The Royals Moves Were Head Scratchers

They protected three and avoided arbitration with another and I'm not sure I totally understand some of them. Plus, some stadium news.

Yesterday’s deadline to protect players from the Rule 5 draft was sure to lead to some moves. Heck, I even wrote about the possibilities on Monday. And sure enough, the Royals added three players to the 40-man roster (I predicted five) and got rid of three players off the 40-man roster in order to make room for them. They ended up DFAing Jake Brentz, which makes sense, along with Brent Rooker and Nate Webb. To be honest, I had forgotten Webb was on the 40-man because he wasn’t even listed on the team site as part of the 40-man roster. So there’s that.

Anyway, two of the three they protected I’m on board with and I even had them as two of my five. Alec Marsh was never going to be left unprotected and Diego Hernandez is absolutely interesting enough to get the bump. The third was Freddy Fermin, which I thought was a little confusing. I know they like to have three catchers on the 40-man roster, but I don’t think there was a ton of risk they’d lose Fermin and you can always add a catcher later before games are actually being played. That said, Fermin is an energetic player who is a very good defender and actually did hit .270/.364/.480 in Omaha this year after hitting .279/.356/.446 in Northwest Arkansas in 2021. I think it’s curious, but I sort of see it at least.

I am surprised, however, that they didn’t protect TJ Sikkema, the lefty they got back from the Yankees in the Andrew Benintendi deal back in July. As I wrote on Monday, he wasn’t very good in AA, which is where the Royals promoted him to immediately after the trade. But he did pitch pretty well in the Arizona Fall League. I can’t tell you what the Royals were thinking here. I can tell you that they’ve generally done a nice job of being right about who won’t be selected in the Rule 5 draft. They typically don’t lose players they don’t protect. That said, a lefty like Sikkema could be a benefit to a big league bullpen in 2023, I would think. Time will tell on that, but I also think it shows that Beck Way was the prize in that deal in the Royals minds.

I’m a bit less surprised that they didn’t protect either Anthony Veneziano or Jonah Dipoto, though if I had to rank my surprise, I’d say I’m more surprised they didn’t protect Veneziano. Lefties who are 6’5” who can hit the upper-90s certainly don’t grow on trees. Just nine lefties were in the top-60 in average fastball velocity in 2022. Not that he can’t be a successful big leaguer in 2023, but he did allow more hits than innings with a walk rate of 11.7 percent in AA as a 24-year old, so it’s not like they left a top prospect just laying on the scrap heap. Still, it seems like you can find a space for him if you found a space for Collin Snider last season.

The move that had the fanbase in an uproar yesterday, though, was the news that the Royals avoided arbitration with Ryan O’Hearn and signed him to a deal for $1.4 million with $250k in incentives. And I’ll say before I say anything else that I unequivocally disagree with what the Royals did here. I’ll get into that as I write through this, but I think part of what I like to do here is try to see things from all angles and I think there’s at least more to this move than it being just a classic Royals blunder.

So why did the Royals not only decide to tender O’Hearn a contract but come to an agreement that guaranteed the deal? And yes, I made a stupid mistake on Twitter yesterday. It used to be that any one-year deal signed by an arbitration-eligible player wasn’t fully guaranteed until Opening Day. That changed in the latest CBA where if a deal was reached to settle outside of arbitration, it is fully guaranteed. My confusion came because that wasn’t the case last year. Anyway, I do apologize for that grave mistake. But back to the point, why guarantee him money? For that, I don’t understand though I have to hope there’s some reason I’m not seeing.

But why could they potentially be interested in seeing what O’Hearn can do in 2023? That I have an answer to. You might recall the shift is going away. Okay, maybe going away is a little bit strong, but it’s being limited. Two players have to be on the infield dirt on either side of second base when a pitch is thrown. There’s nothing to see a left fielder can’t swing around and play short right, but if a team does try that and a lefty bat hits a base hit to left, it’s at least a double, often a triple and sometimes a home run if there’s nobody standing there. So the smart money is that while a team will try it occasionally, they’ll likely get burned quickly enough to do it very rarely.

In 2022, O’Hearn was shifted in 74 percent of his plate appearances. Against this shift, his wOBA (weighted on base average, which is a slightly different way to account for how a player reached base than just OBP; the scale for good and bad is the same as OBP) was .251. That’s very, very bad. However! When the opponent didn’t shift against him (I’d have to see when that happened because fire those managers), he had a wOBA of .323. That’s…fine! I wouldn’t say good, but it’s fine. In 2021, the numbers in a bigger sample were even more drastic. His wOBA with the shift was .244 and without, it was an actually quite good .405.

