Crown Jewels: Royals Trade Bait, Checking in With the AL Central and Pitching Injuries

The Royals have been quiet since they were loud, but I wonder if they could shake things up in a different way.

I’ve written way too much about patience during the offseason. As someone who has very little patience, I do feel like if I’m displaying it here that it should be a sign to the rest of you that it’s okay to hold off. As of this moment, 33 of the top 50 free agents on the MLB Trade Rumors list remain unsigned. Since the winter meetings ended and through yesterday midday, there had been five trades completed and nine free agents signings, but at least four of those eight were just made official and were agreed to during the meetings. By my count, those moves were all made by 13 teams. This is the offseason.

I know what JJ Picollo said on 96.5 the other day. I don’t really care. Words are just words. I’ve lauded him for his honesty with his words, so that might be a little bit of a backtrack on my end, but I always wonder what a GM has to gain from being completely open publicly. As I’ve said before, if you say you have $50 million to spend and you spend $25 million, you’re destroyed. If you say you have $25 million to spend and you spend $50 million, you’re a hero. I have absolutely been wrong before, but I would be shocked if the Royals haven’t added a bat who can hit in that 5/6 range, another starter/swingman and probably a bullpen arm or two.

I’ll repeat what I said the other day that you can read below. The prices are silly right now, and it’s perfectly reasonable for agents and teams to be asking the moon for their players at this point. It’s also perfectly reasonable for teams to play chicken with them. Someone will blink. I will say one thing. If the Royals are going to overpay, I’d prefer them to do it with money, provided it doesn’t impact future budgets. I’d rather spend an extra $20 million over three years on a player than give up a prospect who could help the team sooner than later. I don’t want to overvalue prospects, but you need to be graduating players from your system at some point. It can’t just be hitting the open market and hoping to hit on mid-tier free agents every year.

This week’s newsletters:

Who Blinks First?

Statcast's New Toy and How the Royals Fare

Can the Royals Jump the Market with a Trade?

There was a great question as the first comment on yesterday’s newsletter. I mentioned on Tuesday and above that the market is silly, so Caleb asked if the Royals have made anyone available to take advantage of that market. My answer was that, as far as I know, they haven’t explicitly made anyone available, but I don’t get the feeling that anyone other than Bobby Witt Jr., Salvador Perez and Michael Wacha are totally untouchable. Wacha might seem a little odd there, but that would just be horrible business, and I don’t think they’d do it short of a return that would get the GM trading for Wacha fired. I also think the Perez trade ship has sailed, so whether we agree that he’s off limits or not, he is.

But I really do believe that any other player is available, and it’s not that the Royals are just waiting for calls and will listen. I’m not on the calls, so I have to hedge this a bit, but from my understanding, they’re not afraid to offer anyone short of Cole Ragans. He’s the one guy who I think they’ll wait on a call for, but I also don’t think they’d close the door entirely because a pitcher with two Tommy Johns on his resume is a guy you might think about moving at some point. It would take a MASSIVE haul, so don’t think that’s me saying he’s going to get traded, but if you’re not going to be in the market to give out multiple nine-figure contracts every winter, you need to be willing to make some wild trades.

I do wonder a bit what kind of value a few Royals players. Vinnie Pasquantino was brought up the other day (I’m sorry, I forgot who mentioned him in the comments). In a lot of ways, the Royals can’t afford to move him. We saw what happened to their offense without him down the stretch and with a limited Pasquantino in the playoffs. On the flip side, that happened when they were only able to scour the waiver wire whereas now they could make a move and replace his production on the open market. It makes things a whole lot easier to just keep the guy who seems to have a nose for driving in runs, but that doesn’t mean it should get shot down if a team makes the right offer (or accepts the right offer).

I think Michael Massey, Kyle Isbel, Maikel Garcia, Kris Bubic, Daniel Lynch IV, Alec Marsh and Angel Zerpa all make varying levels of sense of players who could be moved and the Royals should be listening and maybe actively shopping any or all of them. I wouldn’t trade all of the pitchers or both Massey and Garcia (actually I might be willing to do that), but looking at the available players in free agency, I think there could be some good opportunity there. Look at Massey, for example. The best second baseman on the market is probably Gleyber Torres. Massey provided similar value to Torres in 54 fewer games with way more power and better defense. Yes, there are questions about his back, but I do wonder if there’s a market for him that could help the Royals fill another need that’s now more pressing with Jonathan India in the fold.

Isbel is another one who is never mentioned, but I wouldn’t hesitate to move him in the right deal. I know that some might roll their eyes at the idea that Isbel would have trade value, but he’s a great defensive center fielder and there is definitely some upside in his bat. We see it in relatively lengthy stretches every year. The free agent market in center is a bunch of guys similar to him, but without the same upside. I don’t know. I think he’s another guy who could have some value to a team looking to boost their defense up the middle. The point is that I hope the Royals are not just looking to add but looking to take advantage of the market. Taking a small step back in 2025 wouldn’t necessarily be the worst thing, but I also don’t know that moving any of these guys means they have to take a step back.

Central Happenings

In a bigger picture, the National League is taking talent away from the American League, which theoretically makes a path to the World Series at least nominally less difficult. In the smaller picture, the American League Central is what the Royals need to be most concerned with. While the schedule has made it a little less important, they still play 52 of their 162 games against the Guardians, Tigers, Twins and White Sox. Last year, the Royals went 33-19 against their foes in the division (with 12-1 coming against the White Sox), so they took advantage of their division. They won the season series with the Guardians, Tigers and obviously the White Sox while they went 6-7 against the Twins.

