The Nationals finished the 2020 season with several major holes on their roster, and two of the biggest were related. They needed a new first baseman, after the now-departed Asdrúbal Cabrera and Eric Thames combined for -0.7 WAR at that spot last year. They also needed a cleanup bat, with no existing roster option looking fit to follow Trea Turner and Juan Soto in the lineup. Fortunately for them, a good first baseman typically bats in the middle of the order, meaning they could fix two major weaknesses with a single player. Two days before Christmas, they did just that, acquiring Josh Bell from the Pirates in exchange for right-handed pitching prospects Wil Crowe and Eddy Yean.

A trade of Bell has felt inevitable for a while now, as the Pirates are usually rebuilding in some capacity and always looking to shed salary. Set to turn 29 in August, he is entering his second season of arbitration after making $4.8 million last year, was in line to be the second-most expensive player on the team behind Gregory Polanco, and was one of the only remaining veterans on the team who could have fetched some kind of prospect haul in a trade. With Pittsburgh going nowhere in 2021, holding on to Bell didn’t make much sense. Read the rest of this entry »

When an organization has a potential glut of players who play the same position, it’s usually more of a nuisance than a serious problem. Having more major league-caliber players than your roster can hold is never a bad thing, and the issue can often be solved by sliding players down the defensive spectrum. It can be inconvenient to shift a middle infielder into an outfield corner or a corner outfielder to first base, but it’s worth doing if the bats are worth it.

It gets trickier, though, if the overcrowded area happens to be behind the plate. Lifetime catchers rarely possess the athleticism necessary to move to another up-the-middle position and usually can’t hit enough to clear the offensive bar required at a corner spot. It’s incredibly difficult to find sustained playing time for more than two catchers over the course of a season, though because of the scarcity of talented catchers around the majors, it’s rare that a team needs to worry about that.

The Blue Jays are facing exactly that predicament. If you look at our Depth Charts, you’ll find them ranked fourth in the majors in projected catcher WAR for next season, which could come as a surprise to a lot of baseball fans, since none of their backstops are household names. But three of them — Danny Jansen, Alejandro Kirk and Reese McGuire — rank inside the top 30 catchers in baseball according to the 2021 ZiPS projections. What’s more, all three of those catchers are at similar stages in their development: Each is young and has little left to prove in the minors but has yet to break out in the big leagues. All that’s left to learn is how they handle the majors, which creates the challenge for Toronto of deciding just how best to divvy up opportunities between the three. Read the rest of this entry »

The offseason remains slow, but the reliever market saw some moves this week, with a trio of free agents scoring new contracts. Greg Holland signed a one-year, $2.75 million deal to come back to the Royals, who continue to act aggressively this winter. Former Brewers lefty Alex Claudio signed a one-year, $1.25 million commitment to join the Angels, who recently traded for closer Raisel Iglesias. And speaking of the Angels, Keynan Middleton signed a one-year contract with the Mariners, who also added Rafael Montero via a trade with Texas this week.

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Players like David Dahl aren’t supposed to be free agents. He’s a 26-year-old outfielder with an above-average career wRC+, and he’s played just four seasons. He was also a first-round pick with the prospect hype to back that up all the way until his debut. Even though his most recent season was very bad — very, very bad — most years, a team wouldn’t even consider cutting a player like him loose with three years of team control still ahead.

This isn’t most years, though. The Rockies didn’t think the chance that Dahl would bounce back would be worth the meager salary he’d garner in his first arbitration year and elected not to tender him a contract for 2021. It took just nine days for another team to pick up the slack, as late Friday night, the Rangers reportedly signed Dahl to a one-year deal worth $3 million. Because he has only three years and change of service time in the big leagues, you can think of this as a one-year contract with two team options; Texas can keep him through 2023 if it wishes, so long as it picks up his arbitration-year salaries along the way.

That fact boosted the appeal of one of the more head-scratching free-agency cases on the market. Dahl’s 2020 was bad enough — he had a wRC+ of 10 and -0.8 WAR in just 24 games — that a contending team looking to plug a hole in its outfield couldn’t do so by signing him. Any team with playoff aspirations would likely want Dahl to take on a bench role, which would limit him in re-establishing his value. Better would be steady playing time with a rebuilding team, but with so many of those organizations searching for ways to minimize payroll the same way Colorado is, it was unclear who might be willing to pay up.

Enter the Rangers, a fittingly confusing team for a confusing free agent. Texas has been a losing team for four years now, and its road back to contention has always felt rather narrow. Despite this, the Rangers embarked on what Dan Szymborski described as a skinny rebuild — refusing to tear the whole thing down and instead attempting to add modest prospect talent without trading stars while simultaneously spending money on win-now free agents. Some teams, like Milwaukee, have assembled playoff rosters while undergoing similar retoolings. In the case of Texas, the result has been a rotation frighteningly short on depth, a lineup that collectively produced one of the worst seasons ever, and a farm system that doesn’t boast a single prospect in the 55 Future Value tier or higher. All the while, the division around the Rangers is only getting tougher.

Despite the declining product on the field, the last few weeks have seen what looks like a continuation of that strategy. Texas made the obvious sell it needed to, trading Lance Lynn to the White Sox for Dane Dunning and Avery Weems. Then it turned around and traded a Top-100 prospect to Tampa Bay for Nate Lowe. These moves seemingly butt heads in raw buy/sell math, but both fit into a more broad strategy Levi Weaver outlined at The Athletic: Acquire players who are MLB-ready but young enough to still be helping the club when the team’s next crop of prospects mature.

Dahl fits that mold. Despite his years of big league experience, he’s a young player still waiting for his opportunity to break out. It certainly didn’t happen in 2020. He hit .183/.222/.247 with a walk rate on the wrong side of 5% and a strikeout rate approaching 30%. His exit velocity was down nearly three miles per hour from the previous two seasons. He was a poor defender, and he missed time with injuries, just as he has every year of his career. There were just six players in baseball who hurt their teams more than Dahl in 2020, and I’m surprised the number is that high.

If you’re a Rangers fan, you’re probably wondering what the good news is. Fortunately, there are plenty of caveats. This was only a 24-game span we’re talking about, a sample that would take us into the third week of April in a normal regular season. If someone pronounced a player’s career dead after the first 24 games of the year, you would politely shush that person, and maybe urge them to take a walk and get some air.

Dahl’s 24 most recent games also bear little resemblance to his career to that point. He entered 2020 with a career line of .297/.346/.521, a 111 wRC+ and 3.7 WAR. He was a power/speed combo threat who had a knack for posting high batting averages in both the majors and the minors, and he was hardly a liability on defense. In fact, despite center field in Coors being one of the game’s most difficult assignments, both UZR and Statcast’s OAA metric actually prefer Dahl there than in the corners. Prior to 2020, he had done a pretty good job of playing like someone once selected 10th overall in the draft.

But the issues that felled Dahl in 2020 were nothing new. He has always whiffed a lot, and he’s below-average at taking walks. He’s also never stood out much when it comes to Statcast’s exit velocity and hard-hit rate metrics, placing in the 36th percentile in the former and the 51st percentile in the latter in 2019, and those were both career-bests. That isn’t to say Dahl was getting lucky before last year, though his expected numbers do tend to lag behind his actual totals. He just hasn’t shown particularly loud tools to this point.

There’s also the issue of Dahl’s health. He was called up way back in July 2016, opened his big league career with a 17-game hitting streak, and finished the year with a 113 wRC+ in 63 games. Before he could build on that hype the following year, he was diagnosed with a stress reaction in his rib, which caused him to miss the entire 2017 season save for 19 minor league games on rehab assignments. He wouldn’t rejoin the Rockies until late April 2018 and stuck around for only a little more than a month before suffering a broken foot and hitting the shelf for the rest of the year. He managed to log 100 games in 2019 before an ankle sprain once again ended his season prematurely in the first week of August. Following the 2020 season, Dahl elected to receive shoulder surgery, but said he should still be ready for spring training.

It’s difficult to imagine how Dahl’s performance wouldn’t be impacted by such a constant barrage of injuries over these past few years, which is why the Rangers aren’t investing in him because of anything they saw in his horrific 2020 season, or in any of the more successful seasons that preceded it. They’re doing it because they believe none of us have seen what he truly has to offer, and they probably aren’t wrong. Here’s hoping 2021 turns out to be a year of good health — for Dahl, and for all of us.

It doesn’t feel like hyperbole to say one of the most important days in the recent history of the White Sox was Dec. 7, 2016, when they traded Adam Eaton to Washington in return for Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo López, and Dane Dunning. Giolito is now the staff ace and one of the best pitchers in the American League, having compiled 7.1 WAR over the past two seasons. López has been less successful as a back-of-the-rotation arm who hovered just below league average from 2018 to ’19 before falling below replacement level last year, but he’s still provided 4.1 WAR over the last three seasons. Dunning was just shipped out to acquire another right-handed ace in Lance Lynn from the Rangers. A lot of wins can already be credited to the Eaton deal, and more will be added to the ledger by the time all is said and done.

Perhaps it’s cosmically fair, then, that Eaton will now reap the rewards of the roster he played such a key role in rebuilding. NBC Sports Chicago’s Chuck Garfien reported on Tuesday that Eaton will be rejoining the White Sox on a one-year deal, with a team option in place for 2022. The signing comes four years and one day after the team traded him to Washington.

White Sox in agreement with free agent outfielder Adam Eaton, source tells @NBCSChicago. It's a 1-year, $7 million deal with a second year team option for $8.5 million.

— Chuck Garfien (@ChuckGarfien) December 8, 2020

Chicago first acquired Eaton after the 2013 season, in a three-team, six-player deal with the Diamondbacks and Angels that also established new homes for Mark Trumbo, Hector Santiago and the late Tyler Skaggs. Eaton, a former 19th-round pick out of the University of Miami (Ohio), immediately broke out in Chicago’s outfield, compiling 13.5 WAR over three seasons thanks to a .290/.362/.422 line (119 wRC+) and sometimes elite defense. His best season — a 2016 that included a 117 wRC+, 26 defensive runs saved in the outfield, and 5.9 WAR — earned him down-ballot MVP votes, but it came on a White Sox team that finished 78–84, spinning its tires despite the presence of stars like Jose Quintana and Chris Sale. Chicago hit the reset button, and with Eaton coming off a career year and having four years left on his owner-friendly contract extension, he became quite a valuable trade chip.

Eaton seemed like a good fit for a championship-ready Nationals squad with holes to fill in its outfield, but his honeymoon with Washington was short-lived. His 2017 season lasted just 23 games before he tore his ACL running out a ground ball, and he missed two more months in ’18 with bone bruises on his ankle. He finally turned in a full season for the title-winning 2019 Nationals and compiled 2.3 WAR with a 107 wRC+, only to return as a shell of himself in 2020, hitting just .226/.285/.384 (75 wRC+) with four homers in 41 games. He was half a win below replacement level, and Washington declined his $10.5 million team option after the season.

Eaton was able to recoup most of that with his one-year deal in Chicago, which was in need of a starting right fielder after non-tendering Nomar Mazara. Filling that spot in the order was seen as a chance for the White Sox to aim high — George Springer and Marcell Ozuna are potentially transformative bats at the top of the market, while other options like Michael Brantley, Joc Pederson, and Jackie Bradley Jr. rank in the top half of our Top 50 Free Agents list. Craig Edwards’ most recent payroll analysis has the White Sox spending much less than their market size warrants, so the resources to add a big name should be available.

Instead, Chicago opted for a 32-year-old with a modest power ceiling and waning defensive skills coming off the worst season of his career. Eaton had various problems in 2020. He raised his swing rate nearly seven points to the highest mark of his career, resulting in a walk rate of just 6.8%, more than two points below his career average. All of that swinging resulted in a lot of contact — he was in the 91st percentile of baseball in whiff rate — but he still posted his highest strikeout rate since 2015.

When Eaton put the ball in play, he also couldn’t achieve the same luck he has in the past. His ability to leg out bunt and infield singles declined, and a career .335 BABIP plummeted to a .260 mark in 2020. Because Eaton doesn’t hit for much power, his offensive value is sustained by his ability to convert line drives and grounders into singles and to work an above-average rate of walks. When he can’t do that and doesn’t have even average defensive numbers to bolster his case, you’re probably better off calling up someone from Triple-A to take his spot in the lineup.

The White Sox clearly don’t think Eaton has reached that point, likely for a few reasons. He just turned 32 this week, an age that typically means you’re past your prime but not one where you expect production to tank completely. Despite the knee and ankle injuries, Eaton can still run pretty well — he was in the 74th percentile of Statcast’s sprint speed metric this year and up to the 81st percentile the year before, which is pretty close to where he was when he was having his best seasons on defense as well as on the bases. He should avoid challenging Luis Robert to pre-game foot races, but his legs and instincts should still help add value.

His raw tools appear to be holding up in other areas as well. Eaton’s exit velocity in 2020 was down from the previous year, but only by a single mile per hour. He isn’t having trouble catching up to fastballs, as his whiff rate against the hard stuff actually just hit its lowest point since 2014. His line-drive rate has remained steady, as has his distribution of where he’s hitting the ball.

The White Sox, then, are betting that Eaton’s problems are easier to solve than it may appear. If he still runs well, perhaps fixing his defense — where he’s dropped from +27 DRS in 980.1 innings in right in 2016 to -6 DRS in 335 innings in 2020 — could be solved with better positioning, or other subtle tweaks. If his contact skills are still in place, maybe you can salvage his K/BB rates by nudging him back toward his more selective approach of the past. Perhaps there’s a 3-WAR player still here, and it’s just going to take a little elbow grease to bring him back out. The idea of achieving that while reuniting with a former fan favorite might make all that work seem worth it.

Mets fans have waited a long time to be as optimistic about an offseason as they are this winter. After decades in which conservative spending was only part of the self-destructive tactics the Wilpons inflicted upon the franchise, new owner Steve Cohen has stated plainly he bought the team with the purpose of buying up talent and transforming the team into something “iconic.” With no shortage of star players available both in free agency and via trade, Mets fans can let their imaginations run wild imagining what the roster could look like in 2021 and beyond.

Before this week, though, the Mets had yet to make a major move of any kind. That finally changed Tuesday, when they signed former Twins reliever Trevor May to a two-year deal. SNY.tv’s Andy Martino was the first to report a completed deal, while MLB Network’s Jon Heyman was first on the terms.

Mets have signed Trevor May, per source. Deal is pending physical. @AnthonyDiComo first mentioned talks.

— Andy Martino (@martinonyc) December 1, 2020

Trevor May’s 2-year deal with the Mets is for about $15M

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) December 1, 2020

May ranked 21st on Craig Edwards’ Top 50 Free Agents list at the beginning of the winter, the second reliever listed behind ex-A’s closer Liam Hendriks, and ahead of big names such as Brad Hand, Blake Treinen and Kirby Yates. That might seem like an aggressive ranking considering his age, injury history, and production. At 31, it isn’t as though May is hitting the market as a young man. He has a Tommy John surgery in his past, which cost him the 2017 season and a good portion of ’18. Since his return from that injury, he’s posted a 3.19 ERA, 3.56 FIP and 1.8 WAR in 113 games. Those are perfectly solid numbers, but not what you would call elite.

But as Edwards notes, the ranking isn’t so much a reflection of May’s past as it is the potential teams see in him. That sounds strange to say about an over-30 pitcher with a surgically rebuilt elbow, but it does apply here. When May broke into the majors in 2014, his average fastball velocity sat around 92.6 mph. When he returned from Tommy John surgery in ’18, he was at 94. Then he jumped up to 95.5 in ’19 and 96.3 last season. He’s also increased the spin rate on his fastball in each of the past two years. May’s stuff just keeps getting better despite him being 12 years into his professional career.

May aims high with that fastball to make it even tougher to catch up with. Of the 233 fastballs he threw in 2020, nearly 70% were in the top third of the strike zone or higher:

Opponents swung and missed on 46.9% of the cuts they took at May’s fastball in 2020, a rate usually reserved for a good breaking ball; the league as a whole ran a whiff rate of 22.6% against four-seamers. He also generated whiff rates of 34.4% against his slider — a pitch with hard vertical drop that May says has more in common with his old curveball than the slider he had when he first broke into the majors — and 38.7% against his changeup, which was actually his most difficult-to-hit pitch inside the strike zone last season.

Put all of that together, and May had the eighth-highest whiff rate in all of baseball last year. His strikeout percentage of 39.6% ranked ninth among pitchers with 20 innings thrown. He’s one of the game’s very best strikeout arms, so why aren’t his run prevention numbers proportionately strong? Part of it is some bad luck. He had a HR/FB rate of 21.7% in 2020 — tied for 16th-highest among all qualified relievers — and also allowed a career-high fly-ball rate, leading to an icky HR/9 rate of 1.93. You’d prefer May allow fewer flies, but that’s not likely to trend down much given the way he pitches. Instead, you have to hope that such an outsized number of those fly balls stop leaving the yard. If that were the case in 2020, his 3.62 FIP would have been closer to his 2.74 xFIP, and his case as a top free-agent reliever wouldn’t be the slightest bit controversial.

With a $7.5 million AAV over two years, May’s contract beat both Edwards’ prediction and the crowdsource on this site, as well as the figure over at MLB Trade Rumors. He did it by a relatively small amount, but it is a continuation of a trend that provides reason for cautious optimism: Of the free agents ranked at each site (not counting qualifying offer guys), Edwards was under on two and exactly right with one of the free agents he listed; MLBTR has been under on all five of their signees. It’s still early, the predictions haven’t missed badly, and all of the big money players are still out there. But it’s good to see players signing for more money than analysts and fans alike thought they would receive then for less.

May’s signing is particularly reassuring when it comes to the reliever market. Again, this is one top reliever getting signed by a new owner who wants to be ambitious with his money. But when Hand and his $10 million option were spurned in November by not only penny-pinching Cleveland but also every other team, it cast a shadow over what top-tier relief talent may be worth on the market, as well as the market the dozens of merely good relievers may be subject to. If May can get a multi-year deal and a $7.5 million AAV, that should bode well for Hendriks and Hand at the top of the ladder, as well as players like Shane Greene and Jake McGee lingering a couple of rungs below them.

It is also good news for the Mets, who were in need of another good power arm to pair with Edwin Diaz at the back of the bullpen. Diaz was his old self in 2020, striking out nearly two batters an inning and keeping homers in check en route to a 1.75 ERA and 2.18 FIP. But the arms who were in line to throw ahead of him in next year are less imposing. Dellin Betances didn’t look right last season coming off an Achilles injury, and pitchers like Chasen Shreve and Miguel Castro are interesting but probably shouldn’t be the second-best arms in a contender’s bullpen. When spring arrives, May’s assignment will be to tide Mets fans over until the bigger star arrives. Come to think of it, that might be his job right now.

In the final 2019 standings, fourth-place teams in their respective divisions finished an average of 30 games behind the first-place team. In 2018, that number was about 22, and in 2017, it was about 25. The distance between your average fourth-place team and their division’s first-place team fluctuates a bit year-to-year depending upon how super that season’s super-teams are, but it’s never close. The worse team will sneak in a few victories against the superior team over the course of 18 or so matchups throughout the season, but the two really aren’t supposed to be on the same level. One of these teams has a good chance of hosting a playoff series, and the other is having trouble selling tickets in September.

Our preseason playoff projections tend to reflect that space. Before the season was postponed and the schedule still ran 162 games, our projected fourth-place finishers in four of the six divisions were given a 1% chance or less at finishing first. The Phillies, the presumed fourth-place finishers in the NL East, were given less than a 5% chance of winning their division. Then there was the NL Central, where the Cardinals were pegged for fourth but given a 17% chance to finish on top, with a projected record that was within four games of the first-place Cubs. That would have been the tightest grouping of the top four teams in any division since the AL East in 1988.

When the new 60-game season was done, just five games wound up separating the top four teams in the NL Central, and from the looks of our Depth Charts projections, the race figures to be incredibly tight again in 2021. While the Pirates lag far behind the pack, the top four teams in the division stand incredibly close in talent level.

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In 2017, Christian Yelich finished his last season as a Miami Marlin with a 117 wRC+. That figure, along with the help of his owner-friendly contract, was enough to make him a highly sought-after trade chip — valuable enough for Milwaukee to send the then-No. 13, No. 52, and No. 87 prospects in baseball to acquire his services. Yelich was widely recognized as an excellent baserunner and at least a passable defensive outfielder. But the Brewers were acquiring him for his bat, and they felt his offense from the previous season helped justify the price they were paying.

Fast forward three years, and there are a different set of expectations for Yelich. This winter, he’s coming off a season which he finished with a 112 wRC+, not far from that final season in Miami. But after back-to-back seasons in which he posted a 170 wRC+ and 15.4 WAR — both tops in the National League in that timeframe — and finished in the top two in the MVP voting, that number now looks like a disappointment. There were some positive aspects of his 2020: He walked more than 18% of the time, and while his .225 ISO was below the standard he’d set in his previous two seasons, it still leads all of his Marlins seasons by a substantial margin. But while that helped him maintain an above-average wOBA, they obfuscate a season full of bizarre and unexpected developments for the 28-year-old outfielder.

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While scrolling The Athletic’s site recently, I came across a headline that gave me pause, citing Kansas City Royals general manager Dayton Moore saying he “expects to win” in 2021. Front office personnel in every organization do a bit of work hyping up their teams during the offseason; just a year ago, Rockies owner Dick Monfort predicted a 94-win season for a club that had won just 71 games the year before. Moore, to his credit, was much more vague when assessing the Royals. From Athletic beatwriter Alec Lewis:

“We expect to win next year. What does that look like? Is it going to be enough wins to make the playoffs? We’ll find out. But our mindset is going to be to go out and win every single pitch, every inning, every game. That’s the only way we’re ever going to win another championship.”

Moore isn’t guaranteeing a playoff spot, or even a winning record; all he vows is an intent to win games, which is a pretty easy promise to keep. Every team wins games, because the season lasts a very long time, and baseball itself is a weird sport in which a very bad team can defeat a very good team on any given day with only a couple of things breaking the right direction. Even if Moore is hedging here, though, his tone is unambiguously positive, and not even in some “trust the process” sort of way. He thinks his team has a fighting chance, just five months after drafting in the top four selections for a second year in a row.

That kind of faith inspired me to figure out for myself if Royals fans should share that optimism. I’d never previously considered Kansas City to be a threat in 2021. I still don’t, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Peek over at our current Depth Charts projections, and the Royals’ WAR total ranks 21st in baseball. That’s far above 100-loss territory, and even within spitting distance of plausible playoff territory; it’s within two and a half wins of the Phillies, Reds and Cardinals, three teams you wouldn’t be shocked to see in the postseason next year. That would also constitute a downgrade from where the Royals finished this season, when they ranked 15th in the majors in batting WAR and 19th in pitching WAR.

You may not have noticed, since they never stumbled into the playoff hunt the way other rebuilding teams like Detroit and Baltimore did, but the Royals actually improved quite a bit in 2020. They added nearly 70 points to their win percentage in one season, going from 59–103 to 26–34. Their pythagorean record was actually slightly better at 27–33. Part of the reason for that could certainly be the shortened season, but it isn’t as though limiting the previous year to 60 games would have done them any favors. Kansas City went 19–41 over its first 60 games in 2019 and 16–44 over its final 60. This was a step forward — the first big one of the rebuild.

Where did those improvements come from? The most obvious source would be the pitching staff, which featured two rookies — Brady Singer and Kris Bubic — joining the rotation full-time after never previously appearing in the majors, or even in Triple-A for that matter. Those two wound up holding their own, while staff ace Brad Keller turned in a career year.

As it stands right now, the top five names here are the likeliest to fill out the rotation in 2021, and it’s a solid enough group. Bubic was No. 110 on Eric Longenhagen’s global Top Prospect list entering this season, and Singer, the team’s first-round pick in 2018, ranked just one spot below Bubic on his Royals list. The success of those two were significant victories for the organization this year.

The lineup saw modest gains as well thanks to two veterans who weren’t around the year before. Salvador Perez was the headliner: After missing the entire 2019 season because of Tommy John surgery, he burst back into the offense by hitting .333/.353/.633 with 11 homers in 156 plate appearances, getting a bit lucky on balls in play while also hitting for more power than he ever had. Perez’s terrific season at the plate received an enthusiastic cosign from Statcast, which rated him in the 96th percentile in xwOBA despite the fact that he walked in less than 2% of his plate appearances.

Then there was third baseman Maikel Franco, who signed with the Royals after being non-tendered by Philadelphia and rewarded his new club by slashing .278/.321/.457 for a 106 wRC+ and 1.3 WAR while starting all 60 games at the hot corner. It was Franco’s best offensive season since 2015 and, despite the shortened season, his best WAR total since ’16. With Jorge Soler, Hunter Dozier and Whit Merrifield all still hitting at an above-average clip, Kansas City recovered some of the thump it had sorely missed out on in recent years; its 92 wRC+ as a team was its highest since 2015, the year it won the World Series.

To have so many things go well in 2020 — the successful return of the star catcher, the bounce-back of the change-of-scenery–free-agent signing, solid seasons from two rookie starters and the established core players meeting expectations — should certainly give a GM a jolt of energy heading into the winter. The flip side is that in spite of all that good news, the Royals still couldn’t contend, and it’s hard to see much more room for growth from the players currently on the roster.

As good of a sign as it was to see the young pitchers quickly settle into the rotation, neither Singer nor Bubic are projected to be much more than No. 3 or 4 starters, which wouldn’t be far above what they did in 2020. Meanwhile, Keller outperformed his xwOBA by more than 80 points last year according to Statcast, making him more likely to regress than to improve.

The offense doesn’t appear to be standing far below its ceiling, either. Dozier and Soler could help by returning to their 2019 numbers, but that may be offset by any regression that comes for Perez. Perhaps Adalberto Mondesi taps into the pop he showed in 2018, or one of the Irish Ryans at first base — McBroom or O’Hearn — makes some kind of jump. But a scan of this roster doesn’t really reveal any good hitters who woefully underperformed this season or some dormant former top prospect waiting to break out. The offensive performance this team showed in 2020 may be as good as this current group is going to get.

There is help coming from the minors, but it’s unlikely the impact will be felt in 2021. Wunderkind shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. is just 20 and has all of 37 rookie league games to his resume. Left-hander Asa Lacy, the No. 4 overall pick in 2020, has yet to throw a pitch in a professional game. Fellow southpaw prospect in Daniel Lynch hasn’t pitched above Advanced-A and is said to have the same limited ceiling Bubic and Singer. Asking any of these players to contribute much in 2021 would require speeding up their developmental timelines considerably.

If Kansas City wishes to take another step forward in the coming season, then, it will require moves to be made this winter. And even though no one is expecting the Royals to be one of the major players in free agency, there may be some reason for optimism that the team could be active in some meaningful way. Again from Lewis:

“There’s a fine line between aggressive and reckless, and Moore has walked it, finding comfort in the former. When the Royals signed Gil Meche in the winter of 2006, they agreed to an extra year so that they could make the acquisition. In the winter of 2013, Moore executed a similar deal in signing Omar Infante. Through experience, he understands teams must reach deep into their pocketbooks. If that time comes again, the Royals will do so again.”

There is no shortage of ways for Kansas City to improve via free agency. It could replace second baseman Nicky Lopez, who has been below replacement level in each of his first two big league seasons, on the open market with Kolten Wong or Tommy La Stella. It could add Joc Pederson or Michael Brantley to its outfield, or sign a starter like James Paxton or Mike Minor. An offseason that includes two or three of these moves wouldn’t break the bank for a team currently on track to spend just $76 million on payroll in 2021, and could add upwards of six or seven wins to the Royals’ projected WAR total, vaulting them into about the 16th-ranked spot in the majors.

Unfortunately, the front office may not see much reason to attempt that kind of run. According to our Depth Charts, Kansas City could add nine wins to its projected WAR total and still not surpass the next-closest AL team, the Red Sox. Boston is one of 10 AL teams currently expected to outperform the Royals in 2021, and that’s before those teams have added free agents and made trades. If Kansas City played in the NL Central, it might be able to spend its way to contention. But in the challenging AL Central, the obstacles are simply too great.

The Royals’ encouraging steps forward in 2020 place them closer to baseball’s middle class than you may have expected. They’re just in the wrong league to take advantage of that. To make the jump in the AL, they will need to develop this line of top draft picks — Witt Jr., Lacy, the No. 7 pick in 2021 and likely another top-10 pick in 2022 — into stars. Moore’s ambitions for ’21 are noble, but this time next year, he’ll probably be happy he didn’t make any bold predictions.

Devin Williams won the NL Rookie of the Year Award with 27 innings of pitching. They were 27 historically great innings, but 27 innings all the same — 22 appearances out of the bullpen, the equivalent of five or so starts if he were placed in the rotation. You could fit all of Williams’ 2020 inside one month if you wanted to; the only reason that wasn’t considered a more serious demerit is that the actual regular season only lasted two months. This year was about accomplishing as much as possible in a very short amount of time. With that in mind, let’s talk about Ke’Bryan Hayes.

Hayes, the Pirates’ 23-year-old third baseman, finished sixth in Rookie of the Year voting, trailing the three finalists as well as Dodgers right-handers Tony Gonsolin and Dustin May. You just saw a lot of Gonsolin and May, but there’s a good chance you still haven’t watched Hayes at all. He didn’t debut for the Pirates until September, after the team was already well on its way to securing the No. 1 pick with the worst record in baseball. No one sought this team out on MLB.TV, and two thirds of all teams didn’t even have Pittsburgh on its schedule. In case you haven’t updated yourself on Hayes outside of his annual prominence on top prospect lists, here’s what he did in his first game:

The very next inning, Kris Bryant decided to test out Hayes’ arm at third by charging home on a ground ball. It was a mistake: Read the rest of this entry »