Jerry from Kansas City writes:
Dave,
Read your June 17 article about the Royals. You weren't very positive about the Royals holding on to first place. I would have agreed with your comments at the time. But the Royals have had a pretty decent record since the All-Star break and Detroit has faltered. Have you changed your opinion? Why do the Royals keep winning? Is it possible that at the end of the day it's about intangibles - heart, chemistry, luck, good karma - and not statistics and logic? If so, how do you measure these qualities?
I started writing a reply to Jerry’s e-mail, but it spiraled into a wider conversation about the Tigers, Royals, and the general subject of intangibilities, so I thought I’d make it an article instead.
Jerry is correct: I wasn’t too optimistic about the Royals chances of staying in first place in the American League Central. My pessimism stemmed from two observations: 1) that their pitchers were a little lucky on earned runs, and 2) they kept running out batting orders that would make Tom Tango wince.
These two things haven’t changed. Here’s the lineup they put up Sunday, against the dreaded Minnesota Twins:
|
Lineup
|
Player
|
OBP
|
OPS+
|
|
1
|
Aoki
|
.338
|
89
|
|
2
|
Infante
|
.296
|
80
|
|
3
|
S. Perez
|
.304
|
96
|
|
4
|
Butler
|
.325
|
95
|
|
5
|
Gordon
|
.356
|
117
|
|
6
|
Cain
|
.340
|
107
|
|
7
|
Ibanez
|
.252
|
55
|
|
8
|
Moustakas
|
.264
|
77
|
|
9
|
Escobar
|
.313
|
88
|
Lorenzo Cain has finally moved up a bit in the order, though the Royals continue to slot Alcides Escobar in the #9 spot, presumably because the Royals make their lineup decisions based on how much they’re paying their hitters, instead of how well their hitters are hitting.
It is unlikely that the Royals crummy lineup is hurting their team’s chances significantly. Putting out a not-so-statistically-optimal lineup over the course of a season might cost the Royals two or three games in 2014. While three wins is a significant amount for a team in a division with the Detroit Tigers, Ned Yost has to live with these guys and I don’t. It’s certainly possible that he has good reasons for putting up this lineup.
Which gets us to Jerry’s questions. Let’s break them down:
1.Have you changed your opinion (on the Royals’ chances of holding onto first place)?
No, I haven’t. I don’t think that the Royals are a better team than the Detroit Tigers, and I would be very surprised if they held onto first place. They have, at this moment, a one-and-a-half game lead over the Tigers, with forty games left to play. The Tigers added David Price, one of the best pitchers in American League not already on the Tigers, to their rotation. The Royals added Josh Willingham. Then they added Raul Ibanez. I think the Tigers remain the better baseball team, by a comfortable margin.
2.Why do the Royals keep winning?
I’ll come back to this one.
3.Is it possible that at the end of the day it's about intangibles - heart, chemistry, luck, good karma - and not statistics and logic?
The problem with this question is that it frames the two factors as if they existed in isolation; as if a team could win either by logic and statistics, or win by intangibles and teamwork. This isn’t true: the most intangibles-reliant team in baseball would still use statistics to make decisions, just as the most math-minded team in baseball would still be sensitive to the ‘karmic’ state of their players.
A better way to phrase this question is whether or not I think that intangibles like ‘heart’ and ‘chemistry’ are a component to how well a team plays, and whether I think they are a significant component, one that could explain the surprising success of the 2014 Royals.
It happens that I do think that intangible elements like team chemistry can influence a team’s performance, though I have no idea whether or not that influence is significant or negligible. I tend to think it’s negligible....I don’t know that a good clubhouse nets a team more than a few extra wins a season.
4. If so, how do you measure these qualities?
This is the crux of the problem: there is no way to measure such qualities. There’s no way to tell whether or not the Kansas City Royals have better chemistry in their clubhouse than the Houston Astros. Even if you were to imbed yourself with the Royals for a full season, hanging out in the clubhouse before games and taking notes on how the players interact with one another, you’d have no baseline to set the chemistry of the Royals against, no way to determine if the chemistry on the team was better or worse than it was on other teams.
And we don’t know what, exactly, qualifies as effective team chemistry. It could be that the ideal clubhouse is the 2004 Red Sox model: a band of chummy idiots united in a common cause. But it could just as easily be true that some tension in a clubhouse is useful. The Yankees have never seemed like a particularly close-knit team, but they do pretty good every year.
And, even if you did find a baseline for chemistry…even if you came up with a Team Chemistry Quotent, you’d have a hard time trying to calculate just how many of a team’s wins could be credited to that metric.
We can, of course, measure luck: that is the one ‘intangible’ Jerry brought up that we have a great way to measure. You can find this out with just one click on the Baseball-Reference front page, which teams are lucky and unlucky.
Here are the luckiest teams in baseball:
|
Team
|
W-L
|
Pyth W-L
|
Luck
|
|
Cardinals
|
65-56
|
60-61
|
5
|
|
Yankees
|
61-59
|
56-64
|
5
|
|
Royals
|
67-54
|
63-58
|
4
|
That ‘Luck’ count is each team’s actual win-loss record, measured against their expected win-loss record estimated by the number of runs the team has scored and allowed.
Here are the un-luckiest teams in 2014:
|
Team
|
W-L
|
Pyth W-L
|
Luck
|
|
Rockies
|
47-75
|
54-69
|
-7
|
|
Mariners
|
66-55
|
72-49
|
-6
|
|
A's
|
73-49
|
79-43
|
-6
|
The A’s, baseball’s best team in 2014, have actually been fairly unlucky.
