By Brendan Ulmer
Ulmer Uninterrupted
When faced with writer’s block, they say the best thing to do is write what you know.
There are very few things in this world that I know more about than the Kansas City Royals. This year, I think we fans will be pleasantly surprised at how good they are.
Last year’s Royals were a little bit of a disappointment. After making it to the playoffs in 2024, the 2025 Royals finished just a game above .500 and five games behind in the wild card.
With the opportunity to retool in the offseason, fans were hoping for fireworks, big swing moves to add big bats to what was, at times, an extremely stagnant lineup last year.
However, the fireworks seen this offseason were less Roman candles and more bang snaps, or sparklers.
Some fans are worried that, because this team didn’t do much in the offseason, they are doomed for a repeat of last year.
I think they are thinking about this team all wrong.
The bones of the Royals are strong, damn strong.
They hoard quality starting pitching like they’re Scrooge McDuck, as they should, it’s the most important thing to have.
As for the fielders and hitters, the team has decent to elite players in all of the most important, premium positions. At catcher, Salvador Perez will be suiting up for his 16th season in the big leagues, expected to turn in another quality effort. Backing him up will be Carter Jensen, a 22-year-old Kansas City native who is expected to be in the running for Rookie of the Year. At shortstop, they will have the best baseball player in the world, Bobby Witt Jr., whom I will stop writing about now lest this turn into an article about him. At center field, they are expected to platoon Kyle Isbel and some combination of Lane Thomas and Maikel Garcia, an arrangement that I think works well enough.
The positions where the Royals struggled last year were the secondary ones, specifically the corner outfield spots.
You might be thinking, ‘hey if the only spots where the Royals were struggling last year were the less important ones, why did they underperform?’. First of all, that’s a great question. Second of all, they didn’t just struggle at the corner outfield spots, they were extremely bad.
WAR, or Wins Above Replacement, is a stat that is helpful in understanding, at a glance, how a player performed in any given year. An okay season from the Royals’ corner outfielders would have looked like a combined WAR of around 3.5, a bad season would’ve looked like a combined WAR of 0.0, but the corner outfielders’ actual combined WAR last year was -4.1.
That basically amounts to two massive, earth-swallowing black holes in the middle of the lineup, ready to stop any run production in its tracks.
This is all to say that the Royals didn’t even need to have a good outfield last year, they just needed them to be bad in a way that wasn’t completely out of control.
I would argue that this offseason, the Royals made sure to do exactly that.
Their best move, in my opinion, was trading for Isaac Collins. Collins came into last season as an elderly rookie, 27-years-old, and finished the season getting fourth place in the National League’s rookie of the year voting. He accomplished this by getting on base at a robust 36.8% clip and playing solid defense in left field. He is not a flashy pickup, but he brings the exact kind of impact the Royals were desperate for last year.
Outside of this, the Royals did what every small-market team should always do: make small, low-risk moves to make sure they have options. They picked up aging, former all-stars like the aforementioned Lane Thomas and Starling Marte. On top of this, the Royals have a library of fringe big league outfielders who may find themselves making an impact this year: Kameron Misner, Nick Loftin, Drew Waters, Tyler Tolbert, and Gavin Cross, just to name a few.
The name that stands out above the rest, a man who stands as perhaps this team’s biggest x-factor, is Jac Caglianone.
Caglianone had a very disappointing stint in the majors last year, after beating minor league pitching senseless and becoming one of the top prospects in the country.
Early signs for him this season are positive. He played for Italy during the World Baseball Classic and was one of the best players in the whole tournament.
If he is even a fraction of the player he’s proved he can be on the minor league and international stage, the Royals will have a very scary bat in that outfield.
Brendan Ulmer is a reporter with The Hutchinson Tribune. He can be reached at brendan@hutchtribune.com.