Crown Jewels: Aroldis Chapman is a Royal, Brady Singer is Fighting Arbitration and More

A controversial signing, a young pitcher going through arbitration, trusting coaches and where Michael A. Taylor might go.

The closer we get to spring training, the farther away it feels. Maybe that’s just for me because I’m not going to be able to travel down to Arizona this spring as planned. Life just gets in the way, you know? So that’s a bummer because I hadn’t had a chance to get down there for spring training since 2019 before last year. Then I went and the lockout was still going on, so I ate a lot of delicious food and came back four pounds heavier than when I left. On that note, I’m putting this out there to hold myself accountable, but I’m going to put together a spring training guide that at least encapsulates my experience having been there more times than I can honestly count.

I think I mentioned this last week, but I’m sort of missing the long and drawn out free agent sagas of past years that we were dealing with. Because now we’re left with the best remaining position players being, I don’t know, Jurickson Profar, Gary Sanchez and Elvis Andrus maybe? It’s nothing against those guys, but there have been plenty of years where elite talent is still on the board. While I do understand the idea the Royals have had to supplement this roster, I think they’ve gone a little too bare-bones to this point. I’d have liked to have seen them in on someone like Craig Kimbrel or Adam Duvall or AJ Pollock or even take a flyer on a guy like Jeimer Candelario. Again, I’m not against the idea of figuring out exactly what they have and what they’ll need moving forward, but committing to it this much means they have to act accordingly both at the trade deadline if an opportunity arises and next offseason.

Aroldis Chapman Will Pitch For the Royals

Let’s just start with this because it’s the biggest news.

From a baseball perspective, I actually do sort of get it. Chapman is one year removed from a solid enough season, albeit with too many walks. Even last year, he didn’t give up his first run until May 11. Things got awfully rough from that point forward, but the Royals signing him to a $3.75 million deal is probably the right amount for a once-elite reliever who you’re hoping to get a few good months out of before you trade him to a contender for a prospect we’ll likely never hear of again. The guy still throws upper-90s and gets whiffs on 36 percent of his sliders and his splitter still holds opponents to a sub-.120 batting average.

I did talk to someone who I trust who has very good intel into what the organization is doing. He says there is a fixable mechanical issue that they have found and believe they can fix. I think it’s very easy to scoff at them fixing someone’s mechanics, but remember, this is a new big league team of pitching instructors. Nobody knows if they’re capable of something like that, though it sort of sounds like they’ve got the right mix from what you hear around the game.

There’s your baseball side of it. As I said, I get it. And while I try to stick to baseball here, the world outside the game collides with it sometimes, like in this instance.

Chapman was suspended for 30 games in 2016 for firing a handgun eight times during a domestic dispute. He was never charged with anything legally, but MLB doesn’t need a crime to conduct their own investigation and they deemed what he did deserved punishment. In the incident, he was said to have choked his girlfriend and pushed her against a wall in addition to firing the gun. There will be many of you who will say he wasn’t convicted, so how can we deem him guilty or find him to be abhorrent or anything else? I don’t have an answer for that and I don’t care to have an answer for that. Everyone can believe what they want to believe. The league’s investigation led them to believe that he deserved to be punished. Ultimately the suspension was a result of his “use of a firearm and the impact of that behavior on his partner.”

Again, I’m not telling you what to believe about anything. This is what I believe. And what I believe is that Chapman did something vile enough for a league that loves to turn the other way to suspend him. I don’t know what kind of a person he is, though I have my suspicions. I don’t know if he’s changed, though I also have my suspicions. For me, I don’t really care. I hate this. I think this sends a terrible message.

There are times when teams have difficult choices to make. On any given team, there are probably some bad dudes that we’ll never know are bad. Maybe some people in the organization know, or maybe they don’t. They have to make the decision if the juice is worth that squeeze. In my opinion, Chapman is not worth the squeeze. And some of it is because of baseball!

There are reasons why he could bounce back and put together a good half-season. But he hasn’t been able to throw strikes since 2020 and literally abandoned his team in the postseason last year. He missed a mandatory workout and just didn’t show up. I think that’s an aspect of this that needs to be mentioned as well, in addition to anything else from his past. For a team that lauded the leadership and teachings of Zack Greinke in 2022 (how much he helped, I don’t honestly know but that’s another story), they sure are swinging the other way for someone who has shown his selfishness in a big, big way just last season. I believe there are some sound baseball reasons to sign Chapman, but I just can’t get behind this deal for so many reasons. Bad on you, Royals.

Now let’s get to a little more of the regularly scheduled Crown Jewels.

Brady Singer and the Arbitration Case

The Royals signed all their remaining arbitration-eligible players to deals last week. Except for one - Brady Singer. After his 2022 season, he was one of the best of the bunch, alongside Scott Barlow. The gap, on the surface, is pretty small. Singer’s camp asked for $3.325 million and the Royals offer was $2.95 million. So the gap of $375k is a small one, but there are a couple of things I want to note here. It’s 11.3 percent of the total Singer asked for, so it’s not nothing. And the Royals offer was actually higher than the MLB Trade Rumors initial estimate. Those aren’t gospel by any stretch, but I found that interesting.

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My guess based on things I’ve heard is that this case doesn’t get to arbitration. It sounds like the Royals are discussing, hopefully with Singer, a long-term deal that will accomplish one of two things. Either they would buy out some or all of his four arbitration years or extend the deal into a free agent year or two. While I think there are a lot of reasons to hate only taking care of some or all of his arbitration seasons, I think with a guy like Singer there is some reason that it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for both sides.

