Crown Jewels: Approaches Undermining Luck, Some Good News on Prospects and a Weekend Preview

Things have been less than desirable, but the season goes on whether we want it to or not.

I used the Buddy Bell axiom in yesterday’s newsletter and while I adhere to that pretty religiously, it truly cannot get much worse than the last week. They went 0-6 and were outscored 52-15. Yes, it could have been 0-7 or 62-5 or whatever, but winless is winless. So at least there isn’t anything worse they could have done this week. I asked yesterday if this is rock bottom and, man do I hope it is, but I suppose we’ll find out here moving forward. If you want to know why they can’t win at home, I don’t know. But I do know that they played much better baseball on the road and I don’t think an off day followed by getting away from an increasingly apathetic fanbase can hurt. They’ll be greeted by Shohei Ohtani on the mound, which isn’t ideal for their offense, but hey, at least most people will be asleep since it’s a West Coast game.

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I’ll get to this in a bit, but I find myself less pessimistic than most. I don’t know if it’s because I expected them to start slow as I mentioned yesterday or if I just have different priorities with a baby now. But either way, a season is 162 games and it’s super long, but those 162 games are made up of shorter stretches. Some are amazing. Some are terrible. Most are somewhere in between. I think a lot of people were hopeful they’d play around .500 this year. I thought that was possible enough, but I obviously don’t anymore.

The new goal, because as much as we don’t want to admit it, they change, should now be to limit the stretches like this. They’ll get hot and they’ll probably go 11-8 in a 19-game stretch at some point. But what changed from 2013 when they won 86 games and 2015 when they won 95 and the World Series is that they didn’t have an 8-20 month like the 2013 team did in May. The key to winning is almost as much in limiting the losing stretches as it is in lengthening the winning ones. An 8-20 month that becomes a 12-16 month is huge over the course of a long year. So that’s what I’ll be looking for moving forward.

The Offensive Approach

Everyone is absolutely sick and tired of hearing about how hard the Royals are hitting the ball. Coming into play yesterday, they had the highest hard-hit rate in baseball. Their barrel percentage was 12th. There are still good indicators. They have undoubtedly been unlucky with their batted balls. Why did I put it that way? Because there haven’t been nearly enough batted balls for the unlucky ones to make much of a difference if and when it does turn around. Sure, they’ll score some more runs, but the difference won’t really come until (if?) they change their approach at the plate.

It’s pretty simple. They swing too much. All of this is coming into yesterday, but according to Fangraphs, the Royals see the fourth-lowest percentage of pitches in the zone of every team. Just 39.5 percent of pitches thrown to them are in the zone. And yet, they have swung at 50.6 percent of pitches. I don’t even need to tell you that they’re swinging at too many pitches outside the zone. You know it just from those two percentages. The only team swinging at more pitches outside the zone are the White Sox. And here’s where it gets kind of crazy. The O-swing% for the Royals is 37.1 percent. The White Sox are at 37.8 percent. The third-worst team is the Rockies at 34.8 percent. That’s a big gap.

I’ll give the Royals the fact that they’ve faced some very tough pitching. Of the top-30 starting pitchers in strikeout percentage this year, the Royals have faced seven of them. They’ve contributed some, but guys like Pablo Lopez, Joe Ryan and Sonny Gray have done it to others. Jacob deGrom has been doing it for years. Same with Nathan Eovaldi. Alex Cobb didn’t even strike out that many Royals. So there is that, and I think that goes hand-in-hand with their difficult schedule to start the year that is more of a factor than I think anyone cares to admit. But that doesn’t account for the wild swinging we’ve seen all season long. Given the percentage of pitches they’ve seen in the zone, if they just walked to the plate with the bat on their shoulder, they may actually have more success than when they’ve actually tried.

Some of the issue is the usual suspects. Salvador Perez swings a lot. That’s never going to change. But guys like Jackie Bradley Jr., Matt Duffy (who has been fine offensively actually) and Hunter Dozier are not part of any kind of good Royals team in the future and they’re well over league average. Edward Olivares has swung a lot, and that’s sort of his game, but Michael Massey has too and that apparently can’t be if he wants to find success. I think I might be most surprised by how much Vinnie Pasquantino has swung.

He’s swinging at 48.2 percent of pitches, which is above league average. Last year, he swung at 45.9 percent. He’s also swung at 35.3 percent of pitches outside the zone. He swung at 28.9 percent last season. The results are there. He’s hitting .270/.378/.508 with more walks than strikeouts and a 145 wRC+, but I wonder if he isn’t feeling the weight of the offense, knowing that he can’t afford to let one go by because the guys behind him won’t get the job done. That’s not to give him a full-on pass or anything, but when your results are what they are, I’m willing to do that. The point is it’s impacting everyone.

And what’s so puzzling is the biggest point of what the coaching staff preaches is hunting a pitch and doing damage on it. I expected we’d see more strikeouts as they pushed this approach harder simply because it likely means that they get deeper into counts, but I didn’t expect it would be from swinging and ultimately missing. Because all those swings aren’t translating into contact. Their contact percentage is the sixth-lowest in baseball. It’s an easy suggestion and a difficult fix, but if this lineup doesn’t stop swinging so often, it won’t matter what the batted ball metrics show. They’ll likely bounce back a bit because they do hit it hard when they hit it, but they need to be hitting it a lot more. This is the biggest test Alec Zumwalt and Co. have faced. I hope my faith in them getting this right is rewarded.

