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.

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. 

Yeah, so no one cares about boring personal stuff and blah blah but just so you all now, the I'm back up at school for the last two semesters to finish off my psychology degree. What with moving stuff up here - my parents and sisters are kind of ping ponging back and forth between Maine and Mass - and getting registered for classes (which involves busting some heads at the registrar) I've been here sporadically the last couple days. So yeah, that will change as I'm now free from competing with six other people for blogging time at home and I'm settled in up here. In other words, I should be around a lot more often than I was this summer.

Freud is still an idiot, by the way.

Okay GMDM, you may have noticed we have a slight problem scoring runs this season. You may have noticed that this was true last year, as well. The player who was brought to help fix this problem, Jose Guillen, has fallen flat on his fanny. The rest of the babies haven't helped out that much, either; David DeJesus is having his typical solid year, and Alex Gordon was as much fun as hyperactive kittens on roller skates against righties this year, but the fact remains that this team is pretty bad at hitting a baseball. Mike Aviles, a guy who still loses playing time to Tony Pena Jr., handily leads the Royals in position player VORP at 27.1. That's good for a tie for 68th in MLB alongside Alfonso Soriano. Aviles was not even in the team's plans as a utility guy at the beginning of the year, and has only accounted for 6.2% of the Royals PAs this year. In other words, that's not good. I mean, it's great for Aviles, but it illustrates a pretty ugly picture.

So, this brings me to the recent comments you made on 610 radio, which sadly I didn't have the pleasure of listening to. It's all right - don't bother telling me your exact words, some of my friends have clued me in. Basically what you seem to be suggesting is that, with the team that hitting with all of the prowess of a blindfolded six-year-old hyped up on smarties going after a "my little pony" pinata, there's not much chance of one Kila Ka'aihue being called up in September. Something about a 40-man roster, yadda yadda yadda.

This is kind of distressing news to me, I must admit.

 First of all, I am well aware of the possibility that Kila might just be a AAAA slugger, as 24 is pretty late as breakouts in AA go. I am aware that not many of the players with Ka'aihue's career path go on to become major league regulars. Okay? So understand that I'm rational about all this. The catch is, we are in the midst of yet another year where the Royals are entering September with nothing to play for but next year, so it seems rather counterintuitive to me that we wouldn't call up someone who could potentially fill a desperate need on this roster. And I'm all about going with the instincts, Dayton.

"Hawaiian Punch" as we blogging simpletons like to call him, hit .314/.463/.624 in AA this year. I won't waste time pointing out how good that line is, because your must have noticed. I'm assuming that because Ka'aihue's hitting earned him a promotion to the PCL in AAA ball. I wonder if you've noticed that he hasn't stopped hitting there. Yes, there might be some BABIP flukiness in his year, but Ka'aihue's 100-odd appearances in AAA have seen him hit .330/.455/.648. Yes, that's in the PCL, but we can take those numbers with a grain of salt and they're still pretty tasty. For the year, Hawaiian Punch has hit .317/.461/.630, with 100 walks and only 63 strikeouts. That's a 1.091 OPS. He could lose 300 OPS points in the transition to the majors, and he'd still be hitting better than Ross Gload. That's three hundred, as in a "3" followed by two "0s," Mr. Moore. That's the difference between Albert Pujols and our own David DeJesus. It's also an overrated movie based on an overrated graphic novel, too, but I digress. Back to my main point.

Ka'aihue has done nothing to but flat out rake in 2008, and if it costs us a 40-man roster spot to have him get a shot in September, then I promise you we've got some players lying around that really don't mean much. Off the top of my head, there's Tony Pena Jr., Joey Gathright, Ross Gload, Jeff Fulchino, Matt Tupman, and Shane Costa that all look like great candidates to be waived bye-bye. I'd include Kip Wells on this list, too, but you just claimed him so and I don't want to make you think that it's a better idea to get rid of Wells than it is to get rid of Ross Gload. I know I'm forgetting a bunch of players, too. Point is, clearing some of these bums off the 40-man roster would be addition by subtraction. If you were to give Ka'aihue a shot, it would be addition by subtraction AND Ka'aihue might keep hitting the ball, too.

Maybe I'm just an idiot who sits around and "disseminates his unqualified opinions to the masses," as my pal Stephen A. Smith has put it, but this just seems a common sense decision to me. Let me bullet point this for you:

• We do not have a good offense.
• We are a rebuilding team with nothing to lose at the moment.
• Kila Ka'aihue stands a half-decent chance at improving offense if we bring him up in September. He also might prove to be a long-term answer.
• Therefore, we should bring up Kila Ka'aihue.

