Crown Jewels: Dugout Changes Importance, HOF Voting Open and Attracting Players

Maybe the moves they've made that we actually liked will have a bigger impact than we're allowing ourselves to believe.

There was a time when we would be entering another quiet week in the baseball offseason. And maybe we still will be this year. Teams used to be pretty silent around Thanksgiving and generally around Christmas and New Year’s. I just wonder a little bit if that’s changed over the last few years with virtual meetings often winning out over in-person. General managers don’t have to be in the same room to talk face-to-face. Free agents don’t need to be courted from across a table. I guess that’s been true for a long time, but the pandemic has really normalized video conferencing in a way that it wasn’t before. So maybe things will stay at the pace they have, but I’d doubt it. I’d partially doubt it because all the big free agents are off the board (well at least presumably with Carlos Correa).

I ranked 25 free agents a few weeks ago and 23 of them have signed. Of the top 50 ranked on MLB Trade Rumors, 42 of them have agreed to deals. It’s hard to know what a normal offseason looks like anymore. Before 2021, there was so much uncertainty with teams having lost out on revenue in 2020. Before 2022, there was the lockout, so we had a rush of deals before the owners locked out the players, but then nothing for months.

Is this year the new normal or is it a blip? No clue, but it’s been kind of insane the action that’s been out there when you think about the trend from a few years ago. I mean just remember to the 2018/2019 offseason. Bryce Harper didn’t sign until March 2! Manny Machado wasn’t even two weeks before that. It was crazy how deep into the offseason big signings were happening. And this year, not so much. It’s been fun, but now we have a long time before pitchers and catchers report.

The Impact of New Coaching

I’ve hemmed and hawed about writing this for a few days, but I think the time has come that I should at least share a bit from a conversation I had with someone who has an opinion I very much trust. What I was told is that replacing Mike Matheny and Cal Eldred would be worth 10 wins. There wasn’t math behind the statement, so maybe it’s not 10 wins. Maybe it’s four or six or whatever, but I thought it was a strong statement made by, again, someone who I think has a pretty good idea about these things. I can’t say much more, but I thought that was interesting and it really got me thinking about the impact of these coaching changes.

We’ve discussed so much in this space about JJ Picollo and his steadfast belief that the development issues for pitchers were mostly in the big leagues. You all know I don’t disagree that the big league level was a big, big problem, but you also know I don’t think it’s the only problem. But if you asked me what percentage of the problem it was, I might say more than 50 percent. The last year of pitching issues throughout the entire minor league system has me thinking pretty hard about that, but the percentage is insignificant to the overall point that I think it’s clear the Royals would have had a difficult time not upgrading on their pitching coach. And I think it’s also clear that Brian Sweeney is very well-regarded.

But where I hadn’t really considered how important the managerial change might be is kind of frustrating to me because it makes sense. There were so many reports of Matheny’s demeanor and the way he approached each and every game. That approach probably worked amazingly as a player, but as a manager, I can absolutely see how that could wear on players. I can see how the way he communicates wore on players. And when you go back and start to listen to some of the things Picollo and John Sherman both said regarding the managerial search, things become even a little clearer.

So the 2022 Royals won 65 games. You can break down the season however you want. They played at a 67-win pace in the second half, a time dominated by young players. They played at a 66-win pace after the trade deadline when many of the veterans were even off the roster. They played at a 62-win pace in September/October. So you can’t argue that the younger roster played better than the veteran roster that started the season. But if I’m to respect the opinion above, and I do, I wonder if maybe the floor got raised more than we’re giving it credit for in the move from Matheny/Eldred to Matt Quatraro/Sweeney. It’s an interesting thought at the very least.

Royals HOF Voting is Open

You probably saw that the Royals opened their team Hall of Fame voting to the fans this week. There are six players on the current ballot and to be eligible, a player has to have played at least three seasons and accumulated at least 1,500 plate appearances or 300 innings pitched. Managers must have been in charge for at least three full seasons and all eligible have to have been retired for at least three years before the election. Anyway, the six on that ballot are Carlos Beltran, Billy Butler, Johnny Damon, Jason Vargas, Yordano Ventura and Ned Yost. Which is actually a pretty interesting ballot.

