Yost really put up a brilliant record during this run with the Brewers. Note the dripping sarcasm.
Now, two disclaimers:
I don’t know Trey Hillman or Dayton Moore, and maybe Hillman was a shitty manager and a bad guy to get along with, and
I acknowledge that the Royals will very likely have a somewhat better record under Yost, simply because any team in baseball is probably better than .333. It’s not likely the Royals would have finished 54-108 under any manager.
But holy shit, doesn’t this seem to anyone else like the most pointless firing in baseball history? The Royals are arguably the worst-run franchise in the history of baseball, not counting teams with no ownership and stuff like that. They make moves that seem almost designed to make the team bad, like the acquisition of Yuniesky Betancourt. I’ve never seen a dumber-run team. Their roster is composed of 9 guys who could be good but will be misused so they never reach their potential, 14 guys who aren’t any good and never will be, and Zack Greinke and Joakim Soria. What exactly was Trey Hillman supposed to do?
My fantasy team would like to welcome Nelson Cruz back from the DL; he’s been sorely missed.
In his first two plate appearances against Toronto today, he had a sacrifice fly and a bases-clearing double, making him 1-1 with 4 RBI. Of course, in the same game i also have Rich Harden, who managed to walk 5 Blue Jays in the first fucking inning, giving up 3 runs on just 1 hit.
Now, if Jimmy Rollins rejoins the Phillies as expected next week, my team might actually begin to crawl up the standings.
Well, they kept it up for one more game at least. Bautista hit two more big flies to bring his total to nine, and Ricky Romero fired a five-hit shutout, throwing in 12 K’s for good measure.
After the Tigers take 3 of 4 from the Yankees, they’re looking good against the Red Sox and the White Sox come into town for two games. We’ll see if the Tigers are contenders or pretenders, although they’ve been looking solid recently.
Very pleasant surprise: Brennan Bosch. He’s been hitting in the 5 spot and playing rather well as of late.
Hillman has been fantastically bad. When he was hired, he was known for really drilling the fundamentals into players during his time in Japan. (The Nippon Ham Fighters were an unimpressive group, but their defense was flawless, and won tons of close games, making it into the World Series (only to lose in Game 7 to a perfect game performance)). I don’t buy that completely (if at all), but that was what his strength was supposed to be. The home opener saw Greinke’s lead blown in the late innings because Callaspo misread a friggin’ popup. Stupid defensive errors have been far too common this year to be anywhere close to acceptable.
Additionally, there has been no rhyme or reason to personnel decisions. Aviles and Maier were lighting things up in Spring Training, but Aviles was sent to Omaha and Maier rode the bench. Aviles has been called up, and is doing really well, and Maier is finally getting some playing time. Their additions won’t rocket them up in the standings, but these were decisions that seemed trivially easy to make.
Handling the starters and the bullpen is the most difficult job any manager has to do - but Hillman made it seem like using a ouija board would be more successful.
Now - I think FAR more blame should be put on Moore. He’s the one that said 5 years ago he was going to focus on defense, getting on base, and developing talent. So what happens? The Royals sign a litany of strikeout hitters who never get on base, sign guys with no concern whatsoever for defense, give huge contracts to past-their-prime vets like Guillen and Kendall, and abuse the absolute shit out of pitchers and hurt players (Mike Aviles should sue the Royals for their inexcusable treatment of his injury last year).
Edit: and don’t forget Billy Butler. He’d be a solid addition to any team.
No one has an off day in the coming week. Also, everyone seems to have two 2-game series on Mon/Tue and Wed/Thur.
Aside from the first couple of weeks of the season, I’ve always noticed that series seem to be based on Fri-Sat-Sun or Tue-Wed. Monday and Thursday could be added to either series or be an off-day.
Is this something new for this year or have I just never noticed it before?
Was this Aviles’ MLB debut, or did he come up last year? There actually is a reason if it’s the former, and that’s to prevent this from being a full season of service for him. He won’t get to be an unrestricted free agent for another year.
He had a breakout rookie year in 2008 and then IIRC had an off season injury that the deplorable KC medical staff allowed to be continually reaggravated, and hit the DL for TJ surgery early last season.
The immortal Bill Selby once hit a walk-off slam off Rivera - according to some sources, the first time in Rivera’s career to that point that anyone had ever hit a walk-off home run against him.
Yeah, as far as i can tell from Baseball Reference’s search function, Selby’s was the only other Grand Slam ever given up by Rivera.
He’s given up five game-ending homers:
Bill Selby (2002): Grand slam, final score 10-7
Bill Meuller (2004): 2-run homer, final score 11-10
Vernon Wells (2006): solo homer, final score 5-4
Marco Scutaro (2007): 3-run homer, final score 5-4
Ichiro Suzuki (2009): 2-run homer, final score 3-2.
The NL West looks to be full of intrigue this season. I am about ready to burst into tears at the idea of Andre Ethier being out for any extended period of time, but Dodger pitching has looked like…well, Dodger pitching, lately. Remains to be seen how much the offense languishes in the meanwhile.
They’re leading the West, and they’re 6-4 over their last 10 games. Yes, they got swept by the Blue Jays on the weekend, but you can hardly blame a three-game hitting slump on the manager. What’s more, as far as i can tell, there’s basically no buzz in the media about a possible firing right now.
