Improving the team doesn’t necessarily mean moving on from players
Last year, around this time, I wrote about how the Royals fans had a skewed perspectives problem about the team’s roster. I argued that players like Michael Massey and Kyle Isbel were major league-quality players, even if they weren’t stars. The Royals could succeed with such players on their roster, but they needed to add some star power to the team and allow those guys to shine in reduced roles. Don’t ask them to lead the production, but they could easily co-star. The Royals tried to add a batter in Hunter Renfroe and some platoon opportunities with Adam Frazier and Garrett Hampson. You could argue that those moves paid off, to one degree or another, and resulted in the Royals making the playoffs for the first time since 2015.
In 2023, Kyle Isbel made only 42% of his plate appearances batting ninth. In 2024, that number was increased to 96%. Fortunately, we can’t do the same math with Michael Massey. Why? Because he turned out to be an example of a positive outcome for the issue facing the Royals’ roster this offseason: they didn’t rely on him, but when he proved he was capable of batting higher in the batting order, he was able to drastically improved the lineup.
In 2023, Michael Massey took most of his at-bats at sixth in the order, but he spent more time in the 3-5 spots combined. When he returned to the lineup following his preseason back injury in 2024, he was immediately slotted in the seventh and eighth spots, instead. Unfortunately, the Royals were desperate for hitting so he was promoted to the fifth spot in the lineup after only a few games. But then a funny thing happened, he broke out.*
*Later in the season he was forced into a role as the leadoff hitter, which isn’t a good spot for him, but that goes back to the original issue where he isn’t a star, but he’s a good guy to support the stars.
It got lost in the shuffle a bit thanks to Witt’s star turn and the gaudy RBI numbers from Vinnie and Salvy, but Massey had a really good season in between all his injuries. He finished the year a positive on the bases and in the field, but for the first time also at the plate with a 102 wRC+. Now, those aren’t star numbers by any stretch of the imagination, but even the Yankees and Dodgers don’t have stars at every spot in their lineup. A solid, slightly above-average middle infielder on a rookie deal is a hugely valuable brick for a team to be able to slot into their championship aspiration wall.
Of course, none of that would have been possible if the Royals had done what fans wanted last offseason and jettisoned Massey for his below-average play in 2023. This brings us to the headline, today: many fans want to give up on players like MJ Melendez, Maikel Garcia, James McArthur, and Hunter Harvey. The Royals, who see the same numbers I do when I look at their Baseball Savant pages, know that there are lots of positives to build on with all four of those players and that any or all of them could bust out in a big way in 2025. General Manager J.J. Picollo has signaled the Royals still have high hopes for them.
The other side of that coin is the thing that the really good teams - not just the Yankees and Dodgers, but the Cardinals and Rays - do. They don’t give up on promising-but-not-yet-productive players, but they don’t rely on them, either. The Royals should be competitors for a playoff spot again in 2025, but to achieve that goal they should be (and have signaled and intent to be) seeking out more consistency from their lineup as the starting point. The most logical players for replacement in the lineup, then, would be the two least consistent hitters: Garcia and Melendez. Fans seem to think that if a player isn’t a starter, they don’t matter and should be traded away or even released.
Sure the Cardinals are good because they trade for or sign stars like Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt. But the thing that has always helped sustain the Cardinals is that when one of their co-stars stops producing at a high-level, they have multiple high-upside, low-consistency guys waiting on their bench primed to break out at any moment. As Matt Carpenter declined, Kolten Wong ascended. When Kolten Wong began to get worse, Tommy Edman and Paul DeJong arrived on the scene. When DeJong proved to be permanently inconsistent, on came Nolan Gorman. Sure, some of that comes from having better player development to continually fill the benches with such guys. But that just means that until the Royals’ have a chance to prove they’ve gotten better at player development they need to sign the co-stars out of free agency because they’re not yet ready. Not that this isn’t a formula for success worth following.
So, if the Royals want to get on that level, they’ll need to remove Garcia and Melendez from everyday play, where they are not currently suited, and replace them with players who are ready to contribute now. But they should still take advantage of things like Garcia’s excellent infield defense and base-stealing ability or MJ Melendez’s pop from the left side of the plate in bench roles. The Royals, similar to last year, are in a position where they have multiple depth players who have been asked to start. But replacing those players means signing someone like Alex Bregman to force Maikel Garcia to the bench, not off the roster.
Let’s take another look at the Yankees. One guy that stands out is Oswaldo Cabrera. Cabrera was the Yankees’ starting third baseman to begin the season. He’s young with a lot of promise, but he wasn’t getting the job done. So the Yankees traded for Jazz Chisholm Jr. and made him the starter instead. Then they didn’t cut Cabrera, they simply demoted him to a bench role. When Anthony Rizzo went down with an injury, they were able to call upon him to play first base for them. In the Division Series, Cabrera helped his team defeat the Royals by reaching in half of his limited plate appearances. If they had simply cut him, as I’m certain many Yankees fans wanted them to do, the series might have turned out differently.
On the flip side, one of the worst flaws of Dayton Moore’s Royals teams was that instead of hoping for breakout performances to improve a good team, they required them to even begin to be competitive. The reason the 2015 Royals were so good was that they had so many players break out or make comebacks at once. Eric Hosmer, Lorenzo Cain, Mike Moustakas, Kendrys Morales, Edinson Volquez, and more. Then one of the reasons the Royals didn’t go to the playoffs for nearly another decade was because the front office wrongly assumed all of those players would be at least that good going forward and/or that breakouts would continue at that pace despite a significantly worse farm system.
Unfortunately, not everyone continued their high level of play. Then, when guys like Emmanuel Rivera, Ryan O’Hearn, and Hunter Dozier proved to be nothing more than role-players, consistently demanded they perform as stars and all of them failed miserably before moving to better teams that could ask less and get more from them.
The 2024 Royals had their own series of breakouts and rebounds: Bobby Witt Jr., Cole Ragans, Salvador Perez, Michael Massey, and Seth Lugo. It would be a mistake for the 2025 Royals to behave the same as the 2016 Royals, expecting Lugo, Perez, and Witt to play at least as well as they did this year or counting on Garcia and Melendez breaking out to fill in whatever gaps occur as other guys fall back a bit or get hurt. It would be almost as large a mistake to reject the youngsters by releasing them or trading them for cash.
Under Picollo, the Royals have passed every test so far. They successfully identified which among their roster should be role-players and demoted them in the order. They hired a high-quality coaching staff and became much better at identifying mid-range, major-league pitching talent that said coaching staff could improve. The next step is adding depth, including moving their most inconsistent performers to the bench where they can do the most good. The good news? There’s every reason to think they can past this next test, too.
