The winter meetings have started, and rumors are flying around everywhere. The Pirates are getting perhaps the biggest pop from rumors that they’ve offered a four-year deal to Kyle Schwarber. How much
money was in the four-year offer? Well, Dan Szymborski has one idea:
The actual rumors have the Pirates offering him something north of $100 million, which would easily be the largest contract in team history. It’s easy to scoff at that, but then I’d remind you that the richest free agent contract in Royals’ history is the 4 years/$72 million they forked over to Alex Gordon, so it would be the biggest deal in Royals’ history too.
The Royals can’t do more platoons
The Royals got off to a hot start in the rumor mill this offseason; it seemed like everyone was talking about how they might pursue Ketel Marte, Jarren Duran, or Brendan Donovan. Those rumors have cooled off, especially as the Red Sox have already traded for a pair of starting pitchers and now seem set on adding to their lineup instead. Now, the biggest rumors are the assumptions we all ended the season with: the Royals probably want to reunite with Mike Yastrzemski and Adam Frazier.
And, in a vacuum, both of those make sense. The Royals were much better after acquiring those two players. They clearly value Frazier for his veteran presence, at the very least, and both offered the kind of professional at-bats that had been largely missing from KC’s lineup in 2025, even if the results weren’t always there. Here are their finishing slash lines with the Royals:
Adam Frazier: .283/.320/.402/.722 – 98 wRC+
Mike Yastrzemski: .237/.339/.500/.839 – 127 wRC+.
But a weird thing happens if you lop off the final day of the 2025 season, a game that absolutely didn’t matter for either team; Yaz’s line becomes .230/.331/.461 – 115 wRC+. He hit two home runs in his final two at-bats of the season, and the sample size is so small that those two at-bats (plus the others he took that day) can drastically alter his line. There’s no arguing that Yaz wasn’t a breath of fresh air for the team last summer, but he was still unplayable against lefties, and when you expand the sample size, he’s been nearly exactly a league-average hitter for the last two full seasons.
Still, Yastrzemski could make sense for the Royals in a world where they didn’t already have a left-handed outfielder destined to get most of the playing time in right field. And one with a lot more upside, even if he’s a lot less proven. The Royals can only carry so many platoons on their roster, and considering they’ve already got two second basemen who can’t hit (plus a third if they brought back Frazier), there just doesn’t seem to be room for platoons in both left and right field.
The Royals’ trade market didn’t develop
The biggest rumors around the Royals were about their alleged starting pitching depth and how Kris Bubic or Noah Cameron might bring them back the outfield bat they so craved. But then things started to happen. The Angels traded away long-coveted outfielder Taylor Ward for Orioles starter Grayson Rodriguez. At first, this seemed easy to dismiss as the Orioles being the Orioles or the Angels being the Angels. The Orioles seemed to be giving up on a starter with lots of team control and true ace potential. The Angels didn’t require a physical to be performed on their newest acquisition. One of the teams was making a truly boneheaded decision.
Then the rumors continued to persist that whatever deal might develop between the Royals and Red Sox would potentially involve Cole Ragans for Jarren Duran in some combination. Kris Bubic and Noah Cameron weren’t on anyone’s radar, apparently. Very little becomes clear this early in the MLB offseason, but one thing has this year. Teams aren’t valuing starting pitching the same way that they have in the past. Or the way that the Royals hoped they would.
Oh sure, some starting pitchers are still considered quite valuable. Look no further than the deal Dylan Cease signed with the Blue Jays for evidence of that. But “ace potential” doesn’t go as far as it once did. Neither does a good ERA if it isn’t backed up by the other statistics. The Royals have a bunch of starting pitchers, but seemingly not ones that anyone actually wants.
Brian Henry made an excellent – and correct – argument that the Royals probably had the depth to endure a major league season, but not to also trade from about a month ago. But, what if we also evaluated the Royals’ pitching depth from a more glass-half-empty perspective at the same time?
Seth Lugo – untradeable because of his brand new extension. Not to mention how poorly he pitched in August and how he went on the IL and didn’t come back.
Michael Wacha – untradeable because of the money left on his contract at his age, and considering even as he has been solid for the Royals, he hasn’t been anything approaching elite.
Noah Cameron – Not untradeable, but won’t garner a return worth dealing a local kid with tons of cheap team control who might continue to exhibit the ability to pitch beyond his peripherals.
Kris Bubic – Not untradeable, but lacking the kind of value that would make trading him appealing, considering his injury history.
Cole Ragans – Has value, but not as much as he had following the 2024 season, and with too much team control and upside to give up on for what teams would be willing to pay for him now.
Ryan Bergert – Untradeable following a forearm injury, and the small sample size of success he had with the Royals before that.
Stephen Kolek – Lacks the peripherals to cause a team to give up much for him; that’s how he got included in the trade to the Royals for Freddy Fermin to begin with.
Luinder Avila – Probably not even a starting pitcher at the big league level
Bailey Falter – Potentially tradeable, but not for anything more than what the Royals gave up to get him in the first place – an aging AAAA player.
Given what we know now, it seems easy to imagine that the Royals offered up Kris Bubic for Taylor Ward – a move that would have been an overpay on the Royals’ part, given that Bubic could very easily be a qualifying offer candidate next year and bring back a first-round draft pick in addition to whatever he gives you on the field. But the Orioles were willing and able* to outbid them.
*It’s still a really weird move for the Orioles, given their glut of young bats and lack of starting pitching. But even if the deal isn’t just the Orioles being the Orioles, it can also be the Orioles being the Orioles.
So, even if the Royals had enough depth to trade from without creating holes in their 2026 rotation, you can see that – at least the way things have worked out – they don’t have anyone worth trading. As it turns out, yes, teams probably were interested in Kris Bubic and Cole Ragans, but only because they thought they might be able to get them at a discount. The Royals have no real reason to lower their prices, considering how valuable those two can be on their staff in 2026, and that the returns would be underwhelming toward their goal of improving their lineup. So the trades just won’t happen.
Big free agents or bust
This is what happens when a team goes years and years of making terrible draft selections – something the Royals cannot deny happened as they left their last three eligible first-round picks all unprotected in this week’s upcoming Rule 5 draft. When it comes time to fill in the final holes in a good-but-not-great roster, you don’t have the prospects to promote or trade, and teams almost never do major league-for-major league talent trades anymore. Certainly not at the levels the Royals are trying to accomplish.
That means the Royals’ only choice is to go out and add to their team via free agency or not at all. Considering the team needs to keep Bobby Witt Jr. happy or risk losing him to another team, which could greatly harm their standing in the community, making it more difficult to convince someone else to pay for the new stadium they want or even to sell tickets, “not at all” won’t work for a second season in a row.
The Royals stand at a crossroads that no longer crosses. They thought they had a path laid out for themselves, but Billy Beane’s army burned the bridge in that direction – with a little help from the Royals joining the ranks of teams that have found ways to improve pitchers through coaching techniques that have drastically improved in recent years. The only path forward for the Royals is to tread the toll road of free agency. They may not want to pay the fee to get to their destination, but they no longer have that choice, and they can no longer afford to be cheap about it, either.
