2020 ZiPS Projections: Kansas City Royals

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Kansas City Royals.

Batters

The Kansas City Royals are in the middle of one of the weirdest rebuilds I can remember. Rather than go the full teardown route or spend money aggressively to maintain a competitive team, they found a Third Way. This Third Way, unfortunately, doesn’t consist of either spending money, winning, getting younger, or developing a good farm system. It’s different, I’ll give them that.

The Royals have several players of value in the starting lineup, though it’s mostly of the short-term variety. Whit Merrifield’s as solid a player as there is on the team, but moving him to center field to solve a positional crunch that just doesn’t exist — Nicky Lopez can just as easily play third, and Maikel Franco isn’t particularly interesting at this point — strikes me as too cute by half. The Royals using left field as the Official Alex Gordon Left Field Emeritus Position is less concerning; while it prevents the Royals from getting a full look at Brett Phillips or Bubba Starling, and Gordon is unlikely to be a contributor, I see little reason to hope Phillips or Starling will ever be either.

An optimist would say that moving Merrifield to the outfield for Nicky Lopez is a better idea than moving Merrifield to the outfield for Chris Owings. That’s progress, I guess.

Jorge Soler will be just fine as the designated hitter and ZiPS thinks Salvador Perez won’t miss a beat, returning to his usual combination of good defense, good power, and the plate discipline of me finding an all-you-can-eat tacos offer. Adalberto Mondesi is the one performer in the lineup who is both very good and still in his prime years. Hopefully, the Royals ink him to a long-term contract given that he may be the only player in the lineup with real value in five years.

Pitchers

The top of the rotation is one of the roster spots that will keep the Royals as a 90-loss team instead of one challenging the Tigers or the Orioles. ZiPS is downright optimistic about Brad Keller long-term, seeing him carving out a long career as a No. 2 or 3 starter. Jakob Junis is a better pitcher than his 2019 performance, though we’re still likely talking about a serviceable pitcher who throws 170 innings or so of boringly effective innings. Danny Duffy ought to be adequate, but I’ve grown just as pessimistic as ZiPS has about him getting to where he was a few years ago; while he never relied on a big fastball to punch out batters, he’s lost a couple ticks on his heater, and that’s been just enough to make his secondary pitches all look less effective.

ZiPS is much less excited about the bullpen. The computer sees some regression from Ian Kennedy, who the Royals dangled a bit at the trade deadline last year. The Royals reportedly did not want to eat any of the Kennedy or Duffy contracts and shockingly did not find a suitor willing to bowl them over for either.

After Ian Kennedy, Scott Barlow, and Tim Hill, the quality of the relievers drops off rather precipitously. ZiPS still likes Richard Lovelady, but the Royals seemed only grudgingly willing to try him last year and I’m skeptical that this is an organization that will look kindly on his FIP (4.16) rather than disapprovingly at his ERA (7.65). Lovelady may surface with another organization at some point.

Prospects

In the 2019 update, my colleagues Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel ranked the Royals’ farm system as 26th in baseball. Kansas City’s 2020 rank is not out yet, but if ZiPS is any indication, that number’s not likely to change all that much. And remember, the 2019 update did include Bobby Witt Jr., so the first rounder’s presence won’t be enough to singlehandedly save the farm.

Witt’s a bit too early in his pro career for ZiPS to really have a feel for; a computer projection system’s many wonderful uses does not include projecting players with 37 professional games after being drafted out of high school. Given his age and position, Witt did enough to fit at the end of the upcoming ZiPS Top 100 Prospects, but that ranking probably won’t be particularly meaningful until we have more data. Similarly, ZiPS doesn’t yet have a feel for Kris Bubic, though naturally, Bubic isn’t anywhere near Witt’s equal as a prospect.

Who ZiPS does like, even if the error bars are huge, is Brady Singer, who convincingly passed the Double-A test in his first go-around. The computer has him in the same tier as Touki Toussaint, Justus Sheffield, and Spencer Howard in terms of his future production. Jackson Kowar’s long-term projections also see him as a viable fourth or fifth starter.

The Royals are light when it comes to that fun category of Random Relief Pitchers Who Might Be Useful When the Rays Sign Them, but they do boast Tyler Zuber as a solid entrant. Zuber doubled his swinging strike rate in his second stint at High-A, going from 8% to 17% and earning a promotion to Double-A Northwest Arkansas, where he remained effective. And unlike a lot of minor league relievers of this type, Zuber can comfortably hit the mid-90s and doesn’t suffer any serious command issues.

One pedantic note for 2020: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth charts playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned, players who will miss 2020 due to injury, and players who were released in 2019. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in June to form a ska-cowpunk Luxembourgian bubblegum pop-death metal band, he’s still listed here intentionally.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR — which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article.