This isn’t the Hillman we were expecting
All season long, people have asked about Royals manager Trey Hillman. What’s he like? How is he doing in his first year? Is he the right guy? The problem with answering, honestly, is that I’ve seen two Trey Hillmans.
Last October, I saw Trey Hillman in Japan. He was managing the Nippon Ham Fighters in the Japan Series then, and that guy looked like a young managing star. Everybody liked him. Everybody respected him. He was self-assured, he was beloved, his players played hard and smart baseball for him. You could not help but see exactly what Royals general manager Dayton Moore saw when he gave Hillman a big-league job — this guy would bring passion to Kansas City, bring baseball imagination, a little Texas attitude, and he would preach and promote Royals baseball to the whole Midwest. This was the right guy at the right time.
Then he took over as Royals manager. And ever since, to be blunt, Hillman has been drowning. It isn’t just that this team has underperformed — though, of course the Royals have underperformed (they have the largest payroll in team history and are on pace to win and lose the same number of games as last year’s team flop). Well, everyone has grown accustomed to the Royals disappointing.
It isn’t just that this team lost 12 games in a row earlier this year — the longest losing streak by any club in the league and a sure sign of a team that is not very good and is not playing alert or focused baseball. Everyone around here has been through long losing streaks.
It isn’t just that the Royals recently went through a stretch of allowing 22 unearned runs in 21 games, devastatingly bad baseball for a team that was supposed to be built on improved fundamentals and sturdy defense. Then, everyone has seen that act before, too.
Those things mostly reflect on the players — Hillman wasn’t dealt much of a hand in his first shot at the big leagues (One example: The Royals are dead last in the American League in homers and are near the bottom in stolen bases. So this is another no-power, no-speed Royals team. We’ve grown used to that around here, too).
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.
And everyone seems to know it, especially the players. It should be said up front that Major League Baseball players often grumble about their manager. But multiple sources who are around the club every day say that these Royals openly mock him. A new Trey Hillman joke is almost a daily occurrence, and it’s hard for a manager to recover from being a clubhouse punchline.
It would be easy to run a long list of quotes from unnamed sources about Hillman — they line up around the block to say that the Royals don’t look ready to play, that there’s definitely a lack of respect in the clubhouse, that Hillman often seems out of his depth — but let’s not do that. Instead, though, let’s look at some of the more public stuff.
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To reach Joe Posnanski, call 816-234-4361 or send e-mail to jposnanski@kcstar.com. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com
