Originally Posted by SithCeNtZ
I've seen people posting about this on twitter and other places, so I decided to take a look since it's a slow Friday at work and I'd like to give you reading material as you also avoid work and look to the weekend. As it turns out there are a mix of reasons the splits look the way that they do, and you kind of have to go player by player to understand how baseball randomness works the way that it does.
Hunter Renfroe(232 avg 771 OPS at home, 216 avg .622 OPS) - As everyone remembers, Renfroe was terrible at the start, and on May 22 was hitting 160 with a 519 OPS. Yikes. However, this was heading into a road trip, and Renfroe started to come to life, raising his average 30 points on the trip, and also playing well coming back to the K. But then he got injured and missed an entire road trip, then came back and still swung the bat well, finishing with a 1.100 OPS for the month. However, because he missed basically all of the road games that month, it looks like Kaufman was the reason, but that's just random chance he got hurt when he did. He's hitting better in July on the road than at home.
Freddy Fermin(341 avg 816 OPS at home, 253 avg 692 away) - Fermin started slowly in limited duty, hitting .234 at the end of April, but what is notable about this is that for some reason Q primarily played him on the road and not at home. He played 10 games on the road, and really only 3 at home, so his road stats looked pretty bad to start. But he caught fire in May, posting his best month ever. In that time when he raised his average over 60 points, he hit .375 on the road, but most of his games happened to be at home, thus skewing his splits a fair amount. He obviously was just fine on the road and has actually hit 3 of his 4 home runs on the road, but a very slow start + when he got hot mostly was at home = weird splits.
Melendez (225/715 OPS at home, 165/586 OPS on the road) - Basically the opposite of Fermin. It's hard to remember, but Melendez started amazing, hitting .325 through the first 12 games, 10 of which were at home. Then he became one of the worst players in baseball, going 0/29 the rest of the month on the road and 3/21 at home. I guess 3/21 is better than 0/29, but none of that really screams "something fishy is going down at the K". All told he started 4/59 on the road, and while he was better before getting hurt, it's going to take a long time to bring that back up.
Bobby Witt - He's an interesting guy because he plays every day and he's really good, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have random chance involved. Take his walk rate, which KC posted in that tweet: 9.3% at home, 3.7% on the road. Seems suspicious?? Not really. In a homestand in early may against the Rangers and Brewers, for some unknown reason, Witt walked 7 times in 6 games. This a complete fluke, and to put it in perspective, that's more walks in 6 games than the entire month of April, tied for the entire month of June, and unless something crazy happens this weekend, the entire month of July. It's basically the definition of a baseball outlier. He has had two rough road trips. The first west coast trip right after this homestand he went 3/27 on the trip, and then the road trip we thought might end our season in June @Dodgers to start with 2 of their Aces and ending in that disastrous series in Texas where we went like 30 innings without a run. He went 6/37 on that trip. Of course, what did he do on the following road trips after these? The first one he hit .315 with 2 home runs in 7 games, and the one before the all star break he hit a pedestrian .387 and 2 home runs in 8 games. So, we either need our cheating to be more consistent on the road for Bobby to play better, or there just happened to be two random slumps by Witt on two road trips.
Finally, what makes me laugh about all of this is how we compare to last year. This year we have a .127 OPS difference home vs road. Last year, the year we were arguably the worst team in baseball? .102 OPS difference. Funny how nobody thought we were cheating then even though they are roughly the same splits?
TLDR - Random shit happens in baseball and the Royals are pretty random this year.
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