First inning: I can remember that one of the first things that Brian Bannister told me — he loves pitching in Oakland. You would think he loves it because Oakland is a great pitcher’s park, you know, with all the foul ground and with the ball often dying in the outfield.

But he said that he likes the way the mound feels under his feet. He said he feels like he’s on top of mountain there on the Oakland mound … which is weird because, as you know, these days they are pretty strict about mound height in baseball these days. But he said that everything about being on the mound in Oakland feels right — he feels like he’s way up above the hitter, he likes the background, he just likes the feel.

First inning, Bannister looked in total control. He almost exclusively threw that cutter/slider/fastball pitch of his (we call it “The Banny!”) that goes between 85-88 mph and really cuts late. He only threw one 4-seam fastball (90 mph, up and away, sort of a purpose pitch) and one or two changeups. Haven’t seen the curve yet … might be saving that for later in the game.

Anyway, Bannister got a grounder to short, a medium fly ball to right-center and Giambi just popped up to third. It looks like a potentially good night, though it could be tough since he is facing a pitcher whose name is Josh Outman. Man, that might take over as the best pitcher name in baseball. Josh Outman. I suspect we’ll have more to say about that as the night goes on.

Second inning: The question of the day on Royals TV is “What is the most important spot in the lineup.” The four choices are the top four spots in the lineup … and as of right now, the leadoff spot is winning. I just heard Frank White say he would choose the leadoff spot.

It is a semi-interesting question, though I’m not entirely sure how you would judge such a thing. I mean, if by “most important,” they are asking what position you should put your best hitter, then I think it’s clear that leadoff is NOT the right choice. It would make little sense for the St. Louis Cardinals to put Albert Pujols in the leadoff spot right?* George Brett hit a bit of leadoff early in his career with the Royals, but he spent many, many more games at the No. 3 spot than any other. And that was exactly where everyone thought he should be.

*If this made ANY sense, then you know Tony La Russa would have tried it already.

But most people are picking leadoff, which means that’s NOT how they’re viewing the question.

Another great inning for Banny. Got Matt Holliday to ground out to first, then struck out Jack Cust on a cutter that looked a bit outside but was perfectly framed by catcher Miguel Olivo. Here’s another thing to think about: Are some catchers better at framing pitches? And if so: Is that something that you would be able to see in the numbers? Do some catchers get more looking strikeouts than others by knowing how to frame a pitch? Anyway, Banny made Cust look bad on a change-up … it will be interesting to watch that battle all game long.

Banny then got Ryan Sweeney to hit an easy grounder to second. Six up, six down, looking really good. Too early, though, to start making any predictions.

Third inning: Josh Outman. What a great pitcher name. There was a pitcher in 1959 and 1960 named Jake Striker, which is a really good. There was a pitcher in 1968 I’d like to know a little bit more about: His name was Darcy Fast. And apparently was fast. He was up in the big leagues at 21. He struck out 10 in his 10 innings pitched (though he walked eight). And he never pitched again in the big leagues.

Well, it turns out that if you are interested in knowing more about Darcy Fast, you can learn just about everything you want right here. It was quite an interesting career, to say the least.

Solid inning for Bannister. He got The Banny pitch up to Adam Kennedy, who served it out to left for a single. I love the verb “serve” for baseball. That really evokes a certain image. He then got a fly ball to center, a grounder to short and a fly ball to left.

Fourth inning: There’s a huge chunk of cherry pie in the fridge down here. I love cherry pie. Love it. There is absolutely no way I should be eating a huge chuck of cherry pie this late at night, especially while I’m doing a live Banny Log. But … yeah, I’m going to eat it. So, this will be a quick inning update: A Banny 1-2-3 inning, finished off by a curveball strikeout of Matt Holliday, who may have hurt his oblique in the process. Royals leading 1-0 through four.

Fifth inning: Oh, I should not have had that pie. It was good. But … I should not have had that pie. My brother Tony won’t be happy.

Leadoff hitter seems to be running away with the Royals poll, in case you were wondering.

Mike Aviles looks absolutely helpless at the plate to me. You probably know Aviles’ story: Signed with the Royals for $1,000. HIt well early in his minor league career and was briefly considered a prospect but some … but soon lost that distinction. Was in Class AA for two years and then started there a third season … he looked to be the class Triple A player. Then, the Royals watched Tony Pena Jr. hit something like .150 for a couple of months and, in desperation, they gave Aviles a chance. And he went crazy the rest of the year, hit .325, slugged .480, played a solid shortstop, made a push for rookie of the year at age 27.

The Royals were thrilled but, yeah, skeptical. You never know how a player like that will respond … it’s so unusual. Put it this way, the best OPS+ ever for a first year player who is 27 years or older:

1. Ichiro Suzuki, 126
2. Mike Aviles, 122
3. Don Lenhardt, 118
4. Ed Charles, 114
5. Hideki Matsui, 109
6. Sam Jethroe, 109.

The innings are FLYING by … the Royals just went down in five pitches. So I’ll pick up this discussion in a minute. Good fifth inning for Bannister — left one change-up up to Adam Kennedy who cranked it off the wall. But other than that, struck out Cust on a killer curveball, one of the best I’ve ever seen Bannister throw. Got two other grounders back to the mound.

Sixth inning: Back to the discussion of those first-year players who were more than 27. Well, obviously, Ichiro and Matsui do not fit on this list … they were both big stars in Japan already. Sam Jethroe played in the Negro Leagues, so he’s a different case too.

As for the other three, you know the Aviles story. Lenhardt served in the U.S. Navy, then joined the Browns and despite some good minor league numbers, just didn’t get called to the big leagues until he was 27. Ed Charles — who would make a fascinating book, in my mind — was in the minor leagues for eight years before finally getting his chance with the Kansas City Athletics at 29. During his time in the minors, he wrote poetry about racism in the South … that’s where he spent most of his time. Charles was good his rookie year and good again in 1966. He was a member of the ‘69 Mets later.

Anyway, Aviles is a rare case. He really looked good last year. And this year, he looks totally lost. His head flies all over the place, he seems to step in the bucket on every pitch, he doesn’t appear to follow the ball, he has terrible body language after each at bat. I hope he gets his confidence back because he has worked hard to get here. But right now, he just looks … well, lost is as good a word as any.

Banny ran into the wall in the sixth, and you could see it from the start. First batter, Bobby Crosby, Bannister left a Banny up and out over the plate, and Crosby drove to it deep center field. One thing about Brian … once he starts to get his pitches up, he has a hard time adjusting and a hard time getting back down around the knees, where he needs to be.

He threw a good inside pitch to Orlando Cabrera who yanked it to left for a single. Then Brian got a pitch up to Kurt Suzuki, who ripped a single, and threw another pitch up to Jason Giambi, who crushed it off the wall for a run-scoring double. After a purpose walk to Matt Holliday, Bannister got Jack Cust to hit a medium fly ball to left that might have made for a reasonably close play at the plate with David DeJesus out there. But it was Willie Bloomquist instead, and iIt was not a close play. Suzuki scored, The A’s led 2-1.

And then Bannister was pulled from the game because of some sort of injury that was hard to pick up. It doesn’t seem serious or anything like that, but it was serious enough that Brian basically seemed to agree and left the game. You have to wonder if it was the injury that made Brian look so different in the sixth. Maybe we’ll get an update as the game goes along.

In the meantime, Banny Log figures to slow down for the final three innings. I should not have eaten that pie.

Sporadic thoughts from innings seven through nine.

We often joke in the newspaper business about how you know a trend is over when you actually see it in the paper. Hey, it looks like a lot of people are Twittering! Wow, what’s this American Idol thing about? And so on.

Well, here in the bottom of the seventh, Travis Buck just tried to sacrifice bunt. And my good friends Ryan Lefebvre and Frank White joked about the rarity of such a moment … Ryan compared it to seeing a comet. Ryan and Frank then laughed about how out of sync the A’s looked because, well, they just don’t sacrifice bunt.

