On Monday James Shields’ pitched brilliantly (against Chris Sale), pitching eight scoreless innings and only allowing four base runners while striking out nine. The Royals had a 1-0 lead entering the top of the ninth inning and the Ned Yost, the Royals Manager, brought in Greg Holland to close the game out. Holland proceeded to allow three straight hits to the first three batters, filling up all the bases with zero outs. As this was happening Twitter blew up; the consensus was it was a bad move to bring in Holland. When I was watching the game I didn’t mind bringing in Holland. As we all know Holland gave up the lead and the game went into extra innings.

I may be a day late with this rant, but I was listening to the Baseball Show with Rany and Joe and it got my creative juices flowing. My rant is about the lineup construction for the game. Below is the lineup. Why was Eric Hosmer batting fourth and Salvador Perez batting eighth? Since 2012 Hosmer has a slash line of .231/.296/.313 against lefties while Perez has a slash line of .357/.394/.601. It’s obvious Yost wanted to go right-left-right with the hitters, which is extremely useful during the late innings. However, why punt the first 5-7 innings in favor of a small advantage in 1-2 innings? Perez should be hitting fourth and it’s not even close. Why is Chris Getz is playing while Miguel Tejada, who has a slash line of .274/.327/.448  against lefties, sitting on the bench? What’s the point of having players with platoon advantages such as Tejada of George Kottaras if you’re not willing to deploy them appropriately. I’m not trying be a revisionist, but if the lineup was optimal the Royals may have scored more than one run against Chris Sale and could have won the game.

Athletics manager, Bob Melvin, changes his lineup every day to play to his rosters strengths and the opposing pitchers weaknesses. The same is also true about line construction with Joe Maddon, but he gets enough credit already. I’m not a Royals fan but I did predict them to win the AL Central and I’ve watched many of their games. Needless to say I’m rooting for them to do well and they have enough talent to make the postseason if they roster is deployed properly, but I don’t think they will be.

1. Alex Gordon
2. Alcides Escobar
3. Billy Butler
4. Eric Hosmer
5. Lorenzo Cain
6. Mike Moustakas
7. Jeff Francoeur
8. Salvador Perez
9. Chris Getz