Swept �� at home by a f**** garbage team.
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Dayton was aided by having an extremely lucky couple
year run and being so fucking terrible for so long that he was able to draft decent talent. That all culminated into the 2 AL Championships and 1 WS Championship. Also add in having a Ned proof bullpen, maybe the best one ever.
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Houston did the same thing though, they tanked hard for high picks and hit on those picks but they continue to add talent to their system while winning, Royals didn't do that.
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And as always, look st the “talent” we traded away. A ton of shit. We didn’t give up anything. One could say, well: we HAD to trade away all that talent to win. We squeezed every drop we had in that system.
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You wanna know the difference? Houston knows how to develop those high picks. KC can't develop shit.
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And almost none of that talent developed anyways, so it's not like we'd be any better off if they had stayed. Montgomery, Reed, Finnegan, Lamb, etc. all hardly amounted to crap. How is it we were so awful through the late 90s and early 2000s but we were still able to find bonafide stars like Damon, Beltran, Dye, Sweeney, and later on Greinke? Despite the World Series win we've struggled miserably finding elite talent.
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It's kind of obvious our minor league developmental staff is not very good.
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It's not easy to go to two straight World Series. The Indians didn't do it. The Cubs didn't do it. Even the Astros didn't do it.

Acting like it was just pure luck and they didn't develop any talent is absurd. They won 86 games the year before the two pennants. That was a good baseball team, even though everyone wants to act like it was some giant fluke.
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I won't say it was a fluke, but I will argue we were extremely fortunate that the Red Sox and Yankees were both down during our run and Houston wasn't quite at their pinnacle yet. I'm not so sure the 2015 Royals would have competed for a World Series in the 2019 AL.
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Yeah, and it's a bit disingenuous to say there was something wrong with the Royals approach by comparing them to the team who has literally set the gold standard for tanking and player development.

The Royals biggest problem during their run was their struggle to develop pitching, and this was no secret to us at that time. But even still, Yordano, Duffy, Kelvin, Holland and Hoch all had critical performances in our 2014-2015 run. This should speak to just how deep our system was if we were still able to have players perform at this level from the biggest weakness in the organization.

The Royals were also able to help Moose, Cain and Gordo to radically re-design their plate approaches and even paired Cain with a track coach to address his chronic injury problems. With Gordo, not only did they give him the tools to "dominate", but also put him and Cain with fantastic outfield coaching that allowed them to become elite defensive players at their positions.

The Royals also wanted to fundamentally re-design Hos and Esky's swings and approaches (to make both swings shorter). They recognized the issues both players had at the plate, but if your future star prefers to take batting practice with his firefighter brother than MLB coaching, there's only so much you can do.

All of this shouldn't excuse GMDM for his moves 2018 onwards, but the Royals development should absolutely be lauded for 2014-2015, especially for the impact they made at the plate and on the defensive side of the diamond, the revisionism many Royals fans have now is very surprising.

Are we using a 2014-2015 baseball or a 2019 one?
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Even Wil Myers sucks. 9 career war in almost 7 seasons. That’s gotta he one of the worst performances by a top-5 prospect in the last 25 years
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The Royals internal scouting on him looks dead-on in retrospect.

K’s too much, defensive liability, and gets “bored” on the field.

The fact that Franmil got blocked by a combination of Hos and Myers on the Padres isn’t sitting well with a lot of Pads fans.
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They were the best team in baseball for the last couple months of that 86 win season.
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So well that they traded him because they thought he was terrible in the field.
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There were a few notable innovations or practices that led to the Royals’ resurgence under Moore and culminated in the pennants and title.

1) Commitment to draft, scouting, and paying large bonuses to guys outside the top round.

This was taken away by the hard slot. Moore’s staff did a bad job adjusting to the new normal, though it should be lauded for handling the 2013 draft in the way it did, which landed a current very productive player and the piece that enabled them to acquire Zobrist.

It took them a while, but it seems they finally adjusted, if the post-2016 drafts continue to trend the way they are. They have made a major shift in approach to high picks.

2) Emphasis on athleticism and speed on defense.

The Royals defense during that run was tremendously rangy and sure-handed and played really well to the ballpark dimensions.

In the past few years, teams started shifting at rates not seen before, which takes away a lot of the edge having plus natural defenders provides.

3) Bullpen depth and dominance. The Royals ability to shorten games WAS somewhat of a fortunate find... but once the effect was realized the team bought in hard. This has led to a bunch of teams copy-catting the approach and stockpiling multiple high octane bullpen arms.

4) Contact ability. Not every team has adopted this, but look at what the Astros did after 2015. They re-tooled their lineup to focus more on making contact and now have the hardest team to strike out in baseball. That approach gives an advantage in October (to be fair, the Giants were doing this first)

Those advantages have been caught up. That’s what markets do. The trick is finding the next market imbalance and exploiting that (or, Moneyball, in its purest form).

Are they doing that with all these college arms they drafted in 17 and 18? Perhaps.

Is Moore as good at his job as Jeff Luhnow? No, I wouldn’t argue he is. But the task Moore and his front office pulled off - considering the state of things when he took over and the financial constraints of the owner/market - deserves better than being relegated to pure luck.

I think Moore’s developmental system has at times been way too rigid. Fighting long toss and restricting guys from throwing sliders, or trying to square peg specific pitch types, for example. Bill Fischer is - thankfully - gone, and there has been a shift in those areas.

But even with that, i do think they’re still too old school. I’m not 100 percent bought into the idea of this front office getting them back to the WS. If they don’t become a contender again in 2021/22, I think we’ll see fresh blood (and be in much better shape to hire quality than before).

Luhnow is incredible. There’s not a GM in baseball that stacks up when compared to him. And hey, it’s not like he was part of the Royals staff, forced out acrimoniously, and then we realized he was the brain behind the throne the whole time (sorry, Cards fans).

If you compare Moore to GMs in similar situations, he stacks up fine. He isn’t the best, but he’s competent.

Tampa - Silverman isn’t quite as good as Friedman, but also didn’t have the benefit of years of top 5 picks. He’s better than Moore, though.

Pittsburgh - Huntington is a poor man’s Moore, and if you want to talk about a real trade fleecing, look at his Chris Archer deal.

Cincinnati - moore stacks up favorably here, too.

Seattle - Remember when Royals fans though Jack Z was so much better than Moore? Yeah, neither does Jerry diPoto

Cleveland - here’s another one where the front office has outperformed Moore and co.

Miami - it’s unfair, but Moore crushes their performance, just like about anyone would.

Milwaukee - most similar to KC, they’ve built winning teams the past few years and are contenders this year, but the pitching collapse threatens to shut the window without much to show for it.

Arizona - Dave Stewart was a disaster. They had a nice trade deadline yesterday, but it’s the first time I can think of anything really nice to say about the current regime.

And then there’s a long list of bigger market teams who haven’t been able to get over the same humps :

Angels
Orioles
Blue Jays
Nationals
Mets
Rangers
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