Previewing the Royals’ postseason roster

Who makes the cut? What’s their role?

Two weeks ago I wrote an article, “The Royals are definitely going to the playoffs.” Since that time the Royals have gone 5-7...and their playoff odds have gone down only 0.4% per FanGraphs (if you’re looking for evidence that all this losing will become a problem, they were still up 3.1% before Friday night’s loss.) All three of the most commonly used sites have them well above 80% odds to make the playoffs from here. This is, more or less, what I meant when I said that the Royals were definitely going to the playoffs. They can play poorly and their positioning is so good that they can make it anyway. Not only is that still true, but it's more true, now, two weeks of losing baseball later.*

So with that out of the way, lets start talking about what the playoff rosters might look like. As likely as it is the Royals are a playoff team, it’s even more likely they’re going to be playing as a Wild Card team. That means the Royals will need to be ready to go as soon as the season ends because they will be playing on Tuesday, October 1 regardless of their seed. So, first, let’s talk about the lineup because this is probably where the most change is going to have to happen as the Royals drop their roster back to 26 from the 28 they’ve employed since the beginning of September.

Position Players

Despite the fact that I said we are starting with the position players, a lot of what the Royals do here probably depends on whether a pitcher - Michael Lorenzen - is healthy. The Royals can carry up to 13 pitchers on their playoff roster, but they might decide 12 will be sufficient given who they have available. If Lorenzen is available, that calculus changes. So here are the 13 guys who I think are definitely on the roster. Keep in mind that leaving guys off of the playoff roster doesn’t cause them to be immediately released and the team can make adjustments between series.

1. C Salvador Perez
2. C Freddy Fermin
3. SS Bobby Witt Jr.
4. OF Tommy Pham
5. OF Kyle Isbel
6. 2B Michael Massey
7. IF Maikel Garcia
8. IF Paul Dejong
9. 1B Yuli Gurriel
10. UT Garrett Hampson
11. OF Dairon Blanco
12. OF MJ Melendez
13. OF Hunter Renfroe

The 14th spot comes down to two things. The first is whether Lorenzen is healthy. If he is, then neither player will make it, but if he isn’t, then it depends on their opponent. The Royals’ two most likely opponents are the Orioles or the Astros. There’s still an outside chance they could catch and pass Baltimore - who are collapsing even harder than the Royals - for the first Wild Card spot at which point they would host the Orioles. There’s a slightly more likely chance that Minnesota or Detroit could catch them and force KC back to the final Wild Card spot, in which case they would travel to Houston. However, if the season ended today, the Royals would be the second Wild Card and headed to Baltimore for the Wild Card series.

If Lorenzen isn’t healthy, I’d expect to see Robbie Grossman on the roster versus the Astros and Adam Frazier versus the Orioles. This is because Grossman is significantly better against lefties and Frazier is significantly better against righties. The Astros have a lot of good lefties - Josh Hader, Framber Valdez, and Yusei Kikuchi come to mind - while the Orioles’ best pitchers are all right-handed.

Given how hot/cold everyone has been in recent weeks I would expect the lineup to mostly look like this:

1. Tommy Pham
2. Bobby Witt Jr.
3. Salvador Perez
4. Michael Massey
5. Yuli Gurriel
6. Hunter Renfroe
7. MJ Melendez/Freddy Fermin
8. Paul DeJong/Maikel Garcia
9. Kyle Isbel/Garrett Hampson

The slashes are relative to left-handed vs right-handed starters. The bottom third of the order can do a lot of damage if any two of those guys get hot. The frustrating thing is that Pham, despite being very good in some games, has overall been a disappointment. His walk rate - 4.1% - is only a bit more than a third of his career mark and about half of even the lowered expectations offered by his season marks prior to joining the Royals. His strikeout rate is has gone up a fair bit, too. Things just aren’t clicking right now. It does seem like players might be pressing too hard as over the past week we’ve seen hitters get a lot of hittable pitches and just miss them or swing at pitches we would normally have expected them to lay off.

I don’t think the Royals would do it, but they might benefit from leading off Gurriel instead of Pham. All we have are tiny sample sizes that are probably inflated by a very high BABIP, but Gurriel is slashing .379/.459/.448/.908 since joining KC. He isn’t offering much power, but having someone who is on-base after half of his plate appearances in front of Bobby Witt Jr seems like it could be a good thing.

Don’t be surprised if the Royals decided to keep Adam Frazier on the roster against all reason, though. I just don’t see how it works from here.

