Jose Guillen's frustration and the Royals' struggles closing out innings

Guillen has backed up his comments with his play. But let's put that aside for right now. Let's look at what he said. First, he has placed blame on himself as much as the rest of the team. He has not called any players out individually. He has defended Hillman when the media questioned him. I see nothing wrong with what he is doing. He is not out of line with anything he has said and he doesn't put himself above everyone else.

If he keeps performing and behaving himself as he has, I will not have anything against his blow ups. If anything, they have been warranted.

I totally agree, once again, with what you're saying here in your post. For some reason, this Royals team (along with numerous Royals teams in the last 10 or 15 years) are just more prone to coasting than most other teams, only they seem to cast losing in a vast, much larger net. They never seem to give up when it comes to thinking they've get everything made at inappropriate moments. It's almost as if they think the innings only last two innings (and we've seen that lapse in judgement with two regimes now).
You're totally on the ball. I also wanted to bring your attention to my new blog about the
Royals, and its first post, which is located here: http://royalsandcelebs.today.com/2008/06/24/hello-world/
I hope you enjoy it. It's all about the Royals, celebrities, and anything else that crosses my mind. The first one is one Guillen's latest comments on the state of the team. Thanks for all the great posts every day, and I hope to be hearing from you soon. Jhart227

Guillen has a fine line to tread between motivator and "white noise". He needs to also give some praise to guys doing well if it's deserved otherwise his complaining will start to fall on deaf ears in the clubhouse. I like Guillen and what he said earlier in the season needed to be said but he needs to be careful to not alienate his teammates in the process of trying to pull the Royals up by the bootstraps.

I know what VORP, WARP, PERA mean. If you don't pick up a Baseball Prospectus.

I'm fine with Jose blasting his teammates on a nightly basis for every mistake they make, as long as he doesn't mind when they question his pitch selection or throw him under the bus every time he goes 0-4 with 3 strikeouts.

For comparison, a veteran like Grudz would have been well within the "Guillen code" to blast Guillen in the media for being fat and unprofessional when he started the season overweight and hit like Pena.

For a young team that is going to make some mistakes, you can't have a supposed team leader blowing everyone up in the media every night. Someone needs to reign him in.

There was a stat that was on the Ball Star or on the royals section of the star a couple of weeks ago that said the number of games that the Royals have won when they hit a home run...Well, I'm thinking that if we can hit one every game, we can make the playoffs this year, right?

Oh, and by the way...I was listening to 610 or 810 yesterday and whoever was hosting had been talking about Guillen and his comments before the game. He asked callers to call in and comment about those things that Guillen said, and then when the callers tried to give their opinions (most of them positive about Guillen), he would shut them down and tell them how terrible Guillen was coming in fat to training camp and playing a terrible month of April....Anyone else hear that?

I'm sorry man, but I could care less how much he let his teammates down in spring training and even into the month of April, because the dude is playing excellent baseball and will continue until September. I think five months of over-par playing makes up for one month of sub-par baseball. If Guillen was playing terrible and was still "fat", then yes I would have a problem, but the guy is making every single player on that team look like a 2 year old when he gets up to bat and crushes the ball...

PS - anyone else notice the speed of his swing? My god, I don't think I've ever seen a Royal who can get the bat around faster than that...

PSS - Props to Dutton for the "Mexicutioner" in his article. I vote for that Joakim Soria nickname...
JT

I watched the Royals pregame last night, which had a few clips of Guillen talking. I don't know if there was a lot more that he had to say or not, it was all I had access to.

In those clips he seems to be talking about the offense, not the pitching. He specifically pointed out base running mistakes and not being able to move runners or score with two outs.

And when he talks about playing all nine innings, I could at least see that applying to our offense. How many games (until this recent surge) have we scored early and then done nothing the rest of the game? You've quoted the stats above to prove that we've done a pretty good job of holding leads. But how about that crazy stat where we were like 0-38 when trailing after seven? That's an offense that doesn't play all nine innings.

As far as Guillen himself, I'm becoming a bigger and bigger fan of the guy. Of course it's easy to root for him when he's absolutely tearing up the league. But he's also becoming a leader. He's not content with winning a couple of games, he wants to see the team play consistently good baseball. And he backs it up by playing very good ball, both offensively and defensively.

I've been on teams before that lost a lot of games and losing becomes a culture. No one likes to lose, but after a while you start to accept it and get used to it. Many of our current guys have been around losing a lot. Maybe Guillen can help set a new culture for this club - one that will do all the things necessary to win consistently.