You Guys Officially Don’t Like Our Royals Projection
Of all the polling projects I run here, this is the one I like the most. I’ve only done it for a couple years, now, but for me, this is the perfect kind of crowdsourcing. We’ve got our team depth charts, and we’ve got our Steamer and ZiPS projections that get blended together. So after a whole bunch of math takes place, the depth charts and the player projections get converted into projected standings. Everybody loves to look at and analyze projected standings, but sometimes there are numbers people really don’t understand or support. So I poll.
On Tuesday, I asked the FanGraphs community to evaluate the projected American League standings. On Wednesday, I asked the community to evaluate the projected National League standings. Votes have come in by the thousands, and while it’s not particularly fun to create the initial polling posts, this is when it’s all worth it. I gathered all the numbers to see what people think about the whole projected MLB landscape. Hot tip: the Royals are projected here to finish 77-85. And you guys hate that.
In each team poll, I asked whether you thought a given projection was way high, kind of high, good, kind of low, or way low. I took the results and converted the answers into numbers, so I could get an estimate of how the community would adjust a team’s projection up or down. In a few cases — like the Royals’ — I had to do some further estimation because there were a lot of votes toward one extreme. It shouldn’t make too much of a difference, give or take a tenth of a point. Here’s the meat. Here’s how many extra wins the community thinks each team deserves.
I’m going to assume this is unsurprising, and I’m assuming that in part because you’re part of the voting community. We’ve talked seemingly non-stop about whether “there’s just something about the Royals,” and the community has stated its case. Based on the votes and based on my math, the people here think the Royals’ projection should be nearly six wins higher. That’s double what the community thinks about the Blue Jays’ deserved adjustment. The crowd also thinks the projections are a little low on the Pirates and Rangers, and at the other end, the community is a little more down on the Red Sox and the Indians, in particular. The rest of the distribution is pretty close to the middle.
I’ll give this to the community — usually, when you open things up to fan voting, you get optimistic results, on average. And the results here are slightly optimistic, overall, but only to the tune of +0.2 wins per team. All the wins nearly balance out, but for the Royals, who remain an outlier. This was almost assured to happen, but now we have it as concrete math.
I know exactly how it looks to have the defending champs projected to be last in the league. I also know the Royals have defied the projections before, so a large segment of the population has been convinced. In 2013, the Royals won five more games than they were projected to win. In 2014, they won nine more games than they were projected to win. Interestingly, when I ran this project last year, the Royals were projected to finish 79-83, and the crowd thought that was only one win low. So, the crowd thought last year’s Royals, preseason, were basically a .500 ballclub. Then the Royals blew the projection away and won everything there was to be won, and that put voters over the edge. Last year, it seems, sealed the deal.
I’m assuming there’s a lot going on here. Since the Royals keep beating their projections, there’s definitely an increasing belief they just do something the numbers struggle to detect. That’s the obvious one, but there’s more. There was no actual cost to your vote, and hands down the easiest thing to do is vote for the Royals being special, because it’s psychologically comfortable to give in and follow the crowd. Even though all the voting was anonymous, voting against the Royals being weird could be perceived as argumentative. And, importantly: the Royals poll got more than 500 more votes than the next-most popular poll. The Royals are the controversial team, as projections go, and evidence suggests people came here just to vote on them. To do that implies you have a strong opinion, and the strong opinions were overwhelmingly that the Royals are being badly under-estimated.
That’s the stuff on the Royals. People think they’re better than ZiPS and Steamer do. Maybe the people are wrong, and maybe they aren’t. It’s genuinely impossible to know, but it’s interesting to see where people stand, and I think it adds real substance. What we’ve effectively done is create 2016 fan-projected standings.
Let’s look at this stuff side-by-side. We’ll start with the American League. This table ought to be sortable, and on the left, you have the ZiPS/Steamer projections. On the right, you have the fan-adjusted projections.
| Team | Projections | Community |
| Astros | 88 | 88 |
| Blue Jays | 84 | 87 |
| Red Sox | 88 | 86 |
| Indians | 87 | 85 |
| Yankees | 82 | 83 |
| Royals | 77 | 83 |
| Tigers | 81 | 82 |
| Rangers | 80 | 82 |
| Mariners | 82 | 82 |
| Rays | 80 | 81 |
| Angels | 80 | 80 |
| White Sox | 81 | 80 |
| Orioles | 78 | 78 |
| Twins | 78 | 78 |
| Athletics | 78 | 78 |
By the projections on FanGraphs, the Red Sox get the AL’s best record. With the fan adjustments, that honor goes to the Astros, followed by the Blue Jays. The Blue Jays go from four behind the Red Sox to one ahead. The Royals, meanwhile, go from 10 behind the Indians to two behind. The fans would have the Astros, Blue Jays, and Indians winning their divisions, with the Red Sox and Yankees as wild-card opponents. But the Yankees are fan-projected for basically the same record as the Royals.
