The Royals could be playing for the trade deadline

Truck Day is happening later this week, and the Royals still seem to be short of what many fans hoped they’d accomplish this offseason. For those uninitiated, Truck Day is when the team loads up most of the equipment it will need for Spring Training into a truck and begins driving it from Kansas City down to Surprise, Arizona. It traditionally marks the end of the offseason and the beginning of the preseason.

Of course, the preseason doesn’t preclude teams from continuing to make moves. I’ve argued for more than a month now that the Royals have a history of making at least one significant move between the end of January and the beginning of the regular season. In 2023, it was signing Zack Greinke. In 2024, it was trading for John Schreiber and signing Adam Frazier. In 2025, it was signing Carlos Estévez. Having written them all down like that, they’ve also got a pattern of progressively more impactful moves in that timespan.

There are also plenty of big moves left to be made around MLB. Eugenio Suárez finally signed a contract this week, but Framber Valdez is still looking for a home. So are Chris Bassitt, Justin Verlander, Marcell Ozuna, and Miguel Andujar. The Red Sox still haven’t traded from their outfield glut or fixed their lackluster infield, the Mets still haven’t addressed their infield glut, Brendan Donovan is still a Cardinal*, and the Twins could yet make some additional baffling moves.

*He was when I wrote this, and then, before I had to quit checking for the night, it was reported that the Mariners were close to a deal for him.

But what if the Royals don’t make an impactful move between now and the beginning of the regular season? Would that be the end of the world? ZiPS projects the Royals to 83 wins, which would tie them with the Tigers for the division crown. Most other projection systems see the Royals similarly neck-and-neck with the Tigers at the top of a relatively weak AL Central. Last year, ZiPS projected the Royals to finish 82-80, third in the division – exactly where they ended up. Of course, it thought the Twins would be the team between KC and the division-winning Guardians, so it’s not perfect, but there’s certainly some value to these projections. In 2024, they were projected to go 74-88 – Dan noted at the time that ZiPS just didn’t see the Royals as being as advanced as they were acting. But most projection systems tend to be a bit conservative about team improvement, and it wasn’t yet a given that Bobby Witt Jr. was one of the three best players in the AL at any given time.

All that to say, the Royals, as currently constructed on February 3, are contenders for the Central Division in 2026. Something that was not a given in 2024, when they were tied for the division lead as late as August 27, nor last year, even when most expected them to take at least a small step forward from the success of 2024.

The Royals’ offseason work has given them options

An additional move might make them clear favorites in 2026, but the move just may not be out there to be made. I don’t think any of us would argue that the 2025 Royals wouldn’t have been improved by having Mike Yastrzemski on the roster for the entire year, but the Giants believed they could be contenders and weren’t going to trade him before the season. However, the moves the Royals have made this offseason have much better prepared the team to get to the trade deadline in better shape than in 2025.

The Royals had two problems that held them back last year: the absolute worst corner outfield setup in MLB and a series of injuries to their starting rotation that they didn’t have the depth to cover. Those things will not be true this year, even as the rest of the team around those flaws looks remarkably similar. Ryan Bergert and Stephen Kolek are markedly better than any options the Royals had to replace injured pitchers once Noah Cameron joined the rotation in place of Cole Ragans last year. Heck, even Bailey Falter is likely an improvement over Rich Hill, Thomas Hatch, and Trevor Richards. Mason Black, as things currently stand, would seem to be the fourth or fifth guy up in case of injury, and he’d have been the second if he had been a part of the 2025 squad.

Jac Caglianone represents a lot of uncertainty, while Isaac Collins and Lane Thomas are no one’s ideal corner outfield duo. But together they represent a much improved group compared to what MJ Melendez, Hunter Renfroe, Drew Waters, and John Rave could offer the team in 2025. Most importantly, they do this by drastically raising the floor.

Floors are something I wrote a lot about back in the 2023-2024 offseason, so let’s just quote what I wrote back then:

When we talk about sports performance one of the most useful metaphors I like to use is the concept of ceilings and floors. The ceiling of a player is the best likely outcome, so a high-ceiling player is going to be very productive at their best while a low-ceiling player is one who, even if they do the best we could possibly expect, doesn’t move the needle a lot. Similarly, the floor defines the worst likely outcome.

The 2023 Royals ended their season chock-full of low-floor, high-ceiling players, but added a bunch of high-floor, low-ceiling players that December. Of course, as it turns out, Seth Lugo had a much higher ceiling than I’d given him credit for, while Will Smith and Chris Stratton had lower floors. But while most analysts were arguing that the Royals hadn’t done enough to improve their upside, I saw value in what they had done to limit their worst-case scenarios. It’s something they failed to do last offseason when they couldn’t or wouldn’t start the season with starting corner outfielders other than Melendez and Renfroe.

The 2026 Royals have, once again, looked for opportunities to limit their worst-case scenarios, even if they haven’t done a ton to expand their best-case scenarios. And what that does is buy them time. What kind of time does it buy them? Well, let’s look at a few scenarios:

• Teams may not be as interested in Kris Bubic as they could be later because they haven’t seen him pitch healthily since the All-Star Break last year. KC has time to showcase him both in Spring Training and, if it comes to it, in the regular season.
• Teams that currently think they’re on the edges of competing may realize by the Trade Deadline that they really aren’t and will finally give up a piece the Royals want.
• The Royals’ farm system may gain some more steam as the additional results come in through 2026, giving them more pieces to trade or make the pieces they have more valuable or easier to part with. See: Kendry Chourio going from someone most of us had never heard of to a top-100 prospect over the course of a few months last year.
• Carter Jensen could come close to maintaining his breakout September 2025 performance, and Jac Caglianone could finally live up to the hype that got him promoted to the big leagues after less than a year in the minors. The Royals suddenly wouldn’t even need to beef up their lineup.

The Royals got to the end of July last year with a 54-55 record. Had they had competent outfielders, it’s safe to say it would have been something more like 57-52. Had they had better options for replacing injured starting pitchers, maybe they’d have even been at 60-49. That brings us to the one caveat of this exercise.

The Royals’ outfield was so bad last year that they could trade an unranked prospect for a middling outfielder and drastically improve the roster. They’ve already got the middling outfielders on the roster this year. If they want to make a similar deadline improvement, it’s going to cost more and/or be harder to find that upgrade. Hopefully, if the Royals’ plan is to survive the first half to the point that an aggressive trade deadline gets the job done, they know what they’re getting into.