Or is it overblown?
Covering a baseball season is a long, sometimes grueling marathon. Fans can tune in and tune out as they please, but the media apparatus attached to it must churn out Content no matter what is going on, day in and day out.
As a result, there are some consistent themes and types of articles that surface during specific stretches of the year or when there are certain comparisons to be made. I am no stranger to these themes, as I’ve been writing at Royals Review for (gulp) 11 years now; Lord knows I’ve participated in pretty much all of them at this point.
All of this is to say, guys, gals, and non-binary pals, that we have entered Fretting Over Situational Hitting season. For the Kansas City Star, beat writer Jaylon Thompson wrote an article titled “The Royals’ offense led the AL in this area last year. Now, they’re dead last.” The area, he points out, is batting average with runners in scoring position.
The Royals are hitting .224 with runners in scoring position (RISP). They rank last in the majors with a .315 slugging percentage in those situations.
By comparison, the Royals posted a .282 batting average with RISP last season. They ranked first in the American League in that category.
Pasquantino hit .360 with RISP in 2024. Perez hit .329 with nine home runs and 76 RBIs in clutch situations. They both were hitting below .230 prior to Friday’s game.
“In my mind, it starts with me breaking through with a big hit and doing something to help the team,” Pasquantino said. “It’s kind of how our lineup works and how we set it up. It’s how we set it up last year and how we set it up in years past. The biggest difference between this year and right now is I’m awful with runners in scoring position.”
And Anne Rogers, Royals beat writer for MLB.com, also wrote about the lack of hitting with runners in scoring position after the Royals’ 7-5 loss to the Tigers on the last Friday of May. After highlighting that the team was only two for 11 with runner in scoring position, she wrote this:
“We don’t want to leave anybody on base,” catcher Salvador Perez said. “Eleven today. We need to figure it out.”
Two months into the season, and that has been the most striking difference between this year’s team and last. In scoring situations, the 2024 Royals were excellent, with a .282 average (second-best in the Majors), .348 on-base percentage (sixth) .446 slugging percentage (sixth) and 116 wRC+ (eighth).
Not so much this year, even with the same lineup plus leadoff hitter Jonathan India. Their team .224 average in scoring position ranks 25th in MLB, .284 OBP ranks 29th and .315 slugging percentage ranks at the very bottom…
…No one feels those struggles more than the hitters themselves. The solution isn’t always clear or easy; if it was, this story wouldn’t exist.
This, by the way, is not a criticism whatsoever of Jaylon or Anne. I’ve been in some of the same interview scrums as them this year and everybody hears the same quotes; it’s not like Vinnie or Matt Quatraro will whisper different, secret answers to specific reporters. These articles about hitting with runners in scoring position exist in large part because the team is talking about it.
In fact, the Royals were talking about it back in Spring Training, with pitching coach Alec Zumwalt outlining situational hitting drills:
“There were times that, because of who we were playing and because we weren’t playing very well, when that situation came up, we pressed so hard,” Zumwalt said. “That’s natural. Every hitter can say they had opportunities they wish they had capitalized on more last year.”
Some improvement should come internally, as the young hitters gain another year of experience and awareness of those big moments when they need to slow the game down to execute. Some improvement, the Royals believe, will come from the veteran hitters they added.
“The first time you’re in that big moment, your mind is racing,” Hunter Renfroe said. “Your heart is racing. But the more you do it, you’re able to say, ‘I’m calming down. Take a deep breath.’ And the more you fail, the more you understand. Experience is the best thing for that.”
Alright, fine, I admit, I am a big fat liar. Maybe you were tipped off by “Hunter Renfroe, added veteran hitter” or by hovering over the link, but that previous quote wasn’t from this Spring Training—it was from 2024 Spring Training, where the Royals wanted to improve from 2023’s abysmal figures with runners in scoring position.
The reason why I brought up such old news there is because I think it helps illuminate the current situation. I don’t think that focusing on the Royals’ problem with hitting with runners in scoring position is an efficient use of time because it implies that Royals hitters could fix it with a better approach, as I’ve seen lots of folks on social media and here in the comments claim. Rather, the key issue here is just really simple: this is a result of a roster construction strategy and simple variance.
Variance is easy to explain—there’s basically no statistical evidence that “clutch hitting” exists. I wrote about this back in April, and it’s still true. And, frankly, I wonder if some of this isn’t getting into Vinnie’s head in a bad way; I mean, the dude only has a walk rate this year of 6.1%, and his command of the strike zone is way too good for that to happen. Yes, Vinnie has been worse at hitting with runners in scoring position, as has Bobby Witt Jr. and Salvador Perez. The biggest issue with those three is that they’re hitting worse overall, though; the only reason we care about their RISP production is because their overall production is an issue.
To me, the big problem is roster construction. When there are such big on-base percentage holes in the lineup, that is going to negatively impact those RISP numbers at an outsized rate. Last year, the Royals were pretty mediocre overall but at least skill was distributed throughout. This year, not so much. As we’re about a third of the way through the season, I took all Royals this year with 50 plate appearances this year and all Royals last year with 150 plate appearances and sorted them into OBP buckets.
This year, over 60% of batters with 50 or more plate appearances had an OBP of greater than .325 or worse than .275, twice as much as last year. When players who make a lot of outs come up to base, they are inevitably going to come up to base with folks on said bases, and why would you expect them to turn into Aaron Judge in those scenarios?
Two other things are at play here. One, the Royals don’t hit any home runs. At all. With 34 home runs, they are the only team with fewer than 40, and they are 26 home runs shy of the median team in the league (60 home runs, shared between Cleveland and Tampa Bay). If you gave the Royals six more home runs, all of them with runners in scoring position, that would change their line drastically and they’d still have the fewest dingers in the league.
The other thing at play is simply that Witt has been worse than last year by a pretty large margin. His 2025 wRC+ of 121 is 47 points lower than it was last year. Now, that speaks to how crazy he was last year, but it also speaks to how much the Royals needed him to do something similar. You can’t expect Witt to carry the team every year, but the Royals built their squad this year like he could. If Witt slumps—just like he has over the last 13 games, where he’s hit .173/.182/.308—Kansas City just can’t weather that storm.
So, no, I don’t think the Royals’ problem with RISP is worth worrying over. It’s notable, but it is a symptom of other underlying causes. It’s also probably not going to change until they bite the bullet and bring Jac Caglianone up and trade for a bat at the deadline. Buckle up.