World Series preview: 5 reasons everybody wins with Giants-Royals

The Royals have played in two World Series, facing the Phillies and the Cardinals. If you really had to name a postseason archenemy for KC, it would have to be the Yankees, who they played in the ALCS in four of five seasons from 1976 through 1980. As for the Giants, given how many times they’ve been here, you’d think it would be impossible to find them a new enemy. They’ve played:

The Giants have been around since 1883. For much of that time, Kansas City had a team as well -- the Blues in the minor league American Association. They were a Yankees affiliate for many years. The less said of the major league Kansas City A’s the better, carpetbaggers who continued to operate as if they were indebted to the Yankees, which they kind of were. They hung around from 1955 through 1967, losing from 90 to 105 games in nine of 13 seasons. Their best rivalries were with their own incompetence. Greater respect is due to the Kansas City Monarchs, the highly successful Negro Leagues ballclub. They, of course, were not allowed to play the lilywhite major league champions (or for them), though supposedly John McGraw, the manager of the Giants from 1902 to 1932, had a list of African American ballplayers that he would sign as soon as the rest of the league was okay with it. He also tried to smuggle in second baseman Charlie Grant onto the 1901 American League Baltimore Orioles. Here’s half a point for good intentions, Muggsy.

So, there isn’t any real Kansas City-San Francisco history, and that’s a good thing. Sure, due to interleague play these two teams have played each other as recently as August 8-10 of this year (as you’ve no doubt heard, the Royals swept), but that does not a rivalry make. That means all the boring storylines that you tend to hear around traditional rivalries are out the window. The Baseball Gods have spared us Yankees-Dodgers, Yankees-Giants, and Yankees-Cardinals for quite a while now, and for that we can be grateful. Thus we are free to imagine new stories, break new ground as each game unfolds, rather than rehash old ones populated mainly by, and relevant only to, dead guys.

Seven teams have made more than one World Series appearance this century. Here’s what they spent over those 15 seasons to achieve that:

The Royals have spent $832 million since the turn of the century. They now have as many World Series appearances in that time as the Angels, who spent $1.51 Billion. Life is strange and unfair.

One of the wonderful aspects of both these teams is that they’re largely lacking in free-agent mercenaries who made their names in other cities. Brian McCann is not here, nor Carlos Beltran, no Melky Cabrera or Nelson Cruz. The Giants’ entire infield, including Rookie of the Year and MVP-award-winner Buster Posey, was developed internally. Hunter Pence, acquired via trade, is the sole big-ticket item in the outfield. Staff ace Madison Bumgarner was drafted and developed by the Giants. They went outside to the organization to staff out the starting rotation with Tim Hudson (free agent) and Jake Peavy (midseason trade), and Brian Sabean has spent to retain key players, but on the whole this is a team built of on-hand options and second-tier acquisitions.

Sabean’s loudest false step was to doubt Joe Panik’s readiness and waste time on the faintly-glowing embers of Dan Uggla’s career. In his long career with the Giants, Sabean has loved his veterans, but despite giving in to that temptation over the years - the average age of a 2002 Giants position player was over 32 - this is a team built by a man who has learned to compromise with his controlling instincts.

If you think about it, Dayton Moore’s plucky, low-budget ($89 million) Royals are far more the Hessian army-for-rent than the $145 million Giants. James Shields, Jeremy Guthrie, Alcides Escobar, Wade Davis, Nori Aoki, and Lorenzo Cain were acquired via trade. Omar Infante and Jason Vargas were free agents. Brandon Finnegan, Danny Duffy, Mike Moustakas, Kelvin Herrera, Aaron Crow, Eric Hosmer, Greg Holland, Billy Butler, Alex Gordon, Yordano Ventura, and Salvador Perez were internally developed.

That is not to denigrate the way that Moore assembled his team, and in particular his killer bullpen, one of the hardest acts in sports to accomplish, but merely to characterize the composition of each. Neither is the Yankees is the point, neither is the Dodgers.

The Royals finished last in the majors in home runs and first in stolen bases. That said, they stole 153 bases, an unremarkable total even in our home run-bedazzled century. In fact, it’s the exact same number the Royals stole in 2013, and before that in 2011. They just have a thing for the number 153. That said, they’ve put the pedal to the floor in the postseason. The Royals attempted eight bases in the wild-card play-in game against the A’s alone, succeeding seven times, were a perfect 5-0 in the three games of the Division Series against the Angels, and then a quiet one steal in three attempts in the ALCS. If we take their postseason pace as a true measure of their abilities, then yes, these are the 1985 Cardinals reborn, a team capable of stealing 250 or more bases in a single season.

Wait, if that’s true, why didn’t they?

