Royals Recap

This week's Royals Recap will feature lots of frustrated screaming and cries for help. After that, I'll start to talk about the Royals, which will lead me to begin screaming in frustration and crying for help.

Although the Royals only managed to win one game this week (and had to come back from five runs down to do it), not everything is negative. I'll begin with the stuff that's gooder than the other stuff:

• Zackary Grienke has yet to allow a run this season. Against the Mariners last Wednesday, he pitched a shutout through six innings, and allowed no walks.
  
• Andy Sisco had nice outing on Thursday and Sunday. He's pitched 9 and 2/3rds thus far, with a little tiny WHIP of 0.62 and a BAA of .094 -- sweetness personified. To this point, he's been the only bright spot in the 'pen, as every other bullpen pitcher has had at least one horrendous outing.
  
• As I mentioned, the one win was a good one -- after Jose Lima found a way to pitch six shutout innings yet still give up five runs (he gave them all up in the very first inning), the Royals found a way to score six runs to win.
  
• Brian Anderson had another nice, competitive outing on Saturday vs. the Tigers.
  

Yes, and that's it for the positivity. I'll let you soak in it a bit longer...there, that's enough. Now, onto the scaring of little children and the taking advantage of the elderly portion of the Royals Recap:

• If your team plays six games and scores only 13 runs, there's a problem there, and it needs to be fixed.
  
• The Royals still seem hardly able to draw any walks. I have a theory on why this might be, and I've e-mailed Rob Neyer of ESPN.com with my theory, something which I'll summarize below.
• Runelvys Hernandez and Denny Bautista both had bad outings, although in Runelvys' case I believe the season is still progressing nicely enough. Bautista did his version of Beauty & the Beast -- after the beautiful outing against the Angels in his first start of the year, he was beastly against the Mariners last week.

I could list more if I go into more individual detail, but I'll just use this finding to question the Royals offensive philosophy. Upon looking at the Royals hitters individually, I found that every, single hitter with any sort of significant amount of at-bats is below his career average in p/pa (pitches per plate appearance), and most are well below their career averages. This means that, for some reason, the Royals hitters are much more impatient this year than any other year in their career.

They're not working counts, they're not drawing walks, they're letting the other team's starting pitcher consistently work deep into games (with low pitch counts), and to top it off, it's not like they're hitting for high average or high power to make up for it. The Royals are currently second-to-last in average runs scored per game, and the only team below them is the Pittsburgh Pirates, who don't get to use a DH.

Yeah, it's painful.

So, for the rest of this month we get to see the Royals play more division rivals for the chance to either: a) put themselves out of the race before May hits, which is actually normal modus operandi for them, or b) somehow find a way to score, just a little, and try to hang around for at least another month.

Okay, enough of that, back to the Giants.