So far this winter, I can’t say the Central has gotten especially more difficult. The White Sox have actually been the most active team in terms of adding and subtracting, but it’s hard to say they’ve done a lot to actually get better. They moved on from Garrett Crochet and got a nice return, but one that likely won’t have a huge impact on the 2025 team. They did sign Mike Tauchman, which is a nice move but changes very little. I think they’ll be better than 41-121 because it’s quite difficult to be worse, but they aren’t what you’d call a good team.

Looking at the top of the division, Cleveland hasn’t done a lot to get excited about. They dumped some salary in moving Andres Gimenez and re-signed Shane Bieber, who likely won’t be available until mid-season. They also traded for Luis Ortiz from Pittsburgh, a move that I’m bummed about because I think their staff can do well with Ortiz, who had a nice year with the Pirates. But they’re also rumored to be shopping both Josh Naylor and Lane Thomas pretty heavily. They’re always so good at fielding a solid team, so I don’t think they’re going to be bad or anything, but I think they might be taking a step back.

The Twins are caught in a spot where they just don’t have money to spend, so they’re not really adding anyone. But they also have maybe the best team in the division on paper. That didn’t do much for them as they finished in fourth in 2024, but a team with Carlos Correa, Byron Buxton, Royce Lewis, Pablo Lopez, Bailey Ober, Jhoan Duran and Griffin Jax has to be considered a team that can make some noise in some way. There’s just too much talent. Maybe they can’t stay on the field enough and they aren’t able to add depth with their money issues, but that’s a talented club.

The Tigers have the reigning Cy Young winner and they signed Alex Cobb to a pretty big one-year deal. Otherwise, they haven’t done much to upgrade an offense that had its share of struggles. They’ve been rumored to be in on Alex Bregman and they’ve made a splash or two in their time, but they’ve been very quiet so far this offseason. I suppose it’s possible that they’re really just banking on guys like Parker Meadows and Colt Keith continuing to develop and guys like Riley Greene and Kerry Carpenter being legitimate bats in the middle, but they could use some help and haven’t done much of anything to address that.

All of this is a big reason why I’ll admit it’s a bit frustrating the Royals aren’t willing to just be aggressive and overpay a bit. It feels like with one more starting pitcher and a legit power bat that they could run away and hide in the division. That’s probably not totally accurate, but the rest of the division hasn’t done a whole lot to improve while some, like Cleveland, may be actively worse than they were this past season. Still, it’s December 20 for everyone, and there’s plenty of time for teams to make moves. It won’t surprise me if the Tigers end up adding a couple more big-ish to big pieces. If the Guardians uncover a gem, I won’t need a fainting couch to catch me. But still, this division is there for the taking.

Pitching Injuries

Woo boy, there was an interesting one out there earlier this week, and this is probably way too much for a note on Fridays, but I’m going to try to put it in here anyway. I might expand at some point as I think more about it too. To put the report in a nutshell, a big takeaway is that the increase in arm injuries is blamed a lot on the increase in velocity and the increase in high-spin. More specifically, it’s the reliance on “stuff.” Throwing harder increase the torque and stress on the elbow. Working to manipulate the ball to move more while maintaining velocity does the same thing. I don’t think anything particularly new was uncovered as much as previous suspicions were just confirmed.

The problem, from my perspective (and people way smarter than me), is that the game rewards and encourages this sort of maximum effort. Think about the modern pitching staff. There are five starters and eight relievers. Some teams have even gone to six starters or maybe sort of a hybrid six-man rotation that isn’t always using all six. Still, there are basically always three or four relievers available to cover at least three innings and sometimes five or six. What that means is the starter can air it out for four or five innings and turn the game over to a group of flamethrowers you might not have even ever heard of.

It might take more to take away the incentive for max effort from the players, but teams are incentivized to keep pitchers on shorter leashes as well. It’s easy to say that teams will just churn through more arms and there could be more injuries if you limit the number of pitchers on the roster to something like 11 instead of 13, but I think that would change quickly. At some point, a team is going to have to choose between the third time through the order penalty and a worn down reliever. There will reach a team when the starting pitcher, who does see a dropoff when they see a lineup a third time, will be the better option.

As that happens, it will lead to pitchers needing to be more prepared to go six or seven innings. To do that, they’ll likely need to pace themselves, which will decrease the torque put on an elbow. It might take some time, but I think as teams adjust the way they use their staff, this will help quite a bit. It’ll also have a positive consequence for offense, whether intended or not (and I think it might be intended). Part of what makes offense so difficult today is hitters are constantly facing pitchers giving 100 percent effort and putting some of the nastiest stuff out there possible. If they can’t give that effort and the stuff takes a step back, offense will rise.

It was also very interesting to me that there was a section about how reduced workload in development was part of the problem. Pitchers just aren’t accustomed to a big league workload, whether that’s throwing 100-115 pitches in six to eight innings as a starter or working back-to-back days as a reliever. And it’s leading to injuries. Only seven pitchers threw 150 or more innings in the minors in 2024. Only 25 threw 140 or more. The minor league leader was 36-year-old Casey Lawrence, who threw 165. Yes, they play fewer games, but that’s kind of a problem. I wonder if we see some teams start to skew the other way in the hopes that they can get some more out of their pitchers at the big league level. My guess is no, but I suppose I could be wrong there.