Lots of things have gone wrong for the Kansas City Royals in 2026 so far. The bullpen has been a complete and abject disaster, with a 6.40 ERA in 45 painful innings. Power left-handed batters Jac Caglianone and Vinnie Pasquantino have combined for zero home runs and only three doubles in 93 plate appearances. Their pitching ace, Cole Ragans, has a 5.91 ERA across three starts of only 10.2 innings.
But the Royals are built to weather those sorts of things and still do well. They have excellent starting
pitching depth and talent overall. They steal bases effectively. Their defense is still solid.
However, the Royals stand 5-7, two games under .500, because something is happening that the team is absolutely not built for, and that is for Bobby Witt Jr. to be in a prolonged slump.
Witt is, without a doubt, the Royals’ most talented and reliable asset. He’s on a Hall of Fame track, and displays a level of athleticism and poise that few professional athletes in general have. He’s great and Kansas City is lucky, beyond lucky, to have him.
Witt has also simply looked lost this year. Witt slugged .256 in 2024 and .205 in 2025, but it took him until his 12th game to get his first extra base hit, a double; he’s still searching for his first home run. His strikeout rate of 19.2% would be his highest since his rookie year.
Take a look at his Statcast dashboard and you’ll get a visual feel for what’s going on. Here’s his 2025 Statcast info:
And the same screen from his 2026 page:
Witt’s average sprint speed is a full mile per hour slower than last year, which isn’t great. But there are three real problems with Witt this year compared to last year: he’s not barreling the ball, he’s not squaring up the ball, and he’s not pulling the ball.
You can see pretty quickly that most of Witt’s hits this year have been on the opposite half of the field. Witt had a lot of hits to the opposite half of the field, but you can see that only four of his 23 homers were hit to the opposite half of the field in 2025. In other words, Witt’s most dangerous power is pull-side power, and he has simply not pulled the ball this year. Notably, Statcast doesn’t display same-day batted ball events, and you can see that his first extra base hit of the year was—you guessed it—a line drive to the pull side.
In the late part of the clip, Royals broadcaster Jake Eisenberg says that “That’s the thing about hitting the ball hard, you do it consistently, the more you do it, the more likely those results are gonna come.” And Eisenberg is right there, but he’s only partially right—you have to hit the ball hard at launch angles that result in the highest hit probabilities. Broadly speaking, Witt hasn’t been doing that, and his lower barrel rate shows that.
Witt hasn’t been totally useless, to be sure. Quite the opposite; Witt is an elite defensive shortstop and an accomplished base stealer. He’s also walked more often this year, too. That’s why he has a cool 0.4 Wins Above Replacement already (a nearly 5.5-WAR pace) despite an OPS safely below .700. He’ll start hitting home runs, and the Royals will start scoring more runs. That is inevitable.
The real biggest problem with Witt’s slump here to start the season is that it highlights just how shallow the team is. Kansas City simply does not have the offensive talent to compensate whenever its core cog isn’t rotating like it should. They have too many hitters that make too many outs, from Salvador Perez’s abysmal .281 OBP since the start of 2025 to Lane Thomas’ slightly-less-but-still abysmal .294 OBP since 2024. You’ve also got guys like Nick Loftin (career OBP of .296) and Kyle Isbel (career .292 OBP) and Michael Massey (career .283 OBP). Caglianone has an OBP of .250 so far in the big leagues. There’s not a lot of trust to go around, in other words.
When Witt isn’t hitting well, it just becomes uncomfortably obvious that the Royals have basically been a 75-win team with a league MVP talent strapped to it Looney Tunes-style. Consider: they won 86 games in 2024 when Witt was a 10.5 WAR player, and they won 82 games last year when Witt was an 8 WAR player. If you replace Witt with, like, Yuniesky Betancourt or Mark Teahen or whatever, there’s no way either of those teams end up with a winning record.
It’s not a bad thing to rely on superstars to do superstar things. That’s totally a reasonable roster construction strategy. It’s just that those superstars, when used correctly, are what takes a team from good to great. Right now, Witt is taking the team from bad to good. And that is an uncomfortable position for Witt and the team to be in.
