George Toma On Willie Aikens's Saliva

“Most tobacco juice stains spat by ballplayers come out without much trouble. The exception is Willie Aikens. There's something in his saliva that makes his squirted juice tough to remove.”

—George Toma, October 25, 1980 The Sporting News

Royals Five Year Bests

My two most recent I70Baseball.com pieces have looked at the top three position players and pitchers for each rolling five year period of Royals history by rWAR. The following is what those lists looks like combining the hitters and hurlers to get the top three players regardless of position:

1969-73
16.2 WAR Amos Otis CF

13.9 WAR Dick Drago P
10.2 WAR John Mayberry 1B

Bad Outs On The Bases

Here's a little junk stat I just dreamt up. My goal was to measure how often a player makes a frustrating out on the basepaths relative to how often he is on base. There is no reward for good baserunning, only a penalty for making outs. That's why it's a "junk" stat. It is not an overall measure of baserunning. The "bad outs" bucket includes pick-offs, caught stealing, running into outs after a flyball, trying to stretch for an extra base after a hit, etc. I added those up and divided by total number of times on base minus home runs. (No one makes a bad out on the bases after hitting a home run.) The exact equation is (PickOffs+CaughtStealing+OutsOnBases)/((H-HR)+BB+HBP+ReachOnError). Here's how AL teams look through August 17:

If, like me, you feel like the Royals make a lot of frustrating outs, you are correct. I am surprised to see the saber-friendly Rays at the bottom of this list. Here is how individual Royals runners have done:

Let's hear it for the slow guys! They aren't adding anything with their speed, but at least they aren't driving us crazy creating outs on the bases either.

WPA Watch

Before his crazy hot streak in June, Alcides Escobar was on his way to setting a new low in Royals win probability added. He looks to have saved himself from replacing Neifi Perez's mark from 2002.

Kyle Davies likely won't get enough playing time to catch Jose Lima's 2005 record for worst WPA season by a Royals pitcher, but game for game, he's right on pace.

Royals Bullpen Usage

The Sporting News Introduces Some Of Your 1886 Kansas City Cowboys

From the May 10, 1886 The Sporting News:

Jim Whitney

Jim Whitney...is a regular dude, drinks lemonade pale and chews gum.

Mertie Hackett...makes friends wherever he goes. Mertie is a rather giddy young man, parts his hair in the middle, wears patent leathers, and dotes on the ladies.

Fatty Briody

Charlie ("Fatty") Briody, the dashing catcher...was always a catcher, in fact, he was born that way. In early days he was a catcher on the Erie Canal, that is, he used to stand on the bank and catch the captain's profanity and then hurl it back at him. Charlie is a good one and loves baseball nearly as well as he loves a good dinner.

Al Myers...eats three meals a day and chews nine toothpicks, and will drink milk when some one else pays for it.

Jim Donelly...is a pretty boy and plays ball well if his girl is in the grand stand.

Charley Bassett

Charley Bassett, the shortstop...covers a great deal of ground--he has very large feet--and is a good player. He likes pie and will change his boarding house unless he gets it three times a day.

Jimmie Lillie...is very handsome but married and he keeps regular hours, so that the manager cannot fine him for breaking the rules.

Paul Radford...is very superstitious, but still he used to love a cross-eyed girl.

Swinging At Strikes, Laying Off Balls

I don't know if this is anything or not, but because I'm a happening guy, I was playing with the Royals plate discipline numbers from Fangraphs. I decided to try to judge how well each Royals hitter is doing when it comes to swinging at strikes vs. laying off balls. The Z-Swing% in the chart below is the percentage of pitches in the zone at which each player offers, and the O-Swing% is the percentage of pitches out of the zone at which the hitter hacks. The Z-O% column simply looks at how much higher the Z-Swing rate is than the O-Swing rate (and then I've included a fourth column to show the player's overall swing rate): 

I was shocked to see Moose come out on top of this list. He is swinging a lot, something that was expected, but is apparently doing a good job of identifying strikes at which to swing. Seems strange since he is not squaring balls up at all when he makes contact lately, but I take this as a positive sign (albeit one with the required small sample size warning).

Billy's swing rate has decreased every year he has played. From 2007—11, it has gone 47%, 45%, 43.3%, 42.7%, 40%.

Kila was not swinging much when he was up, but he was not necessarily making great choices when he did swing *coughbreakingballscough*.

Everyone's favorite lead-off hitter comes in last not just for the Royals, but for all of MLB (tied with Erick Aybar). I started looking into this because I expected Frenchy to come out at the bottom of the league, but I had the wrong Royal in mind. Frenchy comes in at 131st out of the 151 qualified MLB batters.

Here is the top and bottom five qualified MLB hitters in Z-O swing%. I've included wRC+ for each hitter to see how the approaches are working for each: