It doesn’t feel like corny sentiment to say the Kansas City Royals stole the American League Wild Card from the Oakland A’s. The Royals lineup does not inspire much in the way of fear but this ragtag bunch hung nine runs on the A’s best starter and its (rightly) maligned bullpen.

They did so while hitting just two extra base hits, both of which came in the 12th inning. Eric Hosmer tripled and Salvador Perez yanked the walkoff double down the line compared to 13 singles and three walks. Without the benefit of big bats, the Royals instead did what the Royals do – they swiped and stole and small ball’d their way to victory, just as our fearless leader suggested they should mere hours before the game began.

They stole seven bases on the night, equalling the record for a postseason game. While none of these steals are likely to reach “Dave Roberts Game 4” levels of notoriety, five of the seven thefts came around to score. Let’s look at each steal, ranking them by win probability added to see which was truly the biggest steal of the night.

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What are you going to remember from the AL wild card game? Be honest, really.

You’re going to remember Ned Yost. Hooooooo boy, are you going to remember Ned Yost. There’s going to be no shortage of post-mortems in Kansas City about Yost, for about 40 different reasons, surprisingly not all about bunting. (Argue about whether it was smart to take out James Shields [yes] for an on-one-day-rest Yordano Ventura [no] all you want, I’m still not over the early botched Eric Hosmer / Billy Butler double steal that was actually called on purpose.) You’re not going to forget Brandon Finnegan, either, or Salvador Perez, or Jarrod Dyson on the base paths.

You’re going to remember Bob Melvin and that eighth inning, too, inexplicably leaving Jon Lester in to rack up 111 pitches, get three men on base, and (along with Luke Gregerson) turn a 7-3 lead into a 7-6 nailbiter. You’re going to remember Jonny Gomes in left field, and what should be by all reason the last game that Derek Norris ever catches in the big leagues. I’ll remember thinking that for every time we laugh and make jokes all while understanding that managers know a million times more than we do, every single thing in this game happened. Yost was often brutal in this one. Melvin wasn’t necessarily better.

There’s so, so much to unpack there, and I’ve barely scraped the surface of what was one of the weirdest, greatest, worst, best, ludicrous baseball games ever. So much happened, in fact, that what no one at all is going to remember is what seemed for much of the evening like the biggest story of the night: Brandon Moss, who had hit two homers in the previous two months, hit two in the same playoff game. Let’s talk about that, a little.

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Tonight, the Royals and A’s play a single-game elimination to determine the winner of the American League Wild Card, with the winner going on to face the Angels starting on Thursday. Both teams have their best starters on the mound, and Jon Lester versus James Shields is about as good a match-up as you can hope for in a winner-take-all contest. With these two starters, strong defenses, and a pitcher’s park as the venue, we shouldn’t expect a ton of runs to be scored in tonight’s game.

And so the managers for each squad are likely going to feel the pressure to try and steal a run here or there, knowing that in a low run environment, every little advantage could turn out to be the difference between advancement or the end of the team’s season. So, against that background, let’s offer Ned Yost some friendly pieces of advice.

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The Royals made a trade for James Shields and evaluators had things to say about it. The Royals, for their part, were confident in their belief that Shields could help push the team to its intended destination, and on Tuesday, before a partisan audience, Shields will start the Royals’ biggest game in decades. It’s fitting for a man nicknamed Big Game James, and though a big part of the reason for that is the convenience of his first name rhyming with Game, this is how the Royals drew it up. They wanted to get to games that matter, and then they wanted to give the baseballs that matter to James Shields.

Good pitchers aren’t defined by any single quality, unless you grant the quality of being good. There’s a lot that goes into being a top-of-the-rotation starter, and while, say, Clayton Kershaw has an incredible slider, he’s not incredible because of his slider. Jon Lester has an incredible cutter, but he’s not incredible because of his cutter. Good pitchers, like all things, are complicated to understand, but there are most certainly standout skills. Kershaw does have a standout slider. Lester does have a standout cutter. And James Shields? Shields is good at a lot of things, but he’s known for having a standout changeup. Or, he was. And now he is again, but there was a time that the pitch went missing. It’s been an interesting year for the best pitch in Shields’ arsenal.

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Late last night after dropping a second consecutive game to the Kansas City Royals, the Cleveland Indians’ playoff odds slipped to 0.0% for the first time this season. That means two things. For starters, the Cleveland Indians will not be making the playoffs. But also the Kansas City Royals, barring a complete collapse and miraculous run by the Seattle Mariners, will be making the playoffs.

The Royals haven’t made the playoffs since 1985, so that’s a pretty big deal. Congrats, Royals! You guys did it. Enjoy playoff baseball, you’ve earned it. That the Royals even made the playoffs is noteworthy in and of itself. What might be more noteworthy, though, is how this team got there.
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If you looked at Twitter for even half a second on Sunday, you probably already know that Ned Yost is doing it again. Nearly six years to the day after the Brewers took the nearly unprecedented step of firing a first-place manager in September, at least in part due to some extreme bullpen mismanagement, Yost’s decisions — and bizarre defenses of them — are again being questioned, as the suddenly struggling Royals have lost six of their last nine.

