Has a Team Like the Royals Ever Made the Playoffs?
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.
A few things we know about the Royals
- Just like last year, they fired their hitting coach at the end of May. At the time, they were last in the American League in OPS, home runs, slugging percentage and runs scored. Things have gotten a little better since then, but they’re still last in the MLB in home runs and are a bottom-10 offense overall.
- Their defense has been amazing. Like, historically amazing. Alex Gordon is almost certain to win his fourth consecutive Gold Glove award in left field, Lorenzo Cain and Jarrod Dyson are two of the best defenders in baseball in center field – and sometimes one of them gets moved to right – and Alcides Escobar is pretty slick at shortstop.
- Going hand-in-hand with their elite defense is elite speed. Dyson and Escobar each have more than 30 steals, Cain has 27 and, as a team, the Royals have stolen more bases than any team in baseball.
- They have arguably the most dominant bullpen in the MLB, led by the American League’s best closer in Greg Holland, the American League’s best set-up man in Wade Davis, and maybe the American League’s best “seventh inning guy” – whatever that means – in Kelvin Herrera.
So, in the Royals, you’ve got a team that runs well, plays excellent defense, has a dominant bullpen and is headed to the playoffs while hitting poorly and throwing out good-but-not-great starting pitching.
If you’re the type who, at the start of the season, likes to predict playoff teams and eventual World Series champions, where do you begin evaluating a team? Don’t lie. It’s their lineup and starting pitching. Speed, defense and a good bullpen are nice to round out a team with a strong lineup and good rotation, but that’s where it starts – with hitting and starting pitching. Rarely do you see playoff-caliber teams being led by the little things. Yet here we are in 2014, and the Royals are headed to the playoffs.
That got me wondering: Has a team constructed like the Royals ever made the playoffs? They’re soon to become the first team in MLB history to make the playoffs while finishing dead last in both home runs and walks, so by that measure the answer is no, but that’s not a very good answer. We can do better than that.
First, the limitations: We’ve only got complete defensive data dating back to 2003, so the “ever” in the title is actually more like “since 2003,” but this still gives us a pretty clear idea of what playoff teams look like and where the Royals fit in, historically.
What I’ve done is compiled the individual value components – batting, baserunning, fielding, starting pitching and relieving – of each playoff team since 2003. This gave me a sample of 102 teams. Then, I’ve calculated the percentage of each team’s value that came from just baserunning, fielding and the bullpen. What follows is an entirely sortable table of the top-10 playoff teams that have relied on “the little things,” and the bottom-10, with links to each team page in case you want to do some playing around. You’re going to see some wacky negative percentages, because we’re dealing with negative values, but it shouldn’t be too confusing.
| Bat | BsR | Fld | SP | RP | Total | BsRFldBP% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ’07 D-backs | -141.7 | 9.2 | -4.2 | 120.2 | 35.5 | 19.0 | 213% |
| ’12 Braves |
-56.1 | 7.4 | 67.8 | 96.7 | 53.1 | 168.9 | 76% |
| ’04 Dodgers | -21.7 | 0.2 | 57.9 | 61.3 | 50.0 | 147.7 | 73% |
| ’07 Cubs | -83.1 | -7.3 | 57.1 | 121.6 | 53.0 | 141.3 | 73% |
| ’08 Phillies | -18.9 | 17.8 | 69.0 | 94.2 | 42.5 | 204.6 | 63% |
| ’14 Royals* | -46.6 | 10.2 | 62.3 | 120.9 | 49.6 | 196.4 | 62% |
| ’06 Mets | -6.7 | 16.0 | 25.2 | 73.3 | 60.2 | 168.0 | 60% |
| ’11 D-backs | -23.8 | 1.3 | 66.6 | 103.8 | 26.0 | 173.9 | 54% |
| ’12 Reds | -50.2 | 4.8 | 25.7 | 124.9 | 57.0 | 162.2 | 54% |
| ’06 Padres | -10.2 | 9.0 | 24.9 | 80.6 | 32.0 | 136.3 | 48% |
| – | – | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| ’03 Athletics | -40.7 | 6.6 | -34.4 | 205.0 | 21.2 | 157.7 | -4% |
| ’04 Yankees | 101.2 | -0.1 | -73.4 | 144.0 | 61.7 | 233.4 | -5% |
| ’13 Cardinals | 30.8 | -0.9 | -42 | 123.2 | 29.5 | 140.6 | -10% |
| ’04 Red Sox | 115.0 | -22.1 | -50.9 | 221.9 | 43.2 | 307.1 | -10% |
| ’06 Yankees | 111.4 | 8.6 | -77.1 | 151.5 | 44.0 | 238.4 | -10% |
| ’13 Indians | 40.8 | 7.2 | -42.1 | 129.4 | 17.1 | 152.4 | -12% |
| ’11 Cardinals | 88.7 | -5.0 | -30.6 | 102.0 | 3.1 | 158.2 | -21% |
| ’14 Pirates* | 51.4 | 4.5 | -31.5 | 58.3 | 8.1 | 90.8 | -21% |
| ’14 Tigers* | 70.9 | -2.0 | -44.8 | 169.4 | 4.7 | 198.2 | -21% |
| ’05 Yankees | 121.9 | -7.2 | -143.7 | 129.5 | 38.3 | 138.8 | -81% |
OK, I know what you’re all thinking. We need to have a talk about the 2007 Diamondbacks. If you want to keep reading about the Royals, you can skip this intermission.
* * * INTERMISSION * * *
How the hell did the 2007 Diamondbacks make the playoffs?! I ran these numbers over three times to make sure they were accurate because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It almost made me not want to write this post anymore. This is a team that was 29th in position player WAR and 13th in pitching WAR, yet they still made the playoffs. I thought maybe the NL West was just exceptionally weak that season and they snuck in, but nope! San Diego and Colorado each won 89 games and had a play-in game to decide who went to the Wild Card. The D-backs took the division by half a game with a 90-72 record.
Their run differential was -20. Their best regular hitter, by wRC+, was Conor Jackson. Micah Owings — when he was still a starting pitcher — was fourth on the team in oWAR. After Brandon Webb, their best starting pitcher was Doug Davis. THIS WAS A 90-WIN PLAYOFF TEAM. What the hell, man. If anyone has any insight on how this could have possibly happened, please leave it in the comments, because I have no idea. I guess the real question is “Will a Team Like the ’07 D-backs Ever Make the Playoffs Again,” to which the answer would almost certainly be no. But this is about the Royals, so let’s get back to them.
* * * END OF INTERMISSION * * *
So, the Royals aren’t quite in a league of their own, but they’re close. Since 2003, there have been 102 playoff teams. Only nine of them have had over 50% of their team value come from baserunning, defense, and the bullpen. Only five have been more reliant on the little things than this year’s Royals.
Fittingly, the “little things” teams in the top half of the table are a hodgepodge of teams that only occasionally find themselves in the playoffs – the D-backs, Cubs, Royals, Mets, Reds and Padres. The bottom half are mostly powerhouses whom we’ve grown accustomed to seeing slug and pitch their way deep into the postseason – three different Yankees teams, the Red Sox and the Cardinals. The question that Royals fans likely want to know is: How have the most extreme sides of this coin fared in the playoffs?
Obviously, three of the teams in the above table are from this year and haven’t yet played a postseason game. In addition, two of them (last year’s Indians and the 2012 Braves) only played one Wild Card play-in game before being eliminated. To beef up the sample a bit, I grabbed the top 15 teams from either end of the spectrum who played at least one full series. The results are as follows:
Little things: 54-53, 6/15 LCS appearances, four WS appearances, two WS wins
Sluggers: 74-73, 9/15 LCS appearances, four WS appearances, two WS wins
The teams that have relied more on their lineup and rotation have gone deeper into the postseason and thus won more games, yet the two pools come away with the same amount of World Series appearances and victories. These are just two 15-team samples, so there can’t be too strong of a conclusion drawn from this, but it appears that while more traditionally-constructed teams have an advantage, it’s still pretty random as to who might go all the way.
