Crown Jewels: Lockout and Post-Lockout Moves
Just some thoughts rolling around in my head that need a home.
Welcome to Monday, friends. When the season ended, I decided to take Mondays off from Inside the Crown. Part of that was there just wasn’t much to talk about with no games being played and part of it was that a lot of people were busy recovering from watching the Chiefs play. But now we’re in that in-between time when the season hasn’t started yet (and who knows when it will) and there’s no Monday morning recovery from a football game. So here’s a good spot to talk about some baseball things and some Royals things that are in my head and need a place to be written.
The Royals Could Come Out Swinging
No, this isn’t a knock on their plate discipline historically, though they likely will come out swinging once they start playing. This is, however, thinking about what will happen when the lockout ends. You might recall there was a frenzy right before the owners got tired of people excitedly talking about their sport and locked out their players. But what was left was a free agent pool that, when you include minor league players, exceeded 600 total. While the Royals made one big league signing - Taylor Clarke - and a handful of minor league signings - JaCoby Jones, Richard Lovelady (that was procedural), Arodys Viscaino and Colten Brewer - they’ve still been very quiet.
And yet, there’s the sense that the roster isn’t complete. I’ve mentioned before that I think they could go after a righty fourth outfielder. Maybe Jones is that guy. Maybe it’s Edward Olivares. Or maybe it’s someone else like Kevin Pillar, who I mentioned before. It doesn’t ultimately matter who. I think that’s a position they could look toward since they don’t especially need to find a utility infielder who can handle shortstop. So that’s a move.
They’ve also talked about wanting a veteran reliever. There are still tons of options out there. A lot of people have brought up how perfect Collin McHugh would be as the veteran presence that Ervin Santana provided last season. But there’s also 66 relievers total listed on the MLB Trade Rumors free agents list. Some would not be received well. Ian Kennedy and Jesse Hahn come to mind. Though both could end up being relative bargains if they pitch as well as each has at some points in recent seasons. There’s also Greg Holland and Archie Bradley and Mychal Givens and Ryan Tepera and, like I said, a ton of others available.
And with an abnormally condensed window to get to camp, it could be a free-for-all. While the big money free agents will still likely only sign with a handful of teams, the guys who are going to make what they’re going to make and any team could be in on it will likely just move quick. That means the Royals can benefit from not dealing with other teams courting the player the way that typically occurs in an offseason.
So don’t be too surprised if the Royals jump in there pretty quickly on a bullpen arm. I don’t anticipate them getting into a bidding war or anything, but they could move fast on one of those even though I’m not sure it makes a ton of sense. For a team somewhere between bad and mediocre in 2021, the Royals have a reasonably set roster, but I think they want to find a veteran or two to help supplement some of the youth on this team that we’ll see in 2022. So free agent jumping could be fast, but trades? Not so much.
With that said…
Finding a Fit for Carlos Santana
This is the biggest question the Royals have in terms of the roster before the season. They currently have Santana atop the first base depth chart with Hunter Dozier right behind him. Given how both performed in 2021, it’s easy to gag at the thought of that, especially with Nick Pratto and Vinnie Pasquantino climbing the minor league ladder. Pratto could potentially play a corner outfield, but he’s a legitimately elite defensive first baseman. Pasquantino is a first baseman and designated hitter only, no questions asked.
If you’ve read the tea leaves throughout the offseason, the Royals want to trade Santana. They wanted to trade him at the deadline too, no matter what Dayton Moore said publicly, but he was just struggling too much to find a trade partner. So here they are with Santana set to be paid $10.5 million in 2022 and the Royals want to dump that off. There are some questions we don’t know the answer to just yet like if they’re willing to eat money or how long his leash is if they can’t move him. But I believe they will be aggressive in trying to dump him once the lockout ends and before the regular season begins.
The universal designated hitter is helpful here. Not that Santana’s .214/.319/.342 line has teams lining up to give him four or five at bats per game and only that, but it allows them to search for some teams hiding bat only players at first base, in addition to teams needing just about anything at first. So the market opens just a bit for him.
There are two big roadblocks to a quick Santana trade, though. The first is that the first base market is not exactly hurting even after all those signings before the lockout. Freddie Freeman and Anthony Rizzo are both still free agents and while I’d still bet on the Braves over the field for Freeman, it’s not like there aren’t other possibilities. A team isn’t going to jump to get Santana if they have a shot for him. Or Rizzo for that matter. And then there’s Matt Olson, who is very available in a trade. He’s better, younger and under control for longer. Add in Kyle Schwarber, though he looked bad at first, and even Albert Pujols who showed some value for the Dodgers after they picked him up and the Santana market is slow.
That said, once the dust settles, you could look at a handful of teams who could miss on the bats still out there and be interested in Santana. I’d look to the Guardians, Brewers, Yankees, Mariners, Red Sox, Dodgers and Phillies as teams who might have some level of interest. The return isn’t going to be much, but they could all be interested given their needs on the roster.
