Poz does a perfunctory job here of noting just how historically bad Hochevar’s season was, listing his 2009 as among only 17 seasons all-time in which a pitcher a) got at least 25 starts and b) compiled an ERA of 6.50 or higher. Handy fact there, although I’d guess that just about anyone who reads Poz’s blog regularly and cares about the Royals already had a good idea that Hochevar was really really bad overall. I think the discussion would have been more interesting if Poz had looked into those other 16 seasons to find out if in any of them included as many as 3 starts as good as Hochevar’s best — using game scores or whatever — because it’s not really clear to me without further analysis whether Hochevar, while achieving historically bad results in the aggregate, was historically out of character when good.

Also, I think he makes remarkably little use of James’ bon mot, “The future is not a plan.” Yes, it means that you can’t just hope for the best and expect it to arrive, but I don’t think that’s all it means. It also carries the warning that ideology isn’t sufficient, and Poz doesn’t go there at all. In fact I think he misfires his bullets in that part of the discussion, because you can’t say that the Royals haven’t been aggressive in juggling the major league roster. It’s just that, oops, they’ve aggressively gone after the wrong guys — players that no competent GM should want, or players with talents that the organization didn’t especially lack, or players with potential that was illusory.

Anyway, about Hoch. Does anyone know if he’s a smart guy, maybe a 0.5 or more on the Bannister Scale? I wonder, because the only possible responses for a smart guy pitching in this organization are 1) defiance and 2) despondency. Bannister chose defiance: they told him that no righties succeed with cutters in the bigs, even though one of them won 20 games for the Braves (Russ Ortiz) and one of them is everybody’s favorite sure-fire Hall of Fame closer, and Bannister was terrible without it, so he took matters into his own hands, working his way back into the rotation, with the cutter.

Crazy ups and downs such as Hochevar’s seem like an indication of the other response to me. I wouldn’t blame him if that’s the case. The GM is an ideologue and the manager is a knucklehead who can pass himself off as a sage only to someone with an ideologue’s ability to perform an objective assessment.

Just wondering.