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The Royals according to Ted Williams

July 3, 2025 by Royals Review


The Science of hitting

With the Royals hitting woes causing considerable gnashing to teeth in Royals Nation, I figured it was a good time to check in with Teddy Ballgame and get some advice. Not literally of course, since the Greatest Hitter who ever lived has been gone for 23 years. His body is gone. His head, unfortunately, is resting in some Arizona cryogenic facility, hoping that someday technology will exist to place Williams’ head on some younger, athletic body.

Williams’ bona fides as a hitter are beyond reproach: A .344 lifetime batting average, 521 home runs (despite missing almost five complete seasons to military service). Plus, the guy hit .388 in his age 38 season and .316 as a 40-year-old. He’s the last player to hit .400 with his .406 season as a 22-year-old in 1941.

Written in 1970 and published in 1971, The Science of Hitting remains one of the best books ever written about hitting. Ted and co-author John Underwood put together a seminal book on the science of hitting and in just 81 pages fully describes why so many batters fail and why a rare few succeed wildly. Every baseball player from Pee Wee’s to the Major Leagues should be required to read this book. Tony Gwynn, one of the greatest hitters ever, said that this book made him the hitter he was. I don’t think you need to hear any more praise than that. If a Hall of Famer with 3,141 career hits and a lifetime average of .338 isn’t enough to convince you, then you should maybe take up another sport. How about soccer, champ?

The first thing Williams makes clear is that “Hitting a baseball is the most difficult thing to do in sports”. I wholeheartedly agree. Williams also laments the lack of books written about hitting, comparing to say golf books, of which there are hundreds. Teddy also says “hitting is the most important part of the game. It’s where the big money is, where much of the status is and the fan interest. For an outfielder, hitting is 75% of his worth.”

Think about that statement in relation to the Royals. If in fact, that statement still holds water, Kansas City is in the desert with their outfielders. We all know that. That single topic has dominated message boards going back to last season. Yet the team cannot find or develop outfielders who can hit.

Of the players who have seen action for the Royals this season, seven of the nineteen positions players came from other organizations. Two of those players are no longer with the Royals. Of the twenty pitchers who have thrown at least an inning, only three were drafted and developed by the Royals. Bottom line? It appears the team knows they can’t draft or develop pitchers, so they buy them. The results show they can’t draft and develop hitters either. Sure, they got Bobby, but a second grader could have made that pick. They hit the lotto when they signed Salvy. If a team signs 100 sixteen-year-old Latin American players and one or two pan out, that’s a win. I’ve long contended that the Royals problem is a scouting problem. They just don’t find and draft or sign good players. Take the case of Jacob Misiorowski. If you haven’t seen this kid pitch yet, do yourself a favor and watch some Milwaukee Brewers games. Outside of Paul Skenes, he’s the best young pitcher in baseball. The rub on this? Misiorowski is from Grain Valley, Missouri. Grain Valley is 16 miles east of Kauffman Stadium. 16 BLEEPING MILES!! The Royals can’t even scout in their own backyard, let alone nationwide. The Brewers took him in the 2nd round of the 2022 draft. The Royals selected Gavin Cross in the first round and Cayden Wallace in the second, a few picks before Milwaukee tabbed Misiorowski. They had two shots at this kid and took a pass!!

I’ve seen Cayden Wallace play and I think he’ll be a decent big-league player. Unfortunately, the Royals gave him away to the Nationals for a pitcher who cannot stay on the field. Cross’ struggles have been well documented on this site. Like other scouting and draft failures (See Lacy, Asa), Cross may never see Kauffman Stadium unless he buys a ticket.

The Royals’ history of missing on and ignoring local players is long and ugly. Just a few off the top of my head: Ryan Howard, John Means, Max Scherzer, Ian Kinsler, Will Brennan and Mark Buehrle. Seems like I’m missing one? Oh yeah, a guy that grew up a few miles north of the stadium. Played for St. Louis. Great hitter. The name will come to me in a bit. I’m sure there’s other players that I’ve forgotten.

Maybe Williams’ advice won’t matter to this group. It certainly couldn’t hurt them to try his methods. Again, quoting Ted: “The ideal swing is not level and it’s not down. It’s at about 10% upswing.” Ted didn’t have a college degree, but he was a smart man. The guy was a fighter pilot in World War II and Korea. You don’t fly fighter jets if you’re a dummy. He figured things out. He knew the pitchers’ mound was higher than home plate and that any pitch arrives at a downward angle. Today’s extreme launch angles lend to a hit or miss outcome. Strikeouts have exploded in recent years as everyone swings for the fences. The exacerbated swing angles in today’s game reduces the impact zone for hitters. This seems like an easy fix.

“Pitchers as a breed are dumb and hardheaded. The smart ones, Feller, Whitey Ford, Ed Lopat (I’d add Greg Maddux to that list) are always after an edge.” Ted goes on with these pearls, “hitters are dead from the neck up. Hitting is 50% mental.” Williams always spoke in a loud, booming voice and was not known for mincing words.

Williams laid out four simple rules for hitters that are as valid today as they were fifty years ago.

