Crown Jewels: Projection SZN, Filling out the Front Office and More

Free agency officially started at 4pm CST yesterday. Come on, people, let's get some news.

The opening salvo of the offseason has passed us by with the general manager meetings coming to a close yesterday and the start of free agency hitting at the end of the meetings. Those aren’t necessarily the craziest four days in baseball, but a lot of rumors do begin to come out, which is only natural given that there are 30 general managers in one place for the first time since whenever the last time was. So they talk and things leak and sometimes thing leak on purpose and you start to hear some things come about. It was even pretty quiet by normal GM meeting standards this week, but the stage has now been set for the rest of the winter.

I get the impression just from a bird’s eye view and from some people who I’ve spoken with that it could be a pretty fun winter around the game. It feels like more teams are actually looking to compete and the game is filled with cash. So let’s see what can come over the next few months. Sadly, the Royals won’t be crazy active, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be news surrounding them. We know they’re looking for a starter or two, a reliever, a backup catcher and maybe an outfielder, so there’ll be news on them throughout the winter. Plus, we’re still waiting to find out who is leading that pitching staff.

Projection Time!

One of my favorite things about the offseason is looking at projections. Do they matter? Absolutely not. The game is played in real life, not from a program designed to take comps with programmed aging curves and a lot more stuff that I will never understand because that’s not how my brain works. But they also do a darn good job because the people who build these systems are great at it. Yes, you sometimes have big misses like we saw with PECOTA during the height of the Royals being good and all that, but generally, they do a pretty nice job.

And this week, the Steamer projections dropped on Fangraphs, which means projection szn is here for us and I love it. One thing I would like to note is that they’re nothing to get mad at. I feel like Royals fans have gotten so mad at projections. They’re tools in the toolbelt of evaluation. If you don’t agree with them, cool. If you do, cool. I love them because they add another piece of information for me to work with when I’m looking at the team.

These projections are kind of interesting. Maybe it’s recency bias, but I don’t remember a Royals offense being so well regarded by a projection system. Vinnie Pasquantino is projected to put up a 140 wRC+. That’s 13th best in the game. Remember when I said he’d be a top-30 hitter in 2023 (and then realized he was a top-30 hitter in 2022)? Well, Steamer agrees. It has MJ Melendez sitting at 118, Bobby Witt Jr. at 114, Salvador Perez at 109, Edward Olivares at 107, Nick Pratto at 107, Michael Massey at 101 and Drew Waters at 99. That’s eight guys who are average or better. It also has Tyler Gentry at 116, which means the system likes him as much as I do. It’s less encouraging on the pitching side. Brady Singer’s 3.81 ERA and 3.69 FIP are solid. Daniel Lynch at 4.32/4.30 isn’t bad by any stretch. But that’s really about it on the pitching side.

Filling Out the Front Office

When the Royals fired Dayton Moore, they didn’t make any other moves. Nobody else left the organization, nobody else was hired into the organization. But I was told at the time that there would be more moves made to alter the way things have been done on the development side and just generally adding voices. The fact that nobody has been added isn’t terribly surprising, but I think if they get to the winter meetings or even a little later than that, I will be surprised with no changes. I guess it’d be nearly impossible to not have something changed with the hiring of a new pitching coach, especially given some of how Matt Quatraro phrased things when he was on The Border Patrol on Wednesday morning. He talked about the pitching instruction being a team effort and mentioned a pitching coach, bullpen coach and pitching strategist specifically. That doesn’t have to be how they handle it, but it could be. So there would be changes there.

I have heard here and there that the Royals ownership group is all about how the Astros do business, sans the cheating scandal, of course. And with good reason. The Astros consistently take lower-round picks, smaller-bonus international signings and generally lower-regarded prospects and turn them into something special. That’s not to say they haven’t been blessed with some excellent prospect pedigree as well, but to look at Framber Valdez and Cristian Javier in the World Series tells you a fair amount about what you need to know.

If the Astros aren’t able to get a deal done with James Click to bring him back as GM (I can’t, for the life of me, understand why they don’t want him back), I hope the Royals jump all over that and try to sell Click on working in a revamped organization and with a manager who he used to work with from his days with the Rays. To me, that'd be about the perfect hire. Someone mentioned the idea to me back in August and I thought it was silly because why would Click leave Houston, but here we are with that possibility. And if you’re wondering about the front office structure if they could make this happen, I have to say, I don’t know. But I do remember when Dayton Moore first came on board that he brought in quite a few former GMs to work on his staff. I remember thinking how cool it was that someone was secure in his own job to be willing to hire a potential replacement. This would feel a little like that.

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Offensive Needs

No, I’m not talking about needs for this team that should offend others, but rather what they could use offensively to round out the lineup. It’s easy to see what they did at the end of the season and be on board with them going all young, especially if the goal is to improve and not to win in 2023. That said, as strong as the projections above showed the offense could be, I think they could obviously stand to benefit from a veteran bat somewhere in the lineup. The positional versatility does help quite a bit in potentially going after some help. If they want to play Witt at third, for example, they could try to swim in the deep end and sign one of the shortstops.

They won’t, but they could. But they could look to sign a short-term third baseman if they wanted a veteran right-handed bat in the lineup. One name I think would be interesting, though I’m not sure how likely it is, would be Evan Longoria. He had a solid 115 wRC+ last year and, given that he hasn’t exceeded 500 plate appearances since 2019, he both shouldn’t be too expensive and would likely not block a young player from gaining some experience.

The other area where they could target a bat would be in the corner outfield spots. As of right now, they sit with Melendez, Waters, Olivares, Nate Eaton, Kyle Isbel and potentially Gentry as corner outfield options throughout the season. It would be helpful if they would move Michael A. Taylor, which I expect them to be trying to do throughout the offseason. That would likely give center field to Waters or maybe Isbel, but either way, they have some options. Still, if you’re looking for a veteran bat, I don’t think anyone should be blocking that, especially on a short-term deal. I sort of feel like maybe the right-handed bat part isn’t as important as it maybe seemed at points during the season, but they are stll on that train. Still, some of the shorter-term options are righty, so in looking at them, if they choose to go that route, I’d have some interest in Adam Duvall, AJ Pollock and Mitch Haniger for sure. I had written this before this came out, but shows they are definitely looking for some righty bats.

Who’s Getting Traded?

As you can see in the article linked above, the Royals are willing to make some moves from their big league roster, which should be no surprise at all. The question is who could go? I’ve written about this before, but I think your untouchables are Witt, Melendez, Pasquantino and probably Perez. I’m not sure that Melendez or Perez should be untouchable, but I think they are. Anyone else seems like fair game, especially with a new mindset for the organization. With that said, it seems like there are two obvious candidates, one of whom has been discussed since last trade deadline and one who isn't really discussed much. The one who we know is a candidate I mentioned above and it’s Taylor.

The other, though, is Olivares. The news that the Royals are looking for a right-handed bat and one who can play corner outfield at that makes me wonder what they actually think of him. I believe he can hit. He had a 110 wRC+ in 2022. What I’m not sure if he can do is play the outfield at a high enough level to support a non-elite bat. But I think there’s value with him, not as a centerpiece in a deal, but as someone who can either be part of a bigger deal or in a smaller deal for a leverage-type reliever.

The Rays make some sense, though they’re trying to shed players from their 40-man, so maybe not. But the Rangers, Red Sox and White Sox all could use more production from their outfield. I believe trading Olivares would be a case of selling high after a very good offensive season. I’m a big fan of the guy and I’m not against him being the right-handed bat they covet, but if they can go get someone to give them some much-needed innings, maybe he goes this winter.