Over the course of the offseason, I settled on a new framing device for how to look at a baseball team and its chances of making the playoffs. The common thought around baseball goes like this: “You’re going to win 54 games, you’re going to lose 54 games. It’s what happens in the other 54 that determines where you end up.” I like to think about winning enough of those 54 games to reach the postseason as answering a sufficient number of “ifs.”
You will win a game if the starting pitcher does well, if the bullpen can lock it down, if the offense can score runs, or if you can get a little lucky. Those statements can all be broken down into more specific questions, and, of course, for any given game, you don’t need all of those if-statements to come true, but you need enough of them to work out. And so it is with the season. That’s why projection systems are so conservative by nature, because you’d have to be nearly perfect to be expected to win 108, and have nearly the worst outcome imaginable to lose that many. But the number of potential answers a team has can make a big difference.
For example, every team that wants to succeed needs to try to answer that first “if” every night; they’ve got to send a starting pitcher to the mound. Last year, the Royals had six possible answers that they felt pretty good about when the season started. That ended up not being enough, and people called it bad luck with injuries. The Dodgers suffered more injuries to their starting rotation, but still won the World Series. Why? Because they had more “ifs” they could use when they rolled snake eyes.
There’s also the matter of the quality of the ifs, of course. In computer programming, an “if statement” is followed by a list of possibilities separated by an AND or an OR. If the options are combined with and, everything has to go right to continue (also known as “returning true”); if they’re combined with an OR, you only need one of them to return true. When I was younger, the ifs would go something like, “If Mark Teahen can move to second AND he can still play good defense AND he can continue improving his bat into his late 20s AND he doesn’t slow down AND someone else can play third, first, left, and rightfield, the Royals can win! That’s simply too many ifs for one player to answer, so you’re not going to get to follow through.
If you prefer betting metaphors, it’s the difference between betting a six-legged parlay and having six individual bets. In the parlay, they’ve all got to cover for you to win any money. If you do six individual bets, and you win some of them, you can still make a profit. (Remember this when you’re considering whether to play a parlay or not, please. Parlays are a sportsbook’s best friend and a bettor’s worst enemy.)
The 2026 Royals have a series of if questions to answer, but there are a lot fewer ANDs than we’ve become accustomed to as Royals fans. And the Royals have as many potential options as they’ve had in the history of my fandom to plug in for the ORs.
If the starting pitcher does well
The bare minimum number of answers necessary for this question is five – the number of starters in a rotation at any given time. However, the reality has always been that you’re going to need more than five; probably closer to ten or even fifteen correct answers over the course of a full season. For each starting pitcher, you basically have to answer two more if questions: if he is healthy and if he pitches well. Here’s how the Royals began 2025:
Cole RagansExtremely likely to pitch wellUnlikely to be healthySeth LugoLikely to pitch wellLikely to be healthyMichael WachaLikely to pitch wellLikely to be healthyMichael LorenzenNot particularly likely to pitch wellLikely to be healthyKris BubicQuite likely to pitch wellUnlikely to be healthyNoah CameronUnlikely to pitch wellLikely to be healthyAlec MarshUnlikely to pitch wellWas hurt before the season startedKyle WrightUnlikely to pitch wellExtremely unlikely to be healthy, injured shortly into the season
The Royals simply didn’t have enough guys who were likely to satisfy both criteria, and that ended up bearing out in the end. However, things are different in 2026. Ragans, Wacha, and Lugo are all back and in roughly similar positions as last year. Noah Cameron and Kris Bubic are back, but you’d expect more out of both of them than you did entering last season, as long as they remain healthy. They lost Lorenzen, Marsh, and Wright, but look who they added:
Ryan BergertLikely to pitch wellNot particularly likely to be injuredStephen KolekLikely to be averageNot particularly likely to be injuredBailey FalterUnlikely to pitch wellLikely to be healthyLuinder AvilaUnlikely to pitch wellNot particularly likely to be injuredBen KudrnaUnlikely to pitch wellLikely to be healthyMitch SpenceUnlikely to pitch wellLikely to be healthyMason BlackUnlikely to pitch wellLikely to be healthy
Now, don’t get hung up on how many of those guys are unlikely to pitch well, because not all of them need to. The 2026 Royals don’t have any more ifs for their rotation than the 2025 team did, but they have more potential answers. Soren Petro has spent a lot of time on the Kauffman Corner podcast this offseason asking how things might have gone differently for Luke Hochevar if the Royals had had guys who could start games instead of him, allowing him to shift to the bullpen earlier in his career than he did. If one of these guys turns into a modern-day Luke Hochevar – looking at you, Mason Black – the Royals won’t have to ask if; they’ll be able to find out because they do have someone else who can step into the rotation and give it a shot.
