The Kansas City Royals Are A Model Small Market Franchise- But Don’t Get Credit For It.
For twenty years, baseball pundits and analysts have had a common archetype for the ideal way a small market franchise does business. This has been in large part due to the spotlight put on franchises like the Oakland A’s of Moneyball fame, and then later on the model used by the Tampa Bay Rays to win the American League pennant in 2008 and 2020 and become a perennial playoff team in the years in between.
The philosophy that teams like this employ is of course, most famous for their heavy use of analytical data, or saber metrics, to maximize the value their limited resources can bring to bear on a major league roster. But that is now completely commonplace across Major League Baseball, with huge markets like the Dodgers and Yankees now at the forefront of analytics as well.
What the Rays and A’s approach has become notorious for, however, is that their relentless focus on maximizing value has resulted in revolving door levels of roster turnover. Without the resources to retain homegrown players in free agency, both teams will not hesitate to trade beloved stars away even several years before their contracts with the team are due to expire.
The Tampa Bay Rays’ most recent offseason typified this approach, trading away Blake Snell, their ace starting pitcher who won a Cy Young Award with the team and led their staff to the 2020 World Series, to the San Diego Padres despite Snell being under team control until 2024. The prospects the team acquired for Snell may help the Rays continue their team success, but the downside of this roster turnover is such that the team’s fanbase will find it difficult to stay attached to their team, if any player they might root for possibly gone at any moment.
While no smaller market team is able to completely escape operating along somewhat similar lines to this model, alternative approaches are available and have achieved great success. The Kansas City Royals are the personification of an approach that may ultimately be more rewarding for fans of the team to follow. The Royals endured a playoff drought of nearly thirty years following a World Series championship in 1985, before finally turning their franchise around under the leadership of general manager Dayton Moore, who took over in 2006.
It took several years for Moore’s approach to pay off, but pay off it did. By 2010, Moore had turned the Royals’ farm system into one of the best baseball had seen in years. In 2014, the Royals would finally return to the postseason, led both by graduates from that farm system, such as Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas, as well as established players acquired through trading some of those prospects, such as James Shields, who served as the ace of the staff when the Royals took the San Francisco Giants to Game 7 of the World Series.
Crucially, the Royals’ management and ownership saw how close the team had come to winning it all that year and decided to inject money into the roster in order to put the team over the top. The team acquired multiple free agents who would be crucial to the team’s ultimately winning the World Series that year; these included position players Kendrys Morales and Alex Rios, and starting pitcher Edinson Volquez. The Royals ranked in the top 10 in MLB attendance in 2015, and while their payroll could not match that figure, it still placed at a very respectable 16th out of 30 teams.
The downside of trading away prospects for established players as a small market team was that the Royals’ once vaunted farm system was mostly exhausted by 2015. This is what the likes of Tampa and Oakland seek at all costs to avoid through their strategy of roster turnover; however, neither have succeeded in doing what Kansas City did and reaching the mountaintop of a World Series championship.
Another key difference is that the Royals have retained at least some of their homegrown star players, such as Alex Gordon. Drafted second overall by the team, Gordon debuted in the majors in 2007, and spent his entire career with the team, finally retiring after the 2020 season. An eight time Gold Glove winner and three time All Star who accrued thirty two Wins Above Replacement for his career according to Fangraphs, Gordon’s number will likely be retired by the Royals organization. The Royals differentiated themselves from other small market teams by paying to keep Gordon in blue, and have done so for other key players such as second baseman Whit Merrifield.
The value of that may not be immediately quantifiable, but keeping players like him around can be said to have a more holistic effect on fanbase loyalty- in 2019, the Royals, who lost over 100 games, outdrew the Rays despite the fact that the Rays won 96 games that season and made the postseason, and ranked only just behind Oakland, who was also a playoff team that year with 97 wins.
With spring training for the 2021 season looming, the Royals find themselves back where they were on the eve of their mid-2010s championship run. There is talent back in the farm system, headlined by shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. and left handed pitchers Daniel Lynch and Asa Lacy. Crucially, the Royals also made moves to pay for talent from the outside- not spending extravagantly but bringing in veterans with the potential to contribute, such as starting pitcher Mike Minor, first baseman Carlos Santana, and others, as well as trading for Boston Red Sox outfielder Andrew Benintendi.
Perhaps most importantly of all, the Royals did not lay off employees during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many other teams across baseball did so, including the Rays, A’s, or even large market franchises like the Yankees. Furthermore, the team committed to paying the salaries for all of its minor league players, at a time when even before the pandemic, those players were chronically underpaid. The relentless analytical approach that is so often praised by sports media has come at a cost to players, fans and team employees. The Kansas City Royals should be commended for finding an approach that puts a more human emphasis together with a commitment to winning.
