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The dream playoff scenario for the AL: Toronto, KC, and Oakland win their divisions; Cleveland and Baltimore play for the wild card. Hopefully whoever comes out of that plays Milwaukee in the World Series. Fox would hate it, which is reason enough to hope it comes to pass.

Detroit was looking like world beaters a little more than a month ago, but man, have the wheels fallen off. Right now, I don't know what you hang your hat on if you're a Tigers fan other than it's a long season, and there's still plenty of time left. Even then, the team is a real mess right now. It's like they've forgotten how to do anything well. Verlander is either hurt or he's fallen off a cliff. Joe Nathan looks toast. There aren't many inspiring arms in the pen. The infield defense doesn't seem much better with Prince gone and Miggy at first, mostly because Iglesias isn't there, either.

I still think they're the team to beat in that division, but it's no longer the laugher of a "race."

Their worst starting pitcher right now is Jeremy Guthrie, who is merely league average. Alex Gordon will probably always hit, and Sal Perez is a darn good catcher. Moose Tacos is hitting the snot out of the ball lately. If he's finally for real that will help wonders but Eric Hosmer and Billy Butler have OPS+ of under 90. Many people predicted a stacked offense by now, and they're in first place because of their pitching. What a weird team.

It would be a "dream" scenario, all right: it would put everyone to sleep.

Why? The A's and Blue Jays are a lot of fun right now and the Royals would have that Cinderella factor. The O's and Indian...meh. I hate to say it but the Angels would be more compelling than either of them. (I mean, #### the Angels, but I won't lie).

I wonder if the Royals finally, finally told Moustakas, "you know what, forget all that crap about shortening your stroke and going the other way we've been cramming down your throat the last two years. Just hit the way you hit and everything will be fine."

What's going on with Justin Verlander? His last couple of starts have been disasters.

Lineup is still pretty anemic, but there isn't a hole anyhwere to be found in the rotation or pen

And the defense is just amazing. I still expect some regression from the pitching staff, probably Guthrie and Vargas and maybe even Duffy, who has way outperformed his FIP. But the Royals are in first place despite pretty much no production from 1B, DH, RF, and 3B, and that's pretty amazing. You'd expect at least a few of those guys to start hitting their true talent level and/or a trade to help things out.

No one on the Royals is really playing a lot better than you'd expect them to--Jason Vargas is getting a little lucky, but a 3.25 ERA is nothing impossible.

Meanwhile, they have a few players who are doing a lot WORSE than you'd expect--their two best hitters last year (Hosmer and Butler) are both slugging under .380, and Omar Infante has a .249 batting average.

They could very easily be better going forward than they've been so far.

It would be a "dream" scenario, all right: it would put everyone to sleep.

It would be pretty awesome. Putting someone to sleep would be any combination of Yankees, Red Sox or Mets(not going to happen of course) with their 4 1/2 hour games as every batter fiddles in the batters box for 25 seconds.

If the Cardinals aren't in the World Series, I'm rooting for the NL representative to be the Brewers. In the AL, every year I pick the A's, every year they screw me in the post season, so let's go Royals (I can't get myself to root for a team named after Native Americans or from Ohio)

FanGraphs still gives the Tigers a 67% chance of winning the division (Royals at 18%, Indians at 13%)

Is there anything actually backing up these type of "odds"? When a team goes from 90% to 70% in a week or so, it's just so much hokum. Any system that doesn't assume a 7 game losing/winning streak in the remaining part of the season, is bogus.

When a team goes from 90% to 70% in a week or so, it's just so much hokum.

I don't think this makes much sense. A week or so shouldn't change the projections going forward that much, but it can sure as hell drastically change the standings base onto which the future wins/losses are added.

I don't think this makes much sense. A week or so shouldn't change the projections going forward that much, but it can sure as hell drastically change the standings base onto which the future wins/losses are added.

Concur. If the team chasing you rips off 9 straight wins, your odds are going to plummet.

