Royals Monday Notes – A Gore-y Weekend

The Royals went 3-1 this past week

Terrance Gore and the Royals beat the Twins last night in the most Royals way ever yesterday, on a wild pitch.

The Royals 10th inning consisted of a walk, lazy fly out, and strikeout. Naturally, it ended with Gore scoring the game winning run.

We’ll talk about that inning, as well as all the strikeouts and some worrisome matchups coming up this week.

Next: Royals Now Like The Strikeout

The Royals Got Bored With Pitching To Contact

Dayton Moore and Ned Yost‘s model for success looks more like that of a good high school team than a Major League Baseball team.

Offensively, they bunt, steal bases, and don’t strike out.

Defensively, they are as good as any team in baseball history. Naturally, the pitching rotation pitched to contact, only striking out more batters than five teams in baseball. Only two American League teams struck out fewer batters than the Royals in 2015.

However, in 2016, the Royals rotation is off to a much faster start in missing bats. Thus far, Royals starters have struck out 32 batters in just 28.1 innings.

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If you include the bullpen, only four teams entered today’s action with a higher K/9 than the Royals staff (10.25).

We knew that the bullpen missed bats, but we didn’t see that from the rotation. Will it continue? Who knows. But it’s pretty reasonable to believe that they will at least improve on last season.

Yordano was already a strikeout machine when compared to the rest of the 2015 staff, Edinson Volquez has apparently found his peak-stuff in 2016 at the ripe age of 32, and Ian Kennedy‘s calling card for his career has been his ability to strike hitters out.

All the rotation has to do to keep the Royals in games is to keep the ball in the ballpark. If they’re also striking out hitters, they might be pretty scary.

Next: Let's Talk Sabermetrics

Lets Look At Sabermetrics (I know you guys are just gleaming with excitement)

“SABR nerds don’t understand the speed and defense factor,” is a very common narrative. As a SABR enthusiast myself, I’d like to deny this claim, and I’m going to use Terrance Gore’s ridiculous 10th inning on Sunday as a case study.

Here is the tweet that really started this crap

First of all, this tweet really encompasses a misguided interpretation of metrics in general.

Fanning went on to tweet this as well.

I responded with this thread, which really explains the common misinterpretation of metrics.

Here’s the deal. I get the angst against sabermetrics. They don’t like the Royals, and we are all Royals fans. We want people to love the Royals.

The important thing to realize is this: Metrics do not define success, as much as they evaluate it.

This is why Fangraphs came out and owned their Royals projections, saying this:

Since the Royals keep beating their projections, there’s definitely an increasing belief they just do something the numbers struggle to detect,” Jeff Sullivan said. “The Royals are the controversial team, as projections go, and evidence suggests people came here just to vote on them. To do that implies you have a strong opinion, and the strong opinions were overwhelmingly that the Royals are being badly under-estimated.”

I love metrics and believe strongly in their ability to diagnose real success. However, as they say, that’s why they play the games. More often than not, the numbers are right. There are times that they are not, and woudn’t you know it, the Royals are the team this happens with most, as a team and individually.

With that being said, the original tweet is totally bogus because, just to remind you, Moneyball does not define SABR.

I know Brad Pitt told you not to steal bases, but we metric lovers find real value in speed, whether it be on the bases or defensively.

Next: A Gore-y 10th Inning

10th Inning Madness

Terrance Gore only goes to emphasize this point.

We see Jarrod Dyson‘s speed value in the outfield, as well as on the bases. We find Gore’s value completely on the base paths.

On Sunday afternoon, in a tie-ball game, Christian Colon led off the 10th inning with a walk.

Enter Gore as a pinch runner, and here is where the “that’s why you play the games” statement is still relevant.

There isn’t a metric that can measure Trevor May‘s ultimately dyer fear of Gore’s speed. However, we saw this with his first pick-off attempt of Gore, his subsequent long pause, causing Paulo Orlando to request time, and ultimately in his first pitch, which was an overthrown 95-MPH fastball, which ended up near Orlando’s shoulder.

May was clearly more concerned with Gore than Orlando.

We obviously know that he would throw the next pick-off attempt past Joe Mauer at first base and Gore, showing the difference between 80-grade speed and his speed, took third base, not second base. He also did this while taking a horrific angle around second base.

With Gore on third, May settled down a bit, getting a weak fly out from Orlando and an ugly strikeout of Alcides Escobar.

His confidence in his breaking ball, despite having Gore sitting on third, was seemingly encouraging. He trusted his catcher and got Escobar to strike out on a spiked curveball that was blocked by John Ryan Murphy.

However, that confidence came back to bite him. Not due to any (huge) fault of his own, but because his catcher wasn’t quite as able as he thought.

On a 2-2 pitch to Lorenzo Cain, he threw another 58-foot curveball, directly in front of Murphy. I’m not a professional catcher, so I’m not going to judge, but that was about as easy of a block as you’re going to find on a breaking ball in the dirt.

However, Murphy failed get around the ball and play its spin, causing the ball to hop off of Murphy’s chest protector, about 6-8 feet to the right of him.

This is where Gore’s value again comes to play. There aren’t a whole lot of people who score on that play. The ball didn’t get that far away from Murphy.

As we would know, though, Gore is stupid fast and scored on the play, rather easily. Not to mention that he hesitated. 

Long story short, Terrance Gore is fast.

Next: Looking Toward Houston