Spring training begins in less than a week and among the unsigned remaining free agents is former Royals great Ross Gload.

Gload, age 35, hit .257/.276/.327 for the Phillies last year, although his grit and moxie no doubt helped them to a division title. He was still useful as of 2010, when he posted a 114 OPS+, almost exclusively as a pinch-hitter. He is still a great glove man, and by my best estimates, he tallied over 173 Ron Polk Points last year.*

*-I did not tally these stats per se, but it feels like he had that many.

So why are teams passing on Gload? Is he waiting for the right offer? Or is he being blackballed?

Gload has made over $7.4 million in his Major League career, over $3 million of that with the Royals. I'm sure he has the luxury of sitting back in his mansion and waiting for the right offer, but I still want to see Gload explode for a contender.

There has been a lot of talk about what the Royals 2012 rotation might look like. A conventional wisdom (which has come at least partially from the Royals front office) has emerged that there are three pitchers who, barring injury, will definitely be in the rotation: Bruce Chen, Luke Hochevar and Jonathan Sanchez. Then, there is a larger group of pitchers who are competing for the last two spots.

Given his 2011 performance, career MLB stats and his scouting reports, I have been both bewildered and frustrated that Felipe Paulino hasn't been considered a lock for the rotation. There's a lot to like there, and it seems to me that his only serious competition is prospects who may or may not be Major League ready. Anyway, I thought it would be useful to see what the projection systems say about the Royals rotation candidates. For 10 pitchers, I compiled the ERA and FIP projections from CAIRO, ZiPS and PECOTA. Then I averaged the ERA and FIP projections and finally did a weighted average of those averages (CAIRO = 1, ZiPS = 2, PECOTA = 2). The results are after the jump.

Continue reading this post »

This is probably my favorite poem. One of the few that when I was teaching the students seemed to like as well. At least on their scale of enthusiasm.

(For video of the poet reading the poem and explaining the setting, click here.)

Happy Valentine's Day

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd--
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainess of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends could see:
A sculptor's sweet comissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
Their air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone finality
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Jonathan Sanchez sucks. He was a terrible acquisition because, despite his high strikeout totals (9.4 K/9 career), he just walks too many people (4.8 BB/9 career).

Jeff Francis sucks, too. You see, despite his low walk totals (1.9 BB/9 career), he doesn't strike out enough people (5.9 K/9 career).

Continue reading this post »

Royals Review Community Compilation Album Vol. IV -- Now It's Personal -- The New Breed -- The Return of RRCCA -- Training Camp -- RRCCA: Legacy -- The Quickening

Continue reading this post »

I meant to post the shortly after the first post of 6 Items You Don't Need From the Official Online Store of the Kansas City Royals, but I got distracted and lazy. It never was my attention to draw precious revenue away from our beloved small-market team by pointing out items you shouldn't buy, so in the interest of fairness (and at the risk of looking like a wannabe cracked.com author as someone pointed out), below are 8 items you might actually want to purchase to show your support for the Royals.

Continue reading this post »

I've already done a team win projection for the 2012 Royals based on the individual player projections from the CAIRO and ZiPS systems. I have now done it with the recently released PECOTA projections. You can look at the ZiPS version for details on my methodology. I also put together the projections from the three systems for a mega-projection. All results after the jump.

Continue reading this post »

My friends and I are making our fantasy league a keeper league, and we are looking for two more people to play in our league. Our league is a little different than most:

We play head-to-head instead of playing rotisserie

Because of our scoring system, pitchers have more value than your average fantasy league

We have not set the exact rules, but I think that you will be able to keep 6 or 7 players from your major-league roster. We are also having a separate draft for the minor leagues. You get to keep a minor league player until they get called up to the majors. Once they are called up, you get a week to bring them up to your roster, or they hit the regular free agent market. I don't know how many prospects you get to keep , maybe five or six.

If you have any interest in joining our league, please email me at cmoylan@ku.edu. We are having a live draft sometime the first two weeks of March. If you want to join and there is a particular date that works/doesn't work for you, let me know. The draft will be in Lawrence, so being able to drive there is a requirement to join the league. So if you were hoping to join a serious-but-not-insane fantasy league, consider joining our league.

With pitchers and catchers only 9 days away from reporting for the beginning of a highly anticipated season, I'm finding it harder and harder to wait to fill the void that's been missing since September. One way to do that of course is through shameless consumerism, so today I perused the official Royals shop online, which you can find here.

In the interest of helping dedicated diehards like myself (and potential bandwagoners jumping on to watch the fruits of the BFSE develop here) decide how to show off their bursting Mission: 2012 pride, I've compiled a list of 6 items available online that definitely won't do that.

Continue reading this post »

Royals fans are tough.

Really, we are. There is much disdain among us for the "Best Fans in Baseball" (or BFIB), the fans of the St. Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals have been very good for a decade and have won two World Series. Somehow, they managed to do this with a $105,433,572 payroll. According to a reliable source (alright, Wikipdedia), the metropolitan area of St. Louis is 2.8 million people, compared to 2.2 million for KC. The argument goes that the reason a relatively small metro area can support the Cardinals enough to have that payroll is because the fans are, well, the BFIB.

Royals fans can and do argue with this notion. However, Royals fans haven't encountered a similar situation in two decades. One of the reasons why the Cardinals have so many fans is because of the amount of bandwagon fans, and this is true for every winning team. With our real life team of Avengers looking to fight the evil Cardinals and Red Sox of the world, we expect good things on the horizon; namely, winning. But with winning comes something that core Royals fans will have to endure.

Bandwagon fans.

Continue reading this post »