We’ll turn now to the National League.
| Team | Projections | Community |
| Cubs | 97 | 95 |
| Dodgers | 94 | 93 |
| Mets | 90 | 90 |
| Nationals | 90 | 89 |
| Giants | 87 | 87 |
| Cardinals | 85 | 86 |
| Pirates | 84 | 86 |
| Diamondbacks | 80 | 82 |
| Marlins | 81 | 80 |
| Padres | 73 | 72 |
| Rockies | 72 | 71 |
| Brewers | 71 | 70 |
| Reds | 70 | 69 |
| Braves | 68 | 68 |
| Phillies | 64 | 65 |
The tiers are the same. There’s the same group of bad teams, the same pair of average teams, and the same group of good teams. But the fans think things will be a little tighter. Instead of a 13-win gap between the Cubs and the seventh-best team, the fans see it as a nine-win gap. The community sees the Cubs, Dodgers, and Mets as division winners, with the Nationals then playing against the Giants for the wild card. But the Cardinals and the Pirates are right there.
I’ll close with a big giant table. This one is also sortable.
| Team | High by more than 4 | High by 2 – 4 | Good, +/- 1 | Low by 2 – 4 | Low by more than 4 |
| Angels | 7% | 25% | 37% | 24% | 7% |
| Astros | 4% | 23% | 44% | 24% | 5% |
| Athletics | 11% | 32% | 31% | 19% | 7% |
| Blue Jays | 2% | 5% | 22% | 43% | 27% |
| Braves | 4% | 18% | 48% | 25% | 5% |
| Brewers | 6% | 34% | 43% | 16% | 1% |
| Cardinals | 3% | 10% | 35% | 37% | 14% |
| Cubs | 13% | 40% | 32% | 9% | 6% |
| Diamondbacks | 3% | 10% | 35% | 39% | 13% |
| Dodgers | 9% | 38% | 43% | 8% | 2% |
| Giants | 4% | 21% | 44% | 27% | 4% |
| Indians | 16% | 45% | 32% | 6% | 1% |
| Mariners | 10% | 26% | 44% | 16% | 4% |
| Marlins | 12% | 38% | 35% | 12% | 3% |
| Mets | 4% | 29% | 44% | 19% | 4% |
| Nationals | 7% | 35% | 44% | 13% | 2% |
| Orioles | 5% | 21% | 40% | 25% | 9% |
| Padres | 7% | 27% | 51% | 13% | 2% |
| Phillies | 5% | 8% | 47% | 31% | 9% |
| Pirates | 0% | 5% | 29% | 50% | 15% |
| Rangers | 3% | 8% | 25% | 42% | 21% |
| Rays | 4% | 16% | 36% | 32% | 12% |
| Red Sox | 21% | 40% | 30% | 7% | 2% |
| Reds | 10% | 29% | 44% | 14% | 3% |
| Rockies | 9% | 32% | 48% | 9% | 2% |
| Royals | 4% | 1% | 7% | 17% | 71% |
| Tigers | 4% | 13% | 40% | 32% | 11% |
| Twins | 6% | 19% | 45% | 24% | 6% |
| White Sox | 11% | 31% | 40% | 15% | 2% |
| Yankees | 4% | 11% | 37% | 34% | 13% |
That’s just included for the sake of being thorough. You can see how the Royals really took off. In 19 of the 30 cases, the most popular option was the middle one, which agreed with the projection. Only the Royals had the most popular option be one of the two extreme ones. There wasn’t too much diversity of thought on the Padres or Pirates, with the Padres getting 51% support for “good” and with the Pirates getting 50% support for “low (2-4).” On the other extreme, votes were pretty well spread out for the A’s, as well as for the Rays and the Yankees. The A’s had the lowest “maximum,” at 32%. But despite that, the community still doesn’t think the A’s are very good.