The Royals will still likely have to survive a sudden death Wild Card play-in game to make the extended postseason, but either way, they’re a team unlike most others in recent history to play postseason baseball. They don’t hit and their starting pitching is good more than it is great, but they run, defend and relieve well enough to make up for their deficiencies. In a way, it’s fitting that they’ve gotten to the playoffs through such unconventional methods, seeing as it took them 30 years to get there. While recent history hasn’t been as kind to teams built like the Royals as it has been to more traditionally-built teams, what matters is that the Royals are there. And if the 2008 Phillies and 2010 Giants are any indication, teams built on the little things still have a shot.
August used to cover the Indians for MLB and ohio.com, but now he's here and thinks writing these in the third person is weird. So you can reach me on Twitter @AugustFG_ or e-mail at august.fagerstrom@fangraphs.com.
Small correction: it should be Kelvin Herrera, not Escobar.
If Kelvim Escobar is somehow the most valuable seventh inning guy, then I agree with you that I have no idea what it means.
Kelvim Escobar?! C’moooon man.
2007 D’Backs: Win Small, Lose Big. Their Pythagoras predicted a losing season. Basically, Bob Melvin leveraged a bullpen that had five of the best RPs in baseball (Valverde/Lyon/Pena/Slaten/Cruz) and then was filled out with a bunch of worse-than-scrubs (Medders/Nippen/Piguero/Murphy/tons of others). If his team was up by one late he threw in an ace and ended up by one. If they were down by one he threw in a scrub and ended down by 6. It breaks Pythagoras, but it gives higher-leverage situations to the better pitchers.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/25/AR2007092502515.html
Down by 1 is high-leverage too, though. So that strategy is flawed.
It’s not perfect, but down late is lower-leverage than up late when you have the second-worst offense in baseball.
Yup. They were 1st in Clutch pitching and 4th in Clutch batting.
This makes me even more sad that the 07 Cubs got swept by the 07 D-backs.
The Cubs were swept by the Diamondbacks who were swept by the Rockies who were swept by the Red Sox.
sweeps aside, I remember liking that postseason. Other than AROD showing up at a World Series game to announce he was opting out of his deal
I had the same sinking feeling when I read that digression. Barf.
The 2008 Phillies with Utley, Rollins, Pat Burrel, Jayson Werth, Shane Victorino and the good Ryan Howard + Hamels and… um… were build on “the little things”?
They did have sluggers, but it was also a great place to hit that year, and I can see how the offensive prowess of the lineup was a bit overrated. And after Hamels, it was a pretty pedestrian rotation (Myers, Blanton, Moyer).
But that ’08 Phils team did have amazing defense at every position except LF and 1B, and with Davey Lopes, may have been the most efficient base-running team of all time. Gordon/Romero/Madson were also pretty unbeatable.
I think the numbers above might suggest rethinking about that team being built with sluggers alone.
Lidge too. He was great that year.
They were 14th in the MLB in wRC+ and number one in baserunning and defense.
Their rotation had a 4.23 ERA and a 4.53 FIP and was carried by a top-five bullpen.
So, yeah, they were.
The top 5 or 6 hitters on that team were really good, the problem was they gave 322 PAs to Geoff Jenkins (wRC+ of 75), 238 to Eric Bruntlett (55), 463 to Pedro Feliz (81) and 373 to a worst season of his career Carlos Ruiz (64). But that team had gold glove level defense at every up the middle position plus third and right (when Werth played) and had 4 really good base runners with Werth, Vic, Rollins and Utley.
The bullpen also had Romero/Madson and Lidge pitch way over their heads. They were basically a stars and scrubs team that got really good performances from the bullpen.
First in Defensive and baserunning runs, 14th by wRC+. 19th in SP WAR but 8th in RP WAR. They seem to fit the premise pretty well.
Hmmm… I would have thought the 2 most similar teams to this year’s Royals were other Royals teams.
1981 50 53 (strike shortened season – expanded playoffs)
1984 84 78
They had really bad competition in their division on each of those yrs. I mean seriously, 84 wins got them into the playoffs when there were only 4 teams total that made it to the playoffs.
Well, the author did say that he only looked at playoff teams since 2003, so I wouldn’t expect to find either the ’81 or ’84 Royals in the mix.
