Diving deeper into the Royals road woes

What on earth is happening to the Royals on the road?

It’s no secret that the Royals have had significantly worse results on the road than at home. For those of you needing the exact numbers, the Royals are 31-18 at home and 21-27 on the road. Most teams are better at home than on the road, but you definitely want to try to play closer to .500 on the road so that all the wins you bank at home can stand out more. Also of note, the Royals are three wins behind their Pythagorean record for the year. Pythagorean record doesn’t count in the standings, of course, but it’s much more predictive of future outcomes than the actual team record, and therefore teams behind their “Pythag” can be considered to be a bit unlucky.

At some point over the past few weeks, I began to develop a theory. My theory was that the Royals weren’t actually worse on the road, but simply worse in their first games after traveling. Also, I expected, the Royals would be significantly worse in games at new locations when they hadn’t had a day off before. I even mentioned the week before the All-Star Game on the Royals Rundown Podcast that I figured Tuesday’s rainout in St. Louis could only benefit the team before they went on to sweep that doubleheader. So, to test this theory, I went to Baseball Reference and started playing with the numbers.

Home road splits

Well, it turns out the Royals are just fine in their first games at home. So my theory doesn’t quite fit. However, not only are they just fine at home, but their Pythag backs up the wins and losses. They’ve played like a 6-2 team on the first game of a homestand and that’s the record they’ve actually earned.

Even more interesting than that, though, is discovering the Royals actually have a positive road differential in their first games at each road location, but their record doesn’t reflect that. The reason Pythag works in the way it does is that, generally speaking, if you score more runs than your opponents in total you should win more games than you lose. But the Royals have gone 6-10 in this sample. It’s a small sample, but that makes being three wins off of the Pythag even more stunning.

Still, that got me curious, what did they look like after those first games?

Zoom and enhance

These samples are obviously much larger and they tell a story of a team that’s earning victories about equal to their efforts. That’s what we’d expect after discovering the same difference in their first road game Pythag as their overall Pythag difference. This means they really have played worse on the road, but that isn’t the end of the story. They should be a .500 team on the road. Again, that’s worse than they’ve played at home, but if their actual results matched their post-first game Pythag, they’d be sitting pretty right now.

Add these results to the first table, and we see that the Royals, despite definitely playing worse on the road, should still be over .500 on the road as a whole. Now, those wins they should have earned won’t get them into the playoffs, but that predictiveness mentioned earlier still means there is every reason to think the Royals should earn more wins going forward.

The question then becomes, “Is there anything they can do to improve their chances?” And that’s where we come to the last part of my theory.

Zoomer and enhancer

I love it when a plan comes together.

As you can see here, the Royals are at their absolute worst when they play a game at a new road location immediately following playing the day before. It is the only split with a negative run differential I was able to find for this season.

That said!

That said, remember how the Royals had all of their missing wins from their Pythagorean record in first games at new road locations? Well, it turns out, almost all of those are in an even smaller sample size: first road games without having a day off the game before. The Royals are bad in those games, but they’ve also been incredibly unlucky. It’s a worst-case scenario of playing poorly and achieving even worse results than they have earned.

Obviously, the team can’t do anything about the MLB schedule. The Royals have six games remaining that fit the criteria of first games at new road locations without a day off before. I suppose the good news is that that only represents approximately 10% of their remaining schedule. But if the Royals are serious about maximizing their opportunities to win, they should first add another bat and one more reliever, but then they should probably look at adjusting how they’re traveling somehow to see if they can find a way to break out of their bad play in those games.

Maybe they should be scheduling flights earlier or later. The best area to look at, however, is their pre-game routine. If they’re skipping some aspect of those routines or rituals due to the travel, they should probably go back to full pre-game activities.

However, even if they don’t, the numbers don’t lie and they suggest the team could very well be better than they’ve played to this point. The final stretch of this season should be a lot of fun!