In recent days, several moves have been made in Royals camp.  I have to be honest, it has been quite a reality check for me.  Baseball analysts everywhere are knighting the Royals as the next Cinderalla, the next Rays, the "surprise" of 2009, etc.  While I happen to think all of this hype is great, I'm not so sure Dayton Moore and Trey Hillman believe in their own team.  I mean, how the hell could they actually think we were even a possible contender if they are putting Sidney Ponson on the mound opening day versus the Yankees!?  

I have openly admitted on this site that I am no expert when it comes to stats, but I have been comparing Sid and HoRam to Banny and Hooch over the last couple of days and I just do not see what the Royals' "experts" see in these two washed up losers (HoRam and Sid).

The only explanation that makes any sense is that Dayton and Trey really do not see us as a contender this year and they are playing for 2010 and beyond.  I wish we at RR could get an inside perspective because this just blows me away.

Note:  I still think the Royals are a possible contender, but another fan in a recent thread made the point that divisions are often won and lost by a single game.  This means if you really want to contend, you have to put together the best team you can with the talent you have EVERYDAY.  I don't believe that the Royals FO has done this and that is why I am disappointed.  I expected to see Banny and Hooch well before the All-Star break, but if the Royals are trying to crawl out of the cellar at that point, rest assured it will be too little too late.

There has been other activity besides the tail-end of the rotation, so perhaps there is something to mark as positive.  Let's run down the last couple of days and let it settle for a moment. 

• Hochevar optioned to AAA
• Ponson named #4 starter, thus, home opener starter vs. Yanks
• Ramirez named #5 starter
• Bannister optioned to AAA
• Gload traded to Florida
• Peralta released

The other day, I was enjoying a soup and sandwich with a good friend at my favorite local diner.  As I started my meal, a gentleman with no apparent common courtesy let out a massive muculicious cough.  I looked over in disgust to see if he'd hacked a black lung into his food, but I couldn't quite see because the curtain partition atop the dividing wall mostly blocked my view.  I saw that it was an old man and quickly lost interest and reverted my attention to my soup.  A few minutes later, I looked over and the man was gone.  I stood up to investigate because his disappearance was very stealth.  I soon realized that there was no table there, no chair, no person and no black lung.  On the other side of the dividing wall was an aisle-way.  I asked my friend if he'd seen the man who was just sitting there.  He said no.  I froze.  For the first time in my life, I felt like I was crazy.  A million questions about reality and all things philosophical fluttered through my perplexed little mind.  I was dazed.  Then, just before I got up and checked myself into a psych ward, my friend said, "You mean that guy?"  I turned my head to see an old man in a wheelchair swiftly rolling by.  That was just the comic relief I needed, because I would have questioned my mental stability for the rest of my life.  The laughing, however, ceased when I told my friend I was relieved to know I wasn't crazy because he responded with: "You are crazy, you're a Royals fan."

Sometimes I think being a Royals fan is a mental disorder.  It's been said that insanity is defined as repeating the same task over and over, expecting different results.  If that doesn't define you as a Royals fan, then you aren't a Royals fan.  Check your heart.  Sometimes I wish baseball fans of other teams could have a similar experience to my restaurant experience today, and experience this mental disorder.  Let's be honest, they are an exceedingly poor team with little chance of winning a World Series in the near future.  In fact, Fangraphs has Kansas City as the 4th least likely team to win a World Series title in the future.  Evidently, the Royals are so uninteresting to the outside world that they didn't even get their own write-up.  Even with that said, I find myself at Kauffman Stadium every year.  Insane.

I think I'll be okay, though.  Looking into the future (which you can do when you are bat-shit crazy), I will be 65 years old and senile with more imaginary friends than John Nash when the Royals win their next World Series.  Then I will finally be able to climb back onto my damn rocker.

I just read a post here on Royals Review surrounding a certain sabermetric that actually gave me a headache.  This is a huge statement to that article because I only get headaches about once every three months and of those headaches, one rarely last more than ten minutes; which means that in a given year I only have a headache for a total of no more than 40 minutes (not including days in which I consumed more than 2.5 glasses of wine the previous night) and that's twice as long as it took me to read the article and the posts that followed... I think it finally went away.

I'll be honest, I am actually very fascinated with the sabermetrics that get whittled and whittled into fine-pointed weapons of projection, but let us not forget that those weapons still have to fly through the ever-unpredictable sky of baseball's chaos theory. Baseball is a game of mystique and no matter what happens, we all know that anything can happen.

I have been a devout Royals fan for years and I am beginning to grow out of my childhood fascination and into a more mature perspective of the game, so sabermetrics is something that is slowly grabbing my attention. Although, I am not the same mathematics whiz I was in high school trigonometry, so that could serve as a natural counter-balance to the interest. The fact is, the older I get (and the more fantasy baseball I play), the more important numbers are to me as it relates to this, the greatest game on earth.

That said, I am still a dummy when it comes to baseball (I just learned what OPS is, so I’m sure as hell not going to latch onto the idea of BABIP anytime soon), so despite my recent interest in “the numbers” I thought it would be appropriate to digress a bit. Sabermetrics have become more like crack around the Royals Review than actual blog-worthy material, so sit back and enjoy the thoughts of what this year might hold for Kansas City from an honest, optimistic dummy.

1) Luke Hochevar: I think Luke breaks out this year and becomes a premier major league pitcher.

2) Billy Butler and Alex Gordon: I actually think that bringing in Kevin Seitzer as the hitting coach will bring some consistency to the young bats on this team and you will see both of these guys feeding off of one another’s energy and inch closer to, if not achieve, break-out seasons.

3) Jose Guillen: Jose will have an average to slightly above average season and will be healthy 90 percent of the time (I know, this one’s a stretch)

4) Kyle Farnsworth: Farnsy will kill a man with a wild 99 mph pitch to the skull and set an all-time personal record for lowest ERA using only his roid-rage powered mean-streak mojo.

5) Zack Greinke: Greinke will make a case for the Cy Young award.

6) TJP and Gload: I think these guys are great people, but not great baseball players. They will not be with the team (fingers crossed on this one).

7) Mike Jacobs: ???

8) Offensively: The Royals will make incredible strides in runs scored this year. I predict that they crack the top 8, maybe top 7 in the AL for runs scored.

9) Defensively: Not good. I told you I was being honest.

10) Overall: I predict they will finish second in the AL Central with 87 wins… or third with 86.

That’s all I have. Enjoy the game.