After careful consideration, sabrmetricians across the country agree that high ERA’s thrown by lefties are more valuable to a team than high ERA’s thrown by righties.  “Technically, a lefty who puts up a 7.16 ERA allows the same number of runs as a righty with a 7.16 ERA,” statistical guru Jackie Ballgame said in a press conference on the groundbreaking discovery.  “But it’s the WAY that the lefty allows those runs.  Lefties throw the other team completely off.  Hitters might score five, six, seven runs every time you run a given lefty out there, sure, but they’re completely off balance.  It’s all in the numbers.”

That analysis has raised questions among the baseball faithful.  What if, say, a righty like Brian Bannister or Luke Hochevar puts up an ERA of 4.5 and a lefty puts up a 7.0?  Is that 7 ERA somehow better than the 4.5?  “I know it sounds wacky to the common fan,” says Ballgame, “but us stat gurus, we’ll take the lefty even in that scenario.  Let me break it down for you.  The righty is allowing in the neighborhood of three fewer runs to cross the plate per nine innings.  But you have to keep in mind the way they’re allowing those runs.  Against the righty, the runs are crossing the plate in an orderly, no-nonsense fashion.  Against the lefty, it’s a completely different story.  The runners are disoriented.  The ball was coming at them from a different angle when they hit it over the wall, so they might be running the bases sideways or backwards.  The players in the opposing dugout are confused, the opposing manager just doesn’t know what to make of the situation.  And that’s what you want, that’s what the lefty gives you, a total state of confusion on your opponents’ bench.”

The Royals, in their low-key, tight-lipped style of late won’t admit that they’re using such complex statistics to assist them in putting their rotation together this year.  But you can bet they’ve got this analysis in mind. 

Manager Trey Hillman all but admitted recently that Horacio Ramirez would have to “pitch his way out of” a rotation spot despite getting regularly shelled in his last stint as a starter in Seattle.  "He's going to have to pitch his way out of it," Hillman acknowledged. "Am I fence-riding a little bit? Yeah, I am because he's got to pitch well enough to seize one of those spots. But, at the same time, we have a preference that we'd like to have a left-hander in that rotation."