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

There are several great reasons the Kansas City Royals have been able to get back into the thick of the AL Central race after an abysmal start to the 2017 campaign.

There are also some pretty good ones about why those same Royals were divisional bottomfeeders for large swaths of April and May and why they may not be in such great shape going forward.

Baseball is a funny old game that way. Things don’t always make sense. Numbers don’t always add up. WAR is a fine statistic that gives an overall understanding of who is “good” but Mike Trout still hasn’t made his first plate appearance in the postseason, either.

As my wickedly funny friend Josh Brown (@santoniobrown on the Twitter if you’re a fan of baseball and common sense) likes to say, “Hits don’t matter. RBI don’t matter. Wins don’t matter. All that matters is how good a spreadsheet says you ought to be.”

I’m paraphrasing Josh, who would be appalled if he found out, but you get the idea. Generally speaking, an overview of the stats isn’t giving you the whole story.

Fortunately for you, the home consumer of internet and internet-related baseball articles, I am here. I will be your guide. And we will come to understand the bad (that’s today) and the good (that’s sometime in the future when I get back around to it. Probably next week.)

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.