I don’t think that the Kansas City Royals would have made the 2025 playoffs if they had kept Brady Singer. Singer was good this year, but he wouldn’t have solved the main problem with the team, which was that their
offense was flatter than a can of Dr. Pepper left open overnight all year.
But the Royals traded Singer precisely because they wanted a guy to help their offense be the kind of happy, fizzy, fresh Dr. Pepper that leads to playoff berths. Unfortunately, it’s no exaggeration to say that Jonathan India was a total disaster after trading Cincinnati red for Kansas City blue.
India was so bad that the Royals have an interesting choice: do they even tender him a contract for 2026? Should they?
India will not make a back-breakingly large sum of money next year. India made $7 million in 2025, and he’ll probably make in the realm of $9 million or so in 2026. Considering that the Royals would probably have to pay at least a few million to get an Adam Frazier-type of vet to be their everyday second baseman anyway, the opportunity cost is not gigantic.
But is India worth paying $9 million? That’s the big question they will have to answer before the deadline on Friday, November 21. Per Fangraphs, he was worth -0.3 Wins Above Replacement in 2025, which I don’t have to tell you is bad. Name a stat, any stat, and chances are it was worse than his 2024 campaign: walk rate, strikeout rate, isolated slugging, batting average, barrel rate–the list goes on and on. And if anything, we learned that India is indeed a liability anywhere on the diamond, regardless of what he does at the plate.
Making this more complicated is that India is, in a vacuum, a really good bounce-back candidate. He just had the worst year of his entire big league career while trying to play multiple positions he had never played as an MLB player. He has over 2,200 plate appearances’ worth of previous track record, saying that he’s a solid OBP guy and positive offensive contributor. And a lot of his offensive woes from this season boil down to the fact that he hit fly balls at an abnormally high rate, which is probably a fixable issue (especially with new hitting coaches).
If India were a free agent right now, he’d be an intriguing pickup at a one-year, $4 million to $5 million contract deal. That option is still on the table if the Royals do non-tender him with the notion that they would want him back at that price. Of course, the Royals could also just tender him a contract and pay the additional handful of million in order to not potentially lose him.
Ultimately, I think, the question should be about who gives the Royals the best chance to win at second base. Michael Massey has a clear injury risk and on-base downsides. Adam Frazier has a pretty low ceiling. And India has his own issues, as we’ve outlined here.
The answer to that question is probably “none of them.” Unfortunately, you can’t build a team entirely out of Bobby Witt Jr., so some suboptimal decisions have to be made. At the end of the day, I would guess that the Royals will tender India a contract. They seem to believe in him (and Massey, too). Hopefully they’re right.
