Why the Kansas City Royals are signing players you don’t really care much about

If you’re underwhelmed by some of the Royals recent signings, here’s something that might change your mind.

In 2015, the Royals’ starting rotation ranked 12th in the American League in ERA and didn’t average six innings per start. The Royals got away with that because their bullpen was best in the league and deep in quality relievers.

Over the course of the 2015 season, the Royals had 10 different relievers who pitched 20 or more innings and finished the year with an ERA under 4.00. If the Royals could grab a lead at any point in a game, on most nights they had enough reliable relievers to hold it.

If the Royals had a lead after five innings that season, their winning percentage was .943.

It’s easy to remember Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis and Greg Holland pitching the last three innings of most games that year, but it’s also easy to forget the middle relievers that got the lead to H-D-H.

Guys like Ryan Madson, Jason Frasor, Joe Blanton, Luke Hochevar, Franklin Morales and Chris Young were often the ones bridging the gap between the time the starting pitcher left the game and H-D-H entered. Or they filled in when a charter member of the H-D-H club wasn’t available.

Hochevar and Frasor were already with the team, but when those other pitchers were signed before the 2015 season, most people did not consider them blockbuster acquisitions.

But those underwhelming signings helped the Royals win the World Series.

The 2018 bullpen

Last season, the Royals’ starting rotation ranked 11th in the American League in ERA and once again didn’t average six innings per start.

But this time the Royals didn’t get away with it, in part because their bullpen was the worst in the American League.

In 2018, the Royals had just four relievers who pitched 20 or more innings and finished with an ERA under 4.00: Wily Peralta, Kevin McCarthy, Brad Keller and Herrera.

Herrera was gone by the middle of June and Keller was moved to the starting rotation even earlier, so the Royals had fewer reliable relievers to hold onto the leads they occasionally got.

Last season, if the Royals had a lead after five innings, their winning percentage was .696.

If you’re short on reliable relievers and your starters aren’t throwing six innings, you’re going to lose a lot of games in middle relief. Even if you have a good eighth-inning setup man and ninth-inning closer, you’ll lose leads and games in the sixth and seventh innings.

And the middle-relief problem is only going to get worse: analytics departments are telling managers that a lot of starting pitchers should not face the opposing order three times.

Pull your starter early and you have even more bullpen innings to cover.

Rolling the dice

If you want to complain that David Glass should spend more money, be my guest. But it seems unlikely that he’s going to sell the team to some other billionaire by Opening Day, so for now, it is what it is ... and the Royals are working with the budget they have.

And when you’re on a budget, you clip coupons and look for bargains.

If you’ve been spending time reading about the Royals — and why wouldn’t you? The Arctic Circle seems to have descended to the Arkansas border, and going outside is a death-defying feat — you’ve probably heard KC manager Ned Yost say they hope some of the pitchers they’ve recently signed bounce back.

“Bounce-back” players are guys who once performed at a high level. Either through injury or poor subsequent performance, they’ve seen their value drop. But now they’re healthy and motivated again.

The teams that sign bounce-back players hope to get a bargain when those guys bounce back and perform at previous levels.

And sometimes teams sign a player because a coach within the organization thinks he knows how to make that player better. That can change how a front office evaluates somebody. A pitcher with mediocre results in the past might become valuable if the pitching coach can get him to fix his stride or keep his front side closed.

The Royals are signing guys like Drew Storen, Jake Diekman and Brad Boxberger in hopes of finding the next Ryan Madson or Joe Blanton: guys who can deepen their bullpen and help them hold onto leads once they have one.

These signings might not seem like a big deal right now, but neither did those signings back in 2015.

I don’t about you, but if this year’s roll-the-dice signings don’t work out, I’ll still be watching Royals baseball this summer — which, after this winter, can’t come soon enough.