The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2019 election, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Baseball at high altitude is weird. The air is less dense, so pitched balls break less and batted balls carry farther — conditions that greatly favor the hitters. Meanwhile, reduced oxygen levels make breathing harder, physical exertion more costly, and recovery times longer. Ever since major league baseball arrived in Colorado in 1993, no player put up with more of this, the pros and cons of playing at a mile-high elevation, than Todd Helton.

A Knoxville native whose career path initially led to the gridiron, ahead of Peyton Manning on the University of Tennessee quarterback depth chart, Helton shifted his emphasis back to baseball in college and spent his entire 17-year career (1997-2013) playing for the Rockies. “The Toddfather” was without a doubt the greatest player in franchise history, its leader in most major offensive counting stat categories. He made five All-Star teams, won three Gold Gloves, a slash line triple crown — leading in batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage in the same season — and served as a starter and a team leader for two playoff teams, including Colorado’s only pennant winner. He posted batting averages above .300 12 times, on-base percentages above .400 nine times, and slugging percentages above .500 eight times. He mashed 40 doubles or more seven times and 30 homers or more six times; twice, he topped 400 total bases, a feat that only one other player (Sammy Sosa) has repeated in the post-1960 expansion era. He drew at least 100 walks in a season five times, yet only struck out 100 times or more once; nine times, he walked more than he struck out.

Because Helton did all of this while spending half of his time at Coors Field, many dismiss his accomplishments without a second thought. That he did so with as little self-promotion as possible — and scarcely more exposure — while toiling for a team that had the majors’ sixth-worst record during his tenure makes such dismissal that much easier, as does the drop-off at the tail end of his career, when injuries, most notably chronic back woes, had sapped his power. He was “The Greatest Player Nobody Knows,” as the New York Times called him in 2000, a year when he flirted with a .400 batting average into September.

Thanks to Helton’s staying power, and to advanced statistics that adjust for the high-offense environment in a particularly high-scoring period in baseball history, we can more clearly see that he ranked among his era’s best players, and has credentials that wouldn’t be out of place in Cooperstown. But like former teammate Larry Walker, a more complete player who spent just 59% of his career with the Rockies, Helton’s candidacy started slowly. He received just 16.5% of the vote in his first year, 3.8% less than Walker did in his 2011 debut, but thanks to a less crowded ballot — and perhaps Walker’s coattails, as he jumped 22 percentage points and was elected in his final year of eligibility — Helton rose to 29.2% last year, making the fourth-largest gain of any returning candidate. Still, he’s got a ways to go before he can join his former teammate in the Hall of Fame.

Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Kansas City Royals.

Batters

The Royals are not a dreadful team. They likely won’t lose 100 games or find themselves setting any horrifying, ineptitude-based records like when the 2019 Orioles allowed 75% of the home runs hit in baseball history. But they’re a phenomenally uninspiring club and like most Royals squads since owner Ewing Kauffman passed away in 1993, one that looks forever stuck in the limbo between not really being close to contending and only half-heartedly rebuilding. The Royals briefly broke the wheel in the mid-2010s when the players acquired in return for Zack Greinke, late 2000s prospects, and a few reclamation projects all peaked simultaneously, but they never had a plan to sustain winning beyond those amazing highlights. Since the strike in 1994, the Royals have a .441 winning percentage, the worst in baseball and the third-worst since Dayton Moore replaced Allard Baird as the general manager.

As such, the Royals have several talented veterans, none of whom are remotely likely to be in Kansas City the next time the team is good. It’s not a great sign for a rebuilding club when the offensive players with the most projected WAR remaining in their careers are largely the oldest ones. Adalberto Mondesi is the exception at age-25, at the top of the team with 19.6 estimated wins remaining, followed by Whit Merrifield, Jorge Soler, Salvador Perez, and Franchy Cordero. If you’re keeping score, that’s a 32-year-old outfielder, a 31-year-old injury-prone catcher, a late-20s designated hitter, and a player who last had 200 plate appearances in a season in 2017. Bobby Witt Jr. is the only position player under 25 with a mean projection of five wins in the majors in his entire career. Only Lucius Fox and MJ Melendez even project above replacement level. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2019 election, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

As much as Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, and Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte was a pillar of the Joe Torre-era Yankees dynasty. The tall Texan lefty played such a vital role on 13 pinstriped playoff teams and seven pennant winners — plus another trip to the World Series during his three-year run with Houston — that he holds several major postseason records. In fact, no pitcher ever started more potential series clinchers, both in the World Series and the postseason as a whole.