Only … it’s not true anymore. I’ll have a little chat with Ryan. Maybe the Oakland sac bunt thing was true back when Moneyball was first written (though even then, the A’s were not last in sac bunts). But last year, the Oakland A’s sacrifice bunted 30 times, which was just slightly below league average. In fact, if you want to shock your friends at a party, ask them this question:

Which team had fewer sacrifice bunts in 2008, Oakland or Tampa Bay?

You must know, based on the fact that I asked the question, that Tampa Bay had fewer bunts. Yeah — by a LOT. Oakland had 30. The Rays had 23. Oakland had more sac bunts than Tampa Bay, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago and as many as Detroit. This year, Oakland has six sac bunts, which is almost precisely average. If you want to REALLY talk about a team that doesn’t sacrifice, focus on the Boston Red Sox. This year, the Red Sox have zero sacrifice bunts.

* * *

Word from television: Brian had some right shoulder stiffness which is why he came out of the game.

And with him out of the game, it has gotten out of hand. The A’s have scored five runs in the seventh thanks to walks, an error, an infield single and, finally, a pitch up to Jack Cust. You definitely don’t want to leave a pitch up to Jack Cust. He crushed it into the right-field gap, scoring three, and now the Royals are likely to lose their fifth game in a row. At the moment, they have scored eight runs in those five games … three of those in a 12-3 loss on Tuesday.

* * *

A Royals loss, fifth in a row. You know, Bill James pointed out that last year, the Royals were the streakiest team in baseball. Now that they have won six in a row and, promptly, lot five in a row to follow, I would say that they are continuing the trend. I’m not sure it will be like that all year … it seems that since the Royals have good starting pitching, they should avoid the losing streaks. I mean, in this five-game streak, they got an OK start from Gil Meche, a great start from Zack Greinke, a solid start from Kyle Davies and, until the injury, a good start from Brian Bannister. You shouldn’t lose all those games. But I do believe that the Royals’ lineup with struggle to score runs all year, and that could definitely make this season streaky.

In any case, the Royals are 18-16. Keep up that pace, and they win 86 games this year. Win 86 games this year, the Royals might just win this division.

As for Oakland … I don’t really get what Billy’s trying to do. But that pitching staff sure is young.

In the meantime … enjoy.

Well, I was panicked. Absolutely panicked. You will think this is a joke, but it is not: I had no idea what kind of graphs they wanted. Bar graphs? Line graphs? I mean, I’ve never been artistic. I worried about this the whole day, worked out possibilities in my mind, tried to summon the courage to ask what kind of graphs they wanted but could not find the strength.

Then, before I went to the game, I talked with the editor and again he said “Eight to 10 graphs,” and I did somehow mumble the question: What kind of graphs? It was then, and only then, I learned that “graphs” — it is usually spelled “grafs” in the journalism world — is slang for “paragraphs.” This is what I knew about sportswriting: I was actually going to buy graph paper to cover my first basketball game.

So when I asked Ron if sportswriters were allowed to root, I did not mean out loud. I did have some vague notion that there was no cheering in the press box. What I meant, looking back, was this: When you become a sports writer are you supposed to turn off your insides? Are you supposed to try and live up to some kind of deep standard of impartiality, like an umpire or a judge? Are you supposed to stop caring?

Ron told me many things, some which I have forgotten and some which quietly dissolved into my own feelings about the job. But the thing I remember most is that he said: “You don’t root for a team to win, but you do root for people.”

Through the years, I have quietly (and not so quietly) rooted for people. I rooted for Mel Stewart, an Olympic butterfly swimmer who in the course of interviewing had become my friend. I rooted for Tom Glavine, who was nice to me when I was young and clueless and panicked and covering my first big league baseball game. I rooted for a delightful diver named Becky Ruehl, who finished fourth at the 1996 Olympics and used to read Jane Austen books between dives. I rooted for former Royals general manager Allard Baird because he’s one of the best people I’ve ever known (and, being a sportswriter, I also wrote that he had to go when it was clear that he had to go). I rooted for Skip Prosser because if you knew Skip Prosser you rooted for him. I played weekly chess matches with Priest Holmes and would hope he ran for big yards on Sundays — he usually did.

And I have rooted for the successes of many players who were not entirely successful — Dee Brown, Eric Zeier, Kris Wilson (the pitcher), Tony Cogan, Terry Allen (the football coach), Dick Fick*.

*At the end of this post, I’m going to include a column I wrote for the Kansas City Star in 2003 about the wonderful basketball coach Dick Fick. Every so often, everyone should hear about Dick Fick.

It occurred to me on Wednesday night that much of that was illusion; yes, I have always rooted for people I like because of that — because I like them personally and that human nature. But the way I root for Brian Bannister is somewhat different. Sure, I like him — like him a lot. Everybody likes Banny. And I like his story — college walk-on, underdog, son of a flamethrower and so on. And, of course, I relate to the way he looks at the game; he’s become quasi famous (and quasi infamous too) for his passion for the advanced statistics.

But with Banny, yes, it’s a little bit different. It’s more the way I felt about sports when I was young. I relate to him. In many ways, I feel like he’s what I would be. That’s what drew me to Duane Kuiper, of course. That’s what drew me to Brian Sipe, of course. That’s what drew me to Mark Price. I could never imagine stretch my imagination enough to see myself crushing line drives like George Brett or throwing lasers 40-yards downfield like Dan Marino or jumping over Dick Snyder like Dr. J.*

*I really saw this one time.

But I might with enough effort myself as a hard-working second baseman who dives for every ground ball, and I might imagine myself as a weak-armed quarterback who could inspire a team in the final minutes, and I might even envision spending hundreds and hundreds of hours in a driveway shooting jump shots until I was so good at it that I could make it to the NBA.

And so it is with Banny. He’s really more talented than he lets on — his fastball was in the lower 90s on Wednesday and he can get good movement on it and much of the time he has well-above average command. And let’s face it: You can’t pitch in the big leagues — and pitch successfully — without other-worldly talent.

But, in context, the basic story is true: Bannister does not have a killer fastball or a devastating out pitch. He is not imposing.* He did not have many people believe in him along the way.

*He is listed at 6-foot-2 on his Baseball Reference Page … and I say with affection in my heart as a 5-foot-9 sportswriter who sometimes claims to be 5-foot-10 that there’s no way. None.

And his career is — and always is — very much on the edge. He had a rough 2008, of course, and he had a rough spring training, and the Royals started him in the minor leagues. To be honest, it was sort of a surprise that he got the start on Wednesday. Most people figured that 2006 overall No. 1 pick Luke Hochevar would get the start once the Royals came to the inevitable conclusion that Horacio Ramirez was unpitchable.

It just so happened, because of a variety of coincidences, that I was in Cleveland for Bannister’s start. He was really good. He threw six shutout innings. He gave up just four hits, walked two, struck out one.

And when the game ended, he was not especially happy. He was not unhappy, of course. I think he was proud of the way he pitched, even if he knew that throwing shutout innings with so few strikeouts is not really sustainable. But — and this is the part I could really associate with — he knows the situation. He knows that he will have to prove himself over and over again after last season. He knows that one bad start could mean a demotion (and even one GOOD start could mean a demotion). He knows that the only way to go on this thing is game by game, pitch by pitch, out by out.

I would say that the feeling he had was something closer to relief. He had pitched his heart out, and it worked out on this night, and he could live to fight another day. That’s what it’s all about to me: Sure, I admire talent, and I appreciate genius, and I enjoy dominating performances. But I identify with this kind of struggle. There’s nothing easy for Brian … and that’s a big reason why I root for him. There’s no guessing how he will pitch next time, but Wednesday night was great.

I always believed that the most awesome summers in the entire world are Cleveland summers. Why? Because they follow Cleveland winters.

* * *

Here is that column on Dick Fick:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – When a friend dies young, the best thing you can do is remember him happy. With Dick Fick, that’s easy. We were at a Cubs game. Nothing made him happier than Cubs games. This one was in Cincinnati. The sky was blue, and the grass was green, and the ballpark smelled like bratwurst. And everybody around us, even the people Dick didn’t know, were friends.

“You rooting for the Cubs?” he asked everybody around him. “No? How can you root against the Cubs? Do you know the last time we won a World Series? We’re talking 1908. Come on! Can you pray for us at least? Hey, how’s that pretzel? Good? They have good pretzels here.”

