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The Kansas City Royals are World Champions. Last night, they finished off another spectacular playoff run, this time pushing the envelope on a play at the plate instead of having the tying run get stranded at third base. Despite being continually underestimated — including here, frequently, in things I’ve written over the last few years — the Royals ran away with the AL Central, aggressively loaded up on reinforcements at the trade deadline, and then trounced everyone in their path during the postseason. After years of enduring criticism during the building of this roster, Dayton Moore and his staff can certainly feel a significant amount of vindication this morning; they won with exactly the kind of team they believed could win.

Because baseball is a copycat industry, we are almost certainly going to see the other 29 teams look at KC’s success and try to figure out which parts of it can be reproduced. Certainly, they aren’t the first team to win with mostly home-grown talent, but they are a bit unique in that they refined a certain style of play until that model became synonymous with their organization, so it might be a little easier to copy “the Royals way” than if they just won while playing a more conventional style. So let’s see if we can tease out some lessons from Kansas City’s roster construction that other teams might be able to learn from.

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Let me give you three stat lines, and you’ll understand immediately where this is going. It’s time for Player A, B, and C. Let’s add in D, E, and F too.

Royals Players’ Recent Seasons

Player	AVG	OBP	SLG	wRC+	DEF
A	0.212	0.271	0.361	76	4.6
B	0.232	0.324	0.378	87	-1.6
C	0.232	0.304	0.359	80	-25.4
D	0.251	0.310	0.348	80	20.3
E	0.218	0.274	0.338	72	-11.5
F	0.257	0.293	0.320	67	13.9

wRC+ = weighted runs created plus, or a weighted offensive stat where 100 is league average
DEF = FanGraphs defensive value, or positional value plus defensive value

These guys look bad.

Player A had that season in 2014. He was 26 and supposedly headed towards peaking. He could make contact and hit for power, but there was something missing. A pull-happy fly-ball approach easily defended by the shift, no walks — suddenly his glove was keeping him afloat. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

What’s funny is that Mike Moustakas actually learned the lesson he needed to learn in 2013. It just took until 2015 to really cement in his day to day work. As Ben Lindbergh pointed out on Grantland this year, he meant to change his approach to the shift coming into the 2014 season by trying to maybe hit balls over the shortstop sometimes.

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I watched the last Super Bowl in Seattle. It was a hell of a football game. It followed what had been, for the Seahawks, a miraculous conference championship game, and in the Super Bowl itself, another miraculous event put the Seahawks on the verge of a title. And then, in the dying seconds, a controversial play was called, and they threw an interception from the one-yard line. That quickly, everything that happened before was erased. A feeling crept into the fans around me, and collectively they refused to feel it. Instead, they felt confusion. Why pass? Why not run? What if they had run? The real heartache did sink in in time, but still the confusion lingers. Why not run? Would they have won if they had run? As far as the sport is concerned, it’s the greatest unanswerable question imaginable. There is no closure to be found. The closure doesn’t exist.

I also watched the previous Super Bowl in Seattle. They say people were nervous about it, but the game was shockingly comfortable. On the very first play, the Seahawks recorded a safety. The eventual celebration knew nothing of the horror that was to come. It knew nothing of the fact that a year later, that celebratory feeling would be impossible to remember unblemished.

I’ve asked myself a hundred times what it would’ve felt like if the two Super Bowls were reversed. Seemed to me, it would’ve felt perfect.

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Source: FanGraphs

Of course it involved a crazy comeback. Congratulations to the Royals and all their fans on another remarkable run.

I know this isn’t going to help, Mets fans. And I know this might seem like I’m picking on Daniel Murphy which isn’t fair because Daniel Murphy, by himself, has never lost the Mets a game and Daniel Murphy, by himself, has never lost the Mets a World Series. Players don’t lose games, teams do, and the World Series isn’t over yet.

But Daniel Murphy is a human being, and human beings are prone to mistakes. Some mistakes carry greater consequence than others, and on Saturday night, Daniel Murphy made a very costly mistake. Murphy’s mistake is the one that will be remembered, but it was just one of several made by the Mets in the late innings of Game Four that led to them blow a 3-2 lead in the eighth inning.

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A lot has been written about the Royals’ hitting approach. Not enough has been written about their hitting coach. A moribund offense became a much more dangerous one after Dale Sveum stepped into the role last May.

