What We’ve Learned One Month In

It’s a long season, but we’re more than 14 percent through it now, so some lessons have been learned about this team.

Tonight marks the end of the first month of the baseball season. What started for the Royals with a terrible top of the first has been pretty good ever since. The offense has shown something at times. The pitching has been generally quite good. And we’ve been treated to, let’s say, a wide variety of defensive abilities throughout the first 23 games of the season. As they head to Minneapolis to start a run of 20 out of the next 22 games being within the American League Central, I wanted to take a step back and look at what we’ve learned about this team in the first month.

The Offense Can Be Good...But Isn’t Always

Coming out of spring training, the talk was how deep the Royals lineup had a chance to be. Hunter Dozier, my pick for breakout star of the season, was set to hit seventh in a lineup that featured newcomers in Andrew Benintendi and Carlos Santana in key spots in the order. And right out of the gate, they really hit with 25 runs scored in those first two games. They’ve scored 79 in the next 21. And maybe more damning is they’ve scored 41.3 percent of their runs in just four games. 

What’s gone right so far is that Santana has gotten hot and helped to carry an offense with far too many slumping players who can’t seem to get out of their struggles. Whit Merrifield has been generally okay, but he did have a blistering start followed by a slump that he may be breaking out of as we speak. Salvador Perez has had his moments, including some very clutch ones. Jorge Soler is smoking the ball Benintendi seems to be giving better plate appearances and has been hitting the ball harder and driving it more lately. 

But ultimately, they’ve been more bust than boom and that’s a bit of a problem moving forward. It would be nice to see if Michael A. Taylor can get back some of what we saw from him in that first series of the year. It’d be great if Dozier could find those line drives he’s been hitting without having much success a little more often instead of swinging at sliders low and away so often. This is a lineup that can still be prolific regularly, but they’ll need some more consistency in their pitch selection. They currently have five regulars with a walk rate of 8.6 percent or higher. That’s good. And they’re not striking out nearly as much as they were earlier in the season. But they just need to do a better job of keeping inside the strike zone. Only Benintendi, NIcky Lopez and Soler have an O-Swing% below 30 percent. 

If they can find a little more patience within their plate appearances, that will do wonders. It also won’t hurt to get Adalberto Mondesi back if he can even be 80 percent of what he was at the end of last season.

The Starters Can Pitch...But Need to PItch More

I mentioned this the other day, but the Royals starting rotation has been surprisingly good. They have a 4.09 ERA and a 3.99 SIERA so far this season. That’s with their best starter from last season, Brad Keller, being legitimately terrible in three of his five starts. He’s the guy you probably felt most comfortable about at this time a month ago and he’s really the only pitcher who you don’t at least feel like is close to a lock to keep the team in the game. They’re middle of the pack in strikeout rate and slightly worse than that in walk rate. It’d be nice if they’d get better.

The downside here, though, is that they just aren’t giving enough innings. They’re not even averaging five innings per start. It’s easy to say that Mike Matheny should go get his starters at the first sign of trouble or even before that and before the lineup turns over a third time, but that’s just not realistic in a 162-game season no matter how good the bullpen has been. They don’t really have the horses to get six innings per start, especially if Keller can’t figure it out. Danny Duffy has been amazing, but he’s best served as a guy who doesn’t get exposed. Mike Minor is looking a lot like a five and dive guy this season. 

Brady Singer could be that guy who can give some innings. It’s interesting that he hasn’t added the changeup we all thought he would, but I maintain that if he can keep his fastball up and his slider down and off the plate, he can continue to get outs. He has a big test against the Twins this weekend and I still have my doubts that he can get deep into games without a third pitch, but I feel like it’s possible. Jakob Junis is another one who I have my doubts about, but after he was so enamored with his changeup after that start against the Rays, maybe he could get a little deeper as well. Of course, it’d be tough to do that without adding a touch of velocity. Where he is now forces him to be incredibly fine and you can’t always count on that.

There’s help in the minors in guys like Daniel Lynch and Jackson Kowar, who will start the year in Omaha, but I’m not sure you can get them to the big leagues and see them as six to seven inning starters right away, so someone is going to need to step up or else the Royals bullpen might need some duct tape to hold their arms together by mid-summer.

The Bullpen Can Also Pitch

I’m not going to spend a ton of time on this because I talked about it in my article yesterday, but the bullpen can really go get it and they go five to seven deep, depending on how you feel about Greg Holland and Wade Davis. And the guys who can provide starting reinforcements can also help the bullpen, whether it’s them pitching there or them displacing someone like Minor to pitch out of there, and I have a hunch he’d be good there again. The fact that there is so much depth in this unit will help them withstand the starter’s lack of innings, but they might need some help as the season progresses.

Big Deficit, No Problem

That top of the first on Opening Day that seemed like it was the end of the season was actually the start of something very interesting. They were down 5-0 and that deficit was erased before they even recorded an out in the bottom half. The very next game, it was 4-0 in the middle innings when they scored 11 unanswered runs. They won’t always come back, but they’ve shown already that they aren’t afraid of being down a little bit. It’s not just those two games. 

They were down in the ninth in Chicago and tied the game before ultimately winning in the 10th. They trailed 5-0 after two against the Rays and made it a game before ultimately losing by seven, but that game would have been completely over in past seasons. And that game against the Rays that avoided the series sweep was one that was really big, even for an April game.

This is something good teams do. You don’t want to trail that often, but to have the ability to come back is something that not every team can do. We’ve seen that quite a bit in Kansas City over the years. This team looks a lot more like the 2014 team than some of the teams after the championship year, and that’s something to be proud of for Matheny and his guys.

There’s Urgency

The final thing that I think we’ve seen from the start of this season is that the team seems to have a sense of urgency that comes with the expectation of winning. It’s hard to say if they’d be thinking the same way if they weren’t actually doing the winning, but the move to send down Kyle Isbel was one that I’m still not sure if I agree with, but it showed that they decided quickly he wasn’t cutting it in their efforts to win baseball games, so they chose against development at the big league level in exchange for what they thought was a better chance to win games.

It isn’t just the decision with Isbel, of course. Benintendi’s struggles at the top of the lineup got him sent to the bottom of the lineup pretty quickly. The bullpen roles have changed relatively quickly as well with Holland’s struggles putting him into some lower leverage roles (okay, maybe not truly lower leverage, but not the ninth inning). We’ve seen Josh Staumont take over that closer role right now and guys like Tyler Zuber and Jake Brentz rise up in the circle of trust.

I anticipate this will continue throughout the season as long as they’re winning. If they get to a point where Bobby Witt, Jr. is playing well in AA or AAA and there’s a hole at the big league corner (and there almost assuredly will be), I would assume he’ll be up. The same is true of Lynch and Kowar and Alec Marsh and anyone else who has a chance to help the team win games. I also think this will continue at the trade deadline if they have a chance to make the playoffs when that time comes. I don’t think they’ll mortgage the future for a deal that only helps them for two or three months, but I do think they’ll be aggressive if there’s a fit. 

I don’t know if any of it is the right way for them to be acting, but it’s nice to see a team in baseball just going for it. 

I’m sure there are more smaller things we’ve learned over the first month of the season. I’ve probably talked about them in this very space, but these are some of the big picture lessons. This team can certainly play better than they have, but the start has been better than just about anyone could have predicted. And now they have a big test coming up with 10 games against the Twins, Indians and White Sox. We might learn more about them in these next 10 games than we did in the first 23. I’m still personally not sold on them as a playoff team, but we learn more about them every day. And maybe at the end of this stretch, I’ll have learned enough to change that opinion.