What's Repeatable from 2024 for the Royals? And What's Not?
The Royals improved by 30 games from 2023 to 2024. How much of that can be sustained?
When a team makes a jump like the Royals did from 2023 to 2024, there are usually only a couple of possible reasons why. They either added a bunch of new players to replace a bunch of bad players, they had young players who made big jumps from one season to the next or they had a lot of luck. On the third, it could be that they go from a lot of bad luck the year before to good luck or even neutral luck, but luck is a part of it. Honestly, it’s usually a combination of all three of those. But, generally, you’re not finding a team winning even 15 more games than the year before without at least one of those three things happening.
It was the first two for the 2024 Royals, and I think there was some luck on the health front at the very least. Today I want to look at some of the things that went right and some of the things that went wrong and determine what is repeatable from those. That doesn’t mean that if something is repeatable that it’s definitely going to be repeated, and it doesn’t mean that if something doesn’t seem repeatable that it won’t be. Nothing is 100 percent. But there are some things that even Buddy Bell would agree that at least they shouldn’t get worse and some things that even the biggest pessimist would agree should get better.
Let’s start with the repeatable.
Bobby Witt Jr. is a Top-Five Player in Baseball
In 2023, Witt hit .276/.319/.495, which was good for a 114 wRC+ and was he was a 5.8 fWAR player. So it’s easy to look at his jump to .332/.389/.588 with a 168 wRC+ and 10.4 fWAR and say that there’s some career-year fluke stuff to that. And, yes, there might be. His BABIP was .354, though I think the fact that it was .295 for his career heading into 2024 was weirder than a fast player getting more hits on balls in play than you’d expect. But two things about his offensive numbers stand out to me. The first is that his expected stats tell the story of a player who wasn’t over his head by much, if at all.