A week ago Monday a friend asked me a deceptively simple question, which was, "if the Royals had kept all the talent they have had, would they have won their division this year?"

            The direct answer to the question is "Yes, I suppose they would have."  They probably would have.  However, this is assuming that the Royals get to keep all of the players who have passed through their fingers one way or another, and, making that assumption, every team in baseball could have won the pennant this year, except possibly Baltimore.

Comparing the Royals to the other 29 teams based on the talent produced by their organization and/or talent "formerly owned" by the organization, the Royals are near the bottom of the barrel.   If you could pick all-star teams for each of the 30 teams based on players now owned or formerly owned by the team, the Royals would finish about 29^th among the 30 teams. 

I.  Method

            I began with the Season Scores for each major league player in the year 2010.   From those scores, I ranked the top 200 hitters and pitchers in the majors in 2010, one through 200.  The #1 hitter was Miguel Cabrera, #2 was Albert Pujols, #3 was Joey Votto, #200 was Roger Bernandina.   The #1 pitcher was Roy Halladay, #2 was CC Sabathia, #3 was Wainwright, and #200 was somebody named Alex Sanabia of the Marlins.   There is, too.

            I then converted these lists into what we could call "Pennant Points" in this way.   For the hitters, I awarded 200 points to the Tigers because they had the #1 man (Cabrera), 199 points to the Cardinals because they had Pujols, etc.    For the pitchers, almost the same; I awarded 160 points to the Phillies for Halladay, 159 points to the Yankees for Sabathia, etc., only when I got down to 40 points I awarded two 40s, two 39s, two 38s, two 37s, etc., so that the pitchers numbers 199 and 200 each got one point.

            That’s right; I used one system of vaguely arbitrary points to create a second system of vaguely arbitrary points.  If you were going to do that, you may be wondering, why not just use the first system of vaguely arbitrary points (Season Scores)?

            The ratios are wrong for this purpose.  Cabrera, the #1 hitter in baseball in 2010, had a Season Score of 471.   Roger Bernadina had a season score of 92.   It’s a 5-to-1 ratio.   Possessing the very best hitters, the Cabreras and Pujolses and Vottoes, is much more than five times as important as possessing the Roger Bernandinas and Blake DeWitts and Chris Coglans.   Those guys, if you lose one of them, you’ll replace him with another.   You don’t replace Miguel Cabrera.   The pennant is in substantial part determined by who has the irreplaceable players.

            I used 160 points as the cap for pitchers because I didn’t want the Pennant Points to be 50% pitching.  This makes a system in which about 60% of the Pennant Points are to hitters and position players, 40% to pitchers (actually .595-.405).   It’s a crude but efficient way to do talent accounting.

II.  Who Had the Most Talent in 2010?

            The best teams, of course.   This is the talent credited to each of the 30 major league teams in 2010, by this system:

            There are nine teams in the majors which had 1300 or more points.   Eight of them were the teams that made the playoffs; the other was the Red Sox.    The "16" under the "Count" heading means that the Yankees had 16 players (10 hitters and 6 pitchers) who were good enough to qualify for Pennant Points.   The Twins had 18; the Giants had 18.

            There is not an absolute, one-to-one relationship between Pennant Points and regular-season finish, but.. .pretty close.    All of the post-season teams make the top-9 list; the Mariners, Indians, Pirates, Orioles and Royals bring up the rear as they should.   This list is just intended to re-assure you that our accounting system, arbitrary as it may seem, does in fact track with the performance of the teams.

III.  Who Has Produced the Most Talent?

            The number one talent producers in the major leagues, in terms of 2010 talent produced, would be the Atlanta Braves.

            So here we begin to see the problem with saying that the Royals would have won the pennant if they had held on to all of their talent.   Only 7 of the 400 players in the major leagues who were good enough to qualify for this study entered baseball in the Royals system:  Billy Butler (168 Pennant Points), Johnny Damon (102), Zack Greinke (73), David DeJesus (65), Mike Aviles (36), Mark Ellis (18), and Luke Hochevar (1).   The second-best player produced by the system for the 2010 season is an old guy who came up fifteen years ago and is half the player he used to be.   It’s a problem.

            The Atlanta Braves, on the other hand, have produced 19 players who were of contributing quality in 2010:   Kelly Johnson (165), Adam Wainwright (158), Martin Prado (157), Jason Heyward (154),  Adam LaRoche (145), Brian McCann (130), Neftali Feliz (115), Rafael Furcal (113), Tommy Hansen (103), Garrett Jones (82), Wilson Betemit (73), Bruce Chen (65), Chipper Jones (60), Andruw Jones (45), Kris Medlen (34), Matt Belisle (29), Kyle Davies (28), Jonny Venters (20), and Jeff Francoeur (6).    They’ve let a couple of their really good ones get away (Kelly Johnson and Adam Wainwright), but, because the organization has been so productive of talent, they’re still in good shape.

