Royals Straight Dope: All National MLB Writers Please Read

How Did KC’s Local Media Miss All Of This?

This is a simple one. Even the good announcers like Josh Vernier missed it. Josh is excellent let’s start with that. Like the great Denny Mathews, a real baseball guy. Those are the only two that can forecast future events with any regularity, that I am aware of.  When I came up with these theories four and five years ago, only Josh was feeling it too. He was generally two or three months behind because he hadn’t figured out my positional percentage theory.

Last year he was off because he thought it was going to be all about the starting pitching. Ventura and Duffy “had” to perform well. That was a miscalculation. They were starting pitchers which Josh gave (and still gives, though less) too much weight.

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He was thinking they were 45% like they were in the old days but they were actually closer to 28%. He also wasn’t giving full credit to the relievers and their skyrocketing values. If Ventura and Duffy didn’t play at all last year the Royals still would have won the World Series.

Will the day come when relievers are more valuable than starters? According to the numbers, probably yes. The only question is how high they will go and how low the batters and pitchers will go. This brings us to Wade Davis. He’s pretty good. No, he’s not “pretty good” he’s without a doubt one of the best if not THE best player in baseball. This was missed due to everyone underestimating the value of a relief pitcher. And overvaluing the starters and batters.

The 610 traffic jockeys missed all of this because baseball is really not their area of expertise in the first place. So they ran with the starting pitching being the key without having heard of the positional percentage theory. You can’t blame them for that. Before a World Series game, one of them told me that many in KC think Eric Hosmer has the smoothest swing on the Royals.

I felt pretty bad for them after that as I was imagining Hoz’ violent swing, so I went back and told them; “Hoz is the most aggressive runner on the Royals, not the fastest, but the most aggressive.” Wanted to give them some juicy info for their listeners since they were in over their heads covering the Royals in the World Series. The rest is history. “What did that nut job tell us about Hoz being an aggressive runner or something? Oh well, it probably wasn’t important.”

SAFE!

Next: Omar Infante Clears Waivers, Possible Landing Spot

Homework for national sportswriters, oddsmakers and local traffic jockeys:

Reevaluate your player values.