Royals moves avoiding the real problem

I was at Friday's debacle - you know, the one where Kyle Davies imploded on himself and was quickly shipped to Omaha aferwards - and believe me, it was worse than it looked on TV*.

By the way, I was on the field shooting pictures for the first five innings, so if you watched the game on Fox Midwest you can easily find me as the camera guy wearing the orange/blue striped shirt. At the start of the broadcast I walk right in front of the camera - can't miss me.

I only bring this up because I know I've gotten several e-mails from people wanting to know what I look like. And since I won't e-mail pictures of myself, you can see me if you DVR'd the game.

OK, back to my rant.

The Royals made the right move in sending Davies down. He clearly has not been able to harness his potentially outstanding stuff, and is just as inconsistent as he was when the Braves traded him to KC for Octavio Dotel. It's starting to get to the point where I seriously begin to doubt whether KD will ever figure it out up there.

He short arms his pitches, and doesn't repeat his delivery very well. Thus, he can't locate his fastball for crap. Clearly, his mechanics aren't the only issues though. He's got to harness his stuff mentally. That has been his biggest issue.

My gripe though is that the Royals organization is focusing too much on the pitching staff and hiding the real problem - the offense. At this point in the season it isn't going to matter much that the bullpen is razor sharp - in a bad way. I'm talking the kind of razor sharp that has the razor sliding across your neck - they're creating the bleeding when they should be the bandage that stops it.

Truth is, the pitching staff could give up two runs or twenty thousand runs and it wouldn't matter. The offense can't score enough runs to keep them winning. I've heard the arguments that the team is banged up, but I can easily counter that argument.

Allow me.

Alex Gordon? Well, he was batting .094 when he went down. Mike Aviles hovered around .183. Mike Jacobs, wait ... guess he isn't hurt but he's sucking bad enough you might think he is. Same goes to Jose Guillen. You see? They weren't helping much either.

Albert Pujols has 24 homers folks ... twenty-four. The top two in homers for the Royals, Miguel Olivo and Mike Jacobs, have 10 apiece. Do the math. David DeJesus hit his fourth dinger on Friday. So, basically what I'm saying is that Albert Pujols accounts for the home run total of THREE of the top Royals starters this year while his combined batting average is WAY higher than theirs.

So the losing streak isn't going to stop by the club shuffling the pitching staff around. Heck, Bruce Chen deserves to be in the big leagues right now. He's thrown shutouts in three of his past four starts at Omaha. But even Chen isn't going to help this team. He'll show up and start taking his losses and no-decisions right away. Doesn't matter how well he's throwing the ball right now, the offense can't score enough runs for the pitching to make a difference.

Oh yeah, the Royals defense has committed the 2nd-most errors in the AL. Whew.

It's sad to watch, really.