Square peg, round hole

You could call it depth, but the Royals aren´t actually good enough for that compliment. If you thought last year was fun watching chess master Trey Hilman play around with the the line-up then this year is a dream come true. On the other hand, if you cringed everytime you saw Lil´Willie in RF hitting second then this year has the potential to give you a brain aneurysm by the end of the first month.

Being that winning teams have stability and Dayton Moore is a winning GM, he cleared up all of the confusion immediately with a somewhat ambiguous statement which led us to believe that this is our 2010 outfield: LF=S. Pods, CF=Slick Rick, RF=DDJ. Quote me all of the UZR-150 stats you like, however this would all be fine and dandy if indeed you thought that each would play anywhere near 130 games at said positions. However, what people in the know - and by in the know I mean anyone who watched 10 games last year - see coming is an outfield that will have more odd pairings than a Haiti benefit concert. The Royals right now have 6 players on the 40-man who could conciveably play all three positions (Ankiel, DDJ, Anderson, Maier, Posednik, Bloomquist) add-in Guillen, Fields and Callaspo at the corners and you have permutations that would make for a great Click and Clack puzzler.

The infield is only slightly better; at 3B you have 4 possibilities, 2 at SS, 3 at 2B and 3 at 1B, add one more at each position for Willie and top it off with something like 5 different DHs. All of this leads to Trey´s favorite place for expermienting; the batting order, which will probably start out the year with Billy, Rick and Jose hitting 3-4-5 and no team has ever had two more obvious candidates for brining up the 8-9 hole than Kendall and Betancourt - a past-his-prime catcher and a free swinging SS who might not combine for 10hrs all year. The rest of the guys are at best good 2-hole hitters and otherwise fitting for the 6&7th spots in the line-up.

With Trey´s penchant to handle his team as if he were day-trading with Jimmy Johnson (Willie's stock is UP Scott's stock is Down!! Defensive Sub!! Batting order flip!! BUY!! SELL!!) and a team rife with possible injuries, I contend that the Royals will set a new MLB record for different starting line-ups (Including batting order) this year. If anyone can find this statistic please pass it along and lets start tracking (it wouldn't surprise me if we already hold the record) the 2010 Royals line-up cards aka Tokyo Trey's Fun with Exel Spreadsheets.