Royals in the playoffs!

Playoff baseball means many things. It means fans on their feet cheering during the fourth inning of Game 1. It means talk of pitching on three days rest. It means endless mid-inning pitching changes. It means commercials on Fox advertising postseason baseball during the postseason. Apparently, this season it also means many former Royals players contributing to their current team’s playoff runs.

Seriously, by my rough count, there were 15 former Royals who played for playoff teams this season. I’d imagine a few of these guys were left off their team’s postseason rosters, but 15 former players contributed to these contending teams at some point this season! Out of the 8 teams in the playoffs, only the Yankees do not have a former Royals player on their roster, but former Royals manager Tony Pena is a bench coach.

I didn’t research to see if any other team had this many former players in the playoffs. I would guess a team like the Pirates would have several, but since I’m not as familiar with the Bucs as I am with the Royals, the Royals are who I’m focusing on. 

Last season, the Royals had the top farm system according to Baseball America.* Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, and Wil Myers were all ranked in the top 10 of prospects overall. John Lamb and Mike Montgomery weren’t too far behind them either. Some of these young players have already started to make their presence felt on the major league roster, along with several other young players who were also reason why the farm system was so highly rated.

*And pretty much anyone else who does that type of rankings.

Anyway, I wanted to compare how all of the former Royals players compare to the young promising players who played for the Royals this year. Here’s a chart that shows the production of each former Royal for their current teams this season. Wilson Betemit’s statistics are from only his time spent with the Tigers this season. I excluded Matt Treanor’s 7 games played for the Rangers at the end of this season, but he was included in the count of 15 former Royals.

Obviously, traditional counting stats may not tell the full story about how well a player played, in perhaps a limited role. ERA+ and OPS+ are normalized stats that use 100 as the indicator for league average. Anything higher than 100 is above average. The WAR statistics were derived using Fangraph’s formula.

Overall, current Royals players match up favorably with former Royals, especially the hitters. Blanco and German were only role players for the Rangers, and the remaining middle infielders had about the same OPS+. I would take Escobar over Yuni any day because his defense is light years better. Yuni actually gets penalized for his defense in calculating his WAR. Ouch. Willie Bloomquist had slightly better numbers with twice as many plate appearances than Giavotella, but Gia is 10 years younger than Bloomquist, and is likely to improve. 

Johnny Damon has been a consistent batter for a long time. He would have had a great career had he stayed with the Royals. Still, I would take the production from the Royals outfield this season over Damon. Those three were good. Raul Ibanez, how did you convince the Phillies to let you play as much as you did?

Also, how did Ross Gload get 116 plate appearances? Yeah, I would take Hosmer or Butler at first. Gload played more time in the outfield this season (Philly does have some guy named Ryan Howard at first), but he was a first baseman in KC, hence the comparison to the Royals first basemen.

Betemit and Moustakas seems like an even trade to me, except for the fact that Moose is 7 years younger and could develop into a 35 homer a season player. I’d take Moose over Betemit.

Now to the pitchers. Bruce Chen has put together two solid seasons in KC, but Greinke is a premier pitcher in the league. He’s a former Cy Young winner who may now be reaching his prime as a pitcher. Yeah, there’s nobody on the current Royals roster to compare him to. The Royals bullpen was a strong suit of the team this season, but some former Royals relievers had really good seasons. Farnsworth, Peralta, Cruz, and Dotel were surprisingly good. I would still take the current Royals relievers who are 9 ½ years younger than the former Royals, on average.  

Basically, of all the former Royals contributing to playoff teams, a case can be made in that only Greinke is better than current Royals players in each position. That is very welcoming news to Royals fans who are watching another season of playoffs without current Royals playing. With a little luck, and a good starting pitcher, it might be the last postseason without current Royals playing.