Raising the Floor

There are two ways to improve a team and one is a little easier than the other.

Given the choice between getting better or being less bad, I think most people would choose to get better. It both sounds more encouraging and it’s more inviting. But what if I said that being less bad was a way to get better, but in terms of building a 26-man roster (or really a 40-man roster; heck really a 55ish-man roster) that being less bad can be almost as beneficial for a much more reasonable cost than getting better? It’s a pretty simple idea. Clear out the muck. The bottom of the roster that often gets forgotten and filled with has-beens and never-will-bes can often be the downfall of a team.

Take the Royals, for example. Their projected Opening Day starting nine was going to be Whit Merrifield, Andrew Benintendi, Carlos Santana, Adalberto Mondesi, Salvador Perez, Jorge Soler, Hunter Dozier, Michael A. Taylor and Kyle Isbel. Those nine combined for 4,149 of 5,966 non-pitcher plate appearances plate appearances taken by Royals hitters in 2021. That’s just 69.5 percent of all plate appearances.

Their projected rotation was Brad Keller, Mike Minor, Brady Singer, Danny Duffy and I guess Jakob Junis. Those five combined for 503 of the 796.1 innings thrown by starters. And finally, the Opening Day bullpen threw 443.1 of 621 total innings. As a whole, the projected pitching staff to start the season, accounted for 66.8 percent of the innings thrown.

Some were demoted. Some got hurt. Some struggled and got days off. Some were all of the above. The point is that the roster you expect isn’t going to give you enough that you can count on it without any depth to back it up. Sometimes the bottom of the roster can actually be the deciding factor being playoffs and not, between a .500 season and not and between drafting 4th or 9th.

Offense

The Royals used 19 position players in 2021, which was the fewest in baseball. I’m not really sure I understand that, but that’s what they did. The last time they used fewer than 20 in a season was 2008, so you can bet there will be more opportunities for players to help boost the bottom of the roster in coming seasons. Of those 19 players, eight of them accounted for negative wins above replacement according to Fangraphs. It was “only” six according to Baseball Reference.

Just to give a quick WAR primer, a team with everyone pulling a 0.0 WAR is likely going to win about 48 games, so with each WAR, you’re actually adding on to a base of roughly 48-114. Using the Fangraphs numbers, the nine Royals with negative WAR were:

Jorge Soler: -1.1
Kelvin Gutierrez: -0.8
Ryan O’Hearn: -0.7
Carlos Santana: -0.3
Sebastian Rivero: -0.2
Hunter Dozier: -0.2
Emmanuel Rivera: -0.1
Jarrod Dyson: -0.1

That’s a total of -3.5 WAR for those eight players. Of those eight, the Royals allocated 2,232 plate appearances of their 5,966. The Royals won 74 games. Eliminate the negative and they’re likely to win at least a couple more. Maybe three or four.

Pitching

The Royals used 30 pitchers in 2021, which was also toward the bottom of the league, but not right at the bottom of the league, which was kind of surprising given how many young guys they had debut. But also the league average for number of pitchers jumped by two from 2019, which isn’t a surprise given the nature of the season. Of those 30, eight accounted for negative WAR:

Jesse Hahn: -0.4
Tyler Zuber: -0.3
Wade Davis: -0.3
Jackson Kowar: -0.3
Greg Holland: -0.2
Jake Newberry: -0.2
Kyle Zimmer: -0.2
Anthony Swarzak: -0.1

First of all, this is your reminder that Swarzak was on the 2021 Royals at any point because I imagine most of you had forgotten. I know I had. Second of all, this is actually not as bad as I expected coming into this. But still, that’s a total of -2 WAR in 225.1 of their 1417.1 innings. It could actually be a lot worse. Add in two to four wins gained by the offense and another couple from the pitching staff and you’re looking at 78-80 win team instead of a 74-win team. That might not make a difference at this level, but it can.

Around the League

Let’s take a look at the teams that made the postseason and a couple others who easily could have and count up their negative WAR totals.

That’s the 10 playoff teams plus the two more who won 90 games and didn’t make it. Remember that the Royals used 2,232 plate appearances on players with a negative WAR. The next closest on that list is the Mariners with more than 900 fewer plate appearances given. I think we can take some conclusions from the list above and they all kind of relate to each other.

Takeaways

Good Teams Cut Bait

Every team has players who struggle. Every team has bad players and guys who shouldn’t be a part of their big league club. The good teams minimize the exposure. The Royals gave four players with a negative WAR more plate appearances than the entire White Sox team gave players with a negative WAR. All of Santana, Dozier, Soler and O’Hearn had at least 254 plate appearances. Everyone but O’Hearn had at least 360, so three players were more than three whole teams. Five teams above had fewer plate appearances with a negative WAR than Carlos Santana.

