Marcus Williams is looking to write for a Baseball Site. If you are interested in Marcus’s work, leave a comment for him. Here is an article he wrote for Baseball Musings on the fall of the Kansas City Royals:
The 2016 season saw the end of six straight years of improvement from the Royals. Having moved from 65 wins in 2009 to 95 wins in 2015, Kansas City fell back to .500 in 2016.
This fall for the Royals wasn’t exactly unexpected, though , when looking at what happened in years past and then this year. Instead, KC was perhaps a team on the precipice of falling back to earth sooner rather than later.
That time came in 2016, along with a slew of injuries to some of the team’s most important players. Losing an All-Star is hard to recover from; losing multiple All-Stars for extended stretches is a death sentence to a team’s depth and its chances of putting together extended winning streaks.
On the offensive side, Lorenzo Cain didn’t accumulate enough at-bats to qualify for the batting title because of missed time, though he was arguably the team’s best hitter once again. That final point wasn’t hard to accomplish as no one topped 1.7 offensive WAR, which is why Cain was in the discussion despite fewer than 400 at-bats and a .747 OPS. The injury to Mike Moustakas sapped far more. He barely cracked 100 ABs in 2016 and essentially had time to do nothing more than sock a few home runs. He had season-ending knee surgery back in June.
Alex Gordon injured himself in the same collision that wrecked Moustakas’ knee. Gordon finished the year with 445 at-bats but had a pretty horrendous season at the plate. Whether because of the injury or not, he had his worst season in six years, and that was not an isolated incident. All of Alcides Escobar, Kendrys Morales and Eric Hosmer seemed to take major steps back as hitters as well. Outside of home run totals, which were up across baseball, this trio underachieved.
But even more so than offensively, Kansas City had real issues pitching this year. Wade Davis found himself on the disabled list as long as anyone of note not named Moustakas. Though Kelvin Herrera filled in admirably, the loss hurt everyone moving down the list. And the starting pitching was just plain bad.
The starters had never been areas of strength for the Royals even during their AL crowns, but the rest of the team was so good it helped to cover up the weakness. This year, those areas of strength wilted and the starting pitching was exposed. No starter had an ERA below 3.50 and only Danny Duffy and Ian Kennedy were even serviceable options for the team this year. This led to KC having the 12th-ranked starter ERA and the third-most walks of the 15 AL teams.
The past two seasons, there had been signs that Kansas City had overachieved to reach the heights it was at. In the postseason, especially in 2014, KC simply got hot, as any team is capable of doing in a short sample. According to the Pythagorean expectation formula, the Royals were more of a 90-win team in 2015 (as opposed to a league-leading 95 wins) and an 84-win team the year prior when they won 89 games and secured a wildcard berth. Passing expectations by close to five wins each of the past two seasons is impressive and somewhat fluky.
This was the year expectations reset a little bit, though the team still outplayed its expected win-loss total by around five wins . It was inevitable that Ned Yost and company would come back to earth in their play to something more representative of their run scoring and pitching abilities. Defense and timely hitting can only take a team so far when the other facets are not up to snuff.
from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2eWQGJb
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