This article isn’t really going to be about Yost’s one decision, but we have to at least explain what happened. On Sunday, with the Royals up 4-3 in the sixth inning and starter Jason Vargas on his way out of the game, Yost brought in Aaron Crow with a man out and two on. Crow walked Yoenis Cespedes to load the bases, struck out Allen Craig, then allowed a grand slam to Daniel Nava to blow the lead and then some. Nava is one of the more extreme platoon bats in baseball — a switch-hitter, he’s got a career 125 wRC+ against righties and merely a 60 against lefties — and he even admitted to being surprised after the game that Yost allowed him to face a righty.

Worse, Yost’s postgame comments defy logic. He chose Crow because he wanted strikeouts, but Crow doesn’t really strike people out, with a K% mark tied for 296th of the 311 pitchers with 50 innings. He found it frustrating that the game was lost before he could bring in Kelvin Herrera, but didn’t actually bring in Herrera because “the sixth inning is Crow’s inning,” whatever that means. Crow’s velocity is way down and he’s having the worst season of his career, yet he was still allowed to face a hitter who had the platoon advantage in the biggest spot of the game, apparently because Yost feared Mike Napoli would pinch hit if he made a move. Read the rest of this entry »

The Royals lead the American League Central by one game over the Tigers after Detroit defeated the Indians Thursday night, 11-4 in 11 innings. The teams are even in wins with 77; the Tigers have two additional losses. The Royals are 19-19 in blowout games and 20-22 in one run games. For the Tigers, those numbers are 23-18 (blowouts) and 20-18 (one run games). Both teams have a higher winning percentage on the road and both have dominated in interleague games.

This morning, FanGraphs’ playoff odds gave the Tigers a 54.5% chance of taking the division. The Royals’ odds are at 44.4%. No other division race features such closely-divided odds. Even in the National League West race between the Dodgers and Giants — which the Dodgers lead by two games with 22 to play — FanGraphs gives LA an 83.3% chance of winning the division.

If you believe the projections, the AL Central race is as close as it can get between the Royals and the Tigers. And yet the teams have reached this point in completely different ways. Read the rest of this entry »

Check out some recent versions of this series with Dilson Herrera, Jorge Soler and Rusney Castillo (though he’s still in the minors). I made the cutoff for a write-up a 50 Future Value, meaning a projected peak role of 8th/9th inning reliever, #4 starter or low-end everyday player. Take a look at recent prospect lists for the Rangers or Rockies to get a better idea of the distinction between 45 and 50 FV. The last of the 50 FV prospects is generally around the 150th best prospect in the game.

Joc Pederson, OF, Los Angeles Dodgers
Hit: 45/55, Game Power: 45/55, Raw Power: 60/60, Run: 55/50, Field: 50/50+, Throw: 50/50+

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Since Alex Gordon moved into first place in position player WAR (although he’s now second again), quite a bit of back-and-forth discussion has occurred on if he is this season’s best position player. Most of the talk revolves around how much stock  should people put into defensive statistics. Our own Dave Cameron has already taken a stab at the subject earlier in the week. Alex Gordon is getting close to two wins of value from his defense, a considerable jump from his previous seasons. After looking at the inputs used for UZR, it is not Alex Gordon’s performance going to new levels, but the lack of talented defenders in left field making him seem better.

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Buck Farmer, despite the name, is a real person who exists. A month ago, he was making his final start for the Single-A West Michigan Whitecaps in Clinton, Iowa, a town that has a smaller population (26,885 in 2010) than 21 of the 30 MLB teams pack into their ballparks on any given night. When he did, on July 25, the Tigers, the top of Farmer’s Detroit organization, had a 6.5-game lead in the AL Central and a 94.0% chance of winning the division, had just picked up Joakim Soria, and were about to add David Price to a rotation that was already very good.

This isn’t about Farmer, really, though he’s part of it. He’s just a pretty good entry point into how the Tigers, a team that was flying free and clear to their fourth straight division title against relatively indifferent AL Central competition, could manage to turn that lead into a 1.5-game deficit into fewer than six weeks. Those playoff odds, which seemed to make them a near-certainty to win the division, dropped all the way to 43.3% before the Royals lost last night, which, as Jeff showed yesterday, is by far the biggest downturn of any team in baseball. They wouldn’t even be in the wild card playoff at the moment, thanks to the fact that the AL West has two of the best teams in baseball and a Mariners club that has just stopped losing.

A month ago, Farmer was pitching in A-ball. A week ago, he was getting exactly one out while allowing eight runs for Toledo against a Columbus team that had someone named Giovanny Urshela hitting cleanup. Surrounding that, he’s made two major league starts for a Tigers team desperately trying to hold off one of the biggest collapses we’ve seen in years. If you want to know how the Tigers have fallen apart, that’s a great place to start.

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