Royals Monday Notes – A Gore-y Weekend

The Royals Got Bored With Pitching To Contact

Dayton Moore and Ned Yost‘s model for success looks more like that of a good high school team than a Major League Baseball team.

Offensively, they bunt, steal bases, and don’t strike out.

Defensively, they are as good as any team in baseball history. Naturally, the pitching rotation pitched to contact, only striking out more batters than five teams in baseball. Only two American League teams struck out fewer batters than the Royals in 2015.

However, in 2016, the Royals rotation is off to a much faster start in missing bats. Thus far, Royals starters have struck out 32 batters in just 28.1 innings.

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If you include the bullpen, only four teams entered today’s action with a higher K/9 than the Royals staff (10.25).

We knew that the bullpen missed bats, but we didn’t see that from the rotation. Will it continue? Who knows. But it’s pretty reasonable to believe that they will at least improve on last season.

Yordano was already a strikeout machine when compared to the rest of the 2015 staff, Edinson Volquez has apparently found his peak-stuff in 2016 at the ripe age of 32, and Ian Kennedy‘s calling card for his career has been his ability to strike hitters out.

All the rotation has to do to keep the Royals in games is to keep the ball in the ballpark. If they’re also striking out hitters, they might be pretty scary.

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