Hang on, though, because there’s more: Annoyingly, despite the stolen bases, the Royals also kept winning postseason games with home runs. They’ve smacked a home run once every 29 at-bats this October. Pro-rate that to their full-season at-bat total and that’s a pace for 191 round-trippers, a total and rate which both would have been second in the majors to the Baltimore Orioles. So maybe they’re not the largely powerless ‘85 or ‘87 Cardinals and instead are one of the best power-hitting teams in the major leagues, with 200 home-run potential.

Huh. If that’s true, why didn’t that happen?

Writers will try to extrapolate from what the Royals have done, attempt to make it the new model, and, of course, debunk sabermetrics or Moneyball or whatever knife it was that pricked their sacred cow. They’ll be wrong, because the Royals aren’t whatever you think they are. They’re a team that is hot, that is pressing its advantages, particularly its bullpen, in a way it almost certainly couldn’t sustain in the regular season. You try to repeat this a thousand times, it won’t work.

Making mountains out of molehills is a fool’s errand, as is looking for portents from the sky. There’s nothing more to see here, but the media will cast about in the entrails nonetheless. They’ll be far funnier than the commercials, so feel free to laugh.

After offense got super-heated in the late 1990s, the running part of baseball became completely deemphasized, even more so than at the time of the Great Stolen-Base Die-Off in the age of Ruth. At least batters put the ball in play then. Right now there is still entirely too much standing around, be it due to the home run or the strikeout. As the Royals’ outfielders have shown, watching defenders scampering after balls in play is fun, but that only happens if someone makes contact.

Look, Yostball might not always be the smartest baseball there is, but it’s exciting baseball. Someday, someone will figure out how to give us all the elements, a fast team that can hit for a good batting average but also isn’t handcuffed by silly batting orders and inordinate out-spending. Until then, this is what we have, so don’t try to think too deeply, just enjoy it in spite of all its quirks.

You never can tell when a World Series is going to end in a boring, 4-0 sweep. The 1998 Yankees steamrolling over the Padres seemed fairly predictable, as did the 2007 Red Sox knocking off the Rockies in four straight. Conversely, the 1990 Reds sweeping the mighty Oakland A’s came as a surprise (in retrospect, it shouldn’t have -- that team wasn’t unlike these Royals, average in many respects but with good speed and a killer bullpen trio of Randy Myers, Norm Charlton, and Rob Dibble). This series seems unlikely to be so unbalanced. Having two wild card teams in the finals is less than ideal, but in this case the benefit of the current system is that two flawed teams going all the way means no one has the greater claim to dominance.

This October that’s a feature, not a bug.

These teams could claw away at each other for a year without achieving a decisive advantage. Both have starting rotations that fall far short of the 1971 Orioles’ assemblage of four 20-game winners. Madison Bumgarner has no equal on the Royals; there’s nothing “Big Game” about James Shields, not when he has a 5.19 ERA in nine career postseason starts. As Shields is likely to depart as a free agent this winter, he is less aptly compared to the original Big Game James, NBA star James Worthy, and to an earlier James Shields, a three-time U.S. Senator, but one who had to move to three different states (including Missouri) to stay in office. He can help you get here, but he might not help you stay -- or stay himself.

Conversely, as solid as the career postseason records of Giants relievers Jeremy Affeldt, Sergio Romo, and Santiago Casilla have been (add them up and you get an ERA of 1.23 in 73.1 innings) they aren’t quite the supernatural force that Greg Holland-Wade Davis-Kelvim Herrera has become. Both sides also have secret bullpen weapons in recent Royals’ draftee Brandon Finnegan, a hard-throwing southpaw, and Giants swingman Yusmeiro Petit a soft-tossing northpaw who has pitched a nine-inning shutout in relief this postseason.

As for offenses, well, as we’ve just observed, anything can happen since teams don’t necessarily conform to their established norms in October. Here’s the one thing about Yostball: If the Giants take early leads and Yost starts bunting, bunting, bunting to try to get back into the games, he’s going to reap the opposite effect of the one he intends. It’s like Princess Leia said to Grand Moff Tarkin, “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.” Except they’re not star systems here, they’re outs and runs, and there are no princesses because baseball is all male and it’s not a derivative science-fiction fantasy novel and -- well, you get it.

That said, though Buster Posey was quiet in the NLCS, he has it in him to be the Luke Skywalker of this series. And that’s enough Star Wars analogies to last a lifetime. As much fun as the Royals’ lineup can be, there is no war here, just the Giants’ one star, with honorable mentions going to Hunter Pence and Pablo “Career .325 hitter in the postseason” Sandoval. That observation has no predictive power; it’s just something to remember when folks claim this is a no-name World Series.

Nevertheless, this World Series doesn’t have a Derek Jeter/David Ortiz/Miguel Cabrera/Mike Trout or tried and true prefab narratives, all of which the media might have used to try to drive ratings, but though it might lack appeal to them, it has something for everybody else. It should be good, and that’s enough. Only one of the two teams can walk away with the championship, but otherwise, everybody wins.