As to the 40-man issue:

• We need a spot on the 40-man roster to bring Hawaiian Punch up.
• Tony Pena Jr. and other neverwillbes are on the 40-man roster
• DFA Tony Pena Jr., and...
• Surprise! Now we have space! We are not going to miss a glove man with a negative OBP. Shake a tree, and ten gloves fall out.

Now look, GMDM, I think you've done a pretty good job so far since you've taken over this team. I am willing to defend your work on more than one front, and I think you'll do a good job getting this team ready to make a run at contention. I tell you this because 1. it is true and 2. I'm about to make fun of you so I want you to know I'm doing so as a concerned friend.

See those bullet point arguments above, Dayton? Especially the first one? They seem a lot like this deeply-rooted-in-common sense argument which comes up quite a bit in "real life." Suppose there's someone you want to date (stay with me here, I know this may seem a little juvenile) and you know she's available. You could:

• Ask her to go on a date (with you, of course, make sure she knows that).
• Not ask her to go on a date.

And if you take the first course of action, there are really only two possible outcomes:

• She will say "yes," and you will go out.
• She will say "no," and you won't go out.
• She will die in a tragic blimp accident.

Sorry, forgot about that last one. Anyways, if you choose the second option, there is only one outcome:

• You won't go out.

Now, far be it for me to give relationship advice, being the only moddie around here who isn't married, but that's a pretty frigging simple equation. I understand why you don't want to tango with Ryan Shealy, Dayton - he disappointed you last year and you doubt he's changed much. I have to say, though, that Kila's available. He seems to be able to hit the ball. He has a nice smile. You might as well give the guy a shot. If he fails? What do we lose? More games? Ahahaha. Good one.

Come September, call up Kila Ka'aihue. I'm not sure if anyone in the minors this year has earned it more.

I bet you didn't know that I, too, can blockquote from books! This one is from Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, part of a conversation between the main character, Kilgore Trout, and the truck driver he is hitchhiking with:

"I can't tell if you're serious or not," said the driver.

"I won't know myself until I find out whether life is serious or not," said Trout. "It's dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too."

I love Vonnegut's work, though I always take it as a bad sign when I find myself identifying with one of his characters. Such as Trout in this particular instance.

Good game tonight. Party on.

We did it. We broke the vaunted Curse of Will Getting Married. With a heroically crappy effort by Brandon Duckworth and an offensive explosion for seven runs in six innings off former good pitcher Kenny Rogers, your boys in blue are off the 'schneid.

• According to WPA, the Royals best pitcher in this game was Mudkip Wells. Let it never be said that Dayton Moore doesn't know how to fill out the back end of a pitching staff. To be completely fair to Wells, he actually was good as he K'ed two batters in as many scoreless innings. I wouldn't be surprised if he was in the mix for the back of the rotation next year. That just goes to show you what kind of guys can compete for the back of a rotation. And so on.
• Jose Guillen had a home run. I still dislike him, yes.
• Callaspo had three hits and a walk. The dude has deservedly taken some flak 'round these parts, but give credit where credit is due. Now have a few drinks and drive yourself home, Alberto. Just kidding, just kidding. Performances like tonight are why I was among the Callaspo-for-2B crowd in the first place.
• No one drowned at the pool today, though the hose is not working.
• RamRam and The Mexicutioner were back to their usual selves. I wuv them.
• Butler had a double and a walk, which we like. German continued to play competently with a bingle and walk, which we like. Teahen had 3 RsBI and didn't fall over in the batter's box, which we think is something. The borg is pleased.
• Ross Gload 3oy893gh5q90gh3gh9ehgIHATEHIMga43y3hbvzbvb
• DeJesus and Olivo are not hitting. Oh, well. At least someone hit today.
• We are not the Chiefs, which must count for something. I think. Maybe.
• Next up is Texas, then we go back head-to-head with the Tigers again. Let the excitement build.

Another Bannister start, another good time at the ballpark for the opposition. To be fair, Bannister's two home runs allowed have been Miguel Cabrera solo shots. Just think, if he could avoid making those mistake pitches, he might be good! And we can't hit Verlander so far. And Ross Gload is 3-for-3, as his empty batting average rises to help guarentee his starting spot next year. And Gordon's hurt. Other than that, this game has been great.

Party on.

