How did baseball’s prognosticators predict the Royals 2015 season before it started? (Most thought they would suck)

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Baseball is a hard sport to predict. Still, plenty of people out there draw good paychecks telling their audience how teams and players will perform.

After the Kansas City Royals won their first World Series title in 30 years by defeating the New York Mets on Sunday night, it seemed appropriate to revisit the assessments cast upon the newly crowned champions before the season started.

The dominant view of the Royals: Their surprising 2014 campaign, which ended achingly short of a World Series title in seven games against the San Francisco Giants, was a fluke. Most pundits felt that the Royals didn’t have enough offensive firepower and would rue the departure of last year’s ace pitcher James Shields, who left for to the San Diego Padres during free agency.

A return to the playoffs, many would predict, wasn’t in the cards for the Royals in 2015.

Here’s a look at what key pundits thought about the Royals before the season started.

ESPN
The cable sports network polled 88 of its experts ahead of the 2015 season. Nearly all of them had a dim view of the Royals prospects for glory. 

Only three of those 88 panelists believed that the Royals could win the American League Central Division. Most (43) seemed to prefer the Cleveland Indians’ chances of taking the division crown. One guy — Jim Bowden — thought the Royals could win a wild card playoff spot.

Sports Illustrated 
The vaunted sports magazine ranked the Royals No. 19 among Major League Baseball’s 30 franchises. They garnished their ranking with a prediction that the Royals would finish the season with a medicore 78-84 record. The Royals finished 95-67, 12 games ahead of the second-place Minnesota Twins (a team that Sports Illustrated thought would finish at the bottom of the AL Central with a 67-95 record) .

CBS Sports
CBS didn’t affix a firm prediction in its Royals preview, but said that the Royals would have a tough time matching its 2014 success and that if they made the playoffs, it would come down to the last week of the regular season. In reality, the Royals had the division pretty much wrapped up in August.

CBS had more insight:

[Greg] Holland and [Wade] Davis being untouchable again is unlikely.

Holland did fairly well as the closer until an injury ended his season. In his place, Davis was untouchable.

SB Nation
The generally awful sports blog penciled the Royals in for a fourth place finish in the AL Central, just ahead of the Twins.

But they added this nugget:

Chances of the fourth-place team winning the division: Decent. It won the pennant last year, after all.

Grantland
The journalistic subsidiary of the ESPN marketing enterprise fielded a panel of six of its MLB writers, which includes local Royals blogger Rany Jazayerli. None thought the Royals would capture the AL Central (Jazayerli thought the Chicago White Sox would fit that bill). Nor did any of the panelists figure the Royals for a wild card spot. One of the writers thought the Miami Marlins looked good as 2015 World Series champions (the Marlins lost 91 games).