Looking forward

As the regular season comes to a close, the Royals shift their focus to the playoffs. The rotation is set, Bobby Witt Jr. wins the batting title and happy anniversary to the greatest game.

The final game of a triumphant regular season, a 4-2 victory over the Atlanta Braves, had an enormous ripple effect across the game.

Most important (to our interests, at least), was the fact that the win, coupled with a Detroit Tigers loss to the Chicago White Sox, means the Royals secured the five seed and will now travel to Baltimore for the Wild Card round. The Tigers will visit Houston.

The AL side of the bracket is all set.

The Royals win, coupled with the Mets and Diamondbacks winning, mean the Mets and the Braves have unfinished business. It’s the chaos scenario where the two teams will play a doubleheader on Monday to determine who gets in. Right now, the winner of the first game qualifies. Can you imagine a team punching their ticket for the postseason and then having to come back about 30 minutes later for another game? They’ll have to as the loser of the first game can still qualify if they win the second game. What a bizarre and potentially fraught scenario. Meanwhile, the Diamondbacks will be watching and hoping one of the teams goes for a sweep that they don’t really need. Whew.

I’m good with this because of, you know, chaos. And because two games on Monday sounds like a good deal to me. Rob Manfred has robbed us of any potential game 163s, with his convoluted tiebreaker scenarios, but somehow we get bonus baseball on Monday.

That’s just an appetizer, though. The main course comes on Tuesday in Baltimore. The Royals are back in the playoffs.

I’m a bit agnostic over the Royals seed in this tournament. You have to win three series to get to the World Series and each team will present challenges. I’m just delighted the Royals are in the damn thing. Houston has three really good starters set to take the mound in their Wild Card series. Baltimore has two. The Orioles didn’t play well in the season’s second half, but did take two of three from the Yankees in the last week of the season before finishing off the year with a sweep over the corpse formerly known as the Minnesota Twins. If the Royals get past the Orioles, they’ll face the Yankees in the ALDS. I would’ve preferred Cleveland.

The Royals rotation will be what we’ve all speculated since this was a possibility. Cole Ragans gets the ball on Tuesday. He’ll be followed by Seth Lugo in game two. Michael Wacha has the assignment in the third game if it gets that far.

Baltimore has only announced Corbin Burnes as their game one starter. I think it’s safe to assume Zach Eflin will get the ball in game two.

It will be the third time this year Ragans and Burns have faced off. The first game, back on April 3 was a gut-punch loss where Ragans outdueled Burnes. In that one, Ragans threw 6.1 innings of one-hit ball with seven strikeouts. The Royals touched Burnes for nine hits over 5.2 innings, scoring twice, with Salvador Perez driving in both. Then, the bullpen faltered for the Royals with the Orioles walking off against Will Smith and a 4-3 win.

The next time the two met, on April 20, it was Ragans’ worst start of the year. He lasted just 1.2 innings and allowed seven runs. The Royals bats chipped away, though, but still fell short in a 9-7 defeat.

It’s not often two starters on teams that aren’t in the same division square off three times in a single season anymore. Kind of old timey baseball. I dig it.

With the victory on Sunday, the Royals became one of six teams in the 162-game era of major league baseball to improve their win total by 30 games. From the Royals PR department:

I think among those of us who follow this team closely, the consensus was that the Royals could be about 20 wins better than 2023. Even that would’ve been a fine turnaround. That they went 30 (!) wins over their total last year is, as you can tell from the list above, truly something special.

Plus, a jump like this isn’t necessarily a guarantee for the postseason.

The 1999 Diamondbacks lost in the NLDS.
The 1989 Orioles did not make the playoffs.
The 1993 Giants did not make the playoffs.
The 2008 Rays lost in the World Series.
The 2022 Orioles did not make the playoffs.

See? Even though the expanded postseason was around in 2022, the Orioles who were 31 wins better that year, still fell short.

September 30. Happy 10th anniversary to the greatest baseball game you ever saw. My scorecard from that night:

It’s a bit of a mess, but that night was crazy. My penmanship isn’t great even under the best circumstances. Ten years later and seeing that still makes me buzz. Do you notice anything missing from the scorecard?

Not that there was any uncertainty, but with his 1-4 day on Sunday, Bobby Witt Jr. locked up the American League (and ML) batting crown. Batting average has been heavily reevaluated in this sabermetric era, but there’s still something mythical around the batting title. Maybe that’s my George Brett-era bias talking, but it’s just kind of cool for a player to lead the league. It’s the fifth batting title in franchise history; the first since 1990. Brett had three and Willie Wilson had the other.

