It's time for another team's worth of cards from 2013 SEGA Card-Gen. This time I am featuring the Kansas City Royals. The Royals get 15 cards in the set, which is two above the overall average of 13 cards per team.
Salvador Perez has been pretty good the last couple of years. He was a top 20 catcher in fantasy baseball in 2012, and in the top five or six for 2013 and the first half of 2014. He offers a little bit of power and a good average. It looks like he's not too shabby on defense, either.
Eric Hosmer has been up and down in his career. He had a good rookie year in 2011, finishing third in the Rookie of the Year voting, and a good year in 2013, with good statistical totals all around and a Gold Glove award. But in 2012 and so far in 2014 he has struggled a bit. It seems like all of these Royals batters have a hard time staying consistent. You almost feel like they're the same guy, full of promise but unable to put it all together.
Mike Moustakas is another promising young bat who hasn't quite panned out. So far this season he is batting under .200 and isn't ownable in fantasy baseball. I guess the good thing about all these guys is that they are fairly young as a group and maybe will all hit their prime in a couple of years and live up to their promise.
Alcides Escobar is one of the Royals who has been pretty good this year, putting up top-10 numbers at the shortstop position, mostly by virtue of his stolen bases and near-.300 batting average. He had a little bit of a down year last year, but was still a top-20 guy at his position.
Alex Gordon has been extremely consistent over the last couple of years, ranking right around 25th among outfielders in 2012, 2013, and 2014. He's a guy I tend to target in fantasy drafts because he gives you numbers in every category and doesn't really hurt you anywhere. He's also got one of my favorite 2014 Topps flagship cards because of the funny face he's making in the photograph as he watches the ball in the air. He looks a bit more serious on this Card-Gen card.
Lorenzo Cain seems to be having a pretty good season this year, but has stayed pretty well outside my sphere of awareness. It looks like he has spent the last few years playing pretty well without standing out all that much.
Jeff Francoeur had a lot of buzz in his career, but again never was able to get it to stick for any length of time. After getting released from the Royals in 2013, he spent some time with the Giants, then got picked up by the Indians system, and is currently with the Padres minor league organization. There are some rumors out there today that he might opt out of that minor league deal in order to go up and be the Blue Jays' fourth outfielder. You've gotta love those high socks he's sporting, probably a remnant of his days in Atlanta, where they do baseball the 'right' way, enforcing all of the unwritten rules of the game.
And here we get to the meat of the lineup, specifically the ham, bacon, and sausage gravy you might find in a Country Breakfast. Billy Butler had a pretty awesome 2012, but his 2013 and 2014 seasons didn't quite live up to expectations. I can't help liking the guy, though. There is still time this year for him to turn things around, but he might want to do that pretty soon. Hopefully he's not hiding an injury or something, because his power numbers are not there at all, and big flies are his calling card.
These 15-card teams are hard to do write-ups on. Here we are just getting into the pitchers, and I feel like I've been working on this post forever already. I haven't even posted any good commentary so far, with nothing you couldn't find just by looking a guy up on Baseball-Reference.com and Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball. But I feel obligated to post something along with these pictures. Luke Hochevar was a pretty middling starter for a few years, but had an amazing year in 2013 as a reliever, putting up video game numbers with a 1.92 ERA and 10.5 strikeouts per 9 innings over 70.1 innings. Unfortunately he is out this season with an arm injury.
Who? It appears that Luis Mendoza is playing pro baseball in Japan now for the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters, after bouncing around the majors and minors here for a few years putting up mediocre numbers. His record there for 2014 is 3-8, so he may not be finding much success there, either.
James Shields would be the ace of this lineup, having been a consistently good pitcher for a while now. He came to the Royals from the Rays in a multi-player trade, with the main guy going the other way being Wil Myers. 2011 and 2012 were really good years for him. He's still pretty good, but his ratios and strikeout rate keep him from being a top fantasy guy.
This season Wade Davis has been a perfect fantasy baseball middle reliever this year. He's got great ratios and a K/9 rate of 14.23 over 36-2/3 innings. He was one of the other guys who came over in the same trade as James Shields. His stints as a reliever have gone much better than his attempts at starting, despite what the back of this card tells us.
Tim Collins is currently down in the minor leagues, having pitched just 17-1/3 innings for the big club this year. He's put up a 0.75 ERA in the minors, so maybe he will get a chance to come back up sometime this year.
Aaron Crow is a decent reliever. He made the All-Star team in 2011, and seems to do a good consistent job. His ratios are pretty good this year, but his strikeout ratio isn't all that hot. I don't have much else to say, so I'm going to go ahead and move on.
Greg Holland has been pretty good since 2011, but in 2013 and 2014 has been one of the top closers in the game, with a big strikeout rate, good ratios, and the ability to rack up the saves. The Royals have a pretty good bullpen, it would appear.
And that does it for the Royals in 2013 SEGA Card-Gen. This post sat in my Drafts folder for a while, but I finally got through it. Hopefully you got through it too. Only 23 more teams to go!
2013 SEGA Card-Gen Directory
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