Bill James Stability Index Graphed

Bill James has a fascinating article on his website (subscription required) tracking the stability of five different areas of baseball history (see key in the above graph) plus the overall stability measured as the average of the five factors. The data was calling out to me to be turned into a line graph, so here it is. I've used a rolling four year average trend line for the numbers James provided. (He didn't include the numbers for every year, just pointed out certain years in a narrative summary.)

1985 World Series Win Probability Added

Dane Iorg had two plate appearances in the '85 World Series, and they were both game enders. In the second game, he pinch-hit with two outs in the ninth and the Royals trailing 1-3. Their win probability was just 5% when he strode to the plate, and 0% after he flew out to right field. His second PA was a little more eventful. As you may have heard, Don Denkinger called Jorge Orta safe at first to lead off the bottom of the ninth inning in game six with the Royals trailing 0-1. Then Denkinger failed to catch an easy foul pop-up, then Denkinger gave up a single to Steve Balboni, and then Denkinger allowed a passed ball to allow the runners to move up to second and third. The win probability now actually stood slightly in KC's favor at 54%. Denkinger gave up a single to Iorg, two runs scored, and Iorg's hit was worth a swing in win probability of 46%. You can see what a monumental moment it was by the big red spike in the graph above.

Series MVP Bret Saberhagen comes out looking great thanks to his game three and game seven starts. WPA also gives Denny Jackson plenty of credit. Jackson pitched a good game one in a losing effort, and shut down St. Louis in an overlooked but crucial game five win to keep the series alive. Onix Concepcion got exactly zero plate appearances in the series, but gets a big WPA credit for his pinch-running in that game six ninth inning. He ran for Balboni, moved to second on a bunt, to third on a passed ball, and scored on Iorg's single.

1980 World Series Win Probability Added

I don't know why I do these things, but here is a look at the game-by-game accumulation of win probability added for all the Royals to have a PA or throw a pitch in the 1980 World Serious. Willie Aikens had one of the greatest World Series performances ever seen. (Compare David Ortiz's 0.94 WPA in this year's series.) Amos Otis was fantastic for KC too, but the rest of the team either stayed right around zero or struggled. The highest WPA in the series for Philadelphia was Del Unser's 0.59, well behind Aikens and Otis. But Aikens and Otis couldn't do it alone, and Bob Boone, Mike Schmidt, Bake McBride, and Tug McGraw all joined Unser in having pretty good series for the Phillies. Dan Quisenberry appeared in all six games, and was very up and down throughout, but ended up with the second worst WPA on the team thanks to rough outings in games two and five.

2013 In Review: The Run Creators

Check out the above graph of the game-by-game accumulation of win probability added by the offense and defense and see if you can tell which one was better for the Royals last year! I'll give you a minute.

Lazy cliche spewers like to say pitching and defense win championships. People more interested in accuracy should try popularizing a new saying, something like, "the right combination of run creation and prevention will get you into the playoffs, where anything can happen." Doesn't have the same ring to it I guess. But the 2013 Royals were yet another example that you usually do have to score a little bit to be a playoff team. And another example that it's hard to score when you don't walk or hit dingers. Here's where the Royals offense ranked in the AL in a bunch of categories:

So pretty much all they did well was avoid strike outs, hit for average, and run the bases. The "little things" that don't contribute a whole lot to run scoring. They were mediocre at getting on base, and completely devoid of power, which led to an 11th place finish in run scoring. There were two stretches during the season when the offense completely disappeared that are glaringly obvious on the WPA chart at the top of this post. Between May 6 and June 4, the offense sputtered out 3.2 runs per game during a 6-22 stretch that effectively torpedoed the season. When the team got on a roll after the all-star break, it seemed as though they had dug themselves out of the hole they dug in May. But while the team deserves kudos for bouncing back the way they did, it's also true that there was never a strong chance for a playoff appearance after May. The offense had another terrible stretch from August 12-24 while their record fell from 62-54 to 64-64.

On the rare occasions that things were clicking on offense, it was Eric Hosmer, Billy Butler, Salvador Perez, and Alex Gordon carrying the load. But on the whole, they couldn't overcome the damage inflicted by out-machines Alcides Escobar, Mike Moustakas, Chris Getz, Elliott Johnson, and Jeff Francoeur. If the offense could have managed to just be league-average, which would have required them to score about 50 more runs, the Royals would have had a great shot at playing post-season baseball.

