At the beginning of this offseason, Dayton Moore had two goals: sign a starting pitcher and add a middle-of-the-order bat. When Kansas City pounced early in free agency and signed Mike Minor and Michael A. Taylor, the jokes were easy to make. Minor is a decent approximation of a starter, but Taylor a middle-of-the order bat? Surely there was more, right?

There’s more. Yesterday, the Royals signed Carlos Santana to a two-year, $17.5 million dollar deal, with incentives that could add $1 million to the total. Santana is now one of the top three or four hitters in a Royals lineup that feels underpowered, but less so than it did a week ago. He’ll slot in somewhere in the middle of the order (mission accomplished!) and bring his much-walking, much-taking, some-homers game to a lineup light on both (26th in walk rate in 2020, 20th in home runs).

Santana checked in at 41st on our list of the top 50 free agents this offseason. This ranking is no knock on his career production — he’s been a useful hitter for a decade now, and has become an excellent defender at first base. It’s merely the way that baseball works now; bat-first players, particularly those confined to first base, left field, or DH, are a dime a dozen these days. Add that to his age — he’ll turn 35 early in the 2021 season — and Santana looked destined for a deal of roughly this size. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, the introductory paragraph of a free agency signing piece. Normally, this is a space to let loose and spend a while thinking up a pun about the team and the player linking up. I must sadly tell you, however, that I can’t bring myself to do it. The degree of difficulty is the fun, and Mike Minor’s name is too easy, so you’ll just have to settle for the facts: the Kansas City Royals signed Minor to a two-year deal over the weekend, as Ken Rosenthal first reported.

When Minor left the Royals after a dominant 2017 season of relief work, he looked like a classic conversion arm. He’d been workmanlike over parts of five seasons with the Braves, never overwhelming but also never disastrous. After a brutal series of injuries ending in shoulder surgery, however, Atlanta cut him loose, and he landed with the Royals on a two-year deal. Kansas City turned him into a reliever, and he promptly annihilated the AL Central — his 2.55 ERA and 2.62 FIP represented a new level of performance, and he looked like a relief ace created out of whole cloth.

As he returns to Kansas City three years later, the situation feels both familiar and strange. Familiar, in that he’s spent the last three years putting in a performance that was, in aggregate, a little bit better than average. His run prevention numbers look slightly worse for having played two years in an extreme hitter’s park, but even then, a 4.07 ERA and 4.37 FIP will play, and that works out to an 85 ERA- and 95 FIP- after park adjustments. Even including a rough 2020, Minor looks like a workmanlike pitcher again.

Is he heading back to Kansas City to relieve? Almost certainly not. You see, Minor’s 2019 raises hope that there’s a little bit more there than meets the eye. He started the season strong, with a 2.54 ERA and 3.78 FIP, which led to his first All-Star nod. He faded down the stretch, though he still finished with 4.1 WAR and did even better (6.4 WAR) if you focus on runs allowed rather than FIP.

Even if you want to disregard the half-by-half split and focus on the aggregate, something stood out: Minor threw 208.1 innings, a career high. He followed that up with another 11 starts in 2020, essentially a full season of work. A starter who can put up decent rate statistics over a full workload is a valuable commodity in today’s game, particularly given the fact that essentially every pitcher in baseball will throw many more innings next year than they did this year, which likely increases the chance of injury. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Batters

The Royals are not a dreadful team. They likely won’t lose 100 games or find themselves setting any horrifying, ineptitude-based records like when the 2019 Orioles allowed 75% of the home runs hit in baseball history. But they’re a phenomenally uninspiring club and like most Royals squads since owner Ewing Kauffman passed away in 1993, one that looks forever stuck in the limbo between not really being close to contending and only half-heartedly rebuilding. The Royals briefly broke the wheel in the mid-2010s when the players acquired in return for Zack Greinke, late 2000s prospects, and a few reclamation projects all peaked simultaneously, but they never had a plan to sustain winning beyond those amazing highlights. Since the strike in 1994, the Royals have a .441 winning percentage, the worst in baseball and the third-worst since Dayton Moore replaced Allard Baird as the general manager.

