Friday Notes

Friday Notes

The season is less than a week old (and only two games), and already we’ve seen more Royals coverage than I believe the team received from 1998-2012. Some of the coverage hasn’t exactly been kind or grounded in fact, but there’s certainly been coverage. I guess there’s no such thing as bad publicity, right? It’ll be nice to get to regular baseball scheduling here starting tonight. As I mentioned the other day, the Royals play 87 games over 93 days starting tonight, so the real grind of the season begins now, which I think is an area where the Royals excel.

  • There was a lot of consternation about Joakim Soria and his role, especially following his terrible performance on Opening Day against the Mets. He couldn’t find the strike zone, gave up three runs and couldn’t even make it out of the inning. To add fuel to the fire, he had to be bailed out by Luke Hochevar, who many feel is more deserving of the eighth inning role than Soria anyway. First off, I would have positioned the relievers as Soria in the seventh, Kelvin Herrera in the eighth and Wade Davis, of course, pitching the ninth. That would leave Danny Duffy and Hochevar to be firemen. I really love what those two bring from a stuff perspective and as a lefty and a righty, it allows for Ned Yost to play matchups better. Anyway, in spite of my belief that I’d rather see Soria in the seventh, I find it incredibly shortsighted to want to push a guy out of a role because of one game. I saw a little bit of wondering what Soria had ever done in his career to deserve that role. He’s not the same guy that he was in his prime with the Royals, but the guy has a 2.99 ERA, 3.18 FIP and has struck out more than a batter per inning while walking just 2.6 per nine innings over 135.2 innings over the last three years. He’s allowed just 111 hits in that time. No, I don’t think he’s the second best reliever in the Royals bullpen, but he’s more than good enough to pitch the eighth, no matter what he did on Sunday.
  • It’s only two games, so no real conclusions can be drawn to, well, anything, but it’s been great to see what the two starting pitchers have done so far. They’ve given up just two runs in 11 innings and turned the game over to the vaunted Royals bullpen with an opportunity to win both games. I’m not expecting a 1.64 ERA from Royals starters, but what we’ve seen the first two games tells me that this rotation might have a good understanding of what they need to do in order to win. And that means they don’t have to go eight innings. Sure, it would be nice, but they don’t have to do it. There’s a lot of concern about the starting rotation from many, and a lot of that stems from spring training struggles, but I maintain that this rotation can be above average and give the Royals more than a lot of people expect. The first two games don’t corroborate that belief, obviously, but I do like what I’ve seen.
  • With Jarrod Dyson about set to go on a short rehab assignment, the clock is ticking for Reymond Fuentes to get going. It’s great for the Royals that Dyson doesn’t appear likely to miss much time, but it’s kind of too bad for Fuentes. He doesn’t get much of an opportunity to show something to the Royals while he’s getting an opportunity to play. So far, he hasn’t done much offensively, but he has reached first base on a strikeout and made an outstanding play to bail out Lorenzo Cain on Tuesday, and stuff like that sits really well with the Royals front office. It’s just two games of no hits for him, so that’s not a worry by any stretch, but it wouldn’t hurt for him to get some more playing time even when Dyson returns if he would get a few hits here and there. I really think Fuentes is more of a fourth outfielder, but I do think he can play up to being a third outfielder on a first division club. He doesn’t have much time left to prove that for now, but I think he’ll get his chance at some point, if not this year.
  • I’d love for the Royals to have a truly great weekend to sort of demoralize the Twins this weekend. The Twins were the upstart team in the AL Central last season and were the last team other than the Royals to lead the division. That was in early June, sure, but it still counts. They were swept by the Orioles, so the Royals winning two of three (or even sweeping) would really put the Twins in quite a hole in the division. It’s not that they can’t get out of it because they obviously can. Even if they do get swept, there will still be 156 games to go, but there’s a mental aspect to starting a season like that, and I would really not mind it one bit if the Royals made the Twins question everything this weekend.
  • Interesting Stats of the Week: Two things caught my eye this week. I put them both on Twitter, but I figured I’d share them here as well. The first is that Alex Gordon grounded into a double play on Opening Night, and as I was watching the game, I started to think that I don’t remember Gordon doing that very often last season. So, sure enough, I looked it up and he grounded into two double plays all of last season. He grounded into 11 in 2014, though. Of course, he also grounded into just four in 2013. The other one is that the Royals in 2015 were 0-10 with four runs scored in games in which they didn’t record a single extra base hit. On Opening Night, they didn’t get an extra base hit. Not only did they win the game, but they scored four runs. Weird.
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6 comments on “Friday Notes”

Anita Parsa

I think Fuentes will show his stuff offensively this weekend against the Twins :)

Consider that prior to Opening Night, Fuentes had 33 big league at bats, all in 2013.

Then he comes up with the Royals and faces Matt Harvey and Noah Syndergaard in his first six plate appearances with the Royals. They were hitting Harvey pretty well, but by all accounts Syndergaard was incredible.

Defensively, that bailout of the ball Cain lost in the sun was even more remarkable considering that they hadn’t played next to one another very many times. I’d put the odds that Rios makes that play near zero even at the end of 2015 when they’d played next to each other for hundreds of innings. (No disrespect to the huge impact Rios had with timely post-season hitting; he’s #ForeverRoyal and totally earned his ring. But a defensive star he was not.)

David Lesky

I’m a fan of Fuentes. I was just kind of pointing out the unfortunate reality that he doesn’t have much time to make an impact on the coaching staff before Dyson returns. I agree that he has a much better shot at a big series against Twins pitching than anyone would against the Mets staff.

Anita Parsa

Yeah, I didn’t mean to make it sound like you were down on Fuentes. I just felt bad for the guy at Tuesday’s game because people around me were getting down on him and I thought it would suck to come up like that and immediately face Harvey and Syndergaard!

Anita Parsa

Yay! Perfect time for Fuentes to get his first hit :)

Scott Young

Your new website does not report the daily performance of the Royals ‘ minor league affiliates? Does anyone?

David Lesky

Diamonds in the Rough will return. We’re unfortunately getting a late start, but it will be back in short order.

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