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How the Royals became the streakiest team in baseball – Kansas City Star
If there was a better way to explain this, Royals manager Ned Yost would do more than just shrug his shoulders and offer his sport’s equivalent of what the heck.
“It’s baseball,” he says.
If there was a better way to explain this, general manager Dayton Moore would do more than point to the unpredictable nature of this game.
“It seems like in the past our team either gets really hot together or they’ve gotten cold,” he says.
But then again, maybe there is no perfect way to explain this. On Monday night, the Royals defeated the Detroit Tigers 5-3 in 12 innings at Comerica Park, rolling their latest winning streak to six games. They remained 1 1/2 games behind first-place Cleveland and took sole possession of the second American League wild-card spot. They also confirmed their status as the streakiest, most capricious team in baseball.
The latest streak represents the Royals’ fifth winning streak of at least five games since the beginning of 2016. They have also suffered through losing streaks of nine, eight, seven, five, five and five during the same span.
There is no overlap in these streaks. They can be viewed in isolation. Five winning streaks of at least five games. Six losing streaks of at least the same number. One team prone to erratic stretches where everything seems to go right, where the offense scores and every start is decent and the bullpen is reliable, and then it all goes cold again.
“Whenever they go on kind of a streaky little bad streak,” Yost said this month, “they always back it up with a really good streaky good streak.”
Yost likes to say that the Royals’ nucleus is so close that they often slump together. It’s also possible that an offense predicated on contact and power, and very little plate discipline is bound to go through dead periods when the hits do not find holes or the sequencing is off. The answer does not appear to be tied to focus or consistency or preparation.
“We always compete to win,” catcher Salvador Perez said, “and we play hard.”
The Royals, of course, are not the only baseball team that goes through stretches of good and bad. No matter how trite the phrase, this is baseball, after all. In the last two seasons, there have been 67 instances of an AL team winning five straight games. The Royals have done it five times. In the same span, there have been 62 losing streaks of at least five straight. The Royals have pulled that off six times.
In that sense, in a 15-team league, they are slightly over-represented, statistically, in each category. Since the start of 2016, 24 percent of their wins and 30 percent of their losses have come in streaks of five games or more. But their propensity for streakiness shows up most in its extremes.
Their nine-game losing streak from April 20-30 this season is tied for the fourth-longest in the league over the last two seasons. Their nine-game winning streak from Aug. 14 to Aug. 23 of last year is the fifth-longest in the same time frame. The Royals are the only team to appear in the top five in winning streaks and losing streaks.
“I just think that’s how baseball is though, man,” Royals third baseman Mike Moustakas said last month. “Just so hot and cold.”
On Tuesday night, the Royals will seek their second winning streak of at least seven games since the start of 2016. Only Baltimore (3) and Texas (3) have had more. Two other teams (New York and Houston) have had two.
Yet there is always the other side: Since the start of 2016, the Royals have also had three streaks of at least seven losses, and only the Minnesota Twins, a team that lost 100 games last season, has had more than that.
In some ways, there is no way to explain it.