GO ROYALS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[grovester]

I'm gonna go with the bullpen. I'm not a stats geek, so maybe it's represented, but the whole shortening of the game to 6 or 7 innings is huge and I don't remember another team doing it in the past.

[mean]

They are shortening the other team's game to 6 or 7 innings, but then that's when the Royals tend to do the most offensive damage. Interesting. Could be a factor, for sure. Also, the Royals tend to put hot fastballs into play at a relatively high rate, and those are the innings when fresh arms are coming in. This may offer some at least partial explanation for the Royals seemingly uncanny ability to score in late innings, and scoring so many runs so late in turn leads to them being able to repeatedly come back in situations where their odds of winning seem negligible.

Makes me wonder if a winning strategy against the Royals might be don't throw them strikes and don't ever go to your bullpen. (That's mostly a joke, but it would be pretty funny to see.)

[JBmidtown]

Most stats were predicting regression to the mean throughout the season and didn't account for adjustments at the plate that helped improve the offensive output from the lineup. A number of acquisitions, such as Kendrys Morales and Chris Young, outperformed their previous seasons and Volquez, Medlen and Young performed better than expected for recently recovering from injuries/surgeries. We also had a lot of BABIP luck this year, above league average, which just goes to show how nice it is to exploit opposing defenses (we're kind of spoiled, most teams don't have as deep of defensive players as we do). You also have to realize that it's hard to predict player improvement, you can only really predict average expectations. Plus there's the coastal bias. All stats are noise to be interpreted in any number of ways, especially if you're pandering to larger markets...

And yeah, sure, there's all the cute narratives of clubhouse chemistry and such which I'm sure plays a role (though probably not a pivotal role). It's a good team with above average players stacked perfectly and who get along and communicate well. Moore has done a fantastic job so far. I imagine even if we're not playoff contenders in the next few seasons, he's done a great job the structure for a dynasty to last many more years. That, of course, bodes well for our city as a whole.

[pash]

.

[Highlander]

mean, I think you have come close to what I feel is the weakness in using just math. Math is fine if all you want to do is look at numbers but there is an "attitude" that one can not measure, at least not that I am aware of. Leadership. Never say quit. Approach to game. Team chemistry. Sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
And sometimes it is how the players play the game. For those Royals team of the 70's and 80's many said at the time how Brett and McRae played the game was a factor. Look at Lorenzo Cain's game winning run home. How many players would slow down rounding second thinking they would be stopping at 3rd?

Well - it's still numbers and attention to detail (stats) that matter. Cain was signaled not to slow down acc/to the article in the Star today. The 3rd base coach had noticed Bautista's tendency to throw the ball to 2cd in that situation earlier in the series and he made sure Cain knew not to slow down coming around second to keep his options open when he got to third. The throw by Bautista was all about the numbers, he created a virtual right triangle to the plate when he could have thrown the ball down the hypotenuse of the that angle by hitting the proper cutoff man.

[Highlander]

I think there are several things going on, but the biggest part of it is simply that the Royals have a lot of young (read: cheap) talent, thanks mostly to an accumulation of high draft picks from all the years they were so bad. This is what is meant to happen when you have so many more opportunities to draft talent ahead of your competitors; it took so long to happen only because the team was formerly so broke, due to lack of real ownership and then cheap ownership, that the team wasn't able to draft or sign the best talent available due to budget constraints.

On the pitching side of things, the Royals have been able to exploit some advantages that have been well known for a long time, but that for whatever reason other teams haven't been willing to go after. First, they've shifted innings away from starters towards relievers, who are both cheaper and who frankly have an easier job, since they can be effective by simplifying their approach, paring down their arsenal of pitches, and throwing harder. This reliever-starter arbitrage has been obvious for a long time—scroll back in this thread two or three years, for example, and you'll see me musing about moving to a large rotation of interchangeable pitchers, each of whom would be expected to throw maybe three innings at a go, once every few days—and I think the Royals were sort of forced by circumstances into taking advantage of it. Their starters had been so consistently bad that their relievers were throwing a disproportionate number of innings anyway, so they had an extra incentive to stockpile cheap, effective relievers. Then they sorted of lucked into the other part of the arbitrage, that it's easier to be effective as a reliever, with guys like Hochever and Davis, who were historically bad as starters, and so were obvious candidates for the bullpen (at least for an organization as desperate and cheap as the Royals—other teams might just have cut them). And then those guys made spectacular transformations.

