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The 2014-15 Kansas City Royals Were One Of Baseball’s Great Underdog Stories

Ijaz Ibrahim by Ijaz Ibrahim
January 19, 2021
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We love our sports forecasts here at FiveThirtyEight, but one of the things that make the games great is when a team comes along and takes prognosticators by surprise. So along with our Hall of Pretty Damn Good Players, we want to appreciate these unsung teams that nobody saw coming, in a series we’re calling the Little Teams That Could.

Before their magical playoff runs of 2014 and 2015, the Kansas City Royals had not exactly been a fixture in baseball’s postseason.

OK, talk about huge understatements …

Although K.C. had ranked among baseball’s best from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the 1990s and 2000s were not kind to the franchise. Team cornerstones like George Brett, Willie Wilson and Frank White gave way to stars who didn’t stay long — Carlos Beltrán, Johnny Damon, Zack Greinke, etc. — and a host of lesser players who filled in the gaps. After winning the 1985 World Series, Kansas City missed the playoffs for the next 28 seasons in a row. And worse than merely being mediocre, Kansas City was almost always straight-up bad. From 1997 through 2013, the Royals finished better than 20th in our final Elo rankings just three times (19th in 2000, 18th in 2008 and 14th in 2013).

The mid-2010s weren’t supposed to change that. Though an impressive prospect pipeline and a surprising 86-76 finish in 2013 had raised expectations some, Kansas City was not viewed as a serious contender going into 2014. FanGraphs gave K.C. just a 2.7 percent chance of making the World Series, and the Vegas odds implied only a slightly better 4.7 percent probability. With few household names (did Alex Gordon, James Shields and Salvador Pérez count?) and no recent history of playoff success to call upon, there was little reason to think the Royals would suddenly turn into a powerhouse.

The 2014-15 Royals were true long shots

Chances to make and win the 2014 and 2015 World Series for the Kansas City Royals, according to Las Vegas odds and FanGraphs’ statistical model

2014 Odds to…2015 Odds to…
Projection viaMake WSWin WSMake WSWin WS
Vegas oddsmakers*4.7%2.5%4.7%2.2%
FanGraphs2.71.22.20.9
Average3.71.93.41.6

*Implied probabilities are adjusted for the “cut” that bookmakers take on each bet. This tool can show you the implied probability of any odds

Sources: FanGraphs, Sports Odds History

And yet, the Royals started out steady in 2014 and exploded in the second half of the season — going an MLB-best 52-27 from July 22 onward (including playoffs). K.C. got an All-Star-level season (4.4 wins above replacement) from the late-blooming Lorenzo Cain in center field and an improved rotation, to go with manager Ned Yost’s core Royals formula: contact hitting, great defense, blazing speed and a lights-out bullpen. Kansas City made the playoffs for the first time since that 1985 championship and knocked off the A’s in an unforgettable wild-card game, then swept the Angels and Orioles to give themselves a perfect 8-0 postseason record en route to the World Series.

Granting that the postseason was expanded by an extra round in 2012, no team had ever won each of its first eight playoff games until the 2014 Royals visited the World Series, nor has it happened since. (The 1976 Cincinnati Reds won all seven of their postseason contests.) And they did it mostly out of nowhere. According to our Weighted Average Loss Total (WALT) metric, which looks at a team’s average losses per 162 games over the 20 preceding seasons — placing more emphasis on recent seasons — the Royals were the fourth-most-unsung pennant winner since the divisional era launched in 1969. And only one team in that span (the 1995 Cleveland Indians) had gone straight to the World Series on the heels of a longer playoff drought than Kansas City did in 2014.

The 2014 Royals’ World Series came out of nowhere

Most recent losses (as measured by our Weighted Average Loss Total metric) and longest playoff droughts for World Series teams, 1969-2020

Most avg. recent lossesLongest playoff droughts
YearTeamWALT*YearTeamPrev. App.Drought
1969Mets104.51995Indians195440 yrs
2008Rays97.42014Royals198528
2006Tigers93.82006Tigers198718
2014Royals92.01987Twins197016
1984Padres91.92002Angels198615
1991Braves90.81984Padres—15
1973Mets90.71982Cardinals196813
2015Royals90.31986Mets197312
1992Braves88.82007Rockies199511
1997Marlins88.71984Tigers197211
2003Marlins88.11976Yankees196411

*WALT looks at team’s average losses per 162 games over the 20 previous seasons, weighted for recency (i.e., one year ago gets a weight of 20, two years ago gets 19, and so forth until 20 years ago gets a weight of 1).

Source: Retrosheet

Though the Royals lost to the dynasty San Francisco Giants in the Fall Classic, they came about as close as a team can get to winning without hoisting the Commissioner’s Trophy — falling in seven games with the tying run stranded 90 feet away in the bottom of the ninth, after Gordon had delivered one of the most iconic near-game-changers in baseball history.

With that unfinished business in mind, Kansas City reloaded for another run in 2015. But despite coming off a World Series appearance, they carried only +3300 championship odds at the end of spring training, according to SportsOddsHistory.com — which was tied for just 18th-best in baseball. (After adjusting for the cut, +3300 odds would translate to a mere 2.2 percent chance of winning the World Series.) Since 1985, only two World Series teams were ever disrespected so much by the oddsmakers going into the following season: the fire-sale 1998 Florida Marlins (+8000) and the 1999 San Diego Padres (+5000).

