Kansas City Royals bring back almost all coaches, promote two from minor leagues
The Kansas City Royals coaching staff under manager Mike Matheny will remain largely unchanged next season as the club hopes to build on strides made this past season when they finished below .500 but also recorded their highest win total since 2017.
Hitting coach Terry Bradshaw, pitching coach Cal Eldred, bullpen coach Larry Carter, bench coach Pedro Grifol, third base coach Vance Wilson and coach John Mabry will all return to the positions they held last season.
The Royals went 74-88 and finished fourth in the AL Central in their first full-length season with Matheny at the helm this past season.
As expected, Damon Hollins replaced Rusty Kuntz as the first base coach. The club announced last week that Kuntz will return to an advisory role in the front office.
Hollins, who previously served as the minor-league coordinator of outfield, base running and bunting, took over for Kuntz during the 2020 season when Kuntz opted out due to COVID-19 concerns.
Another new addition to the staff also comes from the minor-league system. Keoni DeRenne has been named assistant hitting coach.
Last week, president of baseball operations Dayton Moore and general manager JJ Picollo espoused their preference for continuity and touted the success that has yielded in the farm system.
Moore also said they aimed for a sense of consistency in their player development at the major-league level while also providing players various levels of information and data and also making different voices available.
DeRenne represents a different voice, yet one who has been in the organization. He spent the past two years as the assistant hitting coordinator and he helped revamp the hitting development program in the minors.
Prior to joining the Royals organization, DeRenne spent a season as the Chicago Cubs’ Triple-A hitting coach following seven seasons in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization as a hitting coach and manager. His playing career included eight seasons in the minors in five different organizations.
After a year without minor-league games due to the pandemic in 2020, the Royals top three affiliates displayed outstanding offensive prowess this season with DeRenne and hitting coordinator Drew Saylor overseeing the hitting development program under the direction of hitting performance department head Alec Zumwalt.
The Omaha Storm Chasers ranked among the top five among all Triple-A East clubs in OPS (fifth), batting average (second) and home runs (first). Northwest Arkansas led among the Double-A Central leaders in both home runs and OPS, and also ranked second in batting average. High-A Quad Cities led the High-A Central Division in batting average, ranked second in OPS and third in home runs.
Individually, top position player prospects Bobby Witt Jr., Nick Pratto and MJ Melendez were each named to the MLBPipeline.com and Baseball America All-Prospect teams.
The Royals had four of the five home run leaders in the minors across all levels this season in Melendez (first, 41), Pratto (second, 36), Witt (fourth, 33) and Ryan McBroom (fifth, 32). Melendez also ranked among the top 10 in slugging (fourth, .625) and OPS (eighth, 1.011), while Pratto ranked seventh in slugging (.602).
DeRenne will team with Bradshaw, who will return for a fifth season as hitting coach.
Tony Pena Jr. will return to coaching in the minors after he spent last season on the major-league staff.
Allan de San Miguel joins the staff as a strategist/bullpen catcher, and Parker Morin returns as the lead strategist/bullpen catcher, Andy Ferguson returns as an advanced scouting analyst/strategist and Bill Duplissea remains the replay coordinator.
