The boys are playing some ball and could make some noise

If you’re a Yankees fan, you’re probably pretty nervous about facing the Royals in the playoffs.

There are 15 games left in the season and the Royals, along with half of MLB, are in an all-out sprint to see who gets to keep playing into October. The Royals finished “The Gauntlet Part Two” with a record of 9-11, weighed down by the seven-game losing streak in the middle which was their only losing streak of more than three all year. Despite losing more games than they won over that stretch, their playoff odds increased by about 10%, according to FanGraphs. We’re going to talk a bit about how that could happen in a minute, but first, let’s talk about the Yankees.

The Yankees are afraid

After the Royals’ loss to the Yankees Wednesday night I took to Twitter to note that while the Royals had lost the game, the Yankees had to be terrified of them as a potential opponent come playoff time. Some people doubted me since the Yankees had won the series 2-1 and the season series 5-2. But let’s look at the facts.

Ignore the first series

The Royals are a completely different team now than they were when they first faced the Yankees back in the middle of June.

• No longer with the team are: Dan Altavilla, Nelson Velázquez, Drew Waters, Angel Zerpa, Will Smith, Nick Anderson, Nick Pratto, or Nick Loftin (The Royals had a lot of Nicks...) They’re also missing Vinnie Pasquantino, it’s true. But even with him gone, that’s a lot of addition by subtraction.
• Now with the team are Tommy Pham, Lucas Erceg, Kris Bubic, Hunter Harvey (hopefully), Michael Lorenzen (hopefully), and Paul DeJong
• Many of the players now remaining are being used very differently and now contributing at a much higher level or otherwise not hurting the team as much, including Hunter Renfroe, MJ Melendez, Maikel Garcia, Daniel Lynch IV, Garrett Hampson, Adam Frazier, Chris Stratton, and Sam Long

We saw the difference that a half-season can make in how the Royals swept the Astros earlier this year but were then swept a couple of weeks ago. No one in Houston feels nearly as frightened of the Royals as they did at the beginning of the year. The wins count, but the way those games were played is almost entirely irrelevant to what is happening now and will come next.

The games were tough bouts for the Yankees, even that first one

Obviously, the Royals shut out the Yankees in game two. And last night’s Yankees victory required them to pull out all of the stops to beat the Royals at home in an extra inning game, a scenario that usually favors the home team.

But what about that blowout in the first game? Surely that should make the Yankees feel good?

Well, here’s the thing. Not really. The final score was hugely disparate, but that’s because the Yankees got incredibly lucky, and then they got to pick on Chris Stratton.

The Royals led or were tied after five of the first six innings. When the Yankees tied the game in the seventh inning, it went like this:

• pop-out
• groundball single with a .360 XBA
• walk to Juan Soto after the umpire missed what could have been a strike three call per Umpire Scorecards
• RBI groundball single with a .320 XBA.

From there, yes, James McArthur made a bad pitch and Austin Wells made him pay for it. But all three of the plate appearances before that should have resulted in outs, statistically. Had any two of them actually resulted in outs, Wells never even gets to bat. After that, If the Royals are playing a closer game and not trying to preserve their bullpen for the rest of the series, Stratton can’t give up three more runs in the eighth. Put a pin in that, though, we’ll come back to it in a minute.

So, sure, the Yankees won. But they can’t have walked away from that series finale or the series in general feeling confident if they have to face the Royals come October. The Yankees are clearly the better team and that means if they played 100 times you’d think the Yankees would win most of those. But in the playoffs, the most they can play at a time is seven. And the difference between the teams isn’t great enough for anyone to feel like there is a foregone conclusion.

The Royals could make more noise in the postseason than we thought

I mentioned at the top that I was going to explain how the Royals could go 9-11 over a 20-game stretch and see their playoff percentages increase. The first and most obvious reason is that there are now fewer than half as many games for the teams chasing them to catch up.

But they actually improved their playoff positioning over that stretch. Check out this nifty table from Baseball Reference and I think you’ll quickly figure out what happened.

That shows the record of every AL team over the time span while the Royals were going 9-11. Other than the White Sox’s 2-17 record (woof,) what stands out to you? That’s right, the best of the playoff contenders (no, the Tigers still don’t count) other than the Royals over that span were the Guardians going a measly 11-8. Everyone else played .500 ball or lower, including the teams that beat the Royals. So the Royals are that much closer to the end of the season with their playoff spot still firmly in their grasp, but it’s even more firmly in their grasp because everyone else has been awful. And all of the other teams were playing much worse competition.

Houston went 4-10 when they weren’t playing the Royals in the biggest outlier of their season. The Guardians went 8-8 when they weren’t playing the White Sox. Had the Royals stolen Wednesday night’s game, they’d have played .500 while the Yankees would have been two games under instead.

All of the AL playoff competitors are stumbling toward the finish, including the Royals. Except while everyone else was facing a random smattering of teams, including the White Sox in multiple cases, the Royals were facing 17 games against teams in first place and three against the team that was directly ahead of them in the division and the wild card. And the Royals were about as good as everyone else. The one time they weren’t facing a division leader they swept them in such embarrassing fashion that the opposing team manager accused his players of being unprofessional. And when we look back at this season we will see that seven-game losing streak in the middle of that as a wild outlier from how the Royals handled their business the entire rest of the year.