They probably could if they weren't having enormous sums diverted into Bud's Billionaire Wefare scheme. Bud is like one of those shady churches that keeps demanding a tithe even when you're unemployed and flat broke.

Teams so boring and unpopular they're forced to subsidize half the league.

They have options that involve not subsidizing half the league. I realize they feel the need to maintain a high payroll in order to assure they don't slip in their defense of 4th place in the division, but spending enough to require subsidization of other teams is a choice they have made.

There probably is another team or two that rivals the Royals in this regard, but I wouldn't be shocked if the Royals are more contingent on team health keeping them above .500 than any other team in baseball. The starting rotation is cromulent and combined with a very good defensive makes the team good at run prevention. But if a starter goes down, the team has Bruce Chen and then nothing much else. The only backup infielder the team has is Danny Valencia (currently on the DL) and the team doesn't have a MLB quality backup catcher in case something happens to Perez.

The team pretty much has nothing in the high minors to supplement the team. So the team better hope the athletic trainers know what they are doing.

Sure, but ERA+ of 350, 308, 177 and 140 from your 4 best RPs is more than a little bit beyond "great"

Last year, Holland and Hochevar were 342 and 215 respectively for the entire year. Coleman's ERA+ was astronomical - and Wil Smith/JC Guiterrez/Collins/Crow/Chen all contributed with good/decent numbers out of the pen. They were pretty ridiculous.

There probably is another team or two that rivals the Royals in this regard, but I wouldn't be shocked if the Royals are more contingent on team health keeping them above .500 than any other team in baseball. The starting rotation is cromulent and combined with a very good defensive makes the team good at run prevention. But if a starter goes down, the team has Bruce Chen and then nothing much else. The only backup infielder the team has is Danny Valencia (currently on the DL) and the team doesn't have a MLB quality backup catcher in case something happens to Perez.

The team pretty much has nothing in the high minors to supplement the team. So the team better hope the athletic trainers know what they are doing.

Yep, agree 100%. As I pointed out ad nauseam in the off-season, this is a team that let Emilio Bonifacio and George Kottaras go for nothing this winter--cut them both just to save a few bucks.

Granted, we're just talking about Emilio Bonifacio and George Kottaras. But when your alternatives are Pedro Ciriaco and Brett Hayes, those first two look like Hall of Famers!

Sean Forman, god bless his nerdy soul, never stops working on that site. They now have wins above average by position on the league page.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/AL/2014.shtml

KC is about a .500 team this year in terms of WAA. It's still June and it sure looks like Fangraph's odds are closer to right than wrong.

Big overachievers
Vargas
Dyson

Big underachievers
Shields

Their best pitcher, even if this is an off season for him, I think we can agree is Shields. He's a free agent, and unless he's hurt this year, will probably command a substantial wage increase next year.

Wade Davis, as usual, has been a great reliever and terrible starter. He's due $7M/$8M/$10M on his next 3 team options. Can KC afford to pay that much to a middle reliever/setup guy, or is he about to become a free agent?

Greg Holland is fantastic, but already makes nearly $5M. What does he get in arbitration this offseason?

Guthrie has been decent, but owed $19M for next two years of his age 36-37 seasons. Not unreasonable, but should a low payroll team lock up that big a percentage of payroll in an old back end starter?

Vargas is a mediocre backend starter having a dream season. He's 31 and they have him locked up at $8M per for 3 seasons, so relatively cheap control. But can they still count on him producing at substantially better than what he did during his age 26-30 years?

Dyson is setting up for a big arbitration award this off-season.

Infante has been terrible, & they've got him locked up for 4 more years.

Butler has been terrible, & has a $12.5M option for next year. Can they afford to exercise it for a DH having a terrible year? Can they afford to let their best hitter of last 5 years walk?

On the plus side of the assets, Ventura looks like the real deal every day, super young and cheap and super good so far. Better walk rate in MLB than minors, but nothing unreasonable. Escobar has been a fantastic pickup, as has Cain.

