As an audacious Royals fan, you are first and foremost an apologetic. And over the last thirty years, it's taken a more talented rhetorician to convince someone of the viability of a winning Royals ball club than the existence of a loving God in a hurting world. In fact, many Royals fans have perhaps abandoned their religious beliefs due to the pain they've endured for the past one and a half generations. Why God, have you forsaken Kansas City??
God has not forsaken Kansas City, Royals fans. We've just been roaming the desert. God has been gracious enough, in fact, to lift the veil a full decade before He did the Israelites. There has been manna given us throughout this period of wandering - Johnny Damon, Carlos Beltran, and Zack Greinke, but it's always been fleeting nourishment before we saw our champions depart. And besides, the pride a fan can muster off one player's accomplishments hardly compares with the prevailing joy that ushers in with the success of the team. That's why this season feels so different.
Successful teams are usually propelled by star power in some respect. Detroit has Miggy. Seattle has Felix. Pittsburgh has McCutchen. The Los Angeles teams claim Kershaw, Puig, Kemp, Trout, and Pujols to name a few. I'd be willing to say that every team with viable hopes of actually making the playoffs can point to at least one major league star on the roster. But not the Royals; they are the anomaly. Sure there is James Shields, who you could argue is a bonafide number one starter. But I'd contend he is not a star. He wasn't even the best pitcher on his old Tampa Bay team, which had Cy-Young winner David Price. There's Greg Holland, one of the best kept dominant closer secrets in Major League Baseball, but he's not a star either. For who as a reliever can be called a star in the aftermath of the careers of Mariano Rivera and Trevor Hoffman? We have Salvador Perez, a burgeoning young catcher with childlike charisma, adroit understanding of managing pitchers far beyond his years, a cannon for an arm, and a decent amount of pop at the plate, but he's not a star...yet. No, the 2014 Kansas City Royals are a team comprised of contributors. Despite this, they have managed to swim upstream to this point in the season and lead their division by one and a half games.
So how is this happening? We know full well the Royals don't win games by out-slugging their opposition. With only 488 runs scored this season, Kansas City ranks dead last in their division. Every other team has scored 500 or more. It's not a newsflash: the Kansas City Royals win games with phenomenal pitching. Their starting rotation has been reliably stingy all year, and their 7th, 8th, and 9th inning relievers are the envy of the league. If the Royals take a lead into the 7th, it's nearly a foregone conclusion that they will win. The magic arbitrary number is four, as in four runs. If the Royals can put four runs on the board, they tend to win. If they put seven on the board like they did several days ago against Oakland, you may as well go to the bookies. The Royals' phenomenal pitching is common knowledge. What I'd like to discuss is the lineup and how this seemingly poor offense has managed to provide enough runs for the team to be sitting at 13 games over .500 through mid-August.
As most could imagine, a lot has gone right for Kansas City this season, most of which has to do with pitching. But let me remind everyone that a lot has not exactly gone according to plan. A glaring hole in this Kansas City offense is a lack of power from those who were supposed to provide it. Billy Butler, who hit 29 dingers just two seasons ago, has just 7 to this point. Mike Moustakas and Eric Hosmer, who were supposed to be the young players who evolved into offensive anchors, have hit just 14 and 6 homeruns so far. So in a combined 360 games played - well over two full seasons, the supposed source of Kansas City's power has hit a cumulative 27 homeruns. What's worse, the ineptitude of these players as it concerns getting that damn little white ball over the wall doesn't even account for Billy Butler's liability on the basepaths, Hosmer's horrific plate discipline, and Moustakas' struggles to stay above the Mendoza line. Taking that into account, it's damn near miraculous that the Royals have won and won often.
