There’s Something About the Royals, or Something
The Royals put me in a weird position. It’s not because their two consecutive pennants make skeptical and critical analysts look stupid — we went over that a year ago, and previously, we went over the same stuff with the Giants. If anything, that part of this is just funny. No, the Royals put me in a weird position, because they make it tempting to believe in ideas that run contrary to what I’ve been taught. I’m not supposed to believe in a team’s vibe. I’m not supposed to believe in a team’s unkillability. I’m not really supposed to believe in powerful and particular things, because baseball is intensely competitive, and it doesn’t make sense that one team would ever have a secret. I’m not supposed to believe the Royals are more special than any other team. Than, say, the Blue Jays. And I’m not saying I do believe in the Royals’ magic. They’re just pretty good at sucking me in. It’s a baseball team that makes me think twice about assumptions I have about baseball teams.
The ALCS isn’t going to have a Game 7. Would’ve been fun, but this was a plenty good way to wrap up. The ALDS between the Rangers and the Blue Jays came to an unforgettable conclusion, a very wild and unpredictable conclusion, but aside from the tie-breaking home run, that memorable inning turned on a series of defensive mistakes. Just before the homer, the whole inning was sloppy. That might’ve been baseball around its most entertaining. What we just saw in Game 6 was baseball in the vicinity of its best. The Royals and Blue Jays competed in a classic, and, of course, the Royals won. They’re the Royals, after all. I don’t know exactly how we got here, but I can tell where we are on the map.
So much of what there is to talk about happened late, but before we get to that, and really before we even get to the game in detail, I want to show you something:
#Royals 2015 postseason play-by-play probability of winning the pennant pic.twitter.com/goLPUiYlta
— Dan Hirsch (@DanHirsch) October 24, 2015
Sure, that’s a graph of approximations, and sure, math can never know a team’s true odds. If you believe in the Royals as a sort of team of destiny, then your plot would never dip below 100%. But if we treat the Royals like any other team, that’s what you get. Less than two weeks ago, in Game 4 against the Astros, the Royals went into the eighth inning facing elimination and facing pennant odds under 1%. Out of that rally has come everything else. A critical part of that rally was a Carlos Correa error on a would-be double play, but everything counts. Baseball’s a game between two teams; on that play, the team facing the Royals didn’t execute.
It’s all the same as a year ago, if we agree not to argue details. The Royals badly want to convince you they have something going on. You might remain a stubborn and skeptical outsider, but this is basically a perfect sort of team for a fan base.
A baseball game is typically seen as a sequence of innings, or events. Because of what I do, from my perspective, a baseball game is a sequence of potential story ideas. As one idea passes, you’re on to the next, and eventually you’re left with one or two things, having discarded another one or two dozen. This could’ve been about David Price. Every game could’ve been about any number of players or happenings. Price, of course, has fought some postseason demons, and the interesting thing about his Game 6 was that he was both tremendously effective and uncommonly hittable. Early, the Royals knocked him around, and got him for a couple of homers. Then he settled in, and kept striking guys out. Then, toward the end, he came a hair from allowing a two-run homer to Salvador Perez. Price certainly looked like a Cy Young candidate; he just didn’t look like that the whole time. It was his second such start of the series.
This could’ve been about the Jays’ situational hitting. They wasted a leadoff double in the first. They wasted consecutive walks to lead off the fifth. They wasted a one-out double in the sixth. On, and on. The Jays would tell you they didn’t execute well enough in big situations. That was the story of the whole ninth inning. But just so it’s acknowledged and not forgotten, with two on in the fifth, Josh Donaldson lined out to Mike Moustakas. According to Statcast, Donaldson hadn’t hit a baseball harder all year long. He is the probable league MVP.
Kelvin Herrera came out throwing 100. When the game was 2-1, Herrera threw 100, also mixing in changeups and a breaking ball he’s featured far more often than usual in the playoffs. Only in October have Herrera’s results really matched the visual of his repertoire. The regular season might just be his warm-up. And when the game was still 2-1, John Gibbons called on Aaron Sanchez to relieve David Price. Over the last two years, if you set a minimum of 50 innings, no reliever in baseball allowed a lower OPS than Aaron Sanchez. Not Aroldis Chapman; not Wade Davis. Sanchez allowed an insurance run to score. It felt like the ballgame. The Royals bullpen doesn’t fail.
And then, incredibly, it failed. It failed in part because of Ned Yost. Instead of going to Davis for two innings, which he’s shown he can do, Yost lined up Ryan Madson for the eighth. Yost suggested he didn’t want to have Davis pitch on the wrong side of the rain delay. He still did. In the eighth inning, the Blue Jays sent their best hitters to the plate. It should’ve been Davis. Most everybody recognized it should’ve been Davis. To be totally fair, Madson had a great season. He actually allowed a lower OPS than Herrera. It wasn’t inevitable that Madson would blow the lead, but he’s no Wade Davis. Against the Astros, in that same Game 4, it was Madson on the mound when the Astros seemed to drive the nails in the coffin. It was a mistake to use Madson in that spot.
In absolute fairness, however, the manager didn’t throw the pitches. Even with Madson out there, the Royals were still heavily favored. He allowed an infield single on a high chop. He froze Donaldson with a brilliant two-strike running fastball. And on the pitch right before Jose Bautista evened the score, Jose Bautista was nearly retired without even attempting a full swing:
That close. That close to the thing that happened not happening. Bautista got lucky. Madson made a mistake.
The Royals formula doesn’t fail. Not in the playoffs, not like that. When they’ve handed leads over to Herrera and the rest of the bullpen, the leads have held up. It’s been automatic, and it’s felt automatic. This was new. A mistake was made managing the Royal bullpen, and then a mistake was made by the Royal bullpen. The people went quiet; the people wondered about the magic.
Then Wade Davis restored the magic and stranded the go-ahead runner.
Then the rain came.
It was rain that could’ve ruined everything. It was rain that could’ve left Wade Davis unavailable on the other side. It was rain that threatened to be a major part of the story. And then the Royals wrote their own story, and the rain is all but forgotten.
Lorenzo Cain walked. He took a decent low and away, full-count slider, and he walked. Then Lorenzo Cain ran. He didn’t stop until there was nowhere left to run.
What the play-by-play shows you is that Cain scored all the way from first on a single. That is, indeed, what happened, although it wasn’t a single like you might imagine a routine base knock. It was, let’s say, a single and a half, but that was enough, as Cain is fast and Cain is smooth. It all led to a situation thought to be impossible: people noticed the third-base coach, because he did something good. Mike Jirschele has something of a postseason history, and I’m sure there are some who still haven’t forgiven him for the way the last World Series turned out. But Jirschele read the play, and had observed that Bautista always would throw to second base. Jirschele didn’t hesitate, and so Cain didn’t hesitate, and so Cain scored with relative ease. The rain washed the disappointment of the top of the eighth away. In the bottom, the Royals re-claimed the lead, and they gave it back over to the formula.
