Winter Meetings Day Two: Searching for a bat

After a frenzied first night, the Winter Meetings settle into a groove of rumors. The Royals are still searching for a bat, updates on the left field situation and Royals Hall of Fame balloting opens.

The pace may be unsustainable, but damn is the week of the Winter Meetings the best time of the offseason. It’s a smorgasbord of non-stop rumors and interviews and general baseball talk which is exactly what one needs in December.

Let’s get right to it, shall we?

I missed a couple of important Hot Stove items from Ken Rosenthal over the weekend. (Shout out to Hoikus for pointing me to the article in The Athletic.) We begin here:

The Kansas City Royals expect their payroll to be in the same $120 million range it was last season, according to sources briefed on their plans. FanGraphs estimates the team’s current payroll is $116 million, leaving little flexibility for the front office to acquire the additional hitter it is seeking.

I tend to lean toward Cot’s for the most relevant contract info because Jeff Euston has put years of work into his site, and—bonus!—he’s a Kansas City guy who I’ve enjoyed chatting with in the past when I’ve met him at a couple of baseball events. He absolutely knows what he’s doing and has become a trusted source within the industry. It’s probably helpful to break things down into three categories: The contracts that are already guaranteed, the arbitration-eligible guys and those who are not.

As for the contracts already on the books, Cot’s is estimating the Royals have just north of $80.2 million tied up for seven guaranteed contracts.

Salvador Perez - $20 million (It’s $22 million, but $2 million is deferred to June 2027. And you thought only the Dodgers deferred payments.)
Michael Wacha - $18 million
Seth Lugo - $15 million
Bobby Witt Jr. - $8,111,111 million (His actual salary is $7 million, but his signing bonus of $7,777,777 is paid out in seven separate installments. Fun Bobby.)
Hunter Renfroe - $7.57 million
Jonathan India - $7.05 million
Chris Stratton - $4.5 million

This is the first year for a serious salary bump for Witt, who would’ve been eligible for arbitration had he not signed his extension last spring. Renfroe and Stratton both exercised their player options.

For the arbitration-eligible players, all we have to go on for the moment are the projected salaries published by MLB Trade Rumors. The big name on this list was going to be Brady Singer who of course was swapped for India. The Royals will probably save around $1 to $2 million on that trade.

Hunter Harvey - $3.9 million
Kris Bubic - $2.8 million
MJ Melendez - $2.5 million
John Schreiber - $2 million
Kyle Wright - $1.8 million
Kyle Isbel - $1.7 million
Carlos Hernández - $1.2 million

That’s roughly $17.1 million projected to go to those six players. Combined with the players already on guaranteed contracts, the Royals will owe around $97.3 million.

There are the 12 remaining players on the roster to be accounted for. Those are guys like Michael Massey, Daniel Lynch IV and Maikel Garcia—players with fewer than three years of major league service time who are not yet eligible for arbitration. Most will earn close to the league minimum, which will be $760,000 for 2025. That’s a base expenditure of $9.5 million. Some will make more than that, but not much.

Add it all together and the Royals are currently looking at an Opening Day payroll of around $107 million. (FanGraphs is rather bullish on the amount of money the pre-arbitration players will be earning, which boosts their total.) They also fold in the buyouts due to Adam Frazier ($2.5 million) and Hunter Dozier ($1 million). I bet you didn’t think you’d be seeing a Hunter Dozier reference in a blurb about 2024 payroll. Rolling in the buyouts, that puts the Royals right around $110 million. That’s the current situation without adding another player from outside the organization.

If the Royals are looking at keeping payroll steady from the previous season, there’s not a lot of wiggle room. Here’s a question: Why, after the successes of last season, would the Royals decide to hold the line when it comes to payroll? Surely they can bump that number closer to $125 million or so. We’re now eight seasons removed from their record Opening Day payroll of around $143 million. They’re not going to push that far, but still…splash a little cash in the AL Central and fun things can happen.

With the Royals feeling the constraints of a budget, it’s difficult to imagine they’d return to the free agent market to find that middle-of-the-order bat they covet. As to that, back to Rosenthal:

Jurickson Profar, a switch-hitter, likely will be out of their price range. A more likely target is Josh Rojas, who was non-tendered by the Seattle Mariners. The return of free agent Adam Frazier is a possibility as well, and a trade for Mets third baseman Brett Baty also would make sense.

All together now: Ugh.

Profar, an 11-year veteran, is venturing into free agency for the fourth time in his career. This time, however, he’s coming off the best season of his career and will be looking for that elusive long-term deal. Industry consensus has the outfielder getting a contract in the range of three years and $45 million. That may be a bit light.

