The Royals need to play smarter

In baseball, there is only one finite resource. We can argue endlessly about which is more exciting, a perfectly executed bunt single or a smash through the hole, a triple or a home run. But none of that matters for winning games as much as managing that one resource as effectively as humanly possible.

In 2005, there were 1620 sacrifice bunts. In 2025, there were only 560. Some of that is because pitchers stopped hitting after 2021, but that just goes to emphasize the point more. If you don’t already have an automatic out at the plate, a sacrifice is a bad baseball play. An extra base is almost never worth an out.

Need more evidence? Check out these run expectancy matrices. Runner at first with no outs? That averaged 0.87 runs in 2025. But a runner at second with one out? 0.67 runs. The numbers are similar the entire way across the matrix. Giving up an out for a base always reduces the number of runs you can expect to score every time. This makes sense if you think about it logically, too. A sacrifice bunt means sacrificing an opportunity to add another runner to the bases or to even drive in the run(s) in that plate appearance. There are an infinite number of bases to be gained in a 9-inning baseball game, but only ever 27 outs.

This goes beyond sacrifice bunts, though. The biggest revelation of the Moneyball Athletics teams was that OBP is more valuable than batting average. How can that be when a hit might be more than a single, but a walk only ever gets you to first base? Because a walk still represents not giving up an out. As long as you still have outs, you’ve still got a chance to win a game. Not giving them away is, therefore, the most important thing. But the Royals, even as they seem to be more analytically inclined than in years past, still don’t seem to get this.

Let me post a quote from an answer given by manager Matt Quatraro during a recent post-game press conference (emphasis mine):

[…] Our offense has to be predicated on some of the aggressiveness on the bases and sometimes you’re going to make those outs.

The Royals have used statistical analysis to determine that bringing in the fences would likely help the team play better. They spent the off-season chasing players with good on-base percentages, which has led to a team OBP of .313 – the highest they’ve had since 2015. But their analytic abilities seem to falter when it comes to the value of an extra base compared to an out despite the fact that run expectancy matrices have existed since before the Royals were even a team.

Earlier in that quote, Quatraro pointed out that the Royals don’t hit bunches of home runs. This misses the point badly. Because every time you make an out on the bases, it represents one fewer plate appearance the team can take in that inning and the entire game. The 2015 Royals had an unofficial slogan of “keep the line moving” because they also didn’t hit home runs, but they didn’t make terrible outs on the basepaths and so were able to keep getting on base and eventually force those runners home. But, hey, fewer plate appearances also means fewer opportunities to hit those home runs. So there’s that, too.

The Royals’ front office and coaching staff are not stupid. These people know baseball well. Most of them more than any of us. But that’s just why it is so painful to see them make judgments so lacking in basic logic. You don’t have to be a baseball genius to know that if you’ve got a highly limited resource like outs, you shouldn’t give them away without a darn good reason.