Number Munchers: A Significantly Less Dire May

Anecdotally, we all know May has been just awful for the Royals in the #GMDM era. The dog days of spring are often promised as roses but delivered as dandelions. Any proper blue blood with a couple Tank 7s consumed will more than happily tell you how this is the month it usually falls apart. For whatever reason, May is snake bitten. Come October, we preach the same vernacular time and time again: If only we could have avoided that terrible May …

Truth is, we are pretty much right. Since Dayton took over the franchise in June 2006, the club has gone 103-149 in May contests (a .409 winning %). To put that in context, our average record for a May with 29 games is 12-17. Applied to a full season, you get 66-96. That is a fine Allard-Baird-esque performance.

Why have we been so bad in May? I don’t know. Smarter men than I get paid a lot of money by the Glass family to figure that out. I merely pull numbers for Royals Blue and am rewarded handsomely with sarcasm and squeeze cheese. Perhaps the veterans start to break down (see Infante and Guthrie). Perhaps the hot and cold streaks even out and we finally reach a point of honest evaluation (See Hosmer, Moustakas, Herrera and Ventura). Perhaps the league finally remembers how to pitch to batters that have the plate discipline of Vladimir Guerrero on a getaway day (see Escobar and Salvy).

Fear not Royals fans, for only the second time since Moore took the bull by the horns, the Kansas City Royals had a winning May at 14-12 (the other being 15-13 in 2012). It wasn’t an easy 14-12. We battled through injuries, inconsistencies on both pitching and offense, an odd amount of off days and a thorough series of beat downs by those damn Yankees.

Still, our (really not so) young pups just kept taking care of business. We took 2 of 3 from both Cleveland and Detroit. We split 4 with the Rangers. We owned our inter league matchups, going 5-2 vs the Reds, Cubs and those dirty, dirty Cardinals (seriously, can we go back in time and go to the NL instead of Milwaukee?). Chris Young, himself responsible for 4 of those May wins, proved to be a very, very tall knight in shining armor for a rotation that saw two pieces miss significant time due to “injury”. While several batters began to return to Earth from their astronomical Aprils, Hosmer punished the ball the first half of the month (before losing his sense of the strike zone and going ice cold in the second half. We’ll touch on that in a minute). Moose continued one of the most surprising career turnarounds in MLB history. The bullpen remained beyond dominant.

In a month of obstacles that might have torn another team apart, our band of brothers held it together and managed to put up more Ws than Ls. It is hard to be super excited by .538 baseball, but the numbers show this is a huge step for the Royals organization. It is just one more sign that we finally have to accept that we have a winner now.

Of interesting note if you really want to pinpoint where things usually goes awry for our boys in blue, it is the last week of May. In the Moore era, from May 24 through May 31, the Royals have gone an astonishingly bad 17-48. That’s a whopping .354 winning %. Applied to a full season, that would equate to a 42-120 record. Them’s Detroit Tigers numbers there.

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