He noticed a woman sitting quietly.

“Hey, how’s that?” he asked her. She was eating one of those chocolate frosty in a cup things.

“Good,” she said cautiously.

“I gotta get me one of those,” he said. “Can I get you another one?”

“No,” she said. He did anyway. By game’s end, she became a friend, too.

Everybody should have a friend like Dick Fick. You might remember him, if you remember him at all, from his wild days as basketball coach at Morehead State here in Kentucky. He lost more games than he won, but nobody could forget him. Coaches admired him – Dick was a coach’s coach, one of those guys who could move around the X’s and O’s, transform a chalkboard into a page of music.

And fans? Well fans just plain loved him. He would never sit down. He stomped. He screamed. He lowered his tie, inch by inch through the game, until it just dangled from his neck like a loose noose. “Why don’t you come on down here and coach,” he told an Indiana fan, and unlike other coaches who might snarl those words bitterly, Dick really meant it.

Once, against Kentucky, an over-and-back call devastated him so completely that he simply lay down on the floor, motionless, a move that inspired ESPN to give out a weekly Dick Fick Award to the wackiest coach.

That was about as famous as he got. In New Orleans before the Final Four one year, college students ran up to Dick and lay down in front of him.

He loved that, of course.

“We all should be young,” he said.

Dick just made people happy. You know how some people are like that? Whenever one of us would get together with Dick Fick, other friends would call the next day to see whether he said anything memorable. He always did.

Once, after a Cincinnati player named Art Long was arrested for allegedly hitting a horse, Dick said he knew Long was innocent.

“I absolutely know Art wasn’t even there,” Dick said.

“How do you know that, Dick?”

“He was still planted in the lane from the last time we played Cincinnati.”

And then there was the time his team lost to Kentucky 96-32, and Dick said, “I looked out there and thought ‘Oh man, we only have three players on the floor. Then I realized two of mine were behind (Kentucky’s massive center) Nazr Mohammed.”

He might tell about the time he kissed a pig at halftime of the Morehead State women’s game. He might talk about how flat pizza wasn’t real pizza. He might announce that dying wouldn’t be too bad if he could still watch his Cubs.

“I sure hope,” he might say, “that they have WGN in the afterlife.”

We lost touch. Friends do that. It seems obvious now that Dick’s life spiraled downward after he left Morehead six years ago. His drinking apparently got worse. Dick always liked beer, drank too much of it – players would say he was erratic, high one minute, low the next – but without basketball, he found himself needing the beers, shaking without them.

Updates came in periodically. One day, someone said he was coaching high schools. Another, he was trying to get into television. He got divorced after a long marriage. He checked in and out of detox centers.

One doctor told Dick the next drink could kill him.

Dick patched a life back together. He became a part-time assistant coach at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, his old Illinois hometown. He told the people he loved that he stopped drinking. He warned kids about the dangers of alcohol and told them about the joys of life. He was born to do that.

He did have a gentle soul.

Monday, doctors found Dick Fick dead in his apartment. He was 50 years old. He left behind a son and a daughter and a lot of friends, many who would love to go to just one more Cubs game with him. Police and doctors won’t say how he died, except to rule out foul play, and maybe that’s best. All you can really do, when a friend dies young, is remember him happy.

Dick, I hope you have a good view of Wrigley Field through the clouds.

In case, you don’t want to click on it: That’s a story about former Kansas City Royals/New York Mets pitcher Ambiorix Burgos. You might recall that Burgos was traded straight up for our favorite pitcher Brian Bannister.

Banny, you probably know, is the greatest guy in the world.

And Burgos, it is now becoming clear, is desperately trying to become the worst.

Burgos was arrested in September, and here I’m pulling from the story that appeared in the New York Daily News, for “allegedly slamming his girlfriend against the wall at the Holiday Inn … He repeatedly punched her on the back, bit her and slapped her, prosecutors said.”

Well, hey, those were prosecutors, right? Maybe they exaggerated.

Burgos was arrested in October in Santo Domingo, and here I’m pulling from the Associated Press story: “Ambiorix Burgos was driving an SUV when it slammed into two women who later died of their injuries, police said.” It was a hit and run, and Burgos turned himself in a week later. It was in the second story that the AP reported, almost in passing, that Burgos also faced an unrelated illegal weapon charge.

Then comes the story we linked. A fellow ballplayer in the Dominican named Felix Gatico Martinez says that Burgos TWICE tried to shoot him after a heated argument they had during — we cannot make up this stuff — during a dominoes game.

I remember a scout calling me after the Royals traded Burgos to the Mets for Bannister. You know, there were some around baseball who thought the Royals were off for making that deal. Burgos could throw 98 mph. He had a devastating split-fingered fastball. He was clearly not going to be one of the five Burgos family members to appear on Family Feud, if you know what I mean, but if there are 100 people surveyed, top three answers on the board, name a pitch that gets people out — a 98 mph fastball would probably be the number one answer.

Anyway, there were mixed feelings about the trade, and this scout calls me and tells me that it’s great for the Royals. He had a lot of good things to say about Banny, all of which were right — guy’s makeup is off the charts, his fastball isn’t hard but it has some late movement, he has outstanding command and so on. And I said, “What about Burgos?”

And he said two words: “Bad guy.”

* * *

I’ve mentioned this before, a lot. But here goes again: Tony Pena Jr. is a nice guy. Well, he is. He seems like a very good person. He seems to have a very nice wife, they seem to have an awesome kid who runs around the clubhouse and will give a high-five to anybody who would like one. My guess is that Tony Pena Jr. is the kind of guy who, when he borrowed your car, would fill it up with gas. My sense is that the Penas are the kind of family we would love to have over for cookouts. I’ll bet that when T.J. mows the lawn (he seems like the type who would mow his own lawn), he will mow a little bit of the neighbors yard, just to be a good guy.

My job, however, demands that I show you this statistic:

Worst on-base percentages since 1901 (200 at-bat minimum):

1. Bill Bergen, 1909, .163
2. Bill Bergen, 1906, .175
3. Bill Bergen, 1910, .180
4. Bill Bergen, 1911, .183
4. Tony Pena, 2008, .185

* * *

Carl Peterson is somewhat misunderstood. I believe this. He has been so demonized in the media that I suspect most people who care think he’s a monster, a man beyond scruples, old Miser Madison. I happen to know (because I’ve seen it often) that Carl Peterson has done a lot of really good things in his life, and he has given of himself for charity many many times, and he really cares about the success of the Kansas City Chiefs. More than one — more than 10 — Chiefs employees have, through the years, made a point to tell me off the record how much they like working for Carl, and not in a way that suggests they were trying to spin me. He negotiates hard, and he doesn’t always make friends, and he’s overly sensitive, and he was the key figure in turning Kansas City into a good football town. I think it breaks his heart to watch his work slowly unravel.

My job, however, demands that I point out — as I did in my newspaper column this morning — that Carl Peterson started his job as President/CEO/General Manager of the Chiefs one month before George Bush. No, not this one. And over the last 11 years, the Chiefs have been bad — two playoff appearances, five losing records (and well on their way to a sixth), four coaches — and lately they have been BEYOND bad, they have lost 12 in a row, they have not led a game since mid-December, they are as hopeless a football team as you can find in America right now.

* * *

Brian Bannister is one of my favorite people in the entire world. I cannot imagine liking an athlete more. He’s smart, funny, self-aware. He’s also had a very rough year, not only on the field but off the field too. His wife is expecting their first child, and it has been a rough pregnancy, she has been confined to bed rest. Brian has not seen his wife in two months. These are the real life problems of real-life people; and yet Brian never mentioned his issues during his struggles, he never asked for sympathy and never made excuses, never backed down from his responsibilities as a pitcher for the Kansas City Royals.

My job, however, demands that I point out Brian is 9-16 with a 5.76 ERA … his 78 ERA+ and .360 winning percentage make this among the rougher seasons a starter has ever had.

* * *

Allard Baird remains one of the best people I know and he is still a close friend. My job demanded that I write he be fired. Dave Shula was (and I’m sure still is) a really nice guy. My job demanded that I write he be fired about 10 times. Tony Muser is a good baseball man and one of the best story tellers I’ve ever known. My job demanded that I write he be fired.

Trey Hillman is a good person with a good family, and he and his wife practically saved my life when I was in Japan. My job required me to mention that I think he has tightened up in his first year as Royals managers and players tell jokes about him behind his back. Dayton Moore knows baseball and management, he has a heartfelt love for baseball and the Kansas City Royals and people. My job requires me to speak my opinion that the Jose Guillen signing was very bad judgement.

Gunther Cunningham is a decent and hardworking guy who, in many ways, reminds me of my father. My job required me to point out that when he explained a bad timeout by saying that the forty-five second clock was running — yes, it became a forty-FIVE second clock — he was probably demonstrating why he should not be an NFL head coach. Tony McGee was a tight end in Cincinnati and a very thoughtful person. We once sat next to each other on a plane, and we had a great talk about sports and life and everything else. My job required me to mention that he dropped lots of passes (which required him to yell at me and threaten to kill me). Herm Edwards absolutely cracks me up — he’s one of the funniest, most passionate, most savvy, most fun-to-be-around people I know. I believe he knows football talent and can get players to play hard for him. My job requires me to surmise that the Chiefs rebuilding project is not going well at all.

And so on. And so on. And so on.

The point of this is not to say my job sucks. The exact opposite is true. I have undoubtedly the best job in the entire world for me. My stock answer when people ask me what I would be if I was not a sportswriter — my stock answer but also my most honest answer — is this: Unemployed.

This job, though, does require you to put away humanity at times — or at least, put humanity off to the side. Friends kid me (and some readers go beyond kidding) because I find it very difficult to rip anyone without pointing out some of their good qualities, without saying that I like them, without polluting my main points with a few puffs of perspective. I plead guilty. I do not like writing badly about people. I get no kick out of it at all.

Now, don’t get me wrong: Sometimes I see injustices in sports, real injustices, and I feel good about coming out, guns blazing, swords sharpened, and then you will get no apologies, no distractions, no reservations or qualifiers. I don’t like bullies, and I don’t like arrogance, and I don’t like unfairness. I hope that I would never hesitate or back off pointing those out. But there is a lot of gray area in sports. A lot of mostly good people are bad at their jobs, and a lot of mostly bad people are good at their jobs. It presents a perplexing landscape.

Wednesday, I wrote that Carl Peterson column, the one that wonders how fans survived the Matt Millen era and when the Chiefs will finally put their fans out of their misery. I wondered if I was being too mean by bringing up the point or too nice because I didn’t include Herm Edwards in the mix. Wednesday, I watched Tony Pena Jr. hit a rare single to right and then, inexplicably, try to advance to second base, where he was thrown out by roughly 483 yards. I wondered how it was possible that someone who grew up around Major League Baseball and has no hitting ability never really learned how to play the game. I watched Brian Bannister throw six shutout innings, and I was really happy for him and I wondered if maybe he could take this as momentum for next year.

And I realized, yet again, that it’s fun being a sports fan, and it’s fun being a sportswriter, but they’re really two very different kinds of fun.

*The brain is expected to return on an American Airlines flight on Tuesday, Sept. 9.

Usually, the coaches and players and general managers and the rest will say something like, “Well, you know, it’s rewarding, but fun might not be the exact right word.” And I must admit … I had never fully appreciated that answer. Because, as fans, I think we want to believe that it is AMAZING fun to be in the game, that it’s a blast playing ball, coaching, running a club, a non-stop party playing professional golf on the most beautiful courses in the world and hammering tennis balls in Australia and Paris and Monte Carlo and, for that matter, being able to tour the country with the band or write a hilarious weekly comedy series or play in a movie or whatever else we might have dreamed as kids.

Trouble is, the “rewarding, yes, but not really fun” answer is probably the truest answer. Is covering the Olympics fun? Well, sure. Covering the Olympics is what I have wanted to do all my sportswriting life. And there are fun parts. Walking on the Great Wall. Playing table tennis in a Chinese ping-pong park. Seeing the optical illusion that is Michael Phelps. Dropping jaw while watching Usain Bolt. Being there to watch the U.S. men’s basketball team redeem itself. And, in the end, I’m sure, that’s what people want to hear, I suspect nobody really wants to hear about the drudgery that makes up mot of the job, the middle seat on the plane, the four nightly hours of fitful sleep, the 10-minute fast-food meals between busses, the writing at 4 a.m. China time when you are literally falling asleep at the keyboard and waking up only to correct the 28 mistakes you just typed in (and hoping that someone else will catch the 32 you missed), the need to sum up the wonder of Phelps in nine minutes. I know I wouldn’t want to hear about that stuff.

I bring this up because I can tell you, this has not been a fun year at all for Brian Bannister. That might seem obvious by his numbers — he’s now 7-14 with a 5.75 ERA after his tough loss on Wednesday night — but it goes way beyond that. The guy is doing what he’s wanted to do all his life. He’s playing in the big leagues, in that mystical place where, as Crash said, you never touch your luggage, the ballparks are cathedrals, the hotels have room service, the women have long legs and brains and all that. This, the children’s dream says, is the time of your life.

Only, I’ve spent this whole year watching Banny try to figure out things, try to figure out how he can use his moderate stuff and win at the highest level. And I’ve seen it take its toll. The thing I love about watching Banny pitch is how much enthusiasm he has for baseball, how much he loves and respects the game, how competitive he feels and yet how thoughtful he gets about it all. I don’t think he’s unique — I suspect most players in the big leagues have those same feelings and doubts and aspirations and brainstorms — but I think Brian’s fascinating because he’s so bright and well-spoken, and because he does have an uncommon ability to look at the game as both a fan and a player, and because he and his wife are expecting a baby daughter in a few months, and because the ending is uncertain. Everyone is rooting for him. But he knows that doesn’t have much to do with it. The game grades with a cruel finality, there are no oral exams, no written essays, only line drives and swings and misses and fastballs around the outside corner that are either called balls or strikes.

Banny has tried everything he can think to try. Readers here know how intensely he breaks down the statistics. He had a fine year in 2007, but his study of the numbers told him that, yes, he was lucky. So through this rough year, he has concluded at different times that he needs to: (1) Strike out more batters; (2) Get more ground balls; (3) Conceal the ball better pitching out of the stretch; (4) Develop his two-seam fastball; (5) Slow down his curve; (6) Lower his arm angle; (7) Be more unpredictable; (8) Change his change-up; (9) Throw higher in the zone; (10) Throw down in the zone more; (11) Take confidence from the good things; (12) Try not to think about the good things; (13) Change lots and lots of other stuff.

And this is the helpless feeling of getting hit hard in the big leagues, the dream level. where there really is no safety net, where only the hitters tell you that it ain’t working, where you start hearing the most frightening baseball word of all — “Omaha” — everywhere you go after your ERA blows up. *

*Though it should be noted here that Omaha is a lovely town with my brilliant friend Tom Shatel presiding.

After all that, Banny has decided his best chance, like Inigo Montoya, is to go back to the beginning. Banny came to this hard realization after he got lit up for 10 runs in an inning in his last ever outing at Yankee Stadium. That was an awful day. He gave up 10 hits and three homers, and just as painful he found that he was bruised and battered, couldn’t tell what he felt, unrecognizable to himself — yes, the Springsteen keeps coming at you. He found that his arm angle had lowered to the point where he was almost throwing sidearm, and he was throwing a two-seam fastball he could not control, and when it ended he felt like throwing up because he had pitched so badly at YANKEE STADIUM. Banny loves the history of baseball, as much as anyone I know in the game, and so he knew what that meant. Right then, he determined that he needed to stop the crazy merry go round and just go back to what had worked for him a year ago. Go back to the beginning.*

*One would hope he would not at this point drink himself into a coma so that the only way he can be revived is for Andre the Giant to come along and dump his head in water — seriously, how can ANYONE not love that movie.