I’ll save the theatrics. Since you can only vote for three, my votes went to Butler, Ventura and Yost. It was actually pretty tough deciding between Ventura and Beltran because Beltran had the better career in Kansas City, at least by the numbers, but Ventura meant more to the team in his short time. My belief is that team Halls of Fame are museums and sometimes a lesser player gets in because they tell more of the story of the team’s history. I definitely understand the idea of thinking of it as a smaller version of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Coooperstown and wanting the best of the best in there, but I think the team HOF tells the story of the team, which sometimes is told with guys who meant more but did less.

Following along on Twitter, I think I noticed that a lot of people have forgotten how good Butler was for the Royals. Though that shouldn’t be a surprise because within his career, he was kind of the guy everyone thought was way worse than he was. Outside of 2012, he never hit for the power people imagined he would, but his job was to hit and that’s what he did. He was a career .290/.354/.441 hitter for the Royals, which was good for a 119 OPS+ and 117 wRC+. So by either metric, he was considerably better than average offensively. He ranks in the top 10 historically in the following categories in team history: batting average, hits, total bases, doubles, home runs, RBI, walks, singles, OPS+, wRC+, runs created, extra base hits, times on base and double plays. I put that last one in there to throw the “Butler stank” crowd a bone.

So he put up the numbers and was part of a Royals renaissance. The 2012 All Star Game in Kansas City story can’t be told from a Royals perspective without Butler. He was there through the lean years to play a prominent role on the 2014 team, hitting .333/.375/.400 in the World Series that year. He even stole a base in the ALDS! I just think that you both can’t tell the Royals story without Butler and you can’t deny his place as one of the best hitters in franchise history, no matter what you think.

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The two easy guys to not vote for, for me, were Damon and Vargas. Vargas is also part of the story, but he was a hired gun, which makes him seem less a part of things. Plus, he got hurt in the middle of 2015, so he wasn’t there for the real fun. And while Damon ended up having a prolific career, he also was sort of just fine for the Royals with a 101 OPS+ and 98 wRC+. Even though he was a local-ish kid and was drafted by the team, the story of the franchise can be told without him and he wasn’t that great.

Beltran was the hard one for me to leave off. I know he did way more statistically than Ventura, but when you combine the tragic passing with his role in the 2014 World Series, I don’t know, it’s just the choice I made. I think you can make a strong argument either way and nobody is wrong.

How to Make Friends and Influence Players to Play for You

I haven’t talked to anyone about this, so this is just me thinking out loud, but sometimes that’s what this spot is for. But I think the Royals hurt themselves (shocker) in two ways to be able to attract players to come play for them. I’ve written about the bad team tax and that’s very real, but I think more than that, I wonder a little bit with offensive players if the way they talk about Kauffman Stadium is a deterrent. All we hear from everyone is that the stadium is a graveyard fo hitters, but the reality is that it isn’t. It’s a graveyard for home runs. And even that isn’t exactly accurate.

By park factor, Kauffman Stadium ranked 11th in runs scored, fifth in hits, second in doubles and eighth in triples in 2022. That’s obviously out of 30 parks. It’s actually kind of a great place to hit. It’s just not a great place to hit home runs. They can certainly be hit, but the park factor for those is eighth-lowest in baseball. The point is that while you’re not likely to see a ton of 40+ home run seasons calling Kauffman Stadium home (though there have been two in the last three full seasons), there is so much space that it’s actually some place that an offensive player can find some excellent numbers. I know that players and agents aren’t stupid and can cut through a lot of the rhetoric, but put yourself in their shoes for a second. If you’re always hearing from the team’s management that the place to play stinks to hit in, aren’t you at least going to think twice about signing there to hit?

And on the pitching side, the Royals have long preached defense, but the reality is that they were the third-worst team in baseball by defensive runs saved in 2022 and were simply middle of the pack in outs above average. A lot of that was on the shoulders of Bobby Witt Jr. and MJ Melendez putting up some truly brutal defensive numbers, but the Royals defense didn’t turn enough batted balls into outs.

This is honestly a more important issue than the way the stadium is discussed and is going to have to be fixed. Because the reality is that the stadium is such a good place to hit that they do need guys who can make it seem smaller in the ground they cover. I love Edward Olivares, for example, but if you’re going to play Melendez in the outfield, it’s hard to put Oli out there in the other corner and expect any of the Royals three very good center fielders (Michael A. Taylor for now, Kyle Isbel and Drew Waters) to be able to make up for their deficiencies.