(New NEW) 2014 Royals Repository

[SPchief]

Let's get back sole possession tonight.

[alnorth]

Yost has announced that Shields will start game 1, and Ventura will start game 2

[Pitt Gorilla]

Originally Posted by alnorth

Yost has announced that Shields will start game 1, and Ventura will start game 2

Well, yeah.

[Prison Bitch]

Royals ERA when Sal catches: 3.24
When he doesn't: 5.12

http://grantland.com/the-triangle/bu...-world-series/

[SPchief]

Originally Posted by Prison Bitch

Royals ERA when Sal catches: 3.24
When he doesn't: 5.12

http://grantland.com/the-triangle/bu...-world-series/

Sample size does play in affect there

[Mr. Laz]

Originally Posted by Prison Bitch

Royals ERA when Sal catches: 3.24
When he doesn't: 5.12

http://grantland.com/the-triangle/bu...-world-series/

Sal still needs to stop swinging at pitches in the dirt. If just to help to drive the pitch count up.

[Prison Bitch]

Originally Posted by SPchief

Sample size does play in affect there

Why? It could easily go the other way.

[alnorth]

Dave Cameron wrote a pretty interesting mea culpa on the Royals over at Fangraphs. If you didn't know, he was a huge vocal critic of the Wil Myers trade, and he argued that the Royals should sell at the trade deadline this season.

Where I Was Wrong About the Royals

He still believes that he was correct about how good the Royals were, and how likely they were to make the playoffs. Which, I think he probably was roughly right on what the team looks like after the Myers trade.

He basically says he was wrong about two things.

1) He may have over-estimated the value of possibly having a great team sometime years in the future vs having a decent team that might be able to make it into the playoffs several years now. After seeing the Angels, Nats, Dodgers, and Orioles get wiped out in short series, it seems like its more important to just make it in vs trying to build up a terrific team.

2) Even though making the playoffs may have seemed unlikely and winning the pennant seemed very unlikely, he may have underestimated the upside of being lucky. He used a poker analogy, if you have an outside straight draw after the turn, you will probably lose if you call, but if the pot is huge and the cost to call is small, then its probably correct to call because if you make your hand, you win big. By going for it and making it, whether it was spectacular luck or whatever, the Royals are probably creating new life-long fans from kids who otherwise would have only cared about the Chiefs.

[alnorth]

oh, and I've pretty much felt that way all year. During our lowest point in July when we were strenuously debating whether to sell or not, I've always said they had to stay in it because they were close enough to plausibly make it, and even though I felt they only had about a 15% or so chance of making it into the playoffs, the upside of making it in was so huge in my mind that it was worth it to forgo whatever we may have gotten from trading Shields.

[WhawhaWhat]

Originally Posted by alnorth

Dave Cameron wrote a pretty interesting mea culpa on the Royals over at Fangraphs. If you didn't know, he was a huge vocal critic of the Wil Myers trade, and he argued that the Royals should sell at the trade deadline this season.

Where I Was Wrong About the Royals

He still believes that he was correct about how good the Royals were, and how likely they were to make the playoffs. Which, I think he probably was roughly right on what the team looks like after the Myers trade.

He basically says he was wrong about two things.

1) He may have over-estimated the value of possibly having a great team sometime years in the future vs having a decent team that might be able to make it into the playoffs several years now. After seeing the Angels, Nats, Dodgers, and Orioles get wiped out in short series, it seems like its more important to just make it in vs trying to build up a terrific team.

2) Even though making the playoffs may have seemed unlikely and winning the pennant seemed very unlikely, he may have underestimated the upside of being lucky. He used a poker analogy, if you have an outside straight draw after the turn, you will probably lose if you call, but if the pot is huge and the cost to call is small, then its probably correct to call because if you make your hand, you win big. By going for it and making it, whether it was spectacular luck or whatever, the Royals are probably creating new life-long fans from kids who otherwise would have only cared about the Chiefs.

or maybe he's just not as smart as he thinks he is. Sweeping the top 2 seeds has a little more than luck involved.

[Pitt Gorilla]

Originally Posted by alnorth

Dave Cameron wrote a pretty interesting mea culpa on the Royals over at Fangraphs. If you didn't know, he was a huge vocal critic of the Wil Myers trade, and he argued that the Royals should sell at the trade deadline this season.

Where I Was Wrong About the Royals

He still believes that he was correct about how good the Royals were, and how likely they were to make the playoffs. Which, I think he probably was roughly right on what the team looks like after the Myers trade.

He basically says he was wrong about two things.

1) He may have over-estimated the value of possibly having a great team sometime years in the future vs having a decent team that might be able to make it into the playoffs several years now. After seeing the Angels, Nats, Dodgers, and Orioles get wiped out in short series, it seems like its more important to just make it in vs trying to build up a terrific team.

