Long-Term Buying for the Royals
We'll call this another entry in the trade series, but it's a little bit different as the Royals sit in no-man's land.
To say the Royals have had an uneven year would be putting it lightly. They were 8-14 before they won 16 of 18. Then they stayed over the .500 mark for awhile, but ultimately fell to 34-38 before winning four in a row and immediately losing six in a row. When they lost the opener against the Mariners at the start of last week, they fell to a season-high seven games below .500. The calendar turned to July, though, and they’re 7-2 and back to threatening the .500 mark. I think it’s safe to say that, without knowing what the Royals team is day-to-day, we know what they are overall.
Make sure you catch this week’s Kauffman Corner. This week, Soren, Les and I talked a lot about Jac Caglianone and if his last couple of games are the start of something. We also talked a lot about buying and selling, the Dallas Keuchel signing, what Cam Devanney can be and what Nick Loftin could be (or maybe/probably isn’t) becoming.
This is a flawed team that has the potential to be very good for extended stretches because of their pitching. They also have the potential to be very bad because of their offense. When things are going well with their big boys - Bobby Witt Jr., Vinnie Pasquantino and Salvador Perez - they are good enough to win just about any game they play. But other than Maikel Garcia in that mix, the rest of the lineup is so up and down that if those three aren’t doing their thing, there’s a pretty good chance they aren’t going to score enough runs, no matter what the pitching does.
But because of that pitching, they’re in just about every game. I wrote about this yesterday that they don’t need a great offense to win. They need to be competent. They’re 19-12 when they score three or four runs. Their .613 winning percentage in such games is third-best in baseball. Coming into play yesterday, the league winning percentage when scoring three or four runs was .450. The Royals have an opportunity to improve their chances by simply adding a very small amount of offense. Of course, that said, they’re in a spot where they’re on the outside looking in and a good chunk less than half the season remains. So they have to be smart.