As such, the Royals have several talented veterans, none of whom are remotely likely to be in Kansas City the next time the team is good. It’s not a great sign for a rebuilding club when the offensive players with the most projected WAR remaining in their careers are largely the oldest ones. Adalberto Mondesi is the exception at age-25, at the top of the team with 19.6 estimated wins remaining, followed by Whit Merrifield, Jorge Soler, Salvador Perez, and Franchy Cordero. If you’re keeping score, that’s a 32-year-old outfielder, a 31-year-old injury-prone catcher, a late-20s designated hitter, and a player who last had 200 plate appearances in a season in 2017. Bobby Witt Jr. is the only position player under 25 with a mean projection of five wins in the majors in his entire career. Only Lucius Fox and MJ Melendez even project above replacement level. Read the rest of this entry »

While scrolling The Athletic’s site recently, I came across a headline that gave me pause, citing Kansas City Royals general manager Dayton Moore saying he “expects to win” in 2021. Front office personnel in every organization do a bit of work hyping up their teams during the offseason; just a year ago, Rockies owner Dick Monfort predicted a 94-win season for a club that had won just 71 games the year before. Moore, to his credit, was much more vague when assessing the Royals. From Athletic beatwriter Alec Lewis:

“We expect to win next year. What does that look like? Is it going to be enough wins to make the playoffs? We’ll find out. But our mindset is going to be to go out and win every single pitch, every inning, every game. That’s the only way we’re ever going to win another championship.”

Moore isn’t guaranteeing a playoff spot, or even a winning record; all he vows is an intent to win games, which is a pretty easy promise to keep. Every team wins games, because the season lasts a very long time, and baseball itself is a weird sport in which a very bad team can defeat a very good team on any given day with only a couple of things breaking the right direction. Even if Moore is hedging here, though, his tone is unambiguously positive, and not even in some “trust the process” sort of way. He thinks his team has a fighting chance, just five months after drafting in the top four selections for a second year in a row.

That kind of faith inspired me to figure out for myself if Royals fans should share that optimism. I’d never previously considered Kansas City to be a threat in 2021. I still don’t, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Peek over at our current Depth Charts projections, and the Royals’ WAR total ranks 21st in baseball. That’s far above 100-loss territory, and even within spitting distance of plausible playoff territory; it’s within two and a half wins of the Phillies, Reds and Cardinals, three teams you wouldn’t be shocked to see in the postseason next year. That would also constitute a downgrade from where the Royals finished this season, when they ranked 15th in the majors in batting WAR and 19th in pitching WAR.

You may not have noticed, since they never stumbled into the playoff hunt the way other rebuilding teams like Detroit and Baltimore did, but the Royals actually improved quite a bit in 2020. They added nearly 70 points to their win percentage in one season, going from 59–103 to 26–34. Their pythagorean record was actually slightly better at 27–33. Part of the reason for that could certainly be the shortened season, but it isn’t as though limiting the previous year to 60 games would have done them any favors. Kansas City went 19–41 over its first 60 games in 2019 and 16–44 over its final 60. This was a step forward — the first big one of the rebuild.

Where did those improvements come from? The most obvious source would be the pitching staff, which featured two rookies — Brady Singer and Kris Bubic — joining the rotation full-time after never previously appearing in the majors, or even in Triple-A for that matter. Those two wound up holding their own, while staff ace Brad Keller turned in a career year.

As it stands right now, the top five names here are the likeliest to fill out the rotation in 2021, and it’s a solid enough group. Bubic was No. 110 on Eric Longenhagen’s global Top Prospect list entering this season, and Singer, the team’s first-round pick in 2018, ranked just one spot below Bubic on his Royals list. The success of those two were significant victories for the organization this year.

The lineup saw modest gains as well thanks to two veterans who weren’t around the year before. Salvador Perez was the headliner: After missing the entire 2019 season because of Tommy John surgery, he burst back into the offense by hitting .333/.353/.633 with 11 homers in 156 plate appearances, getting a bit lucky on balls in play while also hitting for more power than he ever had. Perez’s terrific season at the plate received an enthusiastic cosign from Statcast, which rated him in the 96th percentile in xwOBA despite the fact that he walked in less than 2% of his plate appearances.

Then there was third baseman Maikel Franco, who signed with the Royals after being non-tendered by Philadelphia and rewarded his new club by slashing .278/.321/.457 for a 106 wRC+ and 1.3 WAR while starting all 60 games at the hot corner. It was Franco’s best offensive season since 2015 and, despite the shortened season, his best WAR total since ’16. With Jorge Soler, Hunter Dozier and Whit Merrifield all still hitting at an above-average clip, Kansas City recovered some of the thump it had sorely missed out on in recent years; its 92 wRC+ as a team was its highest since 2015, the year it won the World Series.

To have so many things go well in 2020 — the successful return of the star catcher, the bounce-back of the change-of-scenery–free-agent signing, solid seasons from two rookie starters and the established core players meeting expectations — should certainly give a GM a jolt of energy heading into the winter. The flip side is that in spite of all that good news, the Royals still couldn’t contend, and it’s hard to see much more room for growth from the players currently on the roster.

