Royalties & Cardinalate

Zack Greinke pitched one in inning yesterday, facing the top half of the Royals’ regular lineup. Now, beforehand, I thought about the appearance and tempered my expectations. Sure I wanted him to dominate but I thought he’d most likely get through the inning, give up a hit or two, and draw some innocuous feedback like, “The kid, he threw the ball real well. He’s only 20, you know. He still has things he can learn.” Well, the inning went about like I’d hoped. He gave up a hard single to left off the bat of Mike Sweeney and Carlos Beltran reached on a Ken Harvey error. He broke Angel Berroa’s bat in getting him to groundout weakly to second. Then he carved up Juan Gonzalez, getting him to hit a weak comebacker which Greinke himself turned into a 1-6-3 double play. The real story of the appearance, however, is the gradually building buzz surrounding Greinke’s uncanny polish and poise. Joe Posnanski wrote a great piece about it for this morning’s Kansas City Star and captured the Greinke’s growing aura better than I could, as effusive as I feel about the subject right now. He even dropped in some stat analysis and a Baseball Primer reference. It’s only the second week of spring training and the first actual game is today. But clearly Greinke and the Royals’ decision on whether to keep him at the beginning of the season is racing past Jeremy Affeldt’s Blister as the number one spring story. Here’s a link to Poz’s column (free registration is required):

ZACH GREINKE is pitching today against the Royals' regulars in an intrasquad game. I'll report back when I learn more.

WHAT IS A FAIR ESTIMATE OF MIKE SWEENEY'S PLAYING TIME?
As I pointed out in my column, Sweeney's playing time has been sliding for four years running now. Early reports - if you can ever believe reports out of spring training - are that he is completely healthy right now. No lingering back problems. Assuming this is true and that he doesn't turn up with a new injury, I think Sweeney will play 130 games or so with a maximum of about 140. The Royals will rest him regularly to keep him fresh, especially now that they have quality depth in their 1B/DH rotation. His track record leads you to believe that he'll come up with some sort of ailment at some point, which is why I lean more towards 130 games rather than 140. At 130 games played, Sweeney projects to about 556 plate appearances and given his normal rates of walks and other non-AB appearances, that means about 473 at-bats.

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DOES BELTRAN BATTING SECOND HURT HIS FANTASY VALUE?
I don't think Beltran batting second hurts his value at all. The Royals have a good, deep lineup and he should have plenty of RBI opportunities and should score a lot of runs with Sweeney and JuanGone batting behind him. It's not like the Royals are putting him there to bunt and move guys over. They are batting him second because they want him to bat as many times as possible. That only helps his value. People often exaggerate how much a batting order means. Let them fall into that trap.

Some thoughts on a couple of Royal rookies as the news starts to peter in from Surprise:
DAVID DEJESUS -
The only news that can be related to DeJesus thus far is that Tony Pena announced that Angel Berroa will begin the season as the Royals' lead-off hitter. This is a clear sign to me that Aaron Guiel will start in left field because if they were going with DeJesus, he would be leading off. They have said all along that if DeJesus can't be given at least 300 or so at-bats in Kansas City, then he will go to Omaha. I think this could change if DeJesus has a strong spring and Guiel falls flat on his face but the likely scenario is AAA for DeJesus. I need to run an analysis to try and determine the difference in run production for the lineup based on DeJesus playing instead of Guiel.

ZACH GREINKE
There is a chance that Greinke could make the rotation. He will be making his spring debut Sunday, following Jeremy Affeldt in the game that day. So far, Tony Pena has been extremely impressed with him. The way the injuries are working out - Kyle Snyder is out for the year, as is Runelvys Hernandez, Kevin Appier won't be ready until late-April, early-May, Miguel Asencio is coming off surgery and reported some elbow stiffness yesterday - the Royals may have to keep Grienke. However, you really get the feeling that the team is afraid of rushing Greinke, to the point that even if they are beset with injuries, they may just throw a scrub like Joe Dawley, Brad Voyles or Erik Hiljus to start the season.

Also, my latest ESPN correspondence has been up for a couple of days (the link is below). Soon, hopefully, I'll be slightly redesigning this page to include some baseball links. And, again hopefully as ever, I'll start to post in this thing more often. I've been working on this interminable travel story.