Clearly the organization deserves a lot of credit for that. They've managed to put together a coaching staff that has been very effective at getting pitchers to simplify, to do only the things they're best at, and then putting them in a position in which they can focus on throwing hard for an inning with that simplified approach. And the scouts have done a good job finding guys who do a couple of things well, and some thing badly—guys who prove to be undervalued once you get them to stop doing the things they're bad at. The Royals have also been very successful finding guys like Young and Madson, guys who were undervalued by other teams due to age and injury; part of that is probably luck, but I think their approach to pitching has helped a lot too—they're not looking at Chris Young as a starter who needs to throw seven innings in an appearance and 200 innings in a season, so they have a role for him where other clubs don't.

On the hitting side of things, it's harder to say how they've found a way to be successful that's so different from what other clubs are doing. Part of it, as I already mentioned, is just that they have a lot of young, cheap talent that finally developed to the level expected of them. The one thing that I think is somewhat overlooked that helps explain the high batting average, high BABIP, hits-in-bunches, etc., is that they don't hit fly balls. Alex Rios is pretty much the only guy on the team who makes a lot of outs on lazy fly balls; even Morales, who does use an uppercut swing in early counts, takes more level swings and consequently hits a lot more line drives than you might imagine. As JBmidtown mentioned, this is clearly by design, a product of the organization's approach to hitting, which obviously has been heavily influenced by George Brett. Credit them, if you want, for realizing that a high BABIP does not (alway) measure luck: it reflects an approach to hitting that can be taught to and demanded of players.

And then there's the fielding, which is pretty much down to talent and athleticism. The Royals have a lot of it, and again that's mainly due to all the young, cheap talent they managed to stockpile. But the organization also deserves a lot of credit for consistently going after that sort of player. They don't draft or sign guys who can mash the ball but not play their position. I don't know whether they realized that those sorts of players were overvalued relative to leaner athletes who are never going to hit 40 homers, or whether they just sort of ended up demonstrating that because they already had an incentive to select for lighter-hitting athletes due to their their stadium and hitting philosophy. But it worked.

Now it's time to win a World Series.

We have a ballpark that absolutely favors the type of players you describe. The deep fences and big outfield favors teams with athletic outfielders that can run balls down and players that make contact rather than hit long fly balls - outs in KC, homers elsewhere.

Yost also limits the exposure of his relievers to arm fatigue. Something I was pretty skeptical at first about but it seems to work.

[aknowledgeableperson]

I have no problem accepting that there are factors which can't be measured which can have an effect on the outcome of a game, or even a series, or perhaps even a season; but that the entire baseball world got it so horribly wrong twice in a row is suggestive more to me that there are one or several statistical weighting errors going on. I buy that team chemistry, attitude, and approach can get you somewhere, but I don't think I'm ready to buy that it will get you back-to-back World Series runs when nobody in the entire professional baseball prognostication industry thinks it is going to happen either time. I think it's far more likely that the baseball prognosticators are doing something wrong, believing their own dogmas about the value of taking a walk vs. the value of not taking a walk, maybe, or failing to account for the increased probability of setting up good sequences when you constantly put the ball in play.

Either way, BACK TO BACK WORLD SERIES!!!!!

Can't be too upset about that. Just... please win this one. I NEED A PARADE MAN

here are two articles in the Star about how the Royals approach may be changing the game. And I would imagine if the team is changing the way the game is played then how the various factors are weighed may have to change.
http://www.kansascity.com/sports/spt-co ... 39177.html
http://www.kansascity.com/sports/spt-co ... 95706.html

Have come across some other articles about how some factors might be overvalued and others undervalue in how players are valued.