It is tempting to look at this list and say that the ‘lucky’ teams have good chemistry…that their ‘luck’ has less to do with a fluke of math, and more to do with intangible qualities like leadership and heart. Certainly, the Cardinals and Yankees are two teams that get credit for playing baseball the ‘right’ way.
Except the ‘luck’ scores don’t carry over year-after-year. While the 2014 Cardinals have been very lucky, the 2013 Cardinals were very unlucky, notching four fewer wins than their expected record. The Royals were at -1 last year. Among the three luckiest teams in 2014, only the Yankees had similar luck in 2013. And the Bronx Bombers were neutral in 2012 and in the negatives in 2011.
Luck is a factor, but it’s not an indicator of a team’s intangible qualities. If anything, it is an indicator that a decline can be anticipated. The Royals aren’t really a .554 team…they’re more accurately a .520 team. Over the final forty games of the season, it’s more likely that they’ll play like that team, which means that the Tigers should slip past them.
* * *
So, coming back to the question I dodged earlier: why do the Royals keep on winning?
While I’m happy that Jerry brought up the subject of the Royals, it seems a stretch to assume that the Royals are winning due to some unseen and impossible-to-measure factors of heart, chemistry, and karma, when there is at least one measurable factors that might explain the success in Kansas City.
Let’s consider the two teams vying for the AL Central.
The Detroit Tigers have a better offense than the Kansas City Royals. A quick glance at the Royals lineup posted above should be enough to convince you that the Royals don’t have the offense to match up with the Tigers, but I’m happy to throw in some numbers:
-The Tigers have scored 4.59 runs per game, the third-best total in the AL.
-The Royals have scored 4.08 runs per game, 9th in the league.
A baseball fan who has been paying attention this season would know this. A casual fan could guess that the Tigers, with Miggy and Kinsler, Hunter and V-Mart, and the emerging J.D. Martinez, would have a better offense than the Royals.
A casual baseball fan would probablyhazard that the Tigers have better starting pitching than the Royals. That’s true, too, though the difference is pretty thin. Royals starters actually have a lower ERA than their Detroit counterparts this year (3.69 to 3.81), though the Tigers pitchers have a better strikeout-to-walk ratio. The addition of David Price, who outdueled Felix Hernandez Sunday evening, certainly gives the Tigers an edge in this category.
Lastly: any baseball fan who has been paying attention knows that the Royals have had an exceptionally strong bullpen, while Tigers have had problems finishing games. Detroit closer Joe Nathan has a 5.11 ERA on the year, while recently acquired Joakim Soria, brilliant for the Rangers this year, struggled mightily in five appearances with Detroit, and is now on the DL.
The Royals bullpen has posted a 3.24 ERA this season, good enough for third in the American League. The Tigers bullpen has been more than a run worse, posting an ERA of 4.38, ahead of only Chicago and Houston in the Junior Circuit.
If you wanted to understand why the heavily-favored Tigers are scuffling, and why the light-hitting Royals are ahead in the standings, I think this is the most obvious difference: Kansas City has a better bullpen.
And here’s where we trip down the rabbit hole: all of the surprising teams in baseball have good bullpens.
Okay…that’s not exactly true. But there seems to be a strong correlation between having a good bullpen and having a good record. Here are the top five teams in the A.L., by bullpen ERA:
|
Rank
|
Team
|
Bullpen ERA
|
|
1
|
Mariners
|
2.35
|
|
2
|
A's
|
2.83
|
|
3
|
Indians
|
2.91
|
|
4
|
Royals
|
3.19
|
|
5
|
Orioles
|
3.29
|
These are some surprising teams. The Mariners are eleven games over .500 right now, which no one in the world saw coming. Most people thought the A’s would be good, but I don’t know that many people thought they’d be ‘best team of the decade’good. Baltimore and Kansas City are on top of their divisions right now, and even Cleveland, who shipped off their shortstop and their #1 pitcher before the trade deadline, find themselves on the good side of .500.
The NL side of the coin is a bit less impressive:
|
Rank
|
Team
|
Bullpen ERA
|
|
1
|
Padres
|
2.35
|
|
2
|
Giants
|
2.64
|
|
3
|
Nationals
|
2.83
|
|
4
|
Braves
|
3.20
|
|
5
|
Mets
|
3.20
|
|
6
|
Marlins
|
3.36
|
There are fewer surprises here. The Padres have been playing great since the All-Star break, but it’s a little early to call them a successful team. The Giants, Nationals, and Braves are each about where you’d expect them to be, thought the Giants had a terrific start to the year. The Marlins are certainly a surprise, but the big shocker in the NL are the Brewers, whose bullpen ERA ranks just 8th in the NL.
Acknowledging that this isn’t definitive of anything, the success of the Royals still raises an interesting question: is there a higher correlation between bullpen strength and team success than is generally assumed?
This is what Jerry’s e-mail got me wondering: have the Kansas City Royals, a franchise whose macro (trading Wil Myers) and micro (their batting orders) decision have seemed not only random and senseless, but deliberately antagonist to anyone whose understanding of the game is even casually inclined towards sabermetrics….has that team somehow lucked into some secret formula for winning. And it that formula something as obvious as: "just have a really good bullpen"?
The Tigers and the Royals and the 2014 AL Central race is compelling, to me, because it seems an interesting test of that possibility. The Tigers have a much better offense, and they have slightly better starting pitching...and they have a much worse bullpen. Is that enough to keep these teams even? Is a one-run difference in bullpen ERA as significant as a half-run difference in runs scored per game? Is that one-run difference in bullpen ERA more significant?
I don’t know. But if I wanted to figure out why the Royals are ahead of the Detroit Tigers in the American League Central race, that’s where I’d be looking.
David Fleming is a writer living in New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com