As we enter the season’s third month, with the Royals all but technically eliminated from playoff contention but still a bit too early to speculate about the trade deadline, it seems like a good time to take stock of how they could have handled the offseason better. Matthew LaMar already looked at how some of the players the Royals targeted have done this year, with most of them not performing particularly well, but what about some of the lesser-known names the Royals could have targeted?
Now, obviously,
I’ve argued that I think if they were serious about contending in 2026, they should have pursued the top names in the market. I’m a huge fan of the arguments that interim MLBPA director Bruce Meyer has been making about how the Padres increased their profits and franchise value by spending real money despite being in a similarly small MLB market.
But even if you allow that those guys were too expensive for the Royals, there were lots of other guys who were much less expensive that the Royals could have considered. Some of them are doing quite well for themselves. Why did the Royals miss on them?
JJ Bleday, Dane Myers, and Nathaniel Lowe
Coming off the Reds series, these are obvious guys to look at. Bleday was signed to a 1-year, $1.4 million MLB contract on December 27, while Lowe required only a minor league contract on February 13, right as spring training camps were opening. Myers was acquired in a trade with the Marlins for a minor league outfielder with no pedigree who hasn’t been hitting well. The biggest problem for the Royals with the first two was that both of them hit left-handed, and the Royals are already so lefty-heavy. Lowe is, additionally, a first baseman only. This is, of course, a position the Royals thought they had locked down with Vinnie Pasquantino.*
*Vinnie, by the way, has been slashing .289/.396/.422/.818 since his day off against Boston a couple of weeks ago. Good for a 124 wRC+. Perhaps he’s back?
Lowe has all of 16 at-bats versus lefties, but he has yet to record a hit and has only one walk. If you think Vinnie has struggled against lefties… eesh.
Bleday, on the other hand, has been hitting lefties just fine with a 134 wRC+ against them. He’s been better against righties, but should the Royals have known that Bleday had this in him? Actually, maybe! Bleday’s career splits are 90 wRC+ against lefties and 109 against righties. Obviously, 10% below average isn’t where you want to be, but it would still be better than any of Pasquantino, Starling Marte, Carter Jensen, Jac Caglianone, or Isaac Collins this year.
Bleday had a crummy year for the Athletics last year, but he is only playing in his age-28 season this year and barely making more than Marte. He also had a higher walk rate and ISO than Marte last year despite the down season. And he’s under the Reds’ control for each of the next two seasons without being guaranteed anything. You have to imagine he wasn’t on the Royals’ radar, or they would have been able to outbid $1.4 million. But it sure seems like he should have been.
The Reds got Myers from the Marlins for 24-year-old minor league outfielder Ethan O’Donnell. Myers is an interesting case. Despite the fact that he’s a righty, he’s hit righties much better this year than lefties. Though his career splits suggest that’s a fluke. He’s also walking much more this year than in the past. His swinging strike rates have come down every year since his debut, and he was reasonably good two years ago. He also went on the IL three separate times last year, so you have to wonder if injury played a part in his ineffectiveness. But that didn’t stop the Royals from pursuing Lane Thomas. (Though, admittedly, Thomas has been plenty good against left-handed pitching this season, the whole reason the Royals signed him.)
Still, Myers is playing his age-30 season, so perhaps the Royals simply didn’t think the swinging strike trend could continue. And honestly, it plummeted pretty far this year, so I’d be interested to revisit at the end of the season and see if he’s still doing all that well.
Tristan Peters
Peters is a 26-year-old outfielder the White Sox acquired from the Rays for cash or a player to be named later (PTBNL). He’s hitting well for the White Sox, but he’s a lefty who isn’t hitting lefties, so the Royals probably made the correct decision to stay away here.
Curtis Mead
Mead is a 25-year-old corner infielder acquired by the Nationals from the White Sox for a catcher with an excellent name – Boston Smith – who is hitting well in high A but is already 23 years old. So, basically, some guy we will probably never hear about again. Honestly, Mead came out of nowhere. This is his fourth season in MLB, and he’d never come close to the walk rates or power output he’s shown in Washington. He’s always had good bat speed and a decent eye at the plate. His youth means he is an excellent guy for a team that doesn’t expect to contend to take a shot on as the White Sox did last year when they acquired him from the Rays.
The Royals, of course, have a couple of corner infielders they feel pretty good about in Maikel Garcia and Pasquantino, and they expected to contend this year, so I think passing on Mead or at least not getting into a bidding war over him probably made sense even if he’d look a lot better as a right-handed bat on the bench than Marte has.
Dominic Smith
This name might bring shivers down your spine, and you might not remember why. He’s the one who hit the walk-off grand slam against Carlos Estévez in Atlanta at the start of the season. He’s a left-handed first baseman who hit well last year but signed a minor league deal with the Braves. He has a 97 wRC+ against lefties this year, but it’s only 14 ABs. And did I mention he’s a left-handed first baseman? Once again, I think we can see why the Royals passed here.
Troy Johnston
See: Dominic Smith
Technically, Johnston can play the outfield, but he’s also got a -7 wRC+ against lefties this year. So he still wouldn’t have made sense for the Royals. The Rockies got him off waivers from the Marlins and he has hit .320/.377/.437 with two home runs in 58 games. He is not completely a product of Coors, hitting .293/.358/.404 in road games. He has mashed righties, hitting .358 against them, while just .158 against lefties.
Vaughn Grissom
The Angels acquired the 25-year-old, right-handed second baseman from the Red Sox for a light-hitting, low minors outfielder. The Royals have a few of those. Now, KC had decided that they were going to quasi-platoon Jonathan India and Michael Massey at second base to begin the year, so maybe that could explain why he wasn’t on their radar. But in retrospect, it sure seems like they might have considered making a minor trade for this kid instead of giving India a guaranteed $8 million.
Grissom broke into the bigs with Atlanta in 2022 as a 21-year-old. He was their top prospect playing in AA, and Ozzie Albies was hurt. In retrospect, it seems like they rushed him a bit. He did well that year but struggled in 2023 and 2024 before spending all of 2025 with the Red Sox’s AAA affiliate. And he put up a lot of red in statcast metrics there.
He wasn’t walking, and he wasn’t pulling the ball in the air enough, but he did almost everything else at a high level. You have to especially like the Zone Contact rate combined with a lack of Ks. Now, suddenly, his strikeout rate is cut in half from 2024, combined with a modest improvement in walk rate. His ISO is back to where it was all throughout the minors in the .160-.170 range. A 104 wRC+ isn’t tearing the cover off the ball, and he’s not a tremendous defender, but he would have been quite a bit better than anything the Royals ever got out of India.
Since India went down with an injury, the Royals have been mostly platooning Massey and Nick Loftin at second base, and, at least lately, they haven’t been the problem in the Royals’ lineup. Massey, at least, has been tearing the cover off the ball for two weeks with a 171 wRC+. And Loftin is one of the few guys who has had some luck with runners in scoring position. But, really, we should be comparing Grissom more to the at-bats of Marte with the positions of Loftin. And he would be an improvement, there, too.
Even though there are quite a few cheap bats that seem like they could have been available to the Royals, most of them make sense for the Royals to have passed on because the vast majority are left-handed hitters. No team can be perfect at this sort of thing. It’s easy to argue that the Royals did make similar gambles with players like Kevin Newman and Josh Rojas – their moves just haven’t worked out so far.
But, really, when was the last time such a gamble did work for KC? It sure seems like these kinds of guys break out or come back around the league all the time, but never for the Royals. And you have to wonder if their scouting, development, or coaching departments couldn’t use some improvement to make it easier to generate some of this luck.