Finally, here's a look at how some Royals hit relative to their position. Instead of being compared to the whole league, this is OPS+ compared to the other AL players at respective positions:

The complaints about Butler from some in Royals-land never look sillier than when you directly compare him to average DH numbers. It's true that all he can do is hit. It's also true that there is a spot in the Royals lineup almost every game for someone to just hit. I personally like having a guy to put into that spot who is an excellent hitter. Call me crazy.

In A Small Way, The 2013 Royals Were A Repeat Of 1985

Looked at from a certain angle, the 2013 Royals team was a dead ringer for the slightly more lauded 1985 squad. The above graphic charts every Royals team by run prevention and run scoring as compared to that season's AL average. (The actual formula is (RunsPerGame / ALavgRunsPerGame)*100.) Lower is better for run prevention, higher for run scoring. As you can see, 2013 and 1985 are right on top of each other, and are the two most run-preventingest teams in Royals history. A closer look at the similarities:

Pythagoras would tell you the 2013 team was actually a game better. Here, I'll let him tell you:

Thanks P.

Had the 2013 offense been just league average, Pythagoras would have put their record at 93-69, also known as the Detroit Tigers AL Central winning record.

AL Central At The Break

Our Royals stumble into the All-Star break with a five game losing streak and a .7% chance of making the playoffs according to Baseball Prospectus. Dreams of meaningful second half baseball are slipping away. Here is a look at some of the stats that explain how we got here.

This is my trusty chart comparing the starting pitching in the division. On one hand, the Royals are much improved in this area. On the other hand, they are still barely mediocre. Getting a quality start 58% of the time is impressive. At last year's break, that number was 36%. The rotation has put the team in position to win more often than not, but the offense and bullpen haven't taken advantage. The staff is on pace to eclipse Dayton Moore's mostly meaningless goal of throwing 1,000 innings.

Here are the top 15 starters in the division by WAR. I've averaged Fangraphs' FIP-based WAR and Baseball Reference's runs allowed-based WAR.

Kind of depressing that James Shields would be the fourth best starter for Detroit by this measure.

And now this chart!

Collins and Herrera give me a sad.

Here are the most effective pitch types in the division (by Fangraphs pitch type values):

Fastball: Max Scherzer 17.7 runs above average
Slider: Justin Masterson 14.7 RAA
Curve: James Shields 3.9 RAA
Changeup: Chris Sale 9.0 RAA

Turning to the batsmen, here are the most productive in the division so far:

Miguel Cabrera: kind of good? Tigers all up in the top of this chart too. You know how awesome Alex Gordon is? There are four Tigers above him. Encouraging to see Hosmer's name though.

And also this chart!

Oh Moose. That is the lowest WPA for a batter in all of MLB, and if you include pitchers, only Joe Blanton of the Angels has hurt his team's chances of winning more than Moustakas. Prospects will break your heart.

In conclusion, all of the teams in the division not named Tigers don't really need to bother showing up for the rest of the year.

2012 Royals In Review

 It was a bad year. Good night folks!

The starting pitchers seem to get the lion's share of the blame for the Royals poor record, but the offense was equally at fault. Combine the starters and relievers performance as measured by win probability added, and the arms come out looking a whole lot better than the bats:

But, yes, the starters were a problem. Here's how stark the difference was between the starters and relievers by WPA:

Notice that the hitters and starters come out with almost the exact same win probability added.

While that is a huge spread between the starters and relievers, it's not that unusual. Three AL teams had a larger difference in WPA between their relievers and starters (Twins, Orioles, and Indians). (Only the Tigers, Angels, and White Sox starters posted more WPA than their bullpens. Only the Mariners and Angels bullpens had negative WPA.)

The bullpen was only fifth in the AL in WPA, but they led the loop in fWAR. Part of that comes from being used so much thanks to the weak rotation. The bullpen was only fifth in K% and ninth in BB%, but limited homers better than any other AL 'pen. Their 7.3 fWAR was the highest in team history and resulted in the fourth time the Royals bullpen has led the league in fWAR:

As for the rotation, they posted the fourth worst adjusted FIP in team history with an even worse adjusted ERA:

Maybe the less said about the rotation the better.

The offense was fourth in the AL in batting average and stole bases pretty well but struggled to score runs. If this were the 1970s or prior, that might be confusing, but of course the Royals were bad in the areas that actually correlate to scoring runs: Getting on base and hitting for power.