As good of a sign as it was to see the young pitchers quickly settle into the rotation, neither Singer nor Bubic are projected to be much more than No. 3 or 4 starters, which wouldn’t be far above what they did in 2020. Meanwhile, Keller outperformed his xwOBA by more than 80 points last year according to Statcast, making him more likely to regress than to improve.

The offense doesn’t appear to be standing far below its ceiling, either. Dozier and Soler could help by returning to their 2019 numbers, but that may be offset by any regression that comes for Perez. Perhaps Adalberto Mondesi taps into the pop he showed in 2018, or one of the Irish Ryans at first base — McBroom or O’Hearn — makes some kind of jump. But a scan of this roster doesn’t really reveal any good hitters who woefully underperformed this season or some dormant former top prospect waiting to break out. The offensive performance this team showed in 2020 may be as good as this current group is going to get.

There is help coming from the minors, but it’s unlikely the impact will be felt in 2021. Wunderkind shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. is just 20 and has all of 37 rookie league games to his resume. Left-hander Asa Lacy, the No. 4 overall pick in 2020, has yet to throw a pitch in a professional game. Fellow southpaw prospect in Daniel Lynch hasn’t pitched above Advanced-A and is said to have the same limited ceiling Bubic and Singer. Asking any of these players to contribute much in 2021 would require speeding up their developmental timelines considerably.

If Kansas City wishes to take another step forward in the coming season, then, it will require moves to be made this winter. And even though no one is expecting the Royals to be one of the major players in free agency, there may be some reason for optimism that the team could be active in some meaningful way. Again from Lewis:

“There’s a fine line between aggressive and reckless, and Moore has walked it, finding comfort in the former. When the Royals signed Gil Meche in the winter of 2006, they agreed to an extra year so that they could make the acquisition. In the winter of 2013, Moore executed a similar deal in signing Omar Infante. Through experience, he understands teams must reach deep into their pocketbooks. If that time comes again, the Royals will do so again.”

There is no shortage of ways for Kansas City to improve via free agency. It could replace second baseman Nicky Lopez, who has been below replacement level in each of his first two big league seasons, on the open market with Kolten Wong or Tommy La Stella. It could add Joc Pederson or Michael Brantley to its outfield, or sign a starter like James Paxton or Mike Minor. An offseason that includes two or three of these moves wouldn’t break the bank for a team currently on track to spend just $76 million on payroll in 2021, and could add upwards of six or seven wins to the Royals’ projected WAR total, vaulting them into about the 16th-ranked spot in the majors.

Unfortunately, the front office may not see much reason to attempt that kind of run. According to our Depth Charts, Kansas City could add nine wins to its projected WAR total and still not surpass the next-closest AL team, the Red Sox. Boston is one of 10 AL teams currently expected to outperform the Royals in 2021, and that’s before those teams have added free agents and made trades. If Kansas City played in the NL Central, it might be able to spend its way to contention. But in the challenging AL Central, the obstacles are simply too great.

The Royals’ encouraging steps forward in 2020 place them closer to baseball’s middle class than you may have expected. They’re just in the wrong league to take advantage of that. To make the jump in the AL, they will need to develop this line of top draft picks — Witt Jr., Lacy, the No. 7 pick in 2021 and likely another top-10 pick in 2022 — into stars. Moore’s ambitions for ’21 are noble, but this time next year, he’ll probably be happy he didn’t make any bold predictions.

In the 1980s, the stolen base was king. Rickey Henderson and Vince Coleman were absolute terrors on the basepaths, giving pitchers no time to breathe. They each stole 100 or more bases three different times, with Henderson’s 130-steal season standing atop the single-season leaderboard, unlikely to ever be matched. They were hardly the only speedsters, either; Tim Raines stole at least 70 bases in six straight seasons, for example.

That need for speed made a delicious baserunning omelet, but it also cracked its fair share of eggs. In 1980 alone, players were caught stealing 1,602 times. That’s the cost of doing business when you’re going to steal so frequently. If you only attempt to swipe a bag in the 50 best spots to run in a given year, you’ll be successful at a higher rate than if you go 150 times.

As baseball tactics changed, the steal lost favor. First, home runs decreased the value of steals. Put one over the fence, and it doesn’t matter which base the runner was on. Second, teams started to better understand the value of avoiding outs. The exact math varies based on context, but as a rule of thumb, you need to steal three bases for every time you’re caught to provide neutral value. Succeed less than 75% of the time, and you’re costing your team runs in expectation.

