If you hated the the 2014 Braves, you might love the 2014 World Series. The Braves drove us to distraction and brought “termination” to Frank Wren, the general manager who built them, by swinging big, missing big and spitting the bit in September. The World Series matches teams that are foreign to what baseball in general and the Braves in specific had become — homer-dependent and whiff-crazy.
Kansas City hit the fewest home runs (95) among 30 big-league teams. The Royals also drew the fewest walks. To a sabermetrician, homers and walks constitute two of what’s known as the Three True Outcomes of a plate appearance. The Royals weren’t just bad at two of the TTO’s — they were the absolute worst. So how in the name of Kenesaw Mountain Landis are they four wins from a championship?
Because they were the best at not striking out, strikeouts being the third True Outcome. Every other team in baseball whiffed at least 1,104 times. (The Braves K’ed 1,369 times, fourth-most in the majors.) The Royals struck out 985 times. They didn’t hit the ball over the wall very often, but they did put it in play.
They had the fourth-best batting average (.263) in baseball. The lack of walks reduced their on-base percentage to .314, exactly the major-league average, and their below-average slugging percentage (.376) limited their run total to 651, which was 14th-best. Still, the Royals grasped what they were and didn’t try to be more.
Down 3-1 against the White Sox on Sept. 15, they scored twice in the eighth and once in the ninth to win via two infield singles, two doubles, two stolen bases, three wild pitches and an error. The Chicago radio crew was laughing sardonically at this fortuitous triumph of Small Ball — I listened driving home after another Braves loss — but who’s laughing now?
The Royals led the majors in stolen bases with 153, the stolen base having become a curio in the clout-or-out era. They didn’t bunt as often as manager Ned Yost’s numbers-crunching critics would suggest — the Royals had 33 sacrifice bunts, 22nd-most in the majors — but they ran fast and often and put pressure on a defense.
Trailing the wild-card game 7-3 in the eighth against Oakland’s estimable Jon Lester, they bunched three singles and two walks, stole four bases and scored three runs, the last coming on a wild pitch. They tied the game in the ninth. They won in the 12th on two hits that couldn’t quite be fielded by Josh Donaldson, the best third baseman in the majors. They haven’t lost since.
The San Francisco Giants, who grace the Fall Classic every even-numbered year, aren’t as extreme as the Royals. The Giants had the 17th-most homers and the 17th-fewest strikeouts. They’ve hit only .244 with an OBP of .313 in the postseason, but over six dizzying games San Fran contrived to score 12 of its 22 runs without a run-scoring hit. And then, having gone six games without a home run, they smacked three to clinch the NLCS.
Since sports administrators tend to be copycats, the sight of the speedy-but-punchless Royals and the seize-the-moment Giants in the World Series could spawn imitation. It’s unclear how much would be possible or even advisable. Neither team was good enough to win its division. Had they lost their play-in games, we wouldn’t have given either a second thought.
Should other clubs reinvent themselves because two teams, neither of which won 90 regular-season games, got hot in October? Will organizations question whether the take-a-slew-of-pitches method instituted by the Yankees in the late ’90s and popularized by “Moneyball” has, as ESPN Insider Doug Mittler suggests, outlived its usefulness? (The Giants were 24th in pitches seen per plate appearance; the Royals were 27th.)
Will that be the next wave of baseball thinking? Swing early, make contact, hit singles, steal bases, get lucky? We can’t argue that this month of Small Ball hasn’t worked — the Royals and Giants are 16-2 in playoff games — but we probably shouldn’t call it the wave of the future. Maybe the tweak of the future. Maybe.
