the paper and this blog but just like the criticisms on the organization as a whole, the only way to really change any of this is for the Royals to finally win — and man that’s a poorly constructed sentence.

Anyway, enough Royals.

@BenC1357 chiefs wr corp is avg at best w/o Bowe. Your prediction on how the Bowe situation plays out this year and long term?

Wrote about Bowe’s situation in Sunday’s column, and I think the drama is going to hang for a while.

My prediction is that he’ll play this season under the franchise tag and then get a long-term deal. This is something of a compromise between a player who doesn’t have another option and a team that doesn’t have a better option.

I understand that some of you disagree with my point about Bowe’s knucklehead reputation being stale, but if you’re saying you can’t trust the guy now you’re saying that the last two years of a man’s life mean nothing compared to what he did at 23 or 24. I just don’t buy that.

Maybe this has all been some sort of elaborate hoax he’s pulled, a two-year one-man play to convince the Chiefs and everyone else that the D-Bowe “single biggest dumbass in the NFL” is dead and that as soon as the ink is dry on a big guaranteed contract he’ll be back to saying he wants to reinvent himself like Madonna.

I just don’t buy it.

I never thought Dwayne was a bad guy, only an immature one, and believing a man can’t mature from the time he leaves college to the time he’s 27 years old is somewhere between cynical and ridiculous.

And here’s the other part of this that the Chiefs must keep in mind: they don’t have another path.

You think they can win this division with Jon Baldwin as their No. 1 receiver? You think that’s going to help Matt Cassel and Jamaal Charles?

Bowe is the Chiefs’ best chance, and look around the league. Grading on the NFL wide receiver scale, Bowe is probably in the upper half of behavior history.

All that said…

@BAP_KC What’s the comedic potential of D-Bowe being on twitter?

Enormous.

?@thillsman Still awaiting your thoughts on Dexter’s jams. Also, when is Starling called up? Exact date, please.

Dexter’s jams are both better than anything I could ever do and also pretty bad if he’s got eyes on going big. I am absolutely certain, however, that Dexter’s music can up both the quality and quantity of his, um, companionship if he so desires.

And: May 12, 2014.

@jimmypeddicord Sam when was the last time KC had a favorite son?

We’re talking people from here and doing good here in the sports world, so I think David Cone is your best bet. Starling has a chance, obviously, to join him in a very special way. I’ve always wondered, too, what it would be like if Josh Freeman played for the Chiefs. I’m pretty sure there’d be a string of successful car washes around town.

@bringonthe_cats what are you doing to celebrate American Craft Beer Week? #twittertuesday #ACBW

Kicked it off last night with the ol’ standby, Boulevard Pale Ale. Also have some Green Flash Imperial IPA and Tank 7 in the fridge, and am always up for suggestions.

@ksubmac thoughts on #FloridaState coming to the #Big12? Do travel expenses even matter anymore?

Not only no, but hell no. And, actually, not only hell no, but they probably never mattered. If the Big 12 can get Florida State, it’d be stupid not to do it. You open up a fertile recruiting state, bring in a legitimate national brand, and, perhaps most importantly, send an overdue message that you can be the hunter instead of the hunted.

No disrespect to West Virginia or TCU, but those are the equivalent of fish in a barrel. Florida State would be more like Ned Yost’s deer, Wil Myers.

@MikeZooLoo #twittertuesday Hometown boy #zipzabel, record that will NEVER be broken: http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Zip_Zabel Wonder what his pitch count was?

If that happened today, Twitter would break and the local columnist would have an absolute field day.

@clung99 went to the peanut, life wasn’t changed. Try chorizo queso at el patron. Also odds gmdm ever cuts frenchy even if his obp -300 ?

Sorry to hear that, but no offense, I’d humbly suggest you’re living your life wrong.

And c’mon, buddy. Don’t come at me with chorizo queso at Patron like it’s something I haven’t had many, many times.

@getnickwright On a scale of 1 to The Black Keys performing in your living room while you are handed a Z-Man, how much will you miss me?

Somewhere between Kent Babb’s Kenny Powers quotes and Todd Haley’s “I appreciate the question.”

But, speaking of Nick Wright’s favorite subject…

@JamesKLight Real question: What does loosing @getnickwright to Houston mean to the Kansas City sports talk scene?

I like Nick. Think he does a really good job with the show. I also think talk radio in Kansas City will be just fine. I’m not an expert on radio, obviously, but I think if there’s something to be taken from the progress he made it’s that there is a previously untapped audience that wasn’t targeted as much.

I heard someone say once that Nick was fishing in areas of the lake nobody else thought much about, and there’s probably some truth to that.

I also think he’s making good on the times he’s called himself a careerist, because that’s the only reason I can think of for someone to move to Houston.

@mitchopkins As a future reference, presenting yourself Tony-The-Tiger-Style to your wife as a mothers day gift is somewhat frowned upon. #TT

Noted.

@mmMOUF w/ both playoffs going on, would YOU rather have a NBA or NHL team in KC? (not that either will happen) #twittertuesday

NBA, just because I like basketball a lot more than hockey. But I’d be stoked about either, and this probably goes without saying, but that’s in both a personal and professional sense. My job would be more interesting, there’d be more to write about, and Kansas City would be a funner place.

Also, AEG doesn’t give a damn about any of that.

@kent_swanson You look like a poet in your KC Star photo, a guy at his ten year HS reunion on twitter, and your DKTM cartoon is just awesome.

Gotta keep the ladies guessing, my man.

@TheNumber65 I know you’re not a “soccer expert,” but what would you do about #SportingKC’s recent form? #TwitterTuesday

You had me at “not a soccer expert.” This is something I’m trying to get better at, because I respect the hell out of what that franchise has done in the last few years and there’s obviously a lot of interest.

That said, I do think three straight losses and dropping out of first place (even if they’ve played one fewer game than the Red Bulls means it’s time to make some judgments.

Each loss can be explained on its own, but together it’s a troubling pattern for a team that has real championship hopes and, of course, plenty of time to adjust.

@brentbeats Alright you sportswriter & Black Keys fan, a genie lamp question. Would you rather be a pro athlete or a rock star? #TT

Love this question. I think I’d take being a rock star, because you’d have more freedom. Instead of being given a schedule by the league, you can help create your own tour schedule. Instead of being told when you’re practicing by the coach, you do it after lunch, if that’s what you want.

Also, if you screw up — cuss someone out, for instance — it’s pretty much forgotten instead of leading SportsCenter. There seems to be more forgiveness for rock stars and entertainers than athletes, and I’ve never been sure exactly why that’s the case.

And you didn’t ask, but if I could choose to be an average athlete in the following leagues, here’s my order: 1. PGA (and, honestly, it’s not close), 2. NBA, 3. MLB, 4. NHL, 5. NFL.

Comments

No comments have been posted. Perhaps you'd like to be the first?

Sign in with Facebook to comment.