The Royals are good! Let us count the ways
We are more than a quarter of the way through the season. The Royals have earned your respect.
The 2024 Kansas City Royals are officially a good baseball team.
There are no more small sample size caveats, there never were caveats about having only played crappy teams, and Thursday night they even eliminated the caveat that it was impossible for them to score runs without Bobby Witt Jr.
There are even numbers to prove it!
All stats are before Friday night’s game, because it’s too late to write after those west-coast games.
The Royals are winning
The Royals are 23-16. That is a .590 winning percentage. That would be 96 wins over a full season.
Bobby Witt Jr. is playing at an MVP level
During the offseason, the Royals signed Bobby Witt Jr. to a massive contract extension that will cover at least seven years. It was the capstone on an offseason that saw the Royals spend on players in a way we’ve not seen since at least the early 90s, even when the team was winning playoff games in 2014 and 2015. There was little doubt that the contract was going to be beneficial for the Royals in the future, but it did nothing to directly improve the 2024 roster.
Or did it?
Bobby Witt Jr. has transformed from a 2023 superstar into a true MVP candidate in 2024. Can the security of his new contract be the reason? Who knows, but the Royals still appear to have gotten in on the ground level of a budding generational talent. Witt was pretty good in his rookie season and was worth 2.4 fWAR. In contrast, he has already been worth 2.7 fWAR this season. If he can keep that up for the remainder of the season, he would finish with more than 10 WAR which would make this one of the all-time great seasons.
To put this into some context, he is second in all of MLB in fWAR behind only Mookie Betts and just ahead of Shohei Ohtani. Last year’s top player was Ronald Acuña Jr. with 9.0 fWAR. Ohtani won the AL MVP with only 6.5 fWAR, which led the AL. The best season all-time for the Royals was George Brett’s 1980 campaign, when he almost batted .400, at 9.1 fWAR. Since 1900 there have only been 53 player seasons equal to or greater than 10 fWAR.
It might be tempting to suggest that Witt can’t keep this up for an entire season. However, he did all this while going almost an entire month between home runs. He hit his latest home run on May 8 against the Brewers but the last one before that was when he belted two against the Astros on April 11. He has only five home runs this year, but still leads the AL in extra-base hits thanks to his eleven doubles and five triples. Shohei Ohtani is the only one with more.
He could get better.
The Royals could get better, too
I wrote two weeks ago that the Royals might have been benefitting from some good luck from their starting rotation (FWIW, I wrote that I thought they were pretty good, too, other than a Brady Singer take that is making me look pretty foolish two weeks later.) But if their starting pitching has been lucky, the team as a whole has probably been pretty unlucky.
As noted in the first section, the Royals are 23-16. However, their Pythagorean record (which accounts for the runs scored and runs allowed to try to determine how many games they should have won) is 25-14. It’s hard to be two games off from your Pythag this early in the year.
The Royals are currently tied for the fourth-best run differential in MLB but are ninth in winning percentage. Baseball-Reference has an interesting stat called the Simple Rating System, which takes into account both game-level run-differential and strength of opponent and believes the Royals are the third-best team in MLB, behind only the Dodgers and Orioles. The Royals have the 12th-best offense in runs scored per game at a perfectly respectable 4.74, but the best pitching in all of MLB with only 3.41 runs per game allowed.
They are playoff contenders
If the season finished today they would be the last Wild Card team.
Per Suff76’s excellent preseason post, the Royals needed to be 22-16 following the Brewers series to be on pace for a 90-win season. That’s exactly where they were.
FanGraphs thinks they have a 36.1% chance to make the playoffs.
BRef thinks they have a 69.5% chance.
What else could you want?
I told you a month ago that you could buy into these Royals. If you had, you’d have had the distinct pleasure of watching them play very good baseball for a month. But it’s not too late to do it, now. There is room on this bandwagon for everyone. The Royals have played well. There’s no real reason to think they won’t keep playing well. And after years of articles about why it would be OK to find something better to do with your summer evenings, I can wholeheartedly endorse the Royals as an exciting form of entertainment once again.