A small plus about Hosmer sucking this year is that his arb award will be impacted by it in offseason.

Nothing about this season changes any of the criticism of Dayton Moore. He runs a small payroll team and has totally mis-spent his available payroll and his only asset, a surplus of young talent. He created a team that is on it's second long shot run at a playoffs, and faded badly in it's first attempt. He can't afford to keep this team together even for next year unless ownership steps up to a significantly higher payroll.

Going back to "the trade", it doesn't look any less dumb now. On the surface it looks better for Moore only because Myers sucked for 2 months and is out for 2 months more, while Odorizzi has a 2-7 record and 4.73 ERA. But 24 year old Odorizzi has been far better than his ERA, his peripherals are great and FIP 3.36. And no one expects Myers to come back as anything other than a very good MLB right fielder, he's established that performance expectation not just last year but in all of his minor league performances at a very young age and is still only 23 years old. It still looks very likely both will provide the Rays with nearly a dozen cheap control years as two average to above average MLB starters.

And surprisingly, one of the lottery tickets has taken a big step forward, after 3 years of suckitude Mike Montgomery has been very good in AAA, not only do his peripherals support his results, but he's still only 24. So the Rays have a better than even chance of getting another useful cost controlled MLB pitcher out of the deal.

Spending the Shields/Davis $30M in the free agent market instead of making this trade could have made KC a better team last year, wouldn't have made it a much worse, and wouldn't have hurt this years team that badly, and would have given Dayton 2-3 more minimum wage starters/contributors for next year to continue building this team. That's huge. Instead they could have locked up a decent long term free agent pitcher with the Shields/Davis money and have two starting positions locked down for the next five years at virtually no cost, and maybe a third if Montgomery really has returned to form. Instead of a payroll crunch during the offseason they'd have money to spend to continue to improve the team while the core remains young.

Now they have to cash this season in with not just a playoff appearance, but an actual playoff run or all the hard choices they'll have this offseason will make the last two years for naught. Had they gone the other way they could have been competitive every year starting from last year till 2019 relying on a cheap young core.

They have options that involve not subsidizing half the league. I realize they feel the need to maintain a high payroll in order to assure they don't slip in their defense of 4th place in the division, but spending enough to require subsidization of other teams is a choice they have made.

From Forbes.com:

Even after kicking in $95 million towards the league’s 34% local revenue sharing pool and their $64 million PILOT bond payments for Yankee Stadium last season, the Bronx Bombers led the league in revenue ($461 million).

Yeah, that revenue sharing is just killing the Yankees' ability to compete.

#49--Yeah, his defense is lousy. But still! A catcher with a 100 career OPS+! When you're trying to make the postseason, you don't drop guys like that to save $500,000! (Especially when the cupboard is bare!)

The team pretty much has nothing in the high minors to supplement the team. So the team better hope the athletic trainers know what they are doing.

Yes, they're a VERY thin team.

Now they have to cash this season in with not just a playoff appearance, but an actual playoff run or all the hard choices they'll have this offseason will make the last two years for naught. Had they gone the other way they could have been competitive every year starting from last year till 2019 relying on a cheap young core.

From what I understand, if Shields walks and they decline Butler, they still have $80 in salary obligations, with about a $90-95 million budget at most. Davis or Holland is certainly getting dealt I would think.

#49--Yeah, his defense is lousy. But still! A catcher with a 100 career OPS+! When you're trying to make the postseason, you don't drop guys like that to save $500,000! (Especially when the cupboard is bare!)

Was it simply lousy? All the advanced statistics give him positive value from it. It'd seem to need to be TERRIBLE to make him a player that teams passed around so much.

Kottaras must be a big time towel-snapper in the lockerroom. There is no other explanation.

Back-up catcher is one of those positions where you are immediatley suspect, if you can hit, and beloved for your [pick any intangibles], if you cannot. How else do we explain Corky Miller getting an MLB back-up catcher gig, after a 5-60 year (yes, that is an .083 BA) with an extra base hit, and 5 walks.

I remember I had this super-clever plan six months ago, on how I could fix the Royals and get them to the playoffs. A big part of my plan involved trading Billy Butler, reasoning that they could easily replace his value with a Justin Maxwell/George Kottaras platoon at DH.

Kottaras hits well enough that if anyone thought he could play defense and/or exist in the locker room without pissing everyone off, he would be a starting catcher. That he's been discarded by so many organizations--including both reputedly progressive ones like Boston and Oakland and, well, Kansas City--despite hitting well almost everywhere he's been strongly suggests there is something seriously wrong with his makeup. Or at least baseball men uniformly think so.

They have options that involve not subsidizing half the league. I realize they feel the need to maintain a high payroll in order to assure they don't slip in their defense of 4th place in the division, but spending enough to require subsidization of other teams is a choice they have made.

I think there is revenue sharing in addition to luxury tax stuff correct?

They could spend zero and it wouldn't impact the extent to which they are forced to subsidize the league's freeloaders.

They could spend zero and it wouldn't impact the extent to which they are forced to subsidize the league's freeloaders.

Well if they were under the tax they would pay less though...

If they were under the punitive Yankee Tax they would still be forced to subsidize the league's freeloader contingent to the exact same extent as they do today. I'm just doing my part as a good citizen to debunk the sneering disinformation offered up in #42.

Kottaras must be a big time towel-snapper in the lockerroom. There is no other explanation.

Anti-Scarborough bias. I've been living with it my entire life. Joey Votto and I, both born in Toronto, both born in the same year. We're essentially the same person. But he's from Etobicoke in the west of the city, so he gets the millions. A crime.

I remember I had this super-clever plan six months ago, on how I could fix the Royals and get them to the playoffs. A big part of my plan involved trading Billy Butler, reasoning that they could easily replace his value with a Justin Maxwell/George Kottaras platoon at DH.

I mean, thank God for Dayton Moore, right?

From what I have heard, they did try very hard to deal him this winter and had a deal nixed by Toronto at the last second.

lux tax money does not go to the teams, it goes into Bud's secret slush fund. God only knows what he does with all that money. And YR is essentially correct that this has been a Yanks tax. The Red Sox have tipped slightly over a couple of times and I assume this will now also be a regular Dodgers tax, but through 2012, I think something like 90-95% of lux tax payments over the years came from the Yanks.

Revenue sharing is completely different. The only way the Yanks can avoid revenue sharing would be to, ohh, reduce ticket prices to $1 and give away their broadcast rights.

If they were under the punitive Yankee Tax they would still be forced to subsidize the league's freeloader contingent to the exact same extent as they do today. I'm just doing my part as a good citizen to debunk the sneering disinformation offered up in #42.

In which way. EVERY team has revenue sharing as part of attendance/TV package. So I'm not sure what the heck you are talking about when you go on your insane rants.

If they were under the punitive Yankee Tax they would still be forced to subsidize the league's freeloader contingent to the exact same extent as they do today. I'm just doing my part as a good citizen to debunk the sneering disinformation offered up in #42.

In which way. EVERY team has revenue sharing as part of attendance/TV package. So I'm not sure what the heck you are talking about when you go on your insane rants.

You'd know exactly what I was talking about if you only made the effort to read the very specific post I was replying to in #50, and cited by number in #63. I'll save you the effort of scrolling your mouse wheel and offer you a recap:

Every team puts 34% Of tv revenue into revenue sharing, so every team contributes, Every team shares stadium revenue, so again, every team contributes.

And some teams get back everything they put in and a whole lot more; others get back much less than they put in. The fact that the money takes a detour on the way to the lower-revenue teams seems irrelevant.

By 2016, the fifteen teams in the largest markets in baseball will be disqualified from receiving revenue sharing. This feature is being phased in over the coming years. The disqualified clubs will receive a refund for the amount that they would have received in revenue sharing, although teams that have exceeded the Luxury Tax threshold in recent years will not receive a full refund.