It’s obviously not as cut and dry as just stop playing the bad players, not in some instances at least. With Santana, his decline happened pretty quick, so he’s going to give a lot of plate appearances with a negative WAR just because of how relatively quickly the drop happened. Plus, the options to replace him were Dozier, who had 543 plate appearances with a negative WAR and O’Hearn, who we know had 254. That’s not entirely true. Ryan McBroom could have been an option and they could have given some time to Nick Pratto as well, but you get the idea.

The point here is that good teams don’t spend that many plate appearances on players underperforming, especially when they aren’t young players. On the Mariners, Jarred Kelenic had 377 plate appearances with a negative WAR. While the Mariners were fighting for a playoff spot, Kelenic is likely necessary for them to win a championship in the future. You can excuse that. I don’t hate that Gutierrez got 142 plate appearances or Rivero got 44 or even Rivera got 98. They’re young players who the Royals wanted to find out about. They got all the answers they needed on Gutierrez and are still incomplete on the other two, but young players on non-winning teams are okay to be negative.

Sometimes Innings in Any Form Are Fine

I was surprised by how many teams were hovering around the Royals in terms of negative WAR innings. That’s not entirely true. I was especially surprised about the Brewers, who have such a quality pitching staff (but there’s something on this in a minute), but maybe not that surprised at teams in the bottom half of the list. The list above is sorted by wins for playoff teams and then the two who missed, though the only playoff team with fewer than them is the Braves. Five of the top six teams had 80 innings or fewer of negative WAR pitching.

But the point is that sometimes you just have to get through games, and even if you put a bad pitcher out there, what the WAR number doesn’t tell you is that Ervin Santana giving up five runs in four innings (I don’t even know if that happened; it’s just an example, people) might have saved the better part of the bullpen to nail down a one-run win the next day. So maybe the negative WAR pitchers aren’t the biggest problem as long as you have enough to navigate it.

Still, only one team above had more innings from negative WAR pitchers than the Royals, which means that’s an area for improvement. But, again, young pitchers are an exception. Maybe Jackson Kowar getting his brains beat in will help him to become the star the Royals hope he is. It’s okay in a season like this.

Balance is Important

Outside of the Mariners, the team with the most plate appearances given to negative WAR hitters was the Brewers. They didn’t have a great offense overall, so their real balance came from their pitching, which I’ll get to in a second, but they also had nine hitters with a WAR of at least 1.5 and at least 200 plate appearances. The Royals had five. The Brewers balanced out their negatives with a lot of average to above average while the Royals balanced their negatives with not enough.

The Dodgers didn’t have a ton of plate appearances allocated to negative WAR players, but they did have the most negative WAR of all the sub-zero players from the teams listed above. They also had eight players with at least 2.6 WAR in at least 200 plate appearances. Like the Brewers, they didn’t actually have any massive WAR stars this year, partially due to injuries in the case of Corey Seager and later acquisition in the case of Trey Turner, but they made up for it with an overwhelmingly positive group of hitters in the lineup most nights.

And turning to the pitching side, the Brewers are the best example of making up for a lot of bad innings because they had five pitchers with at least 118.2 innings with a 1.5 WAR or better. Their starters carried that team and allowed them to struggle down the roster a little bit.

What Do the Royals Do?

At the core of this question, the answer is very simple, and it goes back to the start of this article. They get more good players and they limit the bad players. It’s obviously not quite so simple and you can see that great teams also have players who are impacting them negatively. The goal, from a WAR level is to have 42+ WAR to get to 90 wins. Obviously the game isn’t played on a spreadsheet and teams with 30 WAR can win 95 while teams with 50 WAR could win 80, but the general consensus is to get more good players on the field at once.

That seems so obvious, but it’s also not difficult for a team trying to take that next step, and that’s why I think it starts with raising the floor. They’ve backed themselves into a bit of a corner with Dozier, who is under contract for three more seasons, whether he’s the September version or the April version. But if he’s the April version, the organization needs to understand the money is spent whether he’s on the field or not and keep him off the field while he figures out how to be the September version. Santana might have $10.5 million coming to him next year, but if he’s doing what he did in the second half, he can either do that from home or the bench. They need to move him.

They cannot be giving 250 plate appearances to O’Hearn. If you’re going to put a negative in the lineup that often, at least make it someone who you need to find out about before heading into a winning era of Royals baseball. Give Edward Olivares the chance they didn’t. Let’s see what Kyle Isbel can do for 250 plate appearances instead of wasting it on someone they have already wasted plate appearances on.

The 2022 Royals roster probably will be a bit different looking even by the start of June than it is on Opening Day, but if the young talent can both debut and continue to develop at the big league level, they might find themselves having raised the floor of what they can do. Cut out 1,000 plate appearances of bad players and 75 innings and maybe that adds four or five wins. Add some additional talent and some wins with guys like Bobby Witt Jr. and a free agent or two and maybe that adds another four or five more. Suddenly, they’re sitting at 82-84 wins, which puts them in striking distance and, at the very least, propels them to the next step. They just need to raise that floor.