Is he a Billay Beane mult?

No he's apparently a senior writer for Fangraphs. But it's obvious the Royals make him irrationally angry.

I mean, it was pretty creative.

Symborski does the ZIPS analytics ratings so he looked bad when we kept winning. A few points:


1. We had the most wins in the AL over a 3 year period. That isn't luck and it cannot be faked.

2. We went 22-9 in postseason and nearly won back to back

3. Everyone copied our bullpen strategy. Imitation is the sincerest form of something

4. We built our entire team via the farm, so it wasn't like we bought it (i.e. Florida Marlins 2003, etc etc)

5. He's always welcome to come to KC and see the flag, the trophy, and maybe even kiss the ring

Twitter or not, that Symborski tweet is awful writing. “In his backyard” twice in the same sentence. Yikes.

Stupid. And even if true, who gives a ****? It's like making fun of a lottery winner for lucking into being rich. He's still rich, mother****er

Plus they weren't nearly as aimless as he's painting here. They valued making contact and playing great defense, and outpaced the rest of the league by a wide, wide margin over this period. That wasn't an accident.

Interesting, but I disagree with Quirk on pretty much every aspect.

There's no upside in KC cutting ties. They've invested so much already... Might as well hang on until he quits baseball. His tools and defense are such that there's risk in moving on (slim as the chances of it being a real risk are). Would be brutal to cut ties and then have him make some sort of MLB contribution.

I also don't think questioning his work ethic or how much he wants to succeed is fair. Starling works hard. He just can't recognize pitches. That's a skill, not necessarily something that can be learned.

I don't expect a huge return, but they'll get something worthwhile back if there are really 9 teams interested/checking in.

What was planned: Having a great defense, an offense that made contact and could run the bases at a high level, having a pitching staff that played to the ballpark (fly ball pitchers).

The bullpen dominance was a little unplanned, but the formula was purposeful heading into 2014, and the formula was so successful everyone is now trying to emulate it.

To suggest a 3-year run where the team was so good was just blind luck shows a real stubbornness and willful ignorance on his part. And it's annoying.

It's no different, really, than the Giants formula in 2010, 2012, and 2014.

Is he related to Jason La Canfora?

I don't agree with his take on us winning by pure luck, but I do agree with a lot of the rest that he said. He said the Royals rested on their laurels and didn't do enough after the world series to continue to build a sustainable system. He's right. They kept all of our star players for nostalgia and basically coasted into 2016 and 2017. Fans would have been initially pissed, but if the front office had done a better job of projecting their outlook for 2016-2017 they could have easily made the decision to sell off our assets and gotten the rebuild started sooner. 2 postseasons and 3 winning seasons in 12 or so years for this regime just isn't enough. We shouldn't have to go through 7 year rebuilds every decade just to have 2-3 years of winning baseball.

He’s an idiot.

And he missed one of the key reasons we took a step back so fast. They juiced the ball to minimize the effect of cheap fly ball pitching and speedy OF defenders strategy. Now you just want to get fat guys who hit fly balls, because you don't have to hit it hard for it to go out of the park.

You are ****ing idiot

Yordano passing suddenly really upset long term plans as well...

You're so kind. Thank you for offering such constructive criticism in an intelligent manner.