For as important as Pettitte was to the “Core Four” (Williams always gets the short end of the stick on that one) that anchored five championships from 1996 to 2009 — and to an Astros team that reached its first World Series in ’05 — he seldom made a case as one of the game’s top pitchers. High win totals driven by excellent offensive support helped him finish in the top five of his leagues’ Cy Young voting four times, but only three times did he place among the top 10 in ERA or WAR, and he never ranked higher than sixth in strikeouts. He made just three All-Star teams.

Indeed, Pettitte was more plow horse than racehorse. A sinker- and cutter-driven groundballer whose pickoff move was legendary, he was a championship-level innings-eater, a grinder (his word) rather than a dominator, a pitcher whose strong work ethic, mental preparation, and focus — visually exemplified by his peering in for the sign from the catcher with eyes barely visible underneath the brim of his cap — compensated for his lack of dazzling stuff. Ten times he made at least 32 starts, a mark that’s tied for seventh in the post-1994 strike era. Within that span, his total of 10 200-inning seasons is tied for fourth, and his 13 seasons of qualifying for the ERA title with an ERA+ of 100 or better is tied for first with two other lefties, Mark Buehrle (a newcomer to this year’s ballot) and CC Sabathia. He had his ups and downs in the postseason, but only once during his 18-year career (2004, when he underwent season-ending elbow surgery) was he unavailable to pitch once his team made the playoffs.

Even given Pettitte’s 256 career wins, he takes a back seat to two other starters on the ballot (Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling) who were better at missing bats and preventing runs, and who also had plenty of postseason success. Both of those pitchers have reasons why voters might exclude them from their ballots even while finding them statistically qualified, and the same is true for Pettitte, who was named in the 2007 Mitchell Report for having used human growth hormone to recover from an elbow injury. Between those dents and dings and the additional presence of both Roy Halladay and Mike Mussina, Pettitte received just 9.9% in his 2019 ballot debut, and even on a less crowded slate, his share only increased to 11.3% last year. He seems unlikely to make much headway towards 75% barring a significant change in the electorate’s attitudes towards PEDs.

About those wins: Regular readers know that I generally avoid dwelling upon pitcher win totals, because in this increasingly specialized era, they owe as much to adequate offensive, defensive, and bullpen support as they do to a pitcher’s own performance. While one needn’t know how many wins Pettitte amassed in a season or a career to appreciate his true value, those totals have affected the popular perception of his career.

Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Atlanta Braves.

Batters

How do you get to the playoffs easily with only one dependable starter? Pummeling the league into submission with your offense is a good place to start. The Dodgers led the National League in runs scored, but the Braves finished only a single run behind them. Marcell Ozuna’s one-year contract turned out to be one of the best moves of the winter. Unable to maintain the level of his 2017 breakout the last couple of years, he went out and topped even that season, hitting .338/.431/.636 and earning two-thirds of a Triple Crown by finishing third in batting average while leading the league in homers and RBIs. Sure, it wouldn’t have been quite the same in a 60-game season, though one could argue that batting average is harder to lead in over a short year due to being a volatile qualitative measure.

Atlanta now faces the challenge of replacing Ozuna’s production. That won’t happen in full, but newly minted NL MVP Freddie Freeman returns, as does the Ronald Acuña Jr./Ozzie Albies tandem, a pair of young stars that can quite literally match up with any such coupling in MLB history. Freeman did as much to push his Hall of Fame case forward as you can in 60 games and passed the halfway mark to 3,000 hits; he’ll likely finish in the 2,500-hit range, something he’ll likely need with around 400 home runs as a first baseman. By the time he retires, ZiPS projects him to have the fourth-most WAR for a 21st-century first baseman with around 60, but that’s not slam-dunk territory.

