2024 Team Previews: Kansas City Royals
Going through all 30 teams, looking back at 2023 and ahead to the 2024 season through a fantasy baseball lens.
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Royals Intro
The league’s second-worst team in 2023 was the Royals, winning just 56 games. I probably wouldn’t have guessed they were quite that bad, as they have a handful of interesting players on the offensive side of the ball. However, their park suppresses offense and they have not been able to put together a decent pitching staff in several years.
You are not going to see Kansas City do anything crazy in free agency, but they sure do have some holes to fill in to even limp through the 2024 season - so I expect that this roster will look different than I present here by the time the season is getting started. There’s a few exciting young bats here, and one very interesting ace at the top of the rotation - but things get thin really quickly on this roster. Let’s go through it!
Hitters
Bobby Witt Jr.
Age: 23
Pos: SS
What a season for Witt Jr.
694 PA, 97 R, 30 HR, 96 RBI, 49 SB, .276/.319/.495, .813OPS, 17.4% K%, 5.8% BB%
Nearly a 30-50 season, and this guy will be 23 at the beginning of next year.
We will go further on Witt Jr. to really break him down, but right away seeing the 30-49 season there is enough to put him in the first round.
He is one of the elite dots on that plot, and the launch profile is mighty fine as well:
Let’s hit the percentiles:
Not too many players we’ll see are above the 75th percentile in both K% and Brl%, which is one of the key things we really like to see.
So that’s the good on Witt Jr. A bunch of steals, a bunch of contact, and a bunch of barrels.
He’s a clear first-rounder, and possibly a top five guy. But, unlike some of the other top-ten names we’ll get to, there are negative points to hit.
His OPS doesn’t match the rest of the game’s top players. If we look at the top ten players in fantasy point scoring last year and show their OPS as well:
Acuna Jr………2,081 points….. 1.012 OPS
Freeman……...1,724 points…….. .979 OPS
Olson….…….…1,716 points……. .993 OPS
Betts….…….….1,639 points……. .997 OPS
Witt Jr.…….…..1,571 points……. .813 OPS
Carroll….……...1,565 points……. .873 OPS
Rodriguez…….1,559 points……. .818 OPS
Ohtani….………1,535 points……. 1.066 OPS
Semien….……..1,526 points……. .826 OPS
Tucker..….……..1,525 points……. .886 OPS
So he has the lowest OPS of the bunch, and he’s way behind some of the other names there. That has a lot to do with his lack of walks (5.8%), but also a lot to do with the home ballpark. His xSLG came in at .535, which is way above the .457 he actually posted. That might normalize next year with some natural regression, but he’ll very likely under-perform that as long as he calls Kauffman Stadium home.
It doesn’t really matter though, I’m getting a little bit too nitpicky. Witt Jr. has an easy 25-35 floor (assuming full health), and the ceiling is 40-50 with a .280 batting average - an easy top-three player if that were to happen.
This is the first actual good fantasy player I’ve talked about so far, but I don’t really see myself ranking anybody besides Acuna & Betts ahead of Witt Jr.
JA Projection: 677 PA, 106 R, 29 HR, 98 RBI, 41 SB, .284/.333/.517, .850 OPS
Vinnie Pasquantino
Age: 25
Pos: 1B
It was pretty much a lost season for Pasquantino, who went out for the year on June 9th. In the two months he was on the field:
.247/.324/.437, .762 OPS, 9 HR, 0 SB, 12.0% K%, 9.7% BB%
So yeah, it wasn’t going super great for Vinnie P there. Chances are, with the lack of RBI the Royals lineup would have provided him, he would have finished with a pretty underwhelming fantasy season - although it’s hard to say that for sure.
What we do know is that he has extraordinary bat skills. Let’s look at some numbers for his full MLB career:
.272/.351/.444, .795 OPS, 8.2% Brl%, 11.7% K%, 10.3% BB%, 83.7% Contact%
So he is one of the toughest guys in the league to strike out, and he hits the ball pretty hard while doing that (.363 xwOBA, 44% hard-hit rate). That’s not a combination of skills that many people have, and it gives him pretty big upside at the plate.
The real-life upside might be higher than his fantasy upside, however, given that he’s slow and pulls the ball a few points above the league average. That leads to him not getting too many “extra” hits and not stealing any bases. Combine that with the lower RBI upside he has on the Royals and you have a surprisingly mediocre fantasy player.
There is also the point about there being serious questions about his power ability after the shoulder surgery. This is a tough injury to come back from quickly, so we could see a suppressed amount of power in 2024 - at least early on. He’s a tough case to project and rank.
It will be quite interesting to see where his price settles. First base wasn’t a very great position in fantasy in 2023, so he could be a pretty nice get if he falls due to the missed time. His floor is solid, if nothing else. I think you can count on a good to great batting average with 20+ homers and a decent supply of RBIs. He’s not a ceiling player (I’d call his season like 75 runs, 30 homers, 85 RBI, 3 SB, .280 AVG), but he could fall enough in drafts to make him a valuable pick.
JA Projection: 589 PA, 76 R, 23 HR, 87 RBI, 4 SB, .281/.363/.477, .840 OPS
Salvador Perez
Age: 33
Pos: C
It was a down year for aging catcher. He posted just a .714 OPS, a far cry from the .817 he went for between 2021 and 2022. The rest of the numbers:
.255/.292/.422, 23.4% K%, 3.3% BB%, 0 SB, 8.9% Brl%, 69.6% Contact%
You know you’re getting no steals with Perez and the batting average upside is severely capped by his slowness, but he’s stayed fantasy-relevant with a ton of playing time at a tough position and a bunch of homers.
All of the power stuff came down in 2023, which really makes him a tough button-push for fantasy purposes in 2024. He hit just 23 homers in 578 PAs, putting him about in the middle of the pack in home run rate:
The barrel rate came down to a 8.9% as cited above, that was his worst effort since 2017. He was at 16% in 2021 and 11% in 2022, so this was another large step downward.
I’m not sure where Perez is going to go in drafts, and it’s not out of question to think he could have a bounce-back season where he stays on the field and hits 30+ homers again, but that will come with a “fine” (at best) batting average at best, and then no steals, not many runs, and an RBI count you could live without.
I don’t want to get too bogged down by the granular stuff in these posts, I think we can get more than enough information just from our basic stats, but Perez really stands out with his swing-happy ways. You can see he’s below the 1st percentile in walk rate, and the swing rate is at the top of the league.
This is nothing new, he’s always been a guy that goes up there swinging looking to hit a ball out of the yard, but that tendency gets exploited by pitchers, and there’s real risk there if he continues with that swing rate while seeing his contact ability / swing speed decline.
Every decision should consider ADP, I can’t say that I’m totally out on Perez until we have some ADP, but I imagine the name value will price him higher than I’ll want to pay given the huge risk and lack of real upside. I’m sliding him in behind Shea Langeliers as I slowly make these player rankings.
JA Projection: 598 PA, 74 R, 25 HR, 82 RBI, 2 SB, .256/.304/.441, .745 OPS
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