[mgsports]

No Omar Infante and Johnny Gomes instead of Mondesi and Colon.

[AllThingsKC]

Well, that was easy.

[brewcrew1000]

So the clear winner of the Shields trade was Wade Davis. Didn't Moore say without him the trade wouldn't have went down?

[aknowledgeableperson]

I have no problem accepting that there are factors which can't be measured which can have an effect on the outcome of a game, or even a series, or perhaps even a season; but that the entire baseball world got it so horribly wrong twice in a row is suggestive more to me that there are one or several statistical weighting errors going on. I buy that team chemistry, attitude, and approach can get you somewhere, but I don't think I'm ready to buy that it will get you back-to-back World Series runs when nobody in the entire professional baseball prognostication industry thinks it is going to happen either time. I think it's far more likely that the baseball prognosticators are doing something wrong, believing their own dogmas about the value of taking a walk vs. the value of not taking a walk, maybe, or failing to account for the increased probability of setting up good sequences when you constantly put the ball in play.

Either way, BACK TO BACK WORLD SERIES!!!!!

Can't be too upset about that. Just... please win this one. I NEED A PARADE MAN

YOU GOT YOUR PARADE, MAN.

I know the numbers guys have a hard time accepting or explaining or ignoring something that really cannot be measured but attitude, team spirit, and confidence, and to add experience, goes a long way in getting things done. In looking at comments made after this World Series win it appears that Moore, the scouts, and others don't look at just the numbers of what a player has done in the past. But also looks at the person behind the numbers to see if the player is a good fit for the team. Yes, this team has made it to the World Series two years in a row but in many respects this 2015 team is quite different than the 2014 team. I think at one time someone said there were only 12 players from the 2014 WS roster that were on the 2015 WS roster. Quite a turnover.

[brewcrew1000]

Buster Olney made a good point this morning on 810, The Royals seem like a bunch of guys that would all take a bus home after a game and be welcomed to everyones house for christmas. The Dodgers look like a group of guys where everyone would leave in 25 separate cabs after the game

[Highlander]

Buster Olney made a good point this morning on 810, The Royals seem like a bunch of guys that would all take a bus home after a game and be welcomed to everyones house for christmas. The Dodgers look like a group of guys where everyone would leave in 25 separate cabs after the game

I am hoping the lack of egos and the obvious team spirit translates into keeping some of free agents around. That the desire to defend the title and repeat will overcome the financial gain they might attain going elsewhere.

[earthling]

If they can keep most everyone, it would also probably because of Yost. A few may leave for money or if they don't connect well with Yost. Would be surprising if a few don't leave, impressive if none do.

[droopy]

If they can keep most everyone, it would also probably because of Yost. A few may leave for money or if they don't connect well with Yost. Would be surprising if a few don't leave, impressive if none do.

It would be great if we improved and upgraded again, like last year to this year, but I think it would be tough to do. Who's at risk? I know Cueto obviously, pretty sure Zobrist and Gordon too, not sure on any other free agents.

[mean]

I can't make myself care about free agents or roster issues until after the CHAMPIONSHIP PARADE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and so on

[Highlander]

Anybody know where the parade will be? LOL - I hope they do not try to emulate the American Royal's latest move!

[droopy]

Anybody know where the parade will be? LOL - I hope they do not try to emulate the American Royal's latest move!

Grand, around Sprint then down to Union Station. https://www.visitkc.com/royalcelebration

I can't make myself care about free agents or roster issues until after the CHAMPIONSHIP PARADE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and so on

You're absolutely right. I apologize.

[brewcrew1000]

The Pitch is telling us its time to retire "Yosted" I think Yost just passed the torch to Collins, the Mets got "Collined" or "Coloned" about 10 times in that series

[shinatoo]

#yosted is morphing in its meaning. Not necessarily a negative anymore. Never give it up!

For an entertainment rag, the Pitch has really gotten to be the no fun zone.