Jazayerli, who describes himself as a "dermatologist by day, baseball writer by night, pathetic Royals fan all the time," is no mere fan blogger. He's a co-founder of Baseball Prospectus, and he's done admirable work on the study of pitcher abuse. He knows whereof he speaks, and when he speaks like this, in a raging 3,000-word indictment of the way the Royals handle and mishandle injuries, the organization would do well to pay attention. The Royals, being the Royals, did no such thing. Today, Jazayerli writes:

I was just informed last night that I've been blacklisted by the team. That's right: I've been banned by the Royals! The way this team is playing, I'm not sure if the Royals are trying to punish me or reward me.

Which he later clarified a little:

I don't think I've been "banned" in the sense that they're going to have security guards outside the stadium making sure that I don't buy a ticket. It does mean that the Royals have cut off any access I may have from the team for my radio show, and - this is critical - have intimated that any other radio show which has me on as a guest faces the same penalty.

This is obviously the Royals' right, but go back and read Jazayerli's initial post, which is maybe nasty only to the extent that he holds up Swartz (and only Swartz) as a symbol for what is pretty clearly an organizational flaw. He documents three egregious examples in which the team seemed to underplay, if not ignore, the extent of a player's injury, leading — in Jazayerli's mind — to more catastrophic injuries. Here he is on Coco Crisp, who recently underwent season-ending shoulder surgery:

I don't know about you, but to me, the handling of Coco Crisp's shoulder injury is by itself a fireable offense. Crisp was playing – terribly, mind you – with a bum shoulder FOR FIVE WEEKS, and even after his shoulder pain became severe enough that he could no longer play, the Royals kept shuffling him in and out of the lineup for three weeks, putting him back out there as soon as the pain became tolerable again.

But the pain didn't go away. It only got worse, and presumably his shoulder only got worse. The question that no one can answer is whether, five weeks ago, Crisp already had a torn labrum, or whether the injury occurred while trying to play through the inflammation. We can't answer it, but we sure as hell can speculate. As far as I'm concerned, the Royals' ham-fisted approach to Coco Crisp's shoulder turned an injury which might have healed with a few weeks of rest into a season-ender.

This is all very damnable stuff, and at this point, an angry gadfly like Jazayerli should be the least of the Royals' concerns. The team evidently thinks this is a public relations matter. It's not. If Jazayerli is right, it's a medical malpractice suit waiting to happen.

Banned! [Rany on the Royals]
Release The Hounds [Rany on the Royals]

When it launched on the Web in 1997, Baseball Prospectus was a gadfly that hadn't yet caught the ear of the major leagues. Nevertheless, it became a gathering place for sabermetrics' brainy hobbyists: The site laid out the concept of value over replacement player, pushed for teams to do a better job tracking pitch counts, and ran Voros McCracken's breakthrough study that pitchers have little control over the hits they allow.

By the time Moneyball came out in 2003, major-league teams had figured out the value of BP's writers. In 2002, the Blue Jays hired BP's Keith Law as a consultant. Keith Woolner, who invented VORP, left in 2007 to join the Indians, James Click and Chaim Bloom joined up with the Rays, and Dan Fox quit to work for the Pirates. Last year, the entire world realized that Nate Silver was an undervalued asset when he started devoting his genius-power to politics. Two months ago, he resigned as BP's managing partner and announced he'd likely "not be able to write about baseball with the frequency that [he] once did."

Kevin Goldstein, the site's new lead business guy, says the departure of the site's top analytical minds is "a real pain in the ass." He says there are now more than 10 people working for major-league clubs who have BP on their resume. "If someone's really valuable to you, you can usually keep them if you play the money game," he says. "We can't do that because working in baseball is their dream."

Unlike a baseball team, BP doesn't get talented youngsters back in trade when its veterans leave town. The need to find new, cheap, unknown talent explains something as bizarre and seemingly un-wonky as the site's current Prospectus Idol contest, in which 10 finalists are competing to become a columnist.

Along with getting raided by the big leagues, BP also has to compete with a bajillion other baseball-wonk clearinghouses—and the other guys don't charge a subscription fee. One quantitative analyst who does work for several major-league teams told me that BP has less path-breaking statistical material these days than sites like Fangraphs and The Hardball Times. Fangraphs has done more and better work than BP using Pitch f/x, the amazingly rich new data on pitch types, speeds, and location. (BP's former Pitch f/x guru, Dan Fox, is one of the guys who left for MLB. Another f/x expert, Eric Seidman, is now writing for BP along with Fangraphs.) I also heard from several different people that Dave Cameron, who writes primarily for Fangraphs and the Wall Street Journal, is the closest thing on the Web to a proto-Silver—the most-promising young sabermetrician writing today.

Goldstein says that, while he believes BP's writing is better than the competition, Fangraphs has moved the ball when it comes to tech-y tools. He doesn't see it as a problem, however, that BP is no longer the lone port of call for spreadsheet lovers: Joe Sheehan is one of the best baseball columnists anywhere, Will Carroll is the industry's leading injury guru, and Goldstein himself is a respected prospect evaluator. "I don't want [statistics] to be only what we do," he says. "I don't want to be pigeonholed as that, and that's ticked off a lot of people. … There is a certain subset out there who wants us to stick to our roots and talk about the numbers and be more hardcore."

While Prospectus might be losing stathead mindshare, it does still have PECOTA, the player-forecast system invented by Nate Silver. Goldstein emphasizes that the site's subscriber-base and traffic are bigger than ever. The BP gospel has also spread to mainstream publications like ESPN.com and Sports Illustrated, and the Prospectus brand has now extended to include a basketball site and a hockey site. Inspired by Silver's political work, Goldstein and co. are now thinking about moving beyond sports. "I don't want people stealing our ideas, but we've got things in our cooker for the next couple of years," Goldstein says. One clue: "We wouldn't do data on the plumbing industry, because there's not a lot of plumbing fans."

SEATTLE MARINERS
BP - "Both the Athletics and Angels appear to be better teams headed into the season, but not by much. If the players the Mariners believe in to defy the odds all reward the team's faith in their potential, they'll easily contend all season long."
Deadspin - "Rooting for the Mariners is futile, draining, and infuriating. It's not easy to document in a blog post; a baseball team this willfully and historically bad needs to be documented and exposed in a book like Fiasco. Thomas Ricks wouldn't even have to change the title."

Even though we, as always resist the term "snarky" (we prefer "cheeky"), we think it only makes sense. It is the essence of being a fan to despair; it is easier to anguish over sports, which doesn't matter, than it is to anguish about real-world issues, which is really depressing. Complain away, sports fans of America! You are, after all, paying for all this.

BP Hope And Faith Vs. Deadspin Snark [Get Untracked]
Baseball Season Preview [Deadspin]

The book is ostensibly a reference book, with all kinds of stats and strange acronyms, but by the time it comes out each year, we're so insane about baseball starting that we read it cover to cover like it's a novel. And it just arrived. If we start referring to the PECOTA projections for next year's batch of Carolina Panthers cheerleaders, just bear with us.

Baseball Prospectus 2006 [Amazon]

In the preface to his book — essentially about the mind of Cards manager Tony LaRussa — Bissinger calls out Moneyball and Baseball Prospectus acolytes, saying "they have a very bloodless, anti-human, antiseptic view of the game of baseball." Those "anti-humans" happen to be the very type of people who write about baseball on the Web, so, as you can imagine, Bissinger isn't a huge Technorati search these days. (He even called stat guys "nerds" once, which, as you can tell from the picture — with Tim McGraw and Faith Hill! — is a designation with which he is likely quite familiar.)

But credit to Cardnilly: He doesn't let the Bill James of the world off lightly either.

What I really think it boils down to this: the writing style of a lot of the sabr-guys (and gals) is sometimes high-handed, imperious, sarcastic and condescending. It challenges received wisdom, and it does so in a cutting, superior tone. ... So when Buzz complains about the "bloodless, anti-human, antiseptic view" of the stathead crowd, he s clearly overstating his case. But folks like Bill James and the BPro staff can make it easy for that charge to seem plausible with their writing style.

Buzz Hearts Albert [Cardnilly]
Fire Joe Morgan [Blogspot]
Three Nights In August [Amazon]

No, really. Chris Kahrl, who has written extensively about the Washington Nationals and baseball finance, is now Christina Kahrl. In 2003, Kahrl — one of the founders of BP — decided that he was a she and made the appropriate surgical necessities.

"Nobody has batted an eye," says Kahrl. "Everybody has been great and supportive, from friends and family and colleagues to everybody with the White Sox to the University of Chicago alumni. A reader said, 'I had no idea that Chris was short for Christina.' And I was like, 'Yeah, that s what it s short for.' But that s it."

We support Kahrl's decision, obviously, and hope that she is happy. But count us as batting an eye, at least. At the very least, we think Mike Lupica should try this. Heck, he's halfway there anyway. (Oh, come on, you thought it.)

Cheap Seats [Washington City Paper]
Baseball Prospectus [Official Site]

Also in Carroll's column: The rumor that another big-name player is about to be nailed for steroids. Let us know your most likely suspect. We're still going with Cardinals shortstop David Eckstein. Don't sue us, Dave!

A Joe Valachi By Any Other Name [Baseball Prospectus]