It’s no secret to anyone at this point what plagues the Kansas City Royals most. The team’s offense has sputtered in 2025, to put it lightly. Entering Tuesday night, the club had scored just 3.3 runs per game. 183 runs scored was good enough for 27th in baseball, ahead of only Texas, Colorado, and Pittsburgh. The offensive issues date back to before Opening Day, all the way to the middle of last season. Since July 1 of last season, the Royals’ offense ranks 23rd in baseball in runs scored. The issues didn’t start when Vinnie Pasquantino landed on the injured list in late August — they got worse and more noticeable.
Now, back in 2025, the offense remains the ire of fans and the clear shortcoming of the team’s Major League roster. Armed with one of the league’s very best pitching staffs, the Royals have started to stall out following the loss of Cole Ragans and Seth Lugo. Both 2024 Cy Young finalists landed on the injured list earlier this month. Those injuries have only compounded the stress on the team’s pitching staff to carry the load each night. And now, following Tuesday night’s 7-2 loss at home to the Cincinnati Reds, the Royals are nearing a line in the sand. Dating back to May 10, the Royals have lost 11 of 16. The offense has somehow been even worse, scoring just 2.6 runs per game in that span. With injuries to the rotation and a bullpen growing increasingly taxed, the offense has only grown worse. What will it take for the Royals to finally get on track?
Firing a hitting coach isn’t going to be a quick fix, but does the philosophy need a change?
Calls to fire Royals Hitting Coach, Alec Zumwalt, seem more like pitchforks and cries for a scapegoat than a true solution. These aren’t the 2022 Royals. That year, the club was 12-21 when they fired then Hitting Coach Terry Bradshaw. The organization was a full three years into a drastic reshaping of the hitting development program. Change started in 2019, followed by concrete minor league results in 2021. A dramatic turnaround from Nick Pratto and MJ Melendez headlined what was then seen as a drastic improvement. Simply put, it was.
Melendez, Pratto, Bobby Witt Jr., Vinnie Pasquantino, Michael Massey, and others signaled a shift in the team’s hitting development results. Melendez, Pratto, and Witt landed in Pipeline’s Top 100 prospects. The “Pasquatch” eventually made his big league debut and immediately made a positive impact. It was still a short track record of MLB success, but the Royals looked to have cracked the code. Improvements started in underlying data, namely contact rate and hard-hit rate. The Royals finished 2022 16th in zone-contact rate (zContact%). The offense was 14th in hard-hit rate, 17th in barrel rate, and 23rd in slugging percentage.
By the end of 2024, they had improved in many of those aspects. The 2024 Royals finished third in zContact%, seventh in hard-hit rate, and 12th in slugging percentage. Many of the team’s shortcomings were quickly becoming strengths. But now, into 2025, we see the side effect of many of the team’s improvements under Alec Zumwalt as hitting coach. The uber-aggressive, contact-first approach works at times. When players make high levels of hard contact, it can generate explosive offensive output at times. Other times, it can result in dozens of hard-hit outs or weak contact. Those cold spells have come to characterize the offense more than the hot stretches at this point in 2025.
The 2024 Royals remained 18th in barrel rate. The team’s wOBA remained relatively flat, moving from .303 in 2023 to .307 in 2024. Most of all, the team remained middle of the pack — 13th in runs scored. Even midway through 2024, it seemed as if the Kansas City offense was great at what it aimed to be: an aggressive, contact-oriented lineup that would live off batted-ball luck, hard hits, and athleticism. To some degree, the Royals remain exactly that. The problem is that the philosophy has started to show some cracks that may not be fixable simply by removing the Hunter Renfroes of the world.