So what does that mean? I posit to you that it means the Royals are playing significantly better baseball than their AL playoff rivals. And that could make all the difference once October starts.

But, it might just make a difference before October starts, too.

The Royals, as of this writing, are four games back of the Guardians with only 15 left to play That sounds like an insurmountable distance. And, well, it probably is. However, it isn’t definitely insurmountable.

One thing that I think is of particular note about how teams played over the last 20 games is that the Guardians’ opponents’ winning percentage over that span was .464 while the Royals was .563. For the remainder of the year, they will be playing teams with roughly similar records and FanGraphs has the winning percentage of the Guardians’ opponents at .493 while the Royals will face teams at .494.

Because the Royals have the tiebreaker over the Guardians due to winning the season series against them, the Royals only need to match the Guardians, not pass them. The Royals only need to win four more games than the Guardians over the final stretch to win the division.

If you think removing the White Sox from the equation for the Guardians means they’re likely to go 8-7 over their final 15, the Royals would have to go 12-3. That would be a pretty big ask. But if the Guardians stumble at all, say they go 6-9 or even 5-10, the Royals could catch them by going only 10-5 or 9-6. Those numbers seem a lot more doable. And the Guardians just started and lost the opener of a four-game set with the Rays - a team that has refused to give up and go away despite trading away most of their roster at the deadline. After that, they play the Twins for four - a team that looks bad right now but is going to be highly motivated. They also finish the season with three against the Astros - who may be in a position to try to throw everything they’ve got at the Guardians to try and steal the second seed and earn a bye through the Wild Card Round.

Again, catching the Guardians is not likely at all. But them going 6-9 while the Royals go 10-5 seems a lot more likely than the Royals going 5-10 and the Tigers going 11-5 given how the season has shaken out to this point.

Bullpen is king in the playoffs...unless it isn’t

I told you to put a pin in the bullpen discussion earlier and now is your opportunity to pull that out.

Everyone remembers how the Royals changed the modern playoff landscape with a devastating bullpen in the 2014 and 2015 playoffs that allowed them to overcome a weak starting rotation to win a pennant and then a World Series.

Except, of course, everyone remembers wrong.

I’ve noted in this space previously that the last time before - presumably, this year - the Royals had had four starters with double-digit wins and more wins than losses was 2014. That sounds like a good starting rotation, to me! 2015 featured a less-dominant but well-managed rotation which still saw three double-digit winners.

The thing about the 2014 bullpen (the 2015 bullpen was simply good up and down the roster) was that it had three elite relievers and then a bunch of guys everyone hoped then-manager Ned Yost wouldn’t have to call on. Guys like Scott Downs, Francisley Bueno, Louis Coleman, and, yes, Aaron Crow.

One of the reasons the Royals weren’t dominant that year was because of their middle relief. If the starter gave a quality start and they were able to pass it off to the vaunted trio of Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis, and Greg Holland; collectively known as HDH. The Royals, this year, have won more than 90% of their games when they achieve a quality start as well.

However, when the 2014 playoffs came, that weakness was eliminated. Ned Yost, no longer needing to hold back for long stretches without off-days and knowing that there was no room for error, stopped using any of those middle relievers unless there were extra innings. For the entire postseason, he leaned on Herrera and Davis, often for multiple innings, using other relievers only when extra innings forced his hand, before always having Greg Holland close things out. This culminated in Game Seven of the World Series when He sent Jeremy Guthrie out to start but yanked him after only 10 outs and asked Herrera to get eight outs, Davis to get six, and Holland to pitch the final inning.

The Royals didn’t have a dominant bullpen in 2014, they had three dominant relievers that made their bullpen overall slightly above average. They also had a group of very good starters.

The 2024 starting rotation is better.

The bullpen is weaker, of course, but it might even out. And it isn’t as much weaker as you might think. Lucas Erceg and Kris Bubic haven’t pitched as well as Wade Davis and Kelvin Herrera, but they haven’t been as far off as you might imagine. Erceg has an absolutely astonishing 1.1 fWAR since joining the Royals in only 18 games of relief. Wade Davis led the 2014 bullpen with 3.1 fWAR, but it took him more than three times as many innings and appearances to do it.

There’s a knock on Kris Bubic that he hasn’t been able actually to close out a win this season for the Royals, but Kelvin Herrera didn’t collect any saves for that 2014 squad, either. That’s where things fall apart in these comparisons because there is no Holland equivalent in the 2024 Royals’ bullpen. That said, I’d trust Daniel Lynch IV (0.00 ERA, 1.74 FIP since his recall at the end of August), Carlos Hernández (2.79 ERA, 1.62 FIP in the same span), and James McArthur (3.46 FIP in the same span, and 1.29 ERA, 1.18 FIP before the Yankees appearance) more than anyone else from that 2014 bullpen. And, who knows, maybe Hunter Harvey can be the Holland replacement if he comes back and is finally healthy.

Q also showed his hand Wednesday night against the Yankees. With the season coming to a close against a tough rival in a winnable game, he managed it like a playoff game. First was Sam Long for an inning, then Erceg for two, before asking Bubic to stretch out as well. Without the restriction of a long season, Q showed us he can and will adjust to ask more from his most reliable players in the most important spots.

And that should scare anyone facing the Royals come October.