Weekend Rumblings - News for December 14, 2019
Sam Mellinger has some insight into how John Sherman may run the Royals differently.
This is dripping with nuance, but a team guided by sustainability will generally cut the peaks in exchange for avoiding the worst of the valleys. A team focused on winning 85 games every year will operate differently than one that’s OK losing 100 because it wants to win 95 down the road.
To put it in Royals terms: if sustainability was the ultimate goal, they would not have traded Wil Myers and Jake Odorizzi for James Shields and Wade Davis in 2014 (which worked), or traded pitching prospects for Ben Zobrist and Johnny Cueto in 2015 (which worked), or traded Esteury Ruiz and Matt Strahm for Ryan Buchter, Trevor Cahill and Brandon Maurer in 2017 (which did not work).