Chris Owings, Kansas City Royals
March/April Stats: .492 OPS, .115 ISO, 2 homers, 8 RBI, good for a 29 wRC+ and -0.4 fWAR in 104 plate appearances
Here’s the second dosage of bad news for the Royals. The expectations for Owings in Kansas City probably aren’t very high. After all, he hasn’t produced a wRC+ higher than 86 since 2014 (it was 91 that year), and he’s fresh off a 51 wRC+ and -0.8-fWAR performance in 309 plate appearances last year.
Owings has seen both his line-drive and fly-ball rates decrease significantly, while his ground-ball rate has increased by nearly 20 percentage points. Only four other qualified hitters have put the ball on the ground more often. His quality-of-contact numbers don’t look terribly different from recent years, but his overall contact rate is sitting at 69.4%, which would be a career-low mark.
A lot of that has to do with making less contact on balls outside the strike zone (62.3% to 48.1%), but he’s also swinging a lot less often within the strike zone (69.0% career rate, 60.2% so far in ’19).
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