There was concern that Davis would be rusty. Yost kept him in, and Davis went a full hour between pitches. If he opened the ninth missing, though, he wasn’t missing by a lot. Still, Russell Martin quickly singled. And when he was replaced by Dalton Pompey, Pompey stole second on the very first pitch. Pompey didn’t try to time Davis; he went for the surprise. It was all the more surprising when Pompey stole third in the same at-bat. And when Davis walked Kevin Pillar, a funny thing happened — the Royals’ win expectancy dropped below 50%.
Of course, that doesn’t account for the Wade Davis factor. But there was a time, in the ninth inning, that the Jays were arguably favored, even though they were losing. They had a situation many opponents could only dream of. Within minutes, Royals players were looking for goggles.
The Royals got help. There’s not really any way around it — before Dioner Navarro struck out, he took a strike that should’ve been a ball. And more conspicuously, this was a 2-and-1 delivery to Ben Revere, called in Davis’ favor:
That’s a ball. Even if it’s not a 100% ball, it’s a majority ball, so Revere had a legitimate gripe. The tying run was 90 feet away; Revere is one of the game’s very best contact hitters. It’s a big difference between 3-and-1 and 2-and-2 — batters had a 1.050 OPS after 3-and-1 counts, and a .585 OPS after 2-and-2 counts. Revere probably felt like he didn’t need to be punished extra while going up against maybe the best short-stint pitcher in the game. But the call was the call. The next pitch was better, and Revere whiffed.
It came down to Davis and Donaldson — maybe the game’s best reliever against probably the league’s MVP, where an out would win it for the Royals and a hit would put the Blue Jays in front. It took four pitches, the last with something just barely taken off. After three straight pitches at 97, Davis threw one 95, with five more inches of sink. Donaldson hit the top of it, and prayed for an error. Errors weren’t there to save the Blue Jays in this elimination game.
Of course you’d like it to be a little cleaner. You’d like to not have the Ben Revere call looming so large in the ninth. The previous game had its own controversial call, but that one was a lot more of a coin flip — the Revere call wasn’t so close. It’s not fun to have to talk about these things, but they also can’t just be ignored. Blue Jays fans have to live with a big call going against them. Royals fans have to live with other people talking about it. (They don’t have to pay attention to them.) Sometimes baseball isn’t as clean as you want it to be.
But, you know, maybe Revere hits a grounder right at a guy. Maybe he pops out, or flies out shallow. Maybe he fouls out, or still whiffs. It was still Wade Davis out there. Nothing can be assumed, except that the next pitch would be a good one, no matter what. I don’t like it when these things linger, and there’s far from any certainty the Jays find their tying run. There’s no thinking your way out of the unknowns. There’s just coming to terms with them.
And coming to terms with another Royals American League pennant. We know they’re not genuinely unkillable, because Madison Bumgarner ultimately killed them. The Mets have three starting pitchers who had regular seasons as good or better than Bumgarner’s 2014. When we talk about the Royals’ ability to come through in the clutch, I think a lot of us do it with partial grins. We all recognize that special teams shouldn’t exist. But if one were to exist, it might look a lot like the Royals do. All credit to them — they really make you think. It might be the thing I find most refreshing.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
Great article. I came here this morning hoping to answer one question: what was the win-probability swing on that second “strike” to Revere? ESPN used to have a win-probability box in Gamecast, which was always my favorite part. It was a sad day for me when they axed it. Anyhow, the link you gave doesn’t go to the pitch-by-pitch level, right? Anyone know of a place to find it?
I’d also be curious to see how those two botched strike calls affected the Jays win probability. Or their probability to at least tie the game in the 9th.
The incorrect call to Navarro might have been just as harmful to the Jays chances. Davis was able to go back to the same, virtually unhittable pitch to get Navarro to “chase” strike three (or, rather, to protect a plate that extended to the opposite batter’s box).
It seems pretty clear that, whatever the effect on win probability, the umps mistakes were costly to the Jays and had a meaningful impact on the outcome of the game.
Perhaps calls like these represent one more small step in the direction of robo umps. Eventually a tipping point will be reached. Those in favour of robo umps can only hope for more of these bad calls, in even higher leverage situations, in the World Series. In the long run, it may prove to be good for the evolution of the sport.
True, that was a poor call as well. Would love to see the breakdown on both, to get a sense of which was more important. My gut says the one on Revere, but who knows without the numbers?
NoFo,
I was thinking the same thing and looked into it a little.
Using league averages, that call switches the odds of at least a tie from 60/40 in the Blue Jays favor to 60/40 Royals.
The (big) caveat is that Wade Davis had a great year after 3-1 counts ( small sample size and also out of line with his career stats ).
So if you want to say it didn’t matter because 2015 Wade Davis, then maybe it didn’t matter. But outside of that, you’re looking at a pretty hefty difference.
The league average BA/OBP after a 3-1 count is .278/.574,
and after a 2-2 count is .189/.286
However,
Wade Davis’ BA/OBP against splits are .063/.304
and .159/.275 for 2015
but,
Wade Davis’ BA/OBP against splits are .250/.589
and .164/.289 for his career
( all from Baseball Reference )
Chance of scoring at least a run w/bases loaded and 1 out: 67%
Chance of scoring at least a run w/runners on 2nd and 3rd and 2 out: 27%
http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/users/brooks/public_html/feda/datasets/expectedruns.html
I appreciate that you went to the effort to get and share the deep stats that are harder for the layman to find. Thanks.
Thanks, Francis! I also appreciate the effort. There are more factors that go into making these estimates than I had realized.
You really can;t directly compare Wade Davis’s career splits to this year. His career splits include his time as a starter which was a disaster. You need to look at what he did in 2014 when he was purely a reliever.
I’m not sure what years he worked primarily as a reliever in his time in Tampa.
I did a quick look at his stats from 2012 and 2014 ( he was primarily a starter in 2013 ), and the outcome is pretty much the same ( you can check for yourself at Baseball Reference ):
His BAA is actually lower ( around .100 ) after a 3-1 count, but his OBP is around .500. After a 2-2 count, the BAA is around .150 and the OBP around .270
Interestingly, Game 5 of the ALCS saw a wide strike zone to LHH that benefited the Blue Jays as Estrada got 3 called strikes that day on pitches out of the strike zone. Game 6 had a wide strike zone for LHH as well, and this time it benefited the Royals. Wade got 1 call to Navarro and 1 call to Revere in his favor that were out of the strike zone. Herrera got the other out of the strike zone call to a lefty on a 2-1 pitch to Goins. To me the 3 erroneously calls that Estrada got in Game 5 evens out the 3 erroneous calls made on Davis/Herrera pitches in Game6.
