<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Royals seem very focused on Kennedy. Good yanks connection there w/excellent pitching coach eiland. Others still in tho.</p>&mdash; Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) <a href="https://twitter.com/JonHeyman/status/687256775582728192">January 13, 2016</a></blockquote>
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I find if you add the phrase, "According to me," before any Royals rumors tweets and whatnot, it lends a lot of perspective on the veracity of the information being given.

@Ken_Rosenthal: Source confirms: #Royals serious about signing free-agent RHP Ian Kennedy. Would forfeit No. 24 pick in draft. First reported: @jonheyman.

Isn't Heyman the guy that said Royals had no chance of re-signing Gordon?

Then place a bet on it this spring. Hootie used to tell me all the time how dumb Vegas was, and the bettors being fools. then he got into the Fanduel group hug here and lost nearly all their $ within 2 weeks.

Vegas isn't dumb but the projections they use haven't caught up to the Royals. It's already been proven and will be again. They were clearly the best team in the regular season and their losses had no major impact on the regular season. No one has done enough to catch up. They will win a weak division again barring injuries. Winning the whole thing is another story. They'll need to make some moves.

Wasn't he talking about the Sabremetric/fangraphs, rather than vegas?

Just saying, I'd feel better if Vegas put us at 88 than 78. Obv, everything plays out on the field.

Yes. Said "swag" wasn't accounted for in their formulas.

@Ken_Rosenthal: Sources: #Royals talking to Gallardo as well as Kennedy. Either would cost KC 1st-rounder. #Padres would get comp pick after 1st round.

Projection systems continue to expect some things the Royals to excel at to normalize:

1) RP performance.
2) Defensive excellence
3) HR/FB rate

Despite the fact the royals have been excellent at 1) and 2) for a very large sample size (five seasons now), severe drop-off continues to be projected.

Despite the fact the Royals play at minimum 100 games/year at Ballparks that suppress the HR (Kaufman, Detroit, Minnesota, HR/FB regression continues to be projected.

At some point, you have to admit your model isn't working.

1 and 2 also pass the eyeball test. We have a historically good defense and Wade Davis looks unhittable (whereas Holland was clearly getting lucky most of last year).

9 and 15 last year with a 4.28 ERA. Also has a 3.98 career ERA.

It's important to distinguish what it is you're talking about here. You are explaining why last winter's FORWARD projections did not align with reality. And I would say to you that those things are good reasons, although there are prob many more. That is conceded by SABR folks, who readily admit FW projections have 5-10 game standard deviations, with 10+ swings not uncommon. (Put aptly: "shit happens" with injuries, etc)

Nobody should be surprised by the final standings.


But this is where we diverge. I (and others) want to know why the BACKWARDS looking metrics, notably PyThag + BaseRuns, don't align either. Because we **know** what happened and we have decades of data points showing what the record should've been. Your factors are all incorporated into the backwards data. So why did we win 95?


All we have today is that we sequenced out of our minds and had the highest "clutch" score in MLB. There's no explanation for that.

The Royals were projected to win 76 in 2013, 77 in 2014, and 81 in 2015.

Are we going to chalk up three years of incorrect metrics to "luck" and "clutch performances?"