In Banny’s next outing, he threw a brisk eight innings against the Tigers. He gave up four runs, including a couple of homers to Miggy Cabrera, and lost the game. But at least there was something familiar about it. He only threw 100 pitches. He pitched within himself. He gave his team a chance to win*. It was something.

*Well, if he had been pitching for a normal team he would have given them a chance to win — the Royals have scored more than four earned runs in a game exactly twice since August 4, which was the day I left for China. One of those was against the Yankees in the very game that Banny allowed 10 runs in one inning. The other was against the Tigers and the unpitchable Kenny Rogers on a getaway day.

Wednesday, I went out to the ballpark to see Banny pitch his second game since his Yankee Hell Foxtrot day. There wasn’t really much reason to go out otherwise. The Royals have been absolutely dreadful lately … in some ways, the team has never been more depressing. At least when the Royals stunk in the late 1990s, when they sucked in 2004-05-06, there was this overriding sense of comedy about the whole thing, this “well, hell, what did you expect” feeling. This was, after all, the team that brought up some guy named Eduardo Villacis to pitch one game at Yankee Stadium in 2004. Nobody on the team had ever even heard of him. They watched him get roughed up, then promptly sent him back down and, within a month, released him. It would be the only game he ever pitched in the big leagues. The next day manager Tony Pena guaranteed the Royals would win the American League Central. They finished a mere 34 games back.

But two years ago, Dayton Moore came in as general manager, and he had been a part of winners in Atlanta, and he said a lot of good things, and he brought in a bunch of really good baseball people, and they totally overhauled the system, and owner David Glass actually opened up the wallet, and the Royals signed some big-money guys and built a new academy in the Dominican and drafted+signed three first-round Scott Boras clients in a row and all that. Dayton traveled halfway around the world to Japan and hired a new manager, Trey Hillman, who the New York Yankees supposedly were interested in hiring. This really was supposed to be the dawn of a new age.

And maybe it still will be — Moore is insistent that there are so many good things happening below the surface. He believes that so many promising young players should emerge in the next few year. He says that so many good scouts and coaches working non-stop for the Royals that good things HAVE to happen. It all makes sense in to the ear.

But the eyes see a different story. This team is probably the most disappointing in years — not because anyone expected them to be good (nobody really did) but because few expected them to be embarrassing. And that’s what they have become. Embarrassing. Trey Hillman came to Kansas City with a reputation as a man who would not stand for sloppy and disinterested baseball, and now the Royals play sloppier and look more disinterested than I can remember even in the 100-loss seasons. They have allowed 18 unearned runs in 20 games, which has to be some kind of record. They have seven times this year allowed a pitcher to throw a complete game with 105-pitches or fewer, which tells me that some batters want to get home in time to the see The Daily Show live. They just got swept by Texas at home for the first time in TEAM HISTORY, and they allowed Rangers starters to throw three quality starts in a row for the first time since the beginning of April.

The young guys who, at the start, were considered the core players, guys like Alex Gordon, Billy Butler, Mark Teahen, Tony Pena Jr., and others have gotten no better. Some have gone the other way. And these days Trey seems barely recognizable to me. I went to see him for a week in Japan last October, and I saw a guy who was at ease with himself, who was confident but didn’t need to let everyone know it, who was comfortable with players even though they didn’t speak the same language, a guy who was so respectful of the game of baseball that it poured out of him, and you could imagine that if you played for him you would not want to let him down. That’s why I thought he was going to be a huge success as Royals manager. He still may. But I have to say that I have not seen that guy much in Kansas City. Instead, I’ve seen Trey be defensive and cold, I’ve seen him constantly trying to make himself seem like the smartest guy in the room, I’ve seen him turn off players by preaching at them, I’ve seen him overcompensate for his lack of big league experience (well, he had none coming in), I’ve seen him alienate people who want to like him for reasons I cannot understand, and I’ve seen him take it all too hard. I’ve chalked it all up to two things: First-year discomfort and the neck-pain of dealing with Jose Guillen. But it’s getting late. And it’s getting worse.

Anyway, with all that going on, with the clubhouse in shambles at the moment, with nobody quite sure what the Royals should do next, Banny is trying to get his career back on track. So I went out to watch Wednesday, and he pitched really well. He struck out a career-high eight batters, but he did it by staying within himself. He struck out Joaquin Arias with a fastball up and in. He struck out Brandon Boggs with a slider up and in. He froze Jarrod Saltalmacchia with a fastball on the outside corner. He got Marlon Byrd looking on an fastball over the inside corner. He got Nelson Cruz to swing over a pretty good curveball. And so on. He was moving the ball around, not getting too fancy, not throwing too hard, getting a double play grounder on his rarely used slider, throwing fewer change-ups, it really was a return.

And it mostly worked. He gave up a solo homer to Boggs, but I think Banny realizes that’s something he will have to battle his whole career. He gave up back-to-back doubles in the seventh. But this was a good outing, it should have equaled seven innings and two runs against the best offense in the American League (albeit without Josh Hamilton who, of all things, had an abscessed tooth). It should have been a positive step. Then with two outs in the seventh, Arias hit a soft little pop-up, low enough that other infielders probably did not have time to call off the pitcher.* Banny dropped back to catch himself. It looked so easy from above, too easy, a good ending to a good outing, only he dropped the ball. He had an instant “DAMN” reaction, he seemed to lose himself for only an instant, and an unearned run scored before he could pick up the ball and throw home. He got taken out right then, which I’m sure made for a restful nights sleep. “A nightmare,” he called it afterward.

*I say probably … I’ve seen the replays and while I still think it was Bannister’s play, but I cannot say I’m overly impressed by the movement of the other infielders.

Well, it’s been that kind of year. What can you do? You take the good, work on the bad, and go on to the next day. It isn’t fun, no. That’s just not the quite the right word.

Type A: A power, strikeout pitcher who keeps walks down and doesn’t give up too many home runs.

Type B: An extreme ground ball pitcher who keeps walks down.

Type C: A blend of Type A and Type B.

Josh Beckett is a great example of a Type A. In 2007, the year he finished second in the Cy Young voting, his strikeout-to-walk ratio was 4.85 to 1, and he only gave up 17 homers all year. In 2006, on the other hand, Beckett was hammered pretty good. THAT year his strikeout to walk was a much more pedestrian 2.14 to 1, and he gave up 36 homers. And that was the whole difference … his BABIP (batting average on balls hit in play) was actually SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER in 2007 (.316 in 2007 vs. .270 in 2006) but adding strikeouts, cutting down walks and keeping the ball in the park dropped his ERA almost two full runs.

Brandon Webb is a good example of Type B. Well, he’s actually a freak. Webb is a strikeout pitcher too, which makes him (as his Ziegler Numbers will show) perhaps the best pitcher in baseball. But his unique dominance comes from an incredible lifetime 4.20 to 1 groundball-to-flyball ratio. As Banny says, it sometimes seems like Webb is playing a different game. A better example of the Type B, at least this year, is Mike Mussina, who for years was a Type A guy, a power pitcher, but this year he has not walked anybody (1.21 walks per nine) and he’s getting more ground balls than ever before.

And then a blend example might be someone like James Shields, a guy who gets a good number of strikeouts, a good number of ground balls. really keeps the walks down and beats you without the trumpets blaring in the background. Paul Maholm of the Pirates is another good example — good strikeout to walk, gets more than his share of ground balls.

I was thinking about this as I considered why Brad Ziegler has been so successful. I mean, it doesn’t take a detailed calculation to figure it out — his ground ball to fly ball is 5.18, which is simply off the charts, it’s better than Brandon Webb (who is the gold standard). Because of that sick sink on his pitches, he has not given up a home run, majors or minors, since (get this) 2006. Anyway, he was the one who got me thinking: One way to measure a pitcher’s dominance might be simply to look at two ratios — ground-ball-to-fly-ball and strikeouts-two-walks. Would that give us a list of the best pitchers? So, I multiplied those two numbers, multiplied the whole thing by 10 to give it a nice big feel, and I like the list. The statistic definitely needs some tinkering, but this is a good starting point.

