The case for an improved Royals offense needs to be about more than the acquisitions
A night before the Royals’ spring training opener, Vinnie Pasquantino had a conversation with his roommate about how his first game in nine months might unfold.
He figured he’d strike out a few times, surmised that excitement might get the best of him and predicted one thing with a bit more certainty:
“I’m definitely swinging at the first pitch,” he said.
Come Friday, after Pasquantino stepped into the box, Rangers right-hander Dane Dunning painted the corner on his first offering.
A pitcher’s pitch.
But the hitter didn’t budge. His prediction? Wrong.
Everything else about that sequence? Precisely right. In fact, from inside the Royals dugout, hitting coach Alec Zumwalt, a guy who describes himself as someone who values “takes,” made a note of the decision not to swing.
“That’s Vinnie,” he said. “That’s when he’s at his best.”
It’s when anyone is, which is part of what I’ll get at here, because it’s part of what Zumwalt has been getting at for years now.
The Royals players and coaches parted ways for the offseason last October, bruised and beaten to the tune of 106 losses. The players left with game plans individualized for each of them.
Some of those were prefaced with hard conversations, said Zumwalt, who described it as “all coming down to self-reflecting with honesty. You can’t lie to yourself.” That’s illustrative of where the Royals are in this process.
But no matter the specific blueprint, there was a common thread through the players’ reports.
“Are we making really good decisions?” Zumwalt said.
Swing decisions. That’s the phrase you’ve heard before. The phrase you’ve heard it a lot in Kansas City — or Surprise, Arizona for the moment— over the past couple of years especially.
But it carries a place of specific importance quite soon, in late February and then early and mid-March, when the games don’t really count.
Why? A lesson from a year ago.
It was this time last season, before those 106 losses, when the Royals were swinging the bats pretty well here in Surprise. Started 14-2, if you recall. Some pretty good signs for a young team. But as the dates for starting spots and roster decisions closed in, the zones did just the opposite. They expanded. The approach changed when the pressure changed. Some pretty worrisome signs for a young team.
The results when it counted: The Royals began the real season 8-26. Lost all but four of their initial 20 games. It was over before it even started.
The lineup contributed to that dreadful start — and then contributed to an inability to change it.
“We were all pressing. I was pressing right along side them,” Zumwalt said. “You want those guys to have success. You see them putting in all of the work in the cage and on the field, and they’re not getting results in the game.
“That’s hard.”
There are going to be a lot of conversations about the additions to the Royals this spring. There should be. It’s not often in Kansas City we’re focused on free agent acquisitions. They see the AL Central as winnable.
But if that’s going to be realistic, they can’t be reliant strictly on the newcomers. The returners need to show some growth, and part of that growth is just plain maturity. A sign of the latter latter would be maintaining a consistent approach, even if results aren’t following —nay, especially when the results aren’t following. Because that’s when the approach is tested most — and when the consistency of the approach matters most.
Easier said than done, sure. The hope in 2024 is some new veterans will not only add talent but offer reminders that slumps happen to everyone — the best just limit the length of them.
That has to be a sliver of the equation. The bigger piece: The returners.
In that vein, this group of hitters is working with something that last year’s group was not — not really anyway.
Success. You read that right. I’m talking about building on some success after last season.
From July 16 and on — 71 games — the Royals ranked eighth in all of baseball in exit velocity, per data available on Fangraphs. They ranked fifth in hard-hit baseballs. They were 11th in OPS.
That’ll all play.
Some people have argued that shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. carried those numbers in his breakout season, and, look, he was terrific in the second half. He is the leader of it, no doubt.
But it’s not just him. Here are the average exit velocity leaders over that same time frame, for example:
1. Aaron Judge, the 2022 AL MVP.
2. Ronald Acuna Jr, the 2023 NL MVP.
3. MJ Melendez.
That’s not a misprint.
Maikel Garcia was 26th in baseball in the same statistic, by the way. The Royals weren’t world-beaters over the second half of the season — that’s not the argument.
But the request, or the requirement for a team that needs to win 24 more games just to finish .500, isn’t that they do something collectively that they’ve never done before. It’s that they turn a 71-game stretch into a 162-game sample. There’s a difference. It’s still difficult, you bet. But not altogether unreasonable. We’ve seen it. We have to see it for long stretches.
Like, starting in April. The Royals aren’t good enough to survive what happened last April.
The crux of the lineup’s success will depend upon them not simply tossing aside last year but truly learning from it — from the low moments, just like the late-season individual success stories.
That’s why the most important lesson arrives before the real games do — and why the first pitch on the second plate appearance in a spring training is being noted.
The pressure’s off.
But it will soon be on.
The results have to follow the latter, too.
This story was originally published February 26, 2024 at 5:00 AM.