Kansas City Royals' Kyle Isbel Gets the Ultimate Compliment From His Manager

Kansas City Royals' Kyle Isbel Gets the Ultimate Compliment From His Manager

The Kansas City Royals are 18-21 and sitting third in the AL Central after a rough opening stretch to 2026.

Wins have been hard to come by, but when they do show up, center fielder Kyle Isbel tends to have his fingerprints all over them.

He is not the most well-known name on the roster, but manager Matt Quatraro thinks the glove work alone puts Isbel in rare company.

Quatraro Speaks Up

After a recent game where Isbel came up big defensively, Quatraro did not dance around it.

"He's elite. Yeah, I mean, we've seen it now the whole time I've been here. And you guys have seen it before that," Quatraro said. "I mean, he gets great reads and he runs great routes. And he is a well above-average center fielder. It saved us tonight."

Managers do not throw that word around loosely, and the fact that Quatraro went straight to it without hedging says a lot about where Isbel stands in that clubhouse.

He has been the everyday center fielder since Quatraro took over, and the leash has never gotten shorter.

What the Stats Actually Show

The advanced metrics back him up too.

In 2025, Isbel finished with 12 Outs Above Average, which placed him in the 97th percentile among all outfielders while he posted a .997 fielding percentage across 118 starts.

He also graded out near the top of the league in Baseball Savant's Outfield Jump metric, which measures how quickly a player reads the ball and how clean his routes are.