Why the Kansas City Royals’ hitting slump can be traced to just one thing
The hit to break an 0-for-33 team-wide slump traveled 4 feet in the air before rolling along the ground at a speed of 40.4 miles per hour.
Royals rookie Carter Jensen actually hit a baseball harder than anyone during Kansas City’s 6-5 loss Sunday against the White Sox, but his proverbial swinging bunt in the third inning traveled 42 miles per hour slower than any other base hit in the game, per Statcast.
You could say it worked — the Royals scored without the baseball reaching even the infield dirt. But a batter later, they left the bases loaded.
Again.
“You want to break (the game) open,” manager Matt Quatraro told reporters afterward.
The quote is referencing one game. But it perfectly sums up the root of season-long vexation — or of a season-long rarity:
The crooked number.
The Royals have scored multiple runs in an inning just 11 times through 16 games — that swinging bunt, for full disclosure, did come during one of the 11. And they have scored three-plus runs in an inning only five times this year. Both are the fewest in MLB.
They never break a game open.
They’ve scored the second-fewest runs in the American League, but we can trace those statistics to just one source, like the cloud that has hovered over this season and darkened over the last week: They have failed to produce much of anything with runners in scoring position.
The 0-for-33 slump Jensen broke? That’s how many at-bats the Royals sandwiched between base hits with runners on second and/or third base.
The hits are one thing.
The big hits are another.
The Royals have only four extra-base hits with runners in scoring position (RISP). Every other team in baseball has at least seven. The Diamondbacks lead MLB with 18.
The Royals are slugging just .250 with RISP. That’s an astounding 40 points worse than anyone else.
Or worse than themselves for a decade.
The Royals have made a habit of starting too slow in recent years, but it’s been a minute since they started this slow in this category. They lost 106 games in 2023 but still were better with runners in scoring position at this point in the season. They lost 104 in 2018, and yet, still better.
There’s an oddity about this iteration: They are a completely different lineup in every other situation. Like, pretty good even. The Royals have the eighth-best OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage) and fifth-highest hard-hit rate in baseball with the bases empty (.698), per Fangraphs data.
What gives?
The Royals aren’t getting into favorable counts enough, and are taking strike one a bit more than you’d like. But overall, there’s a slight misconception that this problem has infiltrated the entire team — which I realize sounds a bit backwards considering the entire team just exhausted 33 at-bats without a hit in these spots.
But of the seven Royals hitters with at least 10 plate appearances with runners in scoring position, only three are slugging under .300 in that situation:
• Bobby Witt Jr. (.267)
• Vinnie Pasquantino (.176)
• Salvador Perez (.000)
That last one isn’t a misprint. Perez is 0-19 with runners in scoring position — and he leads the team in plate appearances in that situation. And it doesn’t take much digging to understand why. He’s expanding the zone. Of the 19 most important at-bats he’s had this season, 11 of them have concluded with him swinging at pitches out of the zone. Perez is ninth in chase rate overall.
I covered this last week, but when the lineup is providing those three hitters with the run-scoring opportunities, that should be an ideal place to land — an ideal time for a crooked number.
It’s probably not much consolation that Pasquantino had five hard-hit outs in the four-game series with Chicago and did not have a hit in the series. Pasquantino was the unluckiest hitter in the American League over the last four days.
It’s early. That kind of thing should even out.
In fact, the reality that they hit better with the bases empty suggests they should figure this out. But it also suggests they shouldn’t be this bad, which, in the end, suggests they might be pressing.
(The Royals are 1-for-30 when pitches outside the strike zone conclude the plate appearance with RISP, so that would be a pretty good place to start.)
It took them half a season to string hits together in 2025 — when they flipped from 30th in batter run value before the All-Star break to fourth afterward — too late to make a playoff push.
The frustration this April is what it’s already cost them to date.
It’s really tough to win games without the big inning. Teams have a combined .649 win percentage when scoring multiple runs in any inning during a game and .351 in games when they do not. They have a .766 win percentage when they have an inning of three-plus runs, and a .234 when they do not.
Duh, right?
But that’s the point. This is as obvious of a formula as it gets in baseball:
Drive in the runs that are there to drive in.