Early on, it looked like they made a terrible mistake. Maybe moving on from Eiland wasn’t necessarily wrong, but Eldred didn’t appear to be a positive influence on the staff as they appeared unprepared for opposing offenses at times and unwilling to adjust. I know that’s an odd thing to say about a guy who never threw a pitch for the team, but I sort of felt like that was on him and I questioned his ability to do his job. Obviously the lack of talent in the bullpen was a problem, but even so, established pitchers were struggling as well, which is a bit concerning.

It was pretty much a struggle through July. The offense got more fun when Ryan O’Hearn came up and Adalberto Mondesi really got going, but it’s pretty easy to see why the team got better after July 31st. The pitching improved a great deal. After starting 33-73 with a 5.30 ERA, they went 25-31 with a 4.26 ERA the rest of the way. August wasn’t stellar, but the starters had an ERA of 4.90 while the bullpen’s was down to 4.52, their second lowest mark of the season to that point. In September, the starters really kicked it up with a 3.49 ERA and the bullpen posted a 4.39 mark, their new second best. Take a look at the starter and reliever ERAs by month here:

I guess the question is whether or not that was just noise or if there’s something to it. I think simply not having Blaine Boyer and Justin Grimm helped and limiting the innings of Jason Hammel helped quite a bit too. And overall, the numbers weren’t really that much better. There was a spike in strikeout percentage in August, but that dropped significantly in September as well as the swinging strike rate, so maybe the September numbers are a bit of a mirage. I’ll get back to that in a second on an individual basis, but here are their numbers month-by-month.

And finally, before I get into the individuals, I found it very interesting that the team ground ball percentage as a staff in the first half was 41.7 percent, which ranked fifth lowest in baseball. The fly ball percentage of 37 percent was fifth highest. In the second half, the ground ball percentage was 45.3 percent (third highest) and the fly ball percentage was 33.1 percent (fourth lowest). Here’s a look at the ground ball and fly ball numbers by month followed by the home run per nine numbers:

Now let’s talk individuals because it’s one thing to look at team numbers, but they include guys like Boyer, Grimm and Hammel and a bunch of pitchers who don’t really matter to both the future of the team and even a cursory evaluation of Eldred in his new role. The young guys are who Eldred was brought in to work with, so I actually want to see how they did throughout the season. Let’s start with the success stories and move into the…others.

Brad Keller

It’s hard to fully evaluate Keller’s season on a month-by-month basis because the first two months were mostly spent in the bullpen and then he had to evolve a bit as a pitcher, which he absolutely did. This is an Eldred success story if you pin that on a coach. He saw his strikeout percentage jump up in the last two months and his swinging strike percentage go way up in his final month with his walk rate taking a tumble. It all kind of came together for him in September as you can see his ground ball rate jumped back up to where it was early in the year as well. All in all, this is a fun one to look at.

Heath Fillmyer

Fillmyer is a massive success story even if he never becomes a solid big league pitcher. Maybe it’s just my perception because I believed he was a big nothing burger, but he just kept getting better as the season went on. When he first came up, he was a ground ball machine, as you can see below, but after settling into a starting role, he wasn’t quiet that. Still, in September, like Keller, he put together is best effort with season highs in strikeout percentage, swinging strike percentage, walk percentage (well, low there, but that’s good) and a solid enough ground ball rate. His slider is a legitimately quality big league pitch, limiting opponents to a .242 average and .318 SLG with a 35.3 percent whiff rate. The surprise is that his changeup and curve both were solid as well. He may need to pitch backward a bit, but I think there might actually be a future on a big league club for him.

Jakob Junis

It was a truly odd year for Junis, who started off looking like he was going to way outperform projections, then his season took a dark turn and then he ended up about where everyone thought he would. The key for him is keeping the ball out of the air a little better. Through June, he’d allowed 22 homers in 96.1 innings, which is decidedly not good. And he had a fly ball rate of 43.8 percent. From July through the end of the year, he allowed 10 home runs in 80.2 innings. That’s decidedly much better. And his fly ball rate then was down to 29.2 percent. His home run per fly ball wasn’t drastically different. It was good to see him continuing to keep the ball in the park even while throwing a ton of strikes. Just look at those walk rates.

