The Royals have swept the Orioles and everything you know is wrong
With a 2-1 victory in Game 4 of the ALCS, the Royals continue their undefeated postseason and advance to the World Series. Did the regular season give an accurate picture of their capabilities, or does the postseason accentuate their strengths?
Peter G. Aiken-USA TODAY Sports
The Kansas City Royals have swept the Baltimore Orioles out of the ALCS and are going to their first World Series since 1985 and the team's third overall since the franchise's 1969 launch. We had no postseason sweeps in 2013. We had two in 2012: The Detroit Tigers swept the Yankees out of ALCS in four straight games and in turn were swept by the San Francisco Giants in the World Series. How can a team look so dominant and so helpless in such a short period of time? As Albert Einstein probably would not have said, it's all relative. Then there's weather and bad hops and groin-pulls and any of a million other factors. None of that is very important right now, not if we're going to give the Royals their full due.
There's an antecedent for the Royals in the old Philadelphia Phillies. The Phillies won the National League pennant in 1915, but within a few years had ceased to have any relevance, their owner content to function as a big-league punching bag and farm-team for the other franchises. They lost 90 to 111 games -- usually on the higher side -- almost every year from 1919 through 1947. They finished last or second-to-last in an eight-team league in 24 of those 29 seasons. And then came 1950, the Whiz Kids, and, Holy Moly, another World Series.
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They were swept by the Yankees. To paraphrase Depeche Mode, the universe has a sick sense of humor.
The Phillies wouldn’t win a World Series until 1980. They beat the Royals. None of this is the least bit relevant to what the 2014 Royals have accomplished in terms of predictive power -- at this writing we don’t even know who they’re going to meet in the World Series -- but gives us a sense of the way that the elation of making it through the desert and emerging within view of the Promised Land can just as quickly lead to deflation and disappointment. Nothing is guaranteed, not even if you sweep.
Still, let us not be guilty of the same defeatism that afflicted Moses’ dozen spies:
“‘We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we.’ Thus they spread calumnies among the Israelites about the land they had scouted, saying, ‘The country that we traversed... is one that devours its settlers. All the people that we saw in it are men of great size... and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.” -- Numbers 13:31-33
As the foregoing suggests, the other guys may look better on paper, but the Royals can win; they've been doing it all year, and at this point it's fair to ask if the other guys really were better, or if we missed something, such as not only how good this team's bullpen is, but how hard it could be pushed in the postseason. The Royals' bullpen threw 460 innings in 162 regular-season games, or about three innings a game. Less than half of those innings (about 204) were thrown by the game-finishing trio of Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis, and Greg Holland. In the postseason, that trio has thrown 25.2 of 35 innings, or very close to three-quarters.
Do that from April through September and you have just three relievers throwing about 330 innings. You might even be able to get away with that -- individual relievers have thrown 100 or more innings many times -- but I wouldn’t want to bet on the job security of the manager who tried it. Ned Yost can focus down to that trio now, which effectively makes the Royals a different team than the one which went 89-73 in the regular season.
The rest comes from something that the Cardinals have also taught us at times this postseason: That it is foolish to expect unrealized potential to become actualized talent at the exact moment you need to tap it, but sometimes it does happen. Replay the 2014 season a thousand times in some computerized baseball Valhalla and in the vast majority of those seasons the Royals would show more at the plate in the regular season than they did -- Eric Hosmer would have a season more in line with his 2013, Mike Moustakas would figure things out sooner, Alex Gordon would have a season closer to the 2011-2012 top of his range.
Sometimes the postseason accentuates a team’s weaknesses, as it seems to with the Tigers bullpen year after year (after year). At others it accentuates its strengths while downplaying its weaknesses, or making us realize those weaknesses were at least partially exaggerated or illusory in the first place. None of this is to say that we should start mentioning the 2014 Royals in the same breath as the 1927 Yankees, but at the very least we need to reevaluate them in light of their 8-0 postseason record. It’s not just a small-sample fluke, it’s not just good luck. As Buffalo Springfield sang, there’s something happening here.
As for the Baltimore Orioles, Buck Showalter’s quest for postseason validation goes on. The Orioles are a very good team that has a difficult offseason before it if the team is to maintain what it has achieved the past three seasons. They remain the team to beat in the AL East; the division has never been so soft, and though their munificent rivals cannot be lightly dismissed, they are guilty until proven competitive. Still, between many arbitration cases and key free agents, Dan Duquette is going to have a long winter.
There will be plenty of time to talk about that over the next few months. This night belongs to the Royals, to a plan that wasn’t always apparent but somehow came together. One remains skeptical that there even was a plan -- this is still Dayton Moore we’re talking about after all -- but regardless of whether he is responsible, if the Royals were made or just happened, this long-suffering franchise, treated so poorly and ineffectively by ownership and management for decades, is finally redeemed. No doubt the team’s many fans will still want more, but what happens from hereon in is just gravy.
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