The 2022 Royals Tripped Over the Bar of Low Expectations
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There's no need to make excuses for what happened this year, mostly because the Kansas City Royals had a bad season due to them being a poorly run organization. Whether or not you believe that changed with the firing of Dayton Moore is entirely up to you, but I'm pretty comfortable saying an organization that has made the playoffs twice since 1986 is poorly run.
The failure of this Royals season is an inditement on how Kansas City has done business since the 2015 trade deadline passed — a topic that will take so long to cover that it can't be contained to merely one article. This is why this year's evaluation of the Royals' failures has to be spread out over four more articles.
For this article, we'll focus on the failed expectations that the Royals had going into this year. Before any revisionist history seeps its way into your memory, please look at what we at Inside the Royals thought about what this team was capable of in 2022.
The lowest predicted win total for our projections was 76. Although it would've been only a slight improvement over 2021, it would've been one nonetheless. On the contrary, however, this Royals team barely avoided losing 100 games. It's safe to say that not many people had the Royals being a bottom-five team in the league on their bingo cards for the 2022 campaign.
I said in my prediction that I didn't hate the lineup but the pitching, while young and promising, was too underwhelming to compete. For the most part, I can still look at the lineup and not hate what I see, but there is no hope with this current staff. Take out Brady Singer, and the Royals' future for pitching is incredibly bleak.
Out of the six players that got the bulk of the starts for the Royals this year, four of them finished with an ERA at 5.00 or worse. As far as the arms in the minors leagues are concerned, Ben Kudrna was solid, Frank Mozzicato had good strikeout numbers but was below average everywhere else, Beck Way is a 23-year-old Single-A pitcher, Jonathan Bowlan was bad and Asa Lacy may be broken beyond all repair.
Also, let it be known that when the Royals traded away Andrew Benintendi for three mediocre minor league arms, I said it was a terrible idea from the beginning. I was right. Only Way looks like he was worth the investment, with T.J. Sikkema and Chandler Champlain struggling. In short, there is no one coming up to save this team as things are currently constructed.
In the bullpen, Scott Barlow was Scott Barlow and Dylan Coleman replaced Josh Staumont in the circle of trust for Royals fans. After that, it's a bunch of meh. A reincarnation of "HDH" may never arrive (and expecting it to is unfair), but the Royals' bullpen is still a hot mess that needs to be fixed. John Sherman and the Royals could legitimately pour $100 million into free agent pitching acquisitions this offseason, and I'm still not sure they could completely patch all of their holes.
The expectations for Bobby Witt Jr.'s rookie year were never going to be met unless he showed that he was an MVP candidate like Julio Rodriguez was in year one. Witt had a good but not great year, and it's fair to reason that the Royals' supposed savior hasn't quite earned a mega-deal yet.
The only expectations the Royals met this year were for their managerial and coaching staff, which isn't good. Mike Matheny routinely proved that he was unwilling to play the future pieces of the franchise, instead choosing to give at-bats away to Ryan O'Hearn and Hunter Dozier. His distrust of young players was the knock on him coming out of St. Louis, and it was ultimately proven right in Kansas City.
Did you know that when Cal Eldred was hired, he had no experience as a pitching coach? The Royals essentially hired him to oversee the most important part of a rebuild, and it blew up in their faces. In 2022, after all, Singer and Zack Greinke were the only bright spots out of the entire rotation. I'll hold off on judgment for the hitting coaches until next year. With that being said, the Royals were far too inconsistent on offense as a young (but hungry) unit this season.
The Royals organization is a dinosaur whose time has passed. Rather than adapting, they refused to do so and instead believed they were always one reclamation project or one veteran away from competing. In the face of that, all signs pointed to the contrary.
The Royals' main expectation this year was to provide their fans with some hope and to show that they would be ready to compete next year. Over the course of the season, fans got a slap in the face by way of a 97-loss season and still have a bunch of question marks surrounding whether or not this new rebuild will run out of steam before even it has the chance to pay off.
In next week's article, we will take a look at the Royals' farm system and the failure of its pitching prospects.
