Royals Primacy A Kansas City Royals blog

Early Season Thoughts

Posted by: Casey on April 16, 2010.

To start things out, I’d like to go ahead and say I haven’t been as dedicated as I was last year when it came to Royals baseball. I still read the stories and check the sites, but as far as watching the team goes, I’ve probably only watched about half the innings played thus far.

I completely expected this season to be depressing in that I thought a 70-92 season would be a huge plus. Everyone in baseball knew this bullpen was going to be absolutely terrible, excluding those manager’s in the central who get to benefit from the atrocity that is Farnsworth/Mendoza.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the Kansas City bullpen,” Leyland said. “I think the Kansas City bullpen has a lot of fine arms down there, and for whatever reason, we’ve been fortunate to get a couple timely hits.”

The surprise for me has been the impact made thus far from some new guys. Ankiel has hit the ball better than I thought he would, Kendall has hit well for average, Pods has done his share of OBP (.525), and I’ve even been happy with Getz’s performance. I was critical of all of these acquisitions (like why are we putting a 12 million dollar outfielder at DH?) and signing two outfielders in Ankiel/Pods. Granted, Guillen isn’t a good fielder, and apparently he almost died this off-season, so I can see where DM was going with this. He even probably figured Callaspo as the DH in case Guillen did lose the battle to blood clots in the legs.

Yet he did nothing about the god-awful bullpen, except bringing in a career 7.73 era pitcher in Mendoza and some non-roster invitee’s who have actually ended up being the lone not-so-dark spots in the bullpen. Like I said a few days ago on twitter.. The fact that Dayton Moore chilled all winter being comfortable with what our 2010 bullpen was going to be like, without really doing anything about it, makes me think his days as our GM should be numbered.

However, they’ve exceeded our expectations with the bat, base-running has been terrible aside from some good stolen bases, starting pitching has been decent except apparently Zack has some new (or not) mental issues (plus he doesn’t have the world’s best catcher in Miguel Olivo anymore). Meche is still a pussy and Bannie/Hoch/Davies have performed well. I thought Zack might struggle a bit early-season this year with hitters taking different approaches against him now that he’s not just a baby-faced righty.

My outlook: don’t drink the powder blue kool-aid. This team was a 100 loss team a year ago had Zack not gone un-hittable, and the bullpen will continue to be a liability to the rest of our team’s health. The bats won’t keep this ridiculous pace, and our starters will probably slide a little. Consider this: the Royals lead the league in hitting (.307 average), and with the decent starting pitching we’ve got, we are still only 4-6.