Okay, that’s all! Thanks for your help. I really do appreciate it.
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.
It is only 6 games but the community projects the league to be 12 games above .500 against itself. My math seems to indicate that to be impossible.
Really if the community had agreed with the projections on the Royals it would have been 2430-2430 so it seems that for the polling removed some inherent bias of people just seeing there favorite team and automatically voting higher on those.
It looks like it’s due to rounding. For example the data shows people think the A’s and Mariners are definitely worse than their projections but the “voter’s projection” is still the same. I’m actually impressed it’s that close.
Jeff mentioned there was a 0.2 average win increase per team. 30 times 0.2 = 6 games.
Fangraphs projects the AL to beat the NL in interleague by 18 games. The community thinks it will be by 30 games. The average the last 2 years was 30 games.
I was adding up the extra wins before I even got to your comment.
Jeff,
This was an awesome study, thank you for all this work. I have a request, if possible – can you provide the number of total votes for each team?
KC 2685
TOR 2130
HOU 2024
BOS 1957
LAA 1923
SEA 1869
CLE 1854
OAK 1839
NYY 1823
CHC 1820
BAL 1748
DET 1730
TEX 1687
TB 1660
CHW 1635
MIN 1618
STL 1528
LAD 1469
NYM 1422
WAS 1394
SF 1389
ARI 1364
ATL 1349
PIT 1265
MIL 1250
MIA 1214
PHI 1159
CIN 1140
SD 1104
COL 1032
(The NL post was run after the AL post, and was less popular in aggregate.)
One consistent thing we see on all these polls; Not many readers here care about the Rockies
That’s unfair, as the community didn’t vote for the Royals being special given that the crowdsourced projection has them only one game above .500. We are expecting the Royals to be mediocre in 2016 rather than special, we simply don’t buy the massive collapse the projection systems envision.
To clarify, I get that “special” is being used in the context of an ability to achieve more than the numbers expect you to produce, but I believe that the disconnect in this particular case is more about finding the projection system’s numbers to be unreasonably low rather than believing in “Royals magic!”
I mean, I’m sure I could’ve used a better word than “special,” but given that there’s no reason to think a projection system is actively biased, people here still rejected the Royals projection more than any other team’s, by quite a bit. That’s what I was getting at. Not to mention that 71% of voters said the projection is low by more than four games, where no other team cleared 27%. I had to try to estimate how low people think the projection is based on other team voting distributions. “Low by more than four games” has no upper bound, so it’s entirely possible I’ve under-estimated the community belief here.
I hate the use of “bias” here. I don’t think the projection is biased, I think it is wrong. I think there are elements of these projections that need improvement. Mostly because I think the WAR projections from ZiPS and Steamer for relievers are generally not real meaningful, or accurate to reality (I also think reliever WAR has much room for improvement in general) So a team like the Royals with a reliever on a performance extreme like Wade Davis, and a team whose run prevention isn’t based on starting pitching strength, which the projection systems seem to do a decent job with, but rather on defense and a strong, deep bullpen, is going to be underrated. It’s not “biased”, it’s just over-regressing good defense and doing a poor job of accurately rating the value of dominant relievers and bullpens. There are also a couple individual projections that happen to seem low for reason that aren’t underprojecting defensive value, Cain in particular.
Keep in mind, again, that you would need to then adjust ALL teams, not just the Royals, if the current projection system is somehow miscalculating the value of a dominant reliever/closer/bullpen (or overvaluing teams with a mess at the back-end). That would certainly impact (positively) teams like the Yankees and Pirates and would negatively impact teams who have very low bullpen expectations like the Phillies and Reds.
I would agree. I can’t speak for anyone but myself as to the reasons why they might think a projection was low, but the Yankees and Pirates are two others that came out as expected to perform above projections. The Pirates in particular, I’d say they’ve outperformed projections for very similar reasons to the Royals, run suppression due to defense/positioning and strong, deep back-end of the bullpen. But it’s not ALL the bullpen with the Royals. It’s bullpen + defense, and that’s where the Yankees I don’t think are under-projected as much. I don’t think that theory actually applies to the other end of the spectrum, Phillies and Reds … it’s not that I would think replacement level for relievers is incorrect, it’s that teams with multiple, above-average back-end relievers can leverage those players to a greater extent than WAR assumes, as well as projections regressing someone like Davis to perform like a mere mortal when he’s not been anything near mortal for the past 2 years.
