Lollygaggers!

Despite a win, Royals Manager Trey Hillman gets all up in his team's grill:

It didn’t matter Thursday that Ryan Shealy had just hit a game-ending homer for a 4-3 victory over the Arizona Diamondbacks at Surprise Stadium. Or that the Royals had just won their fourth game in a row. Or even that it’s just spring training.

Hillman had seen too many base-running mistakes earlier in the game.

His solution was to gather the entire team at the plate for what amounted to a 15-minute lecture in full view of the Diamondbacks and the departing crowd of 5,539.

I'm usually against coaches who take the Les Steckel route, but I think Hillman is right to call his team out like this. He's new. He's not got a lot of talent to work with. He needs to set a tone now, and the one he seems to have chosen with the Royals is the importance of fundamentally-sound baseball.

I used to watch Trey Hillman manage the Columbus Clippers at a time when the Yankees had no one worth a damn in the high minors. Hillman made those awful teams look pretty good. I think he knows what he's doing.