As you know, Kansas City hitters don’t strike out very often. Their 15.9 K-date was the lowest in both leagues. Aggressive to a fault, they put more balls in play with no strikes on the batter (1,475 times) than any other team.

Not surprisingly, Sveum likes contact, especially when his team is rallying.

“You get three outs in an inning, and if you strike out for two of those outs, your odds of coming back aren’t going to be very good,” said Sveum. “But if you put three balls in play, something might fall and you keep the line moving.” Read the rest of this entry »

The first pitch Noah Syndergaard threw Friday night sent Alcides Escobar to the ground. Syndergaard didn’t give Escobar an opportunity to swing because the instinctive priority was for him to get his head out of the way, and Syndergaard didn’t bother trying to disguise his intent after the game. He owned up to it — he wanted to give the Royals a little fright. The Royals, in turn, were furious, as they’re allowed to be, but the rest of the game spun the narrative wheel, and it ultimately settled on “Syndergaard delivered a message.” In the end he pitched pretty well and the Mets emerged victorious, so Syndergaard gets the favorable press.

But for whatever it’s worth, if Syndergaard did succeed in intimidating his opponent, it didn’t look that way early on, when the brushback was most fresh. After Escobar got knocked down, the Royals scored a run in the first. They scored another two in the second. The immediate aftermath, for Syndergaard, was troublesome, and the national broadcast speculated that he’d only succeeded in waking the Royals up. It was only after Syndergaard turned his game around that the conversation grew more sunny. And as a part of that process, Syndergaard and Travis d’Arnaud made a change on the fly.

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One year ago, at just 23 years old, Yordano Ventura became one of the youngest pitchers to start a World Series game in the last 30 years. The presence of a young starter in the World Series is not a completely rare phenomenon, naturally. Ventura, for his part, was the 64th pitcher in Series history to make a start before turning 24 years old, per Baseball Reference Play Index. Noah Syndergaard is set to be the 65th when the two face off this evening. Widening the criteria a little, one finds that 105 pitchers have made World Series starters before turning 25 years old. Ventura, now one year older, is set to be one of just 19 pitchers to make a start in two different World Series’ before turning 25, a list including Babe Ruth and, over the last 30 years including, only Madison Bumgarner and Steve Avery. Tonight’s encounter between Syndergaard and Ventura represents one of the better young pitching matchups in World Series history.

Over the last three decades, the only pitchers younger than the 2014 edition of Ventura to record a start in a World Series game were Avery, Bumgarner, Dwight Gooden, Livan Hernandez, Bret Saberhagen, Michael Wacha, and Jaret Wright. Noah Syndergaard, a few months younger than Ventura was last year, is set to join that list. The giant Mets right-hander has struck out 20 batters in 13 postseason innings thus far and looks to do what his counterparts could not as the Kansas City Royals have proven difficult to strike out.

While 105 pitchers under the age of 25 have made starts in the World Series, it’s quite rare to find two young hurlers pitted against each other. In the last 15 years, it has happened only twice: Madison Bumgarner against Tommy Hunter in 2010 and Cole Hamels against Scott Kazmir in 2008. In all of World Series history, there have only been 24 such matchups and only 19 if you remove repeat matchups in the same series. The chart below shows every World Series matchup sorted by average age.

World Series Matchups Featuring Pitchers Under 25

Year	Player	Age	Player	Age	Average Age
10/23/1981	Dave Righetti	22.329	Fernando Valenzuela	20.356	21.343
10/22/1991	Scott Erickson	23.262	Steve Avery	21.191	22.227
10/26/1991	Scott Erickson	23.266	Steve Avery	21.195	22.231
10/22/1997	Tony Saunders	23.176	Jaret Wright	21.297	22.237
10/31/2010	Tommy Hunter	24.120	Madison Bumgarner	21.091	22.606
10/19/1986	Roger Clemens	24.076	Dwight Gooden	21.337	22.707
10/7/1950	Bob Miller	24.113	Whitey Ford	21.351	22.732
10/12/1914	Lefty Tyler	24.302	Bullet Joe Bush	21.319	22.811
10/8/1934	Schoolboy Rowe	24.270	Paul Dean	22.055	23.163
10/14/1969	Jim Palmer	23.364	Gary Gentry	23.008	23.186
10/11/1964	Ray Sadecki	23.290	Al Downing	23.105	23.198
10/30/2015	Yordano Ventura	24.149	Noah Syndergaard	22.256	23.203
9/29/1932	Lefty Gomez	23.308	Lon Warneke	23.185	23.247
10/10/1970	Jim Palmer	24.360	Gary Nolan	22.136	23.248
10/14/1970	Jim Palmer	24.364	Gary Nolan	22.140	23.252
10/8/1912	Jeff Tesreau	24.217	Smoky Joe Wood	22.349	23.283
10/11/1912	Jeff Tesreau	24.220	Smoky Joe Wood	22.352	23.286
10/15/1912	Jeff Tesreau	24.224	Smoky Joe Wood	22.356	23.290
10/11/1909	Ed Summers	24.310	Nick Maddox	22.336	23.323
10/21/1972	Gary Nolan	24.147	Vida Blue	23.085	23.616
10/3/1953	Whitey Ford	24.347	Billy Loes	23.294	23.821
10/9/1934	Dizzy Dean	24.266	Elden Auker	24.018	24.142
10/22/2008	Cole Hamels	24.300	Scott Kazmir	24.272	24.286
10/27/2008	Cole Hamels	24.305	Scott Kazmir	24.277	24.291

