Why the Royals couldn't beat a stacked deck and repeat as World Series champs

The Royals won't be repeating as World Series champs, and that's not surprising given recent history

The inevitable is now the official: The Kansas City Royals, by virtue of being eliminated from playoff contention, won't be repeating as World Series champs.

As for the specific shortfalls, the Royals this season were hampered by a generally listless offense. They ranked a strong third in the AL in batting average, but an utter lack of secondary hitting skills up and down lineup meant they ranked just 13th in OBP and 14th in slugging percentage in the 15-team American League. As a direct consequence, they ranked just 13th in runs scored. Lorenzo Cain and Alex Gordon didn't perform up to their recent offensive standards, Mike Moustakas was limited to just 27 games because of a torn ACL, and Eric Hosmer and Salvador Perez slumped badly in the second half.

Elsewhere, the rotation struggled yet again (12th in the AL in starters' ERA and tied for last in starters' FIP) despite some impressive individual bestowals from Danny Duffy and Ian Kennedy. While the bullpen was again a team strength, it slipped a bit from the lofty heights of 2015. The team defense also saw its performance decline, as the Royals dipped from third in the AL in defensive efficiency (i.e., the percentage of balls in play that a defense converts into outs) in 2015 to ninth this season.

In broader and perhaps obvious terms, it's just harder to repeat in baseball. Relative the NFL, NBA, and NHL, a smaller percentage of teams make the playoffs, and the six-month, 162-game regular season can compress some of the Opening Day roster advantages. For those reasons and the quirky nature of the sport, dynastic outcomes are harder to come by.

Even by the standards of the sport, though, repeating has been a more difficult task in recent years. In fact, we haven't had a repeat champion since the 2000 Yankees. Now that the Royals have bowed out this season, that will make 16 straight years without a repeat World Series winner. That's the longest repeat-less streak in MLB history. Coming in second is the 1979-92 period, in which we want 14 years without any repeaters. In fact, the Royals are now the fourth straight defending champ to miss the playoffs the following year (source: ESPN Stats & Info).

While it's easier to make the playoffs right now than it was during the divisional era or pennant era (the two wild card berths in each league means that fully one-third of teams make the postseason), those additional layers of the playoffs make it harder. Thanks to the small sample size of games in the playoffs, randomness drives the results. To boot, these days, teams must make it through three layers of postseason -- four, in the case of wild-card entrants -- in order to hoist the trophy. Since 2000, that's knocked out any repeat hopefuls who made it to the playoffs.

On a structural level, baseball economic landscape has made it tougher to repeat. Revenue sharing has been in place since 1996 and was adjusted in 2002. You'll note that those dates roughly coincide with the current repeat-less streak. No, correlation doesn't imply perfect causation, but there's probably something of a relationship there. There's also the luxury tax on high payrolls, hard bonus budgets for the First-Year Player Draft and some checks on international spending. As well, the recent market trend of teams' locking up young players during their controlled years means that free agent classes -- so often a bountiful resource for deep-pocketed teams -- generally aren't as strong as they once were. The aging curve also seems to be changing such that players are enjoying their peak years earlier and earlier, and those early years are team-controlled years.

For all those reasons, it's harder to get championship-caliber results from one team in consecutive seasons. Unfortunately for the 2016 Royals, they're the latest data point backing up this notion. Sure, in 2014 they were 90 feet from tying up Game 7 against the Giants, in which case I wouldn't be writing this. That thin margin, though, speaks to the difficulties of hurdling everything that baseball puts in the way of those trying to do what no team's done since the last millennium.