Last night I watched a replay of Game 5 of the 2015 World Series and was happy to see the Kansas City Royals beat the New York Mets again.
I was at that game, stuck in a Citi Field dining club out in left field which is where they put the extra media people not considered important enough to rate a seat in the regular press box. Despite my lousy vantage point, someone else paid for the trip so I was damn glad to be there.
We had TV monitors nearby, but the sound was turned down so I never got to hear what the TV guys – Joe Buck, Harold Reynolds and Tom Verducci – were saying about the game I was watching.
Four-and-a-half years later I finally did, and at one point I heard Harold Reynolds say he hoped the rest of baseball was paying attention to how the Royals were winning baseball games.
Here’s why Harold said that.
The influence of Moneyball
In 2003 the Michael Lewis book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game was published and it helped change the way people looked at the game.
Here’s the short version: the book focused on the Oakland Athletics and a bunch of smart guys who crunched the numbers and decided a lot of what baseball teams had been doing for decades was dumb and there was a better, more efficient way to play the game.
In their view, defense didn’t matter all that much and stealing bases, hit and runs and sacrifice bunts were stupid because they risked outs. What really mattered were walks and home runs because that’s the best way to score a lot of runs.
A lot of fans bought into the Moneyball philosophy and wanted to know why their teams were still playing baseball like a bunch of dinosaurs when the smart guys had shown a better way to play the game.
No team wanted to look behind the times, so they started hiring number guys and forming analytics departments to advise them how play the game more efficiently.
And it seems those numbers guys were all dispensing similar advice.
So a lot of teams began to play the same kind of baseball; work walks, swing for the fences, don’t worry about striking out and don’t take any chances running the bases.
It might be boring as hell because there were fewer balls in play and a game might take four hours – you could conceive and have a child in the time it took the Yankees and Red Sox to play nine innings – but what difference did it make if you won?
Good question and it brings us to the Oakland Athletics’ lack of success in the postseason.
If you watched the movie version of Moneyball they made a winning streak the emotional climax of the film because they couldn’t show you the A’s winning the World Series. Generally speaking, those Moneyball A’s ran into trouble in the playoffs and most baseball people think there’s a pretty good reason for that.
Let’s say your style of play – working walks and hitting home runs – will win you 90-to-100 games during the 162-game regular season. Awesome, but now you’re in the playoffs and you no longer need to win 90-to-100 games out of 162; you might need to win three out of five, four out of seven or – if you face elimination – this game, right now tonight.
But the mediocre pitching staffs most likely to give up walks and home runs – the stuff you thrive on – have been eliminated from postseason play. Now you might be facing an ace and walks and home runs might be hard to come by.
When you’re facing a pitcher who’s dealing, you need to be able to advance runners 90 feet with tactics like the stolen base, the sac bunt and the hit and run; all that stuff you thought was dumb and didn’t work on during the regular season.
Waiting for a three-run homer that never shows up is a good way to go home early.
The value of athleticism
Once the Moneyball philosophy kicked in, almost everybody was interested in players who walked and hit home runs.
But a front office executive once said that most people missed the true message of Moneyball; it wasn’t that walks and home runs were good, it was that undervalued players were good and the Royals thought athleticism was undervalued.
Kansas City couldn’t adopt the Moneyball philosophy because they played in a park the size of the Grand Canyon. It’s hard to hit home runs in Kauffman Stadium and if pitchers aren’t afraid you’re going to take them deep, they’re more likely to be aggressive and less likely to issue walks.
Moneyball dismissed the importance of defense; the Kansas City Royals were forced to value it. With an outfield big enough to land a B-52, they wanted three outfielders with centerfield-type range.
So while other teams were willing to play guys with all the range of a fence post – as long as those fence posts could hit home runs – the Royals valued athleticism. And with defensive athleticism, the Royals also got speed on the base paths and good hand-eye coordination, which made those players tough to strike out.
Because the Royals didn’t walk much or hit many home runs – didn’t play the game the way the smart guys had said it should be played – critics said their appearance in the 2014 World Series was a fluke.
And then the 2015 Royals showed it wasn’t.
The 2015 World Series
What a lot of Moneyball advocates failed to grasp is that scoring runs is not the point of the game; the point of the game is scoring more runs than your opponent. If you score nine runs it won’t matter if your opponent scores 10.
As the old-school baseball guys say, there are two sides to the ball. You can put runs on the board or keep runs off the board and either one helps you win ball games.
Everybody who was paying attention back then knows about their outstanding bullpen, but re-watching the Royals 2015 postseason games it’s amazing how many times they kept runs off the board with outstanding defensive plays.
It also became clear the Mets were paying a price for putting mediocre defenders on the field.
Ignoring the swing-for-the-fences philosophy, the Royals thought they could win the Series if they kept putting the ball in play and hit it on the ground. They believed the Mets infield couldn’t handle the pressure and the Royals turned out to be right.
In the ninth inning of the deciding Game 5 the Royals scored two runs to tie the game on a walk, a stolen base, a double, two groundouts and some aggressive base running by Eric Hosmer.
The Mets couldn’t handle the pressure and the Royals won Game 5 in extra innings.
Why more teams haven’t copied the Royals blueprint
Watching the 2015 Royals reminds you how fun and exciting baseball can be when everyone doesn’t stand around waiting for somebody to hit a homerun. But four-and-a-half years later, teams haven’t exactly lined up to emulate the Royals style of play.
(The Washington Nationals just won a World Series playing a more traditional style of ball and it would have been interesting to see if their success got more teams to try that approach, but I guess we’ll have to wait until the Black Plague is over to find out.)
So why haven’t more teams copied the Royals blueprint?
Now we’re getting into theories and lucky for you I’ve got plenty to spare.
A first-round draft pick will get every opportunity to succeed because so many people in an organization have something to lose if he doesn’t. So if a team has staked its future on a Moneyball style of play, it’s hard to admit maybe it’s not working for them and they should try something else.
Which seems to contradict the main theory behind the Moneyball movement.
The whole thing started because some smart guys questioned what everybody else was doing; just because everybody was doing the same thing and had done it that way for decades didn’t make it right and it was time to think outside the box.
But now those out-of-the-box thinkers seem to be trapped in a new box of their own making.
These days it seems like pretty much every team is trying to walk and hit home runs because that’s the way almost everybody else is now playing the game. The old status quo has been replaced by a new one.
Despite the 2015 Royals success, home runs and strikeouts have continued to go up, stolen bases and sacrifice bunts have continued to go down and games take longer to play than they ever before.
Almost five years after the Royals won the World Series and Harold Reynolds hoped the rest of baseball was paying attention, the rest of baseball – with a few exceptions – doesn’t seemed to have learned a lesson.
And now I get to watch a replay of another event I attended in person; the Royals World Series Victory Parade.
The 2015 Royals and the lesson baseball hasn’t learned
I watched it last night, too and was struck by how overmatched the Mets were when it came to defense--how the Royals, once they got on base in that final game, really controlled it. It was so much fun to watch!
For the record, I grew up as a Mets fan--I would say a nominal sort of fan--it was a family thing. If the Royals hadn't made me fall in love with them AND baseball in 2014, I might have been in that sad crowd of Mets fans...I truly feel sorry for those fans.
Great analysis of the Royals. You do a great job of bringing the backstory of baseball to fans like me. Thanks!