Royals in the Rumor Mill

The Winter Meetings kicked off with huge news and then slowed down a lot in day one, but there are a few Royals rumors to discuss.

To say the Winter Meetings started with a bang is an insult to bangs. Juan Soto agreeing to a 15-year, $765 million contract needs a new word to describe it. There will be about a million think pieces about that deal and what it means for baseball, but I think it’s a deal that doesn’t greatly impact the rest of the market. Sure, it makes guys like Anthony Santander and Teoscar Hernandez more in-demand, but the dollar amount is reserved for inner-circle Hall of Fame-like talents. You’re not going to see mid-tier free agents suddenly getting $200 million, so don’t worry about that.

But the Soto signing was helpful because it opened the dam a little bit. The biggest money teams were all in on Soto, and many of them privately told other free agents that they were interested, but they needed to see how the Soto deal turned out. We haven’t seen a lot of movement just yet, but the outfield market should get moving again while some of the other bigger free agents now know who still has money to pay them and who is now a little more desperate because they missed out on their biggest fish. I could be wrong, but I feel like the first day of the meetings is a lot of feeling out while day two is when the action happens. Hopefully that’s right.

For the Royals, things were pretty quiet on the rumor front. One thing I’d been hearing for a few days was that the Royals and Mets had been talking. I imagine some of these talks were held up a bit by Soto too, so add that to the list, but the name I kept hearing mentioned was Brett Baty. So I asked around to some other people and pretty much everyone who I talked to had heard some semblance of the same rumor from a different person.