Royals Be Nimble, Royals Be Quick, Royals Desperately Need Jac’s Stick

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.”

On the back of their pitching, the 2024 Royals posted a winning record and returned to the postseason for the first time since their 2015 World Series championship. While the pitching was impressive, the offense was a great deal less so, and one of Kansas City’s offseason challenges was to shore up the weak spots in the lineup so that the bulk of the runs didn’t have to come only from the triumvirate of Bobby Witt Jr., Salvador Perez, and Vinnie Pasquantino. Back before the start of the season, I wrote about these issues, and expressed dismay that the 2024 Royals featured three starting positions that were below replacement level, the most for any playoff team during the 21st Century, and had done next to nothing to address their offensive woes for 2025.

Sometimes, these things have a way of working themselves out; after all, there’s a reason why competent clubs don’t have that many incompetent positions, so it wouldn’t have been that surprising to see some positive regression from at least one of those three spots. In this case, however, Royals position players are once again underwhelming — but this time they’re even worse than last year. Shockingly, two of the players who held the lineup back in 2024, MJ Melendez and Hunter Renfroe, continued to do the exact same thing after keeping their jobs this year. More recently, though, the team is finally showing a little less reverence for the status quo. Melendez was optioned to the minors on April 19 — he also hasn’t hit in Triple-A — and Renfroe was released on Thursday. The lineup is now in even worse shape than it looked three months ago; Pasquantino’s offense is down from last year, and it appears that time has finally tracked down Sal Perez. What was a three-man offense has become a duet of Witt and Maikel Garcia.

Overall, Kansas City has scored the second-fewest runs in the American League, ahead of only the Texas Rangers, and its 82 wRC+ is identical to that of the White Sox, a team that I think has sourced half of its roster from Upwork. The Royals have had a lot of lousy offenses in their nearly 60 years of existence, and this group looks to be one of the worst.

Let’s be clear: The Royals are likely underperforming a bit on offense and should benefit from some positive regression, but they shouldn’t be expecting much; the ZiPS projections think that, assuming a mid-July call-up for Caglianone, they will finish the year with an 88 wRC+, not enough for them to fall off this ignominious list.

If this were a rebuilding team, well, Kansas City would just take its lumps and stay the course. But the Royals are not rebuilding, thanks to their elite pitching staff, which ranks second in the majors in ERA and sixth in WAR. At 30-27, the Royals are in the thick of the playoff hunt, and if the season ended today, they would only be half a game out of the final Wild Card spot. That Kansas City has such good pitching and is still only shuffling around .500 makes its failures to upgrade its offense during the offseason all the more maddening. Right now, the value the Royals are getting from their pitching staff is simply being used to offset their lack of production at the plate. If their position players were slightly below average instead of downright dreadful, they’d comfortably hold a playoff spot right now and look like a true contender in the American League.

This is a team that needs offensive reinforcements as soon as possible, during a very difficult time of year to do so. Until more teams drop out of contention, most plausible moves are likely to be internal ones, and who better than Caglianone? Neither John Rave (recently called up) nor Cam Devanney, though hitting well this year, have the track record or high upside to suggest they’d be big offensive additions. Most of the team’s other top offensive prospects are catchers, and none of them are anywhere near as advanced offensively as Caglianone.

From a projection standpoint, Caglianone was the biggest mover of the spring, going from a projected wRC+ of 72 to 96, in large part because he had so little professional experience to draw from before. As one can expect, his 14 homers and .593 slugging percentage have only excited ZiPS even more. We now have significant professional play, and in the high minors, so not only has the projection continued to improve, but the error bars have also tightened.

ZiPS now projects Caglianone, if promoted to the majors, to hit .263/.335/.459, good enough for a 120 OPS+ and a wRC+ of 118. Despite his performance this year, he doesn’t project to be an instant phenom; expecting him to come in and immediately turn into Yordan Alvarez is probably unrealistic. But the Royals don’t need him to be Alvarez — though it would certainly be nice — they just need him to be better than what they have right now.

My colleagues Eric Longenhagen and James Fegan discussed Caglianone in the Royals Top Prospects list, which was published Thursday. As noted, he’s not someone who is going to bring much defensive value to the table. He’s quite a free swinger who relies on his impressive power to bail him out when he connects with things he probably shouldn’t swing at, but that will be more difficult to do consistently against major league pitching. Unless he improves his plate discipline overnight, he’ll probably need an adjustment period when he first arrives.

These are problems, for sure, but I’d argue that they are also additional reasons to promote him. If Caglianone requires time to adjust to the majors, then the sooner he begins that adjustment period, the sooner he’ll come out on the other side of it. He’s not going to learn to be more patient at the plate against minor league pitchers considering he’s already destroying them with his current approach; I think he has a far better chance of improving his plate discipline in an environment where pitchers are actually good enough to challenge him.

Calling up Caglianone to the majors comes with some risk, but not calling him up is also risky. Leaving him in Triple-A would mean more of the status quo, and right now the Royals are on track miss the playoffs despite having a top pitching staff and a megastar shortstop. Every championship team in baseball history has had to win a few dice rolls, and I can’t think of many better gambles for Kansas City to take right now than promoting Cags.