IV.  Talent Gainers and Talent Losers

            Contrasting the talent produced by each organization with the talent now possessed:

            The team that has really lost a lot of talent, it turns out, is not Kansas City but Seattle.  . .Seattle, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and the Dodgers, but Seattle is number one on the list.    An All-Star team of players originally signed by Seattle would be

            This team would very easily have won the American League West, with a strong lineup (Ichiro, Adam Jones, Shin-Soo Choo, A-Rod, David Ortiz) and dominant pitching.   Pittsburgh probably wouldn’t have enough pitching to win, but they would have a good lineup and would be close:

            The Royals?   Pssst.  (Dismissive hiss.)   The Royals haven’t produced enough talent to put together a team, let alone a contending team.

V.  Talent Taken and Held

            The team which has developed and retained the most talent in the majors is Tampa Bay.   The team which has developed and retained the least is Cleveland:

            There’s a really interesting contrast between those two organizations, on some level; this isn’t the place to get into it.   But the problems confronted by the Cleveland organization post-2007 are the very problems that loom ahead of the Tampa Bay Rays.   I would bet on the Rays to handle them better, but in any case, they couldn’t handle them much worse.

            Of the 200 best pitchers in baseball, 82 are still with their original teams.   Of the 200 best position players, 83 are still with their original teams.  In both cases the players who are still with their first team are of slightly higher quality than those who are not, so 45% of major league talent (41% of players) are still with the team that first signed them. 

VI.  Brokered Talent

            Talent can be sorted into four categories:

            Talent developed and held

            Talent developed and lost

            Talent acquired

            Brokered Talent

            The one we haven’t dealt with yet is brokered talent—teams which are in the history of some player, but neither as the player’s original team nor as his current team.   It is on this basis that teams like the Royals can claim that they could have won the pennant if they had held on to all of "their" talent.  This is an accounting of the brokered talent in the majors in 2010:

            The Red Sox have acquired but let go 20 players of quality, 12 of them pitchers:  David Aardsma, Bronson Arroyo, Jason Bay, Craig Breslow, Bruce Chen, Coco Crisp, Johnny Damon,

Jorge de la Rosa, Alex Gonzalez, Eric Hinske, Adam LaRoche, Derek Lowe, Brandon Lyon,

Jamie Moyer, Chris Narveson, Carlos Pena, Joel Pineiro, Manny Ramirez, Brad Thomas and Billy Wagner.

VII.  Total Talent Available

            If we add together the talent produced by the organization, the talent acquired and held by the organization, and the brokered talent, we get "Total Talent Available".   The team with the most talent "available" to them has been the Philadelphia Phillies:

            The Royals, then, have had enough talent passing through their hands to have built a championship team.  You make the playoffs somewhere around 1300 points.  The Royals have had 1800.  Still, it’s not really a fair expectation of a team that they would hold on to all of the talent that they could possibly have had.  A criticism which could apply to anyone is not a real criticism; it’s just like saying that Jimmy Carter didn’t solve all of the nation’s problems or that Chris Wallace didn’t ask all of the tough questions.   Realistically, the Royals’ problem is not that they have let talent get away; their problem is that have not had enough talent to work with.   Their farm system has not developed talent, and they (of course) do not have the money to attract talent.   You have to do one or the other, or you never really get to the issue of holding on to the talent you have.

            Oh. . .holding on to the talent you have.    This chart tracks the percentage of talent available that has been retained by each team.   These percentages are derived from dividing each team’s 2010 talent—the first chart in this article—by the numbers above, the total talent available to the organization:

            Stunning, isn’t it?   The World Championship San Francisco Giants still have on their roster 78% of the talent that has passed through it.   Nobody else is in the same orbit.   The Giants are 2.9 Standard Deviations above the norm here.   That’s why they won.   They have done an exceptional job of choosing among the players available to them.

            Of course, this is judgment—and it’s economics.   And time.   The Mariners are at the bottom of this list, in part, because they produced a ton of talent a long, long time ago (Derek Lowe, David Ortiz, Alex Rodriguez, Raul Ibanez), and, inevitably, most of that gets away from you over time. 

            But it’s judgment, and it’s economics.   Teams like Pittsburgh and Cleveland have lost talent because they can’t come up with the money to retain it.  

            There is an important series of questions here that I’m not going to get to:

            a)  What is the role of producing talent in winning pennants?

            b)  What is the role of making good trades in winning pennants?

            c)  What is the relationship between talent produced and talent possessed?

            You could get to those questions by methods like those I have used here, but you’d have to study more than one season.    You’d have to study at least ten seasons worth of teams to have enough data to take on those questions.   There’s obviously some correlation between producing talent and winning games, but beyond that, let’s let it go.

            Anyway, final question.  If each team could make an All-Star team of all the talent they have had, who would win?

            The Phillies.   Cliff Lee would be their sixth starter, Bruce Chen their eighth, Gavin Floyd their tenth: