How the Royals can get better without spending more money

The 2023 Royals are one loss away from tying the franchise record for losses…

Today let’s start with a disclaimer because lots of media members who never go to ballgames or speak to players or coaches like to pose as sports “insiders” which is a label that doesn’t accurately describe them or me. I’m not sure how you spend 100% of your time outside the ballpark and still think of yourself as an insider, but some members of the media seem to manage it.

And even if you actually attend games, sitting in the press box and visiting the clubhouse doesn’t make you an “insider” any more than sitting in a jet airplane and visiting the cockpit makes you a “pilot.”

A real “insider” is someone who shows up every day and knows stuff the general public and the rest of the media doesn’t, but a real “insider” has to be careful about what he or she reveals because if they reveal the wrong thing their sources of inside information are going to quit talking to them.

When I was covering the Kansas City Royals I dealt with the What-Secrets-Do-You-Tell-And-What-Secrets-Do-You-Keep Dilemma by focusing on what happened on the playing field because the players did that in front of everybody so it wasn’t exactly a secret.

I also decided I wasn’t there to write about their marriages or girlfriends or who got so drunk he had to be carried out of a team party or who behaved like a giant asshole during the team’s World Series Celebration and if you want to know that stuff you should buy me three or more drinks next time you see me in a bar and your chances of seeing me in a bar increase daily.

For a few years I was maybe a “limited insider” which means some people in the Royals organization told me pretty much everything and some people in the Royals organization wouldn’t piss on me if I burst into flames and a few people in the Royals organization would buy tickets to watch that last thing happen.

I haven’t been inside a major league clubhouse since the pandemic started because for an entire season reporters couldn’t go in the clubhouse or on the field or have private conversations with players and doing Zoom interviews where players don’t say jack shit – which is what they do when the cameras are turned on – while still having a chance to catch COVID from my fellow writers didn’t appeal to me.

So these days I have no “inside” information…but here’s what I’ve seen from the outside.

Excuses: a baseball tradition

Baseball has a lot of traditions like the singing of the National Anthem by marginally-talented performers, throwing out the first pitch by celebrities who appear to have never held a baseball before and team officials and players making excuses for losing.

According to the internet, baseball has been played professionally in America since 1885 so they’ve had 138 years to come up with rationalizations for losing and you’ve probably heard most of them:

“We’re rebuilding.”

“When the time is right, we’ll spend money.”

“We’re headed in the right direction and expect to turn things around in the near future.”

Playing every day is both a curse and a blessing because when you’re playing lousy the bad numbers just keep piling up and burying you deeper, but playing every day also  means you have a chance to play better tomorrow and earlier this season here’s what some of the Royals had to say after an extended losing streak:

Catcher Salvador Perez: “Tomorrow is a new series and we’ve got to try to do our best.”

Reliever Mike Mayers: “There seemed like it was one or two plays all six games that if those go our way, maybe feel a little bit different about the road trip.”

Manager Matt Quatraro: “How do we reset? We do the same thing we try to do every day…You come in with a new attitude, you start over and prepare for tomorrow.”

But sometimes those excuses are offered because they’re true.

In 2010 a lot of Royals fans still thought Dayton Moore was an idiot and was making excuses when he talked about the players in the pipeline, but it turned out Dayton was right and the Royals did turn things around.

And don’t forget we all thought it was great when Dayton didn’t break up the team after the World Series Championship and trade away players Kansas City had come to love to acquire less-expensive talent, which is at least one of the reasons the Royals are currently scuffling.

Now let’s talk about another.

Bad fundamentals

One of the benefits of playing a sport for over a century is some of the smart guys who play it figure out the best way to do everything and I do mean everything. There’s a right way to hold a bat or catch a fly ball or tag a runner and when you do things right you get the most out of your talent.

The 2023 Royals have lost 105 games and need to sweep the Yankees this weekend to avoid tying or beating the franchise record for losses so it’s easy to conclude they stink, but it’s hard to tell just how much better the Royals could be if they did things right because they spend too much time doing things wrong.

Full disclosure:

I didn’t watch every Royals game or always pay 100% attention when I did (nothing encourages afternoon naps more than a slow ballgame ) and I also didn’t write down names and dates because I didn’t know I needed to, plus I’m no longer paid to do this stuff, but in no particular order I have seen the 2023 Royals:

• Fail to cover a base.

• Fail to back up a base.

• Overthrow the cutoff man.

• Fail to play the wall correctly. 

• Fail to run good routes to a ball.

• Fail to take 90 feet on a wild pitch.

• Fail to keep the double play in order.

• Fail to swing at hittable pitches with two strikes.

• Fail to make sure someone was covering first base before throwing the ball there.

• Fail to pick up the ball on a hit and run and just keep running when the ball was lined out to right field which turned one out into two.

• Fail to score from third base when a groundball was hit up the middle and the infield was playing back, conceding the run.

• Fail to keep running hard between bases which resulted in failing to take an extra 90 feet when the opposition defense made a mistake.

• Fail to get a free base after getting hit by a pitch because the guy bunting didn’t pull the bat back before the pitch hit him.

