The Kansas City Royals are fresh off a sweep of the Baltimore Orioles over the weekend and are all of the sudden one of the hottest teams in baseball, having won six of seven. Yet, they remain in last place in the division and tied for the worst record in the American League at 16-21 while also possessing an ugly -37 run differential.
The question of whether the Royals should stay the course as a contender or have a fire sale will linger for the next month or so and will hinge, obviously, on the club's performance over that stretch.
Amidst all of this, a disturbing storyline has persisted. Alex Gordon, the team's highest-paid player, fan favorite and starting left fielder is lost at the plate. In 35 games he's hitting .152 with a .264 on-base percentage and a .192 slugging percentage. He is, quite simply, the worst hitter in baseball currently.
Gordon's sudden demise at the plate is perplexing to say the least. It's quite common for a hitter to decline once he reaches his early 30s and Gordon is 33. But there are very few examples of a player of Gordon's stature falling off a cliff like this.
Gordon's best season came in 2011 at age 27 when he hit .303/.376/.502. From 2011-2015 he was one of the best 10 players in baseball as measured by bWAR; though he's never again approached that .500 slugging percentage mark. During that five-year span Gordon settled in as about an .800 OPS guy who played Gold Glove defense in left field. He was the team's best player.
He showed zero signs of slowing down in his age 31 season in 2015 and, in fact, was tracking toward his best year since 2011 before going down with a nasty groin injury that caused him to miss about two months of the season. He still posted a career-high OBP season (.377) and had an OPS of .809. The Royals won a World Series, one which Gordon was a hero in, and in the offseason the club signed him to a franchise-record 4-year $72 million deal.
It has all gone awry since.
Playing against the White Sox in May Gordon collided with third baseman Mike Moustakas while going after a foul ball in what was the seminal moment of the season that was riddled with injuries to key players. Gordon broke his hand and missed six weeks. Moustakas tore his ACL and missed the rest of the season.
It was May 22 and Gordon was hitting .211/.319/.331. Not good, but it could simply be deemed a slow start and one that could be recovered from over the course of a full season. Gordon finished with a line .220/.312/.380. He had a .649 OPS in July, essentially his first full month back, and then showed signs of putting it all together in August when he hit .265/.348/.510. A bad September lowered his season totals. Gordon was actually right in line, given the time missed, with his career averages in home runs with 17. However, he was far below his extra-base hits totals.
I for one chalked up his poor season to nothing more than some misfortune. I felt his slow start was exacerbated by the injury and it was essentially a lost season. Not what you want from a guy making $16M a year on a small-market club, but understandable and nothing too alarming, although he did have a career high strikeout rate of 29.2 percent.
Ultimately, I was confident Gordon would rebound this season and while his best years are clearly behind him, I felt he was capable of OPS'ing around .780 and being a two or three-win player. Which makes what's occurred so far this season so confounding.
The easiest way to explain Gordon's struggles is his sudden propensity to hit the ball on the ground. Gordon currently has a 53.2 percent groundball rate; by far the highest of his career. He simply isn't elevating the baseball. Or, in Royals terms, he's caught a case of the Eric Hosmers.
Gordon has never been a big-time power hitter, but it's May 15 and he hasn't hit a home run. What's more, he has just five extra-base hits (!), all of which are doubles. Gordon has a career BABIP of .314. His current BABIP is .200. Usually, that's an indicator of bad luck that will correct itself over the course of 162 games. The issue with Gordon, as it has been with Hosmer, is when you hit the ball on the ground more than half of the time, those are usually converted into outs.
It's not bad luck, it's bad hitting.
According to longtime baseball writer Jayson Stark, who appears weekly with Soren Petro on 810 WHB in Kansas City, some scouts around baseball are speculating that Gordon can no longer get around on major-league fastballs. If that's true, it's even more baffling, considering that was Gordon's signature skill during his 2011-15 run, as he was the sixth-best hitter in the American League against fastballs, compiling a 92.4 runs above average, per Fangraphs. Other players on that list include: Miguel Cabrera, Mike Trout, Nelson Cruz, Jose Bautista and David Ortiz.
Since 2016, however, Gordon is just 1.1 runs above average against the pitch, a catastrophic dip. He enters the series against the New York Yankees batting .190 against four-seam fastballs and .167 against two-seamers, according to MLB Statcast data. The league average against those pitches is .271.
While it's still probably too early to conclude Gordon no longer has the bat speed to hit a major-league fastball, these are scary numbers for Royals fans.
While it's a blog topic for a different day, I was a major proponent of resigning Gordon back in 2016 and I was a fan of the contract. To me, Gordon fit the profile of a player who would age well. His diet and fitness regimen is renowned around baseball. He's a tremendous athlete, who transitioned seamlessly from third base to left field. He has always had a good eye at the plate. I likened him to Carlos Beltran in terms of aging gracefully and thought he could replicate that production through the course of his contract.
So far, that hasn't come to fruition. So it's fair to wonder if Gordon is in fact "done." If so, it severely hinders the Royals going forward and actually accentuates the club's need to sell at the deadline. A large part of me, however, believes there's some flukiness to all this. It's somewhat unprecedented for a player with Gordon's core attributes as a player to suddenly fall off a cliff at age 33. A decline was expected, but he's slugging .192 for God's sake. It seems inconceivable that this type of poor performance would continue.
For the Royals' sake, let's hope that intuition is accurate. Because if not, it'll be an ugly end to one of the greatest Royals careers of all time.
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