The Royals look to build off of a successful 2024

Picollo and Quatraro meet with the media to talk about the offense, improving the leadoff spot, the free agent market and their reactions to 2024.

For the Royals, the season ended on October 10 with a loss in the ALDS. A wildly successful season by any definition but, as general manager JJ Picollo noted in his annual end of the season press conference, the work continues. The focus simply shifts from action on the field to preparing for 2025. Spring Training is just four months away.

Picollo and manager Matt Quatraro met with the media for about 40 minutes on Monday morning. Here are some of the highlights from that session.

Picollo opened by talking about the success of the 2024 season and the impact that will have as the club begins preparations for 2025.

“We gotta lot of work to do. We learned a lot about our team. And now it’s time to move forward.”

“It’s not going to change how we go through our offseason. We’re going to work just as hard this offseason as we did last offseason. The expectations are higher. I think the players acknowledged that on Thursday night after we lost. That’s just part of it. There’s going to be a little bit more of a target on our backs. We’re not going to sneak up on anybody next year. They’re going to expect us to be a good team. And with that comes a responsibility to live up to that.”

I think everyone in and around the game expected the Royals to improve from their dreadful 2023 season. I don’t think anyone expected a 30-win improvement and a spot in the postseason. Now the word is out, emphaticly so.

It’s not just about the wins and losses, though. It’s about, yes, the process. The Royals succeeded after overhauling their field staff and a number of behind the scenes personnel, including their pitching coaches. That, coupled with an aggressive winter when they (gasp!) spent actual dollars on talent is how they propelled their improvement. Not every team can draft a Bobby Witt Jr. But they can build an execute a plan to contend.

Quatraro chimed in with what he learned from guiding a team to the postseason in his second year as the manager of the Royals.

“We got to continue to get better in all areas. There isn’t one secret for, you do this and all of a sudden, it’s figured out. You don’t ever have this game figured out. We kind of went from an area where there were a lot of things we needed to improve on, now it is marginal improvements, continuing to play at a high level consistently. I think some of that is mental, some of it is physical, but overall it’s just continuing to push forward and not be satisfied with where we got to this year and I don’t think that’s an issue at all. I think those guys left the room the other night with a really sour taste in their mouth and I think that will be motivation enough to really fight through and continue to get better.”

Quatraro specifically noted how his staff all worked together to make in-game decisions and the planning that went into making those calls. The leadership seems extremely happy with the current coaching staff. They noted that no changes will be made on that front, unless they have an opportunity with another team.

Picollo was asked about the offense and their overall performance in 2024.

Our offense was…if you look back on the year, it was acceptable. The runs per game that we scored over the course of the year was acceptable. But there were too many ups and downs. We gotta be a little bit more consistent. It really starts, not so much with slug, you always want slug, but it starts with getting guys on base. And that’s going to be an area we’re going to not only address in looking at players we can acquire, but how can we be better offensively. How can we develop hitters better at the major league level and get them to meet expectations, but it all starts with getting guys on base and we gotta do a better job.

The Royals scored 4.54 runs per game in 2024, up from 4.17 in 2023. Their 2024 run-scoring rate finished just above the league average of 4.39 R/G and ranked the Royals 13th out of the 30 major league teams. Acceptable? Yeah, I think that’s the proper adjective to describe the Royals’ offense in 2024.

As someone who has watched baseball pretty much from the moment I could walk, it remains something of a mental roadblock to wrap my brain around the fact that offense production has plummeted to levels rarely seen since baseball expanded and introduced divisional play all the way back in 1969. The league OBP this season finished at .312, barely ahead of the .311 the league saw in 1972, which was the lowest going back to the start of divisional play. I mention this because I have to remind myself that the Royals’ team OBP of .306, which would’ve had us looking for our pitchforks back in 2014 and 2015, actually wasn’t all that bad relative to the league. Still, as Picollo noted, it wasn’t good enough—the Royals ranked 19th in OBP.

We’ve had general managers sit on that dias before and pay similar homage to OBP and then, when the time came to actually build the roster, inexplicably veer in another direction. Maybe I’m naive. Maybe I’m an idiot. (Wait to comment on that.) But for some reason, I believe Picollo means it when he says the key to improving this offense is finding guys who can regularly get on base. I mean, it’s not wrong. Talk is cheap, though. Especially in October. Putting action and a little cash behind that talk? That feels necessary if the Royals are to continue to contend.

To that end, Picollo acknowledged that there was a problem with the very top of the order. That will be a priority when it comes to assembling the team for next year.

“When we look at our offense, it’s somebody at the top of the lineup that can get on base. That doesn’t mean it can’t come internally. That person hasn’t emerged just yet, but a year from now we may be sitting here and somebody did take the reins and get on base. That leadoff spot, we were circulating guys all year long, trying to find the right person. We got Tommy Pham and he stepped in and did a nice job.”

Again, good to see Picollo acknowledge the obvious: The Royals leadoff hitters were collectively the worst in the league at getting on base in 2024. Their combined .270 OBP was the worst and their 64 sOPS+ was tied with the White Sox for the least productive. It was as bad as it sounds.

While it’s good to hear they’re going to target improvement at that spot, I’m going to have to quibble with Pham coming in and doing “a nice job” at the top of the order. In the 104 plate appearances Pham had after coming across the state to Kansas City, he posted a .250 OBP at leadoff and finished with a 58 sOPS+ in that role, meaning he was 42 percent less productive than the average major league leadoff hitter. He walked on just three occasions and struck out 27 times. On the scale of poor leadoff hitters for the Royals, Pham took up residence between Maikel Garcia (a 69 sOPS+ at leadoff) and Adam Frazier (44 sOPS+).

