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Chapter 1: What festive events are happening at Advent Health Sports Park?
Celebrate the holidays at Advent Health Sports Park December 20th. Start your day with brunch and bowling with Santa at 10 a.m. Then hit the ice for skating with the Grinch at 2 p.m. Festive fun, photos, and family memories all in one magical day. Don't miss it at Advent Health Sports Park.
Hour number four of the program on Sports Radio 810 WHB. I'm your host, Jack Johnson, filling in for Soren Petro. Curtis Seaboltz here. Kyle Collier is producing this thing. And it's now time to talk some baseball with Jeff Passan. And the Royals begin a three-game series tonight in Cincinnati. But first things first, Jeff, thanks for joining us this evening.
Pleasure is mine, Jack. I'm assuming that you, like Soren, want to just trade everyone right now?
Yeah.
Chapter 2: Who is Jeff Passan and what is his connection to the Royals?
Oh, man, I just need to see some good baseball is what I need to see. And I'm not sure it happens tonight. They get a gift and not having to face Chase Burns. But I got to get your thoughts on this. I mean, this is a team that not just in Kansas City, but it seemed like everywhere in baseball after the World Baseball Classic. We're high on the Royals. They could win this division.
They could compete with the Detroit Tigers. But unfortunately, they're 15 games below 500 on June 1st. They still technically are in the hunt in the wildcard picture at six and a half games back.
Chapter 3: What are the current challenges facing the Kansas City Royals?
But I don't think you can have that conversation until you start winning some series. So what have you seen that has gone so wrong for this club?
Well, I suppose on one hand that all of us who were bullish on the Royals were right that they can compete with the Tigers. I mean, the Tigers also happen to have the worst record in Major League Baseball right now, and the Royals are only a half game up on them. Yeah, it's been a disaster of a season. And, you know, I think there are plenty of things that we could point to.
The ineffectiveness of the offense and the struggles of everybody not named Bobby Witt Jr. And, you know, even offensively, Bobby Witt's having a very good season, but it's not up to the MVP runner-up type caliber that he's had in the past.
Yeah.
Mikel Garcia wears the slug. Salvador Perez has always had trouble getting on base, but 26% of the time is just not going to cut it. Vinny Pasquantino, you know, a 630 OPS. I thought coming off the WBC especially, he was primed for a great season. Jack Caglione has shown flashes. Carter Jensen has shown flashes, finally getting a home run yesterday to the opposite field, but...
Just the offense has been pretty dreadful, top to bottom. Then you go to the pitching, and when you have the injuries that they do, whether it's Cole Reagans or Chris Bubich now, even if you do have effective starting pitching in Michael Waka and in Seth Lugo, and... You know, league average earned, I suppose, slightly below from Noah Cameron.
But, you know, you have Daniel Lynch with a breakout type season. There's just not enough, though. There's not enough depth. There's not enough effectiveness. There's not enough quality. And at the end of the day. I think you're exactly right. It comes down to did you win the game or not?
And you can look at teams that have flaws, like the Tampa Bay Rays, for example, who have only three hitters in Yandy Diaz, Junior Cabanero, and Jonathan Aranda, who have been consistently above league average with their OPS. And You look at their rotation, and it's actually pretty similar with a couple of effective pitchers.
I know Nick Martinez has been out of his mind this season, and Shane McClanahan's been very good. But I'd say the rotations are pretty similar, and the bullpen, like, the race has been solid. But if you look at it top to bottom, I wouldn't say that it's clearly, definitively, totally better than the Royals. And yet... they have almost opposite records. And so what does it come down to?
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Chapter 4: How has the Royals' performance changed since the World Baseball Classic?
When you have a paucity of talent compared to the best teams in baseball, I think there are some intangibles that are really difficult to quantify, and that's something that the Royals are clearly missing right now.
Mark Twain, who to my mind is the only author who is considerably better than you, said ā once talked about lies, damn lies, and statistics. But some stats are pretty damn demonstrative and illustrative. And there's one that I think maybe capsulizes what's wrong with the Royals this year. They have 30... Quality starts. Only the Dodgers have more.
The league average winning percentage when you have a quality start is just over 700. The Royals are 16 and 14. Is there a stat you can think of that more describes or illustrates what's wrong with this team?
