On July 28, 2005, in Seattle, Washington, a 23-year old shortstop made his Major League debut, playing second base and batting eighth for the hometown Mariners in a one-run loss to the Cleveland Indians. It isn't likely that many Kansas Citians were watching that game, since there was no way to anticipate the role that Yuniesky Betancourt would one day play in our baseballing lives.

But, since you're a Royals fan, there is a reasonably good chance that you were watching the begining of something else momentus on that night. At the opposite end of the country, Buddy Bell sent Kyle Snyder out to the mound in Tropicana Field to face a team that was still called the "Devil Rays," and which still basically sucked. Sure, they had Carl Crawford in the outfield and Scott Kazmir on the mound, but that Tampa team was sitting in the AL East cellar with a late-season record of 37 and 66.

Continue reading this post »

The Signing Bonus Pool system contained in MLB's new CBA has been much discussed since its announcement last Tuesday. In particular, there has been some hand-wringing around here over the possibility that the new CBA will stifle the Royals' ability to stockpile minor league prospects by offering over-slot bonuses in the early rounds of the draft. The Royals and Pirates have been widely cited as the two teams most likely to be affected by the new rules, largely because the Royals and Pirates have be widely credited as the most aggresive teams in offering over-slot signing bonuses. The logic of that last point, however, is based mostly on the raw dollar-figures offered to draftees. But the Royals and Pirates have been cellar-dwelling for quite a while now, meaning they consistently hold some very early picks in the draft. If draft position is taken into account, are the Royals and Pirates really that aggressive with over-slot bonuses?

Continue reading this post »

via img801.imageshack.us (data: fangraphs.com)

The scatterplot above represents the average seasonal fWAR generated by ballplayers appearing in Baseball America's Top 100 list for the years 1995-2009 (i.e. a fifteen-year sample).  Six years' worth of data (begining with the year of the BA ranking) is included for each ranked player (where available--obviously, the 2006-2009 prospects have yet to generate six-years' worth of data), and all of that data is averaged together to create a single per-season fWAR value for each position in the rankings (i.e. 1 through 100).  Because I am interested in assessing the value of each ranking position, rather than the individual players, I have not eliminated duplicates.  As a result, Joe Mauer (who was the #1 prospect in both 2004 and 2005) is responsible for a disproportionate share of the value associated with the number-one spot.  He also did his share to help out the #4 spot (2003) and the #7 spot (2002). 

The overall pattern seems pretty clear, and I took the liberty of adding a trend line to emphasize the point.  The number-one spot has generated an average of 3.825 fWAR per season over the course of the last 15 years, and it tails off somewhat logarithmically after that, with the trend levelling out around 1 fWAR somewhere near the 60th ranked spot. 

Continue reading this post »

In another thread, I mentioned that I catch a lot of foul balls at the K.  I believe this to be due to the fact that my seat at the ballpark happens to be in a high-percentage location for foul balls.  I defined that location as:

Upstairs, anywhere in the first ten rows or so and also within 3 or 4 sections of the new "cutaway" they made behind the plate (i.e. the media booth).  These are sections 414-416 (for LHB) and 424-426 (for RHB).

Continue reading this post »

Scientists researching MLB rosters have recently discovered that between July 20 and August 1, the Royals' 25-man roster got 30 years younger!  This miracle was reportedly the result of a series of transformation that resulted in:

A. Callaspo, D. DeJesus, K. Farnsworth, A. Lerew, V. Marte, S. Podsednik and R. Tejeda

becoming:

G. Blanco, B. Bullington, J. Chavez, A. Gordon, G. Holland, K. Ka'aihue and S. O'Sullivan.

The biggest single move (age-wise) came from replacing Podsednik with Holland on July 29th (10-year differential).  But the biggest single-day change came from converting Ankiel and Farnsworth into Blanco and Chavez (12-year combined differential).

Research shows that before the Callaspo trade, the Royals' 25-man had a collective age of 718 years.  As of this morning, however, that number sits at 688 years.  By dividing those numbers by another number (believed to be "25"), scientists have revealed that the average age of the active roster two weeks ago was 28.72 years old, and today it's at an average of 27.52 years.  This reportedly means that your average Royal is now 1.2 years younger than he was just a couple of weeks ago. 

More importantly, the Royals climbed from the middle-back side of the aging curve back onto the leading edge, meaning that the team age will hit peak performance just one year from now!

Continue reading this post »