In the Zone: A Look at How the Royals Fared Against Pitches in Various Attack Zones

The Royals offense was somewhere between bad and below average, so let's compare them to the league and the best offenses in the league.

I think we all have a pretty good idea that the 2021 Royals offense wasn’t especially good. Nobody wants to know what it would have been without Salvador Perez, but thankfully we don’t ever have to live that world (though I’m going to give you some numbers within this, so sorry in advance). But where I see a difference between the teams that have found their way to the postseason and teams like the Royals is that it is just so much more difficult to pitch to the good teams. You obviously can’t leave it in the middle of the plate against anyone, Royals included, but there are spots you can go against every team. The fewer the better, so the Royals definitely need to close some holes.

I’m going to take a look at each of the below zones and compare how the Royals fared against the rest of the league and then against the top five offenses in baseball. I chose the top five because they were the five teams that scored five or more runs per game.

Heart

This is the area that pitchers just can’t live at all. It doesn’t matter what team you’re facing, an offense is going to inflict pain on pitches in this spot. Obviously not all the time, but enough that you want to move out of this middle even if you have the best of the best stuff.

So you can see that the Royals hit for average reasonably fine against those pitches right down the middle. But the power just wasn’t near enough. They obviously lagged behind the best of the best, which is not surprising, but they were second to last in home runs, only better than Pittsburgh. They were also tied with the Marlins for the lowest ISO, had the fifth lowest SLG and the sixth lowest xSLG.

Right here is a big issue with the Royals offense. They did damage in this spot because everyone does damage, but it wasn’t enough. Now, the ugly part. Let’s take Salvy out because I think it’s at least marginally interesting to see how bad the rest were. As a team, they hit:

Woof.

Let’s be fair. This isn’t good statistical analysis to take away the best and leave the worst. Every team’s numbers will get worse when you take away their very best. But the point here is that they were absolutely carried offensively by Perez, which isn’t news, but it’s still worth noting.

One thing I will say about the non-Salvy numbers is that it includes Jorge Soler and Kelvin Gutierrez with their new teams, so the numbers aren’t all Royals, but it’s close enough and that part is just for fun anyway, so just go with it.

And here’s your first of three Soler gifs. The hardest hit ball of the season for the season was on a pitch over the heart of the plate that he hit on the ground:

I’m going to include a Salvy homer because it was the farthest hit ball of the season and it was rocked too and we can’t talk about the Royals offense without a Salvy homer:

Shadow

These are pitches where some are very hittable, some are pitches you take unless you have two strikes and where pitchers want to get some whiffs on the outer edges of the shadow zone. Really, the ideal pitch location starts here to get a swing, but then ends up in the chase zone, but that’s a pitcher issue and we’re talking offense today.

You know, the Royals actually come out looking pretty good here compared to the best offenses. They actually have the seventh best average and third best expected average. That’s not nothing. They’re 16th in home runs, which is actually good for this team as well as 10th in SLG and 3rd in xSLG. Maybe most interesting is that they had the lowest strikeout percentage of any team in baseball. With strikeouts continuing to rise, making contact has value in today’s game, even with shifting making it harder for balls to find their way through the infield.

And now for the non-Salvy numbers:

That’s not terrible actually. At least not as bad as it could be. Of course, Salvy is a ridiculous force and can hit any pitch for a home run apparently. The Royals hardest hit pitch on one in the shadow zone was a 114.7 MPH lineout, also from Soler:

Chase

As I’m writing this, I haven’t looked at the numbers or anything, so I’m hypothesizing along with you how the Royals will look in comparison to both the league and the best of the best. I’m going to guess that they look really bad compared to them.

Update: I was sort of wrong. They’re pretty well in line with what the rest of the league has done. The Astros are very impressive considering all of these pitches are pretty far outside the zone, but the Royals are pretty well in line with the rest of the good offenses even, though with one exception. Take a look at the wOBA there. Why is the Royals one so much lower? It’s because they don’t work walks on these chase pitches.

Of these plate appearances that ended on chase pitches, 70 percent were either put in play or a strikeout for the Royals. For the Astros, that number was 60.6 percent. For the Rays, 63.4 percent. For the Blue Jays, it was 65.8 percent. The Red Sox were at 86.3 percent, which is closest and then the Dodgers were at a ridiculous 58.4 percent.

So now we’ve pinpointed issue number two with the Royals offense. And this is the one that we knew about. When they make contact with the ball, they’re in line with other teams here, but they just swing too wildly at everything.

The non-Salvy numbers:

They’re actually a bit better on the plate discipline side, but of course he had the two home runs on chase pitches. Why wouldn’t he? Here’s their hardest hit chase pitch of the year. It was a rope at 113.3 MPH, also off the bat of Soler:

Waste

I’m going to put the numbers up here because we’ve come this far, but there isn’t much other than to laugh at how good pitchers are that they get hitters to chase these pitches sometimes.

The Dodgers just don’t chase. That’s crazy. But take a look again at the wOBAs listed and then the Royals strikeout percentage compared to the best. They simply can’t control themselves.

Non-Salvy numbers:

Again, in some instances, excluding Perez actually helps some. Here’s the Royals hardest hit waste pitch at 98.8 MPH:

So look, these are a lot of numbers to tell you a lot of what we already knew. The Royals make pretty decent contact generally, so they have that part down, but they don’t do enough damage to the ball when they hit it. And then when pitchers can get them to swing at their pitch, the Royals do it a lot more than the rest of the best teams in the league. And when you swing at those pitches, you get in trouble.

These aren’t new issues. The Royals have always been pretty low on power and for most of their history low on patience. We’ve seen that limiting strikeouts is one step toward winning. The lowest strikeout rate in baseball is the Houston Astros, and they’re one of four teams still alive this year. The Astros consistently have low strikeout rates (trash can or not) and they consistently make it to the LCS or farther.

But it’s not just about not striking out. Five of the top six ISOs in baseball made the playoffs this year. The only one that didn’t was the Blue Jays, and they won 91 games. In 2019, five of the top six ISOs made the playoffs. In 2018, it was seven of the top eight. The point here isn’t breaking any new ground, but you generally have to punish the ball as well. Are the Royals close to having that kind of offense? It’s certainly possible. It depends a lot on the development of their young core, but it’s hard to argue with Bobby Witt Jr., Nick Pratto and MJ Melendez in the minors this year. So we know they have guys who have it in them. But the illustrations above show just how far off they were in 2021, so there’s definitely a good deal of ground to cover.