Have the incremental improvements already begun?

The Royals are already working on revamping their hitting program, a betting partnership and a Royals legend gets the boot.

One of the themes of Tuesday’s press conference was that, while things need to improve to see a bump in the win total, some of those improvements may be in making incremental adjustments.

From manager Matt Quatraro:

Our internal expectations are extremely high, not only for winning and losing games, but in how we perform process-wise, decision-making, all those kinds of things. And all of those areas need to be improved.

And I think that’s one of the things that I really believe in strongly, is that there isn’t one thing that you hit the button and say, all right, we fixed this, and now we go on to win 100 games. We have to try to make tiny, little incremental improvements in a ton of different areas.

And some of those are hard to find because you believe in the process that you’ve already established. And sometimes it takes a long time to figure out, okay, what is the thing that we have to tweak here, right?

And it’s not a wholesale change. It’s a little thing.

That’s a long quote, but I think it’s important. That’s why the Royals aren’t doing something we could consider “large,” like removing a coach. Instead, they’re working to identify the smaller things to effect a large change.

Lest you think Quatraro is out there on his own, JJ Picollo also touched on making some incremental improvements when he mentioned that hitting coach Alec Zumwalt will return.

How do we support Alec in a way that allows him to have the most success with the roster that we have? Those decisions haven’t been made yet and we still have to work through that. It might just be tweaking our staff.

While Picollo said the decisions on what they’re going to do have yet to be made, the Royals did make at least one move on the hitting coaching front as Anne Rogers reported that Director of Hitting, Drew Saylor, will not have his contract renewed.

From Rogers:

Saylor ran most of the operations on the Minor League hitting side, although Zumwalt was still involved as the senior director. The Royals have two assistant hitting coordinators, Nic Jackson and Abraham Nunez, but will have to decide who will be leading their young hitters in the farm system and what that means for the big league staff.

Saylor had been with the Royals for six years, the last three of them as Director of Hitting Performance. Prior to that, he was a Hitting Coordinator.

In 2025, the Omaha Storm Chasers finished with a team OPS of .767, which ranked sixth out of 20 International League teams. Northwest Arkansas hitters had a collective OPS of .715, which was the third best in the 10-team Texas League. The High-A Quad Cities River Bandits had a .667 OPS, ranking them eighth out of 12 Midwest League teams. The Carolina Fireflies posted a .639 OPS, which was 11th out of 12 teams in the Carolina League.

I offer OPS only as a crude and imperfect measuring stick of offensive performance. For every minor league success story like Jac Caglianone and Carter Jensen, there’s a guy like Gavin Cross who has failed to live up to his lofty prospect hype. To be fair, prior to this recent influx of talent acquired through the draft this year, there just weren’t many prospect bats hanging around the system. Another issue was, very often, the success that was found in the minor leagues did not translate to the majors. Guys would come up after a successful run in Triple-A and would crater with the Royals. How much of that was just general talent and how much of that was the players not being properly prepared to handle the jump?

To me, it feels that if you’re not renewing the contract of the guy who ran the hitting program for the minor leagues, that’s more than a small “tweak.” That looks like an overhaul of a philosophy. Or a realignment of sorts.

The bottom line is that the Royals have had great success with their pitching program throughout their organization. They need to find similar success for the hitters. This is the first step in that realignment to make that happen. And this is where time will tell whether or not this move is successful.

Earlier this week, the Royals announced a multi-year partnership with Underdog. Part of this “partnership” includes—Surprise!— market access for sports betting. Basically, Underdog needs a professional sports team to vouch for them so they can acquire a sports betting license in the state of Missouri.

From the press release:

“The Royals look forward to continuing and enhancing our partnership with Underdog, which is our longest-standing relationship in sports gaming,” said Brooks Sherman, Royals President of Business Operations. “We’ve partnered with them on some of our most engaging fan programs, like Bark at the Park and the Underdog Hot Dog Derby, and we look forward to working with Underdog to provide Royals fans throughout Missouri the opportunity to have even more fun while watching sports.”

I’m not some sort of anti-gambling crusader, but this is just kind of…gross. I wish the Royals wouldn’t do this, but they’re already being broadcast on FanDuel and this is the next wave of revenue for teams. The Royals aren’t going to pass up a chance to make a buck. Hop on board or get left behind, I suppose.

At least they’re not partnering with the Riyadh Comedy Festival.

If you have $10,000 burning a hole in your pocket, you could be the proud owner of the jersey Bobby Witt Jr. wore on September 20.

Or you could just give it to me for operating expenses for the newsletter.

It’s been quiet on the stadium front, hasn’t it? I believe before Spring Training, we were told the Royals would be ready to talk in more detail about their plans by the middle of the year. And…crickets. But there was some good news for the team this week as Jackson County Executive Frank White lost his job in a recall election. The results were overwhelming, with just 15 percent of the electorate supporting him.

A key factor in White’s removal was the whole debacle around property assessments that began about six years ago, that have resulted in huge tax hikes for owners. There was also the whole deal with the stadiums, where both the Royals and the Chiefs viewed White as a roadblock to securing funding. I mean, they weren’t wrong. With White out of the way, it’s possible negotiations can take a, let’s say, friendlier tone. Perhaps the Washington Square Park site can move back to the front of the pack as far as options go. But who the hell knows?

Meanwhile, maybe we can place bets on Underdog for the next location of the stadium.

Thursday is a massive day for baseball as we have three elimination games as the Tigers/Guardians, Padres/Cubs and Red Sox/Yankees will all play a deciding Game Three in the Wild Card round. Only the Dodgers spoiled what would’ve been Rob Manfred’s supreme dream. As I posted on Bluesky on Tuesday, the Dodgers are inevitable.

The games thus far have been compelling. Even the Dodgers cruising past the Reds has my interest when Ohtani is hitting 475-foot bombs. One thing I did not realize is that the attendance in Cleveland has been…poor. Progressive Field has a capacity of 34,830, which makes it the smallest major league park. (I still cannot believe that MLB had two teams playing games in minor league stadiums. And will again next year.) The Guardians drew just shy of 27,000 for both of their Wild Card games. Conversely, Dodger Stadium is the Major League’s largest, yet they’ve also had issues selling tickets. Attendance on Wednesday was 50,000 in a stadium that holds 56,000.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s exactly what you would expect when MLB decided that it was better to dilute its product with an expanded postseason. Sure, the Cubs will sell out, and the Yankees and Red Sox will always be a draw. I don’t blame fans, though, for sitting out the early rounds. October can be a long—and expensive—month.

Plus, by the time the World Series rolls around, I won’t even remember the Reds made the postseason.