FanGraphs Baseball

It’s 24 years ago, and for the Minnesota Twins the World Series is on the line.

Jack Morris has finished his ninth shutout frame, but it looks like that won’t be enough. The Atlanta Braves have also held Minnesota scoreless, and Game Seven of the Series is likely headed for extra innings. John Smoltz having departed in the eighth, it will be all down to the bullpens.

Except that Jack Morris has other ideas.

Mythologizing and revisionism have clouded the exact details, but the outlines are there to see. Twins manager Tom Kelly tells Morris, with gratitude, that he’s done for the night; relief ace Rick Aguilera will take over. Morris declares “I’m not coming out of this game.” Kelly mentions the 118 pitches Morris has thrown, on three days’ rest. Morris holds his ground: “There’s no way I’m coming out of this game.”

And Tom Kelly relents. He probably wouldn’t give way for any other pitcher on his team, but for this 15-year veteran with a certain old-school demeanor, he does. Kelly gives Morris the green light, then turns away and is heard to mutter, “It’s only a game.”

The last starting pitcher to go into extras in a World Series game was Tom Seaver in 1969. In Game Four, he worked around two baserunners to put up a zero in the top of the 10th, and his Miracle Mets won the game in the bottom.

Jack Morris didn’t make it nearly as dramatic. One pitch to Jeff Blauser got the first out, five more struck out Lonnie Smith, and he polished off Terry Pendleton with his eighth. Kelly’s risk had paid off—and he’d be doubling down by sending Morris back out for the 11th.

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Ben and Sam say goodbye to Grantland, the World Series, and the 2015 season.

You’ve got an opinion on the Eric Hosmer play. Y’know, the one where he broke from third on a ground ball that didn’t get out of the infield grass and scored the tying run in the ninth inning of the World Series? Y’know, the one where if he would have been out, the game would have been over but he wasn’t and now the Royals are world champions? That’s the one. You’ve got an opinion on the Hosmer play, I’ve got an opinion on the Hosmer play, and even if you say you don’t have an opinion on the Hosmer play, well, that’s your opinion.

Immediately, people began debating whether he’d have been out with a good throw. Because Lucas Duda didn’t make a good throw. But that’s not the part that has my attention. The result was the result. I’m more interested in the process.

You see, the legend of the Kansas City Royals’ advance scouting department has grown to near-mythological proportions. The stories say it was the advance scouting department that discovered David Price tipping his changeup. Price’s Jon Lester-like avoidance of pick offs to first base. Jose Bautista’s inclination to throw to second base from the corner in right field — which allowed Lorenzo Cain to score from first on a single in the ALCS. Now, the advance scouting department has struck again:

@AmazinAvenue How does it make assumptions when the Royals internally talked about taking chances against Duda? This wasn’t willy-nilly.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) November 2, 2015

This has been the set-up. I want you to now forget everything you know about the Hosmer play, about Lucas Duda, about what the metrics say about him and what you’ve seen with your eyes, about the Nostradamus-like premonitions of the Royals advance scouts and about everything you’ve read since last night. To the best of your abilities, wipe the slate clean.

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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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12:01

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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.

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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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