Crown Jewels: Now We Wait

The offseason means an old favorite comes back while we wait patiently for the Royals to play baseball games again.

If you’re new to Inside the Crown, you aren’t familiar with Crown Jewels. If you’ve been following my writing for the decade plus I’ve been doing it, you know that Crown Jewels was once Lesky's Notes, which was once Friday Notes, which was (literally only) once Royals Notes. It started in the Pine Tar Press days when I had a bunch of random little things to say, but none were enough for a full blog post, so I just wrote a bunch of bullet points. People ate it up. Okay, maybe not all people, but my mom said she sure liked it, so I made it a weekly thing. Anyway, here we are. I’m heading into my 15th offseason writing about the Royals and an old favorite is back.

Just for a programming note, while the Weekend in Review was the weekly post that was free to everyone, nobody cares about my weekend activities, so for the winter, Crown Jewels will replace it. That means you’ll get a free post on Fridays instead of Mondays if you’re not a paid subscriber. It’s still one a week, but you’ll just read it when you’re pretending to work at the end of the week instead of when you’re pretending to work to start the week.

There will be a test over all of this, so I hope you’ve taken great notes. Let’s get to mine.

They Understand Where They Are

There were a lot of issues that plagued the Royals organizationally after they won the World Series. I think you could make an argument that the biggest one is that they didn’t properly evaluate themselves. After a 26-34 shortened season in 2020 that saw debuts from Brady Singer and Kris Bubic along with Salvador Perez finding the fountain of youth (while dealing with eye issues, kind of a dichotomy there) and Brad Keller turning in a legitimately excellent (but very short) season, Dayton Moore thought the Royals were right on the cusp. I can sort of see it looking back. They also had Whit Merrifield still hitting fine and the big power of Jorge Soler.

That winter, they added Carlos Santana, Michael A. Taylor, Mike Minor and Andrew Benintendi. There is a world where that roster put together a season probably not that different than the one we just witnessed. But that world doesn’t exist in the real world. They weren’t horrible, but they weren’t good. I thought they were set up a little better than ended up being the case and they bottomed out two years later before rising back up this past season. I don’t think that was the most egregious case of it in the DM era, but it’s just an example of simply not knowing where the team was.

JJ Picollo and his team seem to have an understanding of both where they are, but also what they actually need to get better. And I don’t just mean the player. I mean the type of player. They have shown an ability to know who their coaching staff works with better than others and get certain guys in a position to succeed. We saw that with two of the more sought-after starting pitchers in the second and third tiers last year and how well they worked with Brian Sweeney, Zach Bove and the rest of the pitching development staff.

But I really appreciated hearing an honest assessment of where the team was after an 86-win season that included a playoff series win. Matt Quatraro thought they should have won more games. Picollo called MJ Melendez a “perplexing” player, which is a pretty perfect word to describe him, but one I don’t think I can imagine a lot of GMs saying about their team. He called the offense “acceptable” and then immediately discussed that they need more ability to get on base. Can you imagine a previous regime lamenting missed opportunities for an offense that finished in the top half of the league in runs scored?

And maybe one of the more interesting and encouraging things said was that they believe they can’t simply count on building a team through your system entirely. They understand the need to add from outside the organization. It’s okay if you look at a chart at the end of the year and your team isn’t fully homegrown. Sure you’d love it if you can put out a team with 20 players from your own farm system, but that’s just not realistic. There isn’t just one way to build a team, but the way that doesn’t work is to take one approach and hammer it home whether it’s working or not.

I’ve said this before. I’m not sure that any of what they’re doing will work in the long run. It worked in 2024 enough to get them to the postseason and through a series win. But I feel like they’re attacking things in a way that if it doesn’t work, it’s not because of a bad plan. To build a team, you need a lot of things, but understanding where you are internally and evaluating yourself is way more important than I think a lot of people realize and I appreciate that they are incredibly reflective and seem to be quite aware of where they stand and who they have to turn to and who they need to go outside the organization to get.

In the Middle

Let’s dive in to one spot in particular that Picollo mentioned on Monday - the middle of the order. I touched on this some yesterday, but I’m wondering if Picollo wasn’t quite as all-in on his discussion of a middle of the order bat as he was a leadoff hitter because he’s just not sure the options are really there for the Royals. I’ve scoured the free agent market, and there are some options. Seven players who are guaranteed to become free agents and one more with a team option hit 30 home runs last season. There were 11 more who hit at least 20. But also let that sink in. There are 19 players on the free agent market who hit 20 or more home runs last season.

You may remember there are 30 teams, and while not all 30 are doing everything they can to actually improve, there are many who will look at this list and it could get picked over fast. The way the market has moved the last few years, I do think the Royals will have their shot at some guys, and if they are as aggressive as they were last year, they’ll at least give some players a very real decision to make. But the market is not exactly loaded in guys the Royals are likely to target at all or land if they do.

