Minnesota 9, Kansas City 4
Royal Record: 5-16

Minnesota 6, Kansas City 5 (11 innings)
Royal Record: 5-17


I think one of the hardest things about being an intelligent baseball fan is overcoming the fact that most of the players aren't. As you move up the ranks of baseball, you expect this to be less of the case, which is why it's frustrating to see major league baseball players make the same mistakes as my adult rec league team.

Yes, it's a little dramatic to make the leap from comparing the royals to my team, but if you've played or watched baseball at the lowest levels (we're talking about my team here), you understand the mentality that a lot of these guys take into their professional careers – the aggressive, offensive scheme of hitting, diving, and attempting to be spectacular at all times, completely disregarding the more subtle, intelligent approaches that breed winning baseball teams. They seem to be pretty widespread things, the type of things that have to be coached out of a player – whether it's from outside coaching or simply from within the player himself – and you expect that when you watch professional teams, the players should possess an excellent knowledge of the game.

In some, this is true. Unfortunately, by the time you reach the major leagues, sometimes it's not through understanding and knowledge, but simply through physical talents (i.e. "tools" players). The combination of these two, baseball intelligence and physical talent, is seemingly rare. It's still not an excuse.

I'm sure other teams have players do the same things quite a bit, but since most fans watch their team much, much more than other teams, it seems like your team makes many more mistakes than others. Which, in the case of the Royals, may very well be true. In the last game I watched, I saw Matt Diaz (not to single him out, it's just the most recent thing I noticed) take a terrible path to field a line drive to left. Instead of moving laterally and getting in front of a hard-hit ball before charging forward, he took a strictly diagonal path, which resulted in the ball bouncing just out of reach of his glove, all the way to the fence, resulting in a double and runs scored. While dropping a fly ball is easily noticed as an error, this is just as much of one, as you're giving preventable free bases. It doesn't show up anywhere, though.

The most frustrating thing is that it's exactly something I see happen during my teams' games.

By the way, in our last game, we lost 12-11 in 8 innings (standard games are 7 innings). Here's my official *Regular Season* stats through one game:

Team Record: 0-1

Offense

Blow, Joe: 0-2 (2 BB, K, reached on error, 1 RBI)

Season:
Avg: .000
OBP: .500
Slg: .000
OPS: .500
RBI: 1

Can you say, "sample size"? I love odd stat-lines like that at the beginning of the season. On defense, I again made no errors, but I also only had one put-out opportunity, which was an adventure in fighting the lights. Unfortunately, I got kind of screwed on that strikeout – I came up to bat first in the top of the last inning, our team down by two, and the clock reading 11:30 P.M. Our home-plate umpire, who, by the way, was getting paid to be at this game, apparently decided anything close was going to be a strike, since if we failed to score two the game would end. So, after taking two pitches at eye level, the next two pitches were a good 5-6 inches outside. Strikes, of course. With a 2-2 count, I ended up swinging a pitch so far outside I couldn't reach it, but I knew it would be called strike 3 anyway. The funny part is we ended up scoring two, and only two, so we had to play the bottom of the inning PLUS an extra inning after we held the other team scoreless. haha, extra innings, no extra pay.

Anyway, as far as the game, our lineup construction was terrible (sound familiar, Royals fans?) Now, I'm not a lightning-quick guy, but I can run fairly well, plus I actually know how to run the bases. Naturally, I batted behind the biggest, slowest guy on the team, a guy that moves one base at a time unless the ball rolls all the way to the fence. So, no stolen bases, no going first to third on a single, since I can't be sure he'll try to score from 2nd on a single. Then, our centerfielder went down, and instead of moving me over from left, our team manager lady puts one of the slowest, poorest defenders out there. In centerfield. He completely ran past two grounders up the middle, and played way too deep on most batters, resulting in 3-4 "hits" that should have been caught.

He's also one of the guys I alluded to above, the type with the baseball, uh, "knowledge" that needs to be beat out of players at every opportunity: you know, the guy (and this team is full of them) that, no matter if a runner is two steps away from the plate and he's throwing from centerfield, throws over all cut-off men and tries to get the out at the plate. Again, no one seems to care that this is just as big an error as the pitcher throwing past the first baseman on a pick-off move, as it gives a free base to all runners. Since it's not a blindingly obvious mistake, it's not a mistake at all!

Well, here's a perfect example of the type of guys I'm now apparently stuck with this season:

The situation: down by 2, top of the last inning, nobody on base (and a team full of guys that can't hit home runs).

Me: "This guy can barely throw strikes, we need to take pitches until he can locate 'em."
Random Team Member: "We need to get hits is what we need!"
Me: "Yeah, but we need base runners, and right now a walk is as good as a single."
Random Team Member: "Well, I'll take a walk if I have to, but I hate it! I'm gonna try to hit it!"

Move forward to a couple pitches later – nobody on base, the batter at the plate has worked the count to 3-1.

Team Member (from dugout): "Come on, swing the bat, we don't want no fuckin walks!"

I'm surprised we don't just name ourselves the Moneyballs. But, this is the attitude that's ALWAYS been pervasive in every level of baseball I've played at. Our brilliant centerfield replacement guy, the defensive wizard, also absolutely refuses to take a pitch with 3 balls (yes, I'm amazed he ever gets that far to begin with), and I've seen him strike out on a couple pitches so high over his head that I don't think he could physically hit it anyway. Think about that: he'd rather swing at a pitch he has to look up at than take a walk. These guys will always dive for a ball instead of letting it drop and holding a runner to a single, they try to take an extra base at every opportunity (no matter how silly), and, despite the fact that I reached base 3 out of 4 times in Game 1, it's considered a failure because I never got a hit. It's that mentality that needs to be groomed from every baseball player, and it's exactly what I don't want to see from the Royals. Good coaching should take care of it, though I've yet to see evidence of that. But, then again, we're not exactly dealing with an advanced brain trust when we're talking about baseball players, are we? You just keep hoping..

Frustratingly,
Joe Blow