Acuña’s a superstar, and one has to remember that the top comp in his cohort is the young, dynamic Jose Canseco, not the plodding slugger the latter was late in his career. In a way, it feels almost fitting to have him comped to the first 40/40 hitter. Technically, Acuña has the talent to be the first 50/50 hitter someday, but there’s always that issue that the better a player hits, the more resistant managers become to letting them run the bases aggressively. Even Rickey Henderson’s attempts dropped over time! Read the rest of this entry »

Why was Greg Maddux as good as he was? In the opinion of longtime pitching instructor Brian Vikander, the biggest reason is that Maddux took baseball-is-a-chess-match to whole new level. Moreover, he did so in much the same manner as that with which Boris Spassky tackled the likes of Bobby Fischer.

That Vikander and I happened upon that particular subject is somewhat ironic. When we spoke earlier this week, it was to discuss his assertion that Steve Dalkowski threw 110 mph. Vikander is the co-author of a book about the legendary left-hander, who along with having extraordinary velocity was the antithesis of Maddux when it came to command. “Dalko” walked 1,236 batters in 956 minor league innings.

(We’ll hear from Vikander on Dalkowski and velocity in the coming week.)

“A big part of pitching is preventing on-time contact,” said Vikander, whose three-plus decades of experience includes working with Tom House and a plethora of professional hurlers. “Maddux was able to take all of the components — pitch selection, sequencing, location, and movement — and put them together to do that. It wasn’t any different than a Grandmaster in chess; it was like Boris Spassky. Most people don’t understand how that unusual opening would be used in a World Title game. Bobby Fischer did, but there aren’t many who are capable of that level of thinking.”

Vikander cited Miguel Cabrera as an example of a hitter capable of thinking along with pitchers in grandmaster fashion. He offered Ted Williams, with whom he’d conversed with over the years, as second example. In Vikander’s view, it’s that ability which separates “the truly great ones” from mere mortals. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

At the turn of the millennium, on the heels of six straight sub-.500 seasons, the Oakland A’s enjoyed a competitive renaissance. From 2000 to 2003, they averaged 98 wins per year, good for a .606 winning percentage that ranked second in the majors, an eyelash behind the Mariners (also .606 but with one more win in that span). They made the playoffs in all four of those seasons, three by winning the AL West, and they did it all despite shoestring budgets that regularly placed their payrolls among the majors’ bottom half-dozen. The ability of general manager Billy Beane to exploit market inefficiencies in crafting a low-cost roster gained fame via Michael Lewis’ 2003 book Moneyball, but underplayed in a tale that emphasized on-base percentage, defense, and quirky, misfit players was a homegrown trio of starting pitchers — Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito — who were central to the A’s success. Drafted out of college, the “Big Three” asserted their spots among the AL’s top pitchers despite a lack of overpowering stuff.

The oldest of trio was Hudson, a skinny, undersized righty (generally listed at 6-foot-1 and 160 pounds) who relied on his low-90 sinkerball to generate a ton of groundballs, as well as a diving split-fingered fastball, slider, and change-up to miss bats and keep hitters off balance. An Alabama native who was drafted out of Auburn University in the sixth round in 1997, Hudson reached the majors just two years later, and quickly emerged as a frontline starter able to shoulder annual workloads of 200-plus innings, belying his modest frame. In a 17-year career with the A’s (1999-2004) and later the Braves (2004-13) and Giants (2014-15), Hudson helped his teams reach the postseason nine times, but both the pitcher and those teams experienced more than their share of hard luck in October. Only at his final stop, in San Francisco, did Hudson’s teams even make it to the League Championship Series, but in 2014, he was a key component of the Giants’ World Series-winning squad.

Though he made four All-Star teams, received Cy Young consideration in four seasons, and won well over 200 games while cracking his league’s ERA and WAR leaderboards seven times apiece, Hudson does not have an especially strong case for Cooperstown, particularly once one looks beyond the superficial numbers. While he’s expected to receive a smattering of support from BBWAA voters in a year where the ballot traffic is comparatively minimal relative to recent cycles, he might not even draw the 5% needed to remain on the ballot. Even so, his outstanding career is worthy of review. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Batters

Some years, the World Series champion is clearly not the best team in baseball; instead, it’s a club that, through a combination of luck and timing, goes on an October run en route to the Commissioner’s Trophy. That was not the case in 2021. The Dodgers played in the same division as the National League’s second-best team this season, the Padres, and still bested them by six games, a 16-win pace per 162 games. Even with surprising down years (relatively speaking) from Cody Bellinger and Max Muncy, this lineup pummeled opposing pitchers from pole-to-pole, scoring nearly six runs a game and setting a franchise-high wRC+ at 122. Sure, it’s different to do that over 60 games than 154 or 162, but it’s still an impressive feat for a club with such a long history and deep roster of Hall of Famers.

