With just two weeks to go before pitchers and catchers report, a scan of the baseball landscape needs to take place.
In the Fall of 2014 they came out of nowhere to hit the American League with a right hook that nobody saw coming. The Kansas City Royals used some of baseball’s throwback ways to roll through the league and into the World Series.
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It’s funny how drastically the scope of Major League Baseball has changed in a decade. Back then the trend was power hitters, sluggers and guys that can hit it to the moon. It was all power, all the time.
Now, the value of speed and defense has stepped front and center. Pitching has always been valuable of course, but it’s now instrumental to now be pitching-rich in the farm.
Just like the young, talented general manager become the trend after Theo Epstein became Boston’s hero in 2004, the speed and defense trend is starting to now take effect in the bigs.
The Royals will enter the year as AL Champs. They’ll also enter the year as the team who hit the fewest homeruns in 2014 with a meager 95. This mark was a far cry from the Baltimore Orioles MLB leading 211 dingers.
However, the team with the second lowest home-runs from a year ago was the St. Louis Cardinals, an organization that many consider the model franchise today and another team who made the postseason.
With performance enhancing drugs slowly being carved out of the game and the fact that hitters have struggled mightily against the growing trend of using extreme shifts, 2014 overall batting average of .251 is the lowest mark since 1972 when we saw a .244 mark.
Those extreme shifts have become an epidemic.
Either hitters are just too stubborn to adjust, or don’t have the ability anymore. Baseball has become such a specialized game that even hitters are now specialized it seems. Pitching was the first position to go in that direction, and now hitters need to become more versatile to overcome these shifts.
When a power hitting lefty gets up there and faces the third base line completely empty, his skill set has to include an opposite field hit or a punch bunt to keep them honest.
The everyday player is well-rounded with skills other than power is what the Royals are comprised of last October. Well, that and pitching of course. The Royals overcame their power outages through great a bullpen and very timely hitting.
In light of baseball changing so drastically and the Royals becoming the darlings of the sport, we provide a sneak peak on three-teams to look out for in 2015 that could have some success with “Royal-like” qualities.
Next: The Team in Flushing