Cautious Pessimism

Two and a half games into the season I was just about ready to forgo the PBR's brief brush with a glass half full stance on the season and start in on full ridicule mode. Then, somehow they scratched together a few trash runs, Jeremy Guthrie struck out nine batters and the Royals have gone 6-1 since being on the verge of a sweep at the hands of the White Sox to open the season. However, while it's nice to know that we can sweep a really bad team and kick another team when they're down (or old, in the case of the Phillies), there is still a lot worry about. So until we start taking two of three from the Tigers, Rangers or any team in the AL East, we're going to implement the PBR's new mantra of cautious pessimism and go over a few reason why this won't continue:

Still Not Playing Long Ball: When CoCo Crisp has as many home runs as your entire team nine games into the season, we can cry small sample size fluke all we want, but it still isn't pretty. The main concern would be the double zeros from Hosmer and Moose; we're not going to get too worked up about this yet because at least Hosmer has been hitting relatively well, but that sophomore slump isn't going to be forgotten until a few fly balls reach the seats. As for Moose, despite being happy that he's proven to be a good third baseman defensively, he's currently no more valuable than Alberto Callaspo and is still miles away from being the guy to break Steve Balboni's Hank Aaron-like Royals HR record. They fired Kevin Sitzer, gave his job to two people and Ned Yostie spoketh, but still the team looks to be reliant entirely upon singles and doubles and it's hard to say if that will ever be enough to win.

James Shields (Veteran Leader Extraordinaire): We love the early season hype for the leadership abilities and such, but the fact is that right now he's not an ace (though almost no ace has been an ace so far) and he'll need to have  a couple more games like his first outing (when he got beat by an ace) to really get back on track to being the #1 we all waned to see. Not the good, but not great pitcher he was criticized for being at the time of the big trade.

Wade Davis (5th starter Extraordinaire?): Dark Horse, Break out candidate, potential, mystery, or just plain 5th starter? He got hit hard one day and threw a very suspect shutout the next time versus the worst team in baseball. We need to see more to believe he's any better than Jake Odorizzi (or even Bruce Chen), we've got plenty of time, but the dream of a third starter will die quickly if he can't get better soon.

The Schedule:  Unfortunately, I think we can safely assume that the Sox, Phillies and Twins are the easiest nine games we'll play for a long time. We've got every one's preseason World Series favorites coming to town this weekend, but the Atlanta-Boston-Detroit road trip after that will be what really sets the tone for early season optimism.

I have this strange feeling that at the exact moment we finally believe in the Royals and they're playing good baseball for a stretch, they'll pull the rug out and collapse in fantastic fashion. So until game 162 is in the books and the Royals have won the division, we're sticking with being cautiously pessimistic.