Kansas City Royals: Early season trade scenarios for four players

The 2019 Major League Baseball season is still in the early stages, but it’s becoming more clear by the day who the buyers and sellers will be near the trade deadline. The Kansas City Royals, still very much rebuilding, will be sellers.

Luckily, the organization has multiple players that should draw interest from buying teams and that’s a good thing, as the Kansas City Royals very much remain a “small market” team.

For teams like that to compete, the franchise needs to draft well while making smart trades at the right time (first to replenish or strength the farm system, and then to cash in those prospects to boost the Major League squad) while also adding some key free agent signings. But it’s the former two aspects–drafting and trading–that are essential for a team like the Royals.

Quick, dirty, and probably redundant history lesson: when the Royals won the World Series in 2015, they did so leaning heavily on high draft picks such as Alex Gordon, Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas; international amateur free-agent signings Salvador Perez, Yordano Ventura and Kelvin Herrera; and trade acquisitions Johnny Cueto, Ben Zobrist, Wade Davis, Lorenzo Cain and Alcides Escobar.

It’s the trade that brought in Cain and Escobar (among others) for Zack Greinke that’s so intriguing at this point in the current Royals rebuild. In that deal, back in 2010, the Royals dealt by far the team’s biggest star along with Yuniesky Betancourt  to the Milwaukee Brewers for four young players: Cain, Escobar and pitchers Jeremy Jeffress and Jake Odorizzi.

Cain and Escobar helped the Royals win back-to-back American League Championships and the 2015 World Series. Odorizzi was involved in another blockbuster that brought to the Royals Wade Davis, the middle of the vaunted HDH bullpen that hammered things down in innings seven, eight and nine for those Royals squads.

Here and now in 2019, Kansas City doesn’t possess a Zack Greinke-type player. But the Royals have numerous players who could catch a haul on the trade market this season.

For the rest of this article, I’m going to take a look at four Kansas City Royals that could be dealt in 2019 for substantial returns. Keep in mind that key term: “substantial.” I won’t be looking at guys like Billy Hamilton, a speedster on a one-year deal who could maybe fetch a fringe prospect, or Homer Bailey, who actually leads this Royals rotation in FIP.

For each of these four Royals, I’ll present two teams that could be interested, explaining why I chose those teams and the particular prospects or other ML-ready players to be sent back to Kansas City. Also bear in mind that I’m not advocating for these trades or predicting that they will happen.

Let’s start in, of all places, the bullpen.