If the bullpen can lock it down
We don’t need to go through that whole exercise from above with every reliever; there are too many of them. But trust me when I say the Royals have more options with better chances of returning true than they’ve ever had before under manager Matt Quatraro. Any of Carlos Estévez, Lucas Erceg, John Schreiber, Alex Lange, Nick Mears, or Matt Strahm might have been the best reliever on the roster at the start of 2024. Heck, this year’s version of Steven Cruz or Luinder Avila might have been, too, and they’re both starting the year in the minors. James McArthur was the Royals’ closer for much of that year, and even if he gets healthy and starts pitching better than he did that season, he might not be able to find much time on the big league roster because of how much more talent the team has available this year. John Schreiber was last year’s third-best reliever and might be this year’s seventh-best.
When you have enough potential answers, the likelihood of getting one right goes way up; that’s just probability. The likelihood of rolling a six on a standard die is 16.7%; the likelihood of rolling at least one six on two standard dice is 30.5%; the likelihood of rolling at least one six on three standard dice is 42.1%. You can never get all the way to 100% probability, no matter how many dice you add, but still, more dice give you better odds, and the Royals have a lot of dice in 2026.
Last year, Carlos Estévez led all of MLB in saves. But if he had gotten injured, the only likely solution for closer would have been Lucas Erceg, who wasn’t pitching as well in 2025 as he did after being acquired in 2024. After him would have been John Schreiber, who isn’t as bad as Royals fans sometimes think, but doesn’t seem likely to thrive in the closer role for very long. But, while there is some concern about Estévez to start the year, there are still half a dozen other guys after him and Erceg who are at least as good as Schreiber that you can try out at the closer job for a short time without feeling like you’re stretching too far. That includes Strahm, who has been one of the best relievers in baseball over the past three years. If those guys are healthy and pitching well, then they get a chance to come up sixes in the earlier innings, instead, shortening games in a way that the 2015 Royals enjoyed with the option to try out a variety of guys in the fifth and sixth innings because they knew HDH had the back three locked down.
If the offense can score runs
Let’s list the questions the offense needs to answer:
If Bobby Witt Jr. can be a starIf Maikel Garcia can be close to as good as he was last yearIf Vinnie Pasquantino can continue to be an RBI machineIf Salvador Perez can fight off Father Time for another yearIf Jonathan India can bounce back to be playableIf Isaac Collins can continue to show elite plate disciplineIf Kyle Isbel can still be a defensive force in center fieldIf Jac Caglianone can live up to the projections this timeIf Carter Jensen can look like the guy he was in SeptemberIf Lane Thomas can mash lefties againIf Starling Marte can hitIf Michael Massey can find his form from 2024 and stay healthy
That’s a lot of ifs, but reading through that list, a lot of them feel pretty likely, yes? Last year, the list included things like “If MJ Melendez’s swing change works” and “If Jonathan India can hit at the highest level he’s ever hit AND play two brand new positions competently”. Things that we either did or should have assumed wouldn’t work. Last year also included “If Bobby Witt Jr. can be a superstar”, which is very different from just being a star, which he still was last year, and feels like his floor.
In a lot of these cases, we’re just asking the players to continue doing what they’ve done. One of the meme-able complaints about Dayton Moore was his seeming belief that everyone would do better next year, and that’s how the team would win. The 2026 Royals mostly don’t need to get better; they just need to be as good as they have recently been.
And, once again, not all of these have to happen. The most obvious example of this is that only one of the three out of Isaac Collins, Lane Thomas, and Starling Marte has to hit to make left field significantly better than last year. When Melendez and Renfroe didn’t succeed last year, the Royals were forced to turn to John Rave and Drew Waters. Now, instead of the first guys through the door, Waters might be gone entirely, and Rave might be third or fourth choice in the minors after several viable-seeming options in the bigs. Second base still looks like a problem because while the team only needs to find success with India or Massey to fix second base, neither seems particularly likely. Still, if everything else works out, that leaves only one hole in a lineup. And a lineup that goes eight deep is still a lineup you can win with.
You want to know what has to happen for the Royals to make the playoffs? So does the team! The old saying goes that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Every year, the Royals have made a plan to get to the postseason. This year, though, when the Royals’ plans inevitably go awry, they have given themselves more options than ever to figure it out. What needs to happen for the Royals to make it to the playoffs? No one knows for sure, but the Royals seem likely to have answers, regardless.