Yesterday, the Royals reportedly agreed to a two year, $12 million contract with free agent left-hander Travis Wood, helping round out a pitching staff that needed some additional depth due to the tragic loss of Yordano Ventura. Wood had several other suitors, and in order to help convince him to come to Kansas City, it appears that the team has offered him a chance to compete for a spot in the starting rotation.

There’s nothing wrong with giving him a shot in spring training, especially since Nate Karns — the likely fifth starter before Wood signed — isn’t exactly a surefire starter himself. But while Wood is a useful pitcher who could likely be a significant asset for the Royals in a bullpen role, the Royals should probably hope that he bombs his rotation audition and accepts a role in relief instead.

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Jason Hammel isn’t yet officially a member of the Royals. He still has to pass a physical, and we’ve been burned before when we’ve jumped the gun. Yet the odds are that Hammel will soon officially join the Royals, and he’ll do so on a two-year guarantee worth $16 million. I’ve personally never signed a two-year guarantee worth $16 million, and I can’t imagine I’m going to, unless FanGraphs gets incredibly popular. Hammel is coming out of this with a nice chunk of change.

On the other hand, we’re a week into February, meaning spring training is right around the corner. Hammel got two years where he really wanted three, and this offer might not have even existed were it not for a horrible accident claiming the life of Yordano Ventura. The Royals were more or less forced into this position, and the offseason for Hammel wasn’t what he thought it would be. Looking back, I suppose there’s not much mystery. Hammel’s representatives were fighting something of an uphill battle.

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Word came out over the weekend that the Royals have signed Brandon Moss to a two-year contract, pending a physical. There’s nothing too strange about it, and Moss should have little trouble finding himself regular plate appearances. He won’t cost the Royals too much, and he will bring a power bat. You can think of him as being pretty similar, overall, to Chris Carter. Decent eye, lots of power, lots of fly balls. Moss is a little more versatile, while Carter is a little bit younger. It’s a fine player signed to a fine contract by a team with an opening. Most people wouldn’t raise an eyebrow.

And — look, team profiles don’t mean very much. Every team just wants to win, and it doesn’t matter how it happens. Front offices wouldn’t often refer to themselves as having one particular style. Value is value. And as far as the Royals are concerned, transition was inevitable. Everyone knew about their impending free-agent situation coming into the winter. At some point, the Royals were going to look different. Teams go through phases.

I’d just like to point something out about how the Royals look today. We’ve spent so much time in the past discussing the Royals’ style of baseball. From the looks of things, these Royals aren’t those Royals. It’s just a team with a few familiar faces.

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Joe Blanton was all kinds of “meh” as a starting pitcher.

In 1,553 career innings a starter – his role during the first nine years of his career – Blanton produced a 4.47 ERA and 4.20 FIP. He was a back-of-the-rotation arm. He soaked up innings. His starts were not going to spike ratings or attendance or win expectancy.

But in 2015 he found himself in the Kansas City bullpen and something strange occurred: he became one of the game’s most effective relievers despite an atypical tools profile.

Blanton was effective in the Royals’ bullpen, and when he was traded to the Pirates at the trade deadline, he was again successful in a relief role. During the following offseason, he signed a modest one-year, $4 million deal with the Dodgers and was, again, successful pitching out of the bullpen.

Since 2015, Blanton has appeared in 107 games, all as a reliever. In that time he ranks 11th in ERA (2.29) among all relievers, 24th in FIP (3.02) and 26th in K-BB% (19.1 points).

So what’s strange — in an era during which we hear more interest and talk about teams relying more heavily on their bullpens, when we saw inspired bullpen usage by the Cleveland Indians and other clubs in the postseason — what’s strange is Blanton remains available in free agency.

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Andy Marte died in a car accident in his native Dominican Republic. He was 33 years old. Yordano Ventura died in a separate car accident in his native Dominican Republic. He was 25 years old. Those are the facts, and those are the ages, but the ages are presented as if they mean anything. Any lost life is a life lost too early, and there exists no formula to calculate a level of sadness. The baseball community is in mourning, as it has been too many times.

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On MLB Network Monday evening, contemporaries Dan Plesac and John Smoltz opined that Bo Jackson could have been a Hall of Famer, at least a regular All-Star, had he committed to baseball.

Jackson produced a career wRC+ of 111 and 7.7 WAR over parts of eight major-league seasons, hardly the stuff of bronzed immortalization in Cooperstown. But had Jackson fully committed to the sport, what could he have been? What could he have done?

Who is going to bet against a guy who can scale a wall?

Or accomplish this ….

The Bessemer, Ala., native was drafted by the Yankees in the second round of the 1982 draft but elected to attend Auburn. He did many impressive things at Auburn, starring in track and football, winning a Heisman Trophy. But he also posted a 1.364 OPS as a junior. He was drafted by the Royals in the fourth round of the 1986 draft after being selected first overall in the NFL draft. Jackson said publicly he would not sign with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

And he didn’t sign.

