Hey, we're winning!

....and Mike Jacobs homered. Off a pitcher. In the major leagues. Today, even.

Royals up 6-4 on the Rays, mid-fifth. Maybe we'll actually see Soria!!!111

St. Willie will guide us to victory!

3-3 in the 5th, Verlander and Chen still battling.

More photos » by Charlie Riedel - AP

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What? We came back and picked up a starter who didn't have a great day? Is that legal?

• Luke Hochevar wasn't good today, but wasn't terribad either. The two dingers aren't good for a sinkerballer's ERA, but Hooch got nine groundouts against four flyouts today. He also K'ed three, which he's going to need to start to do more often. While you have to wonder how much better Luke's ERA would be if the Royals fielded a real-live major league defense, less than 4 K/9 is too low to expect much success. Call it the Jeremy Sowers principle, if you want.

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The Royals lose again. Everyone does realize that when myself and others were talking about the National League not being very good, none of actually said "but the Royals are much, much better!"? Good, glad we have that cleared up. Because right now more than ever, as the Royals drop a series to the NL Central cellar-dwellers, this team really isn't very good at baseball.

• Bruce Chen made it through six-and-two-thirds, and would have had a quality start if the bullpen could've picked him up. Kyle Davies, you recall, had about negative three quality starts. I guess I should be encouraged, but it's hard to be when you're talking about a guy whose only good year came when he used voodoo, smoke and mirrors to go from journeyman to good starter in the AL East. Since then, Chen has reverted to journeyman. At least he'll always have 2005? But realistically, this was the Pirates he faced today. 
• "Journeyman" may actually have a hidden meaning "better than Kyle Davies, anyway."
• Chen was 1-for-1 with a walk. He was infinitely better than DDJ, Olivo, Teahen, and Hernandez.
• I know Trey doesn't care, but you could make a case for having neither Tony Pena Jr. or Little Luis on this team. And it'd be a pretty good one, too. We certainly don't need two utility guys who can't hit their hat size. Really, couldn't we at least give some of their PAs to someone marginally interesting such as Hulett. Oh right, he's not scrubby enough to be Willie Ballgame. Sorry, Tug.
• Speaking of which, Bloomquist and Billy Butler had two hits each. The latter had two RBI, but he is terrible because he has clearly already peaked.
• Brayan Pena had another hit in his only PA. With Olivo not going to be part of the next Royals competitive team, it's hard to see why BPJ shouldn't get more playing time. He's earned the right to fail, if he's going to fail.
• I have only one thing to say about John Bale's pitching: was Terminator: Salvation any good?
• Everyone congratulate Warden11 for correctly guessing Luis Hernandez's career SLG. It was .285 coming into this game.

 
Diamondbacks 12, Royals 5. 

• Greinke was not at his best tonight, and still struck out nine Arizonans. This should tell you something about how good Greinke is, and how bad the National League is.
• That said, I don't see why Hillman left him in for 115 pitches when he was laboring pretty badly.
• Our defense is still terrible. 
• Positives....uh....Mitch Maier was 3-for-5. Jose Guillen was 3-for-4. Mike Jacobs and Billy Butler both had two hits and a walk.
• Miguel Olivo was horrible today. 0-for-3 with two strikeouts to bring his season K:BB to 53:2. I didn't think I'd see anyone eclipse Todd Greene's 2003 in that regard. And yet, here we are. Do people still think that Buck's adequacy is worse than Olivo's brand of hopelessness?
• We let Tug Hulett into the game today. We'll probably demote him tomorrow. Not that it's incrediby relevant to this particular game, but baseball isn't much of a meritocracy when it comes to the 25th man types. Willie Bloomquist is a millionaire and Hulett is probably thrilled to be receiving a major league paycheck for once. Please let me know if you can find a difference between the two players that's worth a two-year, multimillion deal.
• Luis Hernandez pinch hit. Which is just amazing. Just go back and read up on the Camden Chat threads when Hernandez was the starting SS for the O's last year. Fun stuff.
• Luis Hernandez had a hit and an RBI. He probably DOES work the count better than Olivo! 
• We're now 8-6 in games that the Cy Young frontrunner has pitched. 

Well, that was fun for a change. Whereas last start for Meche was a good-result shaky-peripherals outing, The Epic was absolutely brilliant tonight. With 11 strikeouts in seven innings against only four hits and three walks, Meche made it easy on a Royals offense that hasn't been able to hit its way out of a paper bag lately. Except wait - the offense actually showed up tonight. Alberto Callaspo had the biggest night, going 4-for-4 with a Grand Slam. JoGui added a two-run home run as well. Carl Pavano was stupid enough to throw a pitch right down the middle as Miguel Olivo was closing his eyes and swinging really hard, and it turned out to be a home run too. DDJ, returned to the leadoff spot against a righty, had two hits. Teahen had a hit and a walk. Tony Pena Jr. somehow got a hit. Well hell, everyone who started got a hit except for Brayan "Heroic Sacrifice Fly" Pena. Even Luis Hernandez, who came in for Teahen, made contact with a baseball....with his bat! 

