Seeing improvement

The Royals' offense is performing much better of late. In an evaluation year, it's anyone's guess as to what it means, but it's certainly worth calling out.

It was a lifeless performance from a team given up for dead months ago. You can excuse the Royals for succumbing to the dog days of August, failing to show up for the home opener against the Pirates on Monday, after a slog of a nine-game road trip where they won only twice.

Zack Greinke battled traffic all night. The bullpen did their bit where they allowed a handful of runs. It was, at this point in 2023, an unsurprising performance from the pitching.

What was perhaps a little surprising was how feeble the bats performed. Two hits. No runs. Just four baserunners all night. Via Anne Rogers, here’s MJ Melendez:

“We kind of came out flat today as a team. I think we could have hit (Oviedo). I guess props to him for going all nine, but it was a battle with ourselves today. We didn’t really play how we wanted to…I think we could have had a little more energy. Middle of the game, obviously things aren’t going our way, so it’s a little tough, easier said than done.”

Just another night in another lost season. Why does it feel as though things are looking up?

It feels like forever ago, but remember when the Royals reeled off seven wins in a row? It was right at the trade deadline and three wins of that streak were thanks to some fortunate scheduling as the New York Mets waved the white flag just ahead of the first three games in Kansas City in August.

Keeping that sweep in mind, here’s how the Royals have performed in the month.

vs Mets - 3-0
at Phillies - 1-2
at Boston - 1-3
vs Cardinals - 1-1
vs Mariners 1-3
at Cubs 1-2
at A’s 1-2
at Mariners 0-3
vs Pirates ???

Outside of those sweeps bookending that list, the Royals have been a paragon of consistency, winning exactly one game in each series while dropping the rest.

Add it all together and you have a record in August of 9-16 (entering play Monday), which is exactly the record the team posted in July. It’s a .360 winning percentage over the last two months that is outpacing their overall winning percentage of .311.

It’s not great. It’s not even good, really. It’s only notable looking through the prism of the first three months of the season when the Royals were playing at an abysmal .280 clip. Hey! Progress!

I wrote about it when the Royals dealt reliever Aroldis Chapman to the Rangers and then again when Scott Barlow was shipped to San Diego: When a team that struggles to win a quarter of their games trades away their two best bullpen arms, you don’t expect the team to improve. Except the Royals are playing better baseball, despite the subtractions from the bullpen. Well, when I write “playing better baseball,” I actually mean they’re collectively hitting better. Witness.

I admit to being dismissive of the company line that often comes from One Royal Way when there is some sort of improvement or notable statistic that paints the club in a favorable light. However, in this instance, I think they may be underselling the offensive turnaround. Since the All-Star break…A 32-point improvement in batting average? A 12-point boost in on-base percentage? A freaking 68-point improvement in slugging? This is an amazing turnaround from their first-half production. Stunning, really.

The Royals have gone from the worst offense in baseball to league-average production. You will absolutely take that.

They’ve added almost a full run per game and almost 20 percent improvement to the league average according to weighted Runs Created Plus. This is truly a massive turnaround from the bats.

Nobody is going to pay attention to you when you’re the worst in the league at anything, except for an occasional expression of pity or disdain. And when you simply push yourselves ever so close to league-average in terms of offensive production, there aren’t going to be any parades. Still, I’d like to hand out some credit. Given how awful the first half of the season went, you couldn’t blame this Royals team if they had just kept the bats in cold storage for the rest of the season. Instead, they are clearly still working, still grinding, and the reward is a marked improvement. (Never mind what the Royals did against the Pirates on Monday.)

Obviously, Bobby Witt Jr. is doing the heavy lifting here. From the Royals PR department:

(Witt) has hit safely in 23 of his last 27 games since July 28, a stretch in which he ranks among the top 5 in the Majors in total bases (84, 1st), RBI (30, 2nd), extra-base hits (19, 2nd), slugging percentage (.737, 3rd), hits (43, tied for 3rd), OPS (1.155, 4th) and batting average (.377, 5th).

He’s becoming the star we thought he would be. While this article is about the offensive turnaround, it should be noted that Witt is doing it defensively as well. He’s not the only one breaking through in the season’s second half, though. How about MJ Melendez?

Everyone, save Salvador Perez and Maikel Garcia, has improved their overall production in the season’s second half. I should probably note that Freddy Fermin has dipped a bit, but—fun fact!—he’s the only hitter on this club who has been above average in both halves of the season. So fine, it’s three of eight who have seen their performances drop. However, the five listed above who have improved, have really improved. I mean really.

Throw Vinnie Pasquantino into this second-half mix and, dare I say, this offense would be better than league average.

Alas, the improvement hasn’t been seen on the pitching side. Subtracting Aroldis Chapman and Scot Barlow did this team no favors, statistically, although Chapman did return Cole Ragans who has been the best pitcher on the staff over the last several weeks.

Worth noting is that, Saturday’s debacle in Seattle notwithstanding, the Royals have been playing a lot of close games. Most of their losses this month have been by a two or one-run margin. This is how their games by margin of victory or defeat looks since the All-Star break as visualized by Baseball-Reference:

Saturday’s thirteen-run shellacking stands out because it’s an outlier. The Royals may not be winning games, but they’re hanging in there.

The Royals are just 21-40 in games decided by two runs or fewer this season, which is, according to the Royals PR staff, the 2nd-worst record in the Majors. It’s a .344 winning percentage, which is slightly better than the .311 winning percentage they had entering Monday’s game against Pittsburgh. That’s not really interesting to me. I’m more interested in the number of games the Royals have played that have been decided by two runs or fewer. They’ve had 61 games like this so far in 2023, the sixth-most in the AL. Cleveland leads the pack with 71 games decided by two runs or fewer.

Twenty-three of those games have come since the break. It includes a club-record streak of 10 games in a row decided by one or two runs from August 12 to the 22nd. In a season of evaluation, this counts as improvement.

What does all of this mean? We’ve seen bad Royals teams get hot in August and September and then fall flat (again) the next season. Close games don’t matter if you’re coming out on the losing end. A loss is a loss. There are no moral victories in major league baseball.

The short answer is, I don’t know.

I do know these games are more entertaining while watching an offense capable of malice. The fact that these games are close likewise has me a little more locked in. The Royals are on pace to lose 112 games, so maybe it’s the equivalent of baseball novocain and I’m just numb to the loss column.

Entertaining games in August, when a team is careening toward triple-digits in the loss column, doesn’t really mean anything going forward. I’m sure if they improve next year (and odds are in their favor here…teams seldom follow up a 112-loss season with more losses the following year), some thinkers will point to this stretch as when the Royals learned to be a better ballclub and how they clearly used the second half of this season as a springboard to success. It’s a tidy narrative and while we do love those, the reality is usually kind of messy.

In this “evaluation season,” while we may be able to identify the bats who can help going forward, this period of moderate success (generally speaking, keeping in mind the performance from April through June), only underscores the amount of work that needs to be done. What we have learned from the last month and a half is there are some players on this roster who could conceivably help a team push for contention. It’s just that, in the current construction of this roster, it’s not near enough.

For those of us whose summer revolves around this game in general and the Royals in particular, these competitive games are a welcome change of pace. It’s no guarantee of future success, but it’s nice to see the young guys showing some fight.