The Royals take the trade deadline down to the wire

The action happened late, but in the end, the Royals made some of the deals that were necessary to continue the never-ending rebuild.

Baseball can be weird. For example: The team with the major’s highest payroll to open the season found themselves cast as sellers at the trade deadline. After trading away Max Scherzer, Mark Canha and David Robinson in the last week and Tommy Pham and Justin Verlander on Tuesday, the capitulation was completed just hours later as the suddenly rebuilding Mets lost to the Royals 7-6 in 10 innings on a balk-off.

The reversal of the Mets’ fortunes was stunning. A team expected to make a push for October, they certainly didn’t think they would find themselves in this position at the start of August. They’re now recalibrating and focusing not on next year, but on 2025. Okay.

At the other end of the payroll spectrum is our Royals. There were never any illusions here that the Royals would do anything other than sell at the deadline. And who knows how far down the road their focus is placed, contention is just a blip on the horizon in Kansas City. The only real question for them was: Would anyone be interested in what they were peddling?

Earlier this week, Picollo said the Royals occupied a “gray area” leading up to the deadline. I tend to think they are more in no-man’s land. Picollo’s ballclub isn’t good enough to win ballgames. So when you start chopping up the team into parts, those guys alone aren’t good enough to merit a strong return on the trade market. It’s a vicious cycle that’s all too familiar.

The Royals opened deadline day by making a purchase. They acquired left-handed reliever Tucker Davidson from the Angels for cash. Davidson had been designated for assignment last weekend. (Feel free to insert your own joke here.)

Davidson came up through the Braves system and has been primarily a starter until this year, where he’s been working full-time out of the bullpen. In 31.2 innings, Davidson posted a 6.54 ERA but a 3.37 FIP. He also has allowed a .416 BABIP. That’s despite seeing a decline from last year in average exit velocity, hard hit rate and line drive percentage. That’s just a wordy way to say that it looks like he’s been the victim of some rotten luck.

Despite being a starter for most of his career, Davidson really has a reliever profile. He throws a four-seam/slider combo most of the time and will only rarely feature a third pitch—this year, it’s a sweeper. Although most pitchers figure a way to air out the fastball when they transition to the bullpen, Davidson has gone the other direction. His four-seamer averaged 93.1 MPH last year, but is down to 91.6 MPH this season. His velocity is likewise down on his slider. Neither pitch has been an effective option this year.

Davidson has routinely thrown multiple innings out of the pen. He could fill a swingman role where the Royals could use him as an opener and let him go through the order one time, or they could deploy him as a long reliever. He was reportedly in Kansas City prior to Tuesday’s game and will likely be activated on Wednesday. In a change from most of the arms the Royals have collected over the past year, he is out of options, so the Royals will need to keep him on the active roster for the rest of the season or risk losing him.

Then, it got quiet. Too quiet. Five o’clock passed and the Royals, it appeared, had inexplicably stood pat.

Then the trades started to break. The first was Ryan Yarbrough to the Dodgers for infielder Devin Mann and outfielder Derlin Figueroa.

At 26, Mann is a bit old for prospect lists, but Baseball America has him at number 26 in their midseason report on the Dodgers.

Mann is a well-rounded player who does a little bit of everything. He is a persistent on-base threat with strong strike-zone discipline and good pitch recognition and has the contact skills and power to do damage when he gets a pitch to hit. Mann generates average raw power with a short, controlled swing and drives balls from gap-to-gap. He crushes lefties in particular…

Defensively, Mann has been deployed all around the diamond but lacks the arm strength to play third, so if he’s on the infield, he’s going to be at second base. The reports are though that he’s more comfortable in left field.

Mann is not on the 40-man roster, so because of the team’s need for pitching (see Tuesday’s game against the Mets), I would be surprised to see him in Kansas City this year. The Royals will use the spot he would occupy to keep the pitching revolving door turning. According to Picollo, Mann could be on the roster next season in a utility role.

Figueroa signed with the Dodgers out of the Dominican Republic in 2021 and is 19 years old. He hit .237/.372/.376 with three home runs and 21 RBIs in 31 games this summer in the Arizona Complex League. From Baseball America:

Figueroa is a big-bodied outfielder with above-average raw power and good strike-zone discipline from the left side. His swing can get long and uphill, but he has average bat speed and a chance to hit against better pitching.