There may be some RoyalsMagic™ with their contact-heavy offense as well, but even if you don’t believe in the offensive magic, I think the bullpen and defense are just legit things that Steamer and ZiPS are under-projecting. I do have to say, the Royals bullpen looks a lot less deep this year, minus Holland and Madson … if some things go wrong, like Davis gets hurt or doesn’t perform anything like he has, and some of the others don’t perform well, that maybe they do end up sub-.500. But you can say that about just about any team, and the 77 wins seems more like a worst case scenario.
I’d honestly say it’s underestimated. I’d have picked them to beat their projection by six or more.
Yeah, even if you think in your head “the Royals are about a .500 team” that still requires you to pick that their projection is 4 games low.
Fangraph projections are for fantasy leagues, MLB is a different game played by men on dirt. They don’t really have much in common beyond names and box scores.
Yeah, when someone asks me who I have in my fantasy league, I’m always like, “Boston”
“A Different Game, Played By Men On Dirt” — coming to a stadium near you, summer 2016
We’ve finally found the overlap at the center of the Venn diagram between FanGraphs Trolls and Domestic Truck Ads.
Literally. LITERALLY the case for the Orioles of a couple of years back but with better post-season luck and worse competition in their division.
The Orioles won 85 games in 2013 and 86 games in 2014, after people predicted their demise after their “lucky” season in 2012. This is the wrong example to choose.
O’s won 96 in 2014.
“Since the Royals keep beating their projections, there’s definitely an increasing belief they just do something the numbers struggle to detect. ”
There are a lot of people that think fWAR under estimates wins for high end relievers and guys that are “FIP beaters”. The Royals just happen to have high end relievers and Chris Young. I’m not sure I buy that the projections average win total is off by 6 games for them (projections are likely +/- 10 wins anyway so 6 wins isn’t really a big deal), but expect a 2-3 game difference.
With this in mind I’m actually a bit surprised by the Orioles results — I love their bullpen, but the crowd basically agrees with the 78-84 projection. I was expecting maybe 2 or 3 extra wins.
The problem is, they may be getting to that bullpen already down 12-7, or 9-5, etc…
The rotation is the biggest concern. Same with the Royals. A better rotation and both would be ranked much higher
The Orioles have essentially the same starting rotation they’ve had the past 3 years. When those starters under perform (a la 2015) they’re a .500 club. Looking ahead, it’s fair to assume they will regress to their mean and perform in 2016 more like they did in 2013 and 2014.
So, here’s my promise: if the Orioles finish among the worst three teams in the American League, I’ll not only eat my hat, I swear I’ll never criticize Fangraphs’ projections again.
Is there a table somewhere that shows the projected wins, community projection and actual wins for each team in 2015?
the jays were a 500 team before the trade acquisitions, despite scoring at a rate that made them the best run producers since basically the steroid era ended. this year will be really interesting to see whether you actually need pitching to win a division – i like that the jays and dodgers are both doubling down on: maybe we don’t!
For the Jays, it wasn’t just the runs scored, but the +94 run differential at the deadline. The offense was scoring at a rate that more than made up for their mediocre pitching.
except they had the best run differential all year and only saw that reflected in the record once the trades happened. might be coincidence and regression, but also might be a structural problem with the team’s construction.
too bad they didn’t pay for the obvious fixes… but maybe it will end up being a moot concern on my part.
Yeah, I like that most of good 2015 teams really stayed the course on whatever internal strategy they think got them there. Mets ignoring defense, LAD on extreme depth, TOR on all bats/no pitching, Royals with whatever they do, Pirates with reclamation projects, Cards with devil magic hope some AAAA type becomes an all star.
It’s not that people HATE your projections. Its that your projections are so bad they illustrate the futility of this entire nerd sabermetric enterprise.
Dear TWTW there are other web sites where content may be more suitable to your taste. In the meantime, there are many of us that enjoy FanGraphs. I come here almost daily -well, in the season, at least twice daily 🙂
As someone who also enjoys FanGraphs and visits daily, I absolutely love TWTW. Yes, he is a troll, but he has become a part of the site, like an predictable antagonist in a movie. I’ll often see a post and immediately think ‘oh man, what kind of piping hot take is TWTW gonna com up with this time.’ Plus, he provides incredible content for StFtVaB, who is without a doubt my favorite poster here.
