Impatiently waiting for the real season to start tends to make me overly optimistic about everything. That is how I found myself looking for some way to figure out how many more runs this team will score relative to last year’s offense. In the end, I did not completely change my opinion, but I am a little less sure about how well this offense is structured.
The front of the lineup is going to look a lot like 2025 and will most likely have similar production. There is always some risk – Salvy could finally become old, or Maikel Garcia could lose what he found last year. But for now, I am assuming they will do mostly what they have been doing. However, if you take the back end of the lineup and the bench, it will look very different.
Lining up the 7, 8, and 9 hitters, plus the bench of last year, compared to this year looks something like this:
I wanted to compare the 2025 projection to the 2026 projection, as that is fairer since we don’t know how 2026 will play out yet. If you look at how 2025 was projected to play out, it seems slightly insane now. MJ Melendez, Michael Massey, Mark Canha, Dairon Blanco, and Cavan Biggio all went on to have negative fWAR, so it is easy to look at this year’s group and say they can’t be that bad, but they are projected to be worse than last year’s projections.
There is a scenario where Lane Thomas repeats his disaster 2025 and 37-year-old Starling Marte’s production falls off a cliff, Massey/Nick Loftin could be like last year, and Isaac Collins and/or Carter Jensen regress after their solid first seasons. I really wanted to come away from this feeling like this offense is going to be so much better that I could write an overly optimistic article about how KC is going to easily win the Central. However, I think we should all at least keep a healthy amount of skepticism about this offense. It is not definitely fixed.
All of that being said, I think this offense is much improved over the 2025 version. That Dairon Blanco projection is hard to believe in hindsight. We also know that there was negative WAR from Melendez, Massey, Canha, Blanco, Biggio, and because of the way I structured the table, we don’t see Hunter Renfroe, Jonathan India, and Jac Caglianone who also were below zero. That seems nearly impossible to repeat. It is beyond a normal dose of bad luck, or whatever you want to call it, for one team when established big leaguers like Jonathan India and Mark Canha are just crashing down into sub-replacement level. MJ Melendez and Hunter Renfroe were not shocking, though the extent to which they crashed and burned was a bit extreme.
This mostly new group making up the back of the lineup and bench is definitely more stable than the group last year. That is apparent if you think about someone like Isaac Collins versus MJ Melendez. Collins is projected to put up 1.1 WAR there, but that is baking in a large amount of regression from his 2025 total of 2.6. Melendez’ highest career total was 0.4 in 2023, and in every other season has been negative. It is unlikely that Colins will repeat last year’s numbers as some things bounced his way, but it is very, very unlikely he is going to be the black hole of offensive production that the Royals had in left field for 2025. It is less clear that there is an upgrade with the veterans.
Starling Marte has had a year where he kind of crashed out, and it was only a couple of years ago in 2023. He also has a wRC+ over 100 in 7 out of the last 8 seasons that were not that disaster year. He is a safe bet to be at least somewhat productive, with the caveat that he is at an age where it can fall apart in a hurry. Lane Thomas had his collapse last season, posting -0.5 WAR, but in the three previous seasons, it was 1.4, 2.9, and 1.4, and he is only 30. Assuming his health gets back on track, he is extremely likely to be a league-average player or near it, but there is a health risk with plantar fasciitis and a foot surgery to address it. That is the sort of thing that can be persistent.
Compare those two to Mark Canha and Cavan Biggio, and I would say Canha last year was probably more likely to be productive than Marte is this year, coming off of seven consecutive seasons as an above-average major league hitter and a little bit younger. Biggio was riskier just from a consistency standpoint as well as a lower ceiling. I think the two going into this year are better, mostly because of Lane, but the gap is not huge. Luckily, to be an upgrade, they only have to outperform what Biggio and Canha actually did in 2025, which is a very low bar at a combined -0.9 WAR.
Is the back end of the lineup and the bench going to outperform 2025’s? Almost certainly. Again, mostly because last year it was a trash fire. I just want everyone to be clear-eyed about how many points of risk this offense still has on top of the lack of depth in the minors. The Royals have exactly 4 position players I have almost no reservations about: Bobby Witt, Vinnie Pasquantino, Maikel Garcia, and Kyle Isbel. If any of them put up a negative war season over a large quantity of playing time, I would be flabbergasted. Sorry, Salvador Perez is old enough, and we saw him put up negative WAR in 2023, so he is not in the lock category. I am reasonably confident Carter Jensen is going to be an upgrade and safety net for the catcher spot, but the track record is too short to bank on it.
And so, I am a little nervous that this offense will come out of the gate a little cold, which spirals into another year of uneven and below-average production. My gut still says that is not going to happen, but my logical side has been burned too many times to start drinking all the Kool-Aid just yet.
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