While some peripherals in 2021 told a similar story to his 2020 season, others didn’t. I also think there were some fair questions about his mentality out there as well and why he struggled so much in his sophomore season. But he was very good in 2022. From the team perspective, maybe he doesn’t want to give up free agency, but you can get some cost control if the rise continues. From Singer’s perspective, while players almost exclusively bet on themselves, he is a year removed from a 4.91 ERA/4.54 xERA. What if he goes from looking like a legitimate number two to being a four again? My point is that I think there’s a middle ground.

I wrote about what a long-term extension for Singer would look like back in August, and I still think that’s the best avenue to take. I think there’s a lot of risk taken on by the team in a six-year deal for any pitcher, but I also think it’s a necessary one if you’re the Royals given the price of pitching out there. What would Singer have gotten as a free agent this year? Even if he just maintains his 2022 performance for four more seasons, add a number with a lot of zeroes to it then. They aren’t going to swim in the deep end of the free agent pitcher pool, so they need to keep their own when they can.

The numbers in the linked article may be a bit off after this offseason, but the point remains that they should absolutely be getting something done. And I think they will, but it’s important to remember that things don’t always happen as you’d expect, so they could find themselves in an arbitration hearing over $375k. At least they wouldn’t be the only team haggling with their talented players over a small amount, but that doesn’t make it any more enjoyable to watch from afar.

Coaching Insight

A report came out this week that the Royals had talked with the Twins regarding a Michael A. Taylor deal. I honestly didn’t even think about them as a destination, but it does sort of make perfect sense given how often Byron Buxton isn’t out there. They would probably very much enjoy an elite defender on the days (or weeks) when Buxton isn’t available for them. I think the fact that they’re talking Taylor is encouraging and I’d guess he goes sometime before the season starts, but what I found most interesting was the ask. Apparently, they were wanting Josh Winder from the Twins in return.

If you’re wondering why that’s interesting, it makes me think they’re trying to make decisions based on their new coaching staff. Maybe I’m way off here, but Winder is someone who Zach Bove, the new director of Major League pitching strategy and assistant pitching coach, would likely know pretty well. I think there’s also a chance this front office just likes Winder. Heck, he was part of the 2018 draft, so if they’re trying to collect the whole set of college pitchers, he’d need to be part of that collection. But I do think there’s likely some influence from Bove here.

They’d already signed Nick Wittgren to a minor league deal previously, who I would assume Brian Sweeney had quite a bit of familiarity with. That’s interesting to me because, if it’s not just coincidence, it shows that this front office is leaning on the people they hired to do their job to help them find the best talent to put on the field. It’s not that these guys can only work with players they’ve worked with in the past, of course, but I do think it represents something positive for this organization.

Selfishly, it also might help a bit to have some sort of idea of where the team might turn for making moves in the future. We had a generally great idea of what Dayton Moore was going to do every year, I think, but even if you believe JJ Picollo is the same, he’s also very clearly a different person. They’ve been in the same room so we know that to be true. But if they’re leaning on coaches, I think we can expect to see guys like Matt Quatraro, Bove and Sweeney are familiar with and given their previous organizations, that’s certainly not a bad thing at all.

Michael A. Taylor Fits, Part Deux

I wrote in mid-December about some places we could find some Royals veterans before Opening Day. And in that newsletter, the one player who I felt was the most likely to be traded was Taylor. With the news that the Royals and Twins have talked about a deal involving him, I think there are a couple of things to glean from that. The first is that they’re actually talking about him with other teams. And they need to be. They have two players who can handle the position defensively in Kyle Isbel and Drew Waters and you can make a strong argument that both deserve playing time to determine what they have in either or both.

I think there will likely be some pushback on Isbel because of his offensive struggles in 2022, but he did hit .276/.337/.434 in the big leagues in 2021 and hit .320/.376/.531 in his final 35 games in Omaha that year as well. So while he struggled in 2022, you don’t have to go back far to find offensive promise. Regardless, one of he or Waters should be getting daily reps in center field and that won’t happen if Taylor is on the roster.

And Taylor is valuable. He was a 1.5 WAR player in 2022 and a 2.0 WAR player in 2021, pretty much all on the strength of outstanding defense in center field. The power he’s shown at times doesn’t show up enough to believe he’s an offensive force and the odds are that he’ll be someone you don’t want hitting anywhere higher than, say, eighth when he plays, but he can help a team. His salary is reasonable at $4.5 million to the point that a lot of teams would likely be able to find a spot for him.

Among those are still the White Sox, Cubs and Giants from the article last month. The Mets no longer seem like a fit after signing Tommy Pham, but we can add the Twins, Red Sox (if they move Hernandez to the infield), Blue Jays, Marlins, Brewers and maybe the Rockies as potential fits. While I think asking for someone like Winder is an extremely big ask for someone like Taylor, the Royals have some options with how they want to handle this.

Since the return is likely to be relatively small, they could attach a contract they don’t want to it and bring back very little but more roster flexibility. I don’t see them doing that. But what I could see is finding some big arm in A-ball and seeing what they can do with it. With their pitching development history, the odds are that nothing comes of any return, but it’s nice to know they’re at least talking about him with other teams and, even though their ask was so high, it makes me feel better about them potentially clearing the space for a young player by the time the season starts.