Recently the Wall Street Journal ran an article on differences in the strike zone that is called on different players. I had problems with it in that it did not group players according to if they were a left, right or switch hitter. I have shown the differences in the past as seen in this article at Beyond the Boxscore.
I decided to go ahead and look at the Royals and see if there were also any descrepencies. I created heat maps for all the left and right handed hitters (switch hitters are a little more difficult) and grouped them together according to batter handedness. All the data is from 2007 to 2010 and the scale is based on the ratio of called strikes compared to the sum of called balls and called strikes (ratio = (called strikes/(called balls + called strikes)).
Here is a look at the left handed hitters (follow the green bands as they are the ones for the 50/50 zone).
The only major differences I can see is that Maier has to deal with a larger zone and Ankiel has a smaller zone than Pods and DeJesus
Now here is the comparison of the righties:
Aviles looks to have the largest zone of the group with Guillen having the smallest.
Just looking at these Royals hitters, the new players in the league have a larger strike zone to deal with, while the veteran players have a smaller zone.