Around the Kingdom: KC Royals lack of Power, Alex Smith, and Offensive Line
By John Viril
Kansas City is one of the best sports towns in the country, and KC Kingdom has a lot of fun bringing you news from around the area for our professional and collegiate teams.
Few fans are as passionate about their teams than Kansas City fans, whether it is making Arrowhead Stadium the loudest outside venue in the world, or filling up Sporting Park each match, or being Royal in Kauffman Stadium. The area also supports three of the most passionate college fan bases in the country.
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The Royals lack of home runs is drawing the attention of numerous pundits. Kansas City is dead last in all of baseball in home runs, with less than half the league-average number of 45. Pete Melgren at Fangraphs.com digs into the data to determine if the Royals power-outage were just a performance fluctuation or due to a performance decline.
Brian Henry at Kings of Kauffman references his own article at Fangraphs about correlating wins with home runs, to the specific situation of the Royals. Though he concluded that home runs are no more, or less valuable, in today’s low home run environment than the homer-happy times of the recent past, he argued the Royals should overpay to bring in a slugger like Giancarlo Stanton:
"Over the past couple of years I have heard Dayton Moore, Ned Yost, Jack Maloof, Pedro Grifol, Eric Hosmer, Billy Butler, and several other people in the organization talk about Kauffman Stadium not being conducive to hitting the ball out of the park. That needs to stop and what better way to shut them up than add someone who can hit lots of home runs at The K?"
Apparently, the decision-makers in the Kansas City Royals front office are just as concerned as the pundits about the team’s lack of power, since they decided to move hitting coach Pedro Grifol to instructing catchers, and replaced him with third base coach Dale Sveum.
For the Chiefs, the no. 1 concern is quarterback Alex Smith’s contract extension. Arrowhead Addict’s Ben Nielsen attempts to decipher how far apart the two parties are by parsing their public statements.
Meanwhile, in yesterday’s minicamp sessions, Nielsen also notes that the Chiefs have shaken up the offensive line.
Be sure to check out KC Kingdom throughout the day for news on the Chiefs, Royals, Sporting KC, Tigers, Wildcats, and Jayhawks.