Another blast from the past (a haunting?) on a rainy Thursday. Back in January, I looked at the Top Five Doubles Hitters in the post-Brett Era...

Continuing the life-changing examination of the post-Brett era in Kansas City. This time, with a nod to the problems inherent in taking RsBI very seriously, lets instead look at doubles.

Doubles are interesting because a double is a fairly good play, but, at the same time, a double is also sometimes just a home run that doesn't go as far, or do as much damage. Here are the run expectancies for doubles, or, more properly, for a dude standing on second base:

Run Expectancy for a Dude Standing on Second Base:

Dude on Second, no outs: 1.154 runs
Dude on Second, one out: .736 runs
Dude on Second, two outs: .3645

Note: these numbers are just from the 2006 season.

Thinking more about doubles, a fairly common double situation is "man on first moves to third on double" (at least if Sweeney or Buck aren't on first). In that situation, with no outs, the double moves the run expectancy of the inning from .926 to 1.807. With one man already out, the double pushes the expected runs from .567 to 1.173. All good things.

Anyway, here are the top five doubles men since 1993:

Top Five Doubles Hitters For the Royals Since 1993:

1. Mike Sweeney- 292
2. Joe Randa- 223
3. Carlos Beltran- 156
3t. Johnny Damon- 156
5. Jermaine Dye- 115

About what you would expect regarding doubles. Mike Macfarlane has 174 doubles as a Royal -- good for 9th most in club history -- but the majority of them came in the early '90s, which is for whatever reason outside the data-set I'm interested in presently. Berroa currently has 103 doubles as a Royal, and David DeJesus already has 82. If David doesn't catch Angel in this category by the end of 2008, then that probably means things are going horribly wrong.

Overall, Kauffman Stadium has played as a good hitters park over the last decade and change, usually posting solid pro-hitter park factor. Still, the dimensions have changed twice, and intuitively I would suspect that the moved in fences helped homers but suppressed doubles, while the new/old dimensions of the last three seasons have increased doubles while decreasing homers. Unfortunately, I don't have this data in front of me. If anyone knows where outcome-specific historical park-factors can be found, I'd love to know. However, it must be remembered that single-year PFs aren't terribly reliable as it is, and single-outcome ones can be fairly noisy.

Anyway, the beat goes on. Congrats to Sweeney on another post-Brett victory.

Update [2007-8-9 12:46:48 by royalsreview]:

While Sweeney's managed only a 10 double season to date, he's obviously in no danger of being caught any time soon. On other fronts, David DeJesus has, indeed, passed Angel on the All-Time Doubles list. As of August 8th, David has notched 108 2Bs, five ahead of Berroa's 103.

The sometimes maligned Emil Brown has snuck all the way up to 83 doubles as a Royal, passing Raul Ibanez's total of 81 with a two-double game against Texas back on July 28th. Amazingly, the Royals didn't honor this achievement with an in-game ceremony.

Mark Teahen now owns 73 career doubles (two behind our beloved Mike Tucker's total as a Royal), while Buck sits at 66.