My hope is the bats improve as it warms up. They haven't played a lot of warm weather games yet. It's weird because this was a legitimately okay offense up until September last year and they fell off a cliff and haven't found it again. I don't know what else you can bank on at this point, just too many holes. [Reply]
Originally Posted by tk13:
My hope is the bats improve as it warms up. They haven't played a lot of warm weather games yet. It's weird because this was a legitimately okay offense up until September last year and they fell off a cliff and haven't found it again. I don't know what else you can bank on at this point, just too many holes.
Are our players allowed to wear 1980s era leg warmers, use wool gloves, and perhaps were some 4th Element undergarments (seriously good stuff!!!) to bring some of those Surprise Arizona temps back to their bats?
Black holes all over the lineup. Vinny has to hit to make this work at all. Salvy will have a hot couple months - I have no doubt.... but as it stands not doing anything to upgrade the outfield bats looks like a pretty big mistake. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Why Not?:
Last season, Salvy played above his norm in regards to early season offensive performance. That really helped carry the team (along with BWJ, but that's a given). Considering we brought back most of the same awful cast of characters (looking at you, outfield) Salvy not being able to do that is killing this team. Not necessarily his fault, just awful to go into the season with the same shitty guys.
It wasn't just Salvy though. I wish I had the data to prove it, but I'd bet the royals performance through August was one of the luckiest offensive performances ever. Not in the traditional measure, which is cluster luck, but in a way that shows that guys were playing so far above their head that it helped carry everyone else.
Salvy hits 368(!) in April? I believe that's the best mark of his career. Of course that's only slightly ahead of Fermin who hit .364 one month and .368 another month. Think that happens again? Massey in May hit .333 with a 970 OPS! He will never come close to that again. There is quite a bit of talk about the outfield, but in June and July we probably had a top 5 corner outfield combo in baseball. I'm serious, stop laughing. Renfroe hit 333 with a 1.078 OPS in June with a .297/870 line in July. Meanwhile Melendez had an 800 ops in June and a 944 OPS in July. To put these 900 OPS months in perspective, those would all qualify as Juan Soto's third best month last year. This is not normal. A "normal" hot month is something like Isbel hitting .303 with an 850 OPS in June last year. That is realistically the hottest he can get.
In reality sure, someone will get hot eventually, but odds are we will not have anything close to these kinds of numbers put up. For every guy who was struggling last year at a certain point, we had 2 guys having maybe the best month of their career or playing at an All Star level at least. That just isn't sustainable, and it finally hit in September and has lead into this season. [Reply]