It doesn’t even anything out…it just means there were 6 screwups instead of 3. Unless you have a rooting interest for a particular team, compensatory bad calls just mean piling errors on errors
I agree. A couple of pitches in a 6 run game (that were nowhere near as egregious anyway) definitely even out those calls in the 9th of a 1 run game. Good point
It has to come soon. It’s getting ridiculous.
Here’s the pitch. Contrary to what the article says, it is 100% ball:
http://www.brooksbaseball.net/pfxVB/pfx.php?s_type=3&sp_type=1&year=2015&month=10&day=23&pitchSel=451584&game=gid_2015_10_23_tormlb_kcamlb_1/&prevGame=gid_2015_10_23_tormlb_kcamlb_1/&pnf=&prevDate=1023&batterX=71
Brooks baseballs individual pitch maps are a bit off. Need to use the overall maps for accuracy.
There was also a similar called strike in Navarro’s at bat just before… But whatever this was a great game. Congrats to the Royals!
The Royals success should be a major cause for celebration at Fangraphs, the mother ship of defensive metrics. One big key to their success has to be that they led MLB in Defensive Runs Saved by almost double their closest pursuer!
At the same time, there does need to be some re-evaluation of offensive metrics. The Royals scored the 7’th most runs in MLB despite having the lowest walk rate and one of the lower HR totals. Not only was this over the course of a full season, but last year they put up very similar numbers. There is really nothing else that stands out in their offensive stats except they also had the lowest K rate. 1 season may be a fluke, but 2 seasons probably is not. The Sabers may need to do some digging into their stat box and find out how putting the ball in play can produce more runs than they their current formulas would predict.
On the pitching side, it’s really pretty simple: 1. The park suppresses HR’s. 2. Great team defense allows their pitchers to outperform their DIPS. 3. Bullpens are undervalued by WAR due to leverage issues.
It isn’t just the Royals either. The Giants formula has been very similar. Again, instead of moping in their beer, Fangraphs should be doing a victory lap at the Giants success with defense. I think it was Tony Blengino who showed that in 2014 a huge part of the Giants success was due to a combination of great IF defense and pitchers who put the ball on the ground at a high rate.
The undervaluing of great relievers by WAR has been pretty obvious for some time. The whole concept of bullpen chaining is fatally flawed.
They don’t strike out much and they seem to be very good at sequencing, which isn’t supposed to be something you can control. My guess is the excellent defense and bullpen are mostly responsible. Because of those, they play a lot of close games and don’t give up runs late. So any runs they score from in he last third of the game are likely to be bigger than for most teams and get magnified, which becomes he narrative when the reality is if they don’t play great defense and have a great bullpen, those runs are the difference between losing 6-2 or 6-4.
Their sequencing is something that if I wasn’t constantly seeing it, I wouldn’t believe it.There’s something that we don’t understand yet about why it happens to this particular team at the right moments so frequently.
While I recognize that a contact oriented approach maximizes your chances to get good sequencing, I buy that the Royals have a special sauce to the same extent that I bought that the Orioles had a secret to winning one run games. Sure, you can push the needle in one direction but there’s a limit to what you can control (and I think the Royals are playing beyond that limit)
Not striking out is an important part of making sequencing possible. A team that puts the ball in play a lot in a giant stadium is going to have lots and lots of opportunities to score.
They are also the best team around against the fastest fastballs. My hunch—and that’s all it is—is that this neutralizes the traditional manager tactic when faced with a dangerous situation: going to a fresh hard-throwing arm from the bullpen, who will tend to throw harder than a tired starter. If your usual way to gain an advantage and cut off a rally is no longer an advantage, it raises the odds of a rally happening unless you change your own approach against them. Most teams don’t seem to have done that, though.
Of course, you also need to look at the right “saber” formula first. If you focus on HR and BB only, you miss a lot of both real and “saber” offense. But if you look at BaseRuns, the Royals actual runs per game exceeded the BaseRuns calculation by just 0.12. This is meaningful, but not as large of a gap as say the Blue Jays, whose actual runs scored exceed the BaseRuns total by 0.24 runs per game.
The Royals nearly led the league in O-Swing % and did so with a distinct advantage: they didn’t have to face the Royals’ defense 🙂
Congratulations to the Royals! If the Jays had gotten those two balls against Navarro and Revere called actual balls instead of mistaken strikes… maybe we’d have a game seven. Maybe. Maybe not. Hard to say. The Royals pen was clearly better than the Jays hitting, and it’s hard to doubt that, so they could’ve (should’ve?) won. Then again the Jays had momentum, so with adequate umpires who can tell balls from strikes who knows, right? Anyone’s game.
I’m not complaining. Actually, you know what – I am. Answer me this – the guys with the BEST eyes for balls/strikes in this game are guys like Votto, Bautista, Goldschmidt.. so why do we let umpires – and their clearly inferior ability – love the game one way or the other?
I am NOT SAYING the Jays should have won. They might not have. I am asking why it is okay that we all accept clearly inferior umpiring in times like this when we have so many better (and FAR more accurate) alternatives.
Is it history? Is it because we’ve always had umpires who were physically incapable of telling balls from strikes, so we should continue with this? Really? Is that enough?
Go Mets.
sway the game – not love the game – that was what I meant to write.. I suppose this makes quite a difference. Whoops!
How was the KC pen ‘clearly better’ than the Jays hitting? Jays already had 2 runs, a man in 3rd and no outs. Without those two awful calls (they were nowhere near ask close as the article suggests with comments like ‘majority ball’ – if that’s a strike 10% of the time I’ll eat my hat)
Call those properly and the whole game changes. Wade Davis is amazing, he doesn’t need to be gifted strike 2 – a call which halves your expected ops.
This is a great example of where Fangraphs analysis leads people astray. The average OPS drop across all players and in all game situations tells you very little about the change in actual win expectancy in that specific pitcher hitter combo and in that specific situation. This continual confusion of mean value point estimation as an estimate of a probability in a specific situation is at the heart of a lot of the flawed analysis generated by Fangraphs.
But it does tell you more about it than nothing, right? And so far as I can tell, nothing (or maybe “Royals Magic”) is what you are offering in its stead. Why wouldn’t a Revere-Davis matchup hew pretty closely to median differentials bw 3-1 and 2-2 counts? I mean, if you want to offer some evidence that it doesn’t, great! I’m all ears.
Does it? If I tell you what the average weight of a population is, how good is that estimate when you are trying to make an estimate of a specific individual?
Blue,
I have to call you out on your weight analogy. This isn’t an entire population, it’s a narrow subset.
If you give me avg weight for a population and then ask me the weight of a person, that’s tough.
However, if you narrow it down and say “here’s the avg weight of 25 year old men and 25 year old women” and then ask me “estimate if a specific 25 year old man weighs more than a specific 25 year old woman”, now I’ve got a good shot of getting it right.