Kevin McCarthy

The reason I think McCarthy was a success for the coaching staff isn’t so much the performance on the surface because he was relatively steady all year. What gets me excited about McCarthy is that he’s an extreme ground ball pitcher (64.3 percent on the year), but he started getting swings and misses in August and September. Look at those rising swinging strikes rate (11.6 percent and 12.2 percent respectively after not topping 9.6 percent in any month). If he can do that while maintaining a fantastic walk rate and his ground ball rate, he might be more than a middle reliever moving forward. It’s at least worth watching.

Danny Duffy

Duffy isn’t young, but he is a part of the future, and his season cannot be classified as anything but disappointing. Injuries played a big role here, so I don’t want to put this on Eldred, but it was a rough go. We know the baseball card numbers, but in August, his swinging strike percentage was down to just 7 percent, which is well below his average. I’m guessing this was injury, but look at this chart. He was just all over the place. I’m not sure it tells us anything, but he had a weird year. You can probably ignore September given that it’s just two-thirds of an inning and seven batters worth of work.

Brandon Maurer

Please help me. There’s something about Maurer that makes me wonder if he can be something next year. After some adjustments, his strikeout percentage jumped from 8.8 percent in July to 25 percent in August and 25.8 percent in September. He still walks too many and he’s terrible, but this is exactly the reason why he’ll get chances until he’s 112. Anyway, I just wanted to throw him in because I’m mean.

Burch Smith

He’s not good. He’s not a big leaguer. He didn’t get better. He’s just not good. But hey, he walked fewer batters in July and August. So there’s that.

I thought about throwing in Tim Hill and Jorge Lopez, but they weren’t especially interesting, though it is worth noting that Hill saw his walk rate cut in half from the first half to the second and his strikeout rate remain mostly the same. He doesn’t get a ton of swings and misses, but his ground ball rate is so good that you’re okay with that as a LOOGY. The big win for him was cutting that walk rate because he was putting way too many guys on early. Lopez is tough to gauge because the sample is tiny, but also because he was in a different role with the Royals than he had been in the big leagues before.

One other player who was of interest was Eric Skoglund. I was pretty adamant he wasn’t a big leaguer, and I might have been wrong about that. He came back in September and the back of the card numbers were very good with a 1.33 ERA and just 11 hits allowed in 20.1 innings, but the underlying numbers were not great. The sample was obviously very small, but he’s worth watching to see if that was a mirage or the improvement was for real.

In all, I really liked the trend of a fair amount of young pitchers. I’m not sure this is the best way to evaluate Eldred as a coach, but is there really a great way to evaluate coaches? It’s kind of on the players. I’d say the improvements throughout the year at least reflect well on him and seeing guys like Junis, McCarthy, Keller, Fillmyer and some others improve in various ways as the season progressed makes me hopeful for him to be able to continue to make an impact as the pitching staff theoretically skews younger over the next few seasons. I’m not sold on him, but I do feel much better about him than I did early in the season

