<table> </table> SURPRISE, Ariz. | He doesn&#8217;t stop. That&#8217;s what they notice about Trey Hillman. He doesn&#8217;t stop, never stops, ever, he&#8217;s up before the farmers and newspaper delivery folks, he&#8217;s hitting the elliptical machine and jabbering about lineups, he&#8217;s video conferencing with his family, he&#8217;s scouring the Internet for baseball news, he&#8217;s scribbling ideas in his notebook, he&#8217;s watching minor-leaguers, he&#8217;s bouncing around asking questions, crazy questions, like what base the pitcher should cover when there are runners on first and third and a foul ball is hit behind first base.</p><p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve got some different ideas about what the pitcher should do,&#8221; he says. &#8220;I really want some of our players&#8217; opinion on this. I want to think outside the box.&#8221;</p><p>How far outside the box can you go on the topic of where a pitcher goes on a foul ball? Is he going to the concession stand? To the Marine Corps recruiting office? It doesn&#8217;t matter because before you can ask, Hillman is off to the next thing, to hitting; he saw something yesterday during workouts that got him thinking all night, something that he wants to mention to Mike Barnett, the hitting coach, not a big thing, just a little something that woke him up at 3 a.m.</p><p>&#8220;It&#8217;s really not a big thing,&#8221; he says again.</p><p>But it got you up at 3 a.m.</p><p>&#8220;Lots of stuff gets me up at 3 a.m.,&#8221; he says.</p><p>And he&#8217;s off to the next thing, on-base percentage, and the thing after that, bunt coverage, and the thing after that, the single cutoff vs. the double cutoff, and the thing after that &#8230; Trey Hillman is here to turn around the Kansas City Royals. He&#8217;s come a long way to do this job. He&#8217;s been to Japan and back. He&#8217;s toiled in the minor leagues, as a player and manager. He&#8217;s driven the plains of Oklahoma and Texas searching for players with talent. He&#8217;s waited a long time to get here. Too long.</p><p>&#8220;That guy is a (bleeping) bottle of pep,&#8221; Royals senior pitching advisor Bill Fischer said. &#8220;If you had to ride across the country with him, you&#8217;d jump out of the car.&#8221;</p><p><em>02|20|08</em></p><p>Hillman sees the chairs, and he gets an idea. You have to understand that Trey Hillman has only one expectation: He expects his players to respect the game. He can take a lot, he will take a lot, he will stand with a player through any hailstorm and through savage slumps &#8212; as long as that young man respects the game. But if Hillman sees disrespect, well, that&#8217;s when he checks out.</p><p>Respect is the feeling at the core of Trey Hillman. He has the baseball love of a player who wasn&#8217;t quite good enough. His father, Royce, sold tickets at Texas Rangers games, and he helped get Trey a job working in the visiting clubhouse. Hillman thought he would play in the big leagues then, and he watched those major-league players closely, studied them, and he saw the way the good teams &#8212; the Royals stood out for him &#8212; were also the class teams, they treated the clubhouse boys respectfully, they talked about the game, they joked around a lot but they were also serious and professional about the game.</p><p>&#8220;I want this to be a fun atmosphere,&#8221; Hillman says. &#8220;I want everyone to feel like me; I want them to feel like they can&#8217;t wait to get to the ballpark. And I don&#8217;t want anyone to feel like they&#8217;re bigger than anyone else. Everybody is going to help us win &#8212; everybody &#8212; from the general manager to the guys washing the towels in the clubhouse, to the scouts driving a couple hundred extra miles to see some player he heard about. We can&#8217;t win if every one of those people doesn&#8217;t believe he&#8217;s a part of this thing.&#8221;