It's Chevalier's Thread and He Can Do What He Wants To

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Just wanted to say that your personal story about baseball is very fascinating story, even if I know a very little ablout baseball!
Past weeks I did check this thread regularly for new bit of basball stories instead updates of your civ game.
Thanks you very much for sharing this story, I did enjoy it very much!

Thank you so much for the kind words! I was worried there after all my dedlurkers vanished that I'd scared everyone off (the long pauses in the actual game for summer didn't help), so it's really great to hear that at least a few people read along and enjoyed it. I have one or two epilogue posts, and then we'll be done with baseball - but I think I'll keep commenting on the playoffs as they happen.

anyway, Turn 72




Situation, start of turn 72. Two things. Minor note - my warrior was attacked by a barb archer out of the camp. I'll need to pull back and heal, and probably need to go ahead and finish archery so I can upgrade that slinger. The rough terrain makes it dangerous to approach the archer, he'll shoot my warrior full of holes. Need superior numbers to dig him out.



The bigger news is that Emperor has declared war on the Archduke!   Thank goodness someone's doing something about his runaway growth! This, of course, reinforces what a mistake it was on my part to sign the DoF - now Archduke can remove his navy from watching his backdoor (where my navy could continue to threaten Johnny), and can concentrate on Emperor. That's the trouble with no diplomacy, of course. Coordination is really tough. Anyway, I knew at the time that it was an error, but I let my gloom get the better of me. Can't let that happen again.

Anyway, this turn is cheering - I'm once again back in contention (except that the Archduke is still crushing me) following the second turn of war with Grenada:




To maximize damage, I pull my most injured galley out of the line and send in the fresh reserve galley. Our strength advantage has reached an overwhelming 9 points, which means...-checks chart-*...that we should do somewhere between 35-52 damage (the bars are really broad), or ~44 points. We do 40, suggesting either a low roll or that I'm misreading the chart:




No worries, we've got more than enough strength here now. 4 full health galleys is a very different proposition than 3 damaged galleys, that's for sure! The follow up does 47, reducing the city to a paltry 23 health, and then the last galley easily walks in amongst the ruins. Arabian marines leap off their boats and storm ashore, putting much of the population to the sword as they sack the capital of the Moorish heretics:






The Wheel and Celestial Navigation are inspired, and ironically, I've got a Harbor now without having yet finished Celestial Nav ("That's not what ironic means, Chevalier!" Shut up). With that, my score shoots up from last place to third, with Emperor's slightly higher era score giving him the edge over me. In terms of civics, tech, total pop, and total cities + districts, though, I'm a match for anyone in the map (with one obvious exception) and am much closer to the Archduke as well - and Cain's settler is finishing soon, and we're getting closer to the Ancestral Hall settler wave...I have 5 city sites available to me, and I am to go for all of them. That will settle me at 9 cities, a lot for the immediate future, and we can look at colonization. Bottom line: The Arabian snowball is very slow developing, but it's starting to take off.

Mind, I don't expect to win, still, but I feel less embarrassed now than I did two weeks ago.




South of Cain, I've resumed scouting. My navy will heal up and then scatter as well to finish mapping the world. We still need to find Japper and Rowain (they're nearby - Archduke has met them, Emperor has not), and we need to find ANY other city state that exists. Vilnius is out there, since the Archduke is their suzerain (they declared war on Emperor), I know that. We're back on track after the barbarian diversion. This is about where i wanted to be 20 turns ago.

An overview:




Escobar builds shrine (want religion faster), then builder for chopping. Then settler (100% chop) for Rios.
Zobrist is working on the Hall to get some cogs in before Magnus is established, then we'll chop the remainder and work on a settler (Morales) or Holy Site. 
Cain is finishing settler (Moustakas) - will hold it for the hall chop, then will follow with perhaps another settler for Hosmer?
Gordon is working on a builder. Bought the wheat and am working it for a faster size #2. As Gordon grows, it has great tiles, it just needs culture to reach them, so a monument is up next. 
Grenada was renamed after a pitcher, since I'm out of position players (except bench guys). For a normal team, I'd do the starters first, but hte Royals of course prioritized bullpen pitching - so Grenada gets the greatest bullpen arm of them all, Wade Davis. The surname is al Mutakabbir, the Dominant One, which seemed perfect for the Wadebot. The next few turns will be occupied in repairs to the damaged infrastructure - I captured a builder, which is very nice - and then we'll need to get the city's paltry food supply sorted out. 

At some point, we'll need a second trader, as well. 

Research is rudderless. Finishing shipbuilding and archery, then probably Celestial Nav for harbors. Beyond that, I don't know. There's no iron on my island except under the campus at Escobar, but I don't intend to build swords anyway. Mamluks don't need iron. Sadly, though, inspiring ironworking will be tough, since I can't build a damned mine over any. Need to think about the next immediate needs - settler wave, stirrup push, invade the 'Duke? 

Anyway. My time crunch is mostly eased off (we're in the taper phase for my race!, and school is fully in swing! And I finished my online class!), so I have more time to properly update you guys now. Let's see if we can pull off a Royals-esque comeback win. 

