Weighing the Royals Playoff Chances and What That Means for the Deadline
When the Royals are definitive buyers or sellers, the days leading up to the deadline are a lot of fun. They are neither right now. They'll know more soon.
I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to move on from discussing what teams may or may not do. The Royals have been a team on the bubble for the better part of the season. You might believe they should sell hard or sell soft or buy a little or buy big or whatever, but what matters is what those in charge believe they should do. With less than a week to go before the deadline hits, the good news is that we’re almost done talking about what they may or may not do and we’ll be able to dive into what they actually did do.
Check out yesterday’s Kauffman Corner. It was just Soren and me with Les Norman out for the week. We talked about Salvador Perez finding the fountain of youth, the MJ Melendez promotion, what John Rave is and much more. We’re live every Thursday morning at 8:30 (though we’ll go Thursday night next week to break down the deadline) and then you can find it either here or anywhere you get your podcasts!
I think to decide what the Royals path should be, it’s first important to see where they are. They’re 50-53, which is a pace for 78-79 wins. That won’t be good enough. They are 4.5 games behind the Red Sox, who are currently the third Wild Card. Between them and the Red Sox are the Rays, Rangers and Guardians. The Angels and Twins are also hovering. If I had to put it in tiers, I’d say you’ve got Seattle and Boston in the first tier with the Rays and Rangers next, and then the Guardians, Royals, Angels and Twins all lumped together. Currently, the Red Sox are on pace for 85-86 wins.
Let’s do some math. For the Royals to win 85 games, they’d need to finish 35-24. Their best 59-game stretch this year saw them go 31-28. If you were wondering, their worst saw them go 23-36. If they match the best, that’s 81 wins, which is very unlikely to be enough to win a Wild Card spot. Let’s, for a moment, do a foolish thing and just take away a bad stretch of baseball. Outside of June, which was brutal, the Royals are 42-35, which is an 88-win pace. They were over .500 in March/April and May and are currently 11-7 in July. If they played at that pace for the rest of the season, they’d win 82 games.
The math is not what you’d call there. However, where they do have math on their side, at least to some extent, is in their schedule. No, it’s not their strength of schedule. I think that’s pretty overrated in baseball. I’m repeating a point here, but I think it’s worth repeating. They play the teams ahead of them and around them, for the most part. That means that, yes, they need help because it’s such a hodge-podge, but it also means that they have some control over things. Here’s who’s left on their schedule in the same area as them:
Boston - 3 games, August 4-6
Cleveland - 7 games, July 25-27 and September 8-11
Los Angeles - 6 games, September 2-4 and September 23-25
Minnesota - 6 games, August 8-10 and September 5-7
Seattle - 3 games, September 16-18
Texas - 4 games, August 18-21
They do not play the Rays again. That’s 29 games against the teams around them. Against those six teams, they’ve already played 23 games and they’ve gone 12-11. That’s 1-2 vs. Boston, 2-4 vs. Cleveland, 4-3 vs. Minnesota, 2-2 vs. Seattle and 3-0 vs. Texas. If they go 19-10 in those 29 games, is that enough?