Royals Authority

A trip to the east side and the Royals bats fall into another slumber. It felt so promising after the Twins series where the Royals performed the requisite role of favorite and brushed aside the upstarts with ease. Not your time, Minnesota.

The Cardinals, as much as it pains to write, are good. Very good. They are not the Twins. They have been to the top of their division, they have been the favorites and they enjoy the view from the penthouse, thank you very much. My snide May remarks about them being “the second-best team in Missouri” was wishful thinking on my part.

Friday’s game was painful. Five hits. Four of them were of the infield variety. We know the Royals like to ride the singles train, but this was the kiddie version at the mall that goes around in a tight circle at under 5 mph. Pathetic. Hats off to Cardinal starter Jaime Garcia, though. He throws a nasty sinker and has had his struggles with shoulder injuries the last couple of seasons. It’s a minor miracle he’s still in the game. Add to the gross factor was Yordano Ventura exiting the game after he lost feeling in two fingers and the thumb on his pitching hand. Yeah. Friday sucked.

Saturday’s game was painful as well, but for different reasons. With a lefty on the mound for the Cardinals, Ned Yost opted for his NL Special Right-Handed Hitting Lineup with Alex Gordon the only left-handed bat in the game. When your lineup features Christian Colon, Omar Infante, the pitcher and rolls over to Alcides Escobar, you’re going to struggle to score. It’s not a coincidence the Royals only two runs on the day came on solo home runs. This was not a lineup constructed for the big inning.

Which brings me to another point: Yost has to address his lineup. Not in a week, a la Bobby Cox. Today. We are at a critical point in the Royals offensive struggles. It’s not so much about shaking things up. It’s about righting a wrong. Let’s start at leadoff. Escobar has to go. He is hitting .255/.285/.341. Unacceptable for a leadoff hitter. The only team that has gotten worse production out of the top of their order is Oakland. If you go by OPS+, the Royals have actually been the worst team in the AL at the leadoff spot. You simply cannot have October thoughts and have Escobar leading off. I understand he was the guy at the top of the order for September and October. Spare me the arguments for keeping him at leadoff. That was six weeks in a six year career. The Royals got lucky with Escobar at the end of last year. Luck tends to run out.

From Baseball Reference, here is the performance of American League leadoff batters by team, ranked by on base percentage. You’ll find the Royals second from the bottom. They also have the fewest total bases and their slugging percentage is the worst among AL teams. Don’t even get me started about their 10 walks. There is no way you can shine the turd of this table:

While the leadoff spot has been an issue all season, it’s also time for Omar Infante to take a seat on the bench for an extended vacation. The dude has five hits (all singles) in his last 62 at bats. One walk and 14 strikeouts. And Yost still insists he’s the choice at second base. You know my feelings on the situation.

And Alex Rios. Oh. My. God. I haven’t seen outfield play that uninspiring since Kevin McReynolds couldn’t be bothered back in the early ’90s. There is a decided lack of focus out there, which isn’t surprising given Rios’s past. When he’s going good, he’s locked in and a valuable performer. When he’s not… It’s all downhill. It’s a shame he suffered the injury to his hand in Minnesota because it felt like his season was going to be about the former. Now, it’s about the latter. He took longer than expected to recover from his injury (which also wasn’t a surprise to those who have followed his career) and has yet to find his swing since returning. And now it appears he’s carrying the offensive struggles to the field. Lackadaisical and careless. That’s how you describe his defense over the last couple of weeks.

Glaring holes at second base and right field. The more things change…

OK. You’ve read this far and are thinking, “Enough with the bitching. What’s your solution?” Fair. Here’s my suggested lineup:

Gordon
Moustakas
Morales
Hosmer
Cain
Perez
Rios
Escobar
Colon

I’m not entirely pleased with the construction here, but I have my best hitters stacked one through four, so I can’t complain too much. It happens that the Royals best hitters this year are left-handed, so the lineup dispenses with Yost’s favored LRLRLR kind of alternating of bats, but so it goes. Cain has just six extra base hits in his last 30 games, so he needs to drop. I’d like to move him lower, but Perez should never hit in the top half, in my opinion. Rios, as I mentioned above, has lost me, but I don’t see Dyson as an everyday alternative. A spot start, fine. Not six days a week. Although I could be talked into a Dyson/Rios platoon. But you think Rios has checked out now? Wait until he only starts half the games.

Colon is my second baseman, but like the Royals, I’m not happy about it. His defense doesn’t do anything for me and he continues to be overmatched by big league pitching. Neither facet of his game is going to improve.

You know what’s funny about all of this? The Royals are still in first place in the Central. They still have the best record in the AL. That’s great that the Royals are still in the pole position, but smart teams are constantly analyzing their operation and identifying their weaknesses. With the current offensive struggles, you could make the case the Royals are already not moving fast enough to make those critical adjustments. Yost likes to point out he doesn’t do panic. It’s not panicking when you are repositioning your hitters in order to put your team in a better position to win.

Baseball is a funny game. The Royals were getting dressed for their own funeral on Saturday. They won on Sunday, but it was the finale of a 2-4 homestand. They had lost nine out of 11 and had fallen out of first place. Three days later and the Royals are riding a four game winning streak. They are back in first and - catch this fact - they own the best record in the American League.

After a couple of close games to open the series in Minnesota, the offense came to life on Wednesday. Well, most of the offense. It seems Omar Infante is doing his best to keep his game in reverse. Since his six game hitting streak ended on May 22, Infante has five hits in his last 55 at bats. All five hits are singles. Oh, he has one walk. It’s a brutal offensive performance that, except for that six game stretch in mid-May, has been roundly awful.

We’ve seen enough. It’s time for the Royals to permanently remove Infante from the lineup.

To determine just how awful Infante has been in a historical context, I ran a report at the Baseball Reference Play Index. I limited my search to players whose primary position was second base and further narrowed it by searching for those who had an on base percentage less than .226 and a slugging percentage less than .300. Those are Infante’s current numbers through Tuesday. Oh, I also set a minimum number of plate appearances to 175.

Here’s the list.

On thing you can quickly glean from the list is that Infante is the best of this ragged bunch. He should be, since I set the parameters for OBP and slugging at his current numbers. Everyone else would fall below his level of performance. Another thing to note is that as much as the Royals fanbase actively loathed Chris Getz, he’s not on this list. Minor miracles and all that. The other, main thing that should leap off this page of the Interweb is that most of these players had their playing time either limited or cut short due to their overall offensive ineptitude.

We are at the point where the Royals are going to be giving the lion’s share of the playing time to a historically bad player at his position. Now, if this were the Old Royals, we’d just nod our heads collectively and say, “Same old Royals.” Except this isn’t the Old Royals. It’s not even a reasonable facsimile. This is a team with the best record in the American League and it’s a team with designs on another October run. Infante alone can’t derail this effort. He’s simply one of nine guys in the lineup. But he can certainly kill more than his share of rallies or otherwise negatively impact the game from an offensive standpoint.

It’s not as if the Royals don’t have options. Christian Colon has spent this season collecting a major league paycheck and service time. For his efforts, he has been allowed to swing the bat in anger 74 times and posted a slash line of .269/.329/.313. That’s not great, but that’s a helluva lot better than the production the Royals have been getting at the position.

The Royals (who, if they are being honest, are the last defenders of Infante) will cite Infante’s glove as reason enough to keep him around. There is some validity to the argument that his defense is worthy of discussion. To this point, Infante has saved four runs at second according to The Fielding Bible. That’s tied for seventh among fielders at the keystone. His plus/minus rating is at +5, meaning he has fielded five more balls than would be expected of him at the position. Again, that gets him on the leaderboard, ranking seventh among all second basemen. From the limited opportunity we’ve had to see Colon in the field, he doesn’t impress. The question the Royals have to ask themselves: Is the team better off with Colon’s bat in the lineup or Infante’s glove? Does the sum of the team improve if you replace Infante with Colon?

I think the answer is yes. I think Colon’s defense may be below average at second base, but Infante has become so inept offensively, replacing him with a corpse could be a net gain. The Royals? I’m not sure they’re at that point yet. And I think it’s easy to figure out why that is.

You want to identify the main reason Infante is still haunting the lineup? How about he’s only in year two of a four-year deal. He’s set to pocket $7.5 million this year, $7.75 million in 2016 and another $8 million in ’17. (And he can also make an extra $500,000 if Royals fans somehow get him voted to the All-Star Game. I say it’s worth it. But I have a twisted sense of humor.) Oh, and then there’s the requisite Royals option for $10 million for 2018 with a $2 million buyout. So we’ve got a player who is firmly in his decline years and the Royals are on the hook for $24.75 million for the remainder of his contract.

There isn’t a perfect offensive stat to encapsulate his offensive decline, but wOBA can come close enough. From Fangraphs, we can see just how Infante has stumbled at the plate in recent seasons.

Yes, there is an uptick in 2013, (it’s actually the best year of his career) but with below league average numbers in all other seasons since 2010, it’s safe to say that the ’13 season was an outlier. And it just so happens that was the year before Infante hit the free agent market and signed with the Royals. Rotten timing. A horrific contract results and the Royals are on the hook for a player who is no longer worthy of a spot on a major league roster.

(It’s weird how these contracts happen. The Royals bought on Infante’s career year and thought they would get a couple more years like that at the plate. A year later, the Royals bet against Kendrys Morales and his declining numbers. One deal worked out. The other deal… Not so much.)

Every team has a weak link. No team is perfect from one through nine. And the Royals collectively are good enough to cover for someone who isn’t pulling their fair share. At this point, given the depths Infante has fallen offensively, it’s time for the club to give him an extended break. Christian Colon may not be the long-term answer, but he’s a better option today than Infante. That’s pretty clear. And benching Infante won’t turn this team into some offensive juggernaut. That’s not the goal. The goal is simple: Try to field the best players at their position. Right now, there’s no way Infante is the best option for the Royals at second base.

The contract limits the Royals options. It’s toxic enough, no one will trade for him unless the Royals eat a sizable portion. It’s large enough the team certainly won’t release him. The only thing the Royals can do is put him on the bench. Hopefully, he would accept his demotion with some grace. The bench is the only place the Royals can stash him so he stops hurting the team. This needs to happen soon.

Omar Infante had a bad year. A very bad year.

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. The Royals have suffered a black hole at the keystone for years. Really ever since Frank White vacated the position way back in 1990. Carlos Febles, Tony Graffanino, Mark Grudzielanek, Chris Getz… There have been some decent individual performances here and there, but nothing really of note. Not that Infante was to be the second coming of White. No one would ever suggest such a thing.

But by signing Infante to a four-year, $30 million contract before the 2014 season, the Royals finally felt as though they would have some stability at a position where it had been lacking.

Infante reported to camp in what was probably less than the best shape of his life. He battled shoulder soreness in spring training that dogged him throughout the season. The shoulder issues compounded into a back problem in the middle of the year. Oh yeah, he was also hit in the face by a pitch the first week of the season. Through all the issues, Infante only hit the disabled list once (in May) and played in 135 games.

It was not a good thing that he played in so many games.

Normally, Infante can be counted on for a little bit of power (relative to the average second baseman), some decent contact and some solid defense. None of that happened in 2014.

Infante slugged .337 for the Royals last summer, hitting six home runs and 21 doubles. It was his lowest slugging percentage since he posted a miserable .238 SLG way back in 2003 in 69 games for the Tigers. Anything the Royals received in the power department from a second baseman would be a bonus given the Royals most recently suffered through the Getz Era at the position, but surely they expected more. After all, Infante had hit 12 and 10 home runs in his previous two seasons while posting slugging percentages of .419 and .450.

Infante’s batted ball profile didn’t change much from year to year. He hits a line drive around 22 percent of the time and a fly ball at a rate of around 39 percent. From Texas Leaguers, here is a spray chart from his 2012 and 2013 seasons combined. Note the hits clustering in the outfield from left and center. There’s a smaller and shallower cluster of hits to right. This makes sense for a batter like Infante. If he’s going to drive the ball, he’s going to have to generate the bat speed, get the barrel out in front and pull the ball.

Compare that to last season.

Not much difference, is there? As I said above, Infante’s batted ball profile didn’t shift much at all from 2012 and 2013. Meanwhile, not only his slugging percentage found new depths, his batting average suffered. His .252 BA was his lowest since 2005 and was certainly fueled by an abnormally low (for Infante) .275 BABIP. And since Infante doesn’t walk (career 5.5 percent walk rate) his on base percentage is heavily dependent upon the base hit. So… yeah. His offensive numbers were down across the board.

We can surmise his shoulder and back issues had a lot to do with his struggles. He was still making the usual types and amount of contact, but he was making less good contact than his norm. His contact rate of 85.8 percent was right in line with his career rates, so it’s an easy conclusion to reach. Since we’re using the 2012 and 2013 seasons as the kind of benchmarks of the player the Royals hoped they were signing, let’s take a look at how Infante has hit different categories of pitches over the last three seasons to see if we can peel a few more layers.

One thing that jumps out is how his performance against breaking stuff and offspeed pitches has been in lockstep over the last three years. Another thing that jumps out is how his performance against fastballs and sinker in 2013 was an outlier. (His BABIP in 2013 was .333.) And a final note is how he struggled against every category of pitch last summer. And it wasn’t like pitchers decided he could handle the heat so they offered more offspeed and breaking pitches. Infante actually saw more fastballs in ’14 than he did in each of the previous two seasons. Again, the theory is he was hurt and struggled to get around on the ball, so he saw more fastballs because while he could make contact as usual, he couldn’t generate the bat speed to truly drive the ball.

What I’m suggesting is that it wouldn’t be crazy to see a bounce-back season from Infante at the plate. As long as he’s healthy. PECOTA agrees and has Infante as their top gainer in WARP with a projection of .278/.308/.380. That’s still well short of 2012 and 2013, but let’s not be picky. It’s an improvement over last year.

Defensively, Infante was pretty average. The Fielding Bible had him at +4 defensive runs saved, which is kind of where we would expect him to be given his past performances. Inside Edge says he was below average, fielding 97.3 percent of the “routine” plays, which puts him 17th out of 20 qualified second basemen. On “likely” plays, Infante made 72.2 percent. He ranked 14th. From Fangraphs, you can see for yourself how Infante did in the field.

I’ve heard some whispers among those in the Royals brain trust that Infante’s injuries also limited him in the field. That’s probably fair, but I don’t think it really held him back all that much. A fair assessment of Infante’s defense would be “competent” and that’s what I think the Royals got from him last summer.

Infante still has three years (plus an option) on his Royals contract. History will probably judge this deal harshly as it seems a stretch the Royals - or anyone, for that matter - can get value from a 35 year old second baseman, which will be Infante’s age in 2017. In the short-term, there’s a strong possibility we will see a different player at the plate in 2015. A healthy Infante can be a solid player for the Royals in the coming season.

It all happened so fast.

Let’s rewind ourselves just a bit. The first five and a half innings were blueprint Royals baseball. They led 2-1. Their runs scored on an Alex Gordon bomb and an Erik Kratz sacrifice fly. Danny Duffy was looking good. He got two quick outs to start the bottom of the sixth. Nolan Arenado swung at the first pitch he saw and hit a routine grounder to Christian Colon at third. Colon throws off target and in the dirt, Billy Butler can’t grab it on the bounce, and Arenado is safe. Willin Rosario singles on the next pitch and Duffy walks Corey Dickerson on four pitches.

Then, the dagger. Matt McBride crushes a 95 mph belt-high fastball and sends it just over the fence in left.

Grand slam. Ballgame.

That was it. Seven pitches. An error, a single, a walk, and a home run. Duffy spun 102 pitches on the evening. Yet seven stinking pitches define the game.

Duffy really pitched a good game. He threw 76 fastballs, 14 change-ups and 12 curves. It’s a pitching mix that’s notable because he’s throwing curves about 23 percent of the time and usually throws more curves than changes. I’m guessing it was a Mile High game plan to move away from the curve. It seemed to work for most of the game. Duffy couldn’t put hitters away in the first and the Rockies featured a couple extended plate appearances, but he settled in and managed his pitch count well.

Hey, they can’t win them all. It only feels like it when they get on a serious roll.

A couple of other notes from the game:

— The error in the sixth is on Colon. Entirely. Sure, Butler had the opportunity to grab the throw on the bounce and he didn’t. But that’s a throw that has to be made. Billy has played what I would term “more than acceptable” defense at first. In the past, when I watched him play in the field, the thing that stood out was his footwork. It looked like he had a peg leg. (Insert your own “Hey, that’s why he’s so slow” quote here. Or if you’re creative, something about how he’s a pirate.) Anyway, he could field with slightly below average range and he could catch the ball. He just didn’t look comfortable around the bag. Now though, that’s changed. I’m not going to nominate him for the Eric Hosmer Gold Glove for The Most Amazing Defensive Excellence You’ve Ever Seen At First Base, but I will say that I don’t notice the poor footwork. Which probably means it’s gone.

Billy takes a ton of grief from a segment of the Royals fan base. While his offensive production early in the year certainly deserved criticism, he’s capable of playing an all around game.

Besides, we’ve seen Hosmer fail to come up with a few of those exaggerated scoops of his in the past. It’s not an easy play for a first baseman. Especially on the backhand.

— Salvador Perez was a late scratch which was termed as a “precautionary” measure by the Royals. Ummmm… Who’s worried. Perez, you will recall, left Monday’s game after straining his right knee while running the bases. Ned Yost had him in the lineup on Tuesday. Ho-hum, nothing to see here. Sadly, this is Royals business as usual. I know their training staff gets accolades, but why on earth would you play your catcher, a guy who has already seen action behind the plate in 112 of the Royals 125 games, the day after he left the game with a knee issue? Give him a full day to see how it feels. He could probably use another day off anyway. But the Royals send him back out there and he’s unable to go on Wednesday.

Then late word comes that Perez will have a “precautionary” MRI on his knee tomorrow.

Stay tuned.

— Speaking of Royals doing Royals things, Josh Willingham saw action in right field for the first time since 2009. And he made a couple of catches. He didn’t look comfortable out there, but he made the plays. I understand what Yost was doing by loading his lineup with right-handed hitters against the lefty Jorge de la Rosa and there’s no DH in the National League park.

I’m just relieved it worked out.

— And finally, that set lineup that Yost insists on using is starting to slowly drive me to insanity. Alex Gordon hitting fifth? Omar Infante second? I continue to maintain that if the Royals fail to make the playoffs, we will be able to trace it to the obstinance of Yost as it comes to the lineup. Sure, weird things happen like Infante hitting three doubles in a game, but the fact is he’s been an abysmal offensive performer for most of the season. Move him down. Move your best hitter (and MVP candidate) up in the lineup where he can bat more than three times in a game.

It’s not rocket science, but Yost does everything he can to make it so.