2023 – A new beginning for the Royals. Matt Quatraro era begins. A year to see which of our young players will make up the core going forward. Can Bobby Witt Jr become a superstar SS or will go to the hot corner? Will Brady Singer take the next step forward? Will Salvy be Salvy? Will Big Vin or Pratto take first base? Will they find a position for MJ? Who else emerges from the youth movement? Not to mention the development of the new downtown stadium.
Free Agents/Trades Acquisitions
Jordan Lyles, RHP
Ryan Yarbrough, LHP
Josh Taylor, LHP
Aroldis Chapman, LHP
Top 10 Prospects from Baseball America
1. Gavin Cross, OF
2. Cayden Wallace, 3B
3. Drew Waters, OF
4. Ben Kudrna, RHP
5. Frank Mozzicato, LHP
6. Maikel Garcia, SS
7. Tyler Gentry, OF
8. Nick Loftin, OF/3B
9. Angel Zerpa, LHP
10. Carter Jensen, C [Reply]
If Singer keeps up from last year and this Bubic is the real deal, then that's pretty damn exciting. I'd like to see a couple more pitchers actually take a step forward. [Reply]
Thinking about going to see the Northwest Arkansas team play when they come to town later this month. I'm not up on our minor leagues, especially since so many players have been promoted in the last year.
Who are the exciting guys in Double A to check out? [Reply]
Originally Posted by myselff77:
Thinking about going to see the Northwest Arkansas team play when they come to town later this month. I'm not up on our minor leagues, especially since so many players have been promoted in the last year.
Who are the exciting guys in Double A to check out?
You've got a pretty good shot at seeing a fun SP.
Jon Bowlan
Alec Marsh
Asa Lacy
Anthony Veneziano
TJ Sikkema
All those guys are there. Beck Way, too. Luca Tresh (C) and Peyton Wilson (2B) are the hitters to watch right now. [Reply]
Originally Posted by GloryDayz:
On a different note, for those of us who don't have a Bally's option, are there any working streaming sites for Royal's games?
This is one, but it's Rangers announcers. Tomorrow it'll be KC announcers.
How 'bout the Royals making headline news over on Fangraphs? They are the first and only team using a 2-man outfield with a 5-man infield. They are bringing their RF in real shallow, where the 2B would play in the shift era, then shifting the other two outfielders over to compensate. They've used it 19 times already, notably rolling it out against Joey Gallo. He hit a hard grounder right to the shifted-in MJ Melendez, but Melendez booted it LOL.
Here are the two tweets from Tom Tango, a well-known sabermetrician that apparently now has the title of MLB data architect.
The fangraphs article attempts to determine how optimal this is, but they wouldn't have the proprietary data that the Royals would, so it can only be a guess. No other team has used it at all and they would have the same data as the Royals though. Time will tell if the Royals have just started a whole new thing.
In any event, MJ Melendez best get to work on his groundball fielding! Perhaps soon, fielding hot grounders will be a main requirement of a RF.
So far I have enjoyed all the interviews with Quatraro and I really want to see him succeed in KC. There seems to be a lot of positive changes in culture and I really hope this leads to competitive baseball. Games that are fun to watch.
I am struggling, however, with the analytics and the lineups we are seeing on a daily basis. Maybe someone can convince me to be more supportive, but I'm very put off by the line up we saw last night. The 5th and 6th hitters were Duffy and Lopez? Duffy was 'hot' I guess, but he's a career .374 slugger, not a 5th hole hitter. And we know Lopez is not a 6th in the line up type of hitter. I know. There's probably some plausible explanation as to why they were plugged where they were, but I'm just struggling to get excited to see a lineup that looks like that.
Sitting MJ Melendez against left handed pitchers? Granted it's a small sample size, but he has better splits against lefties than he does righties.
I guess I want to see MJ, Witt, Vinnie, and Salvy in the lineup every day (occasional rest for Salvy/MJ). Could probably lump Olivares in that top 5. His splits are better against righties than lefties!
Am I wrong to be frustrated with this? Do I need to give it more time? [Reply]
Originally Posted by Bronco_buster2:
So far I have enjoyed all the interviews with Quatraro and I really want to see him succeed in KC. There seems to be a lot of positive changes in culture and I really hope this leads to competitive baseball. Games that are fun to watch.