This chart shows the team rank in various offensive categories (I've explained or linked to explanations of some of the stats in the caption):

ISO, wOBA, wRC+, BsR=base-running of the non stealing variety, SBr = (.2 x SB)+(-.4 x CS), WPA

It's kind of amazing they had the lowest homerun, walk, and strikeout rates. They loved to put the ball in play. If it's true that former hitting coach Kevin Seitzer's philosophy focused on hitting for average, I'm glad they let him go. It's ironic considering Seitzer was one of the best on-base guys in team history as a player.

Here's a similar chart for the pitchers:

ERA-, FIP-, xFIP-, OPS=opponents OPS, WPA, QS=percentage of games with a quality start, GmSc=game score average

A not great but not terrible K rate, a terrible walk rate, and a good home runs against rate led to a middle of the pack FIP but only a tenth place finish in runs allowed.

Moving on to the confusing world of defense:

"Eff" is defensive efficiency, which is a simple measure of what percentage of balls in play the defense turned into outs. The Royals were at 68.9%, worst in the AL. The fact that UZR and DRS rate the Royals a little better suggested to me that spacious Kauffman Stadium suppresses defensive efficiency. Except Baseball Prospectus has a park adjusted defensive efficiency...and the Royals are still last. So the Royals were at best mediocre on defense and possibly really terrible. I felt good whenever a ball was hit to the left side of the field and nervous when it was hit to the right side.

The end!

Painfully Useless Royals Doubleheader Trivia

• The Royals have played the Rangers in seven doubleheaders in Kansas City. Texas won the first game of the first of those doubleheaders on July 2, 1972. Since then, the Royals have gone 13-0.

• The Royals and Yankees have hooked up in 12 doubleheaders, but only one of them was played in KC.

• The Royals have played more doubleheaders against Oakland than any other team (24).

• 1996 and 2011 are the only years in which the Royals have played zero doubleheaders.

• Between June 16-20, 1969, the Royals played three doubleheaders, and no singleheaders.

• Five back-to-back doubleheaders in club history:
September 21 (vs OAK) and 22 (vs WAS), 1970
September 25 (@ WAS) and 26 (vs WAS), 1971
July 15 (@ CHI) and 16 (@ CHI), 1976
September 14 (@ OAK) and 15 (vs OAK), 1977
August 13 (@ DET) and 14 (@ MIL), 1983

• The Royals have played 215 twin bills, 110 on the road, 105 at home.

• The Royals have played well in doubleheaders with a record of 232-198 (.540). They are 120-95 in first games and 112-103 in second games.

Royal Doubles

Billy Butler has slowed down in his pursuit of the Royals single-season home run record, but Alex Gordon has a good shot to capture a less glamorous team record: doubles in a season. Hal McRae has held the team mark with 54 since 1977. Gordon is up to 44 and is on pace for 56. Here is a graph of McRae's and Gordon's doubles totals by game:

And while we're talking about Royals doubles, here are the top doubles hitters in team history:

Rk	Player	2B
1	George Brett	665
2	Hal McRae	449
3	Frank White	407
4	Amos Otis	365
5	Mike Sweeney	297
6	Willie Wilson	241
7	Joe Randa	223
8	Billy Butler	204
9	David DeJesus	187
10	Freddie Patek	182
11	Alex Gordon	176
12	Mike Macfarlane	174
13	Carlos Beltran	156
14	Johnny Damon	156
15	Mark Teahen	146

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Play Index Tool Used

Generated 8/29/2012

Mark Teahen looms disturbingly large in team hitting history. Billy and Alex are already looking good from the counting perspective (they might be 8-9 in team history by the end of the year), and their rates look even better. Out of the 76 humanoids with 1000+ plate appearances for the Royals, here are the hitters with the most doubles per 550 PA:

Player	PA	2B	2B/550
Mark Quinn	1166	72	34.0
Mark Grudzielanek	1432	88	33.8
Hal McRae	7362	449	33.5
Billy Butler	3392	204	33.1
Alex Gordon	2906	174	32.9
Jeff Francoeur	1141	66	31.8
George Brett	11625	665	31.5
Mike Sweeney	5278	297	30.9
Clint Hurdle	1240	69	30.6
Wally Joyner	2173	120	30.4

Jeff Francoeur ya'all!

Graph of Billy Butler's Home Run Pace Compared To '85 Balboni

114 games into the 2012 Royals season, Billy Butler has 24 ding dongs. In 1985, Steve Balboni had 25 at that point in the season. Balboni was on pace for 35.5, and finished with 36, the infamously pitiful team record. Billy is now on pace for 33.8.

Royals WPA at the Break

(Click for WPA primer.)

Closers get a boost from the opportunity to get the last out regularly, so Broxton's number is a little inflated

The only surprises for me are Alex and Yuni. Alex's wOBA is .339 to Yuni's .296, but Yuni has come through at better times. That's an understatement - in whatever Fangraphs defines as high leverage situations, Alex has a wOBA of .212 compared to Yuni's .448. I wish I could totally dismiss that as a small sample fluke, but Alex has a career-long, large sample problem with high leverage. Here are both players' wOBA in low, medium and high leverage situations this year and for their careers:

2012	Low	Med	High
Alex	0.343	0.361	0.212
Yuni	0.236	0.332	0.448
career
Alex	0.326	0.368	0.284
Yuni	0.282	0.304	0.315

AL Central WPA Leaders & Trailers at the Break

Every other Central team has at least one hitter and pitcher with a higher WPA than the Royals leader. Billy leads Royals hitters with .9 WPA.

AL Central's Best Bats In The First Half

Billy Butler, the Royals most productive hitter so far, comes in at only 10th in the division. Every other AL Central team has at least one hitter with more weighted runs created, and the Tigers and White Sox each have three hitters above Billy.

AL Central Starting Pitching At The Break

Since I expected the Royals fortunes to depend heavily on their starting pitching this season, I've been keeping a close eye on how it has been comparing in the AL Central so far this year. (That expectation hasn't exactly been correct of course. The Royals offense has sputtered and has been almost as much of a problem as the starters have been.) Here's how the teams are stacking up at the All-Star break:

The Tigers and White Sox starters have been in a separate class all season long and have pretty similar numbers across the board. The White Sox rank either first or second in every category on my chart. The Royals starters have been bad, but the Twins numbers are really painful. If xFIP is any indication, they've been terribly unlucky in addition to being bad. Their win probability added is the craziest number on the chart.

Here's a look at the WAR of the individual pitchers in the Central who have made at least five starts. The number is the average of the pitcher's fWAR and rWAR, meaning it meets in the middle of Fangraphs' FIP-based number and Baseball Reference's runs allowed-based figure.

The Tigers and White Sox each have four pitchers in the top 10. Hard to believe the Twins have THREE pitchers rating worse than Jonathan Sanchez. I miss Felipe Paulino, you guys.

Here is a graph looking at the game scores of Royals starters. The thin line is every game score, and the thicker line is a rolling five game average:

Keeping in mind 50 is average, they were pretty terrible for the first 31 games, then found a completely acceptable level of mediocrity for a pretty good stretch before stumbling over the last 10 games or so.

One more. This one is the game-by-game accumulation of win probability from each Royals start:

It tells the same story as the previous chart: terrible start, a leveling off, then awful again leading into the break. Overall a definite downward trend pointing to lots of losses.

The Royals needed their starters to stay healthy and have a couple of break-out performances for there to have been any hope of contention this year. Neither of those things has happened.

Finally, from Fangraphs' pitch values, here are the nastiest of a few pitch types in the division:

Fastball: Justin Verlander, 16.7 runs above average

Slider: Drew Smyly, 6.9 RAA

Cutter: Gavin Floyd, 5.3 RAA

Curve: Justin Verlander, 8.0 RAA

Change up: Bruce Chen, 9.7 RAA

Historical Royals Attendance

The four seasons played at Municipal Stadium at the beginning of the Royals existence were not well attended with a four year average just over 10,000 per game and the all time yearly low of 8,772 in '70. The move to Royals Stadium plus a pretty good club boosted attendance to 16,609 in '73. Another big increase came in '76 on the strength of a burgeoning powerhouse on the field. At 20,744, it was the first season the team surpassed the 20K mark in a season. Attendance remained strong for a long time, peaking in 1989 at 30,589 (the only season over 30K), and did not fall below 20K until the aftermath of the strike in 1995. The team has of course been terrible since then, so attendance has only marginally increased ever since. There was a small spike to 22,249 in 2003 thanks to a winning team, and another small boost to 22,196 in 2009 after renovations were made to Kauffman Stadium.