But while the Royals' lineup may not collectively possess as much vim as Yoenis Cespedes has in his bat alone, they do have other more subtle benefits to their offensive game. First and foremost, the Royals generally speaking have speed. 108 stolen bases trails only the Los Angeles Dodgers, who have 111 (Dee Gordon claiming half of those...seriously). The Royals' 79% success rate is actually considerably better than the Dodgers and one of the best in the league. Unlike the Dodgers, the Royals enjoy many base thieves. Of their 108, Jarrod Dyson has 27, Alcides Escobar has 24, Lorenzo Cain 18, and Nori Aoki 13.
Besides the hard evidence of speed translating into stolen bases, there is much more that speed goes towards impacting the game of baseball that we can't exactly measure, prompting the umbrella phrase coined by Kansas City's own Jarrod Dyson, That's what speed do. Speed provides a mental edge in baseball. About half of Ned Yost's lineup is a viable threat to steal, which can't be very comforting to opposing pitchers. Speed provides flexibility. If Yost wants a runner in scoring position, he can be confident in simply taking it. Speed provides efficacy. The Royals run the base paths well. Alcides Escobar went from first to home on a single by Billy Butler with two outs in the seventh inning of Thursday's game against Oakland. Not too many players can do that. You see, speed is not a particularly valued commodity on teams like Oakland and Boston, which value the almighty homerun. If that's what you're waiting for, then by all means load up the bases with fatties and wait for the longball (Billy Butler to Oakland?). But for a team such as the Royals, which wins the low-scoring 1-run and 2-run games largely by manufacturing runs, speed is invaluable, just as pitching is, just as an impermeable bullpen is. Speed do a lot for Kansas City.
The Royals' hitters aren't particularly intimidating when isolating each of them by themselves. The highest batting average on the team is Lorenzo Cain at .299, which is not overwhelmingly impressive. But the Royals bat .263 as a team, which ranks 3rd overall in the majors. In fact, the only everyday player whose average is under even .257 is Moustakas, and he is a major outlier at .203. The Royals don't generally speaking get their big innings off of homeruns. They get them from streaming together hit after hit after hit. It's how they generated a five-run seventh off of Oakland two days ago, and it's how they generated their 5-run fourth off Nolasco and the Twins yesterday. Everyone in this lineup can hit. Hell, they scored all five runs before Nolasco was even able to record one out, and it's only because of Jarrod Dyson and Nori Aoki's inability to sacrifice Alcides Escobar at third that they didn't score 6 runs that inning. In fact, inability to convert all four of the Royals' sacrifice opportunities is the reason they only scored 6 and not 10 in the game. But the reason why the Royals did break open an enormous 5-run inning is solely because everyone can contribute - and they did. The Royals can hit, and they can run.
In the end, the Royals' style of play is rare in today's game. They pitch, play great defense, and rely on timely hitting and speed to generate just enough runs before handing the game over to superb bullpen arms that shut, no slam the door. You might call it throwback, old-school baseball. You might call it an antiquated and outdated philosophy. But it's working. And though it's the difficult way to win, as opposed to hitting three jacks every day - kind of like a football team choosing to go after the unstoppable defense rather than the star quarterback - like football, it's a formula that works. And perhaps like football, it's ultimately the better way to go because the Royals aren't relying on any one player to hoist the team on their back and lead them to glory. They lost Luke Hochevar, and Wade Davis stepped in (and proved better). They lost Hosmer, and Billy Butler stepped in and began to hit like Billy Butler (and the Royals have been better, much better). They lost Jeff Francoeur, and...well, anyone was pretty much better than him.
The point is that the Royals are a good team in the truest sense of what the word is supposed to signify. Sometimes the better team is not the one with the best players. Instead, it's the one with a whole bunch of role players who consistently do what's required of them. That is, after all, what brings out the best in a team. When they look around at each other after a victory, with no room for selfish pride because everyone contributed, they think we did this. I hope that they can exchange those glances and have those thoughts well on into October. I can dream.
Amendment: As an audacious Royals fan, you are first and foremost a dreamer. And for those who aren't dreaming with me right now, I feel sorry for you. Because this is fun. I rest my case.
