[KChiefs1]

Halfway home: The pitching
At the midpoint of the 2022 season, the Royals are making a strong case for having the worst pitching staff in the majors.

But the attitude is good!
by
Craig Brown

With Thursday’s loss at the hands of the Houston Astros, the Royals mercifully closed the book on the first half of the season. Their record currently stands at 30-51, a .370 winning percentage. The fun thing about the season being exactly half over is the wins can be easily extrapolated. You don’t need a calculator to see that, if the Royals continue at their current pace, they’ll finish 2022 with a 60-102 record.

For a team banking on improvement, not only is this not good enough, it’s wholly unacceptable. The Royals made one move to remedy the situation when they dismissed their hitting coach back in May.

Otherwise, it’s been full steam ahead to the precipice of 100 losses.

Since we’re at the halfway point, now is a great time to take stock of what we’ve seen to this point. Today I’ll start with a look at the state of the Royals’ pitching.

It’s grim, my friends.

There’s no point in sugarcoating it: The Royals’ pitching has been abysmal this year. The starters, the bullpen…all of it. For a time, they were pacing to be amongst the worst staffs in the history of the game. The history! (At least going back to 1901. That’s a lot of history.) Now, they are simply in the conversation for…let’s say…one of the 30 worst pitching staffs in major league history. Isn’t it like most Royals teams in the Dayton Moore era, they’ll half-ass even abject wretchedness?

As it stands, they’re allowing 5.2 runs per game, the 25th worst rate in the majors and worst in the AL. They are the only staff with a sub-2 SO:BB ratio at 1.8. If you’re a Roto geek, their 1.48 WHIP is also the worst in the majors. Are you surprised? The Royals are allowing a boatload of baserunners and over 30 percent of those runners are scoring. (Shockingly, not the worst rate in the majors.)

Let’s start with a couple of key rate stats for the staff as a whole.

K rate - 18.6%
BB rate - 10.2%

On the strikeouts, the only team with a lower rate than the Royals is the Colorado Rockies who own a whiff rate of 18.1 percent. If those rates hold, they would be among the 10 worst going back to 2016. For some reason, the Texas Rangers just refused to strike anyone out from ‘16 to 2018. Again, and I’ve written this so much this year, the TV broadcast constantly harping on the washed idea of pitching to contact probably gives some insight that the front office and staff realize they’ve somehow accumulated a staff that can’t miss bats on the regular, or it’s some sort of bizarre shift in an organizational belief where they’re trying to convince themselves that pitching to contact is a good thing. Spoiler alert: It isn’t.

It’s important to note that my jumping-off point of 2016 isn’t arbitrary or just the first season after the world championship, rather it’s the first time where the strikeout rate jumped above 21 percent. Here’s how the Royals have done against league average since then.

GRAPH

The Royals have consistently been below the league average when it comes to strikeouts over the last seven seasons. It’s actually gone on longer than that (the last time the Royals outpaced the major league strikeout rate was 2013), but let’s keep our focus here. Awwww damnit…I can’t help myself. Fine. Going back to 2006 when Moore arrived in Kansas City the Royals have bettered the league average in strikeout rate exactly twice. In 2009 (18.4 percent for the Royals versus 18 percent for MLB) and 2013 (20 percent for the Royals versus 19.9 percent for MLB).

At the heart of the lack of strikeouts is the inability to get ahead of batters with a first-pitch strike. This has been inclusive of the coverage of the team in 2022, not because those of us following the team was intrepid enough to find a trend, but because the Royals themselves were making a big deal out of it.

There you have it straight from the skipper:

They’re going to make a big deal out of throwing first-pitch strikes. Let’s see how that’s working.

The Royals’ research gurus are following this stat. Reports are being generated. Results are being analyzed. The team is communicating to Cal Eldred and the pitchers, emphasizing the need to work ahead in the count.

And they’re not only not improving, they’re the worst team in baseball.

By quite a bit.

So let’s dive a little deeper into this pitching rabbit hole.

When the Royals pitchers start off with a ball—remember, something they do more frequently than any team in the majors—they put themselves at a massive disadvantage. After an 0-1 count, opposing hitters are cruising to .291/.415/.467 with an OPS+ of 121. They’re 21 percent worse than league average when starting off a confrontation with a pitch out of the zone.

The good news is they’re not the worst! Just very close.

Time for a review. The Royals:

*Don’t strike anyone out.
*Can’t throw first-pitch strikes.
*Get crushed when they fall behind 0-1.

If you’re the type to be building a “Fire Cal Eldred” dossier, I’m doing a lot of the legwork for you. Flag this newsletter in your email or something. And I’m just getting started.

You could maybe live with a lower strikeout rate if the starters could actually find the strike zone. That Royals’ walk rate is also one of the 10 worst we’ve seen since 2016. If you throw out the Covid shortened 2020 season, their current walk rate is tied for third-worst since ‘16. As you would expect by the superlatives of this paragraph, the Royals’ walk rate is the highest in the majors.

Here’s what gets me as I see several teams repeat on these tables of the worst in whatever category…Not only are the Royals ranking at or near the bottom of the pile in some key pitching rates, they’re number 30 with a bullet. Do you have any idea how difficult it would be for the Royals to climb out of the basement on walk rate?

Look at how the teams are stacked above—just .2 percent separates 26 to 29. And then .5 percent to the pits.

The rotation has a 132 ERA+, meaning they’re 32 percent worse than a league-average rotation. That is—prepare yourself for this—the worst in the majors so far.

Yes, the case can be made that the 2022 Royals rotation is the worst in baseball.

Meanwhile, I could use some relief and so could the Royals.

I don’t have the energy to hand out letter grades to the bullpen corps. And you don’t want me to bring you down any more than I already have. Suffice to say the only bullpen worse than the Royals’ 118 OPS+ is the Reds at 133. (Lordy, Cincinnati’s bullpen is beyond awful.) The Royals relievers’ 1.76 SO:BB ratio is the worst in the majors and their 4.76 ERA is second-worst. (The Reds sport a 5.57 bullpen ERA. My god.)

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