I've been on the Darvish bandwagon for nearly two years now. While I think its quite a long shot for the Royals to acquire him in the off season, I honestly believe that doing whatever it would take to acquire him would pay off in the long run for the Royals. However most people caution against him, citing other disappointing Japanese pitchers. So I decided to delve into the dark underworld of Japanese stat keeping (No seriously, its like no one in Japan has heard of sabermetrics or stats really) to parcel out pitchers performance before they came to America and how they performed afterwords.

For the purposes of getting a decent sample, I elected to just go with those pitchers that pitched more than 50 innings in the major leagues, the players that did not make the cut were all relievers and all fringe players at best. As a perfect example one player who barely made the cut was our own Yasuhiko "Shake" Yabuta.

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With the long anticipated arrival of Mike Moustakas to the big league club the Royals are in the middle of the first wave of talent so long promised by Dayton Moore. Mike, Hosmer, Duffy, Crow, Collins are all ready and contributing to the club while others like Monty, Cain, Lough, and Giavotella all look like they'll be ready to assist the club in the coming months. Even a little further down the line guys like Wil, Dwyer, Colon and Perez all look to be bringing up the rear of the wave with the (hopefully) eventual arrival of Lamb signaling the end of our current talent Tsunami. 

So what does the next wave look like? Who do the Royals have in system who are performing well and have the opportunity to become the next best farm system in the history of whatever in two or three years?

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Saying that Dayton Moore has made some mistakes is sorta like saying that Paris Hilton is a little promiscuous.

Less Mistake Prone than Dayton Moore?

You get the feeling that the whole story is never quite explained and that whoever is telling you this is trying to downplay the incredibly horrendous truth.

But, and this is not a happy but, not the type of but that should inspire hope or optimism, for the most part Dayton's mistakes have been relatively small. While there have been many of them, way to many to count, most have been minor involving small contracts, few years, or stopgap solutions. The biggest damage has been done, not to the performance of the team on the field, but to a theoretical future, to the development of players and the acquisition of pieces that could, in time, blossom.

Of course however there are always exceptions. Glaring, incriminating exceptions. In this case there is a large one, practically covered in neon and flashing lights. If you havn't figured it out yet, well you'll find out after the bump.

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*Lets be honest here, I'm probably risking my nonexistent press credentials, but since I planned on attending my final Royals game of the year later today, I think I'm alright.

It was pretty clear to just about anyone watching the game yesterday that something was off in the home plate umpires calls of balls and strikes. Not just a little off, like Tim McClellands notoriously small strike zone, or the occasional random bad decision most umpires make. I'm talking a full fledged out and out bias for Red Sox pitchers and a tightening of the zone against Royals pitchers.

Now to be fair, I'm ONLY going to address the pitch calls. I'm not going to discuss Gibson's handling of the Zach situation, the warning given out after a wild pitch, nor the further situation with Trey Hillman.

So using the very convenient graphs at Brooks Baseball(ironically enough a very pro-Boston site) I decided to take a look at just how the game was called.

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http://www.ranyontheroyals.com/2009/06/release-hounds.html

There. For the like 3 people who haven't already read it.

That gets you up to speed. The idea? That this Royals team, the one we are painfully watching day in and day out, the one beset by injuries, is much better than the product on the field.

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One of the biggest points of concern for the Royals is maximizing the return on their investments. As a small market team every dollar spent is a dollar that needs to be used correctly for this team to have success. So obviously Jose Guillen and Mike Jacobs present a huge discrepancy to this idea. But are the two sluggers being over paid or simply misused?

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You're probably all familiar with the nearly 20-year old debate over which 3rd baseman was the better player.

But what you might be familiar with is that its possible that we could quite possibly have the exact same situation brewing today, only this time the battle has switched from the hot corner to the gritter middle infield.

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So a while back I made some comments about how the Rays had gone from horrible to great in just one season, and used OPS to show how we too could go down the same path and quickly become contenders.

Thats been sitting in the back of my mind and I wanted to do a more detailed, accurate version using VoRP to determine just how much better we would have been. To be honest I was a bit surprised at what I found.

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