Fanpost Roundup Two: Baseball is Back Edition

The last fanpost roundup went up on April 2. It is April 17.

That is not one week. I have failed you.

Still, nobody says that I can't post fanpost roundups in two-week increments, or three-week increments, or literally any other passage of time other than the parsec. Han Solo would not put up fanpost roundups every week, either, come to think of it.

Regardless, here are the fanposts from the past two weeks. There's been some great stuff.

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On April 3, Bart41 wrote his season preview, titled KC Royals 2015 Preview: Against the odds.

I have a few primary indicators of KC’s success. Like I said above, if Moose, Hosmer, Perez, and Gordon hit 80 HRs, this team makes the playoffs. If Ventura, Duffy, Volquez, Guthrie and Vargas make a combined 140 starts, they win the division. If they score 700 runs, they win 100 games. The road for success is lined with HRs and quality starts. If that happens, this team will be good. If they aren’t, I still think this is an above .500 team.

zyzzyva98 has been chronicling the improvement predictions by Royals personnel. On April 4, he published his study. Everyone will improve!

Most Improved: Mike Moustakas (4)

Moose appeared on the list a team-leading four times. Most of those appearances involve him turning some kind of a corner, though in one case he was listed as a bounce-back candidate. What he’s bouncing back to, I can’t tell you.

It only makes sense to expect Moustakas to improve this year, because he can’t really get any worse than he was last year (I hope). But at this point, there’s quite a bit of healthy skepticism surrounding him. Sure, he caught on fire in the postseason, but isn’t it more likely that the Royals end up getting burned for yet another season?

BlitzAce71 wrote about how amazing the Royals are on April 8 using selective endpoints.

And finally, the Royals have been 52-29 33 times. 14 in 1976, 4 in 1977, 3 in 1978, 8 in 1980... and 4 times in 2014.

I think we all already knew that this current team is playing better than any team to don the Crown since 1980. And really, outside of a ridiculous stretch in 1977, this is basically the best that this team has played over a three month stretch of games.

For whatever that's worth.

Six days later, BlitzAce71 decided to compare Wade Davis' 2014 to Mariano Rivera's career bests.

Ridiculous. Other than walks, where Mariano has been in absolute control, including his 2008 where he walked SIX batters in 70.2 innings, Wade was harder to hit. He allowed less hits, less runs, struck out more batters, and had almost half of Mo's best FIP. He had a year that Mariano Rivera not only never matched in a single season, but he never matched those stats once in 15 full seasons of being the best closer in the game.

Then he decided to compare Wade Davis' 2014 to the best seasons in relief history in Wade Davis vs the World.

This shows the pitchers with their total score, as well as their count of all top 10 finishes. So for example, Gagne was never first in any of these categories, but he was 2nd twice, 3rd once, 4th twice, etc. Kimbrel finished first or second 7 different times, which is nuts. Both Gagne's 2003 and Kimbrel's 2012 rank about 20 points higher than Wade's 2014, and you could convince me that either of those seasons could be considered the best relief season in the history of the game. But like, damn dude, Wade's 2014 is pretty easily 3rd place on this list.

On April 7, just after the season opener, MrAndersonm wrote about the illogical effect just one game could have.

It was just one game.

Even so, I'm in. I fought it all night, and part of today. It may have just been one game. We could very easily go on a 10-20 game losing streak now. But I'm in.

I don't know what kind of voodoo magic Dayton Moore is using. I don't know if he's in possession of a Pilantir, hired Miss Cleo or is just lucky, but despite defying both conventional and modern wisdom he has put together another team that I think can compete.

Of course, it was just one game. In two weeks, two months, I could look back at this and shake my head at the obvious confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance I KNOW I am allowing myself to experience right now, because it was JUST ONE GAME.

Finally, 1040X decided to write a biography about royalcoffee two days ago.

At an early age, Norma Jean and Maxwell noticed that Jon-Jon had developed a strong affinity for coffee. He begged them to take him out to sample the coffee from different coffee establishments. He amazed them with his palate, able to discern and describe each note of flavor hidden within a sip of coffee. For his fourth birthday, he asked for a coffee maker, by his seventh, he had amassed several different models of drip coffee makers, French presses and percolators. He eagerly arose early each rosy-fingered dawn, to head down to the kitchen and brew a pot of coffee before his parents awoke. His natural curiosity led him to experiment with many different methods of coffee preparation. Through trial and error, he was able to discern the best approaches for each method, developing within him a sort of intuitive knowledge about how to get the best results.