*see page 1, post #2

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Turn 73

Regrettably, guys, I can't offer you much perspective on the evolving war situation. Archduke is updating his thread once every few days, but Emperor hasn't posted since...July 26. And he hasn't yet made it past page 1. I have more than 20 because I'm a lunatic. :I 

Anyway, here's the only action I'll see, on the northeast front:




The archer is out of the camp. I need ot pull back to my borders to heal and bring up reinforcements, both my units are too weak to tackle this archer without getting shot to death getting close. I'll pick up my own archery soon, and I can soon fling 2 warriors and 2 archers at this camp. For now we'll take one volley as we withdraw, but that should be all. 

In the southeast, we're boldly venturing where hopefully no man has gone before:




Time to find more city states, and Japper and Rowain. 

With that quiet turn out of the way, here's an overview:




Escobar: Finishing up a shrine. This will boost Great Prophet points from 1 to 2, and by turn 80 I should have a holy site up in Zobrist as well, for a total of 3. We're at 14 now. By turn 80, in 7 turns we'll have gained another 14, to be at 28, needing 32 more for a religion. At 3 per turn, we should get a religion turn 91. Rowain is getting 2.3 at the moment, but once i get my shrine I should lead. Will he spend production to snipe the GP from me? It's a possibility. I need to think about running a project. 
Zobrist: Continuing to pump production into the Hall. Chop that, then overflow to Holy Site to speed up religion, then settler. 
Cain: Finishing settler. There's no need to pause production - I ran some SP test games and you get the builder as long as you finish the Hall BEFORE you settle. We'll be finishing the hall in 3 turns, so no worries there. Settler will found Moustakas, which should give me the most cities in the game for a little bit.
Gordon: Slowly growing, working on builder. Gradually will get mines and culture up and running, but this is a slow city. We'll probably farm, mine, and hell, I dunno, mine? Fishing boats for food? 
Davis: Continuing to repair fishing boats and monument, granary next. Food in the city is very tight, but what else is new? Once it's all fixed up we'll maybe do a settler here as well! 

Here's the GP screen, relevant for the war, as well. Note my own GP points, Rowain's pursuit, and Emperor's big GA gains. Archduke is winning the race for Hypatia by a mile. 




Emperor has 22 GA points and is earning 6 per turn, which I think is 2 RNDs? He is in Oligarchy, and his two visible cities on the trade screen each have an RND. No idea if the capital has one. He also has a campus and a plaza, and 9 total pop between the two cities. Important to remember that his empire score is slightly inflated with custom districts. 

Okay, so let's look at the progress of the war. Here's the scores from one turn ago, 72. Note particularly Empire scores and Military Power for both Emperor and Archduke (my own score included to show my own rapid growth in this area).

Turn 72:







63 points for the Archduke versus 53 for Emperor, and much of Emperor's are RND districts. I am bumping along at 44, which is somehow still higher than Japper's. Emperor fields 265 milpower to Archduke's 204. Not sure how that translates into ships and other military units, but there's a slight edge for the English - and I believe Archduke's units are scattered, scouting. I've seen at least two widely separated galleys, while if Emperor is the aggressor he's concentrated.

Turn 73







Archduke drop 11 points to 52, Emperor climbs 9 to 62. Conclusion: Archduke lost 1 size 5 city, Emperor captured it with 3 surviving pop. Interesting that Emperor chose to capture instead of raze the city - he must think that he can hold it. What I'm wondering is if this is the second-city state Archduke took so many turns ago. He grabbed two in quick succession, meaning he sailed over a short strait to reach one, or he had two on his home continent. If Emperor is as close to Archduke as Archduke is to me, then yes, it could have been Emperor's home city-state. Reinforcing this is the fact that I met English galleys just beyond Dutch borders, which is why we have contact. So, what I think happened is that Emperor smarted from the loss of his city-state and quickly built for revenge. He had the highest military score in the game two turns ago. He attacked by land and sea - using his scouting land units, but most of his strength is in the water since he's England? - and quickly grabbed Archduke's colony. Archduke is scrambling to defend - WHICH IS WHY HE OFFERED ME FRIENDSHIP! Damn, I should have rejected it - I'd take the brute squad down now and raze a city on his other side. He'd lose another 9 points and be down to 43 empire score, hardly anything at all. Knew it was a mistake, and it probably cost me the game. Oh, well.

Anyway, though, it's a slugfest. Emperor LOST 52 strenght down to 213, while Archduke climbed 9 to 204. Conclusion: Emperor is accepting losses to capture the city, and now intends to fortify and hold it. Archduke is chopping out miltiary as fast as he's losing it. 

Who is winning?

Can't judge the positions. Don't know production capacity at all, but Emperor has the harbors and an admiral soon - less than 10 turns, in fact. That will make him tough to beat at sea. Archduke has superior culture, but both are in Oligarchy. Archduke also leads in tech - he could field Quadriremes soon, but I dn't think he has Celestial Nav. The Dutch have higher gold generation, as well. 

