Don’t swing!
Baseball is a straightforward game with a look of weird nooks and crannies, but it basically boils down to one event, an event which happens over and over and over in a game: the pitcher throws the ball. The batter tries to hit the ball.
But you don’t get to do so ad nauseam. There is a limit to how many hitters can come up to the plate, and the entire game stems from the one resource that both sides of the pitcher-batter matchup are trying to manage in opposite ways: the out. Pitchers want to get outs. Batters want to avoid making outs. The more outs a team makes, the fewer runs their score. It’s really that simple.
In baseball stats parlance, this is exhibited through the simple stat of on base percentage, or OBP. It’s the inverse of this idea, and expresses how often a player avoids making an out. It’s more important than hitting for extra bases because there is not a limit to how many bases a team can take in a game. There is, however, a finite number of outs a team can make, and that number is 27. Once those are used, that’s it.
The 2025 Kansas City Royals have struggled with this whole “avoiding outs” and “scoring runs” thing, which makes them an often frustrating watch. The league average runs per game this year is 4.31, and the Royals have failed to hit four runs scored in 65% of their games so far. The 18-38 Chicago White Sox have scored more runs on the year in one fewer game than the Royals have. Feels bad, man.
As you might expect from my framing of said badness, much of Kansas City’s offensive woes can be laid at the feet of a poor OBP. Their team-wide OBP of .301 is fifth-worst in the game. A significant driver of this is because the Royals have the lowest team-wide walk rate in the league at 6.5%.
It is tempting to stop here, because telling the batters to “just walk more” is a fair complaint and frankly an accurate prescription that would significantly soothe the Royals’ sad scoring situation. But it is only one part of the issue because, as RoyalTreatment wrote the other day, the Royals have by far the lowest home runs in baseball. This is despite the Royals putting the bat on the ball more than any other team; in addition to the lowest walk rate in the game, the Royals also strike out at the second-lowest rate in baseball.
How could the Royals have the lowest walk rate and the second-lowest strikeout rate? That answer is simple: the Royals swing the bat all the freakin’ time, and they do so to make a lot of contact. The Royals are the only team in baseball with a top-five swing rate, a top-five chase rate, and a bottom-five whiff rate.
Unfortunately for the Royals, we have a lot of data that says that swinging more often is bad for your offense. In 2022, The Athletic posted an article that I still think about to this day that discussed plate discipline and addressed why swinging less is good for an offense.
Now, front offices can see another incontrovertible fact in the numbers, one that has more implications for pace of play and the enjoyment of the game:
Hitters should swing less than they do.
It’s an unfortunate fact if you find the swing more exciting than the take, but it does seem to be true. With the current rules of the game, hitters are more productive when they swing less often…
…Very few hitters in the history of baseball have a positive run value on swings. Hall of Famers did good things; everyone else was a net negative for their team when they swung.
“Hitters should not swing,” said Kyle Boddy, proprietor of Driveline Baseball, an independent player development lab in Washington. His analysts even looked at the value of swinging at more strikes… and found it was negatively correlated with outcomes.
There are a lot of other issues with the Royals’ offense. They hit the ball in the air too often. They don’t make enough hard contact. They don’t barrel the ball very much.
But all of it sort of stems from one issue: they swing too much. They are too aggressive. They are not selective enough. Ultimately, the Royals, both as an organization and as a collection of individuals, need to be more comfortable with watching strike three go by. They need to be comfortable with acquiring guys that maybe don’t have great contact skills but do aggressively seek walks.
Is this a hitting coaching thing? Yeah. Is this a roster construction thing? Yeah. All of the above. It always is. I don’t necessarily think that jettisoning hitting coach Alec Zumwalt would do anything of value here and certainly wouldn’t solve the roster construction issue. However, a rethinking of their hitting philosophy is in order. And if the Royals can’t retool somewhat on the fly here with regards to getting on base, well, they probably won’t be making the playoffs. For the pitching staff’s brilliance, that would be a real shame.