3 Royals narratives that Baseball Savant's new comparison tool puts in sharper focus

The Kansas City Royals have started the second half with some exciting baseball, thanks to their own talent and some blunders, but exciting nonetheless. That is all some fans will ask for in a lost season where the only exciting dates on the horizon are the trade deadline and who may get the call once rosters expand in September. This is a campaign where Royals fans look for the bright moments, because they are few and far between.

One tool that may help identify those bright spots is Baseball Savant. The advanced analytics page has gone from a niche resource to an MLB mainstay, informing fans and sometimes players themselves of what is going right, wrong, and everything in between. Last season, metrics like exit velocity, barrels, and hard-hit rate helped fuel optimism for rookie Jac Caglianone, all available on his Baseball Savant landing page. After all, it is one of the few places where red means good and blue means bad.

The website is constantly launching new tools to help explore baseball's measurements, but their latest addition helps with framing. Their comparison tool is mightily handy for comparing players to one another across multiple seasons, framing the Rookie of the Year races, or simply seeing how things have changed or stayed the same for a given player across consecutive seasons. It is a niche tool that will save many baseball die-hards tab space in their web browser, but it can certainly add perspective to many player-centric questions.

The Royals are no exception. Once I started playing around with the tool, several questions came to mind. How does Tyler Tolbert look as a pitcher? What changed for Lucas Erceg? How good is Carter Jensen compared to other AL rookies? All that and more, but let's explore those at another date. For now, these are three narratives that Baseball Savant's comparison tool provides much more context to in 2026.

Jac Caglianone's process didn't improve, but the results are undeniable

The aforementioned Caglianone had a debut season to forget, and the optimistic fans have largely forgotten it thanks to his 2026 turnaround. He currently leads the Royals lineup with 16 home runs, 11 of which have come since June 1. He also became the third Royals batter to carry a hitting streak of 10 games or longer, joining Jensen and shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. The power has started showing over the past two months, and his hard contact is turning into more bases despite a weakened process according to Baseball Savant.

What does a weakened process look like? It still looks like the player Kansas City knew Caglianone was going to be early in his career when they drafted him more than two years ago: plenty of power, above-average strikeouts, and plenty of swing and miss. All of that has rung true as Caglianone has settled into more of an everyday role, even though his expected output was solid in 2025 but he was plenty unlucky thanks to putting the ball on the ground.

Need a snippet of that perceived luck? Caglianone's .172 BABIP in 2025 was among the league's worst. Meanwhile, his .329 BABIP in 2026 far outpaces the league average of .289, which is the lowest in an MLB season since 1992. But that is partially due to Caglianone hitting the ball as hard as he does, as the league average on hard-hit balls this season is .416, the second-lowest of the Statcast era.

Still, even the most optimistic Royals fan likely could not have predicted a double-digit jump in his hard-hit rate. Caglianone's 42.4% rate in 2025 was respectable for his experience and potential, but his 55.2% rate in 2026 puts him among the league's elite in the 98th percentile. That is what happens when Caglianone swings the stick as hard as anyone in MLB.

There is still plenty to dream on with Caglianone, but watching how his results hold steady or falter to close out 2026 should be the key focus. For now, Royals fans who trusted Jac in 2025 should know their trust was well placed, and the balls are falling more in his favor this season.

Salvador Perez is overmatched at the plate in 2026

Any Royals fan does not need to be reminded of how rough catcher Salvador Perez has looked at the plate this season. As terrible as the Venezuelan's start to the year was, his 19 wRC+ in June really cemented that this was not just another slow start from Perez. This is the new norm. Baseball Savant's landing page for Perez shows how poor his 2026 metrics are, but also just how sudden the fall has been.

Over 2024 and 2025, one of the bright spots for Perez was that his batted ball numbers painted a much better hitter than his results suggested, but a lack of speed getting from first to home and a tendency to put the ball on the ground hampered his output. Despite slamming 30 home runs and notching 100 RBI in 2025, Perez's 95 wRC+ placed him as a below-average hitter and gave him one of the league's largest differences between his .357 xwOBA and real-world .311 wOBA. That chasm between the expected and actual output still exists in 2026, but even if Perez were living up to his expected numbers, things would look pretty dire.

His .293 xwOBA this season places among the league's worst, and his .268 wOBA ranks third-worst among qualified MLB batters in 2026. Royals fans already know this pain, but few players are feeling the effects of Father Time as harshly as Perez. He should still be in the lineup plenty until he eclipses Hall of Famer George Brett for the franchise home run record, but this is what happens when a free swinger loses that bat speed and the ability for his extra-base hits to overshadow the double plays or soft flies to center.

Baseball Savant also provides a stark reminder of one Perez tendency that Royals fans love or hate to remember: his penchant for chasing pitches out of the zone. Perez's 45.4% chase rate in 2026 is the latest in a 10-season run of chase rates exceeding 42%, while the average batter chases 28.6% of pitches. The process did not stop his record-setting ways in 2021, when he carried a 44.8% chase rate, but Perez is simply not able to do the same damage to his preferred pitches anymore.

Michael Wacha is a step behind AL's other workhorse starters

Starting pitcher Michael Wacha is Kansas City's most valuable trade chip at the coming deadline, or at least the most impactful possible move this summer. The Royals seem more open to selling ahead of August's trade deadline, and moving on from Wacha will show just how aggressive general manager J.J. Picollo is willing to be on that front. Wacha earned All-Star honors this season after a strong start and has continued to be the steady presence for the Royals he has been over recent years. But Baseball Savant shows that Wacha still does not blow batters away, and what he does well, he does a step behind the other AL workhorse pitchers.

What do these three pitchers have in common? Ahead of July 21, all three were the only AL pitchers with 120.0 innings pitched or greater. New York Yankees pitcher Cam Schlittler has turned from a postseason darling into a legitimate powerhouse in 2026, while Seattle Mariners starter Logan Gilbert is rebounding from a down (for him) 2025 season with more stellar stuff. Meanwhile, Wacha has been Old Man River for the Royals: dependable, healthy, keeping the team in more games than he lets slip away.

To be clear, that is valuable. No Royals fan would say this rotation is worse for having Wacha in it. Rather, Baseball Savant paints a picture of a pitcher much more reliant on soft contact and his fielders than his peers to get his outs. Nothing wrong with that. But calling Wacha elite in 2026 seems farfetched.

Wacha's changeup was one of the key traits Kansas City looked at before acquiring him ahead of the 2024 season, and that cambio has not waned. The former St. Louis Cardinal sports a 1.77 PLA on Pitcher List, the best mark for any MLB starter this season and only further context to an elite offering. It is tough to imagine what Wacha would look like without that pitch performing so well, but Kansas City has not had to experience that yet. Hopefully, like Schlittler and Gilbert, Wacha is in position this time next month to be pitching in the postseason once again.

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