2023 ZiPS Projections: Kansas City Royals

For the 18th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Kansas City Royals.

Batters

Coming into the 2021 season, there were reasons to be optimistic about the future of Kansas City’s offense, with Bobby Witt Jr., MJ Melendez, Nick Pratto, and Vinnie Pasquantino. Three of these four played well in the majors, but only one — and probably the one the Royals were themselves least high on, Pasquantino — really wowed offensively. Witt was solid, but far from amazing, and Melendez’s bat was mainly good because he plays a position that he may not be playing for very long. I guess what it comes down to is a simple question: outside of Pasquantino, who do you feel better about now than a year ago? The problem with the Royals is that I’m hard-pressed to give many names in response to that question.

KC’s minor league hitters didn’t come roaring out of the gate, which makes the challenges steeper for the next front office/manager. It’d be easy if Melendez had pushed Salvador Perez to permanent DH status or if Pratto blew everyone away at first, but neither really happened, so decisions have to be made. Except for Michael A. Taylor, the legacy veterans are pretty much gone, and while Taylor is frequently named as a possible trade candidate, if he were a car, he’s in a situation similar to that of a 1999 Ford Taurus: you’ll probably find a new home for him, but not someone who is going to offer much in return.

Can Pratto hit at the major league level? After all, he didn’t really hit at the minor league level in 2022. Can Melendez play catcher successfully? Is Witt a shortstop? The Royals have to answer these questions, and if they don’t make great strides into doing that in 2023, the season is probably a failure overall. At least they’ve moved on from Ryan O’Hearn. They’ll need to; of hitters yet to make their major league debut, ZiPS only sees Maikel Garcia as having a strong chance at a 10-WAR career.

Pitchers

Of all the pitching staffs in baseball, the Royals are surely one of them. I’m not sure I mean this as a compliment (I don’t), but when running the projections, they have the gentlest dropoff between their top five starting pitchers and their next five (or 10) starting pitchers of any team in baseball I’ve run so far. In other words, they employ Royals pitchers, but they have a generous reserve of them. The roster is so deep that ZiPS almost thinks that Jordan Lyles, the team’s biggest free-agent signing this winter, is one of the 10 best starting pitchers on the team!

ZiPS is sold on Brady Singer and precisely none of the team’s other starters with the possible exception of sorta prospect Angel Zerpa, who missed a lot of time last season with knee pain. Zack Greinke is still a candidate to return for another go, which would give the Royals another MLB-caliber starting pitcher. This is important because if teams don’t get 27 outs, the game never ends.

The bullpen is actually a more promising unit, with Scott Barlow, Dylan Coleman, Richard Lovelady, and Amir Garrett all at least comfortably above the league-average mark. The quality drops very quickly though, and the back of the bullpen puts Kansas City well down into the bottom 10 of bullpens, though the exact configuration of the relief corps is still partly unknown.

So, where do the Royals stand? Likely fighting it out at the bottom of the AL Central. This is a transitional time with a new owner who moved on from longtime executive Dayton Moore this winter. Is the new régime a continuation of the old one’s retro-mediocre management style? A placeholder for something better? A group that intends to modernize how the team is run? Nobody knows yet — another question the Royals need to answer urgently. The team’s current plan of being good a couple of times every two decades and hoping to catch lightning in a bottle in the playoffs is not my personal favorite management style.

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 or have retired, players who will miss 2023 due to injury, and players who were released in 2022. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Norwegian Death Dixieland Bubblegum Ska-Funk band, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.22, above 2022’s level of offense but lower than other years. Pitchers who appear to have a fairly definite change in the majors from start-to-relief or vice-versa from these projections will receive reconfigured updates in the spring.

Hitters are ranked by 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.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by flaws in the physical reality of the universe or by skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter.