You can buy in on these Royals

The Royals have played fewer than 10% of their games, but it’s still had a huge impact

Before the season started, I was the only Royals Review writer to pick the team to finish above .500 this season. The big projection systems weren’t much more bullish on the team. FanGraphs had them going 76-86 with only a 13.2% chance to make the playoffs. That was still better than last year’s 72 wins and 5.4% chance, but not by much.

In contrast, if you check the most recent projections from FanGraphs, the team is now given a 32% chance to make it to the post-season and their projected record has improved by another four games to 80-82.

Yes, the sample size of the season is small, but it’s already having a huge impact on the way their season plays out. And, of course, that makes sense. Small sample sizes shouldn’t be projected out as if everything will play out exactly the way it has, and no one is projecting the Royals to finish the year with more than 100 wins, which is what would happen in that scenario. But they do get to keep every win they earn in the meantime.

If a player is projected to hit 20 home runs and has 20 at the halfway mark, you don’t project them to hit 40 for the full season, but you don’t stick to the original prediction 20 either. You might project them to hit between 30 and 35, accounting both for your original projection and the home runs they already did hit.

And when we go back and look at this excellent article by Suff76, we see that, as of the end of the Astros series, they had picked up even more wins than they’d need to hit their goals for 90 wins. They needed to be 7-6 after the Astros series. Instead, they were 9-4 and even if they lose both of their remaining games against the Mets this weekend, they are still on that pace for 90 wins.

But beyond that, the underlying metrics suggest the Royals aren’t doing anything crazy to earn their wins. The starters are all pitching well, and maybe a bit better than anyone anticipated, but not to an insane degree where if they regress back toward their mean things are going to get bad in a hurry. The worst FIP in the group is Brady Singer’s at 3.66. FIP isn’t perfect, but that still suggests these guys haven’t just been getting lucky but have been pitching effectively. We started to see the Royals make some strides with their pitching coaching last year with Aroldis Chapman, Cole Ragans, and James McArthur and it seems like the Royals picked more guys who could succeed in their system with Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha plus Singer bouncing back after a full off-season and Spring Training with the new coaches.

The offense has produced runs but not because anyone is playing way above the skill level that seemed plausible. MJ Melendez and Bobby Witt Jr. are leading the way, and while Melendez is incredibly unlikely to carry to a wRC+ over 200 for the entire season, Vinnie Pasquantino started off slowly and seems to be coming back into his own to help make up whatever difference there is between Melendez now and at the end of the year. Nelson Velázquez seems determined to prove that last year was not entirely a fluke. Maikel Garcia has been hitting the ball as hard as ever, but also hitting it in the air more and still has a wRC+ under 100. Hunter Renfroe has been something near the disaster we all expected and Kyle Isbel is still not great at the plate, but they’ve found ways to score runs anyway, so this isn’t just everyone being incredibly hot simultaneously.

The bullpen has been quite mediocre, in all honesty. They had a massive scoreless inning stretch but also gave up a ton of runs early to balance it out. Will Smith and Nick Anderson have not been good, the rest of them have pitched to reasonable ERAs and/or FIPs except for McArthur. The General has a whopping 0.4 fWAR already despite a 5.40 ERA because FanGraphs thinks he’s been exceptionally valuable but also exceptionally unlucky.

We’ve also seen that manager Matt Quatraro is managing to win and as if no one is guaranteed anything. Hunter Renfroe got the biggest deal for a position player from the Royals in the off-season, which under previous regimes would have meant he was batting in the middle of the lineup come hell or high water. Instead, Q has demoted him to batting eighth already and has given him more days off than any other regular. In the bullpen, Will Smith lost his closing job in under a week. There are also too many hungry, talented relievers at the AAA level to think he or anyone else will get to just keep pitching if they continue to struggle.

This isn’t a perfect team, and they’ll probably lose some more games that we wish they had won. They ultimately may not be strong enough to win the division. But for the past several years, this website has hosted a wide variety of articles attempting to grant permission to stop watching the team if you just can’t stand the losses anymore. It seems increasingly unlikely we’ll be writing any of those this year.

All most fans have been asking for is a team that plays at least around .500 and can be in the playoff conversation into August. Those FanGraphs numbers at the start are telling you that you now have what you asked for. It’s been long enough since you had a reason to really enjoy KC baseball, so enjoy this, Royals fans. You’ve earned it.