Royals’ secret to staying alive — don’t strike out
Key for KC was high rate of singles, pieced-together runs
The Zombie Cockroaches.
It sounds like the title of a classic horror movie or a new punk band, and it would be an unflattering nickname in most contexts. But for the 2015 Kansas City Royals, who won the World Series this year in historic fashion, it’s a perfect description.
The Royals are the first team to win three World Series games which they trailed in the eighth inning or later. It was a script they followed throughout their remarkably resilient postseason run, in which eight of their 11 wins were comebacks — seven from multi-run deficits, another MLB record.
Their win expectancy — the percentage likelihood of a comeback calculated from the historical data of more than a century of games — was 25 per cent or lower in all eight of their comebacks, while they clung to a less-than-10-per-cent chance of winning in three of their playoff victories.
They scored a whopping 40 runs in the eighth inning or later, while no other team scored more than five.
In other words, the Royals were MLB’s walking dead — ceaseless and insatiable — and they may be remembered as the greatest comeback team in baseball history.
But while they have been rightly praised for their dogged persistence, spirited determination and gutsy play, what if there was a more tangible explanation for their indomitability?
The Royals played great defence and boasted a top-notch bullpen, but if you had to point to a single trait in which they clearly separated themselves this season, it was their ability to put the ball in play.
In an era when batters are striking out more often than ever before, the Royals simply aren’t. Or rather, they aren’t nearly as often as other teams.
The last eight seasons have seen the highest strikeout rates in baseball history, with each year since 2008 setting a record. In 2014, the league’s overall strikeout rate was 20.4 per cent — the first time the number rose north of 20 per cent — and that mark was matched this season.
The Royals, however, struck out in just 15.9 per cent of their plate appearances, well below the league average and more than two percentage points lower than any other team. Theirs wasn’t a historically low strikeout rate in and of itself — it wasn’t even the lowest of the last five years — but in comparison to the rest of the league, it was otherworldly.
Fangraphs’ Jeff Sullivan looked at the Royals’ strikeout rate this season relative to the era and found them to have led the league by the greatest margin since 1950, declaring them among the best contact-hitting teams in baseball history.
With better pitching in the postseason, the Royals’ strikeout rate was a little higher — 17.2 per cent — but their separation from the pack was even more distinct, with the other nine playoff teams combining to strike out in 26.3 per cent of their post-season plate appearances.
It was clearly a key facet of the Royals’ rallying offence as they staved off defeat by stringing together singles and piecing together runs with an assembly line offence. In the World Series, the Royals hit .202 in twostrike counts, nearly 100 points better than the New York Mets.
The sharp rise in strikeouts is attributed to a number of factors: most notably that pitchers are throwing harder and better than ever before, but also a larger called strike zone and the destigmatization of strikeouts among both players and front offices.
While limiting the whiffs has worked for the Royals, striking out is not necessarily correlative to a lousy offence. The league’s two most strikeout-prone teams — the Chicago Cubs and Houston Astros — both made the playoffs and respectively scored the 15th-most and sixth-most runs this season. With runners on, a strikeout is obviously preferable to a ground-ball double-play.
But in any industry, success breeds imitation, so given the Royals’ recent success — not only winning the World Series this year, but coming just a win short in 2014 — it will be interesting to see if other teams follow their lead by prioritizing the acquisition and development of highc-ontact hitters.
If the league’s strikeout rate declines next season for the first time in nearly a decade, we’ll have the zombie cockroaches to thank.