As we slog through the time that’s sandwiched between the end of
football and the start of baseball, I’ll be counting down the days until
Opening Day with a countdown of random Royals-related numbers. Most of them
mean nothing – this isn’t supposed to be a groundbreaking series of research –
but they’ll hopefully make the days go faster until Opening Day.
50 Days = 50 Ks by Jose Guillen
Everyone’s favorite malcontent played just* 81 games in 2009. When he wasn’t playing Freeze Tag (minus the running and tagging people) in the outfield, he was at the plate collecting a line of .242/.314/.367. That line, and his beyond-awful defense, made 2009 Guillen’s least valuable season by WAR.
*it was 81 games too many, but I still haven’t figured out how to build a time machine and undo his signing, so “just” 81 was as good as we could hope for.
He also happened to strike out exactly 50 times, so he’s our guy today. I have a strong mental bias against JoGui, so I figured he’d have some scandalously high K rate…but nope. His 17.8 K% was actually above league average for the year, and was right in the middle of his teammates.
On that note, I wish FanGraphs would list league averages among ranked lists the way Baseball-Reference does. It’s so nice. There are millions of things I love about each of those sites. If they made sweet Valentine’s Day love tonight and produced some superbaby that combined each site’s best features, I’d probably never leave the house again. </nyeeeeeeeerd>
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