And to add to this point, after I tweeted something about this yesterday, someone with pretty strong knowledge of the Royals thought process reached out to me to basically say that yes, this is what they’re thinking here. So at least there’s thought behind it and I appreciate that.

Does that mean that he’s going to immediately become a legitimate offensive contributor? No, of course not. I want to reiterate that I’m trying to present the Royals side of the equation and I don’t agree with what they did. But I think you can make a case that the shift hurt O’Hearn quite a bit. Only MJ Melendez and Drew Waters as a lefty were shifted in 10 percent or more of plate appearances and had a bigger split between their wOBAs with and without the shift. As much as I disagree with the decision, a guy with a hard-hit rate of 48 percent, an average exit velocity of 92.1 MPH and a max exit velocity in the 68th percentile getting a shot to see if he can take advantage of more traditional infield alignments at least makes some sense to me.

I also think it’s fair to note that not every player takes to a bench role and O’Hearn has done that. While his pinch hitting heroics were incredibly overstated, he did do quite well in that role in 2022 and that can’t be denied. To be on the roster for a full 162 games and start just 28 of them (four of which were almost by default in Toronto), you have to be willing to accept that your role is to get one at bat a game and get a very rare start here and there. Again, not every player can do that and any player will tell you there is a skill to that sort irregular playing time. So I think he deserves at least a small bit of credit for that.

And here comes the second HOWEVER! There are only 40 roster spots on the 40-man roster (it’s aptly named, don’t you think?). The Royals already have Vinnie Pasquantino, who is one of the 30 best hitters in baseball. They already have Nick Pratto, who was a top-100 prospect at this time last year.

They already have Edward Olivares who absolutely could be traded, but posted a .286/.333/.410 line. They already have Melendez who had 18 homers and a league average OPS as a rookie trying to learn a new position. And they have Hunter Dozier, who isn’t good, but is likely a part of this team for at least a bit longer given that teams don’t tend to give up on players with a full two years left on their contract. They don’t need another first baseman/designated hitter, especially one who posted a sub-.100 ISO in 2022. It’s a valuable roster spot that could have been better served on someone else.

I personally wouldn’t have even tendered him a contract, but I can at least see some rationale for doing that and not having any guaranteed money for him on the books. I really don’t understand the thought behind giving him that money. Maybe this’ll all feel silly in a week or a month or four months or whatever if he’s not on the big league roster for whatever reason, but it just feels unnecessary even though I do appreciate them looking at things through a much more analytical lens these days.

The other big news came from a letter from John Sherman to the fans. It’s almost like they had it saved up for the day they announced they were signing O’Hearn.

Kansas City Royals @Royals

An open letter from Royals Chairman and CEO John Sherman.

If you want the tl;dr, the Royals are moving. It’s not tomorrow and they haven’t picked a site, but this letter confirms what we’ve known was the case for a long time. They’re searching for locations for the Royals to play baseball and one of them is not the Truman Sports Complex. We can get into the specifics as we hear some, but I do want to point out that the economic claims in the letter all could be true, but generally haven’t been for other teams as they’ve opened new stadiums.

What I appreciate is the promise that nobody will pay more in taxes than they already are, but there is no indication of how this stadium will be funded outside of that snippet. And a $2 billion price tag for a new ballpark and a district is a pretty hefty amount to spend on that. I’m not going to take the renderings to mean much other than to show that it’s a different park than the one they currently play in, but I’d be pretty surprised if fountains aren’t heavily emphasized and there isn’t some sort of crown scoreboard.

The reality of the whole thing is that they’re going to play in a different place soon enough. I think some of it is dictated by the Chiefs who would like to build a new stadium where Kauffman Stadium is, but I can’t imagine it took too much convincing given that Sherman has mentioned a downtown stadium pretty much since he took over as owner. And people are going to get used to it. It’s as simple as that.

There are 30 of these teams in the whole league and fans will generally go wherever one of those 30 play their games. There are so many amazing memories at Royals/Kauffman Stadium and the arguments will be aplenty about parking, comparing what we have now and what we’ll have after the move. But this letter shows that it’s happening, so that’s that.