Ideally, I'd see a stalemate for about 30 turns here. I use those 30 turns to push my own settlers, then reinforce my own navy. If Archduke is still vulnerable, we pounce from the other side, following up with Stirrups to finish him off. Then we take stock of the world and see where we go.

Okay, so we need stirrups -> so we need feudalism -> So we need 5 more farms. I can make that happen. We'll also do the math on some heavy chariots and see how many we can afford to upgrade versus how many Mamluks we'll have to hand build. Encampment? Eh, maybe. Could use it for the discount if nothing else. 

Sorry, I got more tired as this went on and got less coherent. That's the best view I can offer of a war on the other side of the world. See y'all tomorrow.

[williams482]

Thank you so much for the kind words! I was worried there after all my dedlurkers vanished that I'd scared everyone off (the long pauses in the actual game for summer didn't help), so it's really great to hear that at least a few people read along and enjoyed it. I have one or two epilogue posts, and then we'll be done with baseball - but I think I'll keep commenting on the playoffs as they happen.

On the contrary (for me at least) - the baseball story gave me a reason to keep reading your thread, even when the game was stopped. I may not have anything of substance to contribute, but I'm still here!

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Turn 74

Situation, start of turn 74:




My slinger! D: I didn't expect that to happen. The archer should have done ~50 damage to my 65 health slinger, so I had a spectacularly unlucky die result there. Bah. That's 22 production I shan't see again. 

Well, at least I can pull out the warrior. I'll come back, heal, and then go after this camp (#4, for the record) with fresh troops. I've now lost two or three slingers to barbs, which is a bit embarrassing, but this has been a LOT of barbs and it's tough to maneuver in the rough terrain, and - wait, what the heck is up with my techs!? Oh, right, I forgot to disable CQUI after playing a PBEM13 turn. Stand by.

-soft muzak plays-

...there we are. Let's take a look now:




Sadly, my slinger is still dead. Alas, slinger. 

Anyway, I go back and forth over what to build in Escobar for a while. It's about time I had another builder there, and a settler could always use cogs. But I'll get the cogs doubled if I wait a few turns, so inefficient now. I was gonna go with builder, but I need to replace that slinger and it'll only take two turns to whip that out. Finally, though, Rowain I BELIEVE has Divine Spark (or was that Japper?), because he's making GP points hand over fist. I have about a 10-point lead on him...but I'm not comfortable with that.

Look, there's a huge drop off between Religion #2 and Religion #3 here. 1 & 2, not so much to choose between, since there's enough good beliefs. Rowain might be gunning to snipe my religion, and you know what? There's no harm in getting a religion sooner - the production spent on a project will be put to good use, no worries. So I run a project:




Swap research over to Military Tradition in order to get a government change right when Magnus is ready, and that's about it for my micro. The brute squad is healing up and will be sailing off next turn, and in the south I found nothing of interest - back near that large southern island, with no city-states visible on settler radar. The overview is hard to read since I pinned a bunch of districts in the northwestern corner of the empire - mostly lots of campuses. 

Abroad, no major change in scores for Emperor or Archduke:






So no cities changing hands yet. Military power scores show continued fighting, however. Archduke is sitting at 207, while Emperor is at 196. Overall, of course, a stalemate at the current status quo is the best outcome for me, Rowain, and Japper. We can build, while neither of the combatants gains much ground at the expense of the other, and the ongoing fighting keeps someone from building up an overwhelming, experienced military. I need to be ready with my own military in 30 turns - currently at the bottom of the military standings thanks to my ongoing struggles with barbs.  

Otherwise, though, the scores are quite encouraging. Rowain leads me by 3 civics, Archduke by 4. I've got two cheap ones I've been saving, so while they definitely have better culture, it's not overwhelming. Technology - again, Rowain leads me by 3, Archduke by 4, and again I have cheap ones I've been sitting on. Science is a bit further behind, but I'm working on that. The last major category, Empire score, I trail only Emperor and I have a hefty lead on Rowain and Japper. Now, I've been accused in the past of being "obsessed" with empire score, so I want to take a moment to explain why. I feel like Empire score is a "leading indicator," as it were - just like some statistics predict recessions or economic growth, empire score predicts future civ performance. Higher pop means more yields, more cities means more districts, and more of all three = higher everything else. It's the best rule of thumb guide to how everyone's civ is doing that the score provides, and so while tech/civic counts show where everyone is now, Empire shows where they will be. The fact that my Empire score is competitive means that I'm right in the mix, and my civ has latent strength that I should be able to leverage to have a fighting chance.

Also, note that Archduke's Era score is inflated somewhat. He's got fully 19 more Era points than me, which accounts for the majority of the 31 point lead he has on me. Remove those, and it's down to 12 points - which is entirely due to his tech/civic lead. We're not winning, not by a long shot, but we're not losing as badly as I thought we were. 

That's all I've got for you today.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Can I squeeze in an update before work?

