Royals’ Playing Time Battles: Hitters

The defending World Series champions expect to have nearly the same team intact for 2016 as they did for 2015. After resigning of Alex Gordon, the only two position battles are for the two black holes from the 2015 season, second bases and right field. Instead of the filling the positions from free agency, the Royals have looked at using unimpressive internal options. In shallow leagues, the names may not be exciting, but in deeper leagues or AL-only, these hitters will be rosterable.

Second Base

The Royals second base job has been a huge void for a few years until the Royals traded for Ben Zobrist to help with the 2015 championship run. Here is a comparison of how unproductive the Royals second basemen have been over the past five seasons. Not counting Zobrist’s 1/3 of a season, the Royals’ second basemen have produced 5.3 WAR from 2011 to 2015. Over the same time frame, Zobrist has almost produced the Royals total each single season with 25 total WAR.

The Royals noticed the deficiency and brought in Omar Infante in 2014 to help fill the second base void, but he has just added to the problem. Over his Royals tenure, he has hit just .238 with eight home runs and 11 stolen bases in 1030 PA. Infante has just been awful, but the Royals still owe him ~$18M and will give him just about every chance to win back his job.

One positive note on Infante is he had bone chips removed from his elbow. These chips probably affected his performance recently, but to what extent we know for sure yet. If he can stay healthy, I could see his batting average get closer to his career value of .272 instead of his Steamer projection of .253. Now, if you are in an OBP league, just ignore him. He has gotten to the point of swinging at everything and only had a 2% BB% in 2015. Besides no walk rate, he has little power or speed. The Royals will look elsewhere, but the options aren’t great.

The obvious successor is former first-round pick, Christian Colon. The 26-year-old Colon is probably better than Infante, but not by a ton. While the Royals state the pair will have a position battle in spring training, but we will see if it happen. Even though Colon has more power, speed, plate discipline, and the ability to hit for average than Infante, the difference between the two isn’t huge. The problem is that Colon needs to be better than Infante in spring training. If Infante is better or equal to Colon, Infante and his contract will win the job. I would put the chances of Colon winning the job at 40% while my twitter followers are little less optimistic.

I think the Royals consider Raul Mondesi to be the long-term solution for the second base job, but the 20-year-old needs at least another season of minor league seasoning before joining the Royals.

Right field

Unless David Glass breaks out his wallet one more time this offseason, it looks like Paulo Orlando and Jarrod Dyson will be platooning is right field. The pair replaces the unproductive Alex Rios. While right-handed hitting Orlando has not shown a huge platoon split, the left-handed Dyson does have a significant one (93 wRC+ vs RHP, 50 wRC+ vs LHP over his career).  Without any more signings or injuries to Cain or Gordon, I expect Dyson to get around 400 PA and Orlando to have 200 PA.

If Dyson or Orlando struggle, I could see two different scenario’s play out. If it is Dyson struggling, he may just lose his playing time and just be used for pinch running. If Orlando struggles, I could see the Royals go to the minors and bring up either Brett Eibner or Jose Martinez. In either case, the Royals would be promoting an average bat/plus defender to a corner outfield spot.

The only fantasy option I like is picking up Dyson and see how many steals he can accumulate, especially in leagues where I can set daily lineups. Orlando is basically useless since he is on the wrong half of the platoon. Overall, the Royals’ right field production should be better than in 2015, but it will likely come from several different sources.





Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.

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Cory Settoon
8 years ago

Steamer600 Projections:

Dyson: .250/.301/.347 57 SB’s

Hamilton: .250/.309/.341 62 SB’s

Yost, make this happen!