It is very easy to get bogged down in the season, especially at times when the offense was struggling, and say that this team couldn’t hit well enough to make it to the playoffs. But this team hit almost exactly as it did the year before.
From the perspective of batting average and on-base percentage, this team was nearly identical to last year’s. But they managed to score way fewer runs due to sequencing and a small drop in power. Overall, the wOBA was basically the same as the year before, and the team output just was not consistent enough.
The pitching is a similar story:
Look at those ERAs. I can’t even shave that close. Despite all of the injuries, this pitching staff pretty much matched last year’s stride-for-stride. It is a little shocking how similar this team was to last year’s team in the aggregate. The particulars matter, don’t get me wrong, but the starkest differences came in the Baserunning Runs (BsR) and Defensive Runs Above Average (Def). The baserunning and defense both went from solid positive performances in 2024 to definite negatives this season. By Fangraphs’ metrics, baserunning was 13.4 runs worse in total value, and defense was 21 runs worse than the prior year. That is close to four extra losses just on the drop in those two categories. Four more wins would have the Royals one game back of a reeling Houston team right now.
There is no sugar coating the baserunning, which has been written about a lot this year. It has been ugly, even uglier than the -4.6 above suggests. Bobby Witt Jr. has been worth 7.6 runs on the basepaths and is the only reason that team total is not in the double-digit negatives. Jonathan India, Freddie Fermin, Kyle Isbel, Maikel Garcia, Michael Massey, and Vinnie Pasquantino were all significantly worse on the base paths for the year. Garcia and Isbel were the biggest offenders as players who were solid pluses in 2024, who forgot how to run bases or something.
As a team, they had the second-worst success rate on stolen bases at 72%. They were picked off 21 times, most in baseball. The Royals were 24th in the league in bases taken and middle of the pack in percentage of extra bases taken, despite having Bobby, who is a wizard at such things. I am not sure what happened, but this is an egregious way for a team to shoot itself in the foot and needs to be fixed next season.
Defense was a little bit different. It was more a tale of haves and have-nots. Bobby Witt Jr. was again spectacular, and Maikel Garcia flourished as well. They are the best left side in baseball, and I do not think it is close. It was not large drops in returning player performance that hurt the defense. It was the weird carousel of outfielders that yanked a lot of people out of position that caused a lot of the damage. Jac Caglianone, Hunter Renfroe, Jonathan India, Mark Canha, Nick Loftin, Drew Waters, Randall Grichuk, Mike Yastrzemski, and Adam Frazier all put up negative defensive runs saved in the outfield. It was a pretty rough season defensively out there, which makes the solid pitching performance even more impressive. Also, Vinnie Pasquantino has rated out very poorly at first, but that is the only glaring issue in the infield.
Teams that want to go from being competitive to consistently in the playoffs cannot afford this sort of lapse in fundamentals. Hitting and pitching can be very fickle due to all kinds of variance in the game of baseball generally, but defense and baserunning should not be as volatile year to year. I do not think this will be repeated, but that may just be wishful thinking. Next year’s team needs to do a much better job of taking care of the little things.
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