I can’t prove it, but I would guess that the 1984 Royals are probably the most similar playoff team of all time when compared to the 2014 Royals. They couldn’t hit at all–even George Brett was hurt a lot of that season and wasn’t up to par when he could play–but they leveraged an above-average pitching staff and defense to win a weak division. The ’85 World Champions were about the same, except that Brett was healthy all season and had one of his greatest years.
There’s nothing noteworthy about the 2007 Diamondbacks. They were a good-pitch, no-hit 79-win team that got lucky on run distribution and came out on top in a division where 90 wins was enough.
The ’81 season isn’t even worth discussing. All of the results of that year are bogus. When the team with the best record in baseball gets excluded from the playoffs and a 50-53 team gets in, it’s best to throw the whole thing in the garbage.
Wow, I was too young for that season. Why wouldn’t they take the overall record? Oh wait, I see. New York and LA made it using the method they used and wouldn’t have using the obvious method. It’s safe to say that was the reason. That’s so shady that I’m surprised there hasn’t been an effort to void LA’s championship that year.
The sample size is limited to a largely offensive era. I would be much more interested in the question in the title “Has a team ever…” than in the reduced question about the last 12 years.
When thinking back on ever, a highly successful team that quickly jumps to mind is the Herzog-era St. Louis Cardinals. Probably popped into my head due to the 1985 reference.
I am much more interested in your question, too, but I just wasn’t comfortable attempting to compare teams pre-UZR era to post-UZR, so this is what we were left with.
The ’85 Cardinals aren’t a good comp. They could hit, they just couldn’t hit for power. They led the NL in batting average and OBP, which is why they also led the league in runs scored. The Royals are actually more like the ’86 Cardinals, which is what happens when a team like that stops hitting.
That ’07 Diamondbacks team was the “Pythagoras is bunk and Bob Melvin is a genius” team. (Until he wasn’t. But maybe he is again? Oh, wait.)
Here’s a contemporary analysis of those ’07 Dbacks from THT.
I would have thought the 2007 Rockies would have cracked the top 10. They had good hitters, sure, but their “ace” was Jeff Francis and their last-month tear was largely due to amazing defense.
They were among the next five teams that just missed the cut
The teams that have relied more on their lineup and rotation have gone deeper into the postseason and thus won more games, yet the two pools come away with the same amount of World Series appearances and victories. These are just two 15-team samples, so there can’t be too strong of a conclusion drawn from this, but it appears that while more traditionally-constructed teams have an advantage, it’s still pretty random as to who might go all the way.
If we start with the assumption that the playoffs themselves are a crap shoot, then it doesn’t really matter who you are so long as you’re there. The question is not “How well do these sorts of teams do in the playoffs?” … as expected in a crap shoot they’re about 50/50 just like everyone else. The question is rather “How often do these sorts of teams QUALIFY for the playoffs, or at least strongly contend?”
Instead of comparing them to other “little things” playoff qualifiers, maybe look at the presumably larger sample of all MLB teams, as see what kind of Win% a “little things” team can be expected to earn? Or just how much must they crush the “little things” categories in order to expect a contending record?
Well stated. Virtually any type of team can win once you get into 7-game crapshoot territory, but some roster constructions may be better suited for the 162-game grind than others.
‘Virtually any type of team can win once you get into 7-game crapshoot territory’
Ah, so THAT is the problem with Gardenhire managed playoff teams, they have only moved on from the five game series to the seven game crapshoot once in six tries 🙂
Billy Beane says hello.
It’s true! The failings of the A’s in 5-game and 7-game samples is directly a consequence of Beane’s roster construction and he needs to go immediately. Probably would have like 3 or 4 titles without that dude.
/s/
The ’07 D’Backs had what I like to call the will to win, or TWTW. You can’t put numbers on those things.
They had ILRD, or Incredibly Lucky Run Distribution. When a mediocre team does that, they look like the ’07 D’backs. When a good team does it, they look like the ’69 Mets. When a great team does it, we call them the ’98 Yankees.