Average OBP doubles from a 2-2 count to a 3-1 count, this is pretty significant, as does the likelihood of scoring at least a run with bases loaded and 1 out as opposed to 2nd and 3rd and 2 out.
This is not “take two random people and guess who weighs more” it’s taking people from subsets with distinctly different weight distributions and asking who weighs more.
What is delta OPS by handedness? We don’t know–the mean value OPS change is for all batter-pitcher pairs. That is entirely analogous to weight difference by gender.
are you arguing that it’s not easier to hit in a 3-1 count than a 2-2??
it could be Sandy Koufax pitching and it doesn’t matter.
I’m saying that the average estimate of the difference tells you very little about the difference in that specific situation–for example, we know handedness has a huge impact on OPS. You cannot just assert that the pitch count change across all contests is the same for specific handedness matchups.
Interesting, Blue, how you’re now saying it tells us “very little” when before you dismissed Blerg’s assertion that it tell us more than nothing by rhetorically asking, “Does it?” That was a nice little evasion on your part, failing to address Blerg’s basic point that you haven’t offered any evidence to support your assertion, nor an alternative way to approximate. Without an alternative, I’ll stick with the best estimate we’ve got. And for someone who is arguing that others here don’t pay attention to the finer points of modeling (your nitpicking, for example, about how others talk about randomness) you seem quite convinced that two seasons (two whole seasons!) of poor predictions about one team (those damn Royals!) invalidates the whole model. If we have to remember that models have error bars, then you have to remember that the model is based on a lot of data, and there’s no guarantee that tweaking it to better fit ONE team over TWO seasons will actually improve the model overall. Apparently those finer points of modeling don’t apply to you-even with a minuscule sample size, you are quite certain you KNOW.
The pitch Revere struck out on was an 88 mph breaking ball. Ridiculous.
Could also have been ball 4
Could also have been ball 3
Great article! But I have to say, the eye-rolling/partial-ironic-grin narrative about the Royals is getting really, really old. I feel sometimes like I’m in a Marx Bros. movie: “What do you want me to believe: what my eyes see happening on the field, or what Sheldon Cooper’s computer tells me SHOULD be happening?” (Well, so a combination Marx Bros. movie and “Big Bang Theory” episode . . . ) Everyone repeat after me: no human activity is 100% quantifiable! Some, like baseball, are more quantifiable than most, and advanced analytics only enhance our understanding and appreciation of them. But, yes, “team vibe”, “special team”, “chemistry”–whatever you want to call it, it DOES, in fact, exist. It exists because the games are played by flesh-and-blood human beings, not robots, and flesh-and-blood human beings add a non-rational, psychological/emotional element to the proceedings that can’t (always?) be captured by algorithms. (A truth captured, very darkly, in Notes from Underground, and other works, by Fyodor Dostoevsky.) So, Jeff, you’ve been taught wrong: baseball is part math, to be sure, but it’s also part literature. Sabermetrics take you only so far; beyond that point, you need to sit back and enjoy the narrative. Or, to paraphrase Whitey Herzog: “Stop crunchin’ those numbers, yer missin’ a great game!” The empirical fact here is: The Royals are the best team in the American League and are the AL champions for the second straight year, not: There’s no way the Royals should be winning because that goes against everything advanced analytics has taught us. Sabermetrics enhance the narrative, they don’t replace it.
Reading the article I didn’t get the idea Jeff was eye-rolling at the Royals as much as acknowledging the limits of fangraphs to understand them and praising individual parts such as Davis.
Now for true examples of eyerolling see Dave answering Royals questions during fangraph chats.
Oh, you’re right–and that’s one of the things that makes this such a good article. I wasn’t specifically targeting Jeff, but rather the narrative that he himself feels the need to address, which, as I said, is really tedious. Some people actually seem to be angry at the Royals because of “the limits of fangraphs to understand them”. (See: Blerg’s bilious posts below. [Two points: Again, I ask you: what should I believe, the 95 wins the Royals actually got on the field in the regular season, or Base Runs’ prediction of 84 wins? Only the first is an empirical fact; the second is a hypothetical projection that in the end proved to be wrong. Second, what is the point of bringing up the Royals’ fans?!? Fans are by definition irrational–unless they can make the eminently logical point that it’s their team going to the World Series, so who the hell cares what Base Runs predicted they would do? ])
No one is saying the Royals didn’t win 95 games. Base Runs projects a win loss record, but that projection is based on empirical events — inputs such as the number of singles, doubles, triples, home runs, SBs, and BBs that empirically occurred. It’s also much better at predicting the actual number of runs a team will score and allow in the future than is the actual number of runs that team has scored and allowed in the past.
Your problem is that bw two possible explanations for the Royals defying projections — (1) the Royals break projections and sabermetrics and (2) no projection system can account for randomness, and the Royals have benefitted from that randomness — you choose the former, and that’s fine, but there is a lot less reason to believe it to be true (like a hundred years of accumulated knowledge about how teams score and allow runs) than the latter. Maybe if I were a Royals’ fan and had to hear other people say that my team had benefited from good luck, I’d push back hard against what reason told me, too.
I’m also pretty sure Jeff never says that there is something about the Royals’ success that sabermetrics can’t understand or capture. He does say that the Royals success has been enjoyable for him bc it’s made him wonder about some of those assumptions. Those are two very different statements, but again, you drink the Kool-Aid, interpret his statements through your Royals-colored glasses, and take away from it what you want to hear.
Fandom isn’t rational. Our love of a team and our happiness and sadness over the successes and failures of a team isn’t rational. However, when people analyze baseball, they aspire to be rational, and there’s no reason that fans of a team can’t be rational about that particular analytic aspect of fandom. Be outrageously, irrationally happy about the Royals’ success. Don’t be irrational and delusional about the reasons for that success.
“no projection system can account for randomness”
It’s posts like this that show just how little about actual statistical analysis Fangraph fanboys understand.
ANY decent projection system will ALWAYS include a description of variance in reporting its results. And guess what part of variance includes–that’s right “randomness.”
Hmm, I lost the chance to reply directly to your response, Blerg, so I’ll respond to my own and hope you read it.
To quote Moe Howard, “You got me wrong, stranger”. First, I’m not a Royals fan. Second, I’m not disputing “100 years of accumulated knowledge”. I’m making an aesthetic and philosophical argument: to me, “no projection system can account for randomness” is better worded in this case as “human activity cannot be quantified 100%”, to which I add “so lets stop pretending it does”. “Randomness” to me suggests natural blips in the weather that might throw off the projections of climatologists; I’m saying rather that the outcome of a baseball game (or season) can be affected by stuff that the stats can’t measure, because human beings are not machines and do not always behave rationally. That’s what goes into the concept of “team chemistry”, etc., and, yes, I’m damn well saying that sabermetrics can’t account for them, but that they are a real part of baseball. To paraphrase Dostoevsky, “Numbers know what they know”; they don’t capture everything there is to capture in the narrative of a series or a season. I have spent my professional life studying and writing about philosophy, history and literature, and that’s where I’m coming from. “Kool-Aid” has nothing to do with it. “Kool-Aid” to me is putting the cart before the horse and privileging the projections over what actually happens, and then getting angry because people then question the validity of the projections. I’ve always thought science was supposed to describe things as they actually are. Finally, “projections based on empirical events” are not in and of themselves “empirical events”.
