when he becomes a middle reliever.

He will NOT be a quality starting pitcher, especially not in this organization.

Hillman keeping Hochevar in to pitch to Cano was unbelievably stupid. Your pitcher just threw 4 straight balls to load the bases with 0 outs and you are down 2. YOU PULL THE STARTER. YOU PULL HIM. Hillman is awful at managing pitching. Flat out awful.

I put that a lot better right there than I put it on 610.

When batting Yuni 2nd isn’t the worst move of the night.. that says a lot

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I am not a big Trey hater, BUT tonight made me really mad. You’ve got a starting pitcher who was not efficient all game. He was behind a lot and a lot of his first pitch strikes where up in the zone. The best one all night was the fastball down and away to Posada in the 6th (?) or 7th (?) to make it 0-1. Then he followed that by piping a fastball that Jorge doubled on. His fastball had less movement than the normal Luke, and the curve was not good at all. And put that with Olivo and his predictability, you’ve got a bad recipe for success.

Hindsight is always 20/20, but I would not have let Hoch face a batter that inning and I said that to my wife. He was not consistent in the zone and he was not crisp. He had gotten lucky to that point in my opinion and with the extended rosters, let’s give some of the young guys a shot in a tough situation in NY. I was all for bringing Rosa in there for the 7th.

The most inexcusable thing for Trey though? Not having someone up and throwing at the start of the 7th inning. We didn’t get Rosa up until 4 batters in!! Poor managing tonight.

cannot be counted on as a starter now. It appears that tipping his pitches was not his problem. If I were GM, I would start him in bullpen next season and get me another starter, then work him in as a starter during the season if he shows progress.

with a friend who’s a non-Royals fan. He’s a Rangers fan so he seems to think that Hillman is a good guy and he was bummed that they didn’t can Washington to pick up Hillman. I told him about Trey’s inability to manage a bullpen which as an American League manager should be the biggest criteria. He didn’t believe my Trey stories. That is, not until the 7th inning.

I told him at the beginning of the game that Hoch was effective enough to usually get through 4 or 5 but then he just has one inning where he’ll give up like 6 runs or something. So sure enough, after he’d pitched a 3 run game with 9 hits through 6, we were both beginning to think that my assessment may have been off.

But then the 7th started, we had traded 1 run innings for the last two and the game was shaping up to be a good one. Hoch’s pitchcount was in the mid 70’s. That’s when he put two on and then walked the 3rd on 4 pitches. My buddy says wow, they should have had the pen up in the 6th when your pitcher was giving up homers to light hitting 3rd string defensive shortstops. After the bases were walked loaded, Olivo slumped up to the mound as slowly as he could. About half was to the mound we looked into the Royals dugout as if to say, ’you’d better do something quick.’ All that look got was a coaching visit. I said, well, Carlos Rosa should be ready to go here if we can delay just a bit longer. In comes Cano, out goes the ball (it was a beautiful shot BTW) 10 seconds later, Carlos Rosa is jogging in all warmed up.

After the predictable Hillman outcome my buddy says, ‘So, it’s been a long season, huh?’