Any Royals optimism starts with young core. What’s reasonable to expect? Let’s dive in

On the eve of opening day, Kansas City Royals chairman and CEO John Sherman sat inside a first-floor room at Kauffman Stadium. In his rear-view mirror, the first normal, on-schedule spring training in Surprise, Arizona, since he acquired the Royals in late 2019.

Which probably prompted this: “The energy in Surprise was palpable,” he said.

And then this: “We have work to do here, but we have a promising young team. I think it will be exciting to see if some of these young players take the next step.”

Over a 20-minute news conference, that was his most interesting word choice.

If.

Because it’s not wrong.

Make no mistake, the Royals expect to be more competitive this year. That won’t require moving mountains — they were 65-97 a year ago, after all — but there is some sound reasoning beyond the fact that it’s hard to be all that much worse than last place. The bullpen owns the clearest path toward improvement. The entire pitching staff is going to get better coaching. Heck, maybe even the entire team.

But let’s be real. The Royals’ roster does not look markedly different than the one that won 65 games. Even the best teams in baseball underwent more change than Kansas City did this winter.

The Royals had a mostly quiet offseason, same as they have many offseasons, but there’s more than small-market baseball to blame this time. They believe they are in a figure-out-what-you-have year.

What it means, though, is the root of any belief that the Royals should be better in 2023 rests inside the belief that the same players will be better. That they’ll improve. And on the face of it, that’s probably sound reasoning, too. The Royals offered 190-plus plate appearances to six rookies a year ago, all of them 25 or younger, and four of them 23 or younger.

A year older, a year wiser, a year more experienced. They should be better, right?

Well, about that.

Not always.

Maybe not even typically.

If there’s bias in what follows, it is that of recency, because I extracted the freshest applicable examples, not one hundred years’ worth of data. There is a the-game-is-different-than-it-used-to-be element to that. Most simply: The recent examples are the most relevant.

So I sorted through the league to find the identical criteria previously mentioned for the Royals — rookie players, 25 and younger, who were offered 190 plate appearances. And then I studied their growth patterns (as hitters) from Year One to Year Two.

Did those patterns even exist?

In 2021, for the most recent example used, 30 players fell into that bucket across the league. Combining the numbers of all 30, those hitters finished with an OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage) of .730 in their rookie seasons.

A year later, a year wiser, a year more experienced, those same 30 players combined for an OPS of .710. Collectively, they regressed, if only slightly. (The OPS stat offered a better comparison than total numbers for the entire group of hitters, given the difference in plate appearances.)

Next, I went back to find the previous four samples — skipping over the COVID-shortened 2020 season, in which everyone had a small sample size — and three of the previous four follow this exact same pattern for hitters. Worse collectively in Year Two than they were in Year One. The rookie class of 2018 is the exception. The OPS jumped 30 points in the second season.

Back to the Royals.

This isn’t the matching game. Part of the cruelty and beauty of baseball is careers aren’t linear. They aren’t exact. They can be unpredictable.

But this offers a potential guide in setting expectations. The Royals’ opening day lineup will likely feature five starting position players who fall into the category under the microscope here — Bobby Witt Jr., MJ Melendez, Vinnie Pasquantino, Kyle Isbel and Michael Massey. All rookies a year ago, all 25 or younger, all slated to receive a heavy dose of plate appearances in 2023.

Your counterargument could be that I included every possible qualifier into the data — not only the best, but also the very worst. Good players are less likely to fall into this trap. But isn’t that what we’re here to figure out with this particular group? Is it comprised of outliers, or are they like the rest?

There indeed are tons of players across the league who blow past their rookie trajectory. Who have clear progression in their second big-league seasons. But the recent numbers show those guys to be the outliers.

If you’re asking me? Witt is an outlier. Pasquantino might wind up as good of a hitter as any in this group. This group could very well outperform their peers in this category. But that’s all to be determined. And this is the most recent data on which we have to go.

A clubhouse of mostly young position players will possess the advantage of actually having faced major-league pitchers. But those pitchers will possess the advantage of actually having faced them.

“I’m just excited to make adjustments to the adjustments made on me,” Pasquantino said. “That’s what I find fun in the game — the strategy of trying to figure out how people are gonna get you out.”

One more thing to note. There is a clearer step forward in a third season, using those same pool of players. We are on the verge of 2023 opening day, though, and therefore deep into the weeds of how it might unfold this season. It’s not necessarily the same statement on 2024, 2025 or 2026. (Plus, and this might sound a bit too mathematical — you have to actually play Year Two before you can embark on Year Three.)

To a broader point, that’s why the initial step under a new regime (kind of) is to determine what’s in your own room before determining who from another room might be able to help. The Royals got here, at least in part, by pushing their chips to the center before this group was ready to be competitive.

These second-year players need to play, and at times they will need to play through some struggles, because those are coming. Recent history considered, they could be coming with more frequency than they did in Year One.

It will be part of it. But as opening day brings obvious intrigue as to what awaits over the next 162 games, those same 162 must answer — must erase the mystery surrounding — the question that should drive the much longer term. The question that has too long been more rhetorical than actionable over the past half-decade.

What next?