What Has to Happen?

The Royals could win in 2021. It'll just take a lot to go right.

Yesterday, I gave you some of my bold predictions for the 2021 season for the Royals, and at the end, I gave my vaguely official prediction of 76-86. That’s not very good, but it’s also not very bad! So that’s an improvement. But there’s a lot of talk among media and fans alike about the Royals potentially being a surprise team this season. I don’t see it happening, but I absolutely see how it could happen, so I want to go through that today with you as we are just one week out from Opening Day.

Thump

I said this when the Royals acquired Andrew Benintendi, but even with that move and picking up Carlos Santana, the key to the Royals offense is going to be Hunter Dozier and Jorge Soler. I’ve talked about Dozier quite a bit over the last few weeks, including yesterday, so I’ll spare you the details there, but I do want to get into what the Royals need from Soler. 

They don’t need him to be the monster from 2019 when he hit 48 home runs, but they need 150 games from him (more on that later) and they need him to get back to the .250-.270 average and .350-.360 OBP that he provided in 2018 and 2019. If Soler is healthy enough to get 600 plate appearances, he’s going to hit 30 home runs. It’s as simply as that.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be Dozier and Soler doing the heavy lifting. It’s just that they’re the most likely given their track record and the fact that they both need a bounceback from last year. Maybe Carlos Santana can give them 30+ home runs like he did in 2019. Maybe Adalberto Mondesi puts it together and shows off the power we saw in those last 20 games. And we know that if Salvador Perez can play 120 games that he’ll hit 20+ himself as well. 

Young Arms Stepping Up

The Royals rotation has two veterans in Danny Duffy and Mike Minor. There’s also Jakob Junis who has looked seriously outstanding in spring training and has almost 500 big league innings. The bullpen is anchored by Greg Holland and Jesse Hahn and will likely include Wade Davis and maybe Ervin Santana. And even if you include Brad Keller in the veteran camp (he could honestly probably go either way), the Royals will really need their young arms to step up if they want to win.

Ideally, the young arms push Duffy to the bullpen. That’s step one. But the Royals really need at least two in the Keller, Brady Singer, Kris Bubic, Daniel Lynch and Jackson Kowar group to not only be good, but probably be great. I mentioned yesterday that I think Singer has a big year, but someone else and maybe a third needs to be outstanding for the Royals to have a shot. And it could be someone like Kowar as a multi-inning reliever when he comes up. If they don’t get some monster innings from the young future of their rotation, it’ll be awfully tough for 2021 to end up special.

Join the 21st Century Offensively

I talked about the power already, and we know about that, but one of the top focuses for the Royals this winter was on base percentage, and I think they did a nice job of adding that with Benintendi and Santana. The start to a high OBP is working walks. The Royals ranked as fifth worst drawing walks last season. Out of 16 playoff teams, 12 ranked in the top half of the league in 2020.

In 2019, nine of 10 playoff teams were top half. In 2018, it was eight of 10. You get it. The point here is that you have to be able to work counts and draw walks to get to the promised land. Of course, it’s possible to make it and even win it all without exactly having much patience as we saw in 2014 and 2015, but the exception is not the rule. A likely starting nine for the Royals this year had an 8.3 percent walk rate in 2019 (and 2018 for Perez). That wouldn’t have gotten them into the top half in 2020, but it would be half a percent higher at least.

Some Basic Numbers

Ultimately, what it comes down to for any team trying to make the playoffs is they have to hit some basic benchmarks. Okay, maybe they don’t have to, but the job is a lot easier if they do. If you think it takes 89 wins to win a wild card spot, then the Royals likely need to score about 75 more runs than they allow. If you think it’s 92 or 93, then it’s more like 100. If they can get to 4.6 runs per game, then they need to allow about 4.2 per game. They scored 4.1 per game and allowed 4.5 per game last year, so that’ll need to flip. 

Health

This one is the easiest one of anything that has to happen. The Royals have talent and they have a potentially solid to good lineup, but they need to stay healthy in order for that talent to shine. At the beginning of spring, I wasn’t sure how much depth there was beyond the starting nine, and while I’m still skeptical a bit of what the team can do if someone important goes down, seeing the springs that Bobby Witt, Jr., Nick Pratto and Kyle Isbel had has made me a bit more optimistic. Still, they need to stay healthy.

There’s less of a concern on the pitching staff because of all the young arms and the likelihood that pitchers will get shuffled in and out throughout the year anyway, but the more pitchers you try, the more likely you’re going to find one who doesn’t work. It’s kind of like going to a million relievers in a game. Ideally, the Royals will get to choose when they move guys around, but health isn’t quite as important since there’s an argument to be made that the guys waiting might be better than a lot on the roster.

Luck

The Dodgers don’t really need luck to make the postseason. The Padres probably don’t either. The Royals, though, do. They’re not the most talented team in the division and they might not even be the third most talented. So things are going to have to go their way. Luck can manifest for them as helping them or hurting other teams. But they’ll even need it on a game-by-game level. A ball is going to have to hit the bag when the first baseman is set up to field it to end an inning. Outfielders are going to need to slip. Catchers are going to need to get crossed up at very inopportune times. Check swings are going to need to result in bloop singles a lot. Things need to happen that probably get them a minimum of five additional wins and maybe more like eight or 10. It’s not impossible. It’s just going to take a lot of things out of the team’s control.

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This may seem discouraging. As someone who yesterday predicted a 76-86 record, that means they likely have to figure out a way to be around 15 wins better than that to make the playoffs. That’s roughly a 100 point spread in winning percentage, so yeah, it’ll take a good amount of things happening to make that happen. Where it’s encouraging is that this list is probably half the length of what last year’s would have been and maybe a quarter of the length of what it would have been in 2018 and 2019. This organization is making progress and making it fast. 2021 might not be the year we see it all come to fruition, but it’s getting closer and as JP once said, it could happen.