These two effects led to a predictable change in behavior. Stolen bases have been in steady decline, while success rate on the attempts that remain heads inexorably higher. In 1980, the average game featured roughly 1.5 steals, and the league-wide stolen base success rate was 67%. In 2020, there was less than one steal per game for the second straight season:

On the other hand, the success rate crested 75% for the first time:

Is this a good development? It all depends on your point of view. Steals are exciting, whether they’re successful or not; they punctuate the stilted and ponderous pace of the game with a jolt of pure adrenaline. On the other hand, there’s nothing more frustrating than seeing your team run themselves out of an inning or seeing a baserunner caught directly before a home run.
Read the rest of this entry »

Brad Keller had a boffo season for the Kansas City Royals, and his slider was a big reason why. Buoyed largely by its improvement, the 25-year-old right-hander logged a 2.47 ERA and a 3.43 FIP over nine starts covering 54-and-two-thirds innings. Five times, Keller worked five or more scoreless frames, a complete-game shutout in mid-September serving as his shining-star effort.

Helped by pitching coach Cal Eldred, he jumpstarted his career by developing more depth during his pandemic-forced downtime.

“We made some adjustments during the shutdown,” Keller told me following the completion of the season. “Between spring training and spring training 2.0 we made some mechanical adjustments that allowed my arm to become more athletic, if that makes sense. That’s kind of a weird way to put it, but whenever I would throw my slider in the past, I’d almost block my arm out. We were like, ‘OK, we don’t do that on a fastball, we don’t do that on anything else, so let’s do that same thing on the slider.” Basically, I needed to start throwing my slider just like I throw my fastball.”

The adjustment took time to bear fruit. Initially, the pitch wasn’t breaking at all. As Keller put it, “the very first one almost took the catcher’s head off,” as it was devoid of downward movement. Diligence, accompanied by a Rapsodo and an Edgertronic, eventually did the trick. Once mundane, his slider morphed into a monster.

“With the help of analytics, it became like my fastball for a longer time toward the plate,” explained Keller. “The spin went up. It became sharper, and as a result I started getting some silly swings-and-misses on it.” Read the rest of this entry »

You know roughly what a good batter’s stat line looks like. Here’s Juan Soto’s league-leading 2020, for example: .352/.486/.703 with 20.2% walks and 14.8% strikeouts. In 2019, Mike Trout hit .291/.438/.645 with 18.3% walks and 20% strikeouts. These make sense as “good” in my head, even if I can’t calculate how many runs they were worth without looking it up. Salvador Perez has a 177 wRC+ in 140 plate appearances this year, one of the hottest streaks of his career, and he’s batting an unrecognizable .356/.371/.667. Huh?

Oh yeah — Perez is also walking 2.1% of the time this year while striking out in 20% of his trips to the plate. He has 10 homers and three (3) walks. He’s swinging at pitches outside of the strike zone 46% of the time, the fourth-highest rate in the majors. This is the plate discipline you’d expect from a light-hitting catcher, not from a guy who would have the third-highest wRC+ in baseball this year if he had enough playing time to qualify. We’re going to need an explanation here.

One look at Perez’s Swing/Take profile (courtesy of Baseball Savant) will get your regression senses tingling:

Perez swings at 70 percent of the pitches he sees in the shadow zone, the edges of the plate and the area just outside. Only five batters in the league have swung at more at pitches in that zone. He swings at 21% of pitches in the waste zone, the highest rate in baseball (league average is 5.5%). There are certainly productive hitters who swing a lot, but they usually do it by piling up value in the heart of the plate and living with the downsides. Perez creates more runs by swinging at borderline strikes and balls than he does by swinging at pitches down the pipe.
Read the rest of this entry »

Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I’ve been spending most of my time watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. From a workflow standpoint, it makes sense for me to prioritize and complete my evaluations of these prospects before my time is divided between theoretical fall instructional ball on the pro side and college fall practices and scrimmages, which will have outsized importance this year due to the lack of both meaningful 2020 college stats and summer wood bat league looks because of COVID-19.

I started with the National League East, then completed my look at the American League West. Below is my assessment of the AL Central, covering players who have appeared in big league games. The results of the changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on The Board, though I try to provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team.

Chicago White Sox

Jonathan Stiever’s promotion was instructive because we got to see his velocity coming off of the forearm soreness that ended his spring. He sat 91-94, which is a little below his peak 2019 breakout when he would touch 6’s and 7’s. His changeup looked good, though, and it was a stabilizing force during a jittery first start. He’ll need to locate his slider more consistently for it to be effective, and the same goes for his heater if it’s going to live around 93. Stiever also incorporated his secondary stuff more often in his second outing — that’s probably the long-term strategy if this is where his fastball velocity is going to live.