No loss ever feels good, even when you play with the grit of a Ross Gload type, but this one stings where it hurts. Gil Meche was absolutely stellar after allowing three runs early, two of which go in the "unearned" bin. All told, Meche gave up only two hits, walked one, and struck out nine over seven innings. His ERA (yes I know ERA isn't that great of a stat, believe me) was lowered to 4.01 in the process. That's an impressive feat given how he started this season and this game. Unfortunately, Ramon Ramirez and Joakim Soria couldn't hold the lead. That's probably the only time this year we've seen that sentence, which doesn't make this loss hurt less. Off the top of my head, only "the Twins game" tops this one in terms of bullpen meltdowns. Fans always remember the close losses and forget the blowouts...yadda yadda yadda, but when you get an effort like this one out of Meche, it's one of hell of a game to shake off. To the bullet points:

• We haven't been swept yet. Isn't that looking on the bright side? Greinke goes tomorrow in a 12:05 EST getaway day game that I'll miss entirely. Cheer Zack on, people. We could really use a win.
• Pumpkinhead Fulchino recorded as many outs as Soria did: one. Fulchino succeeded in lowering his ERA to 9.90.
• Royals relievers in this game combined for one inning, four walks, three hits allowed, and two dingers surrendered. Ugly.
• Mike Aviles should be intentionally walked by any unfortunate lefty who has to face him. He went 3-for-4 today and was the only Royal with a multihit game.
• Beer, anyone?
  

And so we return triumphantly to last place.

After everything that happened in that game, somehow you just knew that it would come down to Brett Gardner versus Jeff Fulchino. Blah blah blah some other stuff about how painful extra inning losses like this one are. Some rational thoughts:

• I really don't hate Trey Hillman, but if Soria was avaiable it's hard to stomach the fact that we lost an extra innings game without him appearing. I hope Hillman learns from his mistakes.
• That said, Joel Peralta and Robinson Tejeda both pitched well
• Our offense is not good at hitting baseballs well.
• Zack Greinke was very, very, very great today. Too bad the defense caved.
• Alex Gordon hit a home run and had two walks. Mark Teahen had tow hits. Mike Aviles went 0-for-6. Is it OPPOSITE DAY?!?!

After a game that thrilling, the rest of the night will be an anticlimax.

PS: it's okay, Hosmer signed. At least we are not fans of the Washington Nationals.

Our beloved Royals and the big market oppressor known as the Yankees are tied 2-2 and headed for extra innings. Zack pitched great, Gordon homered, and we fielded like a minor b little league team on valium in the 7th. And I missed it. Hooray.

The Royals are down 3-2 in the sixth, and Jo-El has come in to save the day after another "meh" outing by Hiram. Jose Guillen is so clutch that he doesn't even have to shift when he drives a stick.

True. Blue. Tradition.

The Royals are up 12-2 in the seventh. Our offense is doing its best impression of actual major league offense yet again. There was an exciting brawl that I missed and AJ got punched so that's good. Greinke was good and got tossed out of the game for retaliating.

Good day. Party on.

A little less sixteen candles, a little more 'touch me.'

It's overflow thread time, mainly because I spent about half-an-hour learning how to use the bizarre and useless 'sarcasm font.' In the hopes of contributing something today, let me follow up on Will's earlier points:

• I've heard nothing about DDJ-to-the-Cubs rumors beyond the usual mlbtraderumors-level stuff. Here's hoping David sticks around, because we'd be taking a big step backward in CF if we lost him.
• Ken Rosenthal is a dork. More importantly, he's often factually inaccurate. Trust at your own risk.
• If Mahay can be traded for Jason Donald, then why would we go after Brandon Moss instead? Thoughts on this? If the Phillies are still in the fold, I'd go for their offer.
• The White Sox DID do something after all, the merit of which is debatable.
• Everybody loves Will Ohman. Therefore, everyone should love Ron Mahay. I can't wait until we get Matt Wieters for him.
• Ivan "Pudge" Rodriguez is a Yankee. He's a good band-aid for the wound of losing Posada, but then there's the fact that it's really annoying that some people insist on calling him "Pudge." Nicknaming Ivan Rodriguez "Pudge" was like nicknaming Jake Plummer "Jake the Snake"...I'm not buying it.
• The Marlins-Pirates-Red Sox potential deal involving Manny Ramirez and Jason Bay and gosh knows who else is apparently close to dead, though the Jays are making noise too. Who knows why? Not me.
• We now have two and a half hours until the "moment of truth."
• Bud Selig is still a cretin, just in case anyone forgot that particular tidbit of information.
• The movie "Doomsday" is stupid and can't hold a candle to any of the movies it rips off.

Party on.

In this game, we have the best hit:home run ratio in the history of baseball. This season just keeps getting better and better. We've also committed two errors today, so we've currently got the awesome even H-R-E thing going. I predict a seven run eighth that will ruin all of this precious symmetry and cause us to lose due to negative style points.

via bbs.cnnas.com

Greinke's out, Peralta's in, it's 7-1 as the fifth inning starts and we somehow still need an overflow thread. Three cheers for us for our ridiculous devotion (it has nothing to do with having nothing to do on a friday night, nosirree)!

Hip hip...