SB Nation MLB Team of the Year nominees

What does “team of the year” mean? That’s a good question. It means whatever you want it to mean! We intended for this to be open-ended. If you want to reward a team that made all the right moves, but didn’t have them pay off, you can. If you want to reward a team that won a lot of games, you can. If you wanted to just give it to the team that won the World Series, no one would blame you! With that in mind, here are the nominees, as selected by Grant Brisbee, Marc Normandin, Bill Hanstock and Kurt Mensching.

*As some teams were nominated by a bunch of blogs, I’m just going to link to the SB Nation blog for each team instead.

The Royals weren’t even supposed to be here, man. You should have read Royals Review around the trade deadline. Woe be to Dayton Moore, woe be to David Glass, woe be to everything, because the Royals were going nowhere fast just like they always did. And then they started going somewhere, passing the Tigers for the lead in the AL Central. They couldn’t hold on to the division, but they did earn a wild card with 89 wins, and suddenly looked like a team of destiny. From late-inning heroics in the Wild Card Game (coming back from trailing by three in the eighth inning) to walkoffs and sweeps, the Royals were nearly unstoppable. Until they met the equally charmed Giants, falling a run short of the World Series title, that is. But they were there at the end for the first time since 1985, and they became America’s darlings for it. We were (nearly) all Royals fans by the end.

It’s hard to make a living in the AL East, what with the Yankees, the Red Sox, and the smartly run Rays snatching division titles and playoff spots nearly every year. But the O’s didn’t make a living, they stole everyone else’s lunch along the way, winning 96 games and running away with the division by 12 games. They met the playoff veteran Tigers in the ALDS and left no doubts which was the better team, sweeping them easily for their first playoff series win since 1997. The Royals returned the favor by sweeping them in the ALCS, but Buck Showalter’s O’s have shown you can’t sleep on them in the division any more.

World Series favorites before the season. World Series favorites at the end of the season. D.C.‘s baseball team had baseball’s best rotation, a strong bullpen, young stars like Bryce Harper, and the ability to score plenty of runs. The Nationals may have been baseball’s best team, and they had MLB’s best run differential, +131, and second-most wins, 96, to make their case for it. Who didn’t pick them to be playing in the Fall Classic after all of that? But they ran into a Giants team that just seems to know how to win in the postseason and dropped the NLDS in four games. It was far from an ideal ending to the season, but they’ll be back for another shot next year, too, with a well-constructed roster.

The Angels won the most games in baseball this year, 98. If there were no playoffs, if this were like, say, European soccer, they would have been awarded the MLB title. But this is America, where we have playoffs and insist that a few series of five or seven games tell us who the best team is, rather than the 162 game season. So the Halos were swept out in three games by the Royals, and their wonderful bounceback from a sub-.500 2013 season was all for nothing in the minds of sports fans.

The Giants were tied for the fewest wins of any team to make the playoffs, 88. They were the only team in postseason history to win 12 games, though, leading to their third World Series championship since 2010. They did it in exciting fashion, with walk-off wins and a Game 7 performance by Madison Bumgarner that was an instant legend. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you’ve got to respect ‘em. Their titles speak for themselves.