“With the position that our team’s in right now, it’s a time for us to take advantage of opportunities to evaluate for 2027.”
That’s what JJ Picollo, Royals general manager and overall head honcho of baseball operations, said in the dugout before Tuesday’s game when asked why Kansas City let John Schreiber go a few days earlier. Schreiber was in his third season for the Royals, a downright rarity for a middle reliever who didn’t come up through an organization’s own farm system. To be fair, there were some other reasons: Kansas City saves $600,000 on his contract by not employing him, and by letting Schreiber go he could sign on with a team that’s gunning for a playoff spot instead of just hoping not to lose 90 games. He did just that, and is now a Yankee.
Picollo is right that the Royals are in a period of evaluation. As I’ve even written recently, that can actually be a pretty nice place to be, where a team can take risks and generally not care if those risks pay off. The Royals know who Schreiber is, and Schreiber doesn’t help them at all next year.
But Picollo’s statement is a little curious, especially because of who they used for Schreiber’s open roster spot and the other two additions that the Royals got as part of expanded September rosters: 28-year-old Euston McGee, 29-year-old Nolan Hoffman, and 27-year-old Drew Waters.
Indeed, less than a minute after talking about how the team needs to take advantage of 2027 opportunities, he hedged those words.
“We have some other guys that are on the roster that are eligible to be recalled coming up here in the next couple days,” Picollo said. “There might be a guy or two that aren’t on the roster that we’ll consider as well. It’s 24 games, so how many looks can we actually get? That’s another part of it, but we’ll probably just play it by ear and make decisions day to day.”
Picollo’s reasoning seems squishy here, but there is also a unique twist to this situation. Competitive Bargaining Agreement (CBA) negotiations have loomed over this season. The current CBA between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association ends in December, and pretty much everyone in the industry thinks that the owners are going to lock out the MLBPA. That wording is key, because the owners wouldn’t lock out every single baseball player; they’d just lock out members of the union. Not a member of the MLBPA? You can still come to work, you can still use team doctors, you can rehab at team facilities.
If you’re added to the 40-man roster, you become a member of the MLBPA. And so anyone added to the 40-man roster, regardless of whether they ever made it into an MLB game, means that they will be locked out of team facilities, unable to use team doctors and cut off from team communication – all for a maximum 24 games of big league experience.
I wondered if the Royals’ milquetoast call-ups were impacted by such a decision. And being in the dugout with the rest of the media, I took an opportunity to ask: Does the possibility of a lockout impact who you’re able to call up in September, or are you able to look at whoever?
Picollo’s response was definitive. “No, you can look at whoever,” he said. “All you’re doing is add them to the roster. I mean, if they’re added to the roster, obviously they’re part of the lockout, but we can call up whoever we like to call up. We want to still do what’s best for the team.”
But whatever is ‘best for the team’ is up for debate; are they looking at 2027, or are they looking at trying to put themselves in a position to win the rest of the games for the year? Well…the latter, I guess?
“We have some guys right now that are not on the roster that are outfielders that we have interest in the future,” Picollo continued. “But the reality is if you look at our outfield, we’re extremely left-handed. So when you come down to the now 14 guys that you’re going to have available on any given night, you want that balance. And if we brought up another left-handed hitter, you lose some of that balance. You don’t have as many weapons and somebody for the other team to be thinking about ‘who’s on the bench over there for them’.”
It is true that the Royals’ outfield is very left-handed heavy. John Rave, Kyle Isbel, and Jac Caglianone are left-handed bats. Isaac Collins is a switch-hitter, but he is a significantly better left-handed hitter than a right-handed hitter. Tyler Tolbert is the only right-handed-hitting outfielder, and he’s not even a full-time outfielder let alone full-time player, and besides he’s hit righties better in his big league career.
But it is also true that this approach just doesn’t resonate with me. If the Royals are looking at 2027, prioritizing whether or not they win or lose a game this September because they don’t have a righty to pinch hit for in the late innings seems like an odd choice.
This is especially true because of the guys that they didn’t call up: center fielder Carson Roccaforte and corner outfielder Gavin Cross, both left-handed hitters. The former ninth-overall pick in the 2022 draft, Cross has actually been on quite an extended heater: a .309/.357/.568 slash with 15 home runs in 281 plate appearances since mid-May. And Roccaforte, the back-to-back winner of the Royals’ organization’s minor league defensive player of the year award, is also swatting dingers left and right. He, of course, hit one just a few hours after Picollo’s press conference—his 33rd on the season.
While 24 games may just be 24 games, a successful September can help pave the way for a successful full year. Last season, Carter Jensen played in 20 games, hitting well and showing maturity and athleticism in spades. This year, his 2.2 Wins Above Replacement per Fangraphs rank third on the team among position players.
We know who Isbel, Rave, and Collins are at this point. They are good enough to secure a role on a big league team, but they’re not going to provide the upside the Royals need to get back into the playoffs. Roccaforte or Cross could be regulars for years to come. They might not be. But they could be, and a lost September provides a solid way to get either or both some experience and give the Royals a risk-free period of evaluation. To not elect to do so because of a lack of platoon ability doesn’t sit right.
Of course, there’s another possibility: that Picollo and the Royals are not being fully transparent here. With so much uncertainty regarding the CBA – other than the near certainty that a lockout would include Roccaforte or Cross if they did make September debuts – it makes sense that Kansas City would want to play it safe here. Is Picollo really going to come out and publicly say that the CBA negotiations are impacting baseball operations? Maybe, but you can obviously see why an MLB general manager would not want to touch labor negotiations PR with a 10-foot pole.
In any case, it’ll probably be next year before we see Cross or Roccaforte in a Royals uniform. Hopefully, it will be for a winning team that has figured out how to have effective right-handed and left-handed outfielders—and with a functioning CBA.