The New Moneyball Is Here

- Peter Keating

NEARLY 150 BASEBALL analysts, writers and bloggers across sports media forecast the AL Central this season, and barely half a dozen predicted the Royals would win their division, never mind the World Series. (Among the 88 analysts at ESPN—wait for it—three picked KC to win the Central.) And now that Kansas City has earned its first championship in 30 years, many of those same prognosticators are back to explain the deeper meaning of a team they failed to appreciate in the first place. If you watched the postseason, or you’ve been reading the post-postseason, you know the narrative: The Royals, a notoriously anti-sabermetric franchise, tossed aside decades of egghead advice and swung aggressively at everything they saw. They fouled off pitches relentlessly, slapped hits to all fields and took extra bases maniacally. It didn’t matter that they finished last in the league in walks and next to last in home runs; the Royals’ hustle enabled them to wear out opponents and stage comeback after comeback in the playoffs and World Series. The Royals are, as the headline of a story in the Kansas City Star read, “The Anti-Moneyball Team.” Or as Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci proclaimed: “Moneyball is dead.”