KC Royals: Oops Ned Did It Again In Cleveland Loss

Omar Infante Has Been A Disaster For 2 1/3 Years

Last season with the Kansas City Royals, many lists put Infante at or near the bottom of all position players. With 440 at bats, he hit a paltry .220. His on-base percentage (OBP) climbed just 14 points to .234. To put that into perspective, there are 26 pages baseball players on the MLB statistics website.

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By OBP, one has to go to page 13 to find Infante, surrounded mostly by guys with fewer than 100 at bats in 2015. Seattle’s Mike Zunino is a rare outlier with 350 at-bats and a .230 OBP, but his numbers were held down by a .174 average. He had 21 walks compare to Infante’s nine with 90 fewer at bats last year. Infante’s OBP ranks last among all MLB players with at least 400 plate appearances in 2015.

But that was last year, right? Sort of. Infante has climbed all the way to a .239 average and .279 OBP this season in 134 at bats with the KC Royals. In just 50 at bats, Merrifield’s 18 hits were already more than half of Infante’s total. The one strike against Merrifield in this argument: his .360 average is the same as his OBP.

While last night’s loss is not squarely on the shoulders on Infante, he tops the list of reasons why the Kansas City Royals lost Thursday night. Infante went 0-for-4 at the plate leaving two men on base. The real mistake came in the eighth inning when Infante booted a throw during a routine double play. The Indians turned that mistake into a run before walking off in the ninth.

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