Blue — I think you knew what I meant was that no projection system can account for how that randomness will manifest itself, even if it can account for the magnitude of such randomness. Being intentionally obtuse and parsing my statements for a little nugget you can seize upon doesn’t really advance the conversation. Of course there are error bars, but no baseball projection system can account for which teams that randomness will benefit and which teams it will hurt.
“Randomness” over the course of two years is most likely NOT randomness but rather either some factor not part of the underlying model or some misspecification of the model.
It’s Royals’ fans obstinancy about admitting that their team’s success has been partially due to some good fortune that makes me want the Mets to ground them into a fine powder. I mean, if the Mets obliterate them, Royals’ fans will have to admit that they don’t have some secret postseason formula for success, right?
As long as we’re talking about empirical facts, I’ve got a few for you. One, by Base Runs the Royals were an 84-win team this year, and they were about the same last year. Two, the Royals had about a 5% chance of avoiding elimination at one point in the postseason this year. Three, they had about a 5% chance of avoiding elimination at one point in the postseason last year. The Royals are a good ball club with an exceptional defense and an outstanding bullpen. They’ve also had some things fall their way in the postseason. A little recognition of that from Royals’ fans would go a long way, for me, at least.
That should tell you there is some error in the Base Runs to total win estimation procedure.
Don’t reify your analytical constructs.
One data point brings the entire model into question?
Don’t you know that the Royals bring everything into question, Dave? They are unicorns, and proven methods of sabermetrics don’t apply to them. They are the Chosen Team, so just drink the Kool-Aid and shut up.
Clearly, I don’t veil my contempt for “Royals Magic” and the fans who lap it up mindlessly nearly as well as Jeff does.
WHAT? are you serious here?
I agree with your assessment of the Royals’ success. And to the “good bullpen” point everyone makes, it’s not enough to be good. Their bullpen was also “clutch,” meaning its impact probably exceeded its actual pitching talent. Which is something Royals fans should celebrate, even if it’s probably not sustainable.
All that said, I think we’d all be better off if (1) Royals fans stopped caring if some analysts think their team has gotten to this point in part as a result of over-performance (no shame in that!) and luck; and (2) other fans stopped caring that Royals fans won’t concede that their team’s success exceeds the team’s probable talent.
I’ll agree with you there, Ernie. I’m sure almost all of what I said was a waste of breath. I think what I was fighting against was not really Royals’ fans, who are no more full of it than any other fanbase, but an attitude that rejects the large role that randomness plays in baseball (and in life, more generally). We’d all be a lot better off if we made our peace w that.
OK. I’m a Royals fan and I have no problem admitting that the Royals have had things fall their way the last 2 years. I think that most teams that make a World Series have things fall their way. The Royals the last 2 years, and other World Series teams, take advantage of those breaks more often than not.
I don’t believe in Royals Magic. I believe the Royals are a very good team and that a few time the last 2 years they’ve come back to win games when it looked like they were dead not because of magic, but because they are so confident that they always believe they will come back. Most of the times they don’t come back and lose, but they’ve come back enough times, especially in the playoffs, and those are the games people tend to remember.
so … magical confidence?
I don’t believe in magic either, but rather in a team that has benfitted from a great convergeance of circumstances: KC put together a team of above average defenders while their opponents were trying to stockpile good-hit-no-field sluggers; while other teams were trying to secure aces that would cost $100+ in free agency, the Royals built their pitching staff from the back end. Of course, everyone knows these things.
What consistently made me nervous about the way Dayton Moore built this team, was that it didn’t appear this was REALLY his plan (“process”) all along. While a few of the prospects sorta panned out, pitching development has been a real letdown. Thankfully, what resulted was a team where every player has been above average (with only Omar Infante and Jeremy Guthrie pulling the team down), and collectively good enough to beat the stars-and-scrubs models.
I don’t think there’s a lot of obstinance about admitting the Royals success has been partially due to good fortune among fans. Certainly any team that makes it even as far as an LCS has probably had at least its fair share of good luck (no doubt Elvis Andrus would attest to the Blue Jays streak of luck in game 5 of the ALDS). Rather I think Royals fans are annoyed that the saber crowd apparently undervalues whatever it is that makes them as good as they are. They were the best team in the American League this year, running away with the central in a season that Fangraphs projected them to be under .500 and in third place. And it’s not just Fangraphs, of course; I can’t find ANY pundit (and I’ve invested a fair amount of time looking) that predicted the Royals would return to the World Series before the season started, and most had them in 3rd or 4th place and not returning to the playoffs at all. It seems as though nobody thinks they are actually as good as they are, which I think is fascinating.
And that’s the big point. When your model has been wrong for over two years running it’s time to figure out what is wrong with your model…not just wave you hands around and rant about randomness.
Blue – you keep asserting that 2 years is a significant sample size. It’s not — these results are well within an acceptable variance of projection systems. Especially when the talent spread at the MLB level is so small — this isn’t a normal distribution across a population, this is talent that managed to persevere for decades to become MLB players.
If you’re really interested in learning more, I suggest you take a coursera intro to statistics course, so you can actually understand what you seem to be arguing against.
You make your own luck. As Bill Parcels would say – You are what you are. The Royals are the 2 time American League Champions.
Agreed, but the irony is that the Royals bullpen has been referred to as “cyborgs.” So the flesh and blood robots are the ones flipping the stats narrative.
Regarding the call against Revere, it would have been worse if it had happened in a Game 7. The Royals were actually an entire win ahead of the Blue Jays, and they should take some comfort in that fact.
What total nonsense. There is a 2 win swing on the outcome of that inning. It’s no consolation at all to the Jays that they didn’t get a chance to send Stroman to the mound in game 7
I’m admittedly out of my depth on this site. I’m just trying to understand what I can. Thank you for the info.
Why are you out of your depth, because you’re new to following baseball?
I started following baseball in May 2007, but unfortunately I’ve only started reading (some) FanGraphs articles in the last 6 months, so there’s a bit of a learning curve for me.
I really respect and appreciate commenters who are humble here about still being in the learning process of the advanced statistics portion of baseball. Too often posters look for the chance to be antagonistic when they sense an argument that doesn’t hold with supporting data — not saying that’s what happened here, but people new to this kind of baseball analysis should not be afraid to comment due to the risk of being taken apart. Keep at it Jenstrom, lots of good stuff to learn here.