It's got a very simple explanation, Curtis, which is that a quality start, you need to go at least six innings and give up three or fewer runs. And three runs is not enough. Like, this offense, it just doesn't consistently score four-plus runs. And so those are games that you're going to lose when you're putting up zero or one or two.
And, you know, what the Royals are going to do about their offense at this point, I don't know. I mean, J.J. Piccolo said pretty clearly we feel like we've got the right staff in place. At some point, though, something needs to change. And that's either coaches or players. And, you know, players are a lot tougher to move than coaches are.
So it will be very interesting to see how the Royals handle this because. What they're doing this season, it is unacceptable. It should be unacceptable. This is not, when they put this team together, anything close to what they had envisioned for it.
So when you start doing an autopsy in season on where did things go wrong, sometimes the answers to those questions are going to bring you to really difficult conclusions. And you just have to be... You have to be committed to winning above all else. It doesn't matter what the personnel is. It doesn't matter who the coaches are.
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Chapter 5: What are the statistics highlighting the Royals' struggles this season?
Winning is the priority. And so how are you putting your team in the best position to win? That's the question the Royals need to be asking themselves right now because they're not doing enough of it.
There are two bits of conventional wisdom I think are conflicting with the Royals right now. One is that Matt Quattrero is in a situation where he's unlikely to be fired anytime soon, if not in this regular season. The other is that when a team's lost 16 of 19, somebody's ass needs to be in someone's briefcase, to quote Wilford Brimley. What happens in that situation?
Someone feels like you need to pay the price, but it ain't going to be the manager, is it?
I don't think it's going to be the manager, but the worse this gets, the louder that conversation is going to be. And I think before you get to the manager, the coaching staff tends to come first. It's not always the case, but when the offense is functioning the way that it has... Clearly, there are things that the organization could be doing better.
Now, whether that's a question of talent evaluation and acquisition or player development, I don't know how to assign the percentages to that. Yeah. I think the point Jack made earlier, like the numbers are telling a story right now and it's a story of great failure by this team. That's an extremely lucid point. You can't argue with that.
The sense of urgency of the Royals to me is going to be a really interesting part of the conversation going down the stretch. Not just the sense of urgency to get better, to get out of these doldrums that have gripped and choked the life out of this team, but... how do you respond to it? And it needs to be a multi-point response.
It needs to address this season, but it also needs to address the future and how they're putting themselves in a position for this not to happen again.
The only other person, I mean, the person, if it's going to be an in-season change, the only other person with the crosshairs on him has got to be, obviously, Alex Zumwalt. But if they make a move sometime on this road trip or whatever, I think it might be the right move. But at the same time, there's a lot of people going to be going, Now? I mean, why now? Why not May 1st?
You know, it's a damn if they do, a damn if they don't.
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Chapter 6: What changes might the Royals need to consider moving forward?
That's a sign of not just a bad team but a terrible team.
I think we're already driving on that road, my friend. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, there was just ā It felt like there was some promise after the Seattle sweep and especially you take those first two games in the Cleveland series and you lose the last two, but then you get two against Detroit. And this was before Detroit had gone into its complete free fall.
And since then, six game losing streak, a win, four game losing streak, two wins. six-game losing streak. And we've talked in this segment plenty, Curtis, about how a six-game losing streak is not...
entirely going to cross out a uh you know a playoff berth and a nine or a ten game losing streak that that's not disqualifying either like you can come back from those but when you stack losing streak on top of losing streak and and you have three four plus game losing streaks over a 19 game stretch you're just putting yourself in a position to never be able to claw your way out of that.
And that's where I fear the Royals have put themselves right now. You know, it's one thing to be back in the division. It's another just to be 15 games under .500. Because not only do you have to get, let's just say you get back to 500 and on the way, think about the number of teams that you're going to have to pass.
And, oh, by the way, there are still, even if you get back to 500, even if the Royals were to rip off a 15-game winning streak starting tonight, they would presumably still be behind the Chicago White Sox and the Cleveland Guardians of the Central.
Yeah.
Like, there's just so much work that a team has to do that I have a difficult time at this point seeing that happening, which is a rough thing to say with 100-plus games left in the season.