Another, possibly more revealing way to look at attendance is to compare it to the MLB yearly average. This paints a slightly different picture, one where KC fans are actually turning out relatively less now than they were even during the expansion years at Municipal. Attendance stayed above average between '76-'90 but has dipped far below ever since. The low point was 2005 and '06 when attendance was just 55% and 54% of the MLB average. (With the teams we were asked to watch those years, Royals fans can hardly be blamed.) The last three seasons combined have produced an average of 21,143, about 70% of the MLB average 30,172. 

Cardinals Join '87 Twins In Rare Club

The sloppy pitching and defense on display for much of the 2011 playoffs flew in the face of the old cliche "pitching wins championships."

The 2011 Cardinals squeaked in as the NL wild card despite giving up 4.3 runs a game in the regular season in a year when the NL average was 4.1. Their offense scored 4.7 a game, carrying them to 90 wins. Their pitching and defense did not step up in the playoffs either - they allowed the same 4.3 runs per game in the postseason. The already good offense kicked it up a notch to the tune of 5.6 runs/game.

Not park adjusting, and rounding to the tenth decimal, the 2011 Cards join the '87 Twins as the only champs to have had below-average run prevention in the regular season.

Run Scoring & Prevention By World Series Champs

I have posted charts plotting Royals seasons by team ERA+ and OPS+ in the past, charts that were inspired by posts on Bay City Ball and The Hardball Times. The Hardball Times piece by Paapfly was especially interesting to me. It seemed to show that pitching was an absolute must to win a championship, but many sub-par offensive teams have managed to win it all. This seemed to prove the adage that pitching is indeed what wins championships. Here is my version of Paapfly's chart plotting champions by their team ERA+ and OPS+:

I recently found myself reading through the comments on Paapfly's post, and then on a thread about the article on Tangotiger's The Book Blog. Commenters pointed out several flaws with using OPS+ and ERA+ as the measure of a team's offense and defense. Paapfly himself took those suggestions to heart and wrote a second piece in which he made some adjustments but still used ERA+ and OPS+.

Several commenters mentioned runs scored and runs allowed would be the way to measure. And of course, nothing gets closer to the heart of offense and defense than runs. As far as I know, no one took the suggestion and plotted the World Series winners by runs scored and allowed. I have done that below, comparing each championship team's RS/G and RA/G to their respective league's seasonal average. There is no park adjustment, something that would probably improve the accuracy a bit, but the raw numbers were good enough for me. It does tell a different story than OPS+ and ERA+:

This restores a little sanity on the offensive side, shoving the vast majority of winners into the upper right quadrant of above average in run scoring and prevention. It does uphold the importance of run prevention, given that the 1987 Twins are the only champs to allow more runs per game than the league average. (The 2011 Cardinals will try to be the second.) Those Twins are even more freakish since they were only an average offensive team. There are seven teams that won it all with a below average regular season offense (1916 Red Sox, 1924 Senators, 1965 Dodgers, 1969 Mets, 1985 Royals, 1995 Braves, and 2005 White Sox). All seven of those teams had superb run prevention. The 1985 Royals are the worst offensive champs by this measure, scoring just 4.2 a game in a year when the AL average was 4.6.

The average champion has scored .5 runs per game above average, and allowed .6 fewer runs per game, perhaps suggesting a slight edge to teams who excel at run prevention more than run scoring. But the vast majority of the time, it is both pitching and hitting that win championships.

Joe Posnanski:

..."Pitching wins championships." I don't think that's quite right. I think there are more great offensive teams that have won the World Series than great pitching teams. It's just that most of the great offensive teams also had at least good pitching. The 1992 Toronto Blue Jays heavily leaned offense -- they finished ninth in ERA. But that's pretty unusual.

On the other hand, several of the best pitching teams to win the World Series -- and the 2010 Giants fit right in -- had subpar offenses (at least until the playoffs). So I don't know that it's right to say that pitching wins championships. But I do think it's fair to say that you have a better chance to win a championship with great pitching and terrible hitting than the other way around.

WPA Watch

Before his crazy hot streak in June, Alcides Escobar was on his way to setting a new low in Royals win probability added. He looks to have saved himself from replacing Neifi Perez's mark from 2002.

Kyle Davies likely won't get enough playing time to catch Jose Lima's 2005 record for worst WPA season by a Royals pitcher, but game for game, he's right on pace.

Royals Bullpen Usage

Flip Flop A's Standings Through The Years