This 2025 World Series stat exposes a painfully glaring issue Royals have to resolve

All eyes will be on Toronto on Friday night when the 121st rendition of the World Series gets underway between the Blue Jays and the Dodgers.

Both booked their ticket to the Fall Classic in dominant fashion, each showcasing their immense stockpile of talent and the various ways they can beat any opponent on any given night.

And lineup depth has been what’s really been on full display for both of these teams, as each have world class talent atop their order that’s stepped up in big moments this season, but have also relied on the bottom half of their order to contribute.

Royals need to take a page out of Dodgers, Blue Jays playbook when it comes to depth

Arden Zwelling of Sportsnet posted an alarming stat on X earlier this week that outlined just how strong both the Blue Jays’ and the Dodgers’ six-through-nine hitters had been this postseason.

Toronto leads the playoff field in AVG, OPS, XBH and RBI among six-through-nine hole hitters this month, with none other than the Dodgers ranked second.

For Toronto, names like Ernie Clement, Addison Barger and Andrés Giménez have provided some incredible moments centered around timely hitting. Then out west, while the Dodgers have the advantage of incredible finances meaning they can field All-Stars like Teoscar Hernández and Max Muncy in the bottom half of their lineup, names like Kiké Hernández have had their playoff moments this month as well.

These two teams have shown the importance a well-rounded lineup top-to-bottom can have on not only winning ball games, but winning games when the stakes are at the very highest.

For the Royals this season, this was the very opposite. Their top five hitters in the order were extremely productive. Their four Silver Slugger finalists in Bobby Witt Jr., Vinnie Pasquantino, Maikel Garcia and Salvador Perez primarily occupied the two-through-five spots and after the deadline the surging Mike Yastrzemski took a majority of the ABs in the leadoff position.

But beyond that, the production tapered off pretty dramatically.

While he saw some better days after moving out of the leadoff spot the reality is Jonathan India still only finished the season with an 89 wRC+ and .669 OPS. Their young phenom Jac Caglianone was just a a 46 wRC+ hitter with a .532 OPS in his rookie season. John Rave warranted his demotion after hitting .196 with a .590 OPS and a 65 wRC+ in his extended major league stay.

And a majority of the other names like Nick Loftin or Michael Massey were either primarily below average bench options or were plagued by injury for extended periods of time which hindered their ability to really make an impact.

The fact of the matter is, their nine-hole hitter in Kyle Isbel with his .255 AVG and .654 OPS was arguably their best bottom-half player this season.

When you lay it out like this, it seems as though their mediocre 82-80 record and missing out on the postseason was inevitable.

This leaves the Royals with a clear need to address this winter and J.J. Picollo and the rest of the Royals brass thankfully seem to recognize that.

In their end-of-season press conference Picollo addressed that things have to change when it comes to bettering the output of their offense beyond their big four.

“There’s a certain type of game we need to play and it’s a complete game,” Picollo said.

“How do we take the other nine guys and how do we get the most out of them? There’s a lot of different ways,” he said. “We’ve got to figure out how to do that.”

Only time will tell over the course of the offseason how that exactly looks as there’s countless ways they could go about addressing it. The fact is though, they need to find a way deepen this order, because the results don’t lie when you look at the two teams still left standing this year.