Situation, start of 75:



A quiet turn, for once. No attacks anywhere. Davis is steadily recovering and has finished the monument - note that my culture outpaces my science at the moment. Worth taking monasticism? It'd cost 14 x . 25 = ~3.5 culture, but in return I'd get Escobar and Zobrist with +75% science. Need to look at their science numbers this afternoon. Also worth in mind that I'd have to give up my sole military slot to run that, and I was thinking of swapping in Conscription (since Colonization + Hall = 100% chops) to boost my gold rate.

In the north, I find camp #5 on my island:




Sheesh.   Why is Arabia such a wretched hive of scum and villainy? Five camps in 75 turns! I think that's much more than I'm used to in Single Player. Well, I'll pull this slinger back, and come back later to clear this bugger. The danger is the quads it'll spawn, which can beat my fleet, and might pillage around Davis. Don't wanna take too long to clear this.

No change in score for Emperor/Archduke, forgot to check military scores. No cities changing hands, though.

Scouting news - the brute squad rolls out together for my next crazy idea (more on that later), while in the south, I find more useless island but no city-states yet on the SettlerDar. 

Finally, scores. I plan to do a full survey post after work, but no time for that now:






Davis is now repairing the granary, a highly necessary building in that food-starved city. 
Zobrist is ready to chop out a warrior/Ancestral Hall next turn with Magnus in place. Then Magnus will bounce to Cain, probably, which will get the next round of chops. Liang needs to find a city to settle in and be a builder pump - Zobrist is a good choice, since I'll want Pingala in Escobar.
Escobar is Praying.
Cain is finishing the settler next turn, followed straight by another settler, this one 100% boosted, for Hosmer? Yeah, probably. 
Gordon is still working on that first growth and a builder. Once it's up to size 3 or so with a monument and some farms and mines it'll be up and contributing.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Chevalier Talks Baseball, Epilogue (part 1 of 2): The Celebration

[video=youtube]  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQa3SzW68mI[/video]

Dayton Moore got off the plane and squinted into the sun of a bright Kansas City afternoon. The airport was busy this summer day, dozens of jets coming and going amongst Kansas City International’s three terminals. His wife Marianne beside him, he found his driver without incident, and soon he was whizzing down I-35, making the 20 mile journey south from the airport to the heart of downtown. It was June 8, 2006, and Dayton had just signed on as the new general manager of the Kansas City Royals.

The Royals had a proud past, but had fallen on hard times. It was 21 years since their lone World Series victory in 1985 - and coincidentally also 21 years since the team had last made the playoffs, by far the longest playoff drought in North America. The team had had only a single winning season since 1993, a fluke 2003 campaign that saw the Royals play the hapless Detroit TIgers (who lost 119 games and won only 43) 19 times and only finish 2 games over .500. Indeed, 4 times in the last 5 years (excepting only 2003), the Royals themselves had lost more than 100 games. When old baseball men debated around the bar what the worst job in baseball was, the general manager of the Royals was often a favorite choice. It was Moore’s job to turn the losers of baseball into something the city could once again be proud of.

Moore’s apprehension mounted as the car made its way through downtown. He could reflect back on the moments that had made his new team the laughing stock of baseball:

Spring training, 1999. Royals executives gather around a pitcher named Mike Piechnik. He throws the ball just 75 mph, though it undeniably does dance. He also throws the ball underhanded. He is a Canadian softball pitcher. He has never played baseball before.

“It’s a balk,” Royals assistant general manager Allard Baird shouts as they watch Piechnik throw. The others discuss this. A balk? Someone looks for a rulebook.
Baird walks away while shaking his head. “It’s a balk,” he mutters.

Last game of the season, 2002. The Royals have 99 losses. They have never lost 100 games in a season — not even in their first year. Before the game, a couple of veteran players beg out of the game. They say they are hurting.

Manager Tony Pena sends out a lineup that includes the unmemorable Kit Pellow, Luis Ordaz and Dusty Wathan. Rookie relievers Ryan Bukvich and Jeremy Hill pitch. The Royals lose 7-3. They lose the 100th game.

“One hundred losses, ninety-nine losses,” Pena says. “What’s the difference?”

September 2005. The Royals have already lost 19 games in a row. Pena quit after a game.

A pop-up skies high in a meaningless Tuesday night game. Left fielder Terrence Long and center fielder Chip Ambres settle under it, look at each other and jog toward the dugout. The ball plops behind them.

“Someone needs to put this team out of its misery,” a former Royals player says.

May 2006. Center fielder Kerry Robinson races back to the wall on a long fly ball in Chicago. He leaps at the fence. He climbs the wall.

The baseball bounces 10 feet in front of him on the warning track.

“Every time it seems like we hit bottom, we go lower,” a Royals executive says.

No team in baseball had been as dysfunctional. No team as hopeless. No team had lost more games, seen more talent squandered, made more bizarre decisions in the last two decades. The Royals’ one brush with fame was a brief appearance at the climax of Moneyball - where they are walked off by the Oakland A’s, who win their record 21st game in a row.

Moore thought about all this, and he grew increasingly convinced that he had made a mistake. His face grew stiff and cold, his lips could not unfrown themselves.