2) Even though making the playoffs may have seemed unlikely and winning the pennant seemed very unlikely, he may have underestimated the upside of being lucky. He used a poker analogy, if you have an outside straight draw after the turn, you will probably lose if you call, but if the pot is huge and the cost to call is small, then its probably correct to call because if you make your hand, you win big. By going for it and making it, whether it was spectacular luck or whatever, the Royals are probably creating new life-long fans from kids who otherwise would have only cared about the Chiefs.

#1 isn't a new thing, though, is it? Get in and go from there.

[Prison Bitch]

I emailed Dave when the Royals clinched the playoff spot and asked him if he would issue a mea culpa about the Royals. He didn't respond, but many others on that board (incl non-Royals fans, many from other small markets) pestered him about it too and he did address it.


But that link you just cited is a disgrace. And I like Cameron a lot. Essentially he could've just saved us all a lot of time and just said "I wasn't wrong, they were just lucky". What a pathetic cop out.

[Bearcat]

The Royals put themselves in a position to take advantage of a few lucky breaks. Their decision isn’t any smarter because it paid off, but perhaps the size of the payoff should cause us to reconsider the relative costs and benefits of a decent-but-not-great team going for it. While I think we’ve done a pretty decent job on the cost of side of things, perhaps we’ve underestimated the upside.

Good article (and uh, yeah the guy is pretty smart). When the best teams win ~60% of the time, it does seem like you should play to get in as opposed to trying to buy a championship... at least more so than other sports.

Unfortunately, the Chiefs have tried this strategy for years in a sport where the best teams win 85-95% of the time (and of course, you could argue they don't really give a shit about winning at all).

[Prison Bitch]

Dave is a huge Mariner's fan (founded a fan blog) and he's understandably upset his team, a doppelganger of us, is sitting at home while we run rampage through the playoffs. He's having trouble with it thinking "Why isn't that us?"

Also he's a stats hound and what KC is doing is overturning his (and my) whole line of thinking.

[alnorth]

Originally Posted by Bearcat

Good article (and uh, yeah the guy is pretty smart). When the best teams win ~60% of the time, it does seem like you should play to get in as opposed to trying to buy a championship... at least more so than other sports.

Unfortunately, the Chiefs have tried this strategy for years in a sport where the best teams win 85-95% of the time (and of course, you could argue they don't really give a shit about winning at all).

Yep, in the NFL and NBA though upsets can still happen, the better team generally can assert their dominance. You usually want the Chiefs to be either great or terrible.

Baseball is such a flukey random game in short series that there's just not that much added value in having a 98-win team vs barely making it in. Its still nice to win the division and avoid the knockout game, but aside from that, just get in.

[tk13]

That guy has an ego. In the end he still basically paints it as a mediocre team that got lucky.

I do absolutely think there is luck involved in all sports, even just to get to the playoffs. You have to stay healthy, you have to catch breaks at certain times. There are individual plays you could put to that put the Chiefs in/out of the playoffs. Example: Patrick Surtain drops an INT on the hands in against Dallas in 2005. Cowboys march down and score, Chiefs miss playoffs by one game, Steelers get in and win the Super Bowl. I bet the odds of Surtain catching that pass were at least 50/50.

But really that article is kind of an insult to Dayton Moore, basically saying I know more about baseball than you, and you got lucky. There's a much deeper conversation about how to build a baseball team to be had there, but he never gets there. It depends on what your definition of mediocre is. This years Royals team is obviously not the Big Red Machine or 27 Yankees, but there are things they do very well.

1) They play defense at a very high level, and most people would concede they are the best defensive team in baseball. I'm being conservative, but some would argue their place among the great defensive teams in recent history.

2) The back end of the bullpen is the best trio of finishers in the league. Even if you want to look at it in pure numbers, no other team in the history of baseball has had 3 guys post 60+ IP with an ERA under 1.50.

3) They run the bases as well as anyone in baseball. They have as much speed as anyone, and not only did they lead the league in steals by a decent margin, they also led the league in SB percentage. They did it efficiently. They also had a considerable amount of infield hits.

4) They are exceptional at making contact. They didn't just strike out less than 1000 times this year, they were the only team to strike out less than 1100 times too. There were over 100 strikeouts between them and the next closest team. They put between 100-500 more balls in play for opposing defenses to handle than any other team.

These are just four simple things they probably do better than any other team in baseball. Not just at a high level, but areas where they are the best. And that can lead to all kinds of discussions about how you can build a team, what is important, etc, etc. But it appears many of these statistics are intentional, and the result of a specific philosophy... whether you think that philosophy is stupid or not. Just throwing your hands up and saying "luck" is kind of a cop out.