FanPost

The Royals, Offense, and Power

I was listening to 610 this afternoon and heard them talking about the Royals and their (lack of) power. They were specifically talking about home runs. However, that to me does not capture a team's power.

The Royals don't hit many home runs. We know that. The K reduces home runs. We also know that.

The Royals are a very much below average power team. The K reduces HRs, but that reduction in HRs should result in an increase in 2Bs and 3Bs (figuring that balls hit hard will fly out in some parks for HRs, but will stay in the park in KC and produce a 2B or 3B).

The Royals in 2013 were an above average team when it comes to hits. They had 1443 hits last season. The league average was 1422. However, the Royals scored only 648 runs. The league average was 702 (that's five wins worth of runs, by the way - where would the Royals have been last year with an average offense).

There are two culprits to the Royals offense. One is walks. Although the Royals are an above average hitting team, they were 80 walks below average last year, which led to them being a slightly below average OBP team (.315 as a team vs. a .320 league average mark).

The other culprit is power. Not just HR power, though. The Royals hit 112 HRs last year, 32 fewer than the next lowest team in the AL and 100 fewer than league leader Baltimore. But the Royals also cracked just 254 doubles, fourth fewest in the AL and 25 below the league average. Simply put, the Royals don't just lack HR power. They lack power in general.

The AL Central is full of big parks that would seem to promote doubles and sure enough, Detroit, Cleveland and Minnesota all were above average in doubles last year (5th, 6th and 7th, in fact).

The Royals were third worst in total bases. If the Royals were a more average power team, they should hit more doubles to make up for their lack of HRs. They don't do that. They hit lots of singles and walk very little.

Apparently that makes scoring hard. Except the Royals haven't figured that out yet.

This FanPost was written by a member of the Royals Review community. It does not necessarily reflect the views of the editors and writers of this site.