We need to re-calibrate our standards for what we want the Royals to be
And it’s not our fault!
The past three decades have, for the Kansas City Royals and their fans, have got to be one of the most bizarre stretches in baseball history.
First off, the good: the Royals are one of 16 different Major League Baseball franchises to win the World Series since 1995. They are one of only six different franchises to make the World Series in back-to-back years. And along with the St. Louis Cardinals, they are one of only two small market teams to win it all in that span.
But punctuating this greatness have been multiple stretches of complete and utter baseball incompetence. Since 1995, they’ve had more 100-loss seasons (seven) than they have winning seasons (four). And the Royals have been not just bad but the absolute worst team the entire league for two separate spans of four or more seasons: from 2004 through 2007 and from 2018 through 2023. Hell, they’ve lost 90 or more games over half of the time during this post-strike stretch. That’s incredibly embarrassing.
As a result, an entire generation of Royals fans has grown up and rooted for a team having no idea what bland, mediocre baseball squads look like. See, the Royals are almost never just an 80-win squad that sort of hangs around—they’re usually out of the running by Memorial Day if we’re being generous.
What this means in practice is that Royals fans don’t know what truly good players usually look like. I don’t want to say that bad teams don’t have good players; that’s clearly not true as anybody who remembers watching Zack Greinke in 2009 can attest. But in aggregate, it is absolutely wild how little truly high-end talent Royals fans have watched.
Put it this way: hitting. We think we’ve seen great offensive players in Kansas City, right? The answer might surprise you. One of the best ways to look at offense is to look at weighted runs created plus, or wRC+ as its acronym. This stat gives proper weight to everything a batter does in the box and adjusts it to leaguewide offensive output where 100 is league average offensive production and every point above or below that figure is one percentage point above or below league average.
Since 2004, there have been 3,986 instances in which a player accumulated at least 400 plate appearances over the course of one season. Of that set, there have been 321 player-seasons with a wRC+ of 141 or higher. That works out to an average of 10.7 per MLB franchise, and it happens on average 16 times a year.
Do you know how many of those 321 player-seasons were put up by a Royals player? Zero. The answer is zero. No Royal has put up a 141 or better wRC+ in that many plate appearances since Mike Sweeney did it in 2003. On the flip side, only 51 player-seasons of more than 400 plate appearances have been 40% or more below league average. The Royals have seven of those.
This may sound like a silly point. Maybe it is. But I genuinely think that the Royals having so little top-end talent has skewed what Royals fans think is good. Royals fans grade the team and players on a weird curve because it’s most of what they’ve ever seen. This means that you get fans talking about and hyping supporting cast talent as core pieces every year, and it means you get prospect writers oozing praise about 23-year-old college kids in A-ball every year.
Baseball is a zero sum game. You win, another team loses. I don’t blame Royals fans at all for not recognizing what good baseball or good baseball players really look like because we haven’t seen it for decades, and when we did see it we didn’t see it for very long. So it is good that the Royals are good this year, even if they don’t end up making the playoffs. It means we’ll be able to pull our collective head out of the muck that Royals teams and fans have been in for so long.