The Kansas City Royals HiV LOB, Week Three

Every once in a while, we come up with a great new feature idea, then promptly ditch it like a prom date with crabs. This will likely be one of those, and we will likely be Debbie Downers in weeks that the Royals drop both series in which they play. This has most certainly been one of those weeks. Numbers on it, after the jump.

While the Royals showed some base-path improvement in week two, they lost some important ground in the Central this week, squandering matches to both Cleveland and Detroit. It is, as they say, a hard knock life, as the hits vs. left-on base would suggest.

Week Three

4/21 @ CLE: 7-8 (L); 13 hits, six left on
4/22 @ CLE: 2-0 (W); nine hits, six left on
4/23 @ CLE: 2-5 (L); five hits, eight left on
4/24 vs. DET: 1-6 (W); eight hits, two left on
4/25 vs. DET: 1-9 (L); six hits, seven left on
4/26 vs. DET: 3-2 (L); four hits, nine left on

The week's totals: 45 base hits, 20 runs scored, 37 stranded. Compared to last week, the Royals had six fewer hits, they left just as many runners on, and brought a dozen fewer home. The big difference of course being the inability to get those runners home, translating to three losses and two wins, versus the opposite last week.

The season's totals now sit at 141 hits, 70 runs, and 121 left on. Heading into tonight, Kansas City sits at .500 with a 9-9 record. If good/playoff teams are supposed to average 800 runs a season, then the Royals will not qualify as either. At this pace, according to my special-education calculations, this would put them on pace to score 630. It would also put them on pace to log nearly 1300 base hits, which, with no evidence to support such a claim, would suggest that the Royals need to bring roughly 60 percent of the runners they got on base full circle. I'm not a sabremetrician, but that doesn't seem like too much to ask. If you can't manage the base paths well enough to bring a little over half of your hits in for runs, you certainly don't belong in October baseball. It's of course still April, and there have been some decent pitching performances. There's also the notion that the Royals' bats are still slowly awakening, but for my money, little of that matters if you can't transform those sticks into funs.