Royals’ pivotal players have been mostly great. So why does the team still stink?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Jac Caglianone produced the best June among second-year Major League players.
- Carter Jensen produced the best June among rookie Major League players.
- Both left-handers led their age groups in total bases during June.
The best month of June compiled by a major-league rookie came from a left-hander in Kansas City.
The best month of June any second-year big-leaguer compiled came from a left-hander in Kansas City.
Jac Caglianone is the latter, Carter Jensen the former. They totaled 61 and 56 bases respectively, tops in their age groups.
That’s everything.
Or at least it was supposed to be.
There’s a strangeness to this Royals season, and if you’ve been in town a bit, you already know it’s not simply that they’ve failed to live up to expectations.
It’s why they’ve fallen so short.
Before the season, you easily could have labeled Caglianone and Jensen as the predictive keys to their success. I did. The Royals did, too, even while avoiding publicly applying pressure to the youngest two bats in the lineup. If only those guys would hit, they’d have something, right?
Well, those two have been on fire. Caglianone hit nine home runs last month, one shy of the American League lead. Jensen just ended a 20-game hitting streak.
So why do the Royals stink? How do they still occupy last place in the AL standings?
Turns out, the guys they didn’t think they needed to worry about are those they actually needed to worry about. The players who elevated the expectations — who propelled them to back-to-back winning seasons for the first time in a decade — are the same players who have failed to live up to their own standard.
• Salvador Perez is hitting a career-low .201, getting on base in just 24.1% of his plate appearances and slugging .327, some 76 points lower than he’s slugged in any previous year. His fWAR (Fangraphs’ WAR stat) is -1.6. The second worst in baseball is -0.6. He has never finished with a negative WAR.
• Maikel Garcia has an OPS of .693, more than 100 points shy of the mark he reached last year. He’s on pace for six home runs a year after breaking out for 16, tracking toward a 2.8 fWAR season one year after ranking 14th in baseball at 5.6.
• Vinnie Pasquantino is hitting .224 and slugging .350. On the injured list now, he has six home runs and 10 doubles after posting 32 home runs and 33 doubles in 2025.
• Cole Ragans, the club’s opening day starter three consecutive years, has pitched just 35 1/3 innings, posting a 4.84 ERA before undergoing elbow surgery Wednesday that ended his season.
• After leading the American League with 42 saves last year, Carlos Estévez has made one appearance, an outing so bad that it accounted for -0.5 WAR all by itself.
• Matt Strahm, who had a 2.71 ERA in middle relief for the Phillies over the past three seasons combined, has a 5.53 ERA. Measuring by fWAR, he has been the least valuable reliever in baseball in 2026.
• The most reliable arm in the Royals’ bullpen for the previous 18 months, Lucas Erceg leads Major League Baseball with six blown saves.
Heading into the season, that’s the leadoff hitter, the No. 3 hitter, the cleanup hitter, the opening day ace, the closer and the top setup man.
All were significant parts of why the Royals were competitive. All of them are among the reasons the Royals are not anymore.
The Royals’ current standing isn’t so much about what they did or didn’t acquire in the offseason. It’s not about who did or didn’t develop.
They haven’t been able to dance with the players who drove them to ball.
How do you assess that? Were they wrong to bank on players who cashed in their past opportunities?
That’s the most difficult part of this exercise, but also the most instrumental to the Royals’ future — asking themselves if their beliefs were warranted.
• If they should have foreseen not only their 36-year-old catcher’s drop in production, but even a significant one.
• If Garcia’s breakout was more anomaly than a new norm.
• If a pitcher who had two Tommy John surgeries earlier in his career might confront another.
• If two back-end relievers whose expected ERA (based on hard-hit rate and launch angle) was more than a full run higher than their actual ERA, they might encounter a reversal of fortune.
It’s not only healthy to be skeptical but mandatory, and this season ought to either remind or reinforce the Royals of that.
But that combination stacks together the most skeptical of outlooks — and even if you began there, it still would have been hard to predict them all to unfold.
This Royals season would be easier to assess — though still not easier to digest — if the answer was simply that this group isn’t good enough. Maybe that’s still true. But it has been good enough, and it’s not like the timing of that statement’s truth — 2024 and 2025 — is from a completely different era.
It wasn’t built on hope. It was built on recent success.
The difficult but required evaluation will be to figure out why it wasn’t repeatable. The players. The coaches. The processes. Whatever it might be.
Royals general manager J.J. Picollo said he doesn’t plan to make in-season coaching staff changes, though the fuller context must include that he also said this: “At the end of the year, you take a look and say, ‘Is this really moving in the direction we want go?’”
That’s the relevant question.
It served as his response about the coaching staff.
But it applies across the board.