Moving down the order, beyond the core of Witt, Pasquantino and Perez, the Royals insist they continue to believe in Maikel Garcia and MJ Melendez.

“They are the two guys that have really big upside. It’s hard to get players that have that athleticism, that type of defensive talent, or offensive pop and potential. They’re players that every organization wants. You just have to stay with them, keep running them out there and protect them the best you can.”

It’s easy to understand because if those two could post even just a league-averageish offensive season, this offense looks a lot more dangerous. But the evidence is building and pointing in the direction that these guys are what we’ve seen the last couple of years. Garcia has back-to-back seasons of over 500 plate appearances. This year, he saw a 40-point drop in his OBP and a 25-point drop in his slugging. He cut his strikeout rate by about five percentage points, which is a good sign but his line drive rate, hard-hit rate and average exit velocity all tumbled.

Picollo expanded a bit about Melendez.

“He’s a very perplexing player because he plays extremely hard. His defense got a lot better this year. He’s got tremendous potential offensively. So you have to believe in those things, and we’ve seen it. We’ve seen it in the minor leagues. He had a tremendous year in the minor leagues. It’s that consistency and developing a consistent approach, whether it’s his routines in the cage to what he does on the field in the games, but sticking with something that will allow him to put the ball in play more, because when he puts the ball in play, he hits the ball really hard. And if you hit the ball really hard, you got a chance to get a hit.

He’s somebody that we feel good about. At some point it’s going to click and it’s got a chance to be special.”

“Perplexing” is an interesting adjective to describe Melendez because we don’t usually hear that kind of candor coming from a general manager. Yet, it feels accurate. He’s a guy who has the tools but those have yet to translate to sustained success in the major leagues. Picollo noted his 2021 minor league season when he split his time between Double and Triple-A and hit 41 home runs and drove in 93 between those two stops. He hit .285/.372/.628 in Northwest Arkansas and .293/.413/.620 in Omaha.

Yet we’ve now seen three (mostly) full seasons from Melendez at the major league level. He’s seen his OPS+ drop each season. He started out with a 99 OPS+ his rookie season in 2022. It fell to a 94 OPS+ last year (despite improving his OBP and slugging ever so slightly). Melendez finished with a career high in slugging at .400, but lost 40 points off his OBP and his overall OPS+ fell to a career-worst 87.

Melendez is eligible for arbitration. MLB Trade Rumors has him estimated at a $2.5 million salary next year. I know there are some who would think about non-tendering him, but there’s no way that happens. Nor should it. But the Royals should continue to be serious about improving the outfield. I don’t think Melendez can be counted upon to provide the production they need.

Picollo didn’t divulge much, if anything, on the Royals plans for this offsesason. He said that he had yet to speak to owner John Sherman about the budget for 2025, but expected it to be about the same as this season. Picollo did, however, mention one player the Royals would like to have back: Michael Wacha.

“The only thing that I do believe is that Michael, and his wife, they enjoyed being in Kansas City, that’s always an advantage. He had a very good experience here. I think he and Brian Sweeney got along great. So there are reasons to be optimistic. But he pitched very well this year, and he’s going have opportunities with other clubs. So we’ll work on that, luckily we have a few weeks to sit down with Michael and his representation to try to see if we can work something out.”

Picollo’s comment kind of dovetails with a general thought behind Kansas City and being attractive to free agents. It’s a fantastic community. The Royals have a solid ownership situation and have shown a commitment to improvement. And there’s the opportunity to play with guys like Witt and Perez. The Royals aren’t going to be competing for the Juan Soto types that hit the market, but they can get in the mix for plenty of quality players. There’s no reason Kansas City can’t be a destination. Winning helps that.

Picollo also mentioned clubhouse chemistry and the value of having veteran leadership when shopping on the free agent market. He named guys like Adam Frazier, Hunter Renfroe, Chris Stratton and Will Smith as bringing that leadership value to a team. Smith, in particular, was called out a couple of times for that, both from Picollo and Quatraro.

I wouldn’t expect all those guys would be back. I would expect the Royals to pursue a handful of players to fit those roles, though.

More Quatraro, this time in response when asked about some of the analytical decisions he made as manager.

“The best thing I did was put Ragans, Lugo, Wacha, Singer and Marsh out there every fifth day. And pencil Bobby in, didn’t give him any days off. Analytically, those were really good decisions on my part.”

He said this with a smile, showing off some of that dry Quatraro humor. It’s a fun answer, but it underscores that no matter how advanced analytically a team is, they have to have some luck and quality on their side. Several times in the press conference, it was acknowledged that the Royals did extremely well when it came to health. The fact that they got 30-plus starts from Lugo, Ragans and Singer, with an additional 29 from Wacha is a minor miracle. And 25 from Marsh! They got 93 percent of their starts from their Opening Day rotation. That’s amazing.

My general takeaway from this media session is that Picollo and Quatraro remain the right guys for the job. They have surrounded themselves with some very smart people and they themselves continue to look for ways to improve their processes. As they’ve worked together and with their staffs these two years, their comfort in their respective roles has only grown.

Playoffs are never a guarantee and, as we saw this month, who knows what will happen if you get there, but the Royals are on a very solid path. It’s a good time to be a fan of this ballclub.