And then the car turned the corner onto the Plaza, and his grim expression melted away. The car drove by shops and restaurants, hundreds of busy, happy shoppers lining the sidewalks. It drove around the Nichols fountain, with 4 great equestrian statues representing the 4 great rivers of the world. There were kids holding hands with their parents, people everywhere smiling, laughing. Soon, Moore was laughing, too. His wife looked at him curiously.

“This is where we’re going to have the parade,” he said.




~

Tuesday, November 3, 2015, nine and a half years after Dayton Moore picked out his parade route, was one of the most perfect days, I think, that has ever happened. The late autumn sun shone brightly in the midst of a clear blue sky. There was a light breeze from the south, and the air was crisp and cool, but not uncomfortable. The kind of day you get a handful of times a year at best - if ever.

It started early. Employers got phone call after email after text message from employees suddenly “sick” or just plain not coming in. Then some employers started telling employees not to come in. Schools closed. Medical offices sent non-essential personnel home. Employees at one local engineering firm got an email from their boss late Sunday night, demanding they not show up on Monday, or Tuesday, or before they were done celebrating. The email contained some colorful language. The boss was pretty excited. Local business followed suit. And by noon, of the slightly under 2,000,000 souls in the Kansas City Metro area, fully 800,000 of them were jamming their way into the city.

The Royals were coming home.




People were parking a mile away or more and hiking in foot to get a glimpse of “the greatest team in KC sports history.” They packed in close with hundreds of thousands of strangers - 2 out of every 5 people in the entire metro area was there, the largest crowd anyone present had ever seen in person - and waited for their heroes. Soon enough, the players and the managers piled into the backs of pickup trucks (one sporting a gigantic pair of Moose antlers), and they pulled out.




The parade weaved through downtown, people lining the streets — 10, 15, 50-deep in parts — and nearly all of them in blue. Some of it was well-worn blue, hats with brims faded and folded tight, and some of it was brand-new blue — World Series championship hats and “Thank You Royals” T-shirts.




The city had talked about this day for thirty years. Usually it was a joke, because parades are things that happen in other places. We’ve grown used to seeing those on TV, Kobe Bryant waving, or Rob Gronkowski binge drinking, or Derek Jeter smiling. That would never happen here. How could it? The Chiefs hadn’t won a playoff game since 1993, and the Royals - well, the Royals…




If you were there, the striking thing wasn’t necessarily the size of the crowd, but the cordialness. Fans overwhelmed downtown, turning a one-block walk into a half hour of sidestepping and excuse-me-ing through a crowd that went forever. The Kansas City Police Department reported just three arrests. In some places, sports celebrations like this mean tearing up a town. Here, it merely meant taking over a town.




They parked, literally, miles away. Some parked on the side of Interstate highways. A QuikTrip on Southwest Boulevard, a full two miles from the nearest point of the parade, had a line to get in. A man walked around the rally with a sign that read, “Cell phone service like it’s 1985.”

What a party, too. The aerial shots are stunning — a massive swarm of blue T-shirts surrounding Union Station and downtown streets — and will hang on walls in Kansas City forever.




I’ve done a poor job this series of conveying one of the most remarkable things about that single, glorious year in Kansas City - the fans.

Every place you went, people were talking about the team. Everyone had Royals shirts, Royals hats, goofy Royals bobbleheads. The names of the players were on every lip in town, Eric Hosmer and Salvador Perez’s faces were as recognizable as family members. Never before, and never since, have I seen the city so united in purpose, in passion, in joy. And today, it reached its climax.




The team broke attendance records in 2015, and people spent more time at home watching than ever before. Fans hijacked the All-Star voting, at one point fielding an entire team of Royals - including Omar Infante, the Royals’ injured second baseman - against the best the National League had to offer. Fully 60% of the TVs in the metro area were tuned into Game 5 of the World Series - and it’s fair to assume that a good chunk of the others were tuned in at someone’s bar, or a buddy’s house. Indeed, the World Series as a whole had drawn its best ratings in years: More people watched than any Series since 2009 (when the Yankees had beaten the Phillies). More tuned in to Game 5 than any since 2003 (when the Yankees lost to the Marlins). For the series as a whole, 80% of Kansas City’s TVs at one point or another had tuned in, the highest rating for any single market since the Diamondbacks beat the Yankees in Game 7 in 2001 (one of the best games of all time).

So now the team that had come back from the dead again and again was celebrated in the only way it could be: with the most massive celebration the old city had ever seen. The trucks made their way past the hundreds of thousands of cheering spectators in blue and wound up at the steps of Union Station, the largest outdoor open space in the city, with the long hillside up to the Liberty Memorial utterly blanketed in blue.




There were a lot of speeches, but the one that speaks for them all is Jonny Gomes.

Yes, Jonny Gomes - if you have a sharp memory you may recognize his name from the Wild Card Game (forever capitalized out of respect), when in left field he had failed to catch Hosmer’s ball off the wall in the 12th, the hit that sent Hosmer to third with two outs left in their season, where he would tie the game on Christian Colon’s hit...Gomes had himself wound up on the Royals, appearing in no games, but becoming one of the dugout’s best cheerleaders. His speech closes the last recap video I have (of Game 5), and it plays over the video I found for today, but here's the raw speech.

Transcript:
“It’s unbelievable what these boys did! It’s unbelievable what they did! It’s unbelievable what they did! They stole bases, they hit homers. Hey guess what? Cy Young winner? Not on our team…” 

Dallas Keuchel, the Astros pitcher and Cy Young winner, reared back and delivered his pitch - only to watch Kendrys Morales send it sailing into the night as Kauffman Stadium exploded around him.

“...Beat him. Rookie of the year? Not on our team…”

Carlos Correa had done his level best to beat the Royals here in Game 4. He had hit two homers and a double, and now his team had a 4-run lead to defend for 6 outs to eliminate Kansas City. But the bases were loaded, and his team need him again. Morales hit a chopping ground ball just past Tony Sipp, and Correa charged it - only to watch the ball skip past, and now the game was tied, and the Royals were going wild...

“We beat him. MVP of the whole league? Sorry, guys, not on our team…”

Josh Donaldson had seen his season end at Kauffman the year before, when Perez’s single had just slipped past his diving lunge. Now, he stood at home plate, with the tying run at third, the go-ahead run at second, facing Wade Davis. Beat the best closer in the league and the Blue Jays would survive for a game 7. Davis pitched, and Donaldson swung, and in a repeat of the year before his ball was slicing down the third base line - but this time Mike Moustakas there, smothering it, and firing it to first and once again Donaldson’s season was ending in this wretched stadium...

“But we beat that guy too! You know why we beat them? Because all of you all people had our backs! And Dayton Moore put this team together and Yost delivered it by being the captain of the ship. You all want to be politically correct? I’m the un-politically correct person: We whooped their ass!”

~

I’ll close with the legacy of the 2014-2015 Royals. They were a special team, both personally and in the wider world of baseball. Most comeback wins in history. Smallest market-team ever to win a World Series. Revolutionizing the bullpen (modern bullpen usage in the playoffs can be traced back to these Royals teams), and rejecting the home run/strikeout offense. And, of course, redeeming themselves right as the biggest Royals fan in my life passed away. No other team accomplished what they have. Look at their World Series win probability, particularly during Game 4 at Houston:




No team has ever come back from that before, or since. That chart right there is the glory and the excitement of this team, in one image.

Let me finish by quoting just a few of my favorite columnists’ reactions. First, Joe Posnanski:

This will be the last time (probably) to write about a Royals outfielder named Kerry Robinson, who climbed the center-field wall for a long fly ball and found himself sheepishly hanging on that wall when the ball landed 10 feet in front of him and bounced off the warning track and over his head. This will be the last time (probably) to write about the Royals losing a game in Cleveland because a baseball hit a flock of seagulls (not the band). This will be the last time (probably) to write about outfielders Chip Ambres and Terrence Long settling under a fly ball, looking contentedly at each other and then jogging happily back to the dugout … only to have the ball plop behind them in the outfield grass, forgotten.

This will be the last time (probably) because those Royals are gone, a relic of another time. Those Royals were impossibly terrible for a very long period of time. It felt like a permanent state. Those Royals had no money, no bright ideas, no luck, no staffing, no conviction and no chance. Darkly funny little stories that happened along the way, like the time the Royals called up a player no one had ever heard of to pitch at Yankee Stadium, or the time they brought in a softball pitcher to camp and stood around the mound arguing if his motion was an automatic balk, or the time they hired a manager who liked to unicycle around the outfield to get exercise.

These were all Royals fans had for sustenance. At least they were sometimes good for a laugh.

Most of the time, of course, they weren’t funny at all. They were sad, and they made fans sad. Royals hats gathered dust in Kansas City’s attics. Old Royals jerseys from the good days — George Brett and Hal McRae and Frank White and Bret Saberhagen — shrunk and ripped and went unsold at yard sales. On SportsCenter, the Royals’ highlights and lowlights were routines saved for the rushed final 15 seconds (“And the Royals lost again. Good night!”). Much of the time, it hardly felt like Kansas City even had a baseball team.

But the Royals would argue that all of those dry and unhappy years, in their own odd way, shaped the direction and the luck of this year’s champions. 

- Joe Posnanski, Long May They Reign

Sam Mellinger:

Every champion is remembered fondly, but this one is different even by that high standard. Some of that is in wiping away two decades of losing, and some of that is in the way they attacked every day, every game, every inning, every pitch. Kansas Citians bought more tickets than ever before, and spent more time watching on TV than ever before. Following this team became more than a pastime, and more than a habit. It is now an addiction.

This is the team that Kansas Citians will brag on to their kids, to their grandkids, and maybe even their kids’ grandkids. This group has done more than win the world championship. That happens every year, for some lucky city. But not like this.