Pitchers

There’s far more to say about the “hows” of the playoff pitching staff than the “whos” so let’s answer the simpler question first.

1. Seth Lugo
2. Cole Ragans
3. Michael Wacha
4. Lucas Erceg
5. Kris Bubic
6. Daniel Lynch IV
7. Sam Long
8. John Schreiber
9. Carlos Hernández
10. Alec Marsh
11. Brady Singer
12. Angel Zerpa
13. (if healthy) Michael Lorenzen

That’s five lefties, there, which is almost half the pitching staff. That sounds like a lot, but that’s just where the talent has been.

Even when it comes to how guys will be used, there are some obvious locks. Seth Lugo, Cole Ragans, and Michael Wacha have shown they should be starting. Lucas Erceg and Kris Bubic will be divvying up the highest leverage relief roles. After the Wild Card series, the Royals would probably need a fourth starter, though. And Erceg and Bubic can’t pitch every relief inning. So who else can be trusted?

I think the fourth starter answer is still pretty easy. Brady Singer has a 4.06 ERA since the All-Star Break, and since he came out of the gate hot with back-to-back seven-inning, shutout performances he has a 5.19 ERA. But his FIP has been in the low threes over that same span and Alec Marsh would have needed to be lights out to take his spot. Lorenzen would have needed to be healthy. Also, Singer has almost no experience as a reliever. He started 2022 in the bullpen and he wasn’t good - he had a 6.35 ERA. So he’s going to be the fourth starter, as needed.

That said, Marsh, Lynch, and Lorenzen (if healthy) give the Royals a really interesting option in Singer’s starts. If it were any manager the Royals have had since I started watching almost 30 years ago, I’d say it was impossible, but I think Q might try this. Limit Singer to something closer to an opener’s role where he’s only allowed to go 3-4 innings and ask him to go all-out and hold nothing back. He still gets his starter’s routine but perhaps with a reliever’s mentality to pitch selection and pacing, he could find enough left in the tank to get the game to a long reliever - roles that all of the guys mentioned at the top of this paragraph have excelled in at one point or another, this year or last.

And if the Royals have all three of them, that leaves them with two other guys to back up any of the starters who struggle to go deep or give up too many runs. There will be no reason to leave any starter out there for an extended period if he doesn’t have it. Shorten the outing and try again sooner, if you want. Lugo and Ragans both have experience relieving, too, so the Royals should have a ton of flexibility when it comes to who is pitching.

After those six guys, plus the two relievers we trust, the Royals can kind of mix and match the other relievers in very limited circumstances and - because it’s the playoffs and because there are so many days off - the Royals should have the option to kind of just keep dropping guys onto the mound and see who can get outs on any given night.

But they may not even have to use all that flexibility. Royals Reporter Kev posted a very interesting article that shows that the Royals’ bullpen may be becoming a strength at the last minute. If you think about it, that makes a ton of sense, sure the Royals lost four in a row to the Pirates and Tigers, but none of those were blowouts. The relievers have all performed well, lately, here’s an updated version table he pulled off of FanGraphs showing the bullpen’s performance over the past two weeks.

EDIT: The original version of this post did not have the correct image. The image has been replaced and now shows the correct information

Only Stratton and McArthur, who seem exceptionally unlikely to pitch this postseason, were bad. Erceg, Bubic, and Lynch were brilliant. Zerpa seems recovered from whatever was going wrong before he was demoted. Add in Marsh and maybe Lorenzen to that group, and you’ve got enough relievers you probably feel good about to get things done.

It just goes to show how quickly things can change in MLB. Two weeks ago, it seemed that if the Royals failed in the playoffs it would be because of their bullpen. Before that, we all wondered if the starters were falling apart after adding too many innings to the workloads. Now it seems like the offense might end up being the thing that sinks this team.

But, of course, there’s still one more week to go. Anything could happen between now and then, and I can’t wait to see it.

*It’s probably worth pointing out, though I imagine many people are tired of hearing it, that the Royals actually have a positive run differential (+4) over that two-week span span since I guaranteed they were going to the playoffs. This means, yes, their hitting has been awful, but the game results have also been somewhat unlucky.

They also haven’t lost a single game by more than two runs over this latest five-game losing streak, with more than half of them coming by only a single run. And, in fact, of their nine losses so far in September, only three have been by more than two runs. Neither cold streaks nor bad luck can last forever. It will remain to be seen if the current cold streak survives until the end of the season or into the playoffs.