Minor League Pitching is Encouraging

I think a lot of people probably roll their eyes, but I think it’s important to find the positives, even in a year where the big league club is 4-15. When the Royals made very few personnel changes in the development system, I think a lot of people were both confused and concerned. From what I’ve heard, they have made quite a few philosophical changes that I don’t have details on, but hope to sometime soon. And they seem to be working for a lot of pitchers. I think it’s easy to look at AAA and see Jonathan Heasley and Jackson Kowar continuing to struggle, and that’s an issue, but look a little farther down and I’ve both seen and heard some very encouraging things.

Anthony Veneziano, the 25-year-old lefty who can touch 100, has been very good. He’s struck out 19 and walked one in 15 innings. I’m not sure he’s a starter in the big leagues, but I’m not sure he isn’t either. Given the fragility of the big league staff, I wouldn’t bet against him getting a shot this year. Alec Marsh had a brutal year last year, but he’s struck out 11 and walked three while allowing just nine hits in nine innings through two starts this season. The stuff is there, but he needs to translate it to results. The early returns in a tiny sample are good. He’s another guy who will get a shot. I’ve heard good reports on Andrew Hoffmann, who came over with Drew Waters last season. I wrote at the time that he’s the type of pitcher the Guardians target and he’s started well too.

Down in high-A, Chandler Champlain, acquired in the Andrew Benintendi deal, has struck out 13 and walked nobody in 11 innings with nine hits allowed. He has power stuff that could translate to the big leagues as a starter, but I think he can be a dynamite reliever. Luinder Avila has 14 strikeouts to one walk, Noah Cameron has 14 strikeouts and three walks in nine innings and Mason Barnett has allowed three hits in 11 innings. He has walked seven, so there are issues there, but we’ll see how that goes. The name everyone is curious about, though, in the whole system is Frank Mozzicato. He’s struck out 20 and walked six in 11 innings. The walks are still too high, but the report on him has been outstanding.

I spoke with a scout in attendance for this last start when he struck out 13 in six innings and he said he looked like a legitimate number two starter. If you add 2 MPH to his fastball, he’s a number one. The curve was fantastic and the scout said it had a different feel that he felt could be more reliable for him. The stuff has always been there for the lefty, but if he can turn that into something more, look out. I wouldn’t be too surprised to see him move up a level pretty quickly because he’s showing he’s too good for low-A. So is David Sandlin, who has struck out 17 in 9.2 innings with just two walks and seven hits allowed. I wouldn’t be too surprised if Sandlin sees AA this year too.

It’s not all great. Ben Kudrna has struggled. So has Beck Way. And so has TJ Sikkema. I’m surprised to see the way Jonathan Bowlan has started his season too. I figured his second year back, he’d finally pick up where he left off, but there’s still time. It’s way too early for any of these, but from all I’m hearing from people in the know, the system looks a lot stronger today than it did even a few weeks ago.

A Weekend Preview

The Royals go West, which I don’t think anyone is upset about in Kansas City. After starting the year 1-6 at home, they have to hope that they can get back to some winning on a road trip like they did a couple of weeks ago when they went 3-3 in San Francisco and Texas. They start off in Anaheim against an Angels team that looks better on paper, but is still 9-10 after falling to the Yankees yesterday. Their lineup is impressive and it goes beyond Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout for once. They added Hunter Renfroe, Brandon Drury and Gio Urshela this winter and have called up Logan O’Hoppe and Zach Neto, two of their top prospects. The result hasn’t been what they’ve expected. Some of that is Taylor Ward struggling to start the year. Some of it is David Fletcher being so bad he had to be demoted. And some of it is Jared Walsh being on the IL with headaches and insomnia.

But they’ve been okay and they have legitimately solid starting pitching. The Royals get to see Ohtani on the mound to start the series, so that’s perfect for a struggling offense. And they’ll counter with an opener/bulk man situation with Taylor Clarke and Ryan Yarbrough. I’m not sure there’s a bigger mismatch out there. If you’re into sports betting, you can win a lot more money betting on the Royals to win the first game than most individual MLB games (I think I saw they’re +285, which is kind of crazy). I still wouldn’t do it. But then they’ll get Tyler Anderson, who has struggled, and Reid Detmers, who has been okay but is throwing much harder this season. The other two Royals starters will be Zack Greinke and Jordan Lyles.

I have to say, I don’t love the matchups, though I’m at least curious to see how the Royals handle Anderson tomorrow night. They got to him last year when he pitched in Kansas City the Dodgers. They scored three runs on seven hits against him in six innings. Pasquantinio and Perez touched him for doubles, so maybe there’s something there and they can get some magic from Greinke against one of his former teams. I don’t know. It’s hard to think they can win any games the way they’re going, so just getting one would feel like some sort of big win, but they need a big road trip against some tough competition to get anyone back on their sides when they come home on May 2. I know many have already checked out, but for those who haven’t, this is a pretty big weekend and road trip as a whole.