With the draft and the All-Star Game out of the way, the next waypoint on the baseball calendar is the trade deadline. In other words, it is officially Trade Season. And the Royals and Pirates kicked it off on Wednesday morning with the first deadline deal. I got a little excited; sometimes, when the Royals and Pirates make a deal, you end up with Sir Francis Drake’s invaluable contribution to the defeat of the Spanish Armada at the Battle of Gravelines in 1588.

This was not one of those times. Kansas City sent minor league infielder Cam Devanney to Pittsburgh in exchange for Adam Frazier. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we have a Killers two-fer, with lists covering a couple of important defensive positions, specifically second base and catcher. While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of a contender (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of roughly 10%) and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far (which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season), I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. That may suggest that some of these teams will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because their performance at that spot thus far is worth a look. All statistics are through July 12.

Padres

With Kyle Higashioka departing for the Rangers in free agency, the Padres — who ranked 24th in the majors last year in catcher WAR (1.1) — pencilled in Luis Campusano, the weaker partner of last year’s catching tandem, alongside late-season addition Elias Díaz to do the bulk of the work behind plate. The pair, augmented by 38-year-old free agent Martín Maldonado, ranked dead last in our preseason Positional Power Rankings. After optioning Campusano to Triple-A El Paso in March (he was recalled yesterday), they’ve approximated that billing, ranking 29th out of the 30 teams in catcher WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. Today that title is a bit of a misnomer; I got back from vacation Monday night, so I saw very little baseball before Tuesday. That said, I didn’t need to see very much to have a great time. This week has been awesome. Home runs both mammoth and inside-the-park, great baserunning by slow guys, bad baserunning by slow guys, reflex plays and dekes; the list goes on and on. We might need the All-Star break just to catch our collective breath before a bustling trade deadline and sprint to the finish. For now, though, let’s just marvel at the week – after my customary nod to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, of course.

1. Unconventional Double Plays
Cody Bellinger has been great addition to the Yankees after they acquired him for peanuts over the winter. He is flashing the offensive prowess that has come and gone over the years, and with Trent Grisham manning center, he is playing the corner outfield more than he has in the past. His glove isn’t as good as it was at his peak, but putting a center fielder in left is still a plus for your team defense, as the Mets learned on Sunday. This Juan Soto line drive would have been a hit against almost anyone else:

Statcast gave it a 25% catch probability, and I think it was probably even harder than that. Catch probability measures how far Bellinger had to run and how much time he had to do it, but that ball was absolutely scalded and had so much topspin that it was hooking down hard in the brief time it was in the air. He caught it by the very end of the webbing; “baseball is a game of inches” is usually about the bat hitting the ball or a bang-bang play, but in this case, one inch separated a catch from extra bases:

Oh yeah, then this happened:

That throw is as good of a play as the catch! At full extension, stretched out awkwardly to secure the ball, Bellinger still managed to find first base on the run and unleash an absolute seed that hit Paul Goldschmidt right in the glove on the fly. Making that catch was hard enough. Making it without falling was even harder. Making it without falling and then throwing a frozen rope on target? Almost unthinkable.

Even after that catch, even with that throw, you might wonder why Francisco Lindor got doubled off. Partially, he couldn’t believe anyone could catch that line drive. Partially, too, he got deked. Goldschmidt no-sold the play, barely moving his glove until he absolutely had to. This isn’t the body language of a guy desperate to turn a double play:

That’s not the perfect angle, but you get the idea. The rhythm of this play, to Lindor, didn’t feel like the kind where he’d need to sprint and dive back to first. When someone makes a play that good, you turn around and go back, but what are they going to do, unleash an off-balance missile while the first baseman you’re staring at barely moves? Apparently, yes!

2. Irrational Exuberance
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is not a good baserunner. That’s not an opinion. He’s been below average in each year of his major league career. He has 24 career steals and has been caught stealing 12 times. He’s slow, and he hits into a lot of double plays. But despite all that, Vlad likes to run. Give him the chance, and he’ll take off. Take Wednesday, for example. Guerrero took advantage of an errant pickoff throw to scamper to second:

You’ve seen that play a million times. Everyone was pretty relaxed about it; in the game audio, you can actually hear Jays first base coach Mark Budzinski calmly telling Vlad “go ahead, go ahead.” But the play wasn’t over:

Yeah, don’t do that. I’ve already mentioned that Guerrero isn’t fleet of foot, but it also took him forever to get moving; acceleration isn’t a strength either. Watch his feet – his first step was actually backwards, out into right field. Adrian Houser was on the wrong side of the mound, but Vlad just didn’t have enough straight line speed to make it matter. To make matters even worse, that was the third out of the inning, at third base, with Addison Barger — one of the teams’ hottest hitters — at the plate. Against the White Sox! Don’t do this.

Don’t do this either:

Now, to be fair, this is a tougher play than before. The underlying cause, though, is similar: a belief that baserunning is easier than it actually is. Elite runners might be safe there. That said, elite runners are a lot faster, and better at sliding, and they’d probably take two steps to their left to better block the throwing lane. That should be an extremely difficult throw for a right-handed first baseman, instead of the easy pitch-and-catch that it was. And once you’re dead to rights, well, hitting the brakes and retreating is a better option than starting your slide so early. You probably won’t survive the rundown, but you might stay in it long enough to give the runner on third time to score before you’re tagged for the final out of the inning.

To Guerrero’s credit, he did try a nifty maneuver at second that nearly rescued the whole thing:

Again, though, leave the high-difficulty baserunning stunts for the high-talent baserunners. Both of these decisions would be excellent if, say, Trea Turner had made them. Knowing what you can accomplish is a key part of accruing value on the bases. Watching what happens when that crucial step doesn’t occur sure is fun for a neutral observer, though.

3. One-up-manship
Kyle Schwarber had himself a game on Tuesday night. He went 2-for-4 with a double and a home run, and that homer was outrageous. Not only did he hit it into McCovey Cove, but he did so more or less flat-footed:

He even showed off another facet of his game an inning earlier, swiping second base off a distracted Robbie Ray:

That brought Schwarber to nine steals on the year, with only one caught stealing. He’s one of the slowest runners in baseball, but he understands the proper application of that speed, generally stealing bases off pitchers who forget about him. He’s not a particularly good baserunner overall, but he’s been picking smart spots to go this year.

One batter later, though, Schwarber tried to double up on his baserunning feat by swiping third. Enter Patrick Bailey:

Schwarber had a great read on Ray; he got an excellent jump in a great spot to steal, with the batter screening the catcher at the plate. Bailey just did everything he had to do that much better:

Watch his footwork there. He cleared batter Alec Bohm and got his lead foot planted at the back of the batter’s box while he was catching the ball. The catch and transfer were both perfect, letting him throw in rhythm. The throw? A laser beam to Matt Chapman’s glove for a tag that got Schwarber by an inch or two. I don’t think Schwarber could have done anything better; he just got beat by perhaps the best defensive catcher in the game.

Bailey is having a miserable season at the plate, but he even outdid Schwarber there, too. The Schwarbomb in the seventh put the Phillies up 3-1, and the score stayed there until Bailey batted with one out in the ninth. Then, well:

It’s hard to imagine a more exciting walk-off than that, and it made for the perfect kicker to this game. Sure, Schwarber had a stolen base and two-run homer, but Bailey had a caught stealing and a walk-off, three-run, inside-the-park homer. Real “anything you can do I can do better” vibes.

4. Two-Way Excellence
Oh, you like inside-the-park home runs? Northern California has your back:

That’s Lawrence Butler leading off the home half of the first for the A’s with an only-in-Sacramento play. It involved the ball kicking off of a chain link fence section of the wall and eluding the entire Braves outfield. That let Butler score even with one of the most nonchalant starts to an inside-the-parker you’ll ever see:

That’s the stride of someone who thought he hit the ball out of the park, but the crazy carom and Butler’s speed made it all work in the end. That’s been a hallmark of his game this year, in fact. He’s not the best defender in the world, but he’s got enough range and instincts to make up for a scattershot arm. He has plenty of swing-and-miss in his game, but he has enough plate discipline to keep his strikeouts from capsizing his offensive contributions. He’s a savvy baserunner capable of hitting top speed faster than you’d think. And he has enough power to make up for any small flaws elsewhere:

Inside the park? Outside the park? Butler has the speed/power combination to accomplish both. He looks like a nice building block of the next good A’s team – not this year’s team, of course, but maybe next year’s. After 1,000 major league plate appearances, it seems pretty clear that he’s a solid all-around player but not quite a star. That’s just fine for both the contract and the prospect pedigree, though – and as a huge bonus, he’s tremendously fun to watch. More home runs like these, please.

5. Raw Power
More home runs like these, too. Jac Caglianone was playing college baseball last year. The sixth pick in the 2024 draft, he looked more like a developmental stash than a plug-and-play star. He played both ways in college, though he was clearly a lot better offensively, and the Royals drafted him with that in mind. But he was raw, with iffy command of the strike zone and a swing-first mentality that led to ugly swings over sliders.

A whirlwind tour of the minors – 158 wRC+ in Double-A, 164 in Triple-A – convinced Kansas City to call him up at the beginning of June. Through just over a month of play, the results have been disappointing; Caglianone is hitting .151/.205/.286, for a 31 wRC+. But the results are lying. He’s been much better than I thought he’d be, to be quite honest. He’s running a 22% strikeout rate, far lower than I would have expected given that he’s chasing 41% of the pitches he sees outside the strike zone, one of the worst marks in the big leagues. The stats might be rough, but the process isn’t; by xwOBA, he’s been about an average hitter, rather than 70% below average, thanks to his prodigious exit velocities.

In other words, over the long run. Caglianone is going to hit for a lot of power. He’s already hitting the ball very hard, in fact, he just hasn’t quite harnessed that into doubles and dingers. But oh my god, have you seen what it looks like when he gets hot? Tuesday night, he did this:

If you want to know how scalded that ball was, watch the outfielders. Those are courtesy jogs, not “maybe I can get this one” sprints. That was 114 mph off the bat, the kind of home run that only the Judges and Stantons of the world can consistently pull off. When you hit the ball that low (19 degrees), it’s hard to leave the stadium. Caglianone is part of that group of elite power hitters already.

One hard-hit ball often begets another. His results so far have been poor, but he’s clearly close to unlocking something. If you leave a pitch over the middle of the plate against Caglianone, it’s going to travel a long way. Look at this nonsense from the next day:

That’s not a reasonable place to hit a home run. It went 466 feet, some real Bo Jackson stuff. I had the volume cranked up on this game, and the crack of the bat was so thunderous that the entire crowd went “ooooh” in unison. He might not have hit that ball quite as hard as the previous one, but he got it at the perfect angle and still tattooed it. His power binges are park-proof; Kaufmann Stadium is the stingiest stadium in baseball for left-handed power hitters, but if you hit the ball as hard as Caglianone does, it doesn’t matter where the fence is.

I didn’t think Caglianone was going to hit the majors this quickly. I’m still kind of surprised at how well he’s adapted to big league pitching; he’s getting attacked relentlessly on the inside part of the plate and chasing 40% of the time, and yet still running reasonable strikeout rates. But I’m not at all surprised at how fun he is to watch – and I can’t wait for more rainmaking home runs, and more mob movie celebrations in the dugout:

In a post yesterday, I wrote about the BaseRuns approach to estimating team winning percentages and how it attempts to strip away context that doesn’t pertain to a team’s actual ability, so as to reveal what would have happened if baseball were played in a world not governed by the whims of seemingly random variation. In this world, a win-loss record truly represents how good a team actually is. Try as it might, the BaseRuns methodology fails to actually create such a world, sometimes stripping away too much context, ignoring factors that do speak to a team’s quality, or both.