Defense and relief pitching definitely play a big part in the success of the Royals. I believe that the third key is hitting philosophy and training.
We all know that the Royals put the ball in play more than every team. They are also the best team at hitting 95+ mph fastballs. In close games and against low-FIP pitchers, they still hit the ball. It keeps them in most at-bats, even when behind in the count. This in turn, keeps them in most games. A perfect match for their fine bullpen.
On the flipside, I believe there is a point where HR become overrated when predicting team wins (or using BaseRuns to determine who’s really the “best”).
The Astros rely on the HR. During 2015, the Astros were 52-11 when they hit 2 or more HR (Run Differential=198). They were 34-65 when HR<2 (Rd=-105). The Royals had similar success when hitting 2+HR (26-5,+100) but were more than competitive in low-HR games (69-62,-22). HR are a matter of sequence, but it isn't all random. Depends on pitching quality as well.
Look at individual Astros with power. Most regressed with runners in scoring position. The one exception, surprise!, Colby Rasmus – the "clutchiest" of the Astros during the playoffs.
I know my rant is only an assertion but it's worth a deeper look. I view BIP data as no more than partially "luck". It is also probability. Against tough pitchers or late in the count, put the ball in play. Unless you are an elite power hitter, shorten the swing to get the fat part of the bat on the ball. Put enough of these at-bats together and you'll win more than swinging from the heels regardless of count.
Great observation, particularly relevant because the Cubs were particularly bad against high heat pitchers.
That bodes well for KC at first glance.
RIP Siegrist 🙁
Also – another fine article, Jeff!
One more note – data used in my rant was after 152 games. I was already looking at this issue before the season ended.
Defense, luck with RISP (in both directions) and a bit of help from the ump when you need it most. It’s a heady combination
There’s something to the Royals. I legitimately wonder sometimes if officials aren’t told to deliberately sway games a certain way, and the past two royals postseasons only fuel that.
Yes, because clearly MLB’s master plan for World Domination involves having the 29th largest market in baseball, and a team with no MVP or Cy Young caliber player, win two consecutive pennants.
bush did 911
not unkillable, but definitely unlikeable.
“dude needs to shut up, bothering us about ground-ball rates man, barrels, dude, barrels…”
Jays hit .086 with risp this series.
and then there’s that Caleb kid.
Lol when I first saw him grab it, I thought it was a little kid with a fake Moustakas beard. Nope, just a very fortunate 19-year old.
Every tough-luck team needs a Bartman!
I just can’t believe it. He scored from first on a single. A SINGLE. My eyes saw it, but my brain is still having trouble registering it.
Scored from first on a single. Lorenzo Cain. My god.
A single.
It wasn’t just speed. Bautista threw to the wrong man because he was more concerned with Hosmer not getting to second.
I also believe Hosmer made a big enough turn to fool the Jays into thinking he might try for a double, knowing that would draw a throw and allow Cain the extra precious second or two to score.
Maybe you should start believing in the importance of advance scouting: http://www.si.com/mlb/2015/10/24/royals-blue-jays-alcs-clinch-pennant
Price was tipping his changeup! sonuva…
wow that’s an important read.
Wow. Reminds me of the Lester thing last season…
I’m a Giants fan and I have to say that whatever the ‘something’ is about the Royals, it feels very much like the same ‘something’ that the Giants had in winning the 2012 and 2014 World Series (I’m less certain about the 2010 Giants in this respect). Already in the 2014 World Series I felt like the Royals were to a large extent a mirror of the Giants. Most obviously, the two teams had the best Clutch ratings in the major leagues and a good number of hitters whose BA was significantly better in high-leverage situations than in low/medium-leverage situations, not just in 2014 but in their whole careers–that is, statistical evidence suggested that they were ‘clutch hitters’, although we aren’t supposed to believe in that. Both teams relied on contact and average rather than home runs and walks, and this was associated with the Baseruns rating not being that great (as opposed for example to Oakland, which has focused on home runs, walks, and Baseruns). Both had extremely effective relief pitching–though the Royals big three got more press and had better FIPs, the Giants were just as devastatingly effective in the postseason , even more so if Yusmeiro Petit’s long relief appearances were considered, not just in 2014 but also in 2012. Other than Bumgarner, both teams had starting pitching which didn’t really seem to be that great by standard measures, and even Bumgarner didn’t seem to be that great in the regular season. Both had excellent fielding. You got the feeling with both team that their basic thinking was to get into the 7th inning with the score close and simply have better nerves, clutch hitting, relief pitching, and defense than the other team. There were differences, to be sure–the Royals had a lot more stolen bases and hard throwers, while the Giants had more home runs (but still not so many)–but there were so many similarities that it was hard to miss.
It similar to the Giants “something”. They’re both ex post facto explanations of events that already occured.
Just for the record, CAREER BA differences in high-leverage vs. low-leverage situations for Giants are Posey (.326 vs. .306), Pence (.302 vs. 274), Crawford (.260 vs .238), Pagan (.312 vs. .278), Morse (.302 vs. .269), and Belt (.288 vs. 259) (there’s essentially no difference in league BAs in HL and LL situations since 2006). Everyone who was in the 2014 starting lineup other than Sandoval and Panik is at least 20 points higher in HL situations. Of course it can be argued that all them have simply gotten lucky in this respect through their entire career, but this is a little difficult to swallow.
I can’t wait until we find out it was all because of drugs. Real good drugs, apparently. But just drugs.
The natural explanation for any kind of enhanced clutch performance would be because of some ‘drug’ like adrenaline which the body would produce in such situations but which would have a differential effect on different players.
Or free testosterone. Studies have shown that players get a testosterone spike throughout the game when their team is ahead, compared to the trailing team – whose testosterone actually drops on average. While this would be more helpful in something like football – it could have an affect on a more skill sport like baseball.
The most obvious indicator to me that the feeling of magic or destiny is just your brain slapping narratives on events, is my experience with baseball versus hockey.
I don’t really care that much about baseball and it is mostly an intellectual pursuit for me where I watch few games and am not emotionally invested in any way. I am at no time tempted to slap narratives on things. Results happen, sometimes they seem relatively unlikely, other times not.
Hockey on the other hand which I follow more closely and am somewhat more emotionally invested in is where I start to feel the pull of narratives.
The truth is really just XKCD 904. There is no destiny, some team has to win. That team can easily be a team that only has a 5% chance to win. 5% happens, a lot in a world where trillions of billions of things happen each day. your brain likes to pick out certain things and dress them up in a story. Resist that.