It’s good to see this site is continuing it’s never ending narrative that the Royals are just completely unworthy. Chats, articles, tweets by the owners, you name it. Glad to see the Royals (and Orioles) make it in spite of it all. I love this site, I truly do…can’t get enough most of the time…but pushing this kind of stuff to the extreme is increasingly annoying.
Eh, the Royals are a fascinating case because everything says they should have a worse record. If this site existed back for the 2007 D-Backs, I’m sure you’d see the same thing. It’s less a “THESE TEAMS SUCK” and more of a “these teams are interesting because they’re performing better than it would appear they should”
“Completely unworthy?” How did you draw that conclusion from this post?
Also I have never written about the Royals for this site, or any other for that matter, so don’t put that on me.
You are right, it was unfair. I apologize. On top of that, the guy who responded first also has a point. You just happened to write this after so many slights on the Royals have been put out there on this site, it got unfairly grouped in by me. Again, my bad. I do wonder how Royals fans do such a good job, in comparison to Orioles fans, of staying so quiet when they read some of the stuff here though.
You “can’t get enough of” Fangraphs, yet you somehow take personal offense when a site focused on hard analysis and noting discrepancies from statistical expectations…does just that? I don’t care if you’re a Royals fan or not, they’re an unusual team that more or less *shouldn’t* — by the logic of a community like this — be having the success that they are. That’s cool and worth exploring and keeps us learning new things and honing our analysis. Don’t see how that’s really in any way “offensive” and I become baffled anytime the pissed-off fan section comes out of the woodwork here.
Maybe there are fewer Royals fans reading fangraphs? Or fewer Royals fans in general? Or they’re just collectively very polite.
No doubt Dayton Moore never gets the benefit of the doubt around here, but I don’t think this article had any perceptible anti-Royal bias.
Royals, late to the “these articles are unfair to us and picking on us!” party! Welcome, welcome, thank you for the housewarming gift…feel free to sit anywhere, please use a coaster. Also feel free to mix and mingle with the 2012 Giants, 2013 Braves, and 2014 Orioles.
This party is just getting started, more guests sure to arrive soon!
I’ve gotten my fair share of down votes whenever I’ve suggested the Fangraphs is anti-Royals. I do try hard to look at the big picture though. The fact is, the 2014 Royals as a team without big stars just don’t fit the usual narrative. There is no Mike Trout or Clayton Kershaw, and I’m pretty sure that most WAR leaderboard followers are looking at Alex Gordon’s presence near the top for most of the season, with a mix of surprise, suspicion and eye-rolling.
I do think – and I would rather be wrong on this – that if somehow the Royals made the World Series, it will be a serious drag on TV ratings; unless it is a compelling rematch of the I-70 Series or perhaps the Dodgers were NL champ, it could become the lowest rated Series ever…”and that would be bad for baseball.” Sure, we Royals fans would be happy, but in general, the sport would probably not be.
It’s interesting to see the ’06 Mets (with peak Beltran, Wright, Delgado, Reyes) & the ’08 a Phillies (Utley, Rollins, Werth, Howard, Burrell) to be on the side of the divide they’re on. Maybe it’s the power of narrative, or just evidence that memories are unreliable, but my recollection of those teams was that they were great hitting teams above all else. I guess not!
That was my first thought as well. The 06 Mets hit 200 HR playing their home games at Shea. They were 3rd in the NL in runs scored. I guess their baserunning was exceptional, but they were 2nd in ISO. Bullpen was the best in the league and the starters were bad by FIP but pedestrian by ERA.
Fun fact: The 06 and 14 Mets were both 8th in starter ERA in the NL. 4.67 and 3.65, respectively. Sick how much the game has changed in 8 years.
The reason the 2007 Diamondbacks made the playoffs is that when you deal with 100,000 nearly random events over the course of a season, multiplied by up to 32 teams, multiplied by over 100 seasons, there will be outliers and sometimes even 162 is a small sample size.
It’s too bad FG doesn’t have stats on those 2 covert teams. But yes, outliers FTW.