SOURCE: Baseball Reference

The encounter between Dave Righetti and Fernando Valenzuela back in 1981, when the Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees, represents the youngest such matchup of all tim . Only two of the young-pitcher games have occurred in a Game Two: Jeff Tesrau’s Giants team defeated Boston’s Smokey Joe Wood in 1912 and Dizzy Dean’s St. Louis Cardinals defeated the Tigers’ Elden Auker in 1934. If the Mets and Royals get to a Game Seven and the rotation stays as is, Noah Syndergaard against Yordano Ventura would become just the third such matchup of all-time and the first in more than 80 years.

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Let’s talk about contact. It’s what everybody else is doing, right? The Royals make a lot of it. They did all season, and they still are in the playoffs, even against Matt Harvey and Jacob deGrom. No team this season posted a lower strikeout rate; no team was even particularly close. Contact is the skill around which the Royals lineup is built.

Right around the end of the regular season, I wanted to try to put these Royals in some kind of historical context. I wanted to know how good they are at hitting the ball, relative to other teams over the past several decades, but it’s not as easy as just looking at the strikeouts because whiffs have increased over time, especially lately. You have to make adjustments, so I folded in yearly league averages and standard deviations. What I found: by the resulting measure, the Royals were baseball’s best contact-hitting team since at least 1950. I went back no further, because I didn’t see the point.

It’s interesting, that conclusion. 1950 was a long time ago, and an awful lot of baseball has happened ever since. Mickey Mantle hadn’t debuted yet; Dave Winfield hadn’t been born yet. So it’s notable to post the most extreme anything between 1950 and 2015. In taking the top spot, the Royals just barely edged out the runner-up. The team knocked into second place was the 2002 Angels.

Immediately, that catches your eye. The Royals are the best contact-hitting team in ages. Those Angels were the second-best contact-hitting team in ages, and they won the World Series. For Royals fans, that’s encouraging, probably, and from my standpoint, now that I think about it deeper, there are a ton of parallels between these two ballclubs, even beyond putting the ball in play. Those Angels might be the best historical comparison for what the Royals currently have going on.

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Yesterday, Alex Anthopolous left the Blue Jays, turning down a contract to remain with the team because, as he said in his conference call, he didn’t think it was a good fit anymore.

“I don’t know that I’ve had to make a harder decision in my life, but I did what I felt like I needed to do,” Anthopoulos said. “I just didn’t feel like this was a right fit for me going forward.”

It’s pretty clearly not a coincidence that Anthopoulos’ exit coincides with the arrival of Mark Shapiro, who was hired in August to take over as the new team president. Shapiro was brought in to replace Paul Beeston, so while it’s not a new position in the Blue Jays organization, the fact that ownership openly courted guys with baseball operations backgrounds — first Kenny Williams, then Dan Duquette, and now Shapiro — makes it seem that they’re changing the responsibilities of the position. Beeston was a business guy, an accountant who worked his way up through the organization’s financial side, but the Blue Jays actions over the last year make it clear they wanted a baseball guy in the team president role.

This is the new trend in baseball, of course. Over the last five years, it has become en vogue to promote the General Manager to President of Baseball Operations, or some similar title. The Blue Jays, in fact, became the 12th team to employ a recently promoted GM (or manager, in one case) in that job, with the title of GM going to someone else in the baseball operations department.

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