Spring Stats Do Tell Some Stories

There are a few stats from spring that stand out and give some serious hope for the season.

With spring training now in the books, we can look back on those stats that no longer mean anything just to take a look and see what stands out. Of course, they don’t necessarily mean the trends will continue, both good and bad, but it’s fun to take a look at things that make us take a step back and wonder what could be in the season about to start in a couple days. 

Michael A. Taylor’s Walk Rate

In 47 plate appearances this spring, Taylor has walked eight times. That’s a 16.7 percent walk rate. The only Royals player who did better this spring was Carlos Santana at 18.3 percent, and he’s known for walking a lot. For some perspective, Taylor has never walked at better than a 7.5 percent clip in the regular season. And while he’s had successful springs in the past, he’s also never walked like this in the spring. He seems to be taking a different approach at the plate, and it’s hard to argue anything but that it’s working. According to Baseball Reference, his opponent quality is just under 8, which is pretty high for spring training, so he’s doing it off upper level pitchers. 

The Royals don’t need him to keep walking at a 17 percent rate, though they wouldn’t say no either. What they need from Taylor is for him to keep his strikeout rate around where it is this spring as well (25.3 percent), which would be a continuation of last season’s better contact skills (better not good) and if he can even maintain a walk rate of half his spring total, they could be sitting very pretty with him at the bottom of a lineup that suddenly seems very deep. 

Jakob Junis’ Strikeout to Walk Ratio

When Junis debuted in 2017, he was solid but not spectacular. Then in 2018, he had a truly fantastic spring and followed that up by being solid but not spectacular again. If that was his ceiling, that’s fine! The problem is that he fell off in 2019 and was borderline unusable in 2020. So as the Royals decided to shift him to the bullpen, he worked to develop a new pitch and struck out 10 with no walks in seven innings of work. Now, he’s done this before. That magical 2018 spring, he struck out 20 and walked just one in 14.1 innings, but that was also followed up with a really solid season. He may be a reliever or he may be a starter or he may be both, but that strikeout to walk ratio has my ears perked up for him in 2021.

Seuly Matias and Nick Pratto are Back

I’ve talked about how we were robbed of the chance to see how the Royals new offensive development system would work after just a brutal 2019 for the hitting prospects. MJ Melendez is still sort of MIA and might have been passed by Sebastian Rivero, but Matias and Pratto put themselves back on the map this spring with a combined .349/.417/.814 line. Pratto had more chances to show out, but both of these guys are back on the prospect map after the spring they had. Now they need to do it in game action, but a tidy .465 ISO for the duo will work for now. 

With Jorge Soler a free agent after the season and basically no reports of a new deal anywhere close, both of these players are important for the Royals future. Pratto could come up and be a great defensive first baseman with the bat for the position, allowing Carlos Santana to move to DH. And Matias could be an answer after 2022 if Andrew Benintendi leaves as a free agent. The moral of the story is that it’s good to have options and these two have given the Royals some that they didn’t know if they had or not before spring started.

The Pitching Staff Was Good

If you go by the pitchers who I have on my roster projection, the Royals pitching staff was pretty good in Arizona, which is no small feat given the weirdness that Arizona can provide. On the whole, the 13 pitchers threw 139.1 innings with a 3.88 ERA, 25 percent strikeout rate and 8.3 percent walk rate. Obviously, it’ll take more than these 13 arms throughout the season, but only seven teams last year had a strikeout rate of 25 percent or higher and only seven teams had a walk rate of 8.3 percent or lower in 2020. 

I think it’s fair to say this team will get some strikeouts with some of the high caliber stuff in the bullpen. The key is if guys like Mike Minor and Brady Singer can keep up the strikeout rate they showed in Surprise. Even if it drops a bit, they should still be able to get some quality out of the staff during the season. 

The Hitters Were Better

Again, this is using my roster projection from yesterday, so there might be a slight variation here or there, but the 13 listed hit a combined .293/.353/.539 with 27 home runs and 69 total extra base hits. They had a walk rate of 9.4 percent and a strikeout rate of 24.2 percent, which was a little high, but if you’re trading those strikeouts for power, it works. The walk rate would have been top half of the league in 2020. The strikeout rate would have been 13th, so that’s not great, but it could be worse. 

Same with the pitchers, it’ll take more than just these 13 throughout the season, but what spring has shown is that this lineup has the potential to be deep and difficult for opposing pitchers. The issue is still depth if anyone goes down, but at least they start off from a position of strength, which hasn’t been the case in at least six years and you could argue maybe more than that. They’re going to need more pop from Benintendi and it wouldn’t hurt to cut some of those strikeouts, but spring was a nice look at what this offense can do when they’re clicking on all cylinders. Of course, we’ve seen it in spring before. It needs to translate to the regular season. At least they have a nice starting point with good weather and a bad pitching staff to face.