{"id":2447522,"date":"2026-06-06T07:30:29","date_gmt":"2026-06-06T07:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2447522"},"modified":"2026-06-06T07:30:29","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T07:30:29","slug":"the-royals-need-to-do-more-than-just-hit-the-ball-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/the-royals-need-to-do-more-than-just-hit-the-ball-hard\/","title":{"rendered":"The Royals need to do more than just hit the ball hard"},"content":{"rendered":"

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If there\u2019s one mantra about hitting that\u2019s become very popular lately, it\u2019s got to be some variation of \u201chit the ball hard.\u201d Statcast has made exit velocities very visible and a very big deal, and the sabermetric revolution has broadly valued power hitting in favor of contact hitting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So you might think that the Kansas City Royals aren\u2019t good at hitting the ball hard. After all, they\u2019ve been among the worst offenses in the entirety of Major League Baseball for the past two years. This year, only the San Diego Padres score fewer runs than the Royals, who score a measly 3.90 runs per game.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You would, however, be wrong. The Royals are actually really great at hitting the ball hard. One of the best ways to measure contact quality is hard-hit rate; a hard-hit ball is simply a batted ball hit harder than 95 miles per hour, and hard-hit rate is just how often a player or team hits the ball hard. And the Royals? They rank third<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Team<\/h3>\n<\/th>\n

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Hard-hit rate<\/h3>\n<\/th>\n

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Rank<\/h3>\n<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n

New York Yankees<\/td>\n43.2%<\/td>\n1st<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Kansas City Royals<\/td>\n41.6%<\/td>\n3rd<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
N\/A<\/td>\n39.3%<\/td>\nMedian<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Los Angeles Angels<\/td>\n38.4%<\/td>\n20th<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Tampa Bay Rays<\/td>\n34.0%<\/td>\n30th<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Hard-hit rate matters because there is a sharp uptick in results from batted balls at or above 95 MPH. Per MLB<\/a>, balls hit under 95 MPH have a batting average of .219 and a slugging percentage of .259, while balls hit over 95 MPH have an average of .524 and a slugging percentage of 1.047.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That the Royals would optimize for hard-hit balls makes sense. But the Royals aren\u2019t seeing the results that you would expect for a team that hits the ball hard so often. Does that mean the Royals are, as Rex Hudler says, due for some hits to fall?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The answer is\u2026no, not really. One of the best single stats for offensive performance is weighted on base average (wOBA), which assigns proper value to everything a hitter can do at the plate to one number. There\u2019s also a stat called expected<\/em> weighted on base average (xwOBA), which does the same thing except that it looks at exit velocity and launch angle as opposed to the actual on-field results for batted balls.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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While there are some pretty extreme outliers one way or another\u2013for instance, the New York Mets have a team wOBA of .288 and an xwOBA of .316, and the Tampa Bay Rays have a wOBA of .324 and an xwOBA of .309\u2013the median difference one way or another between the two stats is .006. The Royals? Also at a .006 difference. In other words, the difference between expected performance and actual performance is not that big. In other other words, the Royals may have been a little bit unlucky, but not in such a way that you can expect Kansas City to score a bazillion runs per game moving forward.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This is important because, and I beg you to remember this, not all hard-hit outs are created equally<\/em><\/strong>. You can hit a ground ball in front of the plate at 200 MPH and it still isn\u2019t going to result in a double; you can hit a fly ball straight up at 300 MPH and it isn\u2019t going to fly out of the park. Friend of the site Shaun Newkirk pointed this out on Twitter the other week.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The picture becomes clearer when you break down the Royals\u2019 hard-hit rate by batted-ball type:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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