Kansas City’s Outfield Is a Missed Opportunity

By all reasonable accounts, the 2024 Kansas City Royals had a successful season. Fortune usually frowns upon a 100-loss team that makes a bunch of low-key free agent signings, but that was not the case for the Royals. The veterans starters they added, Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha, joined Cole Ragans to make up one of the best top-of-the-rotation trios in the majors, and Bobby Witt Jr. ascended from promising young star to MVP candidate. They made some smart deadline moves to bolster their bullpen, and they benefitted from some pleasant surprises along the way. Thanks to all of these things, the Royals won 30 more games in 2024 than they did the year before, and as a result, they made the playoffs for the first time since they won the 2015 World Series. While there was no improbable dash to the World Series this time, the Royals did at least eliminate the Baltimore Orioles, and although they fell to the Yankees in the ALDS, all four games were close. Moral victories may not count for much in professional sports, but Kansas City fans ought to be delighted with what this team accomplished last season.

However, successful doesn’t mean perfect, and the Royals did have some significant flaws. The most glaring one was a team offense that was full of holes. The Royals scored enough runs to support their excellent pitching, enough to rank a healthy sixth in the American League in runs per game (4.54), but it was an extremely unbalanced effort. Witt carried more than his fair share of the overall load, with his 10.4 WAR accounting for more than half of the total 20 WAR Kansas City got from its position players. From three of the four most offense-heavy positions, first base, the outfield corners, and designated hitter, the Royals received an embarrassing lack of production. First base was fine, if unspectacular, manned by Vinnie Pasquantino and Salvador Perez, but the outfield corners combined for an OPS south of .650 and a brutal -2.5 WAR, and Kansas City DHs combined for a 77 wRC+, the fourth-worst production in the majors from that position. With Witt’s season and a bare level of competence from these three positions, Kansas City’s offense should’ve been one of the top three or four in the AL. Instead, what the Royals got from the two corner outfield spots and DH was — and I’ll put it generously — below a bare level of competence.

If the Royals had received even just 1 WAR at each of the three positions, they would have netted 5.5 more WAR that what they actually got. Putting that into context, more than half of Witt’s value last season went toward offsetting the production the Royals didn’t get from these three positions.

The Royals did very little this offseason to address these deficiencies. Their trade for Jonathan India was a good idea, but it’s insufficient on its own. India has played only second base in the majors and has never played the outfield as a professional. Right now, RosterResource projects him to be Kansas City’s everyday DH, but he is expected to get reps in left field during spring training, as well as at second and third base. If India plays the keystone, incumbent second baseman Michael Massey would likely move to a corner outfield spot; neither player projects all that well as a corner outfielder. Wherever India plays, he can address only one of the three woeful positions on the roster.

The Royals may not be looking at ZiPS, but surely it isn’t controversial to suggest that a team with wins in the 80s and major weak spots should be active in free agency. Instead, they haven’t signed a single free agent hitter to a major league contract this offseason, with their “big” signing being Cavan Biggio. Nor did they make any trades to address the situation beyond the one for India. There are no top or even good prospects coming up to take these jobs. In the interest of fairness, I should mention that the Royals did make a three-year offer to Anthony Santander, but is that the final offer you make for the type of player you absolutely need to have on your team?

How lousy is Kansas City’s corner outfield situation? Well, when I was running numbers for my Alex Bregman piece earlier this week, ZiPS thought the Royals would most benefit from signing him, despite their not being desperate for a third baseman. In fact, I ran the same exercise for most of the winter’s best hitters available, and basically any good free agent who either played the outfield or a position where someone already on the roster could move to the outfield projected as most impactful in Kansas City. Going back to Santander for a second, ZiPS estimated a bump of 17 percentage points in playoff probability for the Royals with Santander (40% to 57%). To put that into context, it’s a larger projected 2025 improvement, in terms of playoff probability, than every single free agent signing this offseason but one, regardless of position. You can probably guess what that one other signing was, but even that was a close call, with the Mets getting a projected 19 points of playoff probability from signing Juan Soto. Santander’s replacement in Baltimore, Tyler O’Neill, would’ve had a greater impact in Kansas City than all but three signings: Soto to the Mets, Corbin Burnes to the Diamondbacks, and Max Fried to the Yankees.

As it looks right now, the two players most responsible for these Royals problems, MJ Melendez and Hunter Renfroe, are likely to get a ton of plate appearances in 2025 as well. That heavy dose of emoji shrug struck me as unusual behavior for a team coming off a playoff appearance, so I decided to check on this feeling of mine.

We have position-specific data going back to 2002, so starting in that year, I looked at the positional WAR for every single team that made the playoffs. I omitted DH for NL teams during the non-DH seasons, since most of them had something like -0.5 WAR in 45 plate appearances. I also excluded 2020 as a whole because of the small sample size of games and sudden irregularity.

Among the 222 playoff teams, 90 of them had a single position below replacement level in WAR. Designated hitter was the position that playoff teams most often received less than replacement-level production, with 28 teams getting negative value from their DHs. Having multiple positions below replacement was rarer, with only 20 of the playoff teams suffering that malady. But the list of playoff teams with three positions below replacement level features the 2024 Kansas City Royals and only the 2024 Kansas City Royals.

Now, it’s worth mentioning that the Royals aren’t skinflints. They’re projected to carry a $170 million luxury tax payroll once all is said and done. But because they’re spending more than ever before and have already committed a significant amount of future payroll to their franchise player — whose salary is set to rapidly increase over the next handful of seasons — now is the time when the Royals should be pot committed. Not spending more to make the 2025 Royals a winning hand imperils the $170 million they’ve already invested in the team. Every team with a young überstar should look at the Angels and their time with peak Mike Trout as a cautionary tale, not a template. A phenom ought to be a reason to make your team better, not a reason to make your team just good enough to have a chance to maybe sneak into the playoffs.