1. Get a good ball to hit. There are counts that favor the batter: 2-0, 2-1, 3-0, 3-1. The pitcher doesn’t want to walk you. BE READY! Most likely you’ll see a fastball in those counts. Get a good pitch and drive it.

2. Proper thinking, do your homework. What’s his best pitch? What’d he get me out on last time? Is he on or off today?

3. Be quick with the bat. Williams once told a young Carl Yastrzemski, who fidgeted a lot in the box when he first came up: “the pitching at this level is a little faster. You have to be a little quicker with the bat. You can’t have any lost motion.” Yastrzemski took the advice, figured it out and became a helluva hitter.

4. Don’t swing at anything you haven’t seen before. Make the pitcher work.

Just for fun and to test William’s theories, I charted every pitch and at-bat in Friday night’s Royals-Dodgers game, a 5-4 Los Angeles win. It was more work than I anticipated, but here are some of the raw findings. Of course, just one game is a sample size so small that’s it could be irrelevant. Or not.

The Royals sent 42 men to the plate. LA sent only 36. The Royals had favorable hitters counts on 24 occasions, which is not as many as I anticipated. They didn’t do well in those counts, often looking at fastball strikes in the middle. During their at-bats, Royal hitters swung at eight balls outside the strike zone, which resulted in five outs. The Dodgers were much more disciplined, only swinging at two balls outside the zone.

Dodger stater Dustin May often threw first pitch fastballs, usually for a strike. Royal hitters for the most part, just watched these meatballs sail by.

The Royals also suffered from a brutal night by home plate umpire Alex Tosi, who missed three calls (pitches that were balls and called strikes) in the first inning alone and another in the 4th. He missed three when the Dodgers were hitting, one of which went against the Royals (a strike called a ball). Granted, you have to hit the ball and can’t rely on calls from the umpiring crew. But when Tosi rings up Bobby on a called third strike that was outside the zone, well, let’s just say I’m ready for the challenge system set to take effect next summer. There’s going to be some umpires getting their egos bruised in 2026.

Other takeaways from this game.

Noah Cameron was missing on his fastball high all night. That put pressure on him to get his other offerings over. He made the mistake of throwing the same pitch twice in a row to Shohei Ohtani. The second pitch landed in the water. Cameron, for the most part, threw well considering he didn’t have control of his fastball. His worst inning was the second. He fell behind Tommy Erdman, who walked (with help by a missed strike by Tosi) then fell behind Max Muncy, who made him pay by drilling a two-run home run on a 3-1 pitch. Comparing to Williams gospel, both batters had hitters count, Muncy was ready, and Cameron threw him a middle middle fastball and made him pay. It was the difference in the game.

Cameron didn’t get much help from his defense with errors by Jonathan India, Freddie Fermin and Bobby. Fortunately, none of those misfires resulted in the Dodgers scoring, but you can’t keep making three errors in a game and expect to win.

Jonathan India had a brutal game both in the field and at bat. Woof. India bounced back with a solid game on Saturday, and hopefully he can use that as a turning point to become the player the Royals thought they were acquiring. He’s a professional, so I expect his pride will drive him to perform better.

The Royals ran themselves out of two potential scoring opportunities, once with an ill-advised hit and run which resulted in Fermin being thrown out by a country mile. To run in that situation was idiotic. Dodger pitcher Dustin May was not sharp and the Royals had been putting runners on base each inning and had been hitting the ball.

Kyle Isbel followed that blunder with a double, which might have scored Fermin, had he stayed put at first. The second came when Tyler Tolbert got picked off first. As esteemed reader Khazad said, “Just stop running. They suck at it”. Truer words have never been spoken.

Going back to Williams, he was one of the first to advocate charting pitches and knowing what your expected batting average was for each pitch in the strike zone. Ted gets scientific when describing his strike zone as an area 22 X 32, about 4.8 square feet. He also says if a hitter expands the strike zone by just two inches per side, it increases the zone to almost 6.5 square feet, an increase of 35%. That is lethal to hitters. Ted preached KNOW THE STRIKE ZONE! None of this is new news, what with analytics what they are today. That stuff didn’t exist in Williams’ time. He worked it out himself. How does one get to the point of being able to identify pitches in the strike zone? Ted had 20/10 vision, which I’m sure helped immensely. He also states the obvious, “practice, practice, practice. Stay in the batting cage and hit until your hands bleed”. Players today, at all levels, have immense advantages that players in years past could only dream of. Better workout facilities. Video and computer data on their swings and at-bats. Better bats and batting gloves. More information about the pitchers they face. I figured in my last five years of organized baseball; I played in 61 games. Kids today sometimes play that many in a single season. We rarely spent time in the batting cage and it showed. We were terrible hitters. There’s no excuse today. If you want to be a better hitter, put in the work.


What’s the answer for the Royals? I don’t know. Could they benefit by incorporating some of William’s points? Absolutely. Could they benefit from a different director of hitting, say someone like Kevin Seitzer, who has some ties to the organization and has had success as a hitting coach? Absolutely. It’s obvious the current situation isn’t working. Will J.J. Picollo have the guts to make the necessary changes before it cost him his job? Stay tuned.

Filed Under: Royals

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