Kansas City Royals: Who Would Royals Protect in Expansion Draft

The Kansas City Royals have several franchise players on their team right now. If Major League Baseball did an expansion draft the way that the NHL is doing for the Las Vegas Golden Knights, who would the Royals protect?

For those of you who aren’t familiar with hockey, the league is adding a new team this fall – the Las Vegas Golden Knights – and they will begin picking their new team on Wednesday.

How the expansion draft works is that each NHL team gets to protect eight of their players. Those guys cannot be picked up by the Golden Knights, but anyone who is not protected can be “stolen”. There are a lot of other rules to it, but that’s the easiest way of explaining it.

This got me to thinking: If the MLB decided to add another team and used the same rules as the NHL expansion system, which eight players would the Kansas City Royals want to protect? I’m not sure what the rules would be in an MLB Expansion Draft, but if the rules were the same as what the NHL are following, this could be a difficult decision for the Royals organization.

With so many guys hitting free agency this offseason, I did not include them in the protection list. What is the point of utilizing a spot on that list for a guy who might not even be returning in 2018? The Royals have to go with the smart choices here and using a spot on a soon-to-be free agent doesn’t make much sense.

So, without further ado, here are the eight players the Royals would protect in a hypothetical expansion draft.

Again… This is hypothetical. Major League Baseball is not adding an expansion team so please don’t freak out about this list. This is just for fun!