Billy Butler: more than just a delicate flower

Well, the Big Donkey fell just short of hitting for the cycle last night. All he needed was a triple.

This guy was in our yard the other night, and he runs exactly like Butler:

Does anybody else think the whole Soria thing is as dumbass corrupt as the Dubya White House? The Royals and Hillman are lying. They didn't withhold info about Soria's condition in order get a competitive edge. That doesn't make any sense. They didn't know he was stiff until Hillman failed to pitch him for more than a week. And that's why he was stiff!

Zack Greinke. Ho hum.

Greinke goes tonight

"I like the guacamole,” Greinke said. “Now, I don’t really love the guacamole. So I get it when I feel like it. They changed their guacamole from $1.50 to $1.80. I mean, $1.50 is already pretty darn high. So they changed it to $1.80, and I’ll never again get guacamole.”

"So, when I saw her at the library, I said, 'I don't want to look like a loser going to the library during lunch, but...I've got two positives. One, I hate lunch. Two, I could try to put some moves on her.'"

"She, like, has a special mouth...so that her breath is usually pretty good, but she complains about mine a lot."

"There definitely will be flying cars, but whether there'll be flying cars for most people to use, it'll probably take a long time to straighten everything out, all the rules and hassles. It'll take a while to figure out how to keep people from crashing into each other."

"This was the first time Billy Butler's ever looked...like a defensive specialist over there."

“There’s a lot more interesting stuff going on right now,” he said. “They should have something else on the cover. Playoff basketball or something else. So it’s a mistake. They’ll probably sell their least amount of magazines in a long time - except when NASCAR was on the cover.”

P.S. Dear God: Please let Meche be OK.

Who cares about Banny's strikeout-to-walk ratio?

Nice win last night. Not sure how Banny does it. Smoke and mirrors?

If Guillen can have one of his hot months while the starting pitching is smoking, we might be in really great shape by the end of May.

But we haven't addressed this Soria thing yet. We have a theory. We think Soria's shoulder got stiff because HE HADN'T PITCHED IN NINE DAYS. We don't think he was hurt at all, until Hillman failed to use him properly. Baseball pitchers are like racing horses. You have to give them the proper workouts and monitor everything they do. Anyway, we think this is all Hillman's fault. If we're right, that is just about the worst thing a Royals manager has ever done. And that's saying a lot.

But Hillman is saying, in retrospect, that he didn't get Soria into those games because he was hurt, not because the manager was an idiot. We're calling bullshit.

Hopefully Soria isn't ruined for the year. These things rarely turn out well.

P.S. You know by now that Greinke is going to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Kill a chicken or sacrifice a goat or something.

P.P.S. Soria didn't pitch much in Spring Training either. It seems obvious that he just needs to get back in the groove. Or maybe he needs surgery?

This post was actually going to be interesting at one point

We are two games behind. We actually took drunken notes during Banny's start, but we forgot to post them yesterday and now they're out of date. Oh well. Here are some highlights anyway:

The right side of the infield is a freak show!

How good would Callaspo be if he was a good 2B?

Baseball players are usually dumb as shit; but the look in Callaspo's eyes leads us to believe that he would score approximately 7 on th ACT.

Banny!

Freak show! We're ready to sign Grudz. We really do like Callaspo as a hitter, but he's a horrible 2B.

If fucking Farnsworth (Farnyard) comes into this game, we're going to shit our pants.

Banny!!

Aviles is lost. Our middle infield is a disaster. Sign Grudz! (God forbid we start to think about TPJ.)

Banny!!!

Moneyball!! Doh! Butler is slooowow.

Jamie Wright is alright.

The recovery of the global economy and the future of the free world depend upon The Mexicutioner's right shoulder.

Fuckin Olivo. We've had it with that guy.

Strike Three. Put that in your Peace Pipe, Chief Wahoo!

OK. That was Wednesday night. Now it's Friday. That thing yesterday was a debacle.

What's wrong with Mahay?

Shit list: Farnyard, Mahay, Olivo, Aviles, Butler.

Non-shit list: Gil, Zack, Davies, Banny, Teahen, Callaspo (as a hitter), Butler (as a first baseman, believe it or not), Jacobs (as a DH), Coco.

Soria's making things a little more interesting this year.

P.S. The original post had some stuff in it about lesbians, art majors, scotch, Jesus, lubricants, Pi, and Eddie Money. But we cut all that junk because it was either too much information or because it just no longer seemed funny. Kinda like the rest of the stuff we actually did post.

P.P.S. Does the Tony Gonzalez deal mean the Chiefs might draft a TE like, say, Chase Coffman in the third round? Or do they already have another TE? We forget. Regardless, a lot of shit is going to go down with the Chiefs in the next day or so.

And we need you today, oh Banny!

We were busy/distracted last night and didn't get to listen to the game closely. We thought it was going to be a real boring stinker anyway, and then we were surprised the Royals came back. The question for those of you who actually watched or listened to the whole thing is: How can we blame this loss on Hillman? Feel free to be creative in your answers.

Obviously the Royals grounded into too many double plays. And it sounded like Jacobs just missed a home run that would have been the difference in the long run.

One thing we know is: We are sick of that turd Olivo. Get rid of him and his whack-attack approach at the plate, and let Buck and B. Pena play. Also, Olivo, who throws well, is terrible at catching the ball. This is a bad trait in a catcher.

Tonight, we're going to listen to every inning (unless the Royals are getting killed). And we're gonna take notes. So, depending on how much beer/scotch we drink, tomorrow's post should be fun.

P.S. When we hinted that Josh Hamilton was the Destroyer of Worlds last week, we must have been thinking of Grady Sizemore.

P.P.S. Yes, we are evoking Barry Manilow in the headline.

P.P.P.S. We can't get enough of this HoRambo guy on Royals Corner.

P.P.P.P.S. When the season started last year, Banny was our No. 2 starter. And still there are some who insist that there's no such thing as progress.

Seems like something Seitzer could fix

They're pitching Aviles outside and he's trying to pull everything. It's very obvious. Seems like something Seitzer could fix. Also, with two strikes, the pitcher will try to get Aviles to chase a high fastball almost every time.

Hochevar is kicking ass in Omaha.

All of the teams in the AL Central look pretty even to us. If we can minimize the Farnsworth effect, we like our chances.

This just in: Bannister is up, HoRam to the pen. So whose place will Hochevar ultimately take in the rotation, Banny's or Ponson's?

It should end up being a deep rotation, in addition to being a good rotation.

Yes, we are really starting to like our chances of being in it at the trade deadline this year. (Seems like we said the same thing this time last year.)

For now, We just need to keep tweaking the lineup to get the most out of our offensive players, and to hide our bad defensive players late in close games.

And Trey needs to understand this very clearly: His best pitchers in the pen are Tejeda, Cruz and Soria. In that order.

But Greinke was fantastic!

Well, Trey Hillman leads the majors in blown saves.

But we're not going to talk about that, or anybody else, except to say that Zack's game the other night was beautiful.

All of the other Royals blogs have the obvious grillings of Hillman and Farnsworth. We don't even want to contemplate it anymore.

P.S. Signing Farnsworth for too much money and then actually pitching him in high leverage situations is the definintion of compounding a mistake.

P.P.S. The infield defense sucks.

P.P.P.S. Teahen is money again.