That all too familiar sinking feeling

The Royals offense stinks. Again. Some metrics say it should be better and can improve. But will it?

The offensive numbers for the Royals have been, across the board, absolutely brutal in the season’s first three weeks.

They are now averaging 3.1 runs per game. That’s the worst run-scoring rate in the majors. Yes, even worse than Oakland, a team that’s trying to lose on purpose.

It is, on paper, something of an imbalanced offensive attack I suppose. Looking at the myriad lineups manager Matt Quatraro rolls out, the alleged firepower is at the top. The bottom third never inspires much confidence. Yet for all the potential at the front of the order, nothing is working at the moment.

The only regulars who are hitting above league average at the moment are Bobby Witt Jr. (107 OPS+) and Vinnie Pasquantino (145 OPS+). That’s good for them, but when just two out of nine in any given lineup are above league average, that’s not going to work out so well for scoring runs. And winning ballgames.

Today, I’ll take a look at some of the metrics surrounding this start. And just how much, if any, improvement we can expect in the future.

Let’s start with the Statcast rates that started getting thrown around in the very first series of the season: Hard-Hit Rate and Exit Velocity.

The Royals are still doing extremely well in both categories. Prior to Wednesday, they were third in the majors in batted balls that are considered Hard-Hit (an exit velocity greater than 95 MPH).

I included the bottom three to give a little perspective on the early season separation from the elite to the dregs.

Let’s just keep moving and check out average exit velocity through Wednesday.

Less than a single MPH separates the top five clubs. The Hard-Hit list shares three teams with the best average Exit Velocity table: The Dodgers, Braves and Royals. The Cardinals and Orioles, representing in the top five in average Exit Velocity, rank seventh and eighth respectively in Hard-Hit Rate. The Pirates and Rays, on the Hard-Hit table, rank sixth and seventh respectively in average Exit Velocity.

That the two tables share teams is hardly a surprise.

Now, let’s spice things up and throw all these teams together into a table where they’re ranked by wRC+. (Weighted Runs Created is a great, catch-all number that quantifies total offensive value. By adding the “plus” it compares a team’s offensive output controlling for park effects. Since wRC+ is an index stat, 100 is average.)

Oh my god.

The Royals, through Tuesday, were the worst offensive team in baseball. By wRC+, they are 39 percent worse than the league-average offense. Their batting average, on base percentage and slugging percentage…all ranked dead last in the majors. The second-worst team, the Detroit Tigers (all hail the AL Central!), has a wRC+ of 73. So not only are the Royals the worst offense in baseball, they’re the worst by an enormous margin.

How is this possible? How can the Royals be among the elite teams when it comes to hitting the ball hard, yet be the absolute worst in the results of those hard-hit balls?

Pardon me if I don’t buy the company line that it’s bad luck.

Often, the simplest—and laziest—analysis is to simply wave things off as luck. Except here’s the issue…The longer this offensive ineptitude continues for the Royals—and it’s been going on for the entire season, save a couple of games where the offense actually put some runs on the board—the less this can be dismissed as some kind of fluke.

Statcast has their expected rate stats that tell you, in a perfect world, how hitters would perform given things like exit velocity and launch angle and position of fielders. We know from the table above that the Royals have a .204 BA through Tuesday. Their expected batting average (xBA) is .234. It’s not surprising that their xBA would be higher than their actual BA. The difference of 30 points is a bit thin, though. The Royals xBA is just the 25th-best in the majors.

The place where there’s a large difference is in expected slugging percentage (xSLG). The Royals are smashing the baseball and have just 43 extra-base hits. That extrapolates to a 6.7 percent extra-base hit rate. (The percentages of all plate appearances that end in an extra-base hit.) That’s not the worst rate in the league, but it’s in the bottom quarter. Their xSLG is .404 which is well off their actual .328 SLG.

Of the six teams other than the Royals who populate the leaderboards of average Exit Velocity and Hard-Hit Rate, it feels generally safe to assume those teams have an xSLG north of .450. The Royals? While their xSLG of .404 ranks 14th in the majors, given the hard contact they’ve been making, it’s nowhere near good enough. The other six teams in our cohort? They rank in the top seven in xSLG.

This leads me to…even if the Royals were performing as expected, their offense still would be far from competitive. They would obviously be better, and by quite a bit, but they would still be nowhere near good enough.

So even if the Royals break out of this cycle of offensive suckitude, how much better will they be? How many victories are we talking about? They’ve won just four of their first 19 games, so would they double that? (Assuming the pitching stays performing at the level they’ve established over this stretch. Although after what we saw against the Rangers, that may be a tall ask.) That’s an 8-11 record, a .421 winning percentage.

Would that be acceptable? They finished with a .401 winning percentage last year.

I just touched on it, but here’s the thing when you count on luck in baseball…Yeah, the hitting may pick up, but that’s independent of the pitching, which currently looks like it’s about to go off the rails. So maybe the offense strings together a stretch where they’re averaging five runs a game. If the pitching goes in the tank, that might not be enough to go on even a modest winning streak.

Baseball Reference has a game results graph on their team pages. Here’s the one for the Royals after Wednesday’s loss.

That’s five blowout losses in their last nine games. Those are five games they’re probably not winning, even if the offense starts to fire on more than a couple cylanders.

I’m not going to invoke the Bell Axiom here and say things can always get worse. Given what we’ve seen in the first 19 games this season, I’m not sure that’s possible. Things will improve. I’m just uncertain as to how much improvement we will actually see.

It’s easy to talk ourselves in circles. Let’s veer back to some facts about the offense.

The Royals, through Tuesday, were swinging at more pitches than any other team in baseball. Their 50.6 percent swing rate was tops in the majors. In fact, there are only four teams in baseball swinging at more than 48.4 percent of the pitches they’ve seen.

Royals - 50.6%
Nationals - 50.1%
Rockies - 49.9%
White Sox - 49.4%

The average team is swinging at 46.6 percent of pitches, so these four are clear outliers. There’s more than one way to find offensive production, so while the top four clubs aren’t exactly known for their run-scoring abilities thus far, the teams that are more selective with their swings aren’t necessarily the better offenses.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn the Royals are also atop the leaderboard when it comes to chasing pitches outside the strike zone. Their 33.9 percent chase rate leads the majors.

Royals - 33.9%
White Sox - 33.3%
Guardians - 32.2%
Rockies - 32%
Tigers - 31.9%

What’s up with the AL Central?

The league average chase rate is 28.2 percent.

Conversely, the Royals are one of the worst teams in the league making contact on pitches out of the zone. Their 52.7 Chase Contact % ranks 26th in the majors. That’s not necessarily a bad thing since contact made when chasing is often poor contact. Yet given their elevated chase rate, that’s a lot of swing and miss. It’s not surprising the Royals’ strikeout rate, which was initially solid out of the gate, has crept upward over the first three weeks of the season. Currently, it stands at 26.3 percent, the third-highest in the league.

These percentages and rankings underscore a flawed—and failing—approach at the plate. Yes, they’re hitting the ball hard, but are they doing it on a pitch where they can do actual damage? While poor process at the plate—expanding the strike zone—may result in positive results—a hard-hit ball—that result isn’t the actual optimal outcome. Yes, they’re squaring up the baseball, but they’re doing so on the pitchers’ terms. If the hitters drove their pitch, maybe the exit velocity would be a tick higher. Maybe the launch angle would be a little more optimal. Maybe more of these hard-hit balls would be falling in for hits or finding gaps or settling over the fence.

It’s an “all or nothing” approach that is the antithesis of the “keep the line moving” offenses of the championship years. The Royals at this point are incapable of stringing together the hits necessary to build and sustain a rally. The best they can seem to hope for is a home run with a runner on base. In the sixth inning on Wednesday, the Royals collected two singles and a double. The hits, combined with a sac fly, resulted in two runs. It was just the second inning out of the 54 in the home stand where the Royals scored multiple runs.

Yes, time and regression to the mean will help. I’m just not certain it will help enough.