Vegas didn’t believe in the Royals. It didn’t matter.

Longest preseason World Series odds for teams that had been to the previous World Series, 1985-2020

YearTeamPrev. SeasonPreseason WS OddsSeason Outcome
1998Florida MarlinsWon WS+8000No playoffs
1999San Diego PadresLost WS5000No playoffs
2015Kansas City RoyalsLost WS3300Won WS
2006Houston AstrosLost WS3000No playoffs
2015San Francisco GiantsWon WS2500No playoffs
2004Florida MarlinsWon WS2500No playoffs
2008Colorado RockiesLost WS2200No playoffs
2020Washington NationalsWon WS2000No playoffs
2012St. Louis CardinalsWon WS2000Lost LCS
2011Texas RangersLost WS2000Lost WS

Source: Sports Odds History

Most of the other teams on that list had good cause to be dismissed. The Marlins sunk to an abysmal 54-108 record a year after their 1997 championship, and the Padres fell to 74-88 after their 1998 World Series bid. But the Royals beat their odds yet again — this time, even more convincingly than before. They improved by six games in the standings, more than tripled their run differential from 2014 and had an MLB-high seven players named to the All-Star Game (thanks in part to some fun balloting shenanigans). Rather than regressing to the mean like most teams do after a meteoric rise, Kansas City just kept getting better.

(We should note that the statistical systems fared no better than Vegas in predicting the 2015 Royals — to the point that we wondered whether they had broken our beloved projection algorithms.)

And the Royals did it their way, playing small ball even as the rest of baseball moved away from that style. We can measure just how “Royals-y” the 2014-15 Royals really were by looking at their percentile rankings in contact rate, speed, and defensive and relief-pitching WAR, and adding them up to create what we’re calling an ESCOBAR Rating, after speedy shortstop Alcides Escobar (who perhaps most embodied the Royals’ brand of winning baseball). With an ESCOBAR of 397 (out of a possible 400), the 2015 Royals were indeed the Royals-iest team in baseball during the expansion era (since 1961), while the 2014 Royals’ 393 ESCOBAR ranks second on the list:

Who is the most Royals-y team of them all?

ESCOBAR* Ratings for MLB teams since 1961, based on leaguewide percentile grades in contact rate, speed, defense and bullpen WAR

Percentile Rankings
YearTeamPlayoffs?ContactSpeedDefenseBullpenESCOBAR Rating
2015RoyalsWon WS10097100100397
2014RoyalsLost WS10010093100393
2000RockiesNo playoffs971009797390
2013RoyalsNo playoffs979710097390
2001MarinersLost LCS979710086379
2002AngelsWon WS1009710083379
1976RoyalsLost LCS96969187370
2013RangersNo playoffs978683100366
2017IndiansLost LDS97868697366
1973OriolesLost LCS8710010078365
2003AngelsNo playoffs100838397362
1985YankeesNo playoffs968480100360
1985Blue JaysLost LCS849210084360
2005AngelsLost LCS97978679359
1976YankeesLost WS1007410083357
1967White SoxNo playoffs1005810095353
1969OriolesLost WS9657100100352
2017Red SoxLost LDS90729793352
1964White SoxNo playoffs957910074347
1966White SoxNo playoffs748910084347

*Efficiency Score for Contact rate, glOvework, Bullpen WAR And Running.

Ratings are out of a possible 400 (which would mean the team finished 1st in each category).

Sources: Fangraphs, Baseball-Reference.com

Armed with more talent than the year before — like starters Johnny Cueto and Edinson Vólquez, and all-purpose icon Ben Zobrist — the Royals thrived again in the 2015 postseason. They outlasted the Astros in the AL Division Series, sprinted past the favored Blue Jays in the ALCS and finally took care of the upstart Mets in a five-game World Series, coming from behind to force extra innings in the deciding game thanks to a heads-up, aggressive base-running gambit by first baseman Eric Hosmer:

That play — Hosmer’s Mad Dash, as ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian later immortalized it in this oral history — represented everything special about Kansas City’s playoff runs in 2014 and 2015. Nobody saw it coming, and by the time they did, it couldn’t be stopped. “That’s what I’m most proud of, how aggressive and fearless [Hosmer] was,” Yost said. “He was not afraid to make a mistake. He played to win. He saw a way to win the game. That is what we do here — we play to win.”

When the Royals scored five in the top of the 12th inning and shut down the Mets with lights-out closer Wade Davis a half-inning later, Kansas City had gone from an out-of-nowhere playoff oddity to world champions.

“The way the Royals defied the projections is almost without precedent,” my colleague Rob Arthur wrote at the time, noting that Kansas City was no fluke, either — its core simply began playing better all at once, maximizing the potential of its playing style (and, like most champions, excelling during the most important moments). It didn’t last beyond 2015 — K.C. is currently mired in a five-year postseason drought — but for two magical seasons, the Royals were one of the quintessential Little Teams That Could.

Sara Ziegler contributed research.

#Kansas #City #Royals #Baseballs #Great #Underdog #S

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