Joe Posnanski: Trey Hillman Is Not Who We Thought He Was

The Royals, on a national level, are drastically undercovered. That's due not only to their talent-bereft lineup but to their small-market, flyoverland location -- without consistently interesting baseball, a team like the Royals is pretty boring. No mystery here.

Thank goodness, then, for Kansas City Star (and recently syndicated SI.com blogger) Joe Posnanski. Posnanski's ability to make the Royals semi-readable is a true gift, the sort of thing every writer envies but few actually have. Today, Posnanski has an especially important, and perhaps unforeseen, Royals update: Manager Trey Hillman, wunderkind of the Japanese major leagues, has been a giant disappointment:

No, the troubling part is that all of those things that Dayton Moore and so many others saw in Hillman - his bustling energy, his likeable personality, his sense of perspective, his ability to inspire and motivate the players - those things have been missing in action. The Royals have played lackluster baseball. They have gone backward defensively. They are so unfocused that Hillman last week made a point to say they're catching pop-ups better. They have by far the worst plate discipline in all of baseball. The Royals' young players have not improved enough and in some case regressed. This is not a well-managed baseball team.

Yeesh. As Posnanski mentions, that's not the Trey Hillman people saw in Japan -- the guy who looked like the perfect manager for the small-market, post-Moneyball era. Whether or not Hillman has responded to his team, or his team is responding to Hillman, or whether this matters at all is yet to be seen, but if stuff like this keeps coming from credible places like Posnanski, Hillman's days in Kansas City will be short-lived.