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It’s true that, if you look at the free agents who remain unsigned this offseason, you’ll find a lot of power still available. Franklin Gutierrez, Mike Napoli, Mark Trumbo: all three produced an isolated-slugging figure greater than .200 last season. All three are projected by Steamer to produce better than a .195 ISO in 2017. All three have yet to find a team for the 2017 season.

Given the general demand for power, you might wonder why so many of these sluggers don’t have jobs yet. A look both at the supply and the demand in the league reveals a possible cause, however: handedness. There might be an obstacle, in other words, to matching those free agents with the right teams.

To illustrate my point, let me utilize the depth charts at RosterResource. What’s nice about RosterResource, for the purposes of this experiment, is that the site presents both a “go-to” starting lineup and also a projected bench. Here’s a link to the Cubs page to give you a sense of what I mean.

In most cases, a team will roster four non-catcher bench players. Looking over the current depth charts, however, I find 15 teams with only three non-catcher bench players on the depth chart (not to mention five additional bench players who are projected to record less than 0 WAR). For the purpose of this piece, let’s refer to these as “open positions.”

Fifteen! That’s a lot. It means we’re likely to see quite a few signings before the season begins. Of course, not all these openings are appropriate for the power bats remaining on the market. Most of those guys are corner types, if they can play the field at all, while some of those 15 clubs have needs at positions that require greater defensive skill.

For example, Anaheim might need an infielder or a third baseman for their open bench spot. The White Sox need a right-handed center fielder to platoon with lefty Charlie Tilson. Detroit needs a center fielder, maybe a right-handed one — and in the process of writing this piece, they got one in the form of the newly acquired Mike Mahtook maybe. If Mel Rojas Jr. can’t play center in Atlanta, they need a (right-handed?) center fielder, too. The Yankees may need a third baseman — and, if not that, definitely someone with some defensive ability on the infield.

So that reduces the number of open positions to 10. That’s 10 slots that could be filled by an offensive piece with little defensive value. Here are the teams that, by my estimation, have an opening for a slugger: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago (NL), Cleveland, Kansas City, Minnesota, Oakland, Seattle, Tampa, Texas, and Toronto.

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It’s no secret the Royals have been facing a challenging offseason. They came in with so many critical players entering their contract years, and they’re also a lower-budget operation with a mediocre farm system. A month and a half ago, I wrote an article entitled “The Royals’ Last Ride.” Some sort of transition appeared inevitable. The Royals would need to work incredibly hard if they wanted to have a chance to win down the line, without sacrificing too much from 2017.

Now, there’s plenty to like about how the transition has gone. The overall situation is still difficult, to be sure, but the Royals got four years of Jorge Soler for one year of Wade Davis. They got four years of Nate Karns for one year of Jarrod Dyson. And now, maybe most significantly, the team has extended Danny Duffy, with a five-year deal covering four years of would-be free agency. Duffy is the best starting pitcher in the organization. He has it in him to be one of the better starting pitchers in the league.

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When the Rays acquired Nate Karns from the Nationals back in 2014, the story was that he had fastball velocity and a power curve, and we’ll see about the changeup. We saw the changeup, and it was good enough, and the curve was as advertised. Unfortunately, something happened to the fastball along the way.

The Rays sent Jose Lobaton and Felipe Rivero to the Nationals for that curveball and hoped on the change. The change looked good in 147 innings for the Rays in 2015, so the Mariners took a leap that offseason, sending Brad Miller, Logan Morrison and Danny Farquhar to the Rays for Karns, right-hander C.J. Riefenhauser, and center fielder Boog Powell. Now, after a poor year, Karns has been traded again — to the Royals, this time — for outfielder Jarrod Dyson.

What happened last year, when Karns had an ERA over five? The curve and the change were fine in Seattle! But in the meantime, something may have happened to Karns’ fastball. And it could have to do with useful spin. Kansas City has to hope that what broke is fixable.

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After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Kansas City Royals. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Boston / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Los Angeles AL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
As noted over the last month in these pages both by Jeff Sullivan and then Craig Edwards, the Kansas City Royals currently employ a number of players who are likely to become free agents after the 2017 season. What the ZiPS projections featured here do is reinforce the relative importance of those pending free agents to Kansas City’s likelihood of winning games. Because, consider: of the nine field players forecast to record a 1.0 WAR or better in 2017, five of them — Lorenzo Cain (503 PA, 3.1 zWAR), Jarrod Dyson (303, 1.9), Alcides Escobar (652, 1.3), Eric Hosmer (648, 1.3), and Mike Moustakas (381, 1.6) — aren’t signed by the club past next year. Over half the team’s core, in other words, is likely to depart.

That adds some urgency to the 2017 campaign. Unfortunately, Dan Szymborski’s computer doesn’t offer much grounds for optimism. Besides Cain, only Alex Gordon (529, 2.1) and Salvador Perez (561, 3.3) are projected to break the two-win threshold among the team’s position players. The prospective starters at second base and designated hitter, meanwhile — Raul Mondesi (410, -0.3) and Jorge Soler (346, 0.2), respectively — mostly profile as replacement-level types.

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