And some teams get back everything they put in and a whole lot more; others get back much less than they put in. The fact that the money takes a detour on the way to the lower-revenue teams seems irrelevant.

Since the TV revenue depends 100% on the Yankees and Red Sox having opponents, giving money to the revenue sharing pool isn't 'subsidizing' the lower-revenue teams, it's giving them their cut of the money.

Since the TV revenue depends 100% on the Yankees and Red Sox having opponents, giving money to the revenue sharing pool isn't 'subsidizing' the lower-revenue teams, it's giving them their cut of the money.

True to an extent, but the Yankees and Red Sox would make just as must local revenue if they had 22 other opponents, rather than 28.

The other teams are absolutely subsidizing the 6 smallest markets, and it's pretty clear that the other 24 teams would be better off economically if the 6 smallest markets went away.

In fairness, it's possible they might have dramatically expanded, mostly into markets that don't care about baseball and never will, and only realized a few years after the fact that it was a horrible mistake.

Not that the Commissioner of any other sport has ever orchestrated such a thing.

Since the TV revenue depends 100% on the Yankees and Red Sox having opponents, giving money to the revenue sharing pool isn't 'subsidizing' the lower-revenue teams, it's giving them their cut of the money.

Since the TV revenue depends 100% on the Yankees and Red Sox having opponents, giving money to the revenue sharing pool isn't 'subsidizing' the lower-revenue teams, it's giving them their cut of the money.

That is pretty obviously true to everyone but some Yankee fans...

Oh, so the free money gets dolled out based on how many times the Yankees play each welfare team? Is that how it works, comrades?

Since the Yankees are the most popular team in baseball and generate the most fan-interest nationwide, their contributions to the ratings and revenues of the poormouth welfare teams are already baked in the crust based on how often those teams are fortunate enough to host the Yankees. Note that Colorado Rockies owner laid this bare when he openly admitted that losing one series each with the Yankees and Red Sox costs him nearly $4 million.

What the Budshoviks want is double-dipping, where they get the torrents of free money for hosting the league's most popular team while being protected from the depressive effect they have on the interest and ratings of other, more popular teams. If the Yankees come to town and draw a sold-out crowd at inflated prices they stuff their pockets. When they come to New York with their sad sack routines and uninteresting presence that sends New Yorkers scurrying away to any of the thousands of other outstanding entertainment options in the most entertainment-packed city in America, that's just tough titty.

I'm still waiting to hear a whit of support for the baseless claims offered in 42 but of course it always ends up with the usual "Ode to the Noble Remora" from the usual suspects.

If this were true, then I feel like MLB wouldn't have expanded beyond 24 teams in the first place.

Well, the problem is that a lot of the smallest markets were good markets at one time, but shifting demographics and economic changes have eroded them: e.g. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, KC, Milwaukee. Then you have the two Florida markets which look like they should be good, but aren't.

Expansion is always more attractive than relocation because of expansion fees, and you don't piss anybody off. So, it's perfectly plausible that MLB expanded too far, and should have simply relocated struggling teams.

Imagine if instead of the Browns/Orioles, Dodgers, Giants, Braves, and A's decamping from their multi-team cities, MLB had added 4-6 expansion teams in the 50's. You would likely have some real weak sister teams in major markets.

Fine. Allow MLB teams to move wherever they want, let the markets decide it. MLB would be very successful with five NYC teams.

I'm perfectly fine with that.

Me too. The idea that these poormouth plutocrats who say they can't survive in their own private fiefdom without annual influxes of free money will just waltz into the most competitive entertainment market in America and teach the Yankees how to run a ballclub is hilarious.

If the Budshoviks really wanted to end territorial rights they'd just do it. They haven't even proposed it. Instead they keep coming up with scheme after scheme to screw the Yankees instead. Hmmmmm.