Why are the Royals hitting so poorly? These trends tell the story
It turned to the sixth inning one night this week at Kauffman Stadium, and here read the home team’s scoreline on the crown-shaped video screen behind center field:
0 0 0
Tampa pitcher Taj Bradley, lit up by Baltimore and unable to make it out of the second inning just days earlier, glided through five perfect innings Tuesday in Kansas City before a 5-1 victory. Two teammates would one-up him over the ensuing couple of days, producing a pair of shutouts against the Royals.
Hey, it’s baseball. Slumps happen.
But they’ve happened to the Royals quite frequently — like, more frequently than ever before.
The Royals lost to the Dodgers on Friday night, a brutal 5-4 loss as Jac Caglianone grounded into a double play to conclude the 11th straight home loss. But the primary dissimilarity from the remainder of the homestand is not the loss but rather the four runs.
The Royals have scored one run or fewer in 22 games, on pace for 44 of those by year’s end, which would break a club record. They are on pace to score four runs in a game just 61 times, nine fewer than any season in club history. Heck, that would be 16 fewer than 1994, a season, I’ll remind you, cut short by a strike.
You might call their 38-44 record a disappointment after last year’s playoff appearance — with which I certainly wouldn’t disagree — but it’s actually remarkable it’s even that good when you consider the run production.
They still have a record that Royals teams from the 1990s and 2000s would envy, and a starting rotation that any group in franchise history would envy, but they’ve coupled it with the worst offense in franchise history.
That last part isn’t my opinion.
It’s statistical fact. The Royals are averaging all of 3.2 runs per game, nearly half a run worse than their all-time worst of 3.6 runs per game in 1969.
That’s what a lot of this column will cover — the data, and what it suggests about why the numbers are this bad.
Off the top, I’ll say this: It’s a peculiar combination, even if my opener here is predictable.
The Royals just rarely put themselves into the proverbial hitters’ counts. Only 6.6% of their plate appearances reach 3-1 counts, fewest in baseball, and just 11.8% reach a 2-0 count, tied for the third fewest, according to Baseball Reference.
Expected for a poor performing offense, right?
But here comes the peculiar.
In order to reach a 2-0 count, there’s a requirement on the first pitch: You have to take it.
They do.
A lot.
The Royals actually take the first pitch more frequently than any team in the American League. Really.
But while that might sound like a good thing on its face, as though it’s the sign of a team with patience, that wouldn’t be an accurate conclusion here. In literally every other count, the Royals are free swingers compared to their counterparts across the league. They swing at the fourth highest percentage of pitches in baseball — and that’s inclusive but despite rarely swinging at the first pitch.
It’s confounding, suggestive that their initial patience is more think-ahead strategy than in-the-moment decision-making. And it hasn’t been a productive strategy, either.
As a whole, the league puts up monstrous numbers on first-pitch swings, and even the Royals have had success with them. They have posted a .701 OPS on plate appearances in which they swung at the first pitch, compared to just a .643 when they take it. (They have an .827 OPS on the first-pitch itself, aided by the fact swings-and-misses don’t count as outs on strike one.)
So taking them at such a high rate (71%) isn’t helping the bigger cause, and that’s probably in part because it’s a trend in which the remainder of the league has evidently noticed — because despite taking such a high clip, the Royals still fall behind 0-1 in the count more frequently than any team in baseball.
That’s almost impossible, except that the opposing pitchers are just piping strikes because, well, they can. Thus, a team that takes 71% of its first pitches is still dead last in MLB in walk rate.
It’s a series of contradictory data.
Or is it?
Hitting a baseball is at this level is largely about swing decisions, and for a team that not only wholeheartedly believes that but preaches it, they’re far too often making lousy ones.
• As mentioned, the Royals take the first pitch, often for strike one, despite it being a pitch with which they (and the league) have success hitting.
• They take pitches over the middle of the plate — “meatballs,” as Statcast terms them — more frequently than league average.
• Yet for all those takes, they can’t seem to lay off the bad pitches. They still manage to chase pitches outside the zone at the second-highest rate in the league.
Look, hitting 100-mile-per-hour fastballs and top spin-rate breaking pitches is rather difficult. But you know what makes it even harder?
When you’re swinging at the wrong ones.
The Royals preach this regularly, which has to make it all the more frustrating to sit not only on the wrong end of that data but the extreme wrong end of it. It’s not as though the problem is relegated to plate appearance to plate appearance — it’s within a plate appearance.
The other frustration? They were much better at it a year ago. The runners in scoring position splits have generated a lot of attention, even in this exact space, and rightfully so. But all of those numbers I’ve mentioned in this column — literally all of them — were better a year ago. They swung at meatballs at a higher rate, swung at more first pitches and chased bad pitches slightly less frequently.
Or, more simply: They made better swing decisions.
Oh, and then they went out and traded for a leadoff hitter specifically because of his approach at the plate.
It implies this group is pressing — that halfway through a season they expected to progress better, they’re perhaps trying to make up for it in one plate appearance.
That’s a theory.
This isn’t: If the Royals are to improve their league-worst offense, it starts with the basics.
It starts with before the swing — with the decision whether to swing at all.