I delayed for a separate post (this one!) a deeper discussion of specific offensive and defensive units that BaseRuns represents quite differently compared to the actual numbers posted by these teams. To determine whether or not BaseRuns knows what it’s talking about with respect to each team, imagine yourself sitting in the audience on a game show set. The person on your left is dressed as Little Bo Peep, while the person on your right has gone to great lengths to look like Beetlejuice. That or Michael Keaton is really hard up for money. On stage there are a series of doors, each labeled with a team name. Behind each door is a flashing neon sign that reads either “Skill Issue!” or “Built Different!” Both can be either complimentary or derogatory depending on whether BaseRuns is more or less optimistic about a team relative to its actual record. For teams that BaseRuns suggests are better than the numbers indicate, the skill issue identified is a good thing — a latent ability not yet apparent in the on-field results. But if BaseRuns thinks a team is worse than the numbers currently imply, then skill issue is used more colloquially to suggest a lack thereof. The teams that are built different buck the norms laid out by BaseRuns and find a way that BaseRuns doesn’t consider to either excel or struggle. Read the rest of this entry »

Most former players remember details about personal milestones. A hitter can typically tell you where, and against whom, he recorded his first hit and home run. Ditto for details about an especially meaningful moment, perhaps a pennant-clinching double, or even a game-deciding grand slam against a bona fide ace. The same goes for pitchers. Ask them about their first win, their first strikeout — even their first home run allowed — and they can rattle off an answer without much effort. How many Ws were they credited with over the course of their career? Piece of cake.

Other questions aren’t so easy. With that in mind, I challenged former Kansas City Royals (and briefly Anaheim Angels) right-hander Mark Gubicza to a quiz. The now-Angels broadcaster wasn’t deterred when I warned him my questions weren’t going to be layups. Gubicza, who pitched in 384 games from 1984-1997, agreed to give it a shot.

——

The first question I asked the former All-Star was which batter he faced the most times. Gubicza guessed Kirby Puckett. Nope. His second guess, Jose Canseco, was likewise incorrect. I informed him the correct answer: Wade Boggs.

“I should have remembered that,” replied Gubicza, who squared off against the five-time batting champion 97 times. (Puckett was close behind at 92, while Canseco was further down the list at 60.) “He hit about .387 against me, or something like that.”

The hurler-turned-analyst got two of those three digits right. Boggs batted .367 against him, going 29-for-79 while also drawing 17 walks and lofting a sacrifice fly.

How about the batter who got the most hits off of him? Read the rest of this entry »

The Royals’ rotation was a key reason last year’s team made the playoffs for the first time since 2015, with the one-two punch of Seth Lugo and Cole Ragans leading the way. It was the first full season in the majors for Ragans, whose five-pitch mix helped him dominate hitters en route to an AL All-Star selection and a fourth-place finish in the Cy Young voting. Unfortunately, his follow-up season hasn’t gone so smoothly, and after landing on the injured list with a groin strain in May, Ragans has now been diagnosed with a rotator cuff strain and figures to miss significant time.

A 2016 first-round pick who underwent two Tommy John surgeries before debuting for the Rangers in ’22, Ragans enjoyed a meteoric rise in ’23, after his average fastball velocity jumped from 92.1 mph to 96.5. Not until he was traded to the Royals in a June 30, 2023 deal centered around Aroldis Chapman did he finally stick in a rotation (he had a nine-start trial in 2022), but once he did, the results were revelatory. He posted a 2.64 ERA, 2.49 FIP, and a 31.1% strikeout rate in 12 starts totaling 71.2 innings post-trade; his 2.4 WAR ranked 12th in the majors from July 1 onward. On the strength of an impressive fastball-changeup combo accompanied by a knuckle curve, slider, and cutter, he solidified his spot among the majors’ top pitchers last year. He made 32 starts and finished second in the AL in FIP (2.99), strikeouts (223), strikeout rate (29.3%), and WAR (4.9); seventh in innings (186.1 innings); and eighth in ERA (3.14). Read the rest of this entry »

With the sixth pick in the 2024 draft, the Kansas City Royals took slugger-pitcher Jac Caglianone out of the University of Florida, and set him to the task of being a full-time hitter. Caglianone’s short 2024 debut was a middling performance at best, as he hit .241/.302/.388 for the High-A Quad Cities Rivers Bandits, and while he showed impressive power in spots in the Arizona Fall League, he hardly dominated the opposition.