Personally, I think it would be wildly entertaining to give him a weekly chat spot.
He’s like the Dirk Dastardly to our Wacky Races!
I was thinking about who would be a good antagonist to compare him to, and now I’m very happy I didn’t post any that crossed my mind because Dirk Dastardly is so much better.
Mr. Big Chief, I’ve had half a mind to write some content for Fangraphs, but I fear retribution, and that my posts would get deleted by the stats police.
Feel free to speak your mind Mr. Trump. The response will be downright yuuuuuuuge.
Don’t forget to leave your projections here, for comparison.
TWTW or “compete level” in hockey, is basically a concept that gets laughed at by stats oriented people…but i feel like there is a reason that anthropology is still a discipline and why lots of companies pay for ethnographic research to fill in the gaps created by statistical analyses.
The “compete level” argument against advanced stats in hockey is hilarious. Advanced stats measure puck possession, and yet you constantly hear people complaining about things like “The doesn’t measure how hard people work or how good they are at battling along the boards etc.!”
Hint: If you “work hard” and “battle along the boards”, you’ll get the puck more and that will be reflected in the possession stats. If you “work hard” and “battle along the boards” and don’t get the puck more… then does anyone really care how hard you tried?
it’s not an “argument against” – i’m saying that in most cases subjective data from experts has value, and can clarify things. at the leading edge, of course you’re still going to use the best tools you have, but building better ones often means using other tools.
also – i’m obviously joking. we’re in response to a comment from “the will to win” – a friggin hawk harelson coinage.
Thats what we said about weather forecasts back in the 50’s and 60’s. They have improved with time though.
First, the biggest variable between projections and actual records is injury. The Royals are fairly young and athletic, and don’t depend on high end pitching. So, the chance of 1 or 2 injuries derailing the Royals’ season is low.
Next, there may be some cumulative effect of having great defenders at virtually every position.
Similarly, there may be a corresponding effect of having a lineup full of guys who don’t strike out a lot.
We can’t measure this stuff, but it may be real nonetheless
The Royals aren’t a young team any more. It looks like from simple googling the Royals had the 5th oldest team last year.
The age they’ll play majority of season at:
Perez – 26
Hosmer – 26
Infante – 34
Escobar – 29
Moose – 27
Gordon – 32
Cain – 30
Dyson – 31
Volquez – 32
Ventura – 25
Medlen – 30
Kennedy – 31
Young – 37
Davis – 30
Herrera – 26
Hochevar – 32
Duffy – 27
Soria – 32
Late to the party but in case someone sees this, here’s a full sortable list on ESPN:
http://espn.go.com/mlb/stats/rosters/_/sort/average_age/order/true
Giving in and following the crowd?
Let’s turn this around and try to have some perspective. What if there’s a reason for the crowd? I could just as easily say you are digging your heels in despite a mountain of evidence that something is going on here. That’s just as lazy as someone who just wants to follow the crowd.
I didn’t express a position. I tried to explain why the results are what they are and I genuinely do believe that’s a contributing factor. It doesn’t explain *everything* — it’s partial, but I think it’s real. I would also say the mountain of evidence isn’t quite as tall as you claim. Yeah, three years feels like a long time, but three years is also just n = 3, and historical analysis isn’t favorable to teams like this. I’m not trying to be contrarian. It’s just not a settled matter, which is why I ran this project in the first place.
You can claim neutrality but has anyone attempted a deep dive to explain the variance? All I see is the same exact projections we’ve gotten in the past. I guess I just don’t like the claim that people who like the Royals are taking the easy way out when I’m not sure how that’s any different than should-shrugging and handing out the same failed projections. And that’s not even saying one side is right, it’s just that they can both be seen as the easy way out depending on your perspective.
So you’re completely comfortable with the same team hugely outperforming its projections three years in a row? At what point do you say “the problem might be us”?
Probably around year 5 or so.
4% claim the Royal’s projection is high by more than 4 wins.
I deduce that roughly 4% of respondents are one of the following (1) trolls, (2) didn’t understand the question, or (3) have a fairly unique perspective on projections.