Let’s look at someone like Pete Alonso. If the Mets even let him entertain offers elsewhere, are the Royals going to pony up nine figures to a first baseman who isn’t even good at that position? I don’t think so. Juan Soto is out. Rhys Hoskins hits home runs but doesn’t do a whole lot else at this point. Paul DeJong is one of the 19 and it feels like the Royals got what they wanted out of him before he hit the skids at the end of the year and then didn’t see the field in the postseason. I see eight of those 19 as making some semblance of sense for the Royals:

Willy Adames
Alex Bregman
Michael Conforto
Teoscar Hernandez
Tyler O’Neill
Joc Pederson
Jurickson Profar
Anthony Santander

And they all come with questions to answer and boxes to check that the Royals may not. Adames has to be willing to play third and even if he is, is he out of their price range (I’ll get to their price range in like a minute)? Bregman probably has to not be getting the offers he’s wanting and comes down a bit, and even then, his reduced walk rate is scary. Hernandez is probably going to get a lot of money. Profar seems to love San Diego. He’s left and come back. I think I might be surprised if he leaves again. Santander is going to get paid.

So that leaves Conforto, O’Neill and Pederson. I would caution you to not read too much into the interest in O’Neill from last winter. Their interest was real, but I have questions of how much of their interest was in the acquisition cost and salary that 2023 O’Neill required when he now is looking for a multi-year deal at eight figures per year. That’s not to say they won’t check in, but he’s a guy who gives very strong bad contract vibes. With Pederson, he has two big limitiations. He probably shouldn’t play against lefties and he probably shouldn’t be allowed to put a glove on. So that leaves Conforto, who has his own defensive limitations, but probably checks just about every other box for the Royals.

It’s not that they can’t sign someone or won’t, but the options are pretty light out there. There are always trades too. I haven’t even begun to look at the potential trade market because that's always so tricky in the winter, but there will be players available. And, again, if they jump the market, maybe they get someone to make a quicker decision becuase they don’t want to wait for other teams. I just want to point out that the free agent options are a bit lacking in free agency.

Where the Payroll Stands

As of this moment, the Royals have $55 million in guaranteed contracts (thanks, Darin, for catching my bad math!) that are handed out to five players. I’m going to assume that both Hunter Renfroe and Chris Stratton do not opt out. Whether they’re on the team or not, they’re owed $6.5 million and $4.5 million respectively in 2025. The other three are Perez ($22 million), Seth Lugo ($15 million) and Bobby Witt Jr. ($7 million). Then there are 10 players who are arbitration eligible and they’re estimated to earn $26.9 million. Of those 10, only Josh Taylor and his $1.1 million seems unlikely to remain, though I suppose there’s a world where Brady Singer ($8.8 million) gets traded or they just decide it’s not worth it with someone like Carlos Hernandez ($1.2 million) or MJ Melendez ($2.5 million), though I’d be surprised.

Let’s remove Taylor because if I’m wrong and he’s on the team, it’s a small amount, but I don’t think he will be. That leaves them with $81.8 million committed to 14 players. They were a touch over $115 million on the Opening Day roster for their 26-man roster, according to Cot’s. I’m not even going to wager a guess where they ended up because it does get so weird with partial contracts from trades and all that, but I think it’s fair to say that they were a bit higher than that by the time the season ended with all the pickups. Let’s say $125 million for ease of math. That means the Royals could have as much as $45 million or so to spend to reach this past season’s payroll.

There are some financial questions, mostly centering around the television deal. You can ask me all sorts of questions about what it all means. I don’t have an answer. I probably should since I want to position myself as someone who does have a lot of those answers, but I just don’t at this time. I’ll try to get some. What I can tell you is that I’ve heard it won’t impact their spending moving into 2025. I haven’t confirmed this, but I heard from the same source last year that they would be spending big, so I feel good about it. I get the impression that this group has tasted losing and they’ve tasted winning and they’d much rather eat a filet than dumpster dive.

What I don’t know just yet is if that means they are going to blow past this year’s payroll or if they are comfortable repeating it. The other small question is if they just want to stay in the same range, does that means room to grow to $125 million or would they be able to grow to $135 million with midseason acquisitions. These are very small questions that are only important to the people making the decisions, but I find myself curious. All that said, they’ve got some money to spend and very clear books moving forward. They only have one player with guaranteed money beyond 2025 - Witt.

Perez holds a player option for 2026 that I could see going either way. My guess is the Royals will keep him in the fold as long as he wants to be there, but at what cost? Next year will determine a lot of that. The point, though, is that they have less than $20 million guaranteed on the books for 2026 and 2027 before Witt’s contract jumps to $30 million in 2028. So this gives them a whole lot of room to add both for 2025 and 2026 if they’re looking at similar terms to the deals they signed last season. Or it gives them an opportunity to do what they said at the deadline and take on a bad contract in a trade to decrease the player cost.

Every offseason is different, but I think the Royals find themselves in a spot they haven’t been in before, at least not in the era of modern baseball money. They no longer have to pay the bad team tax. They have a superstar with whom other players will theoretically want to play. And they might be one of the few teams spending money. They had the latter last winter and the superstar wasn’t quite a superstar yet, but was close. But they certainly had to pay the bad team tax. No, they’re not going to be in on Juan Soto or players like him, but I don’t think there’s any player the Royals can’t get and any of the players they target could easily see Kansas City as the place they’d rather be over other offers. It’s a wild time we live in.