2022 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 a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Kansas City Royals.

Batters

Let’s start with the good news first: Kansas City’s offense has several very interesting offensive players in the high minors. Then there’s the bad news: Kansas City’s offense has several very interesting offensive players in the high minors. That Bobby Witt Jr. projects well is not a surprise, but Nick Pratto, MJ Melendez, and Vinnie Pasquantino all crushed the feckless assortment of minor league pitchers they faced, and you have to feel much better about the long-term outlook of all three in the majors. How does this quartet of young players transition from terrorizing minor leaguers and start threatening major league ones? That’s a trickier question, given the contours of the roster.

One risk facing the Royals is that Witt plays third base, with Nicky Lopez remaining the shortstop. This would the same mistake that the Orioles made some years ago with Manny Machado and J.J. Hardy; for a handful of runs, the team would needlessly be lowering the ceiling on a franchise player. Baltimore had the excuse of being a good team in a tough division, in which absolutely maximizing wins had a great deal of value. Not giving Witt every opportunity to be a foundational talent at shortstop so that the Royals can be a .480 team instead of a .478 one doesn’t feel like it has the same upside. In five years, he could be their Carlos Correa. In five years, the Rockies will be paying Lopez $10 million a year to put up 1.1 WAR and block the latest iteration of Brendan Rodgers or Ryan McMahon.

Pratto may be able to push Carlos Santana off first reasonably quickly, though that’s probably due more to his contract expiring than the Royals embracing the whole “sunk cost” concept. But will they ever commit to moving Salvador Perez to full-time DH duty to make room for Melendez? Is Pasquantino simply a future starter for the Rays or Padres?

This question is crucial, because it’s those four that could possibly give the offense some actual upside in the next three or four years. If you manage to fit all of them in the lineup, if Perez continues to age well, and if you get some luck with Adalberto Mondesi’s health, all of a sudden, you have a pretty interesting core — one that’s actually enhanced by the Royals filling holes with whatever random inexpensive veterans are unemployed in March. As it is, it’s a particularly unambitious franchise that just kept running Michael A. Taylor and Hunter Dozier out there because they existed and nobody had any better ideas.

(One note: The Danny Tartabull comp for Witt might seem odd, but remember, these are offensive comps. If Tartabull could have played shortstop in the majors for real rather than theoretically, we’d likely have a very different discussion about his career.)

Pitchers

Maximizing the upside in the offense is vital, because the pitching staff doesn’t look to have that high a ceiling. The rotation looks surprisingly competent, with Brady Singer, Mike Minor, Brad Keller, and Kris Bubic all projecting as generally average starters. But there’s not really some pie-in-the-sky performance level out there for this quartet; among pitchers projected between 1.5–2.5 WAR in 2022 so far, ZiPS has them in the lowest quartile for the probability of having a four-win season. Where ZiPS does see potential is from Carlos Hernández, but it remains to be seen how aggressively Kansas City uses him in the rotation next season. Asa Lacy and Daniel Lynch both also have upside per ZiPS, though the projections don’t think that will be a 2022 thing. It would be a lot of fun to see this team invest in Carlos Rodón, a risky pitcher who has that serious short-term upside. Do I expect that to happen? I do not.

ZiPS remains decidedly meh on the team’s bullpen, with generally unenthusiastic projections once you get past the first handful of relievers. Domingo Tapia’s forecast has unusually wide error bars; despite a projected ERA+ of 90, ZiPS has him with the third-best chance of a 150 ERA+ of any reliever on the team, behind just Scott Barlow and Dylan Coleman. The explosive near-century fastball is exciting; the lapses in command and his inability to punch out batters in proportion to that explosiveness are not. ZiPS is more excited about Coleman, who also throws very hard, and while he also has lapses in command from time to time, batters incompetently swing through his stuff (his swinging-strike rate in the minors was nearly twice that of Tapia’s on the same team).

Based on the roster the Royals have now, put me in the mid-to-high 70s in wins, with a real chance of hitting .500 if they show some aggression with promotions and get a bit of luck. I don’t see them making the rest of the division uncomfortable, and I think the Tigers are more likely to annoy the White Sox in the long term. They can still prove me wrong, though.

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 2022 due to injury, and players who were released in 2021. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a big band orchestra that only plays nu-metal versions of baroque cantatas, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.36, similar to the post-June substance-enforcement environment.

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 that 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 assuming that the designated hitter will continue in force in 2022.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article, or get angry at Dan on Twitter.