2 years ago my future wife and I got a dog.  After much debate we ended up naming him Stanley.  (I wanted to call him Lunchbox)  I was fine with the name, but just recently, my wife has began telling people that he is named after Stan Musial, of Cardinals fame.   Now she is from St. Louis (St. Charles actually,  Francis Howell Central High, what what!) and I have ceded her own fandom of that team, but can not stand by idly while she infects our poor dog.  While I'm waiting for my divorce to finalize (just kidding) I need to come up with an alternative namesake for our pooch.  I don't think it's fair to change his name after 2 years, he's not very smart after all, so I was hoping there were some Royals I could over-ride my wife with.

A quick check of all-time Royals comes up with a pretty sad list....

Stan Belinda 1993-1994   4.83 ERA in 76 innings

Stan Clarke  1989 15.43 ERA in 2 innings

Anyone know of any good Stans or Stanley's within the Royals organization at anytime in it's existence?   Maybe a first base coach, or a scout, heck  even a beer vendor?  I can't stand the embarrassment much longer.

It's that time of year again.  The Kansas City Clan and I will be headed up to Milwaukee to make our annual pilgrimage to the Fortress on Fourth.    Though not our first time to your fair city (our 3rd in fact) we are still far from experts and would love some insights into your town.

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Something that’s often thrown around is the term, “sample size”.  It takes most of a full season to really get a good idea what kind of player a guy is.  Being that it is football season though, how do baseball fans take to statistics in football?  Dwayne Bowe has caught 14 TDs in 12 games this season.  Is that good or does he need to play 162 games before we really know how good he is? (That’s probably a little true, if someone plays in the NFL for 10 years we probably have a pretty good idea what kind of player he is)

For fun, I’ve put together a list of your 2010 Kansas City Royals if they only played 16 games like in football.  I took their best 16 consecutive game streak for the season, individually.   I’m not sure what the standard slash line is but I used BA/OBP/SLG.

C) Jason Kendall .323/.386/.371

1) Billy Butler .413/.441/.691

2) Mike Aviles .391/.412/.609

3) Alberto Callaspo .377/.424/.475 *

SS) Yuni Betancourt .387/397/.484

OF) Scott Posednik .387/.451/.403

OF) Mitch Maier .349/.417/.488

OF) David DeJesus .415/.457/.554

DH) Jose Guillen .344/.364/.391

Looks like we got a couple of Pro Bowlers here…

Or am I just comparing apples to oranges here?

*During Alberto’s best 16 game stretch in 2010 he did not actually play for the Royals.

Living in KC, we don't get to watch many Bucks games.  This year I was happy to see that the powers that be granted us 8 nationally televised games.  Up from 2 last year.  That seemed pretty good to me, but I wondered how it stacked up to the big boys.

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So staring at the Bucks schedule the other day I noticed something.  It appears we play every single team in the East twice, both home and away.  Now this is probably common knowledge to you seasoned fans, but it came as a bit of a surprise to me.  So I looked a little more into it.

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The Bucks are 15-7 at home and 5-18 on the road.  That’s a pretty stark contrast.  I’m pretty new to the NBA but is home court advantage that strong?

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 I'll be the first to admit this is completely subjective but based mostly on their current record, I split up the teams as such;

Quality Opponents

Cavs

Magic

Hawks

Celtics

Lakers

Nuggets

Mavs

Jazz

Spurs

Trailblazers

Suns

Medium Opponents

Raptors

Bobcats

Bulls

Heat

Hornets

Thunder

Grizzlies

Rockets

Clippers

Poor Opponents

Knicks

Wizards

76ers

Pacers

Pistons

Nets

Kings

Warriors

Timberwolves

Then I established the following criteria for a quality win;

Any win over a Quality Opponent.

Any win over a Medium Opponent on the road.

For a Poor Loss;

Any loss to a Poor Opponent.

Any loss to a Medium Opponent at home.

From this I found we have 2 Quality wins:

Nuggets

@ Grizzlies

And

5 Poor Losses

@76ers

@Wizards

@Pistons

Kings

Wizards

Incidentally, if you follow the formula and assume losses to the quality opponents and wins against the poor opponents, and splitting the medium opponents, the bucks would project to a 42-40 record.  Calculate in the 2 quality wins and the 5 poor losses and we’re looking at 39-43. 

So what does the future look like?

Well February looks promising.    Of our 14 games this month we have only 2 against Quality Opponents and 5 against Medium Opponents.  And of those 5 Mediums only 2 are on the road.    So is 10-4 realistic for February?  Probably not considering we only have 5 home games this month, but with the slew of low quality opponents there’s a great opportunity to make up some games.

March also looks good.  While there are 6 Quality opponents there are only 3 Medium opponents and all three will be played in Milwaukee, combine that with 10 home games for the month and that’s plenty of chances to steal some wins.

That being said, I think the most important thing for the Bucks to do is win the games they're supposed to win.    Maybe we can steal a quality win from someone but I believe avoiding those bad losses and taking care of business against those lower quality opponents will be the key to getting us back in the hunt.

How do you do a Bucks High Five?

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So how did 5 guys from Kansas City become fans of the Milwaukee Bucks?   Being manly men we were fans of most sports but did not have a local NBA team.  We were all huge NCAA basketball fans and the NBA seemed like a natural progression of our fandom.  The Royals and the Chiefs were under-performing and we needed a spark in our sports lives.   So how does one pick a completely new team to be a fan of?

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As a Royals fan since only 2001, I didn’t know much about the ownership of the Royals.  I knew Ewing died and then a while later Glass bought them.  Reading Glass’s bio, I’ve learned some other interesting thing.

After Ewing died, the Royals were run by a board of directors who made all the financial decisions.  In 2000 they attempted to get a new owner.  It came down to Miles Prentice who bid $120 million and David Glass who bid $96 million.  Seems like an easy call, except David Glass (and his 3 kids, though I don’t know if they were there then) was on the Board of directors who chose the winning bid.   Despite the lower bid, Glass was awarded the team and the rest is history.

Here’s an interview with Miles Prentice back in 2000 when he thought he had the team won. (By Rany Jaz no less)

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=301

Seems like he would have been a slightly better owner than Glass.  At least his head was in the right spot.

To be fair, he was a minor league owner who was going to buy them with the help of other investors.  Apparently MLB had a problem with this.  I’m not sure the details, but it sounds like he got screwed over.

I would love to hear what anyone who was around then remembers or feels about the whole thing.  Or just links to more information about it.  Sounds like we got screwed on the deal but this was only after 5 minutes of research.

Long time listener, first time caller.

I'm not by any means a saber-magician (or whatever you guys are calling yourselves) but I do enjoy the site, so here is my contribution to society today.

The Royals record by day.  This was through Tuesday.  Not looking good for tonight.

Updated.  Two monday losses go to Tuesday.  April 6th and July 20th.  Both those dates were rained out and played the following Tuesdays.  This is what I get for doing my research off the magnet schedule in my cube.