Originally Posted by SithCeNtZ
I wanted to do a deep dive on this because I was curious how true it was beyond the obvious "hey your second best hitter can't hit 194 for a while month and not impact the club" kind of thing. And really from looking at it, I don't think it's true beyond the obvious but he does represent something that really plagued the lineup in June.
One big, big thing that I don't see get much play in the Royals discussion is how little we alter our lineup. Garcia, for better or worse, leads off(or has mostly). And then you can predictably slot in every other guy in the order for most games. While I won't argue if this is good or bad, what you can't argue is that it has very real impacts. So if we want to look at salvy and his impact, we also have to look at other players because they always hit in the same spots.
A perfect example of this is actually Isbel and Garcia. In May, when the Royals were doing well, Isbel was, like all of our outfield, really bad. He hits .200 exactly with a 545 OPS. You can't get much worse than that. However, Garcia was pretty good in May, hitting 300 with a 773 OPS. This results in Isbel scoring 11 runs despite doing the bare minimum to get on base. But then June hits and Garcia turns in one of the worst months in royals history for a regular, hitting .142 with a 397 OPS. Isbel meanwhile has an amazing month, hitting 300 with an 884 OPS. With roughly the same number of at bats. What is the result? Isbel scored fewer runs hitting like an All Star than he did playing like a minor leaguer.
You simply can't afford to have an automatic out at random points in the lineup as it kills efficiency. If your lineup starts with a decent player, MVP, decent player, All Star, then you'll get some runs because it's easy for those to pair together and score some big innings, even if the bottom of the lineup isn't doing anything. But when you have automatic out, MVP, decent, automatic out, that's going to cause problems because it's hard to get rallies going. And that's what salvy hitting 194 in June was. If Garcia wasnt so completely awful I bet this has just as big of impact as Salvy being good because we essentially wasted Isbel playing like an All Star for a month. Had Isbel been moved to the top of the order when he was on fire, I bet that also would have altered some things, but this isn't something Q really does.
TLDR: Salvy isn't the only key, he just represents a bigger problem of guys going in massive slumps which alters how our lineup functions because we never alter the order.
|