My Fangraphs Article And Royals Implications

Fangraphs published a little piece I wrote this morning.  It was of course inspired by the lack of home runs from the offense this year, and I want to talk about why in the context of the Royals the overall picture I gave for the article may be treated differently.

The home run environment is 80% of the peak that we saw in the 2000 season.  This made me wonder if it was a good thing or a bad thing for a team like the Royals who have lacked power for quite some time.  Now the answer from the article is that it doesn’t matter.  The homer to wins correlation does not seem to change based on the overall home run environment over the last 40+ years.  That means that adding power in a low power environment will not give you some sort of competitive advantage, but I am not sure that is true for the Royals right now.

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Giancarlo Stanton is the player I threw out in the article as an example of pure homer power that could be acquired, and that was not an accident.  I would be fully behind the Royals going out and acquiring him especially, or a similar home run but though they are not exactly a common commodity.  My research shows that the home runs will help you win as the correlation is positive, but that being a low power team right now is no more or less advantageous than normal so overpaying for a power boost is generally not a good idea, but for this team I would be willing to overpay for one very big reason:

NO MORE EXCUSES

Over the past couple of years I have heard Dayton Moore, Ned Yost, Jack Maloof, Pedro Grifol, Eric Hosmer, Billy Butler, and several other people in the organization talk about Kauffman Stadium not being conducive to hitting the ball out of the park.  That needs to stop and what better way to shut them up than add someone who can hit lots of home runs at The K?  You would not hear anyone saying that homers are hard to hit in Kansas City if Giancarlo’s 15 homers so far this season were on the team and he has hit 9 of them in Miami which is harder place to hit homers than KC.