Or, as mentioned here earlier, they had a dominant bullpen which basically gave them a win in every game they led after 6 innings and terrible mop-up men who were routinely thumped in games they were trailing. They won 90 games, it isn’t that hard to look at each game and analyze why they won. But, yeah if you want to be lazy, say it was random chance, and learn nothing, be my guest.
It’s interesting that the Twins, in theory a team built on speed and defense and “the little things,” does not make your list. Interesting to a Twins fan, at least.
Maybe I should have said “the mid-aughts Twins,” as more recent iterations of the franchise have been built on not-pitching, not-defense, not-hitting and not-winning, which is not a formula for making the playoffs (unless you are the ’07 Diamondbacks).
I was thinking the same thing.
In 2009:
1st in BsR
26th in starter ERA
But they were also:
4th in Off
27th in Def
10th in relief ERA
Their offense was a lot better than I remember and their defense was a lot worse than I remember.
I think the most bizarre thing about the ’07 DBacks wasn’t just that they made the playoffs, they somehow had the best record in the entire NL. They were the only 90 win team in the senior league that year.
’07 Dbacks were definitely such a weird example. As soon as I saw the title of this writing, I could easily come up with ’07 Dbacks as an example. They scored fewer runs than they allowed, just had an ace, and so so offence.
It’s still mysterious.
It’s already been said by several posters, but I felt the need to repeat it because I distinctly remember the discussion back in 2007. The 07 DBacks were the Pythagoras-breakers, with a very strong front end of the pen and an awful back end.
Josh Persons hit the nail on the head, they put very good ace relievers in in close games (allowing them, along with lucky run distribution, to win boatloads of close games) and awful relievers in in blowouts (causing them to lose blowout losses badly, and further causing blowout wins to look closer than they were).
4 fantastic relievers (Valverde/Pena/Lyon/Cruz) with 60+ innings and sub 3.3 ERAs. But then also 102 innings from Edgar Gonzalez’ 5.03 ERA, 57 innings of Yusmeiro Petit’s 4.58, 45.1 innings of Dustin Nippert’s 5.56, etc. The result is they were a remarkable 32-20 in one run games, allowing them to have a 90-72 actual record against a Pythagorean W/L of 79-83.
Strong bullpen resources for high-leverage situations (plus luck) allowed them to perform better than their numbers might otherwise suggest. And awful backend relievers caused their numbers to look worse than the team reall was.
I wouldn’t rely on it every single year, but having two or more super-dominant relievers in the bullpen like the Royals takes so much pressure off everything else. It reduces the game to six or seven innings for your opponents’ offense.
It’s how the Braves kept making the playoffs in the last couple of years despite a fairly average offense. The problem is that only a handful of relievers in history can seemingly maintain their dominance over an extended period of years, which makes relying on them very iffy as a way to build a winning team.
Ah, the perfect fangraphs team. Fielding, base-running and value-priced pitching, going for it when you have a window.
Shields value $20.6 million salary $13.5
Ventura 15.4/.5
Vargas 14.2/7
Duffy 14/.5
Guthrie 7/5 (actually 8.5 if we average it out)
Davis 16.4/4.8
Holland 12/4.7
Herrera 7.4/.5
While the odds of both KC and Seattle losing their final four games and the Indians winning their final 3 games is remote, if that happened the Indians would be in a wild card game, so they are not eliminated yet.
When there are a lot of “little things” along with some huge margins for reference, then the 2014 Royals do make sense. They are 4th in Batting Average along with the least amount of strikeouts by a large margin and most steals by a large margin. Their record is something ridiculous when they score at least 4 runs and/or they have a lead late in games. Their 7th, 8th, and 9th inning relievers have a historically low combination of ERA. It’s their middle and long relievers that pull their overall pitching numbers way down, because their starters have been pretty good (not great). Again, like the ’07 D-Backs, they win most games by small margins and don’t worry about inflating their negative numbers in loses.
When you add in the significance of their defensive play, especially their WAR combination of OF’s Gordon, Cain, and 4th in team defensive WAR, all of these less heralded “little things” really start adding up. They are also 2nd in the Win Probability “Clutch” stats. Remember how far the StL Cards went last year when their biggest margin advantage was in avg w/RISP? The more you look at everything, the more everything makes sense.