Friday Notes — Royals Thoughts for July 12, 2019

Well, he’s here. Bubba Starling was drafted fifth overall in the 2011 draft. I’m not sure how many of you have followed my Royals writing career, but that’s so long ago that I wasn’t even writing at Pine Tar Press yet. He’s been a top prospect, an also-ran and ultimately a guy who was non-tendered. But he’s stuck with it and he’s finally putting together a quality season in the upper minors that has garnered his first big league opportunity. He’s been a heck of an organizational soldier, though he had plenty of reasons to stick around for awhile with all the money the Royals gave him. But anyway, now he’s in Kansas City and is likely going to start in center field for his hometown team in the first game back from the break. My thoughts aside on what his numbers are going to look like when it’s all said and done, this is pretty darn cool.

• The Royals have 71 games left, and the real work of the season is starting now. I have no real problem with bringing in veterans to start the year, but once you get to this point in the season, it’s time to evaluate. Calling up Starling is the first step to that, but they also need to see Brett Phillips up at some point and playing most days. Phillips has hit .313/.426/.652 in his last 37 games with a manageable strikeout rate and great walk rate. With his ability to play defense, if he can hit even a little, he’s an asset. And he might need to play at the expense of Alex Gordon some. The way I see it, the Royals have five players for three outfield spots and DH, but one of them (Whit Merrifield) can play elsewhere too. That gives him the opportunity to play second some and first some as well. Merrifield is playing every day. Jorge Soler (the fifth guy) is playing every day. So that leaves two outfield spots for Gordon, Starling and Phillips. As much as I love Alex, he’s not part of the future beyond next year in all likelihood, so I’m fine with him sitting some. Let’s say there’s six games per week for the final 11 weeks, which is about right. Merrifield and Soler can play basically every day with the other guys getting a day off every week and still get pretty much regular reps. It’s extremely important to learn what they have in Bubba and Phillips because it can completely shape how they go about their off-season, and they need to find a way to make it work.
• I hope the All-Star break was all that Hunter Dozier needed to get back to doing what he was doing before he got hurt. He’s hit just .190/.271/.365 since his return in mid-June with two home runs. The plus side is that he’s still hitting the snot out of the ball. His average exit velocity since his return is 92.9 MPH, which is quite good. His hard hit rate is above 50 percent in that time and on balls he’s hit 100 MPH or harder, he’s 8 for 14 (.571) while the league average is .629. Now that’s not really that far off in that small of a sample, just one hit, but still, it’s a continued trend from earlier this season when he was destroying balls. But even so, the issue isn’t really bad luck. It’s that he’s chasing way more pitches now than he did before he was injured. His selectiveness was a big reason why I saw him as a breakout candidate who would stick. Before the injury, he was swinging at 27 percent of pitches outside the strike zone. Since he’s been back, that number is up a good amount to 34.1 percent. He’s also swinging at more pitches inside the zone since he’s been back, which isn’t always a good thing. It could be that he’s forced to because he’s swung at two bad pitches early in the count to get him to a spot where he can’t take a strike, even if it’s not the one to drive. And finally, he’s swung and missed on 13.7 percent of pitches since his return, which is way up from 8.3 percent before. Add it all up and you can see why he’s struggling. Hopefully these last four days have given him a chance to reset and he’ll come back the Dozier we saw before the injury.
• I’ve talked about this before, but I’ll bring it up again since there’s a lull in the action from the break. Cal Eldred has to go. And even if it turns out he hasn’t been as bad an influence as I suspect, the performance of the pitching staff indicates a scapegoat is necessary. Look at literally every pitcher on the roster under the age of 30. They’ve all regressed in some way. Early in the year when people were calling for Eldred’s head, defenders would argue that he’s been huge for Scott Barlow. Barlow now has a 6.19 big league ERA and is in AAA because he posted a 12.86 ERA in his final 14 big league appearances before his demotion. No, I’m not saying Eldred magically turned him to crap, but I’m saying the one example people had to fall back on was maybe the worst of them all after looking so good. I’ve heard from reliable sources that Eldred is sour on advanced analytics to the point that he mocks them, and there’s just no place in today’s game for that. And before you get your jokes in about how he’s a perfect fit for the Royals, this is an organization that was one of the, if not the, first to have Trackman installed in all their minor league facilities. They may not always listen to the analytics team, but they at least have invested in them. So I guess this is my every other month reminder that Eldred has got to go and the sooner the better.
• When Ryan O’Hearn first went down to AAA, he struggled. Even with a 3 for 5 game with two doubles in his first game, he hit .216/.322/.353 in his first 14 games with just one home run in a crazy home run environment. It’s a small sample, but after his massive big league struggles, you had to wonder if he would ever figure it out. The good news is that since then, he’s on a seven-game hitting streak in which he’s hit .333/.387/.852 with three home runs. All the samples are small, but it’s nice to see him having some success, especially given the struggles of Cheslor Cuthbert. He was on fire early with a .333/.378/.595 line in his first 11 games with three home runs, but since then, things haven’t been nearly as good with a .265/.282/.349 line in 21 games. It’s easy to overlook that because the average is high enough that you see him getting hits, but he has just one home run and four doubles in that time, and that’s just not going to cut it. He’s obviously out of options as he has been for a couple years now, so I can’t imagine they move on from him, but I can pretty easily see him being the weak side of a platoon with O’Hearn if they decide to bring him back up in the next few weeks. Hopefully that would finally mean the end of Lucas Duda. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I’m sure O’Hearn just needed a few weeks out of the spotlight to get his swing back and he’ll be the guy we see at the end of 2018, but he’s a better bet than anyone else they have to be a productive big leaguer simply because he’s done it and done it recently.