Side effects of the current philosophy have caused the team’s current offensive struggles
The uber-aggro approach that Zumwalt and Co. have pushed has led to some expected numbers. The team was 26th in chase rate in 2023 at 31.3%. They improved marginally to 24th in 2024 (30.2%), bottoming out at 28th so far in 2025. The Royals swing a lot and they seem to swing at just about anything. And now, the team has done it long enough that the rest of the league has certainly caught on. The Royals are 29th in barrel rate this season, stemming at least somewhat from a drop in hard-hit rate. The 2024 Royals were 7th in hard-hit rate, but have followed that up in 2025 by ranking 25th thus far. They’re no longer barreling the baseball and no longer hitting the ball harder than the rest of the league. We’ve reached a point where it makes sense to start asking: are the Royals making too much contact?
In an Anne Rogers article from back in 2022 titled, “Alec Zumwalt is ‘best person for job,’” one specific quote stands out.
“We’ve felt for a while that we need to address, whether it’s on-base percentage, hard hit rates, chase rates,” general manager J.J. Picollo said. “And Alec, Mike Tosar, John Mabry, they’ve all worked together and will continue to work together to make some improvements every day.”
The Royals have stopped improving hard-hit rates and have never improved the chase rate under Alec Zumwalt’s direction. What stands out most of all, however, is talk of on-base percentage. General Manager J.J. Picollo talked about needing to add an on-base presence as recently as last offseason. The team hoped to do so by acquiring infielder (er…outfielder?) Jonathan India. The Royals ranked 25th in 2021 with a .306 on-base percentage. By the end of 2023, they were 28th at .303. Now, in 2025 they currently rank 26th at .300. The Royals have gone backward in on-base percentage and haven’t improved to any real degree in chase rates.
Not only has the team gone backward, but we’ve consistently seen individual hitters go backward. There’s no better example of this than Vinnie Pasquantino. Pasquantino walked 11.7% as a rookie, posting a .383 OBP in 72 games that season. The walk rate fell to 9.6% in 2023, then 7.2% in 2024, and is all the way down to just 5.3% in 2025. His .303 on-base percentage this season is right in line with the team average, but 80 points lower than his rookie campaign. The Royals have seemingly handcuffed themselves offensively by removing one of the best aspects of Pasquantino’s game. It’s this focus — more than roster construction, more than batted ball luck, more than drafting and development — that has created the Royals’ offensive woes.
Firing coaches won’t save the Royals offense, but offseason changes should be in store
By now, it may seem that firing Hitting Coach Alec Zumwalt is the next step to course-correcting the offense. I’ll be the first to tell you that isn’t a solution. Removing Zumwalt doesn’t change the organization’s philosophy to hitting. It took years for Paul Gibson and Co. to completely change the team’s pitching development. That process started back in 2019 as well and has only just now reached the big leagues in 2024 and 2025. For the Royals to get the most out of their now phenomenal pitching development, they have to adjust course when it comes to hitting development.
That’s something that can be done alongside Zumwalt, not without him. He’s well-respected by executives and players alike in the organization. The current hitting development has done well in teaching swing mechanics, and improving contact rates. Royals hitters rarely strike out, ranking second in baseball since the start of 2024 with just a 19.3% strikeout rate as a team. All of those elements are puzzle pieces you want to have when piecing together a good offense. Now, it’s time to add more patience to the recipe. Walk rate alone isn’t a measure of success, but it’s a good indicator of teams implementing a sound approach at the plate.
The looming offseason will need to include a concerted focus on improving chase rates, limiting “bad” contact, and raising walk rates through better selective swings. Only then can the Royals truly find lasting success with their current high-contact approach. Low strikeout numbers are nice, but walk numbers have a larger correlation to runs scored in today’s game. The top four teams in runs scored since the start of 2024 — the Diamondbacks, Dodgers, Yankees, and Cubs — own walk rates north of nine percent. It all comes back to on-base percentage. The Dodgers, Yankees, and Diamondbacks are all tied for the best OBP in the league in that same span. It’s time to stop asking about new hitting coaches and look instead at changing the entire hitting philosophy as an organization.
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