• Fail to run out of the box because the hitter decided the ball was going foul…it didn’t.

• Fail to chase down a fly ball because the outfielder decided that ball was also foul…it wasn’t.

• Fail to block a sinking line drive in the outfield, turning a single into a triple.

• Fail to use the right technique when catching a fly ball with a runner tagging.

• Fail to catch a pop fly because the infielder and outfielder didn’t communicate.

• Fail to get an out on a double steal because they also apparently failed to talk about what they were going to do if the runner on first base took off for second.

Annnnnd…

• Over and over again, fail to understand the game situation and play accordingly.

You could argue – and the Royals announcers often do – that the team was getting better as the season progressed and it was, but in late September I still watched one of their centerfielders launch a throw home to get a runner whose run didn’t matter. The throw had absolutely zero chance of getting an out, but since the throw was high and missed the cutoff man, the runner on first base – whose run did matter – advanced to second and took the double play out of order. You shouldn’t see this kind of bad play in high school, much less on a Big League field.

That’s a player who didn’t understand the situation and play accordingly.

I tried to avoid complaining about stuff like swinging at bad pitches (which the Royals do a lot) and I tried to avoid that stuff because having attempted to play it, turns out baseball is really, really, really hard and I’m pretty sure some of those bad pitches looked hittable for the first 55 feet.

As they say in baseball: “The farther away you are from dirt, the easier the game becomes.”

Baseball is easier when you’re in the dugout, much easier when you’re in the stands, easier still when you’re in the press box and really easy when you’re sitting on your couch at home, working on your third beer which I plan to do sometime this weekend.

Failing because your opponent did his job better than you did yours is not a sin and happens to good players all the time. But the stuff I listed is totally within the control of players – the opposition can’t force a pitcher to forget to cover first base – and there’s no excuse for screwing those things up.

Are bad fundamental the fault of the coaching staff?

The answer to that question is a definite maybe.

If a coach gets in a pitcher’s ass because he gave up a hit and decided to stand there and pout before backing up a base and the throw from the outfield gets away and a runner advances because the pitcher was late doing his job, will the front office support the coach or the player?

It’s not as simple as it sounds because these days a player might call his agent and his agent might call the team GM and say if in the future you want to sign any of the other players I represent, tell your coach to get off my player’s ass.

BTW: I’ve got tons of respect for Royals current GM J.J. Piccolo (seen here telling Rex Hudler the moon is not a planet) and who knows what J.J.’s working on or what he’s got up his sleeve because like I said at the start I’m not an “insider.” In 2010 fans complained about the quality of the players because fans didn’t know most of those guys were just placeholders until the players in the pipeline were ready.

Anyway…

Yelling at a player who makes 80 times as much as you do and has a six-year contract while you’re on a one-year deal and hanging by a thread might not be the best idea a coach ever had, but managers do control one thing; the lineup card – at least on the good teams.

But I wouldn’t be totally surprised if the Royals analytics department makes out the lineup for manager Matt Quatraro and if they do it robs Quatraro of one of a manager’s biggest enforcement tools because most players want to play.

I say “most” players because some guys make a pretty good living by just being ready and rarely playing and as a player once told me, “Overexposure is the fastest trip out of the Big Leagues.” As the player explained it: if you never play, who knows, you might be great, so don’t fuck that up by getting on the field and proving you’re not.

In any case…

The coaching staff is theoretically responsible for cleaning up a team’s fundamentals, but they can’t do it if they don’t have the support of the front office and don’t forget team owners who won’t stay in their lane and might call up the GM and say I’m paying that guy 18 million dollars, why isn’t he playing?

And as is so often the case…analytics

You might think I’m beating a dead horse, but in reality this horse is alive if not exactly well and responsible for at least some of what I just complained about.

I’ve said this before, but players will work on the skills that get them paid and if baseball teams valued ventriloquism and tap dancing, players would run out and buy a dummy and a pair of tap shoes.

Analytics overvalues individual numbers and undervalues team play, so it’s understandable if a player thinks he’s got 600 plate appearances to hit 30 home runs and get stinking rich, so he’s not going to waste even one of those plate appearances grounding out to the right side and moving a runner over – he won’t get paid for that.

Way too many teams undervalue fundamentals and until that changes we’re going to see pitchers throwing hard as they can with little idea of how to actually pitch and hitters swinging out their asses and striking out way too often and players throwing to the wrong base and generally fucking things up on the base paths and if it makes you feel any better (it really shouldn’t) I see other teams do the exact same things, but the Royals do them more often which is part of why they’re in last place.

It has been suggested that the Royals need to spend more money on players and that’s pretty much always welcome, but no guarantee a team will win.

If the Royals want to play better without spending one extra dime they can do it with the talent they have – if they clean up their fundamentals. Focusing on fundamentals doesn’t mean the Royals will actually be a good team, but it does mean they’ll be a better team and maybe next season avoid 100 losses and setting a franchise record for losing. If they played clean baseball this season they might still be in last place, but I can pretty much guarantee you they wouldn’t have 105 losses.

And now I’m going to open a beer and sit on my couch and watch some baseball because from there, it looks pretty easy.