Goal #2: Playing St. Willie Less
Thanks to both injuries and organizational incompetence, the Royals ended up playing Willie Bloomquist way too much in 2009. St. Willie logged career highs in games played (125) and plate appearances (468) by wide margins. But hey, any time you can pencil in an all-batting-average-hitter-with-a-horrible-batting-average-and-no-position into the starting lineup, you pretty much have to do it.
After a hot start, the beloved Bloomquist cooled, and ended the season with a .265/.308/.355 line. Honestly, it was a bizarre season for Bloomquist, who completely lost/abandoned the OBP skills that he'd shown in 2008 (.377 OBP) in favor of an extremely small power surge (4 homers!) He apparently took the one skill he'd developed in his early 30s and decided to go away from it. (The Royals, where a 70 point OBP drop happens and is praised!)
The Royals played Bloomquist everywhere in 2009, and while a part of this can be attributed to the various owies which (supposedly) plagued the Royals in 2009 (robbing them of that 77 win season they'd earned), Bloomquist's playing time also wasn't entirely innocent. It wasn't like he wandered out of the desert as the last baseball player alive after World War III. No, the Royals like Bloomquist and think he helps them.
Bloomquist started 42 games in right field (where the greatest number of his PAs came) and 9 in left, after all, which is a sure sign of a broken baseball braintrust. They found ways to get him run, and they probably will continue to do so in 2010.
Yes, Bloomquist can nominally play a number of positions (most of them not well) but how does that give you flexibility of a desirable kind when the player isn't actually good? And it isn't like Bloomquist's flexibility allows the Royals to employ less flexible mashers at other postions either. Nope, the Royals have similarly bad options all over the place. There's nothing actually of quality being generated by this relationship. Nothing is being advanced here! It's like dating someone who brings nothing to the relationship physically, emotionally, intellectually or financially, yet saying they have the whole package.