Royals to retain hitting coach Alec Zumwalt for 2026 season

The Royals were officially eliminated from the playoff race minutes before taking the field for a game last week, so manager Matt Quatraro approached the everyday players seeking feedback.

“How do you want to play this out?” he asked.

It had been a grind of a season, some 156 games into it, and now the final six would have literally zero effect on their playoff fate. He was offering his top players a day off or two.

“They looked at me like I was nuts,” Quatraro said Tuesday, before recalling their response:

We’re playing. Every day.

The Royals won a game that night, and won four of their final six, to finish 82-80 and reach just their second winning season in the last decade.

Which makes this a bit of a paradox, because we’re here to analyze why the Royals fell short in 2025.

The exercise itself is illustrative of an elevated standard. But it results in a most glaring reply: The Royals scored 84 fewer runs in 2025 than they did in 2024, which is why they were holding a season-ending news conference Tuesday as opposed to preparing for the opening game of the postseason, as they were this time a year ago.

The most compelling news from that conference came swiftly from general manager J.J. Picollo:

Alec Zumwalt will return as Kansas City’s hitting coach in 2026.

You could get lost in that headline, fooled into thinking the Royals are content with where this offense stands. But context never hurt anyone, right? The Royals are not running back a lineup and offensive staff that finished 26th in runs and simply praying for better results.

They want change.

Just not with the man in charge.

Over the course of a 45-minute media session, Picollo listed the job employment that won’t change but spent the majority of his time talking about the things that will change offensively. The things that must change.

That will include the potential of staff adjustments, possibly an addition to the room. They spent those final six days evaluating how that might look, though they’ve yet to reach a final conclusion. “What are we missing?” Picollo has asked his staff.

He wants the athleticism to pop more on the bases, though the Royals cannot run into outs at the same clip. He wants to evaluate swing decisions. He wants to evaluate, well, everything.

We could delve deeper into the weeds, but the point is the Royals will be doing the digging on their own. Picollo even asked aloud Tuesday if the Royals are striking out enough. No team struck out less than the Royals did. They used to wear that as a badge of honor.

Now?

“We have to look at that. Is that good or bad? Is that getting us to where we want to go?” Picollo said. “Generally speaking, not striking out is good, but if you’re making early outs and weak contact, we have to adjust that.”

It’s a change, and maybe an overdue one — even if the voice in the room will be the same.

So, let’s talk about that voice in the room. Why are the Royals sticking with the hitting coach of the league’s 26th-best offense?

Picollo talked about relationships, game-plan preparation and processes, but the answer is actually pretty simple: It’s hard to fire the hitting coach when the star players are producing, and even harder yet when they all credit the processes for that production.

• Bobby Witt Jr. will follow his runner-up MVP season by likely finishing third. He’s worked with Zumwalt his entire professional career.

• Salvador Perez eclipsed 25 home runs in back-to-back seasons for just the second time in his career and drove in 100 runs in back-to-back seasons for the first time in his life.

• Vinnie Pasquantino followed up one career season with another. He’s also worked with Zumwalt his entire professional career.

• Maikel Garcia turned into a literal All-Star this year, and the primary reason why — removing a leg kick in favor of a toe tap — can be directly traced to the hitting coach.

If you’re the Royals, those are the four players you need most. They’re all hitting.

The overall team output is about the rest of the body of work. And yes, if we’re crediting Zumwalt with those core four, he’s not just absolved from the rest of it. An additional five home runs would have counted the same, no matter whose barrel connected with them. Zumwalt has ownership in the lack of production from the bottom of the lineup.

But so does a front office that searched far and wide for a corner outfielder a year ago and found only a second baseman who could not play the position.

Which is the important part: If Picollo has determined Zumwalt to still be the right fit for the job — and the players separately voiced their approval — it’s simultaneously an admission that he needs to provide him with some better supporting tools in 2026.

Where does that lead? He didn’t offer specifics.

To be clear, that’s not to say these players can’t do some re-tooling of their own. They can.

The Royals swung at the fewest first pitches in baseball, just 28.2% of them, yet the rest of the league does far more damage on first pitches than any other pitch in the count.

They swung at the sixth-fewest strikes, yet they had the ninth-highest chase percentage in baseball, as mystifying a combination as it is a frustrating one. They let meatballs — middle-of-the-strike-zone pitches — pass without much consequence. (All of those numbers are courtesy of Statcast.)

Irrespective of the talent, the swing decisions have to change.

That’s among the ways the results can change.

Even if they opted for consistency at the top.