Michael Massey and Drew Waters are the tipping points for the offense

Once again, we sit in August witnessing Kansas City Royals baseball through a lens of some sort of avant-garde postmodernism. Even though the point of professional sports is to win games, whether the Royals win or lose does not matter; rather, it is the development of individual players that is important.

Better performing players will naturally lead to more wins, of course. And lately we’ve seen some strong movement in that front. Cole Ragans looks like a revelation. Brady Singer has a 3.53 ERA in his last 13 starts. Freddy Fermin looks like a legitimate starting catcher. Bobby Witt Jr. has taken steps forward on offense and defense.

To me, though, the two most important names to keep an eye on are a pair of names who have flown under the radar and yet who are a big part of just how far and how quickly this rebuild goes. As you might expect from the title of this blog, they are Michael Massey and Drew Waters.

I’ll explain why that’s the case here, but we have to back up a bit.

What do playoff teams look like? Royals fans don’t have a lot of recent experience to draw on, considering the team has made the playoffs twice in 38 years. So, we’ll look to other teams. There are a lot of ways to answer that question, but I’ll keep to something pretty simple as it pertains to Massey and Waters: how many good hitters do playoff teams have?

I took a look at last year’s playoff teams and counted how many players they had in a couple of buckets: players who were worth more than 1.5 Wins Above Replacement per Fangraphs, players who were worth more than 2.5 WAR, and players who were worth more than 3.5 WAR and 4.5 WAR. These are the results:

This doesn’t take into account pitching, sure. But it’s a pretty good representation of what it takes to win enough games to make the playoffs on the offensive side of the game. It reveals one common misnomer, which is that playoff teams are filled with stars. That’s sometimes the case, but the average playoff team in 2022 only had three hitters worth more than 3.5 WAR, and in fact no playoff team last year had more than four hitters at 3.5 or more WAR.

It’s the lower end of that list that is important: playoff teams are deep. The average playoff team last year had seven hitters worth 1.5 or more WAR, with four different playoff teams at eight or more hitters who accrued that value. Last year, Kansas City had four. The year before, five. They combined for six such players in 2018 and 2019.

Moving forward, you can for sure count three players in the “contributing player” camp: Bobby Witt Jr., Maikel Garcia, and Vinnie Pasquantino. Freddy Fermin seems pretty likely to be in that group, too. And let’s say one of Nick Pratto or MJ Melendez get into that group.

That’s five players. To get to seven, the Royals are gonna need some help. And this is where Massey and Waters step in.

Since the All-Star break, they’ve both done quite well. Waters has hit .243/.313/.500 with four home runs in his last 83 plate appearances. The budding prince of the Three True Outcomes has ended up with a home run, walk, or strikeout in a whopping 43% of the time over that stretch.

Similarly, Massey has also been mashing since getting that mid-July breather. He’s hitting .230/.288/.527 with six home runs in his last 80 plate appearances despite an extremely low .183 BABIP. More broadly, Massey followed up a terrible, horrible, no-good very bad first month of the season by hitting .245/.320/.454 since May, a 219 PA stretch in which he has accrued 1.3 WAR.

There are certainly reasons to be skeptical of both. Waters just strikes out too much, and it’s really hard to contribute offensively if you’re walking dejectedly back to the dugout 35% of the time like he does. Meanwhile, Massey has middling exit velos and doesn’t walk very often due to his aggressiveness.

And yet, neither Massey nor Waters are that far away from becoming productive hitters. They’re both young, and neither has yet to eclipse 500 big league plate appearances. They’ve shown good power and have put together some nice stretches. Heck, Waters owns a career wRC+ over 100, and Massey had a 93 wRC+ in almost 200 PAs as a rookie.

We’ve been in this situation before, rooting for players to reach their 80th or 90th percentile outcomes in order for the Royals to turn it around. Just like with most young players, Waters and Massey are more likely not to take that next step than they are to take it. Baseball is hard.

But it’s not a ridiculous question considering nonlinear player development and the talent they’ve shown on the field in their age-25 and younger seasons. If they do? That’s a big boon for the Royals.