For most of this season – even when the Royals were at their
worst, a designation they appear intent on challenging yet again – I have tried
to refrain from blaming Ned Yost too much for their problems. It’s not that I
think that Yost is a great manager, or even a good one. But at least this
season, I don’t think he’s been a bad one, and more importantly, I think that
the problems that have bedeviled this team all season – i.e. offense – have
been more the result of roster construction than of roster deployment. And I
think that placing the spotlight on Yost just allows Dayton Moore to scurry
away and hide in the darkness.
So I haven’t written too much about Yost. I think he’s cost
the Royals some runs by letting guys like Chris Getz and Alcides Escobar bat
waaaay too often at the top of the lineup. But where I think he has cost
the Royals the most is if, as rumored, he is the reason why Kevin Seitzer was
let go. This season is a bright, shining exhibit of how the disappointing
offense of 2012 wasn’t Seitzer’s fault:
- Jeff Francoeur was a worse hitter for the Royals this year
(.208/.249/.322) than last year (.235/.287/.378), and even worse after joining
the Giants (.194/.206/.226). Seitzer only worked with him for two seasons, and
in one of those Francoeur hit .285/.329/.476. It looked like an impressive
achievement at the time; it looks like a freaking miracle today.
- Alcides Escobar hit .235/.288/.326 with the Brewers in
2010, then hit .254/.290/.343 and .293/.331/.390 in his two years with Seitzer.
That first season breaks down as .203/.237/.236 through June 3rd, then
.286/.323/.411 the rest of the way. Selective endpoints and all that, but if
you give Seitzer two months to work with his new hitter, he basically turned
Escobar from a .230 hitter to a .290 hitter with some pop.
This year, Escobar hit .295/.333/.429 through May 5th – and
he’s hit .218/.241/.266 since. He’s at .236/.262/.303 overall, even worse than
his one full season in Milwaukee. If you assume that there’s a lag of a month
or two between the time a hitting coach works with a player and the time the
results manifest themselves, Seitzer is basically the difference between
Escobar being an above-average shortstop offensively and one of the worst
everyday hitters in the game.
- Salvador Perez hit .331/.361/.473 and .301/.328/.471 in
two seasons with Seitzer as his hitting coach. This year, he hit .318/.340/.439
through June 15th – and .213/.260/.290 since. He’s hitting .268/.301/.367.
Again, a guy who hit beyond expectations under Seitzer, and doesn’t resemble
the same batter at the plate this year.
- Mike Moustakas hit .263/.309/.367 and .242/.296/.412 under
Seitzer – not great, but not terrible, and he was trending upwards,
particularly when you consider how bad he was when he first came up (he hit
.182/.237/.227 in the first 53 games of his career, then hit .379/.412/.564 in
36 games the rest of the way). This year, he’s hit .235/.292/.366. This,
despite being at an age where you would expect him to improve over time.
- Alex Gordon struggled for two years after Seitzer was
first hired in 2009, partly because he was injured and partly because he was in
Triple-A. After the 2010 he reconfigured his swing. He hit .303/.376/.502 in
2011, and .294/.368/.455 in 2012. This year, he hit .340/.379/.502 through May
29th. Since then, he’s hit .214/.299/.346; he’s at .268/.332/.413 overall. Two
years ago, he hit 45 doubles, and last year he led the league with 51 doubles.
This year, with a month left to go in the season, Gordon has only 22 doubles.
- In four years under Seitzer, Billy Butler hit between .291
and .318 every year, and slugged between .461 and .510 every year. This year,
he’s batting .289 and slugging .423, although he’s walking more than before, so
his .383 OBP is his highest since 2010. From 2009 to 2011 he averaged 47
doubles a year; he hit only 32 in 2012, but also hit a career-high 29 homers.
This year, he has just 12 homers and 24 doubles. He had at least 60 extra-base
hits every year under Seitzer; with a month to go, he has just 36 this year.
- Even Eric Hosmer, who was probably the reason Seitzer got
fired last year after he hit just .232/.304/.359 last year, didn’t do a damn
thing under the new hitting coaches until Jack Maloof and Andre David got
fired. He’s been terrific ever since, but his overall line this year of
.299/.347/.453 is essentially indistinguishable from his performance as a
rookie in 2011 of .293/.334/.465. (His OPS+ is 118 each year.) He was 21 then;
he’s 23 now, and the same hitter overall, although we’re certainly hopeful that
the hitter he is now is the hitter he’s been for the last two months.
Add it all up, and a team that finished 6th in the AL in
runs scored two years ago WITH THE YOUNGEST OFFENSE IN BASEBALL is 13th in the
AL this year. It’s not just that almost every hitter has hit worse – it’s that
they’ve hit worse even though they’re at
an age where they should be improving, in some case dramatically. Even
today, Hosmer and Perez are 23 years old, Moustakas is 24, Escobar is 26.
Gordon and Butler, the old men in the lineup, are 29 and 27. Not one of them –
NOT ONE OF THEM – is having a better year at the plate than they had two years
ago. Only one of them is having a better year at the plate than they had LAST
YEAR, which is the year that got Seitzer fired.
Heck, throw Lorenzo Cain in there if you want. He only
played 67 games under Seitzer, and 96 this year, but with Seitzer as hitting
coach he batted .266/.315/.410, and this year he’s at .261/.324/.362.
Oh, and Chris Getz hit .255/.313/.287 in 2010, and
.275/.312/.360 last year – yes, Chris Getz was almost respectable last season.
This year, he’s hitting .224/.290/.281.
This is astounding. You can lay the blame at whichever
hitting coaches you want this year; Moustakas and Hosmer have turned things
around since George Brett and Pedro Grifol took over in late May, but that’s
roughly the same time that Perez, Escobar, and Gordon all went into the tank.
Both sets of hitting coaches have plenty of questions to be asked of them.
Grifol earned lots of plaudits (and the full-time job) because of the
turnarounds from Hosmer and Moustakas, but the Royals aren’t scoring any more
runs now than they were three months ago, because in fixing two problem spots
in the lineup, three more have sprouted up.
The drop in doubles is particularly astonishing. Two years
ago the Royals finished second in the league with 325 doubles. Last year they
dropped all the way to third, with 295 doubles. This year they are 12th, on
pace for just 258, with almost exactly
the same personnel. This is what people who were critical of Seitzer harped
on – that he focused on hitting the ball up the middle, and gap power, which
was good for two-base hits but not so much for the four-base hits that you
really want.
Seitzer is gone, and so are the two-base hits. Yost
evidently wanted the Royals to hit more home runs – remember the comments he
made to the media at the end of last season, when Seitzer was let go. And it’s
true, under Seitzer they didn’t hit a ton of homers. They were 11th in the AL
in 2011, and 13th in the AL last year. Of course, they’re always at the bottom of the league in homers, largely because
Kauffman Stadium (except during that 1995-2003 era when the fences were moved
in) is a tough park to hit homers in.
Well, the Royals sacrificed doubles to hit more homers…and
this year, they’re the first team in AL history to be 15th in home runs. (Okay,
so it’s the first year there’s been 15 AL teams.) They don’t hit doubles or homers, so despite being 7th in the
league in batting average, they’re dead-last in slugging average. Under
Seitzer, maybe they didn’t hit the ball over the fence, but they still had a
little of what Trey Hillman called slug: 5th in the AL in slugging average in
2011, 10th in 2012.
Back in May, Russell Carleton published a study at Baseball
Prospectus that evaluated hitting coaches based on whether the hitters under
their tutelage improved or declined. By his methodology – and it’s only one way
of looking at things – Kevin Seitzer was worth about 58 runs over an average
hitting coach over the course of a season. Among every hitting coach of the
last 20 years who had held the job for more than two seasons, the only hitting
coach worth more was Clint Hurdle – who coached for the Rockies from 1997 to
2001, before the humidor, when Coors Field was maybe the best hitters' park in
world history. Carleton admits that the extreme conditions may have affected
the numbers in a way he could not control for, and made Hurdle look better than he was.
So basically, Carleton came to the conclusion that Seitzer
was, if not the best hitting coach of the last 20 years, certainly close. And
that was before this season, when practically every hitter he coached last season
has declined to varying degrees. I imagine the same study performed today would rank Seitzer even higher.
You want to know what’s wrong with the offense? The answer
is astoundingly simple: Kevin Seitzer isn’t here anymore.
I’m just going to stop here. When I sat down to write this
article an hour ago, I had a completely different article in mind. I planned to
write about Yost’s tactical screwups, which seem to be coming more frequently
as the team wilts in the August heat, culminating in last night’s terrible 9th
inning, when Jarrod Dyson pinch-ran for Billy Butler even though Butler wasn’t
the tying run, and Escobar was allowed to bat against a right-handed reliever
with a big platoon split while George Kottaras sat on the bench. I was
repeatedly warned by Joe Sheehan that in a pennant race, Yost’s tactical
blunders would come back to haunt the Royals, and he was certainly proven right last night.
But what was supposed to be a brief detour into Yost’s
influence on the decision to fire Kevin Seitzer turned into the destination,
because the evidence is pretty overwhelming: firing Seitzer was the worst
decision the Royals made all off-season – at least when it came to the 2013
season. (Insert necessary reference to The Trade here.) Keeping Seitzer around
may well have been the difference between a team struggling to stay over .500,
and a team that right now could be at the head of the wild-card race. If you
think that’s an exaggeration, ask yourself how good the Royals would be if
they had the 6th-most runs scored in the league to go with the AL’s second-best
ERA. And then remind yourself that two years ago, with virtually the same
lineup, the Royals were 6th in the league in runs scored. And once Perez was
called up in 2011, no one in the entire lineup
was more than 27 years old.
It is almost literally unbelievable that a lineup that was above-average two years ago, with a pair of 21-year-olds (Hosmer and Perez), a 22-year-old (Moustakas), a 23-year-old (Johnny Giavotella), a 24-year-old (Escobar), a 25-year-old veteran (Billy Butler), and a 27-year-old (Alex Gordon), all of whom are still in the organization today, would be one of the worst offenses in the league this year.
I was planning to make the case that it might be time to let
Ned Yost go because of his tactical deficiencies. But I’m not going to make
that case. Because there’s a much simpler case to be made here: Ned Yost should
be fired because he couldn’t get along with Kevin Seitzer, and because he couldn’t
appreciate the fine work that Seitzer was doing.
It’s time to let Yost go.
And with all due respect to Pedro Grifol, who I’m sure can
be an asset to the organization in another capacity, it’s not too late to bring
Seitzer back. But they better hurry before it is.