Frankly I am shocked that people like Dave and yourself feel the need to even pay lip service to such narratives, or feel the need to defend yourself against the people attacking you with them.
that baseball (where I do not follow it super closely, but keep a tab on the stats and watch a few games and dthe playoffs)
Guys, the issue isn’t “magic” or “unicorns”; it isn’t that sabermetrics are evil; it isn’t that the Royals are the greatest team since the ’27 Yankees. It’s this: KC has won the AL pennant two years running; they did so one year compiling the best record in the league; both years they had to get through two or three rounds of playoffs; and they pushed the 2014 Series to 7 games. Yet there’s this naggingly obtuse conversation that won’t go away that there’s something “wrong” about this, something “random”, something that irritates educated adults and make them say that they “want to see the Royals ground into dust” in this year’s Series. “Random” in baseball is Bill Virdon’s grounder bouncing up and hitting Tony Kubek in the throat, or Muddy Ruehl dropping an easy pop foul after stepping on his own catcher’s mask; unless you can show me concrete evidence to the contrary, “random” is surely NOT prevailing over the course of two grueling 162-game seasons and five playoff rounds. Ergo, if your algorithms can’t explain the Royals’ success, you need to refine them, or find new ones, or else admit that mathematics can take you only so far in explaining human activities. What you DON’T do is complain about/mock/dismiss the results that call your models into question; or get angry at people who themselves subsequently question the value of said models. There are two corollaries to this: 1.) It is extremely unattractive to hear sedentary analysts mock the people on the ground who are actually responsible for the stats they analyze; and 2.) once again, it’s putting the cart before the horse: what needs to be privileged are the results of two seasons of AL baseball, not the analytics that can’t account for them.
And speaking of obtuse: Narrative is as much a part of any human activity as scientific analysis. Dressing up chemical reactions or photosynthesis in a story would be silly. Seeing the human element in human activities is natural. It depends on how your brain is wired, I suppose–I myself see narrative wherever people interact. Resisting that says more about how your own brain is wired than about what should or should not be resisted. If you want to see baseball (or hockey) as 5% randomness in a world where “trillions of trillions of things happen each day”, that’s okay, too. But for me it kind of just sucks the life and joy out of it, doesn’t it? And then why not play out each season on your computer instead of suffering the muss and fuss of a six-month, 162-game slog executed by imperfect beings?
Yeah every time I roll three sixes in a row I just throw the dice away because they must be broken. I am super rational that way…
Look the blond criticiIng of an imperfect but pretty good model without some alternate replacement because some unlikely thing a happened is just stupid.
That the royals looked to be so-so and were in fact great two years is totally not fatal evidence to something modeling a baseball season and if you don’t not think so you badly Gil to understand how into gent the outcomes of a baseball season are.
Probably 4 pitches go different in the past two years and we are not even having this discussion.
Kendrys Morales’ grounder eating up both Tony Sipp and Carlos Correa. Or a fly ball dropping between Jose Bautista and Ryan Goins. Yep.
Yeah, that was ridiculous. Correa had 2 home runs so far and HOU had a 6-2 lead. That grounder with “changed spin” and/or deflected off Sipp somehow missed Correa’s glove on what coulda-shoulda-woulda been a DP. That was just nuts.
———————————–
I think back to the OAK-KC wild card game from a year ago when Sal chased an 0-2 slider off the plate and somehow pulled it down the 3rd base line for the game winning hit. I mean really. The pitcher threw it well off the plate.
As baseball coaches we’d say “I’m not gonna reward that” (but, I’ll sure as hell celebrate it).
I’m a Cardinal’s fan … so talking about Royal good fortune in playoffs isn’t my favorite topic.
I admire greatly your English composition and philosophical repertoire about the game. I wish I could do not as much but to a larger degree. However, I can’t complain too much since I can handle two languages as well- Spanish included, which I was raised with in Mexico many years ago. THAT ASIDE, I have been a baseball fan since the “tecolotes” de N.Laredo Mexico in the 1940’s thru the 1950’s before I came to this country to study and stay. that too, aside,I have been an ASTROS fan since then. As one, my heart has been broken many times over the years by the Astros misadventures, its HIT AND MISS seasons, poor management, and lastly this year’s “stumble over the kitchen broom” in losing to the ROYALS. I admire both teams, Royals and Mets, and it wouldn’t bother me which team comes up winner in the W.S. however, IT WOULD PLEASE MOST IF THE ROYALS DID, for one reason, it would elevate the Astros prestige to have lost to a superlative team, the Royals. I don’t ascribe their success to magic or luck; they have proved, two years running , that they have what it takes to get to the finish line in first place. Also, when they falter, they don’t panic, and fall by the wayside- AS MILO HAMILTON USED TO SAY WHEN A GAME CAME APART AS HAPPENED TO THE ASTROS IN THEIR LAST TWO GAMES WITH THE ROYALS; ” AND THE WHEELS HAVE FALLEN OFF THIS WAGON”. No, definitely not, we should not deny the Royals their “just deserves”. Baseball is a wonderful sport, untold fans live and die by it. We should all rejoice that it exists. It brings so many benefits to OUR NATION IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE. BYE
You really don’t know what you are talking about, STFU in your case is a good idea.
Settle down.
What a salient response. Very convincing.
The playoffs are a crap shoot,logic and past performance mean less in this,important,but small sample size.
Yeah, that one strike call lost us the series. Which didn’t even go 7. Which we gave up 36 runs. Which we hit .186 with runners on base, including 0-11 in this game. Yeah – it was the umpire’s strike call! That must be it.
You’ve got a good point, but that one bad call probably dropped the Jays chance of winning the series from about 12-13% to 8-9%, which is a lot for one bad call.
You are picking nits here, bro, a 5% change is peanuts… get over it. My team failed to make the show, I can accept it…I suggest you do the same.
Exactly! all events that are not obvious and monumental are insignificant. Finally, somebody gets it.
There is such a thing as a team vibe in baseball, negative as well as positive, as long as a season and as short as an inning. The Astros experienced a choke recently, and the Rangers accomplished an historic gag. That’s the most powerful vibe there is. All streaks are vibrating and so, sometimes, are seasons.
Maybe my eyes lie, but has anyone other than me noticed that patient hitters do worse in nearly all post seasons than aggressive hitters? I have been watching baseball for almost 40 years and i would swear that post season strike zones are always much bigger than regular season strike zones. As a result, guys like Dexter Fowler suffer much of the time and guys like Alicedes Escobar do startlingly well during October.
You want to know who else defied the odds and put together improbable runs that got them into the World Series two years in a row? Hitler, that’s wh- … uh, no, uh … the Texas Rangers, that’s who, in 2010 (when and where they lost to the Giants) and then in 2011 (when and where they lost to the Cardinals).
The only things which were improbable about the two Royals’ runs is the two big comebacks in individual games when they were facing elimination against Oakland in 2014 and Houston in 2015, and these didn’t get them into the World Series, they were in preliminary rounds. I think they were the best team in the AL both years.
