How the Royals Proved Hawaiian Bros Island Grill Doesn’t Know Ball

Like many of you, Lilo & Stitch taught me that, “‘Ohana means family,” and Hawaiian Bros, like many businesses, boasts that it has a familial relationship with its employees and customers. But that didn’t stop the fast casual restaurant chain from making a business decision to walk back a promise to its most loyal customers.

At the beginning of the season, Hawaiian Bros announced a Plates for Plates promotion in conjunction with the Royals. Anytime the Royals “plated” six or more runs during a home game, HB Rewards members would be eligible for a free Classic Plate Lunch, redeemable the following day at participating locations. But by May 6, the Kansas City-based restaurant had issued a statement to its rewards members, announcing a change to the Plates for Plates promotion. Now when the Royals score six or more runs at Kauffman Stadium, members of the loyalty program can receive a free Classic Plate Lunch only with the purchase of a Plate Lunch. It’s still a good deal, but going from a no-purchase-necessary perk to one that requires spending a minimum of $12 is a sizable downgrade.

So what prompted the change? In their first 17 home games, the Royals reached the six-run scoring threshold eight times. To start 2025, Kansas City hit the six-run mark just three times over the same number of home games. The promotion’s cashing in at more than twice the rate it would have just one season prior is reason enough for the company to reevaluate, but the Royals amplified the issue for those running the corporate fraternity of Polynesian food by scoring six-plus runs in five consecutive home games from April 21 to April 26.

At this early stage of the season, it is fair to wonder if Hawaiian Bros perhaps overreacted to a hot performance during a soft part of the schedule. Maybe this year’s slate of opponents was less competitive than last year. The Guardians, Orioles, Twins, Rockies, Astros, and White Sox made up the early part of the home schedule in 2025, while this year, the Royals faced the Twins, Brewers, White Sox, Orioles, Angels, and Guardians. Some overlapping opponents and similar vibes across both years, but for the sake of thoroughness, I calculated a weighted ERA- to compare the overall quality of pitching faced in the early going each season. In 2025, that number came in at 103, and in 2026, it was 104, making for a very similar strength of opponent in the visiting dugout.

So without a weak strength of schedule to act as a source of comfort, Hawaiian Bros was forced to issue a statement. The tone of the email that went out to HB Rewards members was very, “Wow, we love the enthusiasm, but we didn’t realize folks would be this stoked about free stuff.” Clearly, whoever authored the release has never been to a sporting event featuring a mascot armed with a t-shirt cannon. Hawaiian Bros also framed the change as an effort to take the heat off restaurant employees who had been, “working around the clock to keep up with the response, the lines, and the wave after wave of Royals fans showing up hungry.” It was purely a pro-labor move, not at all motivated by the way handing out thousands of free lunches was eating into profit margins.

Just kidding. It was about the money. And given that Hawaiian Bros obviously does know how to tabulate revenue and losses and make data-driven decisions, it’s worth considering the following question: Could the restaurant chain have avoided undoing whatever positive PR Plates for Plates generated by employing better forecasting models of the Royals’ offense heading into the season?

In fairness to Hawaiian Bros, the Royals lineup is largely the same as last year, and yet, this year’s iteration of the team has been markedly more productive.

It’s not absurd to assume that a similar lineup would produce runs at a similar clip, but it’s still worth trying to poke a few holes in that assumption. That is, if you’re a company with a bottom line to protect. A basic model might start by looking at recent team seasons and mapping average runs scored per game at home to the average number of home games where the team scored six or more runs. Intuitively, those values should correlate with one another, but I checked just to be safe, and they produced an r-squared value of 0.85 — a strong positive correlation. With that in mind, the table below shows how the relationship plays out.

Last season, the Royals scored 3.7 runs per game at Kauffman Stadium and scored six or more runs in 17 of those games, slightly below the historical average, but still within the error bars. So far this season, Kansas City has scored 5.0 runs per game at home and is on pace for over 38 games of six or more runs, while the historical averages suggest 31 such games. Such a large year-over-year spike in scoring for a fairly static roster feels tough to predict, but there were clues. For one, a very similar Royals lineup scored 4.8 runs per game at home in 2024, introducing the possibility that 2025 may have been more of an outlier than representative of the team’s true talent. Further, preseason position player projections estimated this year’s offense would average 4.7 runs per game overall, and applying Kauffman Stadium’s 2025 park factor bumps the estimate to 4.8 runs per game at home and comes much closer to approximating the current state of reality.

