Can anyone drive in Bobby Witt Jr.?

On Tuesday night in Detroit, the Royals played the most Royals game imaginable in this young season.

Cole Ragans took the mound for the Royals and the pitcher’s duel between he and Tigers starter Framber Valdez expected certainly materialized. In a way. Ragans wasn’t exactly sharp—he walked four hitters on the night. The velocity was good, but he recorded only five swings and misses and struck out just a single hitter. He finished at 93 pitches; only 53 of them were thrown for strikes.

The hitting was abysmal, although they get some leeway in this space as they were facing the lefty Valdez. Some. They scratched out a single run against Valdez, coming in the second inning when they loaded the bases with one out. Carter Jensen grounded into a fielder's choice, bringing home the run.

With Ragans out of the game after six, it was left to the bullpen to get nine outs to lock down the win. A difficult ask under any circumstances. If you have watched any of these 2026 Royals, your confidence going into the seventh and beyond was low. Matt Strahm put two runners on, but emerged from his frame unscathed. Nick Mears was not so fortunate. A double, a ground out that advanced the runner to third and a wild pitch knotted the game at one. A walk and another double broke the tie.

The ninth inning for the Royals held a sliver of promise. Lane Thomas led off with a single and swiped second. Salvador Perez hit a soft grounder to third that advanced Thomas. All Vinnie Pasquantino had to do was loft a fly ball and the Royals could tie the game. He hit a grounder to second with Thomas held at third. When Starling Marte flied out to end the game, it was the sixth time in the last seven games the Royals have scored two or fewer runs. They have played 17 games in 2026 and have scored two or fewer in 10 of those games. They are averaging 3.2 runs per game, the third-worst mark in the majors.

The Royals lost, 2-1. The offense has been very, very poor to this point.

So far this year Bobby Witt Jr. has come to the plate 74 times. He has collected 17 hits. He has been walked 10 times. Overall, he has reached 27 times, good for a .365 on base percentage. He's reached a couple of other times on a fielder's choice. Overall for Witt at the plate, he's been good, not great, but it’s a small sample.

This is the statistic that, even in a small sample of 17 games will blow your mind, Bobby Witt Jr. has scored one run.

That’s it. One stinking run. Just one single, solitary time this year has Witt traveled all the way around the bases, culminating in his foot (or hand, I do love his head first slides) touching home plate and a run going up on the scoreboard in favor of the Royals.

That is baseball insanity.

How insane is it? I’m glad you asked. So far in the early going, the average major league hitter scores roughly 30 percent of the time they reach base. Last year, Witt scored 35 percent of the time he found himself on base.

Over the first 17 games of the 2026 season, Witt has scored just four percent of the time he’s reached base. Four percent!

According to Baseball Reference, there are 194 qualified batters in this young season. There are a grand total of four who have not scored a run at least 10 percent of the time they reach base.

Kerry Carpenter - 7%
Marcus Semien - 6%
Alex Bregman - 4%
Bobby Witt Jr. - 4%

If you're interested in the raw numbers for the players listed above, Carpenter has scored four runs, Semien two and Bregman three.

Look, we just finished the first 10 percent of the season. It is still very early days. There will be statistical anomalies. That’s just the way this sport works. But that kind of statistical anomaly? How in the world does that happen?

I love a good mystery and I'm glad you asked. Let’s investigate!

Let’s start with the facts. Here’s one: The Royals third place hitters have stunk up the joint. Collectively, they’re hitting .177/.274/.194 this season. That’s a 30 OPS+. A 30 OPS+! Yeah, that’s the worst mark in the majors. (To underscore how it's very early days, Tuesday's third place hitter, Lane Thomas, went 1-3 with a single and a walk and bumped up the team's OPS+ from this position in the lineup four points.) Somehow, they’ve driven home 7 runs. That’s more than the Mariners (5 RBIs) and the Diamondbacks and White Sox (4 RBIs). Sadly, Vinnie Pasquantino has gotten the lion’s share of PA in this spot. Along with a handful from Thomas.

Pasquantino has collected all seven of those RBIs. He has cashed in Maikel Garcia and Kyle Isbel twice each. He has also driven home Nick Loftin, Jonathan India and Isaac Collins.

Let’s move on to the cleanup spot. The good news: The Royals number four hitters aren’t the worst in the majors. The bad news: They’re the second worst. Hitting a collective .159/.221/.286, with a 41 OPS+, they’re better than only the Seattle Mariners. Royals cleanup hitters have driven in a grand total of two runs this year. Two RBIs! This spot in the order is the domain of Salvador Perez. He’s the only Royals hitter to have come to the plate as the cleanup hitter in 2026.

It turns out that Perez has hit two home runs. Those account for his two RBIs.

It gets worse. Perez has come to the plate 23 times with a runner in scoring position. Not only has he failed to cash in a single one of those guys, he’s hitting .000/.130/.000 in that situation. With runners on, he’s hitting .033/.121/.033. That’s one hit in 33 plate appearances.

Sadly, I cannot get the proper Baseball Reference game log pages to load this morning, so I don't have data for 2025 to refer to in this next paragraph. So I'll refer to 2024. In that season, Pasquantino drove in 97 runs. Witt scored 28 of those. Perez drove in 104. Witt was the guy 33 times. So in 2024 when Pasquantino and Perez combined for 201 RBIs, Witt was the runner who touched home on 61 occasions. That accounted for just over 30 percent of their combined RBI total.

We move on...

Royals fifth place hitters have been much better than their counterparts directly ahead of them in the order. They’ve hit .200/.269/.400 which works out to an 87 OPS+. (Their numbers looked much better on Monday. They had a 100 OPS+ meaning they were producing at exactly league average. Who hit fifth on Tuesday to push those numbers down? Pasquantino.) They have also driven in six runs. All of those RBIs have come courtesy of Carter Jensen.

And wouldn’t you know it! Jensen is the guy who drove home Witt! Mystery solved.

It came way back in the third game of the season, the Royals first win, a 4-1 game against Atlanta. Jensen had homered previously and in the eighth inning with two outs and Witt on third, Jensen lofted a sacrifice fly to left-center.

Baseball lends itself to the weird. That's kind of the point of 162 games in a season...the weird, the strange and the absurd are mostly supposed to wash away by the end. The small samples are forgotten as the statistics compile at FanGraphs and Baseball Reference. Dry spells, such as the one with Witt and the Royals inability to bring him home, can impact the final numbers, but they're usually forgotten by the end of the year.

So while I am impressed at the Royals futility in this department, I doubt that it will continue for long. Pasquantino is a notoriously slow starter. However, I am concerned about Perez and continue to think he needs to be dropped lower in the batting order. Foolish as this sounds as we watch another Royals team fail to consistently score runs, I will not let an early season stretch cloud my long-term outlook. There is still too much baseball yet to be played.

But could they cut us all a break and just score some damn runs?