The second roadblock is something that having to wait might help the Royals with, at least a bit. There’s at least reasonable evidence that his struggles had something to do with his hip, which was an issue for him down the stretch. Let’s say the lockout ends this week (more on that in a second) and teams report a week from today (please???). If the Royals have to wait a bit for the first base market to shake out and they can get Santana 25-30 at bats in games and he looks better at the plate, ignoring numbers, maybe they can convince a team that it truly was his health that caused the issues. It won’t change a ton, but it might make him just a bit more tradeable. So this is the big story as far as the roster is concerned once things start back up.
Lockout Chatter
The big story from the first part of last week was the bomb dropped by Jeff Passan on Twitter.
What. A. Joke.
It wasn’t long ago (just a year, in fact) that the minors were realigned and cities lost their teams and organizational affiliations when they cut down the number of teams from 160 to 120. Franchises like Lexington, where the Royals had their high-A affiliate from 2013 to 2019 and had a rich history in the Sally League is now independent. It’s like that all around the country. But with this proposal, it just continues to snip away at the minors.
Currently, teams are allowed to roster up to 180 players throughout the minor leagues. This proposal gives them the right, after 2022, to drop that number to below 150 in future seasons. Apparently the league has no plans to actually drop the number, but they’d like the ability to do so. But why? Oh right, they continue to not want to pay minor leaguers, which was also the big story from the week before when everything came out about them not wanting to pay them during spring training, essentially giving them the internship speech about how great the exposure is for them.
This is just another round of a long line of minor leaguers getting treated like less thans throughout the game. And it just doesn’t make sense to me. Teams talk all the time about how the minors are the lifeblood of their organization. Of course they’re right. You have a big league roster to fill and it would seem to be difficult to do so without developing a single player in your own system. I suppose it’s possible, but the player comes from someone’s system. It blows my mind that some teams just don’t take care of their players.
That includes housing, that includes nutrition, that includes, yes, money. We think about the massive bonuses that the first round picks and sometimes a little later get, but you don’t think about the player picked in the 28th round who got a $15,000 bonus and makes $4,000 a month (if that much) for six months. Or the player signed out of Venezuela for $20,000 who moves to a new country and makes that in the minors. It all goes hand-in-hand. Take care of your players and that helps them to develop and ultimately take care of you as a team. I feel like the powers that be should understand that selfish reasoning.
The players responded to the owners proposal on Thursday with a 15-minute meeting that probably didn’t mean as much as people made it out to be. Typically the presentation of a proposal won’t take long and there wouldn’t be a response immediately because they’d need to actually read what was in that proposal. Before you ask, no, I don’t know why they can’t email, fax or even send the proposal by carrier pigeon so they’ve had a chance to review it, but that’s just the way it works.
There wasn’t much movement by the players outside of redefining a previous proposal that I found very interesting. Originally, they had asked for arbitration to start after two years of service time. The owners obviously want to keep things the same because they’re making billions from this. With that, the players wanted a $100 million bonus pool to be paid out to the top-30 of that group. In the new proposal, they’ve reduced the number of players who will reach arbitration and they proposed a new $115 million bonus pool. While that might seem like it’s going the wrong way, that money would now be going to 150 players rather than 30.
But even more interesting is something I totally missed, but Marc Normandin caught.
That ultimatum is the sort of thing that has some legs to get a deal done. The players want a full season of baseball. The owners want the expanded playoffs because they make a buttload of money (that’s a technical term). Once the toothpaste is out of the tube on expanded playoffs, it’s not going back in, so the reality is that the owners have to ask themselves if they want to give in on some key issues now in order to get expanded postseason forever. Seems pretty simple to me.
Reports are that the sides are going to finally start daily negotiations today with a deadline of a week from today set for the deal to get done in order to start the season on time. I don’t remember who tweeted this, but they made a good point that if a deal gets done on March 1, they’re not likely to delay the season a day so it’s largely a figurehead deadline, but still, that’s one week of daily negotiations with one big ultimatum on the table. I’m back to being somewhat confident we’ll see regular season baseball on March 31.
So let’s hope we get some baseball soon and I get to see at least one spring training game when I’m in Arizona next week.
Thank you again for writing such a thorough and well-reasoned article about Royals baseball and baseball in general.
I have said before that I am opposed to signing any additional major league level free agents. I firmly believe we are at the time where we have enough players knocking on t he major league door and we need to find out what they really are. Starter? Bullpen arm? Closer? Set up man? Organizational filler?
At this time, there is no salary cap or salary floor. I see not signing anyone as saving money today to spend in the future years when we are really going to compete. I believe we will be below .500 in 2022, just at or above .500 in 2023 and competing for real in 2024-26.