Royals' worst position in 2026 has been a glaring problem for an entire decade

Every team in baseball has a bad year at designated hitter every once in a while. The Kansas City Royals though, have had a bad decade. Since 2017, Kansas City ranks 27th in the majors in DH production, and it only gets worse from there: the Royals are currently posting the worst OPS and worst wRC+ at the position in all of baseball in 2026, a season that is, by the numbers, the single worst DH campaign the organization has produced in the last ten years. The trend line points clearly toward the worst DH season in franchise history, after 2025 came questionably close to that same low-water mark.

This is not a story about one bad year. It is a story about a position the Royals solved exactly once in the last decade, for exactly one season, and have failed to solve in every other year around it. Whether driven by an overall lack of spending or development, the bat-forward spot in the lineup has been anything but for Kansas City.

Since the AL adopted the designated hitter back in 1973, the Royals are mired in the longest run in franchise history without average DH production, after the position was a staple of the franchise's early identity. What Kansas City is getting from the DH spot now is a polar opposite of what it saw in the early 80s.

Look at that table and one season jumps off the page in the opposite direction of every other row. Everything else clusters in a narrow, ugly band. The gap between 2019 and literally every other year in the sample is the story of this position for the Royals. There was Soler. And then there was everyone else.

Royals had the DH spot figured out once upon a time this decade

Outfielder Jorge Soler's 2019 season remains one of the most complete offensive campaigns any Royal has produced at any position in the last decade, let alone at designated hitter. He hit 48 home runs, shattering the previous single-season franchise record of 38 set by Mike Moustakas just two years earlier, and led all of Major League Baseball outright. He drove in 117 runs, seventh-most in the league, and became the first Royals player in history to lead the majors in home runs.

The season was not a smooth line. Through June 1, Soler was working with a .290 on-base percentage and a below-average wRC+ near 98, striking out at a 30.3% clip. His breaking point came on April 21 against the Yankees, when he struck out in all five plate appearances, the dreaded platinum sombrero, in a game that had fans openly wondering whether the Royals had lost the Wade Davis trade that brought him to Kansas City in the first place.

From July 1 forward, something clicked. He hit .301/.409/.649 over the final three months, a 170 wRC+ that made him the sixth-best hitter in baseball over that stretch, and finished the year slashing .265/.354/.569 with a 136 wRC+ overall.

That 2019 season stands as the high-water mark against which every other year on this list gets measured, and every other year comes up emphatically short.

But Kansas City's DH woes have been the rule rather than the odd exception.

Strip away 2019 and the picture is remarkably consistent in its misery. Every remaining season since Kendrys Morales last suited up for Kansas City produced an OPS between .565 and .744, a batting average that never once cracked .260, and home run totals that trended steadily downward as the decade wore on. The 2021 season, at .744 OPS, is the second-best year in the sample, and even that fell 21 points shy of a league-average sOPS+ mark of 100. Kansas City's designated hitters have been below league average at the position in nine of the last ten seasons.

The home run totals tell their own version of the decline. Kansas City DHs hit 29 or more in three of the first four years of this sample. Since 2022, that number has never reached 22. The position has quietly lost its power dimension at the same time it lost its on-base ability, leaving Kansas City with a spot in the batting order that has been simultaneously punchless and unproductive for the better part of seven years running.

2026 is the new low water mark for Royals at DH thanks to Salvador Perez

This year's collapse has a specific, identifiable cause, and it is a name most Royals fans know intimately. Catcher Salvador Perez has taken on a significantly larger share of designated hitter duties in 2026 as his body and his bat have both shown real signs of decline.

By August 23, he had already logged 58 games at DH, blowing past his career high of 40 set in both 2021 and 2022. This is part of an organizational effort to manage his workload behind the plate as rookie catcher Carter Jensen has emerged as a legitimate everyday option, while still trying to extract something from the franchise icon's bat.

The results have been rough. Perez entered a stretch this season slashing .195/.232/.328 with a wRC+ that ranked dead last among Royals hitters, 15 points below the next-worst regular. His expected batting average and expected wOBA, both comfortably above the 80th percentile as recently as last year, fell to around the 20th percentile in 2026. This is not a platoon or matchup issue, but a future Hall of Famer in unavoidable decline, absorbing a growing share of at-bats at the one position specifically designed to extend a bat's usefulness once the legs and the knees start to go.

The uncomfortable truth is that 2026 is not really a departure from the pattern established since 2019. It is the logical endpoint of it. The Royals have spent six years cycling through stopgaps, converted corner outfielders, aging veterans getting half-days off their gloves, and part-time solutions at a position that, in a properly built lineup, should be a source of offense rather than a hole to be managed around. Perez in 2026 is simply the most recent, and most visible, version of a problem that has never actually gone away since Soler left for Atlanta.

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