Now it is time to worry about their chances to stay alive.
The Kansas City Royals finally—finally!—spewed buckets of water all over their 29-year playoff drought Friday night, beating the Chicago White Sox to clinch at least an American League wild-card berth. The celebration was glorious, and the city should be euphoric as October brings it something more than Kansas City Chiefs football for the first time since 1985, when the Royals won their only World Series.
However, now it is time to seriously assess their chances to advance beyond next week’s one-game crapshoot, and that dissection starts with the team’s historically inept offensive attack/whimper.
If you don’t feel like poring through stats and want a quick take on that part of the team, do a Twitter search for “Royals offense” and have a laugh. The Twitterverse is full of observations to give you a decent idea of what the Royals bring offensively, game after game after game.
The numbers back up the jokes and frustration, unfortunately for Kansas City faithful. The Royals will likely become the first team in major league history to make the playoffs while finishing dead last in the majors in home runs and walks. Oddly enough, this team has the fewest strikeouts in the majors by a big margin, so one would think walks and accidental home runs would come every now and then. But with the Royals, those things are even more rare than that.
They have hit one home run since the end of play on Sept. 17. They have a propensity for taking the first pitch of an at-bat, which often puts them behind in the count, which leads to pitches out of the strike zone, which leads the Royals to swing at pitches out of the zone at a rate near the top of their league. And as common sense tells us, when you put those pitches into play, they often lead to outs. That concept is simple.
What is not simple is keeping track of the franchise’s hitting coaches since 2012. There have been six including current man in charge Dale Sveum, who came in less than a year after the team named Pedro Grifol hitting coach in 2013. Seriously, it’s ridiculous the way this team rolls through people in that position.
And the crazy thing is, the Royals are trying to hit the ball over the outfield wall. That’s part of their philosophy.
“I think we’ve got a group of young power hitters who are capable of hitting home runs,” manager Ned Yost told Vahe Gregorian of The Kansas City Star when Sveum took over for Grifol. “Our offense was built more around singles and doubles, but it’s difficult to get three or four singles in a row to score a run.
“We have to have the ability to open it up a little more, use the power that we have to take advantage of a quick strike. A walk, a base hit and boom—there’s three runs. I think that’s the major difference in philosophy.”
The Royals can scapegoat all the hitting coaches they want, and they clearly have, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are offensively deficient going into the franchise’s most important game since Game 7 of the 1985 World Series. Assuming the Detroit Tigers win the AL Central—they have a one-game lead with two to play—the Royals will have one game to score enough runs to ensure this playoff “run” is more than just a few hours long.
They have gotten here with good starting pitching, totally dominant relief pitching, outstanding defense and great team speed, and in spite of wretched offensive production.
The Royals are likely going to face the Oakland A’s in the AL Wild Card Game on Tuesday, and probably will do so at home. But the venue does not matter if the A’s are going to bring Jon Lester and his 2.46 ERA and 1.10 WHIP to the mound for that showdown. It leaves little hope for the Royals to score in crooked numbers. Yost tweaked the rotation last week so that No. 1 starter James Shields could pitch in this game, but there isn’t much the manager can do for the lineup.
The team’s best all-around hitter, Alex Gordon, hit .178/.318/.274 with a .592 OPS from Sept. 2 through Thursday. On Friday, Gordon went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts.
The team’s two home run leaders besides Gordon, Mike Moustakas (15) and Salvador Perez (16), are below league average offensively for the season with OPS+ marks of 72 and 91, respectively.
Eric Hosmer, the third overall pick in 2008 and a player dubbed as a future star power hitter, has nine homers this season, and his 101 OPS+ makes him very ordinary.
Quite simply, no one in this Royals lineup scares anyone else. Other aspects of their club do, and they should, but the bats are brushed away with first-pitch strikes and others out of the zone. There is little there to threaten most pitchers, let alone an ace like Lester.
The Royals have the bullpen, defense and speed that make other teams drool, but you can’t win a game with no runs, and that is why this party 29 years in the making won’t be long for October.
Anthony Witrado covers Major League Baseball for Bleacher Report. He spent the previous three seasons as the national baseball columnist at Sporting News, and four years before that as the Brewers beat writer for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Follow Anthony on Twitter @awitrado and talk baseball here.
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