If the Royals can’t develop hitters, how do we explain Maikel Garcia?

He’s been a revelation

The most important thing an MLB organization can do is to develop homegrown talent. Younger players are less expensive, more durable, and have more trade value than older players. A pipeline of good young talent can serve as the needed rocket fuel to the lofty goal of playoff success while simultaneously papering over whatever shortcomings an org may have.

More specifically, the most important thing an MLB organization can do is develop homegrown stars. Yes, stars are more marketable. But really good players are disproportionately more valuable because of the hard limits of roster construction. You can only have 26 dudes on your team at once. There is only one pitcher on the mound and one batter at the plate at a time.

So it is a huge, huge deal that the Royals have managed to develop Maikel Garcia into what he has become. One year after accruing 1.1 Wins Above Replacement per Fangraphs and putting up a .614 on base plus slugging percentage, Garcia has an .877 OPS and has been worth 2.4 WAR already—all while being yanked around defensively and throughout the lineup to cover the deficiencies of the rest of the team. Garcia being a 5 WAR player is hugely valuable.

Of course, Garcia taking such a huge step forward is also interesting in light of the extreme hitting struggles throughout the organization. On the big league front, MJ Melendez, Hunter Renfroe, and Michael Massey all lost their starting gigs—with the former two losing their roster spots. Veterans Salvador Perez, Mark Canha, Cavan Biggio, and Jonathan India have been significantly less productive than last season. And in the minors, the bats of important position player prospects Gavin Cross, Austin Charles, Joey Wiemer, Javier Vaz, Tyler Gentry, and Hyungchan Um have disappeared.

So Garcia really does stand apart from all these bats. How, then, do we explain Garcia’s ascendancy? Did he succeed in spite of the Royals’ hitting coaching? Or did he succeed in part because of it?

In some ways, hitting and pitching coaches exist to get fired when things aren’t going well. And in the Royals’ case, there has been a lot of consternation about Alec Zumwalt and the rest of the hitting development staff because things, uh, haven’t been going well. Kansas City has been a bottom-five team this year by pretty much any offensive metric you want to talk about. To see Melendez look so lost, and to see Vinnie Pasquantino regress further in the plate discipline department, and to even see Bobby Witt Jr. take multiple steps back from last year’s performance has been pretty painful to see.

But then...there’s Garcia, who made the most valuable transformation a player possibly could: from fringe roster role into a core player (and maybe even an All-Star). I’ve read a lot of social media posts and comments and pretty much no one is giving the team any credit for helping Garcia get to where he is right now.

To be fair, there is a lot to complain about. To be fair, making a few coaching changes is a plenty reasonable thing to do to try and jumpstart an offense. And to be fair, there is still some pretty big red flags organization-wide when it comes to developing hitters.

I don’t really think that the Royals are some super organization when it comes to developing hitters; clearly they aren’t or they would have a better record right now. And to answer the title of this piece, any player can get better in spite of a team’s coaching strategy. Human skill development is not always linear, especially at the higher levels. Maybe the Royals helped Garcia. Maybe he underwent a sort of Sailor Moon transformation on the inside on his own. Who knows.

Unfortunately for everyone, the true answer is that there is a lot more nuance involved than any of us would like to admit. Would it help if the Royals had different hitting coaches? Potentially. It also just might not, because talent acquisition and, frankly, luck are also contributing factors. If Garcia’s breakout didn’t happen, things would be a lot simpler.

This is baseball, though. Sometimes things are simple. Sometimes they are as far from simple as can be.