And it's even a surprise looking ā some things are a surprise from the preseason expectations, but even from where we are looking back ā Most of the time when a team has big losing streaks is because they don't have very good starting pitching.
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Chapter 7: How do coaching decisions impact the Royals' current situation?
How much of this are we going to unload? How much are we going to start over? To me, the untradeables on this team right now, Bobby Wood Jr. is not going anywhere. Mikel Garcia, not going anywhere. Carter Jensen, not going anywhere. Jack Cagliome, probably not going anywhere. Beyond that, how many guys are you in a position, if you're the Royals, to say no to?
Hmm. Probably nobody. And that includes Vinny. You did mention Vinny in that list. And I assume that's for a reason.
Yeah, Vinny Pasquantino's got two years until free agency. One of those could theoretically be lost if the lockout continues throughout next season. Yeah. I think short of an extension, and nothing he's done on the field this year has screamed to the Royals, we should extend the guy.
Short of an extension, I think you have to listen because you know that there are going to be teams out there that are going to want Vinny Pasquantino if only for the reason that they feel like they would be buying low and would have an opportunity to make a positive surplus value trade. But right now, I think... Anything should be on the table for the Royals. Is it on the table?
That remains to be seen.
We'll talk with Jeff Passan here on the program. And kind of to segue off of that, or I guess to another point, when you are roughly 60 games into the season, though you're only six and a half games out, at what point do you just come to terms with the fact that you are going to be a seller? I mean, I'm sure the coaching staff is telling the players, hey, one good week, two good weeks, whatever.
We're right back into this thing. But what have you seen in the first 59 games that would indicate a good stretch or two is coming? I mean, do you wait till the end of June? Do you wait all the way into the trade deadline to see if something happens? Or is it here in the coming weeks where if you've got a good deal on the table, you might as well pull the trigger?
I think the Royals should not discount any possibilities at this point and have to be very open-minded toward, frankly, moving just about everyone on the team. I think that would be the smart thing to do. I think that would be the pragmatic thing to do. I understand not wanting to give up hope, but I think you put it well there. What have they done that suggests that they're worthy of that?
What have they shown, other than for maybe a week-long stretch here or there, that this team has any chance of turning things around? I mean, maybe it goes back to the belief in starting pitching. But starting pitching has gotten you to a 22-37 record at this point, regardless of how good it's been. So... That's not working.
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Chapter 8: What future strategies should the Royals adopt for improvement?
And it's not like we're 10 or 20 or 30 games into the season, guys. We're approaching the halfway mark of the season. And if at that point you don't have a decent sense of what you are, a feeling of what you can be, and that the what they can be is the type of team that can claw back from this seemingly insurmountable lead that Cleveland has right now.
Listen, I will fully acknowledge that the Cleveland Guardians are a team that has flaws, and it's not like we're looking at a team that's going to be anywhere near favored to win the World Series this year. Like, in terms of playoff teams, if the season ended today... I think the Yankees would have better odds. I think the Rays would have better odds. I think the Mariners would have better odds.
And depending on who the wild cards are, I think, you know, certainly if one of them comes out of the East, probably going to have better odds. So...
uh that's the team by the way that the royals are chasing so if they're chasing this team that's probably fourth or fifth in line in the american league alone and oh by the way they have to leapfrog two other teams in their own division and you know six seven other teams within their own league to get there it just it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to chase that it's it's almost like if you have bad money into something
acknowledge that there's a sunk cost instead of trying to repair it when it might just be irreparable.
Last one for you here, Jeff. Really appreciate your time. Looking ahead to the offseason, let's say the Royals go in that direction of selling off some pieces. You tear it down a little bit. What should the focus then be for J.J. Bacolo and company?
Is it a, that was a lost year, now let's build things back up again by spending money, making some big trades, or is it more leaning into a quick reset where you're You're trading off some more pieces. You're trying to get younger. You're trying to get cheaper.
Not that the Royals have a big payroll, but you kind of lean into that quick one- to two-year rebuild so that you're set up for more extended success moving forward.
And I think a lot of this will coincide also with the opening of the new stadium. And that, to me, is a big part of this whole deal and, frankly, the reason why the Royals shouldn't be entering into a full rebuild. And I
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