...The Royals have rewritten not just a franchise’s sorry history, but forever changed the way sports are viewed and loved and consumed back home. Kansas City has not had a championship parade in 30 years, long enough that babies conceived and born in the years since have grown up to know sports success only as something that happens in other places. It is long enough that some of those kids are doctors, or war heroes. They have careers and mortgages and marriages. Some have divorces. This is a long time coming.

This group embraced that challenge, too, which is no small thing. In other places, with other men, the pressure has become overwhelming. For 86 years, the talked about the Bambino in Boston. They still talk about a goat in Chicago. The men who chose or were chosen for the Royals put their arms around their task and squeezed…

These Royals will be forever remembered for the forceful way they sliced through the regular season, and continually refusing to die in the playoffs. Eight of their 11 playoff wins came after trailing in the sixth or later. Six of those comebacks have erased deficits of two runs or more. No team has ever done that. You could live 100 more years and not see it again.

The eighth inning in Houston. Lorenzo Cain scoring the pennant-clinching run from first on a single, and Davis pitching both sides of a rain delay in Kansas City. The ball scooting past Daniel Murphy’s glove and Hosmer’s sprint home here in New York. Baseball’s playoffs create drama naturally, but the sport has never seen anything like this.

..These Royals have shown baseball’s hungriest market how to love the sport again, and that wishing for and even expecting good things to happen doesn’t have to end in heartbreak.

...Others have won on budgets, but in modern baseball the Royals lifting the trophy with all those little flags on it is without precedent. The Oakland A’s were celebrated with a best-selling book and a Brad Pitt movie, but Moneyball never played in the World Series. The Tampa Bay Rays may be the closest cousin to what the Royals accomplished, but they lost their only World Series in five games. The Colorado Rockies built a pennant winner almost exclusively through their farm system, but were swept in their only World Series.

...Kansas City is different now, because of this team. Buildings downtown light up in blue. Kids wear T-shirts with “Gordon” or “Perez” or “Cain” on the backs. Conversations begin with, “You watch the game last night?” and in a good way. On any block in any neighborhood back home, you might see two, three, four blue Royals flags out front. Some of the people who drive through these neighborhoods are the men who made it happen. The players. The coaches. The executives.

Nobody knows where the future will take these guys. The business of baseball has a way of breaking up successful teams and even with record attendance the Royals are more affected by rising costs than most...

But no matter what, this will be the team that Kansas City talks about for a generation.

- Sam Mellinger, Even by championship standards, this Royals team is special


I will close with the biggest Royals fan of them all, Rany Jayazerli, who will wrap up better than I ever could (you should read the whole thing of all three of this columns, but if you only read one, make it this one):

Of all the amazing things I'll remember the 2015 World Champion Kansas City Royals for, the most amazing is this: They turned the story of the 2014 Royals into a prologue.

The 2014 Royals were the biggest story in American sports for an entire month and the greatest story in Kansas City sports in a generation. Before that, the Royals were as connected with being hapless losers as they are associated with being a relentless winning machine of late. They had gone 29 years without reaching the postseason, the longest playoff drought in professional sports. They had just finished a stretch of 17 losing seasons in 18 years.

And then the magic started. In the AL wild-card game, the Royals became the first team in playoff history to win an elimination game after trailing by four runs or more in the eighth inning. They wouldn't lose again for three weeks, sweeping their way through the ALDS and ALCS before falling to the San Francisco Giants and Madison Bumgarner, taking the World Series to a Game 7, and making the final out with the tying run 90 feet from home plate.

It was an enchanted run. It was about as enjoyable a team to root for as any team can be without actually winning a championship. And afterwards, I didn't think there was any chance they could repeat it. I felt like the 2014 Royals were the closest I would get to seeing a championship in a long time, perhaps in my lifetime. Walking to my car outside Kauffman Stadium in the wee hours of the morning after Game 7, I tried to cheer myself up with the memories of the Royals' month-long assault on immortality. But all I could think about was how rare and precious the opportunity to play for a championship is, and having fallen just short in 2014, there was no guarantee the Royals would get that opportunity again. The 29 years the Royals had waited to make the playoffs might not be the norm, but to win a championship, in a 30-team league, it actually is.

I'd like to claim that I broke from the offseason consensus that the Royals would return to mediocrity, but I didn't: I had them pegged for 83 wins and watching the playoffs. Most of that was based on the reasonable, if completely inaccurate, assumption that their bullpen couldn't possibly be as effective, their defense couldn't possibly be as impermeable as last year, and that they wouldn't improve enough in other areas to compensate. But I think that, somewhere in the subconscious recesses of my mind, part of me was convinced that the 2014 Royals had exhausted the franchise's supply of good fortune for the foreseeable future.

I know that's irrational, the sports fan's equivalent of the Gambler's Fallacy. Sports aren't fair; things don't even out in the long run. But having been a fan of a team that had been the bug for a generation, I wasn't prepared to accept that they were now the windshield...