With only one championship available per season, aggressively trying to win isn’t always met with a proportional reward. In this instance, the Dodgers went all-out to rent the services of Mookie Betts, with no guarantee he’d re-sign with them, and then inked him to a long-term deal with one of the richest payouts in major league history in the middle of a global pandemic and corresponding economic meltdown. Betts was as good as advertised — just one Freddie Freeman away from an MVP trophy — and the Dodgers earned a championship. Score one for positive incentives!

The team’s to-do list on the offense is relatively small this winter. Replacing Justin Turner is a priority — bringing him back for a year or two strikes me as the best mutual opportunity — but with a championship already in the bag and the team so strong elsewhere, the Dodgers may not feel compelled to be aggressive as they would have been in a similar situation a year ago. In extremely limited big league time, Gavin Lux hasn’t been great so far, but he remains a top prospect, he’s still very young, and this organization isn’t known for panicking when it comes to its best prospects. Read the rest of this entry »

Drey Jameson is one of the more-intriguing pitching prospects in the Arizona Diamondbacks’ system. Drafted 34th overall in 2019 out of Ball State University, the 23-year-old right-hander possesses a lean frame — he is listed at six-foot-even and 165 pounds — yet he consistently pumps mid-to-high-90s gas. Moreover, the secondary pitches he throws from a deceptive delivery all grade out as plus. A native of Greenfield, Indiana, he entered the year ranked 13th on our 2020 D-Backs Top Prospects list.

Jameson discussed his repertoire and how COVID-19 impacted what would have been his first full professional season during the final week of Arizona’s fall instructional league, which wrapped up earlier this month.

———

David Laurila: What should people know about you as a pitcher?

Drey Jameson: “I’d say I’m kind of electric, kind of fast-twitch with a really fast arm. It’s more like [deception]; I’m not a guy who is standing tall on the mound and has that straight downhill with his fastball. And my stuff separates. With my changeup, I’m a pronation guy, so my changeup works really well for me. Outside of that, I consider myself a fierce competitor who goes out and attacks guys.”

Laurila: You’re listed at six foot and 165 pounds. Is that still accurate?

Jameson: “I’m six foot, but I’m ranging anywhere from 170 to 178. I guess I’m usually around 175.”

Laurila: When our 2020 Diamondbacks Top Prospects list came out, your writeup included, “His high-maintenance delivery is hard to repeat.” Is that accurate? Read the rest of this entry »

Position: Research and Development Intern

Job Description:
The Tampa Bay Rays are in search of their next Research and Development Intern. Their R&D group helps shape their Baseball Operations decision-making processes through the analysis and interpretation of data. They are seeking those with a passion for baseball and a desire to contribute through mathematics, data analysis and computation. Their next intern will be an intellectual contributor that can work both individually and collaboratively, coming up with interesting research questions to explore, find ways to answer those questions with the data at their disposal, communicate the results of their research, and work to apply their research outcomes to improve how the Rays organization operates. The Rays want to work with people who care about being good teammate, want to make a positive impact on their organization, have an innovative spirit, and will explore new ways to make them better. Does this describe you?

Responsibilities:

• Develop strong skills in statistical modeling and quantitative analysis of a variety of data sources, for the purpose of player evaluation, player development and strategic decision-making
• Learn methods for communicating complex research findings to a variety of Baseball Operations audiences
• Design research inquiries with the potential to yield immediately actionable findings within the Rays organization
• Work collaboratively with and assisting other members of the department with your areas of expertise
• Collect in-game data to support operational needs of the department
• Ad hoc research and analysis in support of general Baseball Operations tasks

Read the rest of this entry »

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.