{"id":562,"date":"2013-10-01T08:45:58","date_gmt":"2013-10-01T15:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=562"},"modified":"2013-10-01T08:45:58","modified_gmt":"2013-10-01T15:45:58","slug":"kings-take-the-fifth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=562","title":{"rendered":"Kings Take the Fifth"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Kings third baseman Ryan Zimmerman and shortstop Ian Desmond<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For the third time in four years, the league championship was determined by one point or fewer.\u00a0 Despite a second half fade which saw a double digit lead evaporate, the Kings held on for dear life and edged out the Mavericks by a single point.\u00a0 Kevin’s Kings are the 2013 Dream Team Baseball League champions.<\/p>\n

With their fifth championship, the Kings can now claim more titles than any other franchise.\u00a0 But this one was a long time coming.\u00a0 After winning four straight titles from 2000 through 2003, the Kings have been on a bit of a roller coaster ride, bottoming out in last place in 2009.\u00a0 But in the years since then, they have built a solid foundation which eventually led to this title.\u00a0 A year ago, they came up just short, missing the title by the same one point margin that they won by this year.\u00a0 But in the year of the tenth anniversary of their last title, the Kings are champions once again.<\/p>\n

For a good portion of the season, it appeared the Kings might win the league running away.\u00a0 They held a double digit point lead for a good portion of the summer.\u00a0 Their starting pitching was awesome in the first half, and the offense was even better.\u00a0 The Kings had a league high eight players on the All-Star team (two more than any other team).\u00a0 But their fortunes changed significantly in late July, and especially August.\u00a0 Part of this was due to the finger injury suffered by their best all around player, Carlos Gonzalez.\u00a0 Gonzalez suffered the injury in early July and wound up missing a majority of the second half of the season.\u00a0 The Kings actually coughed up their lead to the Mavericks for a couple days in the last week of August.\u00a0 But fortunately for them, they caught a hot streak in early September to regain positive momentum.\u00a0 However, in the final week or so, they started coughing up points with their struggling pitching staff and had to hold on for the one point victory.\u00a0 Had the season been another week longer, this might be a completely different article.<\/p>\n

The Kings offense was the primary reason why they won the league.\u00a0 They led the way with 43.5 batting points, which was 9.5 more than any other team earned.\u00a0 They were a well rounded offensive squad, finishing in the top three in the league in all five categories.\u00a0 In addition to Gonzalez’s first half contributions, the other top offensive performers were all Kings veterans:\u00a0 Robinson Cano, Jay Bruce, Carlos Beltran, Ian Desmond and Ryan Zimmerman.\u00a0 Zimmerman’s contributions were especially important because his September surge carried an otherwise lackluster offense.\u00a0 But the other mentioned players were solid all year.\u00a0 The Kings also had a very impressive catching duo of Wilin Rosario and Jonathan LuCroy, giving them an edge on pretty much every other team at that position.\u00a0 It was truly a team effort because not one Kings player came near the league lead in any offensive category.\u00a0 Bruce (109 RBI) was the only player to finish in the top five of a category.<\/p>\n

Even though the offense was better than the pitching, the improvement of the Kings pitching staff was a major reason why they won the league.\u00a0 Their offense was nearly identical to 2012, but the pitchers improved by nine points, finishing third in the league with 34.5 points.\u00a0 The rotation was led by the Tigers trio of Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander and Anibal Sanchez.\u00a0 Verlander has been the Kings ace for several years, but this year he was a distant third behind his two Tigers teammates.\u00a0 Scherzer is their top Cy Young candidate, leading the league with 21 wins, third in WHIP (0.97) and second in strike outs (240).\u00a0 He was probably the best non-Mavericks pitcher in the league.\u00a0 But Sanchez actually led the staff in ERA (2.59).\u00a0 To complement those three, the Kings made a key mid-season signing with Ricky Nolasco just before he was traded to the Dodgers.\u00a0 Nolasco chipped in seven key wins as the rest of the staff was struggling.\u00a0 Jake Peavy was his usual solid self in the rotation too.\u00a0 The bullpen turned into a bit of a disaster, finishing ninth in saves due to injuries to former closer J.J. Putz and mid-season saves leader Jason Grilli.\u00a0 Fortunately for them, the leaky pen didn’t come back to haunt them.<\/p>\n

It is interesting to examine how this team was built.\u00a0 Usually, championship squads are able to win largely because of some great draft picks they made prior to the season.\u00a0 But that simply wasn’t the case for this Kings team.\u00a0 In fact, they had a rather poor draft in March.\u00a0 They made a historically bad trade in dealing their first round pick to the Mavericks for Ike Davis, who was a horrific bust.\u00a0 The Mavericks used that pick to select Manny Machado.\u00a0 If the Mavericks had won the league over the Kings, that trade would have gone down in infamy for the Kings.\u00a0 Although they did acquire some nice role players in the draft, almost all of their key contributors were the 16 players who they retained from a year ago.\u00a0 This speaks to the depth the team has built in recent years.\u00a0 In fact, they used two of their draft picks to reacquire players who didn’t quite make that 16 player cut in the winter (Jonathan LuCroy and Michael Morse).\u00a0 The solid core of players the Kings have assembled finally paid off with a title.<\/p>\n

In the upcoming weeks, I’ll review the 2013 season for the other nine teams.\u00a0 If this government shutdown lasts a while, I may finish them all this week!\u00a0 I’m looking forward to the MLB playoffs, featuring a whole bunch of small-market, low payroll teams.\u00a0 It should be fun to watch.\u00a0 Thanks to everyone for another very fun year.\u00a0 21 seasons in the book!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the third time in four years, the league championship was determined by one point or fewer.\u00a0 Despite a second half fade which saw a double digit lead evaporate, the Kings held on for dear life and edged out the Mavericks by a single point.\u00a0 Kevin’s Kings are the 2013 Dream Team Baseball League champions. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=562"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":565,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions\/565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}