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Kansas City Royals
Scouting Report
By the Numbers | Players To Watch | Projected Roster
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Crash
scene With all the comings and goings in K.C., players like
infielder
Jed Hansen sometimes get caught in
traffic.
(Tom DiPace)
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The
truth—what somebody really thinks of you—usually comes out when
you're not around. Early in spring training a few baseball
writers were sitting in the office of a National League
manager. A challenge was issued: Name 10 Kansas City Royals
correctly before
getting five
wrong.
"I can't do it," a veteran scribe
said.
The manager shook his head sympathetically, not for the
writer's plight, but for the Royals. He smiled thinly and
said, "It's
tough."
Last year Kansas City paid substantial sums for the talents
of DH Chili Davis, first baseman Jeff King and shortstop
Jay Bell. They all had good years. It didn't help. The
Royals finished last in the American League Central for the
second consecutive
year. Davis and Bell, free agents and smart men, left for
richer pastures. King opted to stay behind,
re-signing for two years. Among his teammates are Brian
Bevil and Matt
Whisenant. There are no typos in the preceding sentence. Those
are the names of
two pitchers in the Kansas City
bullpen.
The Royals are an organization with a lot of pride. They
keep their ballpark beautiful. Their players are role
models, solid citizens. They field respectable teams—or
they did, until last year (67-94) and the year before that
(75-86). The timing of this
funk is awful for the team's board of directors, who soon
will be looking to sell the club and now will have to test
the market with a bargain-basement
team.
This spring the players were given a fancy sheet of paper
with the club's mission statement printed on its center:
"Our purpose is to develop a winning organization,
provide exciting entertainment, quality services and value
to baseball fans, customers
and stakeholders." The
namby-pamby nature of that sentence may reveal the underlying problems
at the top of the Royals' organization. Memo to the brass:
Before writing your next mission statement, see
Jerry
Maguire.
The mission statement did not come from the typewriter of
Larry Doughty, Kansas City's vice president for player
personnel and a baseball lifer. He's old school. He
supported the firing of Bob Boone as manager midway through
last season. "Bob was a
manager who gave the players too much credit," Doughty
says. What is his take on Boone's successor, Tony Muser?
"Tony understands that young players are not always
finished
products."
Muser's a tough guy, by
modern-skipper standards. He doesn't allow golf clubs on
road trips. Jeff Conine, picked up from the Marlins in a
trade for minor-league righthander Blaine Mull, says Muser
works his players much harder than Florida manager Jim
Leyland does. (Conine wasn't complaining; he's a worker
bee.) For whatever it's worth, Muser won 31 games and lost
48 after taking over from
Boone.
Muser, managing in the majors for the first time, says his
players suffered from "an inability to concentrate, a
lack of a clear vision of what's expected of them." He
says the Royals lost 20 swing games after he took over, by
which he means games
decided by one or two runs. He believes that by teaching
fundamentals—how to hit the cutoff man, how to lay down a
sacrifice bunt—many potential swing losses will become
swing wins. In the meantime he may need a teacher of his
own, to learn how to relax.
After a 6-5 loss to the Indians, he said, "We lost a swing
game today. We got a long bus ride tomorrow and another big
game." And that was during
spring
training.
One more thing. It's not that hard to name 10 Royals, if
the rules allow you to count George Brett. He's 44 now and
hasn't played for four years, but he's vice president for
baseball operations and still a presence. There are Conine
and King. There are
Lee Smith, 40, and Terry Pendleton, 37, hanging on. There's
Jose Offerman, the second baseman, who cut his errors from
35 in '95 to 16 in '96 and nine last year. There's Hal
Morris, the DH, who has hit well over .300 in three of the
last five years for
the Reds. There's Dean Palmer, the third baseman, who has
163 homers in less than seven seasons. There's Jeff
Montgomery, the Royals' alltime save leader, with
256.
Then there's Tim Belcher, the wily righthander, 36 years
old and the winner of his club's award for pitcher of the
year last season. "I don't think a 13-12 record with a
5.02 ERA warrants an award," Belcher says, chagrined,
of course. "But on our club,
I guess it did."
—by Mark Bechtel
Scouting Report | By the Numbers | Players To Watch | Projected Roster
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