Be careful O' baseball scribes.
Your carefully worded musings about the domination of the Kansas City Royals in the American League All-Star Game voting are becoming less veiled, revealing your true disdain for the"unconventional", "unprecedented" "phenomenon" unfolding before our collective eyes.
Those aforementioned descriptors are suddenly sounding a lot more like, "silly", "undeserved", "crazy", and "stupid". We get it. We see how you really feel about it.
Okay, let's go down that road. Let's use those terms and that thought process. And by the end of this post I will agree with you. But first, allow me the discretion to illustrate how roads can curve and take us to unintended places.
Derek Jeter. He was voted into the All-Star Game for the American League last year. His stats weren't bad (certainly not "crazy" bad like those of 2015 Omar Infante), but there were others who were having much better and more deserving years, statistically speaking.
But we all know that every year there are many players voted into the ASG because of reputation, not because of their statistical success. Because they are popular. Because of what Derek Jeter has meant to the game throughout his career he earned the right to start in his last ASG. We could all come up with numerous arguments why certain players were more deserving than others. And some of the disparities and injustices have been downright egregious.
So, the identity of the MLB All-Star Game and its associated fan voting has always been some sort of amalgamation of statistical success, popularity, sentiment, and the emotional attachment of a fan base with certain players.
But what if I had ended that last sentence with the word "a team", instead of "certain players"? What if a particular TEAM had created an unprecedented phenomenon collectively instead of through the traditional individual route.
Roads, like baseballs, do curve. And they both end up in unexpected places occasionally. Here's where my curvy road leads:
On the field, in the most recent team tournament style playoff, the Kansas City Royals didn't just win the American League Pennant, they went undefeated. Without blemish. That's "crazy" good by any standard. That's the first statistical criteria I will use. Also on the field, including the final 8 games of the 2014 regular season playoff race, the postseason, and the first 60 games of the 2015 season, the Royals have 52 wins. The next best AL teams are in the low 40's. That's a pretty large gap in TEAM performance over the last eighty some games (52-31 record for the Royals), or about half a season.
Here's another couple of twists in the road - the Royals did all of this without a single "All-Star" starting pitcher. There wasn't one on the 2014 All-Star team and there won't be one on the 2015 AL squad either...and their batters were last in the league in 2014 in home runs as well - "phenomenal". Now, their bullpen has been so good that it is almost "silly". I mean, like, historically good. But relief pitchers are chosen for the ASG by the managers, not the fans. And the AL ASG roster only included one Royal last year and will include only one at the most this year - "undeserved".
So, that leaves the position players. That crazy bunch of characters who act more like fun-loving college players than major leaguers. Oh sure, they had 4 gold glove finalists and finished with 3 gold gloves and the platinum glove for the AL. And they could legitimately end up with 6 finalists this year (can you really argue against Cain and Moustakas being in that conversation)? Obviously, that would be "unprecedented". And the combination of Rios and Dyson in your other outfield position? Wow. Defensive stats are still stats, and should be included in All-Star evaluating.
Let's tie all of this together with another Derek Jeter reference. When I Googled, "Jeter play against A's", the first result is from MLB.com. The caption reads, "Jeter's iconic flip" and the narrative continues by calling it one of the most memorable plays in baseball history. It was a defensive play. It was instinctual, it was memorable in how it was different from anything you had seen in a long time.
Now take that thought and extrapolate it out to a team you saw in the postseason last year that played the game differently than you had seen in a long time. A team that won games differently from any team you had seen in a long time - flying around the field and the bases, celebrating like a bunch of little leaguers, and transforming a city that had endured very bad baseball for almost 30 years - "unconventional". It captured the hearts of many baseball fans across the country. Perhaps that is why there hasn't been a national outpouring of voting against the Royals, as some in the media have called for.
You see, some believe that if a guy in Kansas City can be smart enough to serve some of the world's best bar-b-que out of a gas station, then surely there could be a pimple-faced geek living in a Kansas City basement of his mother's house who would be intelligent enough to invent some type of algorithm which can manipulate the system and vote in all the Royals position players. There's probably also a secret plan to have a local hypnotist convince Ned Yost that he should use 5 guys out of his bullpen, announced to the ASG pitching roster, to cover the entire game 2 innings at a time. Yet MLB officials have said they have found no improprieties in the voting. And keep in mind that 80% of the voting last year was done online.
Even if all the Royal starters that get voted in strikeout in their only at-bat before getting replaced by "more deserving" all-stars, there will still be plenty of time for the latter to get the lead and have Wade Davis come in and get the save. But what if, just maybe, all the KC Royals fans, both lifers and recent adoptees nationwide want to see if this entire scrappy bunch of "team above all - whatever it takes" players attempt to do what they did not so long ago...turn the impossible into the improbable, into the unconventional, into the "holy crap, look at this", into the phenomenal.
Now, wouldn't that be just "silly", "crazy", "stupid" fun?