Yet Profar comes with considerable risk. He will be 32 next season and his offensive performance of .280/.380/.459 represented career highs in all three categories. His 4.3 fWAR was nearly double his previous best total. Is his performance sustainable (at least as far as we would consider sustainable given that he’s on the wrong side of 30), or will his 2024 season be looked at as an outlier? Some teams may be willing to gamble $45 million over three years to find out. I doubt it’s the Royals.

Michael Conforto, who the Dodgers signed to a one-year deal for $17 million on Sunday, would’ve been a perfect candidate. The batted ball data points to a player who paid a penalty for playing half his games in San Francisco last season. Yet he was still able to put up a 112 wRC+ with the bat.

If the Royals are shopping for B-tier bats like Profor or Conforto, that puts them in the $15 to let’s say $18 million range for a salary for 2025. That would indeed bump the payroll to around that $125 million mark I mentioned above.

Instead, Rosenthal posits the Royals will look at Rojas, a current free agent after a non-tender from the Miami Marlins or consider bringing back Frazier. Rojas is primarily a third baseman with a bat that is probably a little better than the incumbent Garcia but with a glove that most definitely is not. I don’t see the point here.

I see even less of a point with Frazier, who found a way to almost 300 plate appearances for the Royals while posting a -0.6 fWAR. The Royals must have really enjoyed that veteran presence in the clubhouse for them to consider bringing him back. Still, he has to produce on the field, which…Yeah.

As for Brett Baty…why? That makes even less sense to me. Besides, the Mets will probably trade him to the White Sox for Garrett Crochet.

Again, the Royals are looking for a power bat to extend the lineup. None of the aforementioned comes even close to that. Sure, maybe the Royals are in on some, ahem, less interesting names, but that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped the search for a bopper. At least I hope not.

Within the Athletic article, there is talk about India and Massey both finding some playing time in left field. That the Royals are entertaining playing one or both of those two in the outfield—in a position neither has played in the majors before—tells you a lot about how the Royals view MJ Melendez.

Both India and Massey are apparently open to the idea of playing some in the outfield. If both players can produce offensively along the lines with what they brought to the plate in 2024—Massey slugged .449 and finished with a 102 wRC+ while India posted a .357 OBP and a 108 wRC+—while playing averagish defense in left, that would represent an upgrade from Melendez who finished 2024 hitting .206/.273/.400 with an 85 wRC+. Still not what you want from a corner outfielder, but an improvement.

For fun, here are some projections from Steamer, courtesy of FanGraphs:

India - .254/.349/.400, 112 wRC+, 2.8 fWAR
Massey - .256/.304/.424, 100 wRC+, 1.5 fWAR
Melendez - .234/.313/.425, 105 wRC+, 1.1 fWAR

As the projection systems continue to crunch their numbers, it will be interesting to see if others are as bullish on Melendez as Steamer.

Was your Thanksgiving holiday tricky because of our current political climate? Imagine the upcoming holiday season in Kansas City. The Royals Hall of Fame ballot the team revealed on Monday threatens to rip fans and families apart.

Check out these names:

Carlos Beltrán
Billy Butler
Johnny Damon
Wade Davis
Jarrod Dyson
Alex Gordon
Kelvin Herrera
Joakim Soria
Yordano Ventura

Whew. That’s…a ballot.

While, as I noted on Monday, I feel invested in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, I’m wholly ambivalent when it comes to who gets selected here. It’s very much an exercise in fandom and while there’s nothing at all wrong with that, it can lead to some, let’s say, questionable decisions. Besides, with free agency and the Royals’ status as a small-market team, there just aren’t many players who have spent longer than six seasons in Kansas City, so the pool you’re pulling these candidates from can seem a bit underwhelming.

Then there’s the obvious recency bias that will undoubtedly come into play. Davis, Dyson, Gordon, Herrera and Ventura were all heroes of the 2014 and 2015 pennants and ultimate World Championship run. Their memories burn the brightest because they played in the most important games in Kansas City in roughly three decades. Butler is in that mix too, but had the misfortune of being lured away by the Athletics following the 2014 postseason.

Beltrán and Damon played on some high-octane Royals teams that had some of the worst pitching I’ve ever seen. Both then went on to greater success once they moved on. It is not difficult to understand why some may harbor a grudge. Even after all those years.

Arguments can be made for and against every one of these players. Except for Alex Gordon. If you can somehow argue against Alex Gordon for the Royals Hall of Fame, congratulations and I’m not interested in hearing it.

You can vote for up to five candidates so with Gordon a no-doubt selection, that leaves up to four more. I immediately know there’s a couple who I would not consider so that means there are around five or six candidates in my mind vying for four potential votes. I’m going to need a bit of time to think about this one.