Pencils down. The trade deadline is over!
Let’s talk about where the Royals are right now. They’re 54-55, a game under .500 with only 53 to play. Not great. They’re also 9th in the league – they’re closer to the bottom of the league than the top. Again, not good.
If you look at the teams ahead of them, barring an insane hot streak, they’re not catching the current division leaders as the Tigers, Blue Jays, and Astros are all 8 games ahead of them or more. Let’s say the Astros go 26-27 down the stretch. That brings them home at 88-74. The Royals would have to go 34-19 to catch them. That’s 104-win baseball across a season to catch a team that’s on a 92-win pace, if they go under .500 the rest of the way. No, I don’t know the tiebreakers. I don’t expect to need them. There’s a reason all of those teams are 90%+ to make the playoffs.
Then there’s the Wild Card. The Yankees did a lot of adds today and have a 91% chance of making the playoffs. They might have another spot all but locked up. The Mariners are at 75% and they snagged a pair of All-Star bats in Eugenio Suárez and Josh Naylor. They are currently the owners of the 3rd Wild Card spot but I think they’ll be moving up.
That just leaves one spot. Boston has the inside track right now. But they did next to nothing and the Royals are 4.5 GB. That’s a lot of ground to make up. The Rangers are 3.0 GB and bolstered their pitching today. They’re going to be tough to catch. The Guardians, who are immediately ahead of the Royals sold. And the Rays, right behind the Royals, may have improved a little with their typical buying /and/ selling at the deadline. That’s 4 teams for 1 spot and the Royals are realistically in the 3rd position. That feels about right for their 12.4% to make the playoffs.
They’re on the outside looking in and it probably will feel more like 2013 – they were mathematically in contention, but never really had a chance. But there’s still hope and that makes the next two months fun. Even if these moves don’t cash this year, it doesn’t look like they gave up any major assets and many of their moves today could help them for the next few years.
Here’s something interesting, if you want to dream a little.
Royals’ @fangraphs playoff odds on July 30, 2014 (the year they went on to make Game 7 of the World Series): 12.4%
Royals playoff odds on July 30, 2025: 13.1% pic.twitter.com/ZYBDf6g8T8
— Jesse Newell (@jessenewell) July 30, 2025
ICYMI, Yesterday was the trade deadline. Royals Review had you covered. Max’s stories are first and then I’ll have bullets linking to takes from other sites
Royals Review: Royals trade Freddy Fermin to Padres for pitchers Ryan Bergert and Stephen Kolek
Royals Review: Royals acquire left-handed pitcher Bailey Falter – from the Pirates for pitcher Evan Sisk and first baseman Callan Moss
Royals Review: Royals acquire outfielder Mike Yastrzemski from the Giants – Yunior Marte to the Giants
Update: Royals say Noah Cameron will start Saturday. Guessing we’ll see some of the new additions to the staff in Boston. https://t.co/TAUctLLlXM
— Anne Rogers (@anne__rogers) August 1, 2025
A couple of other little nuggets from the Star, courtesy of Pete Grathoff.
First, the Royals delayed their plane flight until after the trade deadline. I guess Fermin didn’t need his passport after all.
To avoid a potentially uncomfortable situation, the Royals are leaving later than usual on Thursday, which is an off-day. Their flight will depart Kansas City 30 minutes after the deadline passes.
“It’s awkward, right?” Royals manager Matt Quatraro said. “But you’ve got to travel the day before the game, so we pushed it to after the deadline. In case something does happen, we’ll be able to notify guys instead of taking them or then having them have to turn around from Toronto.
Also, Michael Wacha won an award for charity work:
The Make-A-Wish foundation also will be receiving a big donation in the future in Wacha’s name. That’s because the Major League Baseball Players Association’s Players Trust on Tuesday announced Wacha as the monthly winner of the Most Valuable Philanthropist award…With that comes a $10,000 grant to support Make-A-Wish of Missouri & Kansas.
Around the league, lots of news.
MