Games » Oakland Athletics
Jun1The month of June
Lee Judge
The Kansas City Star
In the month of June, the Royals are playing the Oakland Athletics (losing record), the Minnesota Twins (losing record), the Pittsburgh Pirates (just barely over .500), the Milwaukee Brewers (losing record), the St. Louis Cardinals (just barely over .500), the Houston Astros (losing record) and the Tampa Bay Rays (who are actually playing well).
If the Royals are going to get back to .500, this would be a good month to gain some ground. By July 1, the Royals will have a much better idea of where this team stands. It’s a good time to win some ball games.
Game notes
• In the first inning, Jemile Weeks led off with a double and Seth Smith failed to move him over to third base. Josh Reddick followed that up with a fly ball to center — possibly too shallow to score Weeks. But Jemile can run, so it was a wasted opportunity for the A’s on night when there wouldn’t be many opportunities at all.
• Billy Butler did not make the same mistake. In the bottom of the first inning, he hit the ball deep enough to right center field to move Yuniesky Betancourt from second base to third. Yuni scored on a subsequent hit by Mike Moustakas.
• Yuni would have scored without Billy’s fly ball. Moose singled, Jeff Francoeur drove the ball to the gap and Eric Hosmer had an infield hit. But it’s nice to appreciate good baseball when you see it. And Billy’s ball to the right side made sure Betancourt would score.
• Francoeur continued to hit the ball hard, driving Coco Crisp to the right center field fence. It probably would have been a home run on the road, but in Kauffman Stadium, it was a long out.
• Oakland starter Bartolo Colon got slapped around a bit in the first and third innings, but started locating the ball down and away consistently and cruised through the next four innings.
• Skip ahead to the seventh. Oakland’s Coco Crisp got a call he didn’t like, and he let everyone know by snapping his head around and showing disgust. Umpires don’t like that. Unfortunately, the Royals’ Kelvin Herrera missed with the next couple of pitches and never got one close enough to allow the umpire to help him. If a pitcher knows the umpire is steaming, he can help himself out by putting something just off the plate. At that point, most umpires are dying to call a borderline pitch a strike.
• In the eighth inning with a two-run lead, the Royals’ Greg Holland walked the lead-off hitter. That is frowned upon. The lead-off hitter can’t hurt you — especially when he’s hitting .205. Walk him, and the tying run you bring to the plate can do some real damage. Fortunately, Holland got out of the inning with no further damage.
Outfield positioning
Every once in a while, someone else does a story, and I think, “Damn. I wished I’d thought of that.” Recently, Royals broadcaster Joel Goldberg did a couple of pieces on the pregame show about spray charts and defensive positioning. They were outstanding … dammit.
I recorded first-base Doug Sisson talking about outfield positioning, and here is a summary of what Doug had to say:
• Doug gets several charts on each hitter: one against right-handed pitching, one against left-handed pitching and charts showing what the hitter does once he has two strikes.
• The outfield is positioned to protect against the fastball. It’s an educated guess, and the goal is to cover about 75 percent of the outfield. One hundred percent would be nice, but it’s just not possible.
• Hitters generally tend to pull the ball on the ground, but fly balls’ patterns can be more erratic.
• “Straight up” is positioning the outfielders in line with third and second base (for right field), first and second base (for left field) and home plate and second base, kind of (for center field, although the center fielder has to play to one side of the mound or the other so he can see home plate).
• When playing a right-handed hitter to go to the opposite field, the center fielder and right fielder will shift a minimum of 10 steps. The backside outfielder (the left fielder) will stay home in case the pitcher hangs an off-speed pitch.
• Like I said earlier, the outfielders try to protect against the fastball. If the pitcher hangs a breaking pitch and it is hit into an unprotected gap (we saw that recently with Humberto Quintero), there’s not much the outfielders can do.
• If the outfielders set up to protect against a pull hitter, the center fielder and the pull-side outfielder will shift 10 steps minimum, and the off-side outfielder will move in and protect the line. (They figure a pull hitter won’t drive the ball the other way and is more apt to hit a flare the other way off the end of the bat.)
So now we can all pay attention to the outfield shifts as each hitter comes to the plate. That will tell us where the Royals expect the ball to be hit and when the pitcher missed a spot or hung a breaking ball.
Thanks to Doug Sisson and Joel Goldberg for the information.
Paulino
Broxton
Moustakas
Morgan Roesler
11 months, 3 weeks agoKeep. Sawing. Wood. Love it!
Tom Roesler
11 months, 3 weeks agoGotta start checking to see if my wife is logged into Facebook or not before posting. Haha.
Anyway, go Royals. This is fun!
Thayne Griffin
11 months, 3 weeks ago1-0 in June. Great start by Paulino - would have liked to see him go 7, but a great outing nonetheless.