Meche came into this game with a very good FIP, almost a full run below his ERA. While it may be strange to think given the good quality of his first two seasons as a Royal and the misfortune of the team lately, Meche might be better now than ever before. His fangraphs page shows his GB rate improving, his LD% down from last year, and he's only given up two home runs to date.

We had a pretty cool draft too, what with drafting Aaron Crow in the first round. Crow, you may remember, was a top ten pick of the Nationals last year but was not successfully signed. Since then, he's been in the Indy Leagues working on improving his changeup. For my money, Crow is a top ten talent that the Royals nabbed at 12. He's projected to be able to reach the front of an MLB rotation by most scouts, so it looks like a solid selection. Getting William Myers, a good catching prospect, and the high upside college pitcher Christopher Dwyer both seem like good picks as well. For the complete list of our picks, click the linky. And nwroyal should be doing an in-depth post on the Royals draft tomorrow.

Myers is probably already better at working a count than Miguel Olivo. 

Horacio Ramirez did once beat the Royals when he was not pitching for them.

At this point last year, Jose Guillen was beginning to get very angry. He would go on to OBP .300. Can he do it again?

Team Fortress 2 is a PC game that I've devoted waaaaaaayyyyy too many hours to during my slacker college years, you die often. It's an online FPS--that's First Person Shooter, for you n00bs--that places a strong emphasis on teamwork. A staple of FPSes is back-and-forth gameplay, and while your character dying is nowhere as near as random as your typical bullet-spraying fratboy game--Halo and Call of Duty come to mind--you will still die fairly often. The graphics being done in a cartoony style (my avatar is one of the classes), the game has a good sense of not taking itself very seriously. When NHZ or any of the other heroic protagonists (it's a world full of heroic protagonists) die, the game will display some statistic under the heading "On the Bright Side...". This helps takes the edge off dying and waiting to magically come back to life (known as "respawning' in TF2 circles) and lends much-needed humor to the totally non-funny situation of getting your cartoony blood spilled everywhere because your blew yourself up or just got totally owned by some troll who can barely operate a mouse correctly. For example: "On the Bright Side....you had more kills (3) that round than your previous best."

And now Alex Gordon needs surgery, and he's on the 15-day respawn timer disabled list for the time being. "On the Bright Side...it's hard for some of the Royals to keep being this terrible on offense." Too positive, you say? Crazy talk. The primary reason for an offensive rebound without Alex is the indisputable fact that Willie Bloomquist might get an extra base hit sometime soon. Hell, maybe even next month! Seriously folks, the reason that we signed someone like Willie Ballgame is because he's a guy you can plug into any position and lose only a couple ticks of production. It's hard to find someone who can slug .285 over a full season and be a non-entity at seven different positions. No really, it is. Crimony, does anyone else have a player like that?

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I have been busy lately, as I might have mentioned a couple times. I'm really bored with being busy at this point, so I've decided to cut it out. It helps that those pesky applications have finally been sent in, because, as you've no doubt heard, the life of a college student at a small liberal arts school in Maine is already busy enough. That may seem like an ironic statement, but Your Humble Stathead has been juggling the aforementioned applications, being president of one of the largest clubs on campus, the worst psychology project in the world, all that other classwork stuff that I wish would just go away at this point, and I suppose there's a life outside of that framework left in here somewhere. I'm graduating at an odd time, I might add - the school is going through a transitional period where part of the administration seems to be trying to change it's hedgehog concept (and by the way, the economy doesn't help small public colleges). I'm not trying to make all of you empathize with the likable protagonist known as NHZ, I'm just telling you that yesterday the baseball season really snuck up on me. More so than any season I can remember since I was maybe seven years old, living in Maryland, and thought batting average was second only to Cal Ripken Jr. in awesomeness. Time's flown by lately.

