Stats and the 2017 Kansas City Royals: The Not-Good

O-Swing Percentage

At present, the Kansas City Royals offer at 34.1 percent of pitches outside the zone.

If you think that is a high number, you are correct sir/madam!

This decade, only the 2014 Colorado Rockies—who went a sterling 66-96, it should be noted—have had a higher mark.

On the home front, myriad Kansas City Royals are swinging outside the zone at an alarming rate. Of the regulars, seven are above 30 percent O-Swing percentage.

For some perspective, the Philadelphia Phillies are an objectively terrible ballclub at the moment and they have a 30.0 percent O-Swing percentage as a team. The Phillies! Who regularly, and intentionally, give Freddy Galvis at-bats!

Some of the numbers are truly alarming. Alcides Escobar and Brandon Moss, hey, nobody is surprised nor particularly cares; they’re bad at the part of the game where you dig in the box and try to hit the ball. Whit Merrifield’s 33.6 percent O-Swing mark is a little high for a leadoff hitter, but what’re you gonna do?

But Mike Moustakas (42.2 percent)? Salvador Perez (45.8 percent)? Not only are those horrendous numbers, they make Mouse and Salvy the only teammates in the league’s top-10 in O-Swing percentage among players with at least 100 at-bats. And both those guys have a chance to set the franchise single-season home run record.

I can’t yet decide if I’m excited that Alex Gordon’s 25.2 percent O-Swing rate is both lowest on the club and an indication that he hasn’t lost that excellent batting eye, or disappointed that he’s being patient, working the zone and getting good swings and still can’t sniff .200.

Swing Percentage

Being from the Deep South, I have a ton of folksy colloquialisms at my disposal, and with this stat I’m honored to share one with you:

Two farmers are standing near a fencepost, talking. One looks at the sky and says to the other, “Do you think it’s gonna rain today?”

“It’s 50-50,” the second farmer replies.

That causes the first farmer to look back at the sky. He’d asked the question as a polite nothing, the sort of question southerners ask because we ask them—“How’s your mama? Y’all gonna be at church on Sunday? Think it’ll rain?”—and seldom expect a response beyond “Fine. Of course. It might.” There were no clouds in the sky. It hadn’t rained in days.

“What makes you say that?” the first farmer pressed.

“Because it’s always 50-50,” the second replied. “It either will rain or it won’t.”

It’s meant to be the sort of thing we hillbillies say, either in the manner of cornpone wisdom or to poke fun at the idea of predicting anything. But it makes a ton of sense regarding these Kansas City Royals. That’s because these Royals have a dubious distinction—at 51.0 percent swing rate, the Royals would be the ONLY TEAM SINCE 2002 TO SWING AT MORE THAN 50 PERCENT OF PITCHES SEEN.

Watching the game, it doesn’t seem like the Royals take more hacks than your average team. Sure, they swing a little more than some of their contemporaries, but as baseball continues to trend toward a “Three True Outcomes” model, teams will naturally begin to be more aggressive.

Since FanGraphs doesn’t keep track of this beyond 2002, I am sort of hamstrung on what I can research. If you know where I can search pre-2002 stats, let me know, but I think that’s burying the lede a little bit. The Royals swing half the time. Incredible.

Walk Percentage

You, home reader, are probably pretty smart. So you can probably see this logic.

Royals swing at lots of pitches out of the zone + Royals swing at a lot of pitches in general = Royals unlikely to walk very often.

And yet, the Kansas City Royals have somehow raised the inability to work a walk to something of an art form.

That the Royals 6.6 percent walk rate is baseball’s lowest is no surprise—nothing I tell you about some of their plate patience issues should come as a surprise by now. But what might be a little surprising is that this is a long gestating issue for the franchise.

Since 2001, 21 teams have had a season with a walk rate of 6.6 percent or less. The Royals are responsible for a full third of those. The damage:

• 2015 – 6.3 percent
• 2014 – 6.3 percent
• 2016 – 6.3 percent
• 2008 – 6.4 percent
• 2012 – 6.6 percent
• 2001 – 6.6 percent
• 2017 – 6.6 percent

Somehow, some way, the Kansas City Royals have created a culture where free-swinging and refusing to walk—in an era where we thought everyone had learned to appreciate that getting on base was more important than how it happened—is an institutional imperative. Amazing.

Fastball velo

Here’s a spot where losing some of the hard-throwing bullpen guys (and our late, lamented #ACE30) really stings. As a staff, the pitchers don’t throw hard.

Well, that’s not quite accurate. I’m sure the pitcher’s are throwing hard and trying their best, but they have no velocity. Thus, the average 92.5 MPH fastball velocity, second from the bottom in baseball behind the Twins.

The addition of Neftali Feliz, who still flings it in the upper-90s even at this late hour in his career, will help. And Kelvin Herrera can still touch triple digits. But the erstwhile No. 1 (until Danny Duffy returns) is averaging 86.9 MPH; this isn’t a knock on Jason Vargas, but it is indicative of the razor’s edge he walks on.

All told, six hurlers who have combined to toss more than 330 innings have struggled to break a 93 MPH average—Vargas, Travis Wood, Peter Moylan, Jake Junis, Jason Hammel and Ian Kennedy. That doesn’t include the departed Chris Young, who managed to throw 30 major league innings in 2017 with two pitches, one a fastball that barely cracked 88 on a good day. Tough to imagine we’ll see that many more times.

Next: Royals drop series in the Motor City

Anyway, that’s what I found. If you have some other stats I couldn’t discover, send them my way. We’ll run back the other side of this coin next week.