The Royals Game Planning Process Needs To Change
The Royals “reassigned” their hitting director; they need to go in an opposite direction with his replacement
The Kansas City Royals finished the 2026 season with the 5th highest hard hit rate in the MLB. Couple that with the 8th best batting average, add in the 12th best slug, sprinkle on top the 6th lowest strikeout rate (despite so many injuries to our best bats) and the upcoming stats I’m about to show you would be extremely confusing if you hadn’t paid attention this year:
Runs: 22nd
RBIs: 23rd
So what do the Royals need to do next year to turn solid batting numbers into runs and -- barring pitching quality -- wins? The answer, on the surface, may be simpler than you think:
see more pitches.
The Royals had the 9th fewest plate appearances in the league this year. Sure, as we mentioned before, they really didn’t strike out very much… but that’s because they were swinging so early and so often that potential strikeouts or walks were traded in for groundouts, popouts, and flyouts (but mainly flyouts as we’ll talk about in a future post). On the flipside, the Royals finished 23rd in walk percentage. Is this because they’re bad at taking walks? No, not really… but we’ll come back to that in a second.
The Royals were also 23rd in batting average with runners in scoring position and 27th in OPS with runners in scoring position. They were also 23rd in batting average with runners on base in general and 26th in OPS in the same scenario. Does this mean they’re just not clutch? Do we have to ship a bunch of players away because they’ll never get over the mental hurdle of not being able to perform in high leverage situations? I don’t think so. Because the Royals were also 8th in the league in batting average with runners in scoring position and 2 outs; an even higher leverage situation. No, I think the Royals biggest problem was in game plan. That’s why I think the Royals demoting or as they put it “reassigning” Alec Zumwalt is the best move they’ve made in a long time. Alec was the offensive game planner. He is the man who felt that, for the Royals to win, they needed to attack the starting pitcher early; swing at first pitches often, swing in unexpected counts where pitchers might expect a take, swing in general… just keep swinging. It’s the type of plan that works out if you’re a team that had been patient for most of the year and you want to win a few games with the element of surprise on your side. But when you’re a team that was already employing this tactic all year and you are desperate to win games after a 20-35 start to your season -- it’s not so effective. But going back to how poorly the Royals have performed with runners in scoring position, we believe that if your team is so used to being aggressive and swinging extremely often then they have a disadvantage in high leverage situations where the pitchers know they likely are going to swing and can get a lot of swing in miss on balls outside the zone. And then at the plate you have a bunch of batters that aren’t used to going late into a count and aren’t prepared to do so in a high pressure situation.
Making plate discipline and seeing more pitches a priority in 2027 will be the single biggest key to success for the bats next year. Not only do you increase your chance of getting on base, getting a starting pitcher out of the game earlier, and getting a win -- you also allow your hitters to improve more. This is something that is severely stunted if batters, especially younger ones, don’t get to see as much pitchers and therefore have less experience to draw on. It’s a similar criticism we had early in the season when they were platooning Carter and Jac. They’re not going to get better against left handed pitching unless they… face left handed pitching.
There’s reason to believe the hitting coaches under Alec who were focusing more on individual mechanics and development did a great job this year. Hopefully whoever replaces Alec in the game planner role of our hitting team has credibility, drive, and the ability to not over effect the game on a day to day basis.