I think the Mets describe the Royals very well here:
http://espn.go.com/newyork/mlb/story/_/id/13964481/daniel-murphy-david-wright-newyork-mets-call-royals-hitters-relentless-come
While watching the Patriots final drive against the Jets yesterday, right after Brady threw the winning TD to Gronk, the announcer commented about Brady going directly over to hug offensive coordinator Josh McDaniel and about how Brady and McDaniel were working on that play all week.
That play got me thinking about just how much it seems the entire Patriot’s organization buys into the process of Belichick’s system and the similarities to which it seems the Royals buy into the Royals’ system.
I’m not a saber in either baseball or football, but based on the WRs Brady has had over the years (Moss notwithstanding) and some head-scratching iffy secondaries the Pats have had, I would bet the Pats have won more games than statistics say they should. I’m really, really, out of my league when it comes to football stats so if anybody knows for sure, please inform of my ignorance. But if it’s true– and I’d bet hard currency it is– I wonder how much of that overperforming is a direct result of the coaching staff? Is that even quantifiable?
The corollary of the Pats in baseball being the Royals. Not Ned Yost. But the managers surrounding him. Jeff talks about 3B coach Mike Jirsche and the decision to send Cain, but there was also the important Game 2 decision by 1B coach Rusty Kuntz to send Hosmer on a steal and that broke up a DP against Price. Having watched a ton of Royals games and read their beat writers regularly I know that (1) These two decisions were the sole factors of those two respective coaches and did not involve Yost and (2) Those two coaches have sole control of their respective aspects of the game.
Kuntz also has sole control over defensive positioning. Dave Eiland and Pedro Grifol, the pitching and and catching coaches, control the in-game strategy for how to approach individual batters. Dale Sveum, the hitting coach, took over from George Brett and has now been at the position for 18 months, an eternity for a team that in Ned’s early years changed hitting coaches more often than Joe Buck changes beard styles.
The point is not just that these coaches do these things but that Yost gives them absolute free reign in their feifdoms. Also, in the case of Kuntz in particular, the coaches work obsessively in their particular niches. During a series against the A’s this year, Ryan Labfevre, the Royals play-by-play man, told a story about how the Royals had two off-days in a row on the road in the San Fran area and how many of the players went golfing or seeing the town but that Kuntz had spent both days doing nothing but reviewing tape– going so far as to just order room-service so he wouldn’t have to waste extra time on dinner.
And Yost, for all of his faults, is smart enough not to interfere. This is an evolution by Yost– possibly the most important evolution he’s had– and one that can be traced back to September 2014, when he put Aaron Crowe in a game against Dave Eiland’s wishes and it backfired horrendously. Since then, Yost has been extremely open about listening to his coach’s opinions or not intruding on their territory.
To Conclude:
1) How many other position coaches spend the hours the Royals’ coaches do? A ballpark guess is many but not all. The Royals’ obsession to scouting and tape detail is probably on the high side but not all that rare.
2) How many teams’ managers give those coaches absolute reign? I’d guess this is rare. Yost has limited himself pretty much to lineup construction, bullpen use and clubhouse stuff. It’s hard to believe but he has zero say in the Royals’ much-vaunted run game. Again, I have no numbers but its difficult for me to believe that many managers have swallowed their pride to the point they regulate the running game and defensive shifts completely to another person.
3) Finally, how many other teams’ players have bought in to the position coaches completely? Again, my gut instincts would say several teams but not all. This is the Royals’ similarities to the Pat’s in which announcers always comment that their players just seem to play “harder” and my BS meter goes through the roof. I don’t think the Pats can make their players play any harder than any others, but what they can do is make sure every single player is on the same page, and working for the team. The Royals’ seem to do this as well. One of the most interesting passages in Molly Knight’s book ‘The Best Team Money Can Buy’ is where she talks about people questioning Hanley Ramirez’ efforts and some player had the quote that everything they do on the field they are thinking 95% about themselves and 5% about the team– yes aiming to hit the ball at the first baseman may help the team and move a player over but how will that effect my line and my salary negotiations? As a fan who thinks solely about the team, this was a little shocking, if not surprising. But, to my eyes, it seems as if much of the Pats success and the Royals’ too, comes from finding players who inverse those percentages and put the team first.
I don’t think any of those three factors by themselves are that rare in baseball but combining all three so cohesively in one team I’d bet is a very,very rare combo. Who knows what other factors there are and how you’d quantify this at all, but guys like Jirschle and Kuntz do tremendous leg-work to make little differences, and then the Royals’ players execute those little differences really well and Ned Yost just smiles through it all and that Jeff, is why I believe there is actually something about the Royals.
Something funny about the title of this article… Something Royal was the name of my mother. Good things come from something royal.
A very “There’s Something About Mare-y” point to ponder.
Just neighing.
Not sure if anyone is going to read this, with my post down around the 100th entry, but did anyone else think about this in Game 6: if Bautista threw the ball to the cutoff man instead of to 2nd base, and the cutoff man threw home, perhaps Cain is safe anyway, and the batter ends up on 2B instead of holding at first. If he was on 2nd, he would most likely have scored that inning, based on the events that happened next (which of course, may not have happened exactly the same way in a different situation), but perhaps the “blunder” of not throwing to the cutoff man could have possibly SAVED the Blue Jays a run. It turned out to be immaterial, but it was interesting to think about.
That Game 6 was a perfect example of the fine line between “we did enough and the umpires screwed us” and “forget the umpires; maybe get a hit with RISP”. There were 100 opportunities to win that game and the Jays didn’t come through on enough of them. It happens. On the other hand, SRSLY?! Dat plate, tho.
The one real downside to a team hitting philosophy of patience is that, when the HP umpire is inconsistent, your whole approach seems to go out the window. A bad-ball hitting group doesn’t have that problem. They have other problems, but not that one. I don’t know what that means, nor what to do about it, except maybe get a bunt down so that the next hitter’s fly ball can score a run.
See you in 2016.
RoyalsMagic isn’t a thing, but the notion that 2 seasons isn’t meaningful enough, the saber-metric numbers are perfect, and the Royals are winning because RANDOM isn’t the right answer.
It is, in fact, ironic that the people that cling most closely to the numbers are the ones without the intellectual curiosity to posit that it might not be entirely luck. Hint: it’s almost certainly not entirely luck. We don’t have a 100 years of good defensive metrics or of power pitching with liberal bullpen use. The Royals have, almost certainly, to some extent broken our best models.
Jeff’s article is great but the major problem with win probability graphs is that they do not contain confidence intervals. So if the win probability decreased with the call against Revere, does it change outside the confidence interval of a call that would have benefited Revere? Rob Arthur addressed the issue of not having confidence intervals attached to WAR on 538. This issue needs to be addressed with the win probability calculations.