Analysis: the Royals are on pace to break an MLB record that’s stood for 102 years
Give them this: The 2020 Kansas City Royals are certainly outliers.
While there have been baseball teams that have avoided walks in the past ... none of them in a full season has come close to the Royals’ current free pass-averse pace of their first 13 games.
Let’s take a look. In FanGraphs’ system, I searched for all team seasons going back to 1900. Then, I sorted for walk percentage — the likelihood a team’s plate appearance ends in a base on balls.
Here are the results.
| BB% | |
| 2020 Royals | 4.2% |
| 1918 Brooklyn Robins | 4.6% |
| 1901 Cleveland Blues | 4.7% |
| 1903 Boston Americans | 4.9% |
| 1919 Brooklyn Robins | 4.9% |
In other words, there’s nowhere to go but up for the Royals’ walk rate ... in modern baseball history.
Out of 2,580 MLB team seasons, the Royals are currently 2,580th in walk percentage, while on track to take down a 102-year-old record set by a lineup that included names like Ivy Olson, Ollie O‘Mara and Mack Wheat.
It’s not just the baseball environment for the Royals either. FanGraphs’ “+” stats are used to compare a team’s numbers to the league average for its own season.
KC’s BB%+, so far, is 46 — meaning the team is walking 54% less than MLB average. That’s the farthest away any team has been from a league average walk rate since the start of the 20th century.
| BB% worse | |
| 2020 Royals | 46 |
| 1918 Brooklyn Robins | 67 |
| 2020 Red Sox | 68 |
| 2020 Cardinals | 68 |
| 1957 KC Athletics | 69 |
We see the Brooklyn Robins get a bit more credit here, as they were playing in an era where not as many teams were walking in general.
That can’t be said about the Royals. The league average walk rate in 2020 is 9.3%, which makes the team’s 4.2% number stand out even more.
One example that not every team is like KC in this regard: The Phillies have outwalked the Royals, 30-20, despite the fact they’ve played in six games compared to the Royals’ 13.
The numbers don’t look any prettier for the Royals when broken down individually. Out of 116 MLB players that have received at least 40 plate appearances this season, only three have not drawn a walk. Two of them (Whit Merrifield and Maikel Franco) are Royals.
Reduce the search to 30 plate appearances, and the Royals have four of the top nine when it comes to avoiding free passes.
| BB% | PAs | |
| Whit Merrifield, KC | 0% | 56 |
| Maikel Franco, KC | 0% | 52 |
| Amed Rosario, NYM | 0% | 41 |
| Jonathan Schoop, Det | 0% | 39 |
Tony Wolters, Col | 0% | 33 |
| Dylan Moore, Sea | 0% | 30 |
| Salvador Perez, KC | 1.9% | 54 |
| Dansby Swanson, Atl | 1.9% | 53 |
| Adalberto Mondesi, KC | 2.0% | 49 |
It’s important to put this all in proper context. We’re still at the point in the season where a “small sample size” warning is needed when looking at a team’s numbers; for example, the aforementioned Phillies, through their COVID-19-shortened schedule of six games, are on pace to have the best walk rate in MLB history.
That doesn’t make the numbers any less worrisome for the Royals. A franchise that has gained a reputation for its free swinging has taken that to a new extreme in 2020.
The 1918 Robins might just have a worthy challenger.
This story was originally published August 6, 2020 at 1:35 PM with the headline "Analysis: the Royals are on pace to break an MLB record that’s stood for 102 years."