But applying last season’s park factor to this season’s projections isn’t quite right either. The Royals spent part of their offseason tweaking the dimensions of Kauffman Stadium. The right and left field walls both came in about 10 feet and all of the outfield walls got about a foot and half shorter. With the old version of the stadium known for suppressing power, team officials said the goal was to create a park more in line with league averages when it comes to fly ball outcomes. The new setup still leaves plenty of outfield grass for doubles in the gap, while making it easier to hit home runs down the lines.

When Ben Clemens projected how the new configuration might impact offense in Kansas City, he estimated an additional 0.3 runs per team-game. Adding that to a blend of the possible estimates discussed so far (2024 actual RS/G, 2025 actual RS/G, 2026 projected RS/G) approximates the home-field scoring potential of the 2026 Royals at 4.4 runs per game, which historically maps to 26 games with six-plus runs. That per-game average is still lower than the reality we’ve experienced so far, but it’s much more reasonable than assuming a repeat of last season.

Though bringing in the walls at Kauffman Stadium combined with some positive regression seems to provide a clean explanation for the uptick in production, the actual shape of that production may or may not agree. Park factors offer insight on how the dimensions of a stadium (among other things) influence its run scoring environment. Baseball Savant provides the option to look at either single-season park factors or averages across multiple seasons. Generally, a single season of data isn’t enough for park factors to stabilize, and a quarter of a season of data certainly isn’t, but in cases like this, where the goal is to get a feel for the impact of known changes to a ballpark, single-season park factors can at least offer some insight on the directionality of the changes, even if the magnitude of the change still needs some refining.

Park factors indicate an increase in walks, doubles, and home runs, with singles suddenly a bit harder to come by. If the Royals are scoring more runs this year because they moved the fences in, we should see an increase in walks, doubles, and home runs when compared to the first few weeks of recent seasons.

The small, early-season samples of doubles and home runs are a bit murkier to interpret, but the increase in walks is undeniable. This year, the Royals’ walk rate is up over four percentage points relative to last year and 2.4 percentage points compared to 2024. Park factors suggest the updates to the stadium account for roughly half of that change, while the other half is likely attributable to ABS. The introduction of the challenge system has brought with it a narrower zone, and the league-wide walk rate this season is 9.5%, up from 8.4% in 2025.

And if you’re wondering why moving in the fences would lead to such a noticeable increase in walks, my speculative guess is that the increased likelihood of hitting a home run incentivizes hitters to wait for a pitch they can drive in the air. It has to be deflating to put your entire tuchus into a swing and then watch your beautifully arcing fly ball die at the warning track — only to have that happen time and time and time again. Now that the Royals know they don’t have to hit the snot out of a pitch to get it to leave the yard, they probably feel less obligated to go with whatever pitch they get and slap it somewhere for a single. Instead, they’re more inclined to believe good things will happen if they wait for their pitch. The opposite is true for the pitcher, who probably feels a bit less comfortable attacking the zone, knowing the once-cavernous outfield won’t be able to minimize damage the way it used to. Indications of this effect do come through in the data. Royals hitters are seeing fewer pitches in the zone and being more selective with the ones they do get.

As for doubles and home runs, the power numbers are certainly up compared to last season’s showing, but they don’t pop off the page when compared to 2024. Delineating between park effects and natural fluctuations in performance isn’t always possible based on a table of raw data. Instead, I watched all 20 of the home runs hit by the Royals at Kauffman Stadium prior to May 5 to see if any of them were benefactors of the new wall configuration. I counted four that would have been questionable to make it out last season — a solo shot by Salvador Perez on April 4 that only made it a couple of rows into the seats in left, a leadoff home run by Maikel Garcia on April 11 hit to almost the exact same spot, a solo blast off the fair pole in right by Isaac Collins on April 26, and the walk-off homer hit by Lane Thomas later in that same game. The Thomas dinger might have had just enough mustard on it to get out last year, but it was a close enough call to merit inclusion on the list. Four found home runs fits with Ben’s analysis and what Statcast’s park factors have observed in the data thus far. But since all four were solo jobs, their part in the Royals’ sudden scoring surge is more supporting role than main character.