You’re probably aware that Garrett Crochet made his major league debut over the weekend, becoming the first 2020 draftee to reach the majors and the first since Mike Leake to skip the minors entirely. He made just one pre-draft start this spring sandwiched between a February injury and March’s shutdown, so he was barely seen by teams this year, if at all, which is why some clubs were hesitant to draft him early in the first round. I’ve updated The Board to include his pitch data now that I have it, but neither his Future Value nor ranking has changed yet (45 FV is a late-inning reliever). He currently has the hardest fastball in baseball, and Crochet joins Zack Burdi and Codi Heuer as White Sox rookie relievers who have among the top 20 fastest heaters in the game. He’s yet another weapon in a bullpen that I consider dangerous enough to carry the Pale Hose deep into October. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Diego Padres came into 2020 with one of the best late-inning setups in baseball. Their plan was simple: offseason acquisitions Drew Pomeranz and Emilio Pagán would handle high-leverage situations in the middle innings before passing the baton to Kirby Yates, one of the most dominant relievers in the game. That plan hasn’t worked out this year, largely because Yates will miss the rest of the season after surgery to remove bone chips from his elbow. On Saturday, however, they made a move to replenish their planned area of strength, acquiring Trevor Rosenthal in a trade with the Royals.

Nationals fans might wonder whether acquiring Rosenthal is supposed to be a good thing. He was, no doubt, abysmal for them last year — he racked up a 34.9% walk rate over 12 games before getting the heave-ho. A slightly longer stint with the Tigers ended the same way — striking out 28.6% of the batters you face is good, but not when you’re walking 26.8% of them as well. The Royals signed him as a reclamation project, nothing more — a minor league deal that could escalate to as much as $4.25 million based on incentive bonuses.

Consider him reclaimed. In 13.2 innings this year, he’s been effective, striking out 37.5% of his opponents en route to a 3.29 ERA that, while still short of his peak, represents a huge improvement from last year’s disaster. It’s not all daisies and lollipops, even at surface level — he’s walked 12.5% of opposing batters and given up two home runs. Mid-three ERA relievers don’t grow on trees, though, and San Diego was intent on getting one.

In acquiring Rosenthal, the Padres are making a bet that they can fix him, because despite his acceptable results this year, there are worrisome underlying signs. As Johnny Asel pointed out, Rosenthal might resemble his St. Louis form superficially, but the way he’s doing it has changed completely. He’s flooding the center of the strike zone and daring batters to hit it, which explains the better walk rate but also the hard contact.

At his peak, Rosenthal was that most cherished baseball stereotype: effectively wild. He lived on the edges of the strike zone and just outside it. That ballooned his walk rate, but it also suppressed home runs; squaring up Rosenthal’s explosive fastball and where’d-it-go changeup was simply beyond most batters when he didn’t leave them hanging over the plate.

To wit, when batters swing at pitches he leaves over the heart of the plate, per Baseball Savant’s definitions, they’ve hit nine home runs in 774 swings. When they swing at pitches on the edges of the plate, they’ve hit two in 816 swings. That’s not wildly different from how major league pitchers work in general — Rosenthal suppresses home runs in a similar ratio in both places — but for a pitcher who will always allow some traffic on the bases due to his walk rate, home runs are an anathema. Read the rest of this entry »

Because they have had so many pitcher injuries, it was a bit of a surprise to see the Rays make a trade for an outfielder, let alone one who hasn’t been able to crack the starting lineup on a last place Royals team. But today, the Royals sent Brett Phillips to the Rays for prospect Lucius Fox.

It’s hard to say what Phillips will bring because he hasn’t been given much of a chance to do anything in Kansas City. Only twice this month has he gotten more than two plate appearances in a game, leaving us with an insufficient 2020 sample to evaluate him. He has historically struggled to make consistent contact in games but plays the outfield well and has elite arm strength. He appears to have slightly altered his swing this year, changing where his hands begin and how early his leg kick starts, but because he has barely played I don’t know if this has made a difference on the contact end of things. I still have him as a fifth outfielder type.

Phillips is not an easy roster fit for Tampa Bay. He is on the 40-man, so this move does not help to clear the small 40-man crunch the Rays will deal with as the Rule 5 roster deadline approaches, and Phillips has no options left. He’ll be on an active roster with several other outfielders who run well and have big arms, Phillips’ two most notable traits. Read the rest of this entry »