Brad Ziegler, in case you are wondering, scored a 103.6 Ziegler number, which is fabulous. Here, though, are the best pitchers in baseball by the Zieglers:

1. Brandon Webb
Ziegler number: 112.6
Core numbers: 15-4, 3.04 ERA.
Comment: It’s risky, of course, to give any pitcher a long-term contract. But I’m willing to wager that with the way Webb sinks the ball, he will be a dominant pitcher for a long time. At this moment, I’d pick him No. 1 overall.

2. Roy Halladay
Ziegler number: 106.8
Core numbers: 12-8, 2.85 ERA.
Comment: Halladay’s strikeout are up this year, he hardly walks anybody as usual, and he still has that 2 to 1 ground ball ratio. Halladay has been a terrific and hardworking pitcher (his 36 complete games are the most for any pitcher since 2000) but because of injuries and such he has 123 wins, which puts him on pace for that “I’m not sure if he’s a Hall of Famer” purgatory that David Cone, Curt Schilling, Kevin Brown and Luis Tiant probably will share someday.

3. Cliff Lee
Ziegler number: 85.6
Core numbers: 14-2, 2.58 ERA.
Comment: His 6.3 strikeout-to-walk ratio is beyond incredible — it’s hard to believe that Lee’s first full year he walked 81 in 179 innings. I recall that his reputation then was a wild, overpowering lefty. Now, he’s still getting his strikeouts but he has become crafty* — he hardly walks anybody.

*We’ve mentioned here before that only lefties are ever called crafty. It doesn’t seem fair. So I would like to nominate the aged Greg Maddux as the first crafty righty in baseball history. I don’t know, it just seems like it would give meaning to the somewhat unfulfilling final stage of his career.

4. Derek Lowe
Ziegler number: 79.4
Core numbers: 8-9, 3.70 ERA.
Comment: Obviously, a 3.70 ERA is nothing to mock, but I have to tell you … looking at Lowe’s numbers I have no idea why that ERA isn’t even better. He’s an extreme ground ball pitcher, his strikeout to walk is 3.1 to 1, he has given up only 11 home runs all year. The key seems to be that with runners in scoring position, batters are hitting .331 against him. Lowe, like Banny, is just not nearly as good out of the stretch as he is out of the windup.*

*I wonder if anyone has done a study on how much less effective pitchers are out of the stretch than out of the windup. You have to figure that in general they are somewhat less effective or else they would pitch out of the stretch all the time. Right? Zack Greinke, for one, has been considerably BETTER out of the stretch this year. Anyway, I’m sure someone has studied this …

5. Mike Mussina
Ziegler number: 76.5
Core numbers: 13-7, 3.56 ERA.
Comment: Give it up to Moose, who appeared to be absolutely done as an effective pitcher and instead started getting more ground balls and now seems to have a couple more good years left in him, if he wants. He might even have an outside shot at 300 victories.

6. Dan Haren
Ziegler number: 70.9
Core numbers: 11-5, 2.62 ERA
Comment: He’s not really a big ground ball pitcher (1.27 to 1 ratio) but he gets enough sink to keep the ball in the ballpark, he gets a lot of strikeouts, he’s stopped walking anybody, he’s awfully good. The Diamondbacks are 26-37 when either Webb or Haren does not start.

7. Tim Hudson
Ziegler number: 57.5
Core numbers: 11-7, 3.17 ERA
Comment: He’s an extreme ground ball pitcher — not quite in Webb’s league but the next best thing. That’s there for him every year (except 2006, when his ground ball numbers dropped, his homers went up, and his ERA skyrocketed to 4.86). If he stays healthy, I think he will be effective for a few more years.

8. James Shields
Ziegler number: 56.0
Core numbers: 9-7, 3.66 ERA
Comment: One of my favorite pitchers to watch; I’ve been on Tampa all year so obviously I’m not backing off now. I still think with Kazmir, Garza and Shields they’ve got enough pitching to be a real factor in this race until the very end.

9. Andy Pettitte
Ziegler number: 55.4
Core numbers: 12-8, 4.18 ERA
Comment: That’s an inflated ERA for someone with such a good Ziegler … I think it has to do with the .323 BABIP. That is a bit high. In other words, I think Pettitte has been a bit unlucky this year, though of course he has been quite lucky in that the Yankees are scoring 5 runs per game for him. See, it all evens out.

10. Jesse Litsch
Ziegler number: 52.2
Core numbers: 8-7, 4.46 ERA.
Comment: Not sure how Litsch got on this list — he does get ground balls, which is good. And his strikeout to walk is good, which is amazing because he doesn’t strike out anybody (he doesn’t walk anobdy either). This is a glitch in the Ziegler Formula — I need to incorporate strikeouts per nine, I think. Plus Litsch does give up home runs. I’ll work on it. In the meantime, here are three other pitchers who might interest you.

C.C. Sabathia
Ziegler number: 47.5
Comment: He’s not really a ground ball pitcher — a pure Type A guy who is probably the most important player in the NL right now.

Johan Santana
Ziegler number: 38.2
Comment: Lots of people seem to be arguing about whether Santana is REALLY have a disappointing year or if it’s just hype — after all the guy is seventh in the league in ERA. But here’s something that is true: His strikeout to walk numbers are way, way down — that seems to be what is keeping him from being dominant.

Brian Bannister
Ziegler number: 20.5
Comment: Yeah, that’s not a great Ziegler. But things are looking up. Really. In July, he struck out about a batter per inning, he got a few more ground balls, from the rose-tinted view of Banny Log, a lot of stuff started falling into place as he tries to reinivent himself a little bit. True, what most will notice is that he did have a 7.20 ERA for the month, but that was because he had a ridiculous .392 BABIP … that won’t last. Things will get better in August. I feel it. Although it might be tough to do Banny Logs from Beijing. I’m not sure if they even allow that over there. We’ll have to see how that goes.

Well, I wrote a fairly long piece about Brian Bannister for the Star on Sunday — it’s all about how he prepared for perhaps the most gut-wrenching start of his career — so I figure there’s no real point in repeating myself for Banny Log. You can read the piece here if you like.

And also, I ran across this on YouTube … it’s video-game Banny pitching his heart out for an inning against the tough Detroit Tigers lineup. I’m sure it’s just me, but I found this to be shockingly hypnotic. Plus it offers a chance to see Tony Pena play again (though, not to give anything away, he seems to lose concentration. I think it makes sense to make him a video game pitcher too.)

No, we’re not abandoning Brian Bannister. Of course not. We’ll get to him in a minute. But first … the Royals got demolished by Detroit 19-4 on Monday night in a game notable for two events.

1. The horrible, awful-to-watch, turn-your-head-away performance of Jimmy Gobble. It was painful, like watching the slow motion replay of Joe Theismann’s leg snapping, like watching Greg Norman lose the Masters over and over, like watching Pacino in “Author Author.” Gobble was reasonably effective in 2007 — his 3.02 ERA was probably a bit misleading, but he struck out 50 in 53 innings, he held lefties to a .241 batting average, he was only 25 and had seemingly a long and profitable career as a LOOGY ahead of him.

And then, this year, it has all fallen apart. I will say that part of the blame falls on manager Trey Hillman — Jimmy Gobble cannot get out righties. That’s a given. Even in his pretty good 2007 season, righties hit .319/.377/.532 against him. He can’t get them out, and if you send him out there to face righties you send him to fail. He’s a guy you send out there to get out one or two batters, that’s his job, that’s his role, get out a lefty, maybe get out a pinch-hit righty, that’s it, that’s what he can do, and if you need more from your designated lefty then you can’t afford to have Jimmy Gobble on your staff.

Well, Hillman — and I think this is often to his credit — does not get as caught up in righty-lefty match-ups as most other managers. I generally like this because it means that Hillman does not just wrestle a game to the ground with pitching changes like, oh, I don’t know, the guy across the state. BUT, while I appreciate a bit more of a laissez faire approach, the overarching truth doesn’t change: Gobble still cannot get out right-handed batters. And so it goes: Gobble was pitching OK, his usual self, until May 22 in Boston when Hillman — and I’ve already mentioned this bizarro decision — allowed Gobble to face righty Mike Lowell with the bases loaded. Lowell, of course, hit the grand slam over the green monster.

A couple of weeks later, in Chicago, the Royals-White Sox game went into extras, and Gobble started the 15th with righty sluggers Carlos Quentin and Paul Konerko coming up. This was probably unavoidable — it was the 15th inning, after all — but it could only end badly, and it did. Gobble walked Quentin. Then he gave up the inevitable walk-off homer to Konerko.*

*Konerko is now hitting .833/.889/2.833 against Gobble. Yeah, I have to post those numbers. Konerko has faced Gobble 9 times, and he has walked twice and been hit by a pitch once. That means he has six official at-bats. He has five hits and four home runs in those six at-bats.

And so on. A week later, he gave up a grand slam — this time to David Murphy, a lefty — but by now it was clear that his confidence was shattered, and Gobble was just gone. He gave up a homer to switch-hitter Brian Roberts. He sat for 12 days, and when he pitched against Chicago his last time out, he looked like a much slower version of Rick Ankiel. He walked Jim Thome, hit Paul Konerko with a pitch, and walked Nick Swisher.

So, after all that, Gobble had a 7.99 ERA. His splits show that his talents might not have been well served.

Lefties off Gobble: 51 plate appearances. 149/.216/.277, 13 strikeouts, 3 walks.
Righties off Gobble: 66 plate appearances .400/.530/.720, 14 walks, 7 strikeouts.

You know, sometimes, slumps are not complete mysteries. You just CANNOT put Jimmy Gobble in situations where he has to face good right-handed hitters. Sometimes, perhaps, it can’t be prevented, you get outflanked by the opposing skipper … but it seems apparent that Gobble has been put in those situations way too often this year. It’s not Hillman’s fault exactly — hey, a pitcher allowing righties to hit .400 off him is not a Major League pitcher — but I do think Hillman has not served Gobble too well.

Anyway, all those numbers are shattered now. Because on Monday, Gobble came into a lost game with the bases loaded and righty Pudge v2.0 up at the plate. Gobble walked him on four pitches, and none of those pitches were close. He did get Renteria to ground out to end the inning. Things were bad. They were about to get a lot worse.

Next inning: Curtis Granderson, a lefty, lined a single to right on an 88-mph fastball up and in … Placido Polanco lined a single to left on a 90-mph fastball up and over the plate … Carlos Guillen smashed a double to left on an 86-mph fastball on the inner half … Gobble threw a wild pitch … Miguel Cabrera, who should NEVER face Gobble, not under circumstances, not even in an exhibition game, not even with the Royals down by 15 runs, singled to right on a 90-mph inside fastball … Matt Joyce (a lefty, finally) lined another Gobble 90 mph fastball to center for a single. … Gary Sheffield, one of the best right-handed hitters of his generation, turned on a 91-mph fastball up and crushed it for a three-run home run.

You would think that would be enough, but there was more. Hillman was, rightfully so, dying to save his bullpen in a lost cause. So he left Gobble out there. After getting two outs, Gobble walked Edgar Renteria on four pitches … Granderson pulled a ground ball through the infield for a single … Gobble walked Ramon Santiago on five pitches. Gobble then walked Carlos Guillen on four pitches. He then, finally, mercifully, thankfully was taken out of the game.

He’s broken. That’s all. He’s broken, and I’m not sure all the Kings’ pitching coaches can put him back together again. I’ve been writing about Jimmy since he was 21, and he’s a good person, he’s a stand up guy, he takes the blame when he struggles. And he’s a lefty who, I think, can get Major League lefties out. It’s sad to watch him like this. But the simple truth is that if you keep sending him up there to get out righties, you’re got to run him out of this game. ‘Cause he can’t get them out.*

*Updated Gobble numbers against righties. They are not hitting .421/.558/.772 against him. If righties could get 650 plate appearances against Gobble this year, they would hit .421 with 68 doubles and 203 runs scored.

2. So, the Gobble fiasco led Hillman to try something goofy in the ninth — he had Tony Pena Jr. pitch. It had been about 10 years since the Royals had pitched a position player in a game. As a fan, I liked the move. Heck, why not? The game was over. Save your bullpen and give the fans a cheap thrill. Plus, Pena seemed an excellent choice — he had been hitting like a pitcher all year.

But here was the thing: Pena was GOOD. I don’t mean he was good in a funny way. I mean he he threw 91 mph from an odd arm angle. I mean his fastball had life and sink on it. I mean he froze Pudge Rodriguez on a curveball. I mean he can probably field his position better than any pitcher in baseball history — he made one dazzling play on a chopper hit back to him. I mean he came side arm on a curveball and got some real movement on it. I mean he did all this even though he hasn’t pitched in YEARS.

I’m not saying that Tony Pena is the second coming of K-Rod (though with his goggle glasses, he had the look). I’m saying that when a guy’s hitting .153 in almost 200 at-bats, and then he goes out without practice or serious warm-ups and throws 91 mph from a low arm angle, and that balls dives down, and he shows the potential to work both sides of the plate … well, you tell me.

OK, so beyond that: I guess I should say something about Banny. He’s now 7-8 with a 5.49 ERA, and there’s no question that he is searching. He seems to think now that his problem is coming out of the stretch — he’s not getting the same kind of movement or the same kind of precision when pitching out of the stretch. There could be something to that. He also is having some trouble putting hitters away … on Sunday, he had Joe Crede down 0-2 and simply could not find a pitch to finish off the job. Crede ended up hitting a three-run homer. Maybe the two issues are connected — he was, I assume, pitching out of the stretch then.*

* I did not actually see Sunday’s game — I was driving back from Cincinnati. That meant I heard the game on the radio, and it was a bit of a surreal experience because I listened to the Chicago radio team of Ed Farmer and Steve Stone. It was surreal for a few reasons. One, whenever I hear another city’s broadcast, I always feel like I’m eavesdropping. I’m just not used to the rhythms, the jokes, the level of homerism, the promotions. The White Sox must have more radio promotions than any other team in baseball. Every double means money for a charity, every homer they have Steve Stone guess the distance, every other inning they seem to have some ridiculous contest going, and everything has some corporate sponsor, everything — this pitching change is brought to you by Acme, this pressing of the cough button is brought to you by Vick’s, this confusion over balls and strikes is brought to you by the Eye Center of Greater Chicago and so on.

Another reason it was surreal is that Steve Stone grew up in my town, South Euclid, and listening to him call a game is sort of like listening to one of my old friends from the neighborhood calling a game. He has that punchy Cleveland sense of humor, he has that double-accented Cleveland voice (where sky turns into skee-eye), he gives you some great Ohio bluntness. I always liked him on television, but I think I like him even more on the radio. At one point, he told a great story about Earl Weaver pulling him out of a game after he gave up a long foul ball. Weaver came out, and Steve said: “What are you doing here? That went foul.” And Weaver said, “Yeah, the next one will be fair, hit the showers.”

Anyway, there was some talk about sending Banny down to the minors to work out some things. But several people seem to think Banny’s close to putting it back together, so he’s going to make his next start Friday against Tampa. Obviously, I don’t know what’s the right thing. I’ve had a couple of people in the game tell me this week that Banny thinks too much out there. I don’t know — that seems like such a “baseball” thing to say. He was thinking plenty last year too, and he was just fine. No, it seems to me that Banny’s problem right now is that he’s giving up too many hits and too many runs.

There are two things that drive me absolutely nuts. Well, OK, that’s not true, there are about 1.3 billion things that drive me absolutely nuts — people who take up two parking spaces in a crowded parking lot; drivers who chug along below the speed limit in the left lane; American restaurants that charge for Diet Coke refills (you expect that sort of thing in Europe but I was raised to believe this is the land of plenty and the home of caffeine); email spam that is imaginative enough trick me into opening it; the bad and outdated magazines at doctors and dentists offices (come on, magazine subscriptions these days are, like, 12 cents an issue — get me some decent and up to date mags before my root canal); the way 25 cent air hoses at gas stations will go dead BEFORE you have all your tires filled up (hey, it’s bad enough that you’re charging for AIR, how about at least giving me an unlimited supply for my quarter?); readers who moan that there are too many mentions of my upcoming 1975 Cincinnati Reds book (to be published by William Morrow, a subsidiary of Harper Collins, in March 2009) on their FREE FREAKING BLOG; parents who just let their kids run around aimlessly in restaurants and stores; airline passengers sitting in front of me who, at first opportunity, recline their seats ALL THE WAY BACK, right into my sternum, like they’re in therapy or something; biographies that begin by telling you how the subject’s grandparents met; the way some newspaper headlines have intriguing questions (“Will Gas Prices Go Down”) but the stories flat do not answer them (“Maybe. Maybe not.”); being 41, which is a crummy age because no matter what concert I go to, I will always be too old or too young; the music they inevitably play at gyms; people who sit behind me at ballgames and will lecture some poor sap next to them about the intricacies of the infield fly rule and they ALWAYS get it wrong, ALWAYS (this just happened to me again in Tampa); also the Tampa Bay mascot Raymond*; the movie choices that Robert DeNiro keeps making and … oh, wait, I kind of got off on a tangent there.

*I don’t want to bury Raymond the Tampa Bay Mascot based on one day’s observations; I think as a scout you should see a mascot two or three times before you make any official recommendations. But the day I saw Raymond in Tampa, there was a less than overwhelming crowd of 16,000 or so, and he lacked energy, and from what I could tell Raymond didn’t like kids. I see this is a problem. And it was noticeable — I wasn’t the only one saying this. Raymond would walk through the crowd, and all these kids kept waving at him, and he kept looking the other way, finding hot young women to hug and old balding men so he could do that hysterical “rub the bald head like a genie lamp” gag that never gets tired. Fortunately, I was not one of these balding men, but my point is really this: If you’re a sports mascot dressed up like an aardvark,** you probably should focus on the kids. They might be your core audience. I appreciate that kids will grab you, and shriek in fear around you, and sometimes kick you or grab your tail or generally drive you mad. But you know, I don’t think the mascot pay scale would be quite as high if your only demographics included balding men and hot young women.

OK, seriously now, what the heck was my point here? Um … oh yeah. There are two things that drive me absolutely nuts. The first thing that drives me nuts is when people complain incessantly about umpiring and officiating. I get it. These guys makes mistakes. Their strike zones vary. They blow pass interference calls all the time and call phantom holdings against your team twice every game. They screw up the block-charge call seven out of ten times, and in hockey they often seem to be making it up as they go along. I get it. And the fact that we now get so many more television angles doesn’t leave much mystery — these guys blow calls all the time.

So, OK. The umpire blows a call against your club, and you beef for a few minutes. Fine. That’s part of being a fan. That’s part of the story of the game. And I’m not suggesting that umpires should somehow be above criticism — I think it’s ridiculous that leagues FINE managers or players for saying that an umpire blew a call. What kind of totalitarian attitude is that? Umpires DO blow calls, and managers, coaches, players SHOULD get ticked off when it happens. In my mind they should be allowed that night to say whatever the heck they want about a bad call.

But only that night. Look, after a while … hey, enough already. When you constantly complain about umpires, you begin to sound petty and delusional. What happens is you first complain about a bad call, but then you start to see ghosts and shadows and Jorge Orta’s around every corner, and you start whining about VERY close calls, ones that could go either way, ones the umpire might have gotten right, and then you cross over and complain about correct calls. And that’s when you start to sound like a big ol’ loser. That’s why it drives me nuts. I say this for a reason: I’ve noticed lately that my very good buddy Ryan Lefebvre, who I believe is an excellent announcer and a wonderful guy, has been moaning way too much about umpiring lately; he’s definitely creeping into that dangerous territory where you start ripping umpires for making good calls. Wednesday’s game ended when Mike Aviles was called out on a check swing, and Ryan who had been ripping the umpires for four or five innings gave a big old, frustrated “Well, why not?” The replay showed that Aviles had DEFINITELY swung, it wasn’t close, and it was correctly called out, but it was too late to say, “OK, hey, I apologize, I went overboard, the umpire was right.” Anyway, the next time I see him I will advise him as a friend to just stop the whole umpire thing. It sounds amateurish to me.

The second thing that drives me nuts is sports self-delusion. Well, self-delusion of all kinds is irritating, but in sports it really stands out … you know, it’s when a hitter talks about how he “saw the ball really good” after he struck out four times, when a quarterback talks about how the offense really moved the ball well despite scoring three points, when a coach talks about the difference in a 24-point loss being one or two plays, when a general manager talks about how hard his crummy team is playing … this stuff is really annoying.

I bring this up because I have been thinking quite a bit about whether or not Brian Bannister is being delusional when he says that he’s been doing some really good and encouraging things as a pitcher lately. The numbers are cold and stark — Wednesday was the third straight game he gave up five runs or more. His ERA since April 30 is 6.34, and the league is hitting .306 against him and slugging .502 over those 10 weeks. It has been a real struggle.

Banny understands this … he has become convinced that he needs to change the way he’s pitching, add what he calls “a few new pitches,” go after hitters in different ways, reshape his style. I think that in some ways Banny has come to accept that his luck kind of ran out — you have to remember, the guy studies the numbers, and he knows the harsh realities and startling odds against pitching the way he pitched last year (fly balls, low strikeout numbers, low home run total, good ERA). I also think that he’s experiencing failure for the first time in the big leagues, and he has only thrown 318 innings so far, a bit staggered at the moment.

But the question: Is Banny, despite the recent numbers, on the right track? Obviously, everyone has their own opinion and nobody knows for sure. But I do remember something about Tom Watson, the great golfer. In 1975, he won the British Open as a 25 year old. It was quite a surprise — Watson did not have an overpowering amateur career, he was not a superstar college golfer, few really expected greatness from him. Then he won the Western Open in ‘74, the Byron Nelson in ‘75 and most impressively the British Open in ‘75. He was WAY better than others thought.

And then Tom Watson did what I think is one of the nerviest things a premier athlete has ever done — he tore it all up. He had been outperforming every expectation that people had for him, but Tom looked at his swing and decided it could not hold up under the most intense pressure and if he was going to become the best golfer in the world (and this, despite what people thought of his limitations, was what he expected) he had to start over. So he scrapped his swing, completely rebuilt it. He did not win a single tournament in 1976 while he tinkered and adjusted. When he came back in ‘77, he twice beat Jack Nicklaus in majors — including the incredible Duel in the Sun at Turnberry — and he was the PGA Tour player of the year six times the next eight years.

There are only a few similarities to Banny here but there are some: He had more success last year than most people expected, and I think at first he just wanted to keep it going. But now, I think, he feels like he needs to rebuild his swing. He has started the process. He’s throwing his fastball with a little something more, he’s pitching upstairs, he’s adding a few wrinkles, he’s working on his curveball. Banny said that he saw some encouraging signs in his previous start, and frankly I thought that was a bit of, well, let’s just call it excessive optimism.

I’ll tell you what: And I don’t just say this as an unabashed Banny apologist … there was some really, really good signs on Wednesday. Yes, he gave up the five runs. Yes, he gave up four extra base hits — including two almost identical home runs to Carlos Quentin. Yes, his ERA went up again — it’s now an unseemly 5.24.

But you know what? I thought he pitched really well this time. Sure, I could be jumping into the delusion pool myself. But I saw him attack hitters inside. He pitched went after them up in the strike zone. His fastball had a little more of a cutting edge to it. He definitely had a different look … he really threw like more of a power pitcher, which was interesting. He struck out six. He also made three or four mistake pitches, and let’s face it, that’s all that people really care about now. But I thought that this time around, there really should be some optimism. I asked Tom Watson once what was the hardest part of the swing change he made in ‘76. He said it was seeing himself in a new way. I think that makes a lot of sense.

* * *

I realize now that this post might sound a bit cranky … all that stuff that drives me nuts. But I’m not feeling cranky — I really hardly ever feel cranky, and I think people sometimes mistake my faux crankiness for real. I really don’t mind people ripping me for mentioning the book or for my perhaps irrational Gardy love. That’s half the fun. Anyway, to even things out, here is one of my absolute favorite things ever: The Critic, by Mel Brooks.