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"Sometime after he quit playing...someone asked (Dan Quisenberry) why he settled in Kansas City. After all, he was a California kid. He had played all over the country. He had enough money to live wherever he wanted to live. 

'This is home,' he said quietly. 

'But why?' he was asked. 'Why is this home?'

He smiled and shrugged. 'It's like baseball,' he said. 'You don't ask why home plate is there. You just pitch the ball over it.'" 

— Joe Posnanski

Hall of Famers Vs The Royals In Kansas City

This one came about in a roundabout way. There was some back and forth on the Twitters today about forgotten Royals players, which lead me to look up how many players have played exactly one game with the team. Turns out there are nine such players, only three of whom got a plate appearance, and of those only Matt Tupman got a hit. (Tupman's 1-for-1 with a single in 2008 means he will forever have a career line of 1.000/1.000/1.000. I actually remember watching that single.) I clicked over to the one game Gary Martz played with KC on July 8, 1975, and saw that in Martz's lone career MLB game, he got to play with Hall of Famers George Brett and Harmon Killebrew and against Robin Yount and Hank Aaron. Not too shabby. I was especially intrigued by Hank Aaron playing in KC. I think of Aaron as just an NL guy, forgetting he played '75 and '76 with the Brewers. Turns out the Hammer played at Royals Stadium 9 times, hitting career homer number 737 against Al Fitzmorris there on May 9, 1975. It was his only homer off the Royals. That got me wondering what other Hall of Famers have played the Royals that might surprise me, so I went digging through the modern marvel that is Baseball-Reference.com to come up with this master list of regular season games played by Hall of Famers vs. the Royals in Kansas City. Here is that list (broken down into games played at Municipal and Royals/Kauffman Stadiums):

Would you have ever guessed that Billy Williams, Tony Perez, Fergie Jenkins, Ron Santo, Joe Morgan, Hoyt Wilhelm and Juan Marichal all played against the Royals in Kansas City?

Goose Gossage made his career debut at Municipal Stadium with a scoreless inning pitched on April 16, 1972.

Juan Marichal pitched in 11 American League games in his career, all with the '74 Red Sox, and one of them came at Royals Stadium. The Royals knocked him around for 7 runs in 7.1 innings, with Amos Otis and Cookie Rojas tripling and Fran Healy homering off the past his prime star.

HOFers Mike Schmidt and Ozzie Smith also played in KC in World Series games.

HOFers Willie Mays, Johnny Bench and Willie Stargell played in the July 24, 1973 Royals Stadium All-Star Game.


Games played by Hall of Famers for the Royals in Kansas City:
1366 George Brett
51 Harmon Killebrew
16 Orlando Cepeda
7 Gaylord Perry

Pic Dump III

Wathan & Bo argue with replacement umps at a spring training game

1888-89 KC Cowboys manager Bill Watkins

1922 Blues

Prince Fielder Comps

I don't have much new to add to the Prince Fielder hubbub, but I did crunch a bunch of numbers to average what his top 10 similar batters through the age of 27 did in the next nine years of their careers. The numbers reflect what everyone except Mike Ilitch expects: two or three more highly productive years followed by a sharp decline during the bulk of the insane nine year contract. I expect Fielder to outperform the average of his comps by a bit—he has averaged 4.4 fWAR over the last five seasons, so it would be reasonable to expect similar production for the next couple of years, whereas his comps project just a 3.3 WAR in 2012 and '13. Fielder has been incredibly durable so far in his career, and his comps don't keep up with his playing time (of course, he probably won't be able to either). Still, I would hate to have the last five or six years of that contract looming over my team's future. The problem for the Royals of course is that Fielder's remaining productive years may overlap with what is the Royals hoped for window.

Here is the boring explanation of the below numbers: The top is Fielder's actual career to date, and the bottom is the average of his top 10 comps. To get the WAR numbers, I took the OBP & SLG of his comps and plugged them into this spreadsheet. I set the league average wOBA to .325, and rated Fielder at -5 UZR/150 at first base for each season (which is kind since he has been a -6.4 over his career and should only get worse). I also plugged the numbers in at DH, but it turned out WAR came out almost exactly the same for a -5 UZR/150 first baseman as for a DH. The last line totals the age 28-36 average seasons of his comps.

So nothing earth shattering here. Fielder joining the division is probably bad news for the Royals in the short term and good news in the long term.

Royals & A's Defense Independent Perfect Games

My main strength as a blogger is finding cool ideas from other people and applying them to the Royals. The latest such idea to tickle my fancy is defense independent perfect games (DIPG), as dreamed up by David Wishinsky. He defined a DIPG as a nine inning game with no walks or home runs allowed. As suggested by Tom Tango, zero hit-by-pitches should also probably be included, which I have for my lists below. I have also included eight inning complete DIPG, of which there have been six in Royals history. There is yet to be an extra inning DIPG by a Royals player. There have been 96 regular season DIPG by the Royals, or about 2.2 per season. They have gotten more rare as complete games have; In the 2000s, there have been nine DIPG, or only .75 per season. No Royals pitcher pulled the trick in 2010 or '11.

Zack Greinke's insane start in 2009 shows up with four DIPG between April 18 and May 26. He only had eight starts in that span.

Kevin Appier might be the best pitcher in team history, but he only had one DIPG, and it came in an eight inning loss. Bret Saberhagen pulled the trick an impressive 15 times in the regular season, plus once in a pretty memorable World Series game seven.

Most DIPG games:

16: Bret Saberhagen

10: Mark Gubicza

7: Dennis Leonard

7: Larry Gura

6: Al Fitzmorris

5: Dick Drago

The team's record in DIPG is 84-12. Saberhagen took four of the losses. 

Tom Tango also suggested making the definition stricter by requiring 13 strikeouts in an eight inning game and 15 K in a nine inning game (the reasoning behind those numbers being that the pitcher would have a 0.00 FIP for the game). No Royals player has reached that height. It has only happened 12 times since 1919 in all MLB. The most strikeouts a Royals pitcher has had in a DIPG is 10; Greinke did it twice, Mark Gubicza once and Rich Gale once.

The Royals have been on the wrong end of a DIPG 99 times; Catfish Hunter, Jimmy Key, and LaMarr Hoyt lead the way with three DIPG against the Royals each--except Hunter did it again in the '76 ALCS, the only pitcher to do it vs. the Royals in the playoffs.

The full list of Royals and KC A's DIPGs after the jump.

80-82: Some Early 2012 Projections

I've been having fun with a cool spreadsheet developed by Jeff Zimmerman that allows you to plug in expected playing time and performance for a full team and an expected win-loss record is spit out. Check out Jeff's post about it here. I've entered in my current guesses for the 2012 Royals (subject to change, but informed by past performance, Bill James projections, fan projections on Fangraphs, and my gut), and the magic spreadsheet says 80-82. As you can see, I'm not bullish on the pitching. Many of the hurlers have potential to put together better years than I've entered, but their track records don't inspire confidence. See any projections you think are way off?

Merry Christmas Baseball Fans!

December 24, 1947 Kansas City Call