I am struggling, however, with the analytics and the lineups we are seeing on a daily basis. Maybe someone can convince me to be more supportive, but I'm very put off by the line up we saw last night. The 5th and 6th hitters were Duffy and Lopez? Duffy was 'hot' I guess, but he's a career .374 slugger, not a 5th hole hitter. And we know Lopez is not a 6th in the line up type of hitter. I know. There's probably some plausible explanation as to why they were plugged where they were, but I'm just struggling to get excited to see a lineup that looks like that.
Sitting MJ Melendez against left handed pitchers? Granted it's a small sample size, but he has better splits against lefties than he does righties.
I guess I want to see MJ, Witt, Vinnie, and Salvy in the lineup every day (occasional rest for Salvy/MJ). Could probably lump Olivares in that top 5. His splits are better against righties than lefties!
Am I wrong to be frustrated with this? Do I need to give it more time?
Former Royals managers Ned Yost and Mike Matheny were not exactly paragons of analytical thinking, and by the time you go back to the pre-Yost days of Trey Hillman, Buddy Bell, and beyond, the modern analytical movement was limited to a few cutting edge teams.
Matt Quatraro, then, brings a bit of a culture shock, coming from the Tampa Bay Rays and Cleveland Guardians school of analytics. That’s a big deal for a lot of reasons, and one of the most clearly obvious is in regards to lineups. Yost and Matheny tinkered, for sure, but Quatraro’s commitment to the analytics has resulted in some, shall we say, unusual looking lineups in this early season, a theme that continued when bench coach Paul Hoover took over when Quatraro tested positive for COVID-19.
Take, for example, this one, the fifth game of the year against Yusei Kikuchi: no MJ Melendez, no Vinnie Pasquantino, no Kyle Isbel, Matt Duffy hitting fifth. Seems weird!
Or this lineup, game eight in the young season. No Witt. Isbel hitting fifth. Michael Massey hitting...second?
Though these seem like the kind of lineups that you’d see in, like, September, there is logic behind them. In both cases, the opposing pitcher had extreme splits; Yusei Kikuchi’s career wOBA allowed against lefties is .283, while Alex Cobb’s wOBA allowed against righties since coming back from injury in 2020 is also under .300. Loading up with opposite-handed hitters gives you the best chance to win while paving the way for late-game substitutions, which the Royals have done in nearly every game.
Also contributing to these odd lineups is that the Royals are no longer committed to playing a player every single day forever and ever amen. Witt sitting out seems weird. Salvador Perez has already sat out, which seems even weirder. Look—baseball is hard enough to do when you’re not playing 162 games. Playing 140-150 lets players stay fresh and recover quicker from nagging injuries, and there’s no prize for getting to a games played streak of a few hundred.
Quatraro, Hoover, and company aren’t coming up with this on their own. Before each series, the front office sends the big league coaching squad suggested lineups based on expected run production against the projected opponent starting pitchers. These lineups are then tweaked by Quatraro from factors that the equations know nothing about (you know, quirky “human element” things).
But in any case, both of those weird-but-not-weird lineups above had something frustrating in them: Jackie Bradley Jr., who is, generously, not a big league caliber player. You know how everyone was tired of Ryan O’Hearn’s offensive ineptitude? Bradley makes O’Hearn look like Joey Votto. Which seems like a joke, except Bradley’s wRC+ since 2021 is 45, which is...bad, aka “second worst in baseball among everybody with 500 plate appearances bad.” [Reply]
Thank you ChiefsCountry. Interesting read. And I do understand the philosphy, but it makes me like it even less. It's just too extreme for me. It feels very much like Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill giving them the lineups and we should be geared for 30 million dollar payrolls, after we let MJ, Vinnie, and Bobby walk from their current contracts (or we trade them). It feels like a cheap trick if you know what I mean, as a means to compete. Can we not compete with good, every day players in the top 5 spots, and then platoon the the last 2 or 3 spots?
The changes so far in pitching is very much appreciated. Walks are getting lower and obviously giving up less runs keeps us in ball games. I hope it continues. [Reply]
His career OBP is 275? Minor league OBP was pretty good, but just not yet at MLB. His BB/SO ratios are not much to be excited about. Witt should not be lead off so I agree with you there. My vote is MJ but he’s struggling right now. [Reply]
