Man, check out just how awful the Royals’ cleanup hitters have been. They are nearly 100 points below the second-worst team, and the entire range of everybody else is about 200 points. It’s not like their producing in any other way, either. The Royals’ #4 batters have a collective batting average of .211 and OBP of .278. Sheesh. The cumulative OBP for all of MLB is .333, meaning that the guys on the Royals who should be in the upper echelon of power hitters have an OBP that’s more than 50 points below leave average. And they have struck out a ton. Umm…yeah.

It must be those damn Allard Baird signees!!!

Mike Aviles, Alex Gordon and Coco Crisp would have made our cleanup hitters better!

is record-breaking awful

The 10 worst cleanup hitters since 1957

They only counted players who spent at least half the team’s games in the cleanup spot. No one on the Royals technically qualifies – both Jacobs and Guillen have each spent 49 games in the cleanup spot.

But Jose Guillen would be tied for fifth worst.

Especially now that Baconater is out fulltime 3 hole….

Did you guys ever hear of someone named Guillen, Jacobs, Gordon and Butler? They are, for the good or bad of it, the Royals cleanup hitters. Guillen and Gordon have been out all season with injuries. Both of them were walking wounded when they showed up at the stadium. How do you compare your middle of the order hitters without two of them being present? That why this discussion is just silly.

I will admit that Jacobs performed awfully – that’s Jacob’s fault for his ridiculous swing (until recently) and GMDM’s fault for trading for him in the beginning. We would have been better off failing with Kila and Shealy. But in reality we wouldn’t be better off, neither of those two guys would have got it done either. At least we would have known it. Now that I think of it, Shealy was injured 2/3 of the season also.

A better discussion is why don’t we have any clean-up hitters that we’ve developed ourselves? That’s the only place they come from – a club with our finances and in our position can’t pick them up as free agents. And the blame for that is with Glass. Until GMDM came along, Glass had taken the approach that no draftee is worth more than $100,000. Plus the ones we had developed were let go – Dye, Beltran, Ibanez, or got injured, Sweeney. With $70+ mill payroll, we probably could have kept them all. Plus with Glass’ new attitude towards the draft (pay as much as it needs), we would have had at least one or two more young ’uns in AAA by now.

Basically, the whole fault for this is due to David Glass. It was his penny pinching approach that got us into this spot since he bought the club. However, now we have a chance. We had one going into the season but it didn’t work because of injuries – and we have one going forward into next season, given healthy players. In 1 1/2 to 2 seasons from now, me’ll have Moustakas, and maybe even Hosmer (who came alive during the Rocks losing play-off run).