But since the calendar flipped to 2025, Caglianone has been on a quest for vengeance against pitchers with the ferocity of a Liam Neeson movie protagonist. First, he went 9-for-18 in spring training with six extra-base hits, in order to give major leaguers fair warning that he was coming for them. After hitting .322/.394/.553 for Double-A Northwest Arkansas, a promotion to Triple-A hasn’t tamped down his homerlust, and he’s already smacked five home runs for Omaha. The question of Caglianone’s promotion to the majors has rapidly become “when” rather than “if,” and it’s in the interest of the Royals to answer it with a three-letter word: “Now.” Read the rest of this entry »

No team has been caught stealing more than the Royals this year. As hard as it might be to believe, their 20 thwarted stolen base attempts are the most in the league. Their 70.1% stolen base success rate ranks 27th, as do their -2.1 weighted stolen base runs (wSB). This stands in stark contrast to what many think of as the Royals’ brand of baseball. After all, you’d have to go back to 2017 to find a full season in which the Royals didn’t rank among the top five AL teams in wSB, and all the way back to 2010 to find the last time their wSB was below league average. Thanks to players like Whit Merrifield, Jarrod Dyson, Adalberto Mondesi, Alcides Escobar and, most recently, Bobby Witt Jr., the Royals of the 2010s and 2020s developed a reputation as the most larcenous team in the league. From 2011-24, no team stole more bases, and no team racked up more wSB.

Kansas City’s stolen base supremacy hasn’t been limited to one side of the ball, either. From 2011-24, only two teams allowed fewer stolen bases than the Royals, and none caught would-be basestealers at a higher rate. According to the stolen base component of DRS (rSB), their catchers were twice as productive as any other team’s backstops in that period, while their pitchers were 12 runs better than the next-best team (the Diamondbacks) and more than three times as valuable as the next-best AL club (the Orioles). The Statcast numbers tell a similar story, although they only go back to 2016. From 2016-24, Kansas City catchers ranked second in both catcher and pitcher stealing runs. No other team placed within the top five in both metrics. So, you could make a pretty convincing case that preventing stolen bases is even more essential to the Royals’ brand of baseball than stealing bases, especially with the way things have gone in 2025. Their baserunners might be struggling to swipe bags like they did in the past, but their defense has taken control of the running game like never before. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Kansas City Royals. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

“The reason the Royals are so far down this list is that they don’t have an obvious back of the rotation yet.” That’s what Ben Clemens wrote when the Royals turned up at no. 13 on our Positional Power Rankings back in March. Until Saturday, the lack of depth hadn’t held them back at all. Their five starters, Seth Lugo, Cole Ragans, Michael Wacha, Michael Lorenzen, and Kris Bubic, had started 45 of the team’s 46 games. As Michael Baumann wrote last week, Bubic, the biggest question mark of the bunch, has instead pitched like an exclamation point. After taking a no-hit bid into the seventh inning in San Francisco last night, he’s 5-2 with a 1.47 ERA and 2.72 FIP. Put it all together, and the Kansas City starters have a 2.93 ERA and 3.45 FIP, good for the third- and fourth-best marks in baseball, respectively. But that depth is finally going to be tested. On Saturday, the Royals announced that they’d sent both Lugo and Ragans to the injured list.

Lugo and Ragans, who respectively finished second and fourth in the AL Cy Young voting in 2024, have been on opposite sides of the process-results spectrum thus far this season. Lugo is rocking a 3.02 ERA with a 4.52 FIP, while Ragans has a 4.53 ERA and a 1.99 FIP. The good news is that neither injury sounds too serious (with the obvious caveat that because they’re pitchers, either player could spontaneously combust at any moment). Both had been dealing with nagging injuries in recent weeks and seemed to reach the point where it was time to back off rather than risk something more serious. Read the rest of this entry »