Royal Pain
The Kansas City Royals have now won the 2015 World Series, beating the New York Mets in five games. They clinched the final game at New York Sunday night just about the same way they won two of the other games – by coming from behind in the late innings with some clutch hitting, clutch base running, and solid relief pitching of their own.
Forget about all of those baseball “experts” and what their computers and sabermetric statistics try to tell you. Baseball games are won and lost by players who either rise up and succeed in the key moments of games or they fall apart and fail in the clutch. The Royals were great in the clutch. The Mets were not.
The Royals proved they were the better team by dominating the Mets in the late innings when the Amazin’s were just a few outs away from victory. That is where the clutch moments occur. In the 8th and 9th innings. And in extra innings. When the game came down to closing out and holding onto a lead and saving a victory, the Mets late inning pitchers, including their closer, could NOT get the final outs. The Royals would NOT be denied victory and became a superhuman team in the last few innings, scoring runs each and every time they trailed late in a close game.
The closer on a baseball team should be that team’s BEST pitcher in the clutch. If he’s not, why is he the man with the ball pitching to preserve a victory? If anyone is playing a game where everything is on the line in the 9th inning, the pitcher out there pitching should ABSOLUTELY be your best pitcher. You as a baseball team put your entire game on the line when you trot out your closer. That is where each team makes its final stand. You beat a team’s closer in the ninth and you take away their heart, their soul, their confidence, everything.
Kansas City’s closer and late inning pitching was simply better than the Mets’ late inning pitching. The Mets closer Jeurys Familia technically “blew” three save opportunities in the World Series. The Royals closer Wade Davis was
successful in all of his opportunities. That is as simple of a breakdown as you can make. If Mariano Rivera (in his prime) was pitching for the Mets, THEY would have probably won the Series, not the Royals.
Given that we know WHO won the Series and THAT these Royals won the Series, the important thing to take away from this exercise, though, is to know the HOW and WHY for the team that won pulled it off.
The Royals won precisely because they do things DIFFERENTLY than everyone else. They do things differently than the way the young general managers and the supposed experts tell them they are supposed to be doing it.
The rest of baseball is all being told they should be ZIGGING right now. They all should be acquiring a team full of guys that get on base a lot, work the count, take a ton of pitches and hope the OTHER guy maybe makes a mistake and they can hit the ball out of the ballpark. They want freakishly talented, “toolsy” ballplayers that hit for power (even if they have to strike out a lot to get results that may or may not come). These same players want to hit for power at all times and develop the types of weaknesses in their swings that can be exploited by crafty pitchers that know how to get that type of hitter out (especially at key moments in the late innings of a close game).
Oh, and these players want, more than anything, to be paid top dollars, no matter where they have to go to get that big money. They might be in demand because of their power statistics but they are less likely to be a team player. And MAYBE, they are the types of players that are less likely to produce in the clutch.
The same with pitchers. The current baseball mindset wants these teams to have hard throwing, number one type starting pitchers that strike out a lot of batters (never minding the fact that with that type of pitcher comes the risk of arms blowing out and them needing Tommy John surgery). And these successful pitchers want to be paid so much that half the teams in baseball cannot afford to pay their glutted prices. So what is a team supposed to do then?
While the others are all ZIGGING, he Royals have chosen to ZAG. Instead of freakish prospects, the Royals have been developing and trading for BASEBALL PLAYERS. Instead of teaching them the importance of producing bat speed and hoped for home runs, the Royals have produced good contact hitters that are skilled at putting the bat on the ball and in play.
These hitters are taught the selfless way to play ball. Say it’s a close game. When the TEAM needs a batter to hit the ball to the right side to move a runner over from second, their hitters do what’s best for their team, not what’s best for their own statistics. They get the guy over. And the next batter, when all he needs is to connect with the ball to produce a run from third, this type of batter doesn’t try to hit a home run, he gets a single, or a sacrifice fly, or a well directed out that gets that important runner home.
This is ZAGGING in an era of ZIGGING.
Take pitching for instance. While all of the attention is paid to high priced starters, the Royals have chosen to spend their dollars wisely and get some form of starting pitching, but more importantly, they get some quality low or mid priced pitchers for the back end of their rotation. They don’t care who starts, but rather who finishes. Who cares how exciting a guy’s name might be, the Royals get relief pitchers (or starters who can do well in just the last inning or two) that simply can get hitters out when they have to. On the season, the Royals had the best ERA for relief pitchers in all of baseball. THOSE are the innings that matter in things like World Series games.
So while the rest of baseball has played the copycat game of trying to out-ZIG everyone else, the Royals have been ZAGGING their way to getting their hands on some fundamentally solid, but not very glamorous BASEBALL PLAYERS up and down the roster. Everyone has a “baseball player” skill set that can allow them to hit, pitch and defend to a standard that produces runs when they need them on offense, and outs when they need them on defense.
The thing that made Kansas City into champions this year is also something that can’t be measured in baseball analytics. They had heart. The organization hired the types of guys that could produce at their best in the clutch. A true TEAM has a group of guys that want to do their part in helping their fellow teammates succeed in winning. This Royals team had exactly that type of personality. All of the raw statistics in the world can’t beat the team that won’t allow themselves to lose.
So now, we have an entire baseball world that has tried to model a team on the ZIGGING model when maybe they should have considered an alternative to copying the latest flavor of the month way of doing things. For they have seen the Royals ZAG their way to a World Series triumph. They may have seen the Royals’ Way of playing the game as the “right way” to play baseball.
The Royals have been to two straight World Series now, winning this last one. They can be beaten, of course, but it’s probably going to take a team that also “ZAGS,” with perhaps a better closer and talented pitching at the end of the rotation needed to beat them. For now, though, Kansas City rules baseball and will be a Royal Pain for everyone else to deal with for quite a while.
