Royals

[Back2Lawrence]

Streak: W4?!?!?

Going to the show!

Also, none of these trades matter. There is no path to mediocrity at this point.

Also, also. Sure Lopez is good defensively but meh.

[Sparko]

Lopez hit .300 in 2021. But, six straight has a nice ring

[jhawks99]

Royals, doin work.

[Sparko]

Looking great. They have made big time adjustments coaching. This team looks different.

[jfish26]

Witt is sure starting to look like a guy...

...that you trade for four of a good system's five best prospects.

[Sparko]

This roster looking pretty solid right now though.

[ChicagoHawk]

Witt is sure starting to look like a guy...

...that you trade for four of a good system's five best prospects.

They won’t do it, but they should. Especially if there’s no path to getting him locked up for 8-10 years. If he keeps this up, future value may never be higher than it will be coming off of a massive second half.

[Sparko]

The Royals have the money. They need a roster based on a star, see 1970s/1980s. Their every day lineup is starting to turned the right way after someone schooled Q on baseball 101. They are stealing bases, generating runs with bunts, pitching to contact. I like the roster now more than I did early. Some really good break-out performances.

[jfish26]

Witt is sure starting to look like a guy...

...that you trade for four of a good system's five best prospects.

They won’t do it, but they should. Especially if there’s no path to getting him locked up for 8-10 years. If he keeps this up, future value may never be higher than it will be coming off of a massive second half.

I’m not sure he’d even take the usual “buy out a star’s free agency plus a couple options” contract right now. And I’m not sure the club should offer it anyway, given that it’s not looking like the club will be even trying to compete until at least 2025.

[NewtonHawk11]

Speaking of trading. Royals apparently were really close to trading Salvy to White Sox or Marlins. Each team didn't give up what the Royals wanted. I think by them willing to trade Salvy, it shows that basically everyone is open for business.

[Sparko]

Royals ripped off again by umpires tonight. Clearly a strike out with two out in the 9th. I would have pulled the team. This is out of control. Two out of three games.

[Shirley]

[Shirley]

[jfish26]

The Royals have thoroughly botched the PR side of their grift hunt. By failing to understand that 1/3 of the fan base doesn’t want a move at all, they’ve gone down a silly path of dividing the YES votes into two camps, rendering the NO votes possibly the plurality.

Not great!

There remains a non-zero chance this all results in the Royals being in Nashville or Charlotte or SLC or San Antonio.

[jhawks99]

Watching the Royals serve up batting practice to the Mariners.

Geebus

[Back2Lawrence]

Didn’t really want Royals to get to 50 wins, just because I’m spiteful.

Do like that 4 of the latest batch of wins have been against the Astros.

The fact that residents don’t want a move to downtown is reason enough to move the team. And again, I love the K. But meh, at best.

[Sparko]

Four straight series wins. They looked better late in the season, but Q still doesn't generate enough offense. Much better than before. But unusual power numbers the last week or so, kind of masks it.
There is no mass transit and no great place to move the team downtown. I really hated the Nationals ballpark and they had a metro station nearby. KC is a regional team and the location of the K was chosen for good reason. People want to get to the games safely, and get away safely. The idea that they will stay in the Muehlbach and walk around shopping on their way to a massively more expensive ticket is ludicrous.

[pdub]

Welp.
We even suck at the draft lottery.

[jfish26]

Welp.
We even suck at the draft lottery.

I am broadly in favor of what the draft lottery is seemingly intended to do, which is to discourage owners from fielding uncompetitive teams.

I don't think the lottery is the right way to go about it, though. This isn't the NBA or the NFL, where more often than not there's guys at 1-1 through 1-3(ish) that are capable of lifting a team right into relevance. Baseball simply takes a LOT more time than that (for a lot of reasons, very much including that college baseball isn't the same sort of incubator that college football and basketball are).

Since the incentive for tanking is not really competitive, I don't think a system that prohibits tanking to discourage uncompetitiveness is really all that useful.

Since the incentive for tanking is financial, I think we need to look to financial tools.

A salary floor (calculated, perhaps, with reference to the absolute minimum amount all teams get through national TV and advertising deals?), would be useful, but there is no world in which the owners agree to a floor without a cap. In my opinion - and I know you and I disagree on this, which is fine - this is a non-starter, in that all a cap really does is ensure that a greater portion of revenue ends up with the owners.

So, what to do?

I come back to tools relating to roster depth.

To win in baseball, you need lots and lots and lots of good players; ask the Angels, who had two of the, I don't know, 10-15 best players ever for the last six years, and failed to make a single postseason (despite the bar for that being progressively lowered).

So maybe, what you do is something along the lines of (1) rewarding top-half-drafting teams for spending money by giving them more sandwich round picks, and (2) penalizing teams spending less than their central revenue take by eliminating the third arbitration year for their guys.

The effect of (1) is to give aggressive-but-losing teams more looks at guys picked in the 31-60 range (so, generally, cheap roster depth guys to develop). The effect of (2) is to make it more expensive for low-spenders to fill out their roster (because they have fewer control years over developed-but-still-cheap guys).

[pdub]

A salary floor (calculated, perhaps, with reference to the absolute minimum amount all teams get through national TV and advertising deals?), would be useful, but there is no world in which the owners agree to a floor without a cap. In my opinion - and I know you and I disagree on this, which is fine - this is a non-starter, in that all a cap really does is ensure that a greater portion of revenue ends up with the owners.

Baseball already sucks but it might be better if teams salaries were more equal and not, I dunno, 150 million more per year from one team to the next.