Doubles are somewhat more perplexing. As Ben noted in his piece, several of the “new” home runs would have been doubles under the old configuration, implying a downturn to the frequency of two-baggers. But the early park factors suggest a boost rather than a decline. The Royals’ early-season doubles pace is on par with the numbers they’ve posted in recent seasons, but their opponents, on the other hand, have picked up the pace considerably, hitting a double in around 8% of their plate appearances, whereas in the past that number sat between 4% and 5%. It’s not clear where the increase in opponent doubles is coming from, but since those aren’t contributing to the rising tide of Royals run scoring, that can be a mystery for another day.

Using some napkin math and this year’s wOBA weights, the bump in walks and home runs attributable to ABS and the change in ballpark dimensions was worth somewhere in the neighborhood of 22 runs for the Royals during those first 17 home games. Those 22 runs represent an increase in scoring that should have been easily anticipated by anyone trying to guesstimate how many days they’d be handing out free lunches over the course of a season, since the changes to the ballpark and the introduction of ABS were known in advance. Scoring 22 runs over 17 games is 1.2 runs per game, which if added to, say, the Royals’ 3.7 runs per home game from 2025, creates an estimate much closer to the 5.5 runs per game that Kansas City put up at home from the start of the season to May 5. If the decision-makers at Hawaiian Bros had figured on the Royals’ scoring 4.9 runs per home game, then using the runs per home game mapping above, they would have anticipated around 30 games of six or more runs spread throughout the season. And pro-rating that figure to those first 17 games, they would have anticipated six or so such games over that span. In that event, it still wouldn’t have been ideal for their business model that the actual numbers of games in which the Royals scored six-plus runs was eight, but it certainly would’ve been less of a shock to the system.

And yet, that still leaves a certain amount of the Royals’ newfound scoring (at least relative to last season) unaccounted for. Some of that could be positive regression following a down start to the season last year. Some could be the type of streaky overperformance that is wont to happen in small samples.

There are several members of the lineup currently outpacing their preseason projections, especially when playing at home, raising concerns of how sustainable this all is. Some of those concerns are more easily dismissed than others. The projections were clearly skeptical of the career-best numbers Garcia posted in 2025, but so far in 2026, it appears those numbers were a result of meaningful adjustments to his swing. It’s also not hard to believe that 26 year-old Bobby Witt Jr. might still have some room to grow and evolve his game. However, it remains to be seen if Kyle Isbel can keep slugging .410 despite his .356 xSLG and the lowest hard-hit rate of his career. Likewise, Collins is running a .415 BABIP at home, which calls into question how long he’ll be able to maintain the matching .415 wOBA.

Another BABIP-related cause for concern is the team’s .309 BABIP at home, relative to its .260 BABIP on the road. However, if you scroll back up to the park factors table, you’ll notice that in the new version of Kauffman Stadium, wOBACON gets a bump that xwOBACON does not, suggesting that this iteration of the ballpark has established a pattern of delivering better-than-expected outcomes, which further suggests that a higher BABIP at home is justified, and perhaps not a cause for concern after all.

But even if Isbel and Collins do take a step back, there’s Vinnie Pasquantino, who currently resides at the other end of the BABIP-luck spectrum. His overall BABIP currently sits at .223 (.197 at home), and his .310 xwOBA offers some light in the darkness cast by his .284 wOBA (.272 at home).

So yes, certain members of the Kansas City lineup may be producing above expectations to this point in the season, and they may be doing so in a manner that would have been difficult to predict for a marketing executive or financial officer in the food service industry. But on the other hand, those overperformances are somewhat counterbalanced by underperformance from Pasquantino and Perez (who seems to have one of those aging curves that more closely resembles a cliff).

Overall, a decent chunk of the pain inflicted on Kansas City-area locations of Hawaiian Bros was foreseeable by anyone who knows ball even a little bit. And arguably, if you plan to partner with an MLB team, you should probably know a little bit of ball. But ball knowledge aside, the heads of Hawaiian Bros definitely understand ‘ohana (even if they haven’t seen Lilo & Stitch) because they have an entire glossary of Hawaiian words on the community engagement page of their website. That definition of ‘ohana reads, “Family, but used beyond blood relations to express love and commitment within communities and workplaces.” And yet, they couldn’t commit to Plates for Plates as originally presented to their community. So yes, it’s true that ‘ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind or forgotten, but Hawaiian Bros was quick to leave an ill-conceived promo behind in the hope that it would soon be forgotten.