• When the Royals decided to move on from Don Wakamatsu and Dave Eiland, they did so under the premise that they wanted to bring in some new voices for the rebuild. So those two were out, Dale Sveum moved from hitting coach to bench coach, Terry Bradshaw became the hitting coach and Cal Eldred took over the pitchers. I know this has been on Twitter, so it’s not a new thought, but at what point do we question if Eldred has any idea what he’s doing? I’ll leave Bradshaw alone for now because I think a hitting coach does far less than a pitching coach. But Eldred makes me wonder about the Office Space line of wondering what it is he does. Junis is the perfect example, and if you want to read too deep into Ned Yost’s comments, you might wonder if Yost has the same question. After his last start, Yost said it was a simple adjustment. Now I know there’s way more to it, but if it’s that simple, why hasn’t it been made? And I could be way off here. Maybe it was brought up and Junis is having trouble implementing it. But outside of Brad Keller, who has been nothing short of a revelation to this point, what pitcher hasn’t regressed? I don’t know if Eldred is the answer at pitching coach or not, but I do know that the results his staff has gotten this season has me leaning one direction. Fair or not, this is a results business, and his staff is one of the very worst in all of baseball and doesn’t appear to be getting any better. I could very well be letting off some steam as a fan of the team and looking for a scapegoat, but I definitely have questions about his ability to lead a pitching staff.
• Having said all that, I have to say I’ve been really surprised at the work of Heath Fillmyer in his long relief outings. He’s only thrown nine innings, but the stuff looks a little dirtier than I remember from watching video when he was in the A’s organization. He hasn’t gotten the strikeouts, but he’s another ground ball guy, which seemed to be a focus this offseason. I guess I should break here in my Fillmyer praise to mention how sad it is that this is one of the bright spots of the season. He’s had three outings and thrown nine innings and I’m marveling at him. Obviously he’s only struck out five batters, and that’s not good enough, and he won’t maintain his near 90 percent strand rate and all that, but I am surprised that the stuff has been as good. This doesn’t change my evaluation of him any. I think he’s a pretty generic AAAA type arm, but those are valuable to have to protect more important investments and to ride the I-29 shuttle during his options years. Maybe he can be a guy Eldred develops to turn my previous point into me looking really stupid. It’s certainly happened before and it’ll certainly happen again. I’m confident of that.
• I have my doubts about Brad Keller’s ability to stick in the rotation, but they’re getting a little more difficult to justify with each passing start. He’s made six starts and gone 33.2 innings, which is quite good because he’s only made three of his starts with a full pitch count available to him. He’s posted a 2.14 ERA and allowed fewer hits than innings pitched. It’s been a really fun stretch of starts to watch, but his last two are the highlights, of course. He’s gone 15 innings and allowed just one run on eight hits with only two walks allowed. My concerns lie mostly with his lack of strikeouts, and I think those are valid concerns, but he does a really fantastic job limiting hard contact and converting batted balls into outs, as tenuous as that can be. Opponents are hitting just .206 on ground balls against him, which is way below the league average of .242. He’s been barreled just 2.9 percent of the time. He’s allowed balls hit of 95 MPH or higher just 32 percent of the time. His ground ball rate of 59.4 percent ranks third in baseball among pitchers with 50 or more innings pitched this season. If I told you about all that, then told you he’s a 6’5”, 240 lb. 22-year old with a fastball in the mid-90s, you’d think he’s a future star. I’d like to think the slider he used a lot against the Angels can be a big strikeout pitch for him, but I just don’t know. If he can figure out the changeup, I believe he can stick in the rotation, but the nice thing is that it’s pretty clear he can be a bullpen piece of the rotation doesn’t work out. Either way, it’s fun to watch him pitch in days when not much is fun.
• On the farm, it’s really nice to see a couple of recent minor league promotions hit the ground running. Khalil Lee was recently promoted to Northwest Arkansas, and we discussed him last week. Nicky Lopez was also promoted to Omaha. So often, guys will get the bump and hit a little bit of a slide when they move up for various reasons, but both of these players have been very good in the early going. Yes, there’s time for that to change because the sample size at their new level is so small, but it’s good to see at this point. One thing Clint Scoles was mentioning in the BP KC breakroom is that both of those players have such a solid approach that it isn’t too surprising how well they’ve taken to their new levels. It’s just so nice to have some players who actually have a quality approach. I feel like I’ve talked about this before, but there are actually quite a few players with advanced approaches in the system, which is quite a departure from the past. Not all of them will make it. Maybe none will. But even if two or three do, it allows the Royals to better carry guys like Adalberto Mondesi and Seuly Matias if he can develop enough to ever be a big leaguer. Yes, in an ideal world, they’d have nine guys with a .350+ OBP, but we all know that’s not likely. If Mondesi could be a .280/.320/.475 guy at shortstop and Matias could be a .240/.300/.575 guy in right field, that’ll play with a few guys who actually know a ball from a strike. A guy can dream.

This week, we covered some 2017 Awards and the Royals who received qualifying offers (and reiterated their impact).

We also looked at what’s ahead. The Royals are in transition, with players leaving, new coaches coming in, and some hints at drama behind the scenes. We knew this offseason would have some intrigue, but may there’s more than we expected.

Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes and BlogTalkRadio. You can also download this episode here (mp3).

Follow the Vault at @KCBaseballVault. Follow host Jeff Herr at @TheJeffReport, co-host Michael Engel at @michaelengel. You can also email feedback to KansasCityBaseballVault@gmail.com. Email us a question and if we answer it on the air, we’ll send you a gift certificate to our friends at Kelly’s Westport Inn.