Assuming the projections are roughly correct then there would be as much chance of being high by 4+ wins as there would be being low by 4+ wins. That’s assuming no skew in the distribution of wins, and of course the community as a whole thinks the Royals are underprojected by 4+. Still, it’s not an indefensible position to take by any stretch.
If you think the projections are roughly correct, then there is a chance of +6 and a chance of -6, but your ESTIMATED ERROR should be +0. To say the projection is high by 5+ is to say that you actually have no trust in the projections, because you think putting the defending champs at 77 wins is giving them far too much credit for what should be expected of them.
There’s no reason the votes for over and under should look anything like the actual probabilities for over and under, each person is submitting a single vote, not a probability range.
I’d not be shocked by a 72- win Royals, but if you asked me to take the over/under on that total I’d be willing to put several thousand dollars on the over, and would probably be willing to give odds.
Is there an actual sane person who’ll take the Under at even odds? Because that’s what the more than 4 high voters are claiming they’d do.
It’s a well known statistics principle. It’s called regression past the mean.
(4) Someone who believes in projections but has a fundamental misunderstanding about regression and applied some shitty law of average thinking.
Like if a batter is a true .300 BABIP guy, but in the first half of the season, got unlucky and hit .250. Some peole may incredibly incorrectly think this means he will be likely to hit .350 the rest of the season to get him back to .300.
I thought they were low, by 2-4 Ws. Who’s playing RF? Do Cain and Gordon both stay healthy? Who’s playing 2b? Where is the depth if Hosmer, Moose, Perez get injured or anyone in the OF? No Ace, bullpen lost Holland and Madson and no impact rookies on the horizon…It could very easily fall apart.
Jeff,
I find it curious that the fan adjusted projections still show the Indians ahead of the Royals.
I suspect that if you did a poll isolating this competition, the majority would vote for the Royals to finish ahead of the Indians in the standings this year.
Agreed, I don’t think the Royals will be the best team in the AL again this year but I also think the Indians will be lucky to finish over .500. Their rotation still doesn’t have a long track record and their position players (especially the outfield) are terrible.
I also think the Dodgers will be mediocre and wouldn’t be surprised if they miss the playoffs. .
Thanks for this. This is great. I wonder if there are two distinct components to opinions on the Royals?
1) Metrics don’t capture something about the team (chemistry, defense, relief pitching, leverage, sequencing, grit, TWTW, whatever) and so individual players are projected to have less value than their “actual” worth.
2) The metrics do capture those things, and instead they think the players won’t actually be as good because the system is too dependent upon historical production for players that have raised their game (say, Lorenzo Cain) or are coming back from injury (say, Alex Gordon).
It should be obvious that the individual and total roster metric value is not all that. Anyone here, if he wished, could construct a team with superior metrics that finished last. KC is rolling with the other side of that coin in fitting a team together, but this requires more personal judgements than others are prone to risk their reputations upon. Better to fail with the crowd than to succeed all alone. Metrics are an aid and not a method.
I don’t think this should be so mysterious. As has been shown here, we already have reason to believe that CLUTCH is influenced by (1) having elite relievers to use in high-leverage situations, and (2) having a low team K% for hitters (presumably because high-leverage situations involve having men on base who can be moved along by outs as long as they aren’t Ks). It is also recognized that Chris Young is a repeatable BABIP-beater because of his huge number of infield flies, and in general the Royals are also way above average with regards to IFFB%, which isn’t taken into consideration in your model. In other words, you’ve demonstrated yourselves which characteristics the Royals have which result in them outperforming your model, but you haven’t yet responded by updating your model to make it more accurate.
All valid points about why the projections could be off.
I will say that it would be a pretty big undertaking to move those items into revising the team projections. For example, you would have to make an assumption about how each team would “stack” their relievers in different roles, and you’d have to get both the “stacking” and the performance projections right (otherwise this adjustment will hurt more than help).
Lots to consider.
fan picks look heavily influenced by recency bias.
I find it fascinating that the Twins are least covered team according to this: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/who-weve-covered-the-most-and-the-least/ and also received the fewest votes in the AL poll. Over one thousand fewer than KC.
It seems like no matter how much we focus on numbers; we still love a good narrative. I think the Royals beating projections provides fertile ground for that.
As always Jeff, thanks for doing this stuff. I really love how you’ve been engaging us in new ways with this kind of work!