John Wilson
11 months, 3 weeks agoPaulino has a knack of making innings “interesting”. If he didn’t do that, he could do complete games.
Broxton was beastly pitching the 9th.
Larry Tindle
11 months, 3 weeks agoLee, I remember thinking when Joel did that piece that he was stealing your ideas. Guess he covers more people, so it’s good he is doing those pieces.
Jim Fetterolf
11 months, 3 weeks agoPaulino looked effectively wild, 55 of 94 pitches for strikes, but it worked, 5 Ks, 8-2 ground outs to fly outs, suggests they were hitting the tops of balls fairly early in the count, even with three walks he was at 15 2/3rds pitches per inning, good efficiency. Is it too early to start the movement to extend Felipe Paulino:)?
How did Yuni’s ankle perform? Footwork a little more comfortable, a little more quickness on the first step? Maybe getting healed will help the coaching “take” on the stance and help his range.
Lee Judge
11 months, 3 weeks agoThayne: After the game Ned said he considered sending Paulino back out, but his pitch count was 94 and if Felipe put a runner on, Ned was going to the pen anyway.
Yost said the heck with fooling around—getting in trouble then trying to get out of it—and went right to Herrera.
John: Apparently, Paulino got breaking ball happy in the 4th, walked Ka’aihue and Inge and they had to get him back to his fastball.
The ability to correct in the middle of the inning and get out of it with no damage seems like a big deal to me.
Larry: If Joel stole the idea I stole it right back. He and I talk a lot and the exposure he’s given me on the pregame show has really helped the website.
Whoever does it, getting the information out to the fans so they can understand and appreciate what they’re seeing is a good thing.
I’ve learned an incredibly amount of baseball from the pros over the last two-plus years and it makes the game so much more enjoyable.
I hope it’s doing the same for all of you.
Donald Wilson
11 months, 3 weeks agoI really got tired of the TV announcers telling us how bad Oakland was. They gave every statistic possible and then some. Okay! SHUT UP!!!! I get the picture! ENOUGH ALREADY! Keep it up and it will come back to bite you!
Michael Cost
11 months, 3 weeks agoLee I am getting so excited about a couple minor leagures that they MUST pull up this year. Do you think you could get some info on what the team thinks about pulling up Myers and Odorizzi? I know they want to give Cain a chance - but man Myers is tearing it up!
Also - what are your thoughts on the team sending Falu back down while he is performing better than Gio?
Lee Judge
11 months, 3 weeks agoMichael: One of the things I’ve tried to avoid—when I’m thinking clearly—is pretending to have some expertise that I don’t actually possess.
I get to talk to the players and coaches on a regular basis and I then try to bring that information to the web site.
I have much less information on GM-issues. Having advised everybody to take what I say with a grain of salt, I’ll tell you what I’ve heard:
(And most of what I’ve heard comes from the Star’s beat writer, Bob Dutton who knows much more than I do when it comes to these issues.)
Odorizzi might be up this season, September call-up if not before then. It’s possible Myers might get a call-up at some point and play centerfield. (This comes from a Dutton chat currently available on KansasCity.com.)
A caution to fans who get excited about minor league numbers: I asked Mike Moustakas what the big difference was when he made the jump to the big leagues. Mike said EVERY at-bat is hard.
Other players confirmed this: team’s generally don’t have seven dynamite relievers on their big-league staff, so if a guy is terrific coming out of the pen he’s probably already up.
The No. 1 starter in Triple A might be a four or a five in the majors and you see that level of pitching every four or five nights.
So figure that in when you see exciting numbers out of Omaha.
As for Falu vs. Gio: Yuni gives the Royals the flexibility they need (someone to play second, short or third) and Yost said he likes Giavotella’s bat off the bench.
I don’t have any special information on this, but teams tend to give “their guys” (usually high-draft picks) every chance to succeed. If they do, it confirms the wisdom if drafting them in the first place.
No idea if that played into the Giavotella situation, though.
Robert Sailler
11 months, 3 weeks agoI would love to see the Royals get back to .500, but I don’t see how they will with the rotation. It’s going to be tough when three of the starters come from this pool: Hoch, Mazzaro, Adcock, Smith, Mendoza. That’s not a deep pool. What are your thoughts about the Royals trading a starting outfielder for a pitching prospect?
Jim Fetterolf
11 months, 3 weeks ago“What are your thoughts about the Royals trading a starting outfielder for a pitching prospect?”
Gordon might return a #3 if he heats up a little by the ASB. Pitching’s a premium item.
Lee Judge
11 months, 3 weeks agoRobert: In general, I agree with Jim. A lot more starting outfielders available than good pitchers.