My "oh hey, the season's here" moment occured when I returned to the suite that I live in up here in the cold recesses of north nowhere, to find one of my roommates--the obnoxious libertarian one with well-defined eyebrows--playing "Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney" on his laptop.  Just in case you care for some reason, it's a fun game. His concentration level was pretty impressive at the moment, so I skipped the greetings and turned on ESPN. A few moments later, the fact that the baseball season started in about twenty minutes really hit me. The magic words were John Kruk's, as the BBTN talking head picked Cleveland to win the World Series and I nearly choked on my Chicken Quesdilla Hotpocket. And yes, those taste every bit as good as they sound. I had other things to do, really, as this semester is pretty heavy on crappy little reading assignments, but instead I watched most of the Braves-Phillies game. You know it's opening night when you can tolerate John Miller, Joe Morgan, and Steve Phillips without yelling at your television screen. It was baseball, and it's back, and that's all that mattered. I'm a fan of multiple sports--I follow football very close as well, hockey sometimes too, and I play ultimate at college (insert your own pothead joke here)--but baseball has always been my favorite by far. It's the only sport that I spend an unhealthy amount of time watching, even if the games that are on involve teams I don't care about at all.

The Braves won the game, 4-1, in one of the first of gosh knows how many games I'll watch this year. The BP annual, as last year's edition did gosh knows how many times, came off the shelf in the second inning when I was trying to remember who in the heck this Jordan Schaefer--who took Brett Myers deep--kid was. Derek Lowe, who it's hard to believe is still an effective pitcher if you're a Sox fan who remembers his penultimate season in Beantown in 2004, pitched an absolute gem against the defending champs. My "that's definitely a home run" eye obviously isn't in mid-season form yet, as I still swear Greg Dobbs's drive against Lowe in the sixth had the distance. Mike Gonzalez was very shaky but picked up the save, reminding us all how important it is to have a Closer. And so the 2009 baseball season was here, complete with Joe Morgan's first two boneheaded tangents (Charlie Manuel is just as important as Chase Utley; Gary Sheffield is still awesome and should've been signed).

So I got back to thinking on the Royals, which is something I've been doing a lot lately but haven't really had much of a chance to expand into something more than vague ideas about the team's chances in 2009. It's no secret that Moore and Kansas City have had a very strange off-season, and it's equally obvious that the AL Central could be won by pretty much anyone this year. As with many of the members of this community, I'm encouraged by the idea of the Royals hanging in the picture due to the progress some of the young veterans should make this year, and, at the same time, frustrated by the prospect of watching Sidney Ponson and Horacio Ramirez taking the mound as starters on a team that really had no reason to revamp a pretty solid starting group. I'm excited to watch what I'm hoping will be the year that Alex Gordon moves into "plus" territory, and I'm aghast--though not entirely POed--that Tony Pena Jr. managed to make the opening day roster. I'm hoping that finally, in what's my third season of participating on this blog in some capacity, that I can make it down to Kansas City for one of the games. And I'm hoping, PLEASE, that the game I make it down for this summer will be Greinke-Lee rather than Ponson-(insert Orioles starting pitcher other than Jeremy Guthrie here).

It's going to be a fun year for the Royals, I think. We won't be without our frustrating moments to be sure, as some of the veteran chaff brought in on a wave of replacement level excitement are sure to draw our ire. With the large contrast between the abilities of the young core of this team and the wholly unnecessary free agent acquisitions, the 2009 Kansas City Royals remind me a lot of the movie version of Watchmen. Mayeb it's a stretch, but hang with me here. KC has a lot of positives (young veteran position players, strong front of the rotation, S-O-R-I-A nailing down victories), a lot of negatives ("potential" is still just that for some player we thought would be stars by now, back end of the rotation, overpaid average at best acquisitions), and the end result is pretty mixed, but still exciting. "Watchmen" had its positives a very cool narrative structure, a totally rocking performance by Jackie Earle Harley as Rorschach, Jeffrey Dean Morgan's becoming "the Comedian," and Malin Akerman's curves. Its negatives being the pedestrian performances by most of the main actors, Dr. Manhattan somehow becoming boring, Richard Nixon's make-up, and Malin Akerman's acting. End result, very mixed, but still worth the price of admission. Particularly if you live in Maine where the movie theaters only charge five bucks (whoops, that's not really part of my simile).

Dropping the superhero stuff and talking just beisbol, it seems to me that the division is so weak compared to even the recent past of 2007 that I'm surprised that there's any kind of consensus on the favorite for the Central, projection systems notwithstanding. If Cleveland is the acknowleged favorite this year, than "why not us?" just became a question that deserves a clear answer instead of being dismissed as false hope. As with the movie adaptation of everyone's favorite superhero story, the ride will be exciting and have its positives. It's a little disappointing, I suppose, to be writing that the team has a chance because the division stinks. But I look at it this way; if we happen to win a division title by accident this year, while at the same time building towards a legitimate 90-win team down the road, then the possibility of that is much more fun than beginning the year with "wait 'til next year" as the team's unofficial slogan again.

Watchmen won't have a sequel (or, uh, really shouldn't and I'll ignore it if it does) The 2009 Kansas City Royals will. In the meantime, I'm on the edge of my seat. What's up with this rain? Gosh that's annoying.