As a Royals fan, all I wanted was a championship. Instead I got something more: a team that makes a case for being the most clutch October team of all time, best summed up in this SportsCenter tweet that I ought to frame and hang on my wall:

At some point in 2015 postseason games, KC had win probabilities of:
18% 1% 25% 8% 10% 16% 5%
KC won all 7 of those games. (via fangraphs)
12:44 AM - Nov 2, 2015

The stats are astounding. From the seventh inning on in the postseason, the Royals scored 51 runs -- the other nine playoff teams combined for 55! -- and allowed 11. They won games in which they were losing after four innings, after five innings, after six innings, after seven innings (twice), and after eight innings (twice). They won seven playoff games in which they were losing by two runs or more; no other team in history has won more than five such games. (If baseball games were seven innings long, the Royals would have lost the World Series in five games instead of winning it in five.) There have been better teams in baseball history, but no team has proven itself so hard to kill...

Trying to make sense of what had happened after Game 7 last year, I wrote that "sports are pain. ... But there's meaning in that pain. There's a sense of belonging in that pain." Why do any of us bother to be sports fans when 97 percent of the time a season ends in failure? No one signs up to be a sports fan for the chance to share misery with a community. We sign up for the promise of that three percent, for the hope that once or twice in our lifetime the heavens will open up to us, that we will reach the mountaintop.

After waiting 30 years for this, I can tell you that everything you've heard is true: The view from here is amazing.

So here's to the 2015 Royals, for taking us there. For being the team I've waited my entire life to root for. For dominating the regular season from start to finish. For being the most unkillable baseball team October has ever seen. For finishing the season with a Game 5 that so perfectly embodied their season that it's as if they had planned it all along.

If I live another 50 years, I may never see another Royals championship. Even if I do, I will probably never see another championship as gratifying as this one. And you know what? That's okay. This was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of season. This was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of team. Sports are pain.

And then, suddenly, they are perfection.

- Rany Jayazerli, Eden.

[Grotsnot]

I’ve done a poor job this series of conveying one of the most remarkable things about that single, glorious year in Kansas City - the fans.

Every place you went, people were talking about the team. Everyone had Royals shirts, Royals hats, goofy Royals bobbleheads. The names of the players were on every lip in town, Eric Hosmer and Salvador Perez’s faces were as recognizable as family members. Never before, and never since, have I seen the city so united in purpose, in passion, in joy. And today, it reached its climax.

Seriously, folks, this. I think I mentioned I was living in KC at the time - y'all were one hell of a class act. Seemed like the whole building was blue for all of October (I got some friendly ribbing for my expat Cubby blue but, like I said at the time, hey it's still blue ) and I think like 80% of my department was out the morning of the parade. I wish I could remember if we (10k+ person company) got an official sanction from the leadership, like that engineering co., or if the managers and HR were just all out themselves A well-deserved celebration for a well-deserved win!

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Turn 76




My slinger died, AGAIN!? What hte actual fuck? There was just a spearman there, and the slinger was at full health! There was nothing preventing me from taking a hit and retreating back to my territory! There were NO other units in sight! 

I'm a bit frustrated with this. Short of NOT scouting (or not using slingers, I guess), there was nothing I could have done differently to avoid that. Does everyone else have as many barb issues as I do? No way to tell, since no one but Archduke is reporting! Anyway, that's three slingers gone, literally the entire starting force I built for Machinery. I'm down to one slinger and one warrior.

Well, soon to be two:







At least I can still do some things right.

A look at the South, which continues to be barren of all city-state contacts:




And scores and overview:






Still no cities changing hands, but Archduke's power has surged to 265, while Emperor's has fallen to 165, only a little higher than my own 150. Galleys are cheap at this point, though, and with Maritime Industries I have 3 cities that churn them out at 4-5 turns apiece. We'll be prepared to resist the Archduke when the DoF expires in 25 turns. 

Building numbers are mostly the same. Cain finished its settler and immediately started a new settler at +100%. Davis is rebuilding, Zobrist finishing the Hall, after which it will crank out a HS and then a slinger (alongside Escobar). 

In terms of research rates, my culture is only 2 behind the Archduke's, who is the leader. That's quite nice - the main reason actual civics are lagging is my inability to hit inspirations like Foreign Trade. Science is the main issue. We're not dead last, but Emperor has 22 science to my 12, Archduke has 26, and Rowain is somewhere between the two. Looks like after cities, the next push will be for campuses and libraries. 

Or Mamluks.

[Cornflakes]

PBEM 11 spoilers:

Your experience with barbs and your own slingers is exactly why I built 7 warriors in PBEM 11, and didn’t build my first ranged unit until nearly turn 70. I’ve killed 5 barb camps there and am about to kill my 6th including 2.5 horse camps (count the one I’m currently killing as a half horse camp because it hasn’t spawned any horse units yet). So that is somewhat comparable to what you’ve faced. If I had slingers instead of warriors I would have been in deep trouble. 

[Grotsnot]

Slingers are pretty puny on defense without any modifiers. I think trees are +3? So the Spear should net a +17STR swing. I didn't think that was quite instagib territory but I guess so? Or maybe the camp spawned another unit at just the wrong time?