I don’t think I ever imagined this for Witt, a batting crown. I figured he would develop into a fine hitter. I hoped he would be an All-Star caliber of player. I never would’ve guessed him for batting champion. He finishes the year at .332/.389/.588. Those are straight-up superstar numbers.

In addition, he’s a member of the 30/30 club for the second year in a row. That’s 32 home runs and 31 steals. He scored 124 runs. He drove in 109. He hit 45 doubles. Eleven triples. And he only grounded into four double plays. Four!

Let’s focus for a moment on the extra-base hits. Witt set the franchise record this year for extra-base hits in a season with 88, two more than Hal McRae in 1977. He finished with 373 total bases which, also, is a franchise recorded. The old one was held by Brett who recorded 363 in 1979. The Stathead tool at Baseball-Reference is made for seasons like the one we witnessed from Bobby Witt Jr. At the end of the day on Sunday, I made my way over there for some fun.

First, I queried all players who finished a season with at least 40 doubles, 10 triples and 30 home runs. That’s been done 21 times. Get a load of these names.

I mean…that kind of takes your breath away. It’s easier to list the players on that list who aren’t in the Hall of Fame. It’s Nomar Garciaparra, Ripper Collins and Babe Herman.

And it’s been done twice now since 1949. Twice.

I was going to expand the search and add things like 100+ runs and 100+ RBIs, but looking above, I realized that would only cut out Garciaparra. Which in itself is incredibly mindblowing. Bobby Witt Jr. is the first player since Stan Musial in 1949 to collect at least 40 doubles, 10 triples, 30 home runs while scoring 100 or more runs and driving in over 100.

He’s one of five players to rack up those numbers while winning a batting title.

Then there’s this from the Royals PR department:

Witt Jr. is the second player ever to lead the Majors in batting average during a 30-homer, 30-steal season, and joins Mookie Betts, who went 32/30 and led MLB with a .346 batting average during his 2018 American League MVP season.

This is just an incredibly historic season from the Royals’ shortstop. (I’ll save the MVP discussion for after the postseason.) What a pleasure it was to watch on a daily basis. Truly special.

In his Substack on Saturday, Joe Posnanski noted that the Chicago White Sox “singlehandedly propped up perhaps the two best stories in baseball,” meaning the Royals and the Detroit Tigers. We’ve talked about this at length this season, the dreadfulness of the White Sox and the breaks that come with having such a terrible team in the division.

Here are the records of the four other Central Division teams against the White Sox this year:

Guardians — 8-3
Tigers — 10-3*
Royals — 12-1
Twins — 12-1

*Lost two meaningless games after the clinch.

While you could perhaps make the argument the White Sox have helped the Royals and the Tigers get to October, what do you say about the Twins? They have the same number of losses against the Sox as the Royals and Tigers.

Here’s a fun revisionist experiment. Let’s say for argument’s sake that the White Sox were bad, but not historically bad. As of this writing, there is one other team in baseball with 100 losses: The Miami Marlins. Here’s how they did against their division rivals this year:

Phillies — 6-7
Mets — 6-7
Braves — 4-9
Nationals — 2-11

That’s not what I expected when I looked up the numbers.

So for argument’s sake, let’s pretend that the White Sox went 5-8 against the Royals and Tigers and Twins. Each team gets four fewer wins in this hypothetical. Here are what the Wild Card standings would look like through Friday:

I take away a couple of things from this hypothetical: One, the AL is steeped in mediocrity. Apart from the division winners and the Orioles, who were nowhere near as good in the season’s second half as the first, there’s not much to separate the next tier of teams. We can pretty much drop them into this group. Two, while the Royals, Tigers and Twins have certainly benefitted from a historically bad White Sox team, perhaps they haven’t benefitted as much as we thought had Chicago been just ordinary bad. Again, you can take these hypotheticals and twist them in whichever direction you like. It’s not to be taken seriously. (Just like the White Sox.) Still…interesting? Disturbing? Not worth our time? You decide.

I’ll wrap today with another heartfelt thank you for subscribing and coming along with me through this amazing regular season. It’s been a pleasure to share this experience with you.

Looking ahead, the next couple of newsletters will have a guess as to how the Royals will roll with their roster ahead of this first series along with some analysis of the Orioles and what to watch for. Maybe some bold predictions. And whatever else comes to mind.

I’m no longer active on Twitter but have been posting on Bluesky, so if you’d like some in-game discussion, I can be found @craigbrownkc.bsky.social on that platform. I believe it’s open so you no longer need a code to sign up. And they have video!

Thanks for reading. Plenty more to come.