The Royals are Either Good or Lucky to be Good

There's been a surprising amount of bad in a really good start. Does that project to continue or is that something that will turn around?

I’ve spent the first part of the season really breaking down each individual game, which is the whole point of what I wanted to do here on Inside the Crown, but I want to take a step back today and try to decipher just how good the Royals are. I mentioned that question in my weekly notes article on Royals Review, but I’d like to dive a little deeper here. Full disclosure, I don’t know the answer. And I’m not sure any of us truly will until we get a little more data, but if we waited for enough data to have every answer, we wouldn’t talk baseball until mid-May and nobody needs that.

So my simple question in my article on RR today was are the Royals good? I came to a pretty quick conclusion over there that they’re not bad, and I think that’s definitely something. On a broad level, they have a deep and relatively diverse offense with a deep and potentially high quality bullpen. The starting rotation is a bit of a question, but they’ve been pretty good since that Rangers series, only with too few innings thrown. 

Here are the two sides of the coin for them:

They’re Good and Lucky

So far, this team has been missing their shortstop and the guy penciled in as their number three hitter, Adalberto Mondesi. He had a good spring and you know all about the last 22 games when he hit .376/.424/.706. He hasn’t played a single game and they’re 7-4 and sitting atop the AL Central. Add him to the lineup and the Royals have a dynamic playmaker who lengthens the lineup. It might be that he’s no longer the number three hitter with the way Salvador Perez has gone since he got to that spot, and I had my doubts about he and Perez back to back, but either way, as well as Nicky Lopez has played, Mondesi is the better option. 

They’ve also done this with Hunter Dozier playing in just seven games and leaving early in two of them. Oh yeah, and he started the year 0-16 as he was battling the thumb injury. You might recall that I spent the better part of the month and a half before the season touting the breakout potential he had in 2021. And then he went and did me dirty like that. Hanser Alberto has been pretty good in his absence, but Alberto at his best doesn’t even come close to comparing to Dozier at his. A healthy Dozier even hitting like he did in 2019 and not taking that next step would make this offense that much better.

Oh, and then there are the struggles of Jorge Soler, Carlos Santana and Andrew Benintendi, all of whom were expected to take this lineup from meh to very good. They’ve combined to hit .186/.298/.297. Santana is historically a bit of a slow starter and he has shown some signs, at least from the right side, of starting to heat up. I mentioned the other day that I think Soler is getting closer. I’ve seen better swings from him and a couple takes that wouldn’t have happened when he was in the midst of his yearly strikeout barrage (he struck out in 18 straight games early in 2019 and had 32 over this games, yikes). 

Benintendi is the one who worries me. He says he feels like he’s close and he’s had some better swings lately, but he’s still not hitting the ball hard basically ever. He’s without a barrel and his hard hit rate is just 26.7 percent, which is in line with what he did last year when he had that brutal short stretch. But again, he feels like he’s close, so I guess we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for a bit longer.

Add in that Brad Keller was beyond a disaster in his first two starts, Jesse Hahn was the team’s best reliever last year and was miserable this year before going on the IL and the Royals have had to endure three different home openers and the scheduled off days right after them and things haven’t exactly gone right for them this year.

And yet, they’re 7-4 and in first place. To overcome that and be where they are says that there might even be better days ahead for this team. Whit Merrifield and Dozier have both mentioned that they aren’t even clicking on all cylinders and are still doing what they are. They’re encouraged, and it frankly makes sense why. Of course, what if…

They’re Lucky to be Good

It’s easy to look at everything that’s gone wrong and have a really easy argument to say that better days are ahead, but what if this is their true talent level and they’re lucky that they’ve gotten to seven wins in their first 14 games? I think it would be tough to say that Keller is the worst pitcher in baseball, and his start against the Angels on Wednesday that should get him back on track says that he won’t be that bad, but some of the other things going on with this team could bite them in the long run.

They’re averaging less than five innings per start. That’s not good enough. Even in their last eight games when the starters have been really good with a 2.25 ERA, they’ve only averaged five innings per start. No matter how deep the bullpen is, that’s going to wear on them. We’ve already seen it a little bit with Scott Barlow stretched on Monday when he could have used a day off and letting a game the Royals were clawing back into get back out of hand. They need innings from their starters.

And in the case of the Benintendi, Soler and Santana trio, the assumption is that they’ll figure it out and pick it up, but they also combined to hit .201/.335/.363 last season. That’s better than what we’ve seen this year, but that’s concerning to me. It’s early, so I tend to be in the wait and see category, especially considering how streaky Soler is and how slow Santana starts, but it’s one of those things that you worry about. 

This offense has had four games without a single barrel. After hitting a lot hard in the first series against a bad staff, it’s been pretty quiet. Since leaving Cleveland, the highest hard hit rate for any game is 30.8 percent, which is just simply not enough. 

Moving on to some of the Statcast metrics, the Royals don’t fare especially well in these. Offensively, they aren’t doing too well. Only three regulars have xBA above the league average. Only four are above average in xSLG and xwOBA. They’re about 50/50 as far as league average goes with chase rate and pretty much everyone other than Lopez, Santana and Merrifield are swinging and missing too much. Because of that, they’re not even making that much contact inside the zone. That’s an issue. 

On the pitching side, only one pitcher who has thrown a single pitch for the Royals has gotten hitters to chase bad pitches at an above average rate and that’s Tyler Zuber. He’s thrown one inning. He looked good, but it was one inning. That means Barlow hasn’t and Staumont hasn’t and Holland hasn’t and Junis hasn’t and...well you get the idea. The good news is that they’ve gotten a lot of swings and misses, but I just worry about staying in the zone too much against good hitters. And the fact that there have been too many barrels really solidifies that thought for me. Only three pitchers - Wade Davis, Keller and Holland - are eliciting weak contact more than the league average.

So...Are they Good or Lucky to be Good?

I...don’t know. I tend to believe that the offense is better than what we’ve seen since their hot first two games. It’s still just 11 games of data and they’ve had an inordinate number of days off. I’ve said this quite a bit, but baseball is a rhythm game and they haven’t had an opportunity to get into a rhythm. They are currently in their first stretch of games playing more than two days in a row, and while it hasn’t been impressive, they have scored 13 in their last two games combined. 

It’s been a fun ride to start the year. I think more has gone wrong than has gone right and they’re still sitting where they are, so I tend to believe they’re closer to good than lucky to be good. I don’t think they’re a 103-win team like their 7-4 pace would indicate, but I like the chances that the guys in slumps step up and more than cover for some backslide we’re likely to see with players like Michael A. Taylor, Danny Duffy and Jakob Junis as the season gets going. 

I predicted they’d go 76-86 when the season started, and I’m not going to budge on that because it’s only 11 games, and also because I always believe that a team can easily sway eight or 10 wins from their “true” talent level over the course of a long season. I will say at this point that I think I’d be surprised if they only won 66 games, but if they got to 83 or 84 wins, I wouldn’t be the least bit shocked. They have six more on a tough homestand before heading to Detroit and Pittsburgh. If they can get through these next 11 games at even 6-5, they’ll be sitting at 13-9 and that much closer to actually being good. Hey, it could happen.