5 Numbers That Will Help Define the 2025 Royals
Baseball is a game of numbers, and there are a few that will make or break the Royals in 2025.
Nobody relies on statistics more than sports fans and no sports fan relies on statistics more than baseball fans. There’s something for everything, and with even more ways to analyze the data popping up every day, that’s not changing any time soon. The game is still played on the field, sure, but the numbers can tell the story. And anyone who doesn’t want to rely on these “new age” stats needs to be reminded that every stat was new at one point. It’s just a series of numbers put together to put something into context. Batting average was once brand new. On base percentage was once brand new. Slugging percentage was too. No stat tells everything, but every stat tells us something.
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Let’s just get right to the numbers.
28.6%
This number is more a representation, but it’s the league average for chase rate in baseball from 2024, so the actual number itself could be slightly different. But the Royals have placed an emphasis on actually swinging at strikes and not swinging at balls. They have three new additions to their roster offensively - Jonathan India, Mark Canha and Cavan Biggio - and all three of them are elite at not swinging at pitches outside the zone. India and Biggio were both 98th percentile last season and Canha was 82nd percentile.
Only Tommy Pham (97th percentile) and Maikel Garcia (92nd) percentile were even in the stratosphere of those three. Pham has obviously moved on to the Pirates while Garcia remains. MJ Melendez was roughly league average last year (48th percentile) and Hunter Renfroe (64th percentile) was pretty good. But the rest of the team struggles with laying off pitches outside the zone. They’re not helped much by Salvador Perez who is routinely first percentile.