could you imagine if these were the astros instead of the roayls....can you imagine the type of feelings their fans must have. ugh so jealous. id be so fkin estatic. wish I ever see the stros win the championship
Royals deserved it more than any team. Top to bottom the best team in baseball. This is no lucky run to the championship.
I think the Jays were significantly better than the Royals, and could convincingly argue that the Astros were a better team as well. Anything can happen in a short series, though, and the Royals dispatched both - they are deserving champs.
Yes.... and that's not luck. They've now had semi-improbable, (deemed "lucky"), comebacks in last year's playoffs x 3, and this year's playoffs x 4. At some point, this is just who this team is. They're that hard to "close" out when they have to get a hit/run to stay alive and win a game.
They are the anti-money ball team. The get get hits steal bases don't walk a ton or hit a lot of homeruns.
KC's OBP was slightly higher than league average, their SLG was right on league average (they had a lot of doubles and triples), and overall their offense was slightly above league average. Not sure how that makes them anti-moneyball. Also, moneyball doesn't hate stolen bases, it hates giving up outs by getting caught stealing. KC was second in the AL in success rate at >75%, which is around the point where the value of a stolen base is accretive to scoring runs.
Of course it does, but you can't count on Daniel Murphy to totally miss a baseball, or a ball to off of 2 gloves to prevent a double play. That isn't skill, that is luck.
http://espn.go.com/mlb/beanecount The royals were middle of the pack in the moneyball rankings. I guess they weren't anti moneyball, but they weren't build like a typical moneyball team. The Astros on the other hand were the quintessential money ball team.
Money ball isn't about any particular philosophy to baseball. It's simply about valuing what other people don't. Back in the day, OBP was overlooked, so it was "cheap" to get and thus you got better bang for your buck. But if OBP is expensive, then moneyball doesn't care about it. Similarly, HRs seemed to be cheap last year, which is why the Astros collected so many of those types of hitters. Moneyball is simply about exploiting inefficiencies in the market - it has nothing to do really with a style of play.
That ESPN analysis is baloney ... shocking, I know. Those metric rankings are incomplete, to be kind. Moneyball (which, to Major's point, is no longer an accurate description - a more accurate name would be run differential) doesn't care about walks, it cares about getting on base. It doesn't care about HR, it cares about advancing baserunners (2B & 3B count, too). Likewise, on the pitching side, it's not just BB that matter, but K/BB ratio that's way more important. You can live and even thrive with a pitcher that walks a fair amount of batters, if he strikes them out in a high proportion (see Ryan, Lynn Nolan).
Oh I thought this was a predictions thread not who I'm rooting for... I voted KC when it went up... did they win! I didn't care less.
It is incredibly ****ing annoying that people still haven't learned this basic concept. "Moneyball" is the most overused and misused phrase in sports.
