The 2024 KC Royals were a pleasant surprise, making the franchise’s first postseason since 2015. Finishing 86-76 was a marked turnaround from the 56-106 campaign in 2023. As a nightcap, the Royals defeated the Orioles in the Wild Card round before falling to the Bronx Bombers in the Divisional Series.
The team was clearly better in 2024 than 2023. That said, I was curious: how much better? With the eyeball test, the difference was night and day. However, would hard numbers substantiate? Particularly, what area of the team was most improved? Again, with the eyeball test, it was the pitching…but what will the unbiased numbers say?
If we compare aggregates of major offensive metrics between the two years, the differences are noticeable, though not necessarily eye-popping. The clearest improvement is in the total number of strikeouts.
On the pitching side, the story is more stark, with moderate to major differences in most categories.
The above numbers are some of the “classics”, if you will. They are not rates not “advanced”, though they provide some useful context. What about WAR? Across total team defensive, offensive, and pitching WAR, we observe noticeable improvements. As expected, the difference in pitching WAR is most striking.
Lastly, how can other non-standard metrics make the story more full? The joyplot below overlays distributions for four advanced stats. With FIP, we observe a distribution of comparatively low values for 2024 (a positive change), helping us understand the totality of the pitching improvement. OPS+ (scaled to 1 instead of 100) looks roughly the same between the years. Rbaser is, more or less, how many runs a player generated on the basepaths above or below expectations. My big takeaway is the 2024 team had a wider range of baserunning abilities, which is not inherently good or bad. Rtot is to fielding what Rbaser is to baserunning. The distribution appears to have markedly improved. The story, once again, is pitching and defense.
We knew the Royals were better in 2024 compared to the previous season. However, it’s always enlightening to see how the numbers tell the story. In this case…the eyeball test was right: the team was noticeably better, especially on the pitching front.