Weekful of injuries highlights Picollo’s next task - improve team depth

If general manager J.J. Picollo really wants to set himself apart from his predecessor, turning the team around is just the first step.

The Royals have suffered a season’s worth of injuries in the past week. Don’t believe me? Let’s go over them again.

• August 24: Hunter Renfroe exits a game early. He is placed on the Injured List the next day with a right hamstring strain.
• August 25: Salvador Perez is caught on camera massaging his left hamstring after hitting a double in the eighth inning of a blowout loss. The trainers didn’t visit him and he hasn’t missed an inning.
• August 26: Cole Ragans exits the game after only four innings. He is diagnosed with left leg cramps, he avoids the injury list and is expected to start Saturday.
• August 27: Michael Lorenzen collapses to the ground after attempting to stretch for a double play in the second inning. He stays in the game to strike out the next batter but then comes out after throwing one pitch to the batter after that. He is placed on the Injured List with a strained left hamstring
• August 28: Bobby Witt Jr. is hit on the hand and is examined by trainers for an extended period of time. He stays in the game and hasn’t missed an inning.
• August 29: Lucas Erceg attempts to field a comebacker with his bare hand. He eventually retrieves the ball and throws wildly to first. Vinnie Pasquantino, attempting to catch the errant throw, has his arm bent at a bad angle in a collision with the baserunner. Both Erceg and Pasquantino are immediately removed from the game. At this point, it’s unclear how much time either will miss.

That is at least one injury or near-miss every single day for a week. For a team like the Royals, it’s enough to make fans immediately pivot from lusting after the division crown to wondering if the team can possibly hang on for the postseason. In fact, I had already mostly written a piece that was supposed to go in this space declaring that the Royals were going to the postseason, the only question was what their seeding would be. I did add, as a post-script, the following paragraph:

P.S. If the Royals suffer a rash of injuries such as the one they perhaps started earlier this week, they could collapse far enough to miss the postseason. But it would have to be a lot of injuries. If they lost Bobby Witt Jr. that would also be it. At that point, the naysayers might believe they were right all along, but they weren’t. The world is just incredibly bizarre sometimes.

For what it’s worth, I still don’t believe the Royals have hit the critical mass of injuries necessary to completely miss the playoffs. Despite their loss last night, their playoff odds went up because Boston also lost. We are at the point of the season where there are just very few games for the Red Sox to attempt to make up the ground they lack in order to catch the Royals. Being 5.5 games back means the Red Sox need to win six more games than the Royals the rest of the way, even holding the tiebreaker. That means even if the Royals went 13-14 the rest of the way, the Red Sox would have to go 19-9 to catch them.

And, make no mistake, winning the third Wild Card spot would still be important for the Royals. There is nothing that matches playoff experience. Even if the Royals don’t go far this year, that experience should improve their chances in future seasons. And, of course, as the 2014 and 2015 Royals showed us, anything can happen once you make the dance.

Still, when you look around the league at the very best teams the one thing they all have in common, other than hefty payrolls, is a lot of depth. The Dodgers have suffered numerous injuries to their starting rotation, necessitating starts by 17 different players. Eight of their starters have made multiple starts and been positive contributors by fWAR. The Twins have given 19 different position players at least 100 plate appearances 17 of them were positive contributors.

The Royals, on the other hand, have only had to use nine starting pitchers, and only six of them made multiple starts with positive contributions. On the position player side, they’ve only given 15 position players at least 100 plate appearances and only 13 were positive contributors.

Dayton Moore garners lavish praise from many for building a team over the course of nearly a decade that eventually won the World Series. I’ve gone on record multiple times as being critical of his term as general manager because the 2014 and 2015 teams had incredible injury luck that disguised the fact that they didn’t have the depth to keep winning without their stars. I’ve been much more willing to praise Picollo because he turned the team around significantly faster than Moore. (Owner John Sherman probably deserves some of that praise, too, because he allowed Picollo to spend in the free agent market this year in a way David Glass never allowed Moore to do until the team was already winning.) That said, Piccolo has an opportunity over the next few seasons to do the thing Moore never managed: add enough depth to the team that it can compete even while suffering injuries and then replace players as they move on into retirement or to new teams.

We all have our fingers crossed that the injuries to Erceg and Vinnie will end up being minor or the Royals will find production from waiver wire acquisitions or minor league players. Or both! I have high hopes there will be plenty of reason to post the article about how likely it is for the Royals to make the playoffs next week. These injuries don’t have to derail the team. Maybe there’s more depth than we think.

Regardless, however, Picollo has passed his first step with flying colors. No matter how the rest of this season goes, no one can take away the absolutely massive turn-around the franchise has made both in the major and minor leagues since last year. Picollo’s front office hasn’t been perfect, but it’s been well above average. Ditto the coaching staff he hired. His job isn’t done, though. Whether the Royals barely miss the playoffs or miraculously win the World Series this year he’s still got plenty of work to do.