Crown Jewels: Royals Farm System Improvements, Freddy's Future and Lots of Awards

While there is some vague off-field news for the Royals, we're just waiting for something real to happen.

The offseason is very much an example of having to hurry up and wait. Even if your favorite team is one of the most active teams and makes, say, eight moves, that’s eight moves over a three and a half month period. There’s only so many things that even can happen. But this week, there has actually at least been a little bit of news. It just happens to be regarding two things I simply don’t have that much knowledge on - the stadium and the television deal. The television deal is the one that’s the most interesting for 2025, and it may actually be settled for the Royals by the time you read this, depending on when you open this up.

It sure does appear that the Royals are going to be in the same position they were last season, on the network owned by the Diamond Sports Group. It’s now called FanDuel Sports Network, but it’s the same situation. What we don’t know yet is exactly how you can watch the Royals without cable. But the Royals were one of the few teams to already have a direct-to-consumer streaming option. You may not like it, but it existed, and it’s why I got so frustrated with people when they’d say they couldn’t watch the Royals. I’m not saying it was a great option, but they absolutely could have watched if they had chosen.

One of the big pieces of news from their bankruptcy hearing is that they’ll be offering a direct-to-consumer option through Amazon Prime for every partner. That doesn’t mean that’ll be how you can watch the Royals without cable. They may remain on the previous option, but at least there’s that. Hopefully we’ll know more soon enough. It seems that other teams who have re-upped with Diamond are doing so for about 20 percent less than their previous deal. For the Royals, that probably means about $10 million in lost revenue. I’d imagine they made up a good chunk of that with their playoff run, so I don’t think it’ll impact payroll in any way.

The other news is about the team apparently looking at a couple of Johnson County locations for the new stadium. I’m going to be honest. Neither makes much sense to me, so I’m not going to spend much time on it. But, in my experience, when teams start to float other locations it likely means that they’re trying to get the location they actually want to make a move, so I wonder if we’ll get something more concrete about the stadium pretty soon. I still like the location idea at Washington Square Park, but I haven’t heard much one way or another on that since it was mentioned a few months back.

This week’s newsletters:

JJ For a Day: Let's Make Some Deals

JJ For a Day: Free Agency Bonanza

The Hitting is Getting Better Organizationally

I commend the Royals and their front office for taking what they learned in 2023 and understanding that they couldn’t rely on their system for the next year or two. They learned definitively that they needed to go outside the organization for immediate talent. It worked, and I think that’s the route they’ll go again next season. But long-term, they’re going to need to figure out how to develop to be able to promote from within. They can sign players like they did last year every single year, but there are going to be seasons it just doesn’t work out. That’s why a consistent pipeline is so important.

I’ve long argued with people who would say that the Royals didn’t draft well for years that we actually have no idea if they drafted well or not because the development was so bad. The best of the best can work their way through a bad development system, but the vast majority of prospects need some help to make it. I think we’ve seen some big strides in the pitching development in the system, but the bats just weren’t there. We saw just how reluctant the Royals were to bring up anyone from AAA to help an offense that needed plenty of help at times. I wrote during the season that there were signs things were getting better at the lower levels, but it just hadn’t reached the top yet.

We saw guys like Carter Jensen develop into an offensive force. There were flashes from players like Austin Charles, Javier Vaz and others. Blake Mitchell showed his star bat potential (and why he needs a good development program too). And now Jac Caglianone is in the system as the hitter with potentially more power than anyone the Royals have ever had in their organization. Let’s take a look at the league average for the various levels and the affiliate numbers.

• International League: .255/.344/.420, Omaha: .257/.341/.444

• Texas League: .240/.327/.374, Northwest Arkansas: .244/.326/.390

• Midwest League: .235/.325/.359, Quad Cities: .232/.328/.361

• Carolina League: .229/.325/.336, Columbia: .219/.324/.330

You can see something happening at the two lower levels. They had a higher spread between their OBP and average than the league average. No, it wasn’t by much, but those teams worked some walks and got on base a little, relative to the league average. I also thinking looking at those averages is a big reason why you can’t just read a stat line and call it a day. Mitchell hitting .238/.376/.439 in Columbia, for example, looks a whole lot more impressive in context.

One area that showed tons of improvement was the underlying data. Baseball America looks at Statcast rankings throughout the organization. They have a metric called HIT+ that basically takes everything into account. It’s based on the scale where 100 is average and the Royals were at 101 this season. They were at 87 last year. They also look at 90th percentile exit velocity. The average in the minors was 101.2 MPH, which is exactly where the Royals ended. Last year, they were at 100.7, which doesn’t seem that different, but it was below average and fifth-worst. Their contract rate was 71.3 percent last year and 71.8 percent this year. The chase rate didn’t change much from last year, but it was right around league average.

We’ll need to see them do more in 2025. I think it’s a huge season for the overall health of the organization. Again, they probably can’t rely on bringing in players from elsewhere every year to fill in holes, so they’ll need to find a way to start churning out talent, but I think the signs, particularly at the lower levels, are promising.