Picollo said the Royals like that power potential with Figueroa and that he would be playing first base or a corner outfield position.

Scott Barlow was the next to go, heading to San Diego in exchange for right-handed minor league pitchers Henry Williams and Jesus Rios.

Williams is a 21-year-old who was San Diego’s third-round draft pick out of Duke in the 2022 draft. The catch is he underwent Tommy John surgery in December of 2021, so he missed all of his last collegiate season and spent most of his first professional one rehabbing from the surgery. He’s made 12 starts for Class-A Lake Elsinore and checks in as Baseball America’s 10th-best prospect for the Padres:

Athletic on the mound, Williams still has room on his lean frame to get stronger and add more velocity as he moves further away from surgery. He throws strikes with above-average control and has solid command of all of his pitches. Williams’s build, arsenal and control are that of a no-doubt starter, but if something stalls in his rehab, his stuff would also be rather loud in a relief role.

BA notes that Williams features a fastball that lives in the mid-90s with plenty of spin to give it that “rising” action. There’s also a slider described as a “wipeout” pitch along with a changeup with about 10 MPH separation from his fastball with some fade. He’s still working his way back from the surgery and has had some difficulty with his command, but the strikeouts are there. He’s thrown 42.1 innings with 40 strikeouts and 21 walks across 12 starts this season.

Williams is the prospect that I’m most intrigued by and the one with the highest ceiling.

Rios is a 21-year-old the Padres signed from Mazatlan in the Mexican League. Pitching in the DSL, he’s struggled this season with a 6.38 ERA in 16 relief appearances covering 18.1 innings. He’s struck out 13 and walked 10. Picollo noted that he throws a mid-90s fastball and has some spin metrics the club was intrigued by.

Picollo noted that even with all the late activity, there were are couple of larger deals in the works. Ultimately, neither happened—one because they just couldn’t reach an agreement on players and another as the clock was running down.

One of those trades would’ve involved Salvador Perez. While Picollo wouldn’t identify the team, Miami was frequently connected to the Royals’ captain.

“It was worth going down the path, but we knew with the team that we were talking to how complicated it was and it was going to be hard to pull off.”

Any trade involving Perez would include the Royals throwing in a lot of cash. How much cash depends on their stomach for sunk costs. We know from the past, there’s not a lot of appetite for that. Although in the economics and restrictions in place in today’s game around the draft, sending money to a team to cover a contract basically amounts to purchasing prospects. What kind of return could the Royals have received in a trade for Perez? That depends on how much money they were willing to spend.

A Perez trade at the deadline was always going to be a longshot, simply due to the complexity of any deal (including Perez needing to approve a trade as a 10-5 player) and the volume of activity in the final days. If the Royals are serious about trading Perez (and they should be very serious), this kind of deal would go down in the offseason, sometime around the Winter Meetings.

Picollo also said there was interest in Zack Greinke. Presumably, that was one that developed very late in the day and with Greinke’s no-trade clause, there would’ve needed to be some more involved discussions. Besides, I can’t imagine the return for Greinke being that great at this stage, and as he said after the game he likes it here, so it’s not surprising the Royals decided to hold.

Mark Feinsand of MLB.com, who broke the Yarbrough and Barlow trades, reported earlier in the day that in addition to the two aforementioned pitchers, the Royals were also taking calls on Taylor Clarke and Edward Olivares. Again, it’s difficult to think the proposed deals for either were that enticing. This is where the Royals are as an organization—willing to sell, but with assets that hold little or no appeal to the rest of the league.

With the trade deadline done and dusted, there is still plenty of roster work to be done. I expect Perez’s name to continue to resurface in rumors this winter. Given the emergence of Freddy Fermin and the catching prospects in the pipeline, the Royals should seriously think about moving him for prospects. One name that I didn’t hear mentioned that really should’ve been in discussions was Brady Singer. He will have three years of team control after this season. He’s taken a step back this season but could be appealing to a team as a relatively low-cost back end of the rotation starter.

The Royals will now use the final two months of the season to continue to evaluate their roster. Currently the owners of a four-game winning streak, Picollo and his staff have to be prepared to move into the winter, willing to make some hard decisions and perhaps painful deals. It’s going to be difficult to break this cycle of losing. Tuesday was a tiny step but there’s still so much more to do.