Freddy’s Value

One of the overwhelming things I keep hearing from people is that the Royals should trade Freddy Fermin or at least look at moving him. I think it does make a fair amount of sense. While he struggled offensively after the start of August, he was such a good defender that he was top three for the Gold Glove, and honestly kind of deserved it. And before the offensive slump, he was hitting well. After back-to-back two-hit games to start August, he was hitting .308/.357/.442. That’s good enough to start on basically any team. He hit .203/.243/.234 in his last 136 plate appearances though.

It makes some sense because the Royals have Luca Tresh close to ready to be a backup catcher in the big leagues. Aside from him, they have Jensen working his way through the system and Mitchell not far behind him. There should theoretically be a market for a guy like Fermin, who is an outstanding defender, has a track record of hitting well enough to start (as long as the last two months were a fluke) and is pretty inexpensive while he has plenty of team control.

I can think of only a handful of teams that wouldn’t be interested in Fermin as someone to catch at least half the games. That leaves a lot of possibilities for him. The issue that I keep coming back to, though, is how much can the Royals actually get for him. Because the issue with trading Fermin is that the Royals need him. Salvador Perez doesn’t catch every day anymore, and he shouldn’t. Fermin ended the season with the 29th-most plate appearances as a catcher, just 73 fewer than Perez.

There aren’t really a lot of trades to look back on, so it’s hard to put together his trade value. But I just don’t think he would bring back enough to be worth trading a player who is so important to a playoff team. I count five teams - Rays, White Sox, Marlins, Cubs and Rockies - who would see Fermin as their starting catcher. There are a few others who might, but most would see him as a high volume backup, just what his role is with the Royals. I’m all for moving anyone if the return is there, but I talked to a few people asking and none of them thought there would be a move for Fermin that would be worth it for the Royals to move him.

It leads to an interesting philosophical question. A bad team needs to trade players at their top value. The goal is to get good, not to keep useful players to win 67 games, so if a player’s value is at the top level, you move them even if the return makes your team worse in the moment. But a good team also has to think about the current moment. If a player’s top value doesn’t make a team better today, the future value needs to be so high that it can offset it. And while you could argue the answer is to trade Fermin and just go out and sign Carson Kelly or James McCann or whoever, why would a team trade value for Fermin when they can just do that too?

Again, I’m not against trading Fermin. I just don’t think it makes sense given the return at this point. If they can get a legitimate high-leverage reliever for him, I think I’d do it. If Fermin brought back a real hitter at another position, sure, I’d do it. I just don’t think that trade is there, so I wouldn’t be trading him just because they have a surplus of catching in the system and his value seems to be near a peak level.

And the Award Goes To…

…lots of Royals! While I don’t get the feeling that any of the “finalists” for the major awards are going to win, the 2024 awards season is filled with the Royals. I honestly don’t even remember if I wrote about this when they happened, but Seth Lugo and Bobby Witt Jr. won Gold Gloves, which is still an award that might not always go to the best fielder but is much better. That’s pretty great, especially when you consider that two others - Cole Ragans and Freddy Fermin - were “finalists” as well.

If you’re wondering why I keep putting quotes around that word, it’s because all the voting is fully completed before the postseason starts and when the league releases the “finalists,” they’re just telling you the players in the top three in votes. Still, the Royals have a finalist for MVP (Witt), Cy Young (Lugo) and Manage of the Year, which is pretty fantastic. In their history, the Royals have had one MVP (George Brett in 1980), four Cy Youngs (Bret Saberhagen in 1985 and 1989, David Cone in 1994 and Zack Greinke in 2009) and one Manager of the Year (Tony Peña). They don’t often even get finalists for these awards with Lorenzo Cain the last player to finish in the top three in any of the major awards.

To be honest, I’m a little surprised that Emmanuel Clase is in the top three for Cy Young. It wouldn’t surprise me if when the voting is released if Ragans finishes fourth, but if he’s not fourth, I don’t see much of a chance he’s lower than fifth, which means they’ll have two starters finish in the top five. I believe Quatraro deserves to win Manager of the Year, and I don’t think it should be a contest. The Royals went from 56 wins to the postseason. They were just the sixth team to improve by 30 or more wins. That’s more worthy of Manager of the Year than Stephen Vogt leading a Guardians team from average to good. AJ Hinch’s candidacy is interesting because of the run the Tigers went on and I worry that will have been fresh on the voters’ minds. But Quatraro deserves this win even if he doesn’t get it.

Even with those awards not being announced yet, I think the cherry on top was the All-MLB teams announced. Witt was first team, which makes him just the second player in Royals history and the third occurrence (Perez was both in 2020 and 2021). If it seems unbelievable that George Brett or any of the Cy Young winners didn’t get it or even Cain, it’s because they didn’t start picking an All-MLB team until 2019, so there isn’t a whole lot of a track record, but that doesn’t mean it’s still not impressive. Perez also finished second team for catcher and Lugo at pitcher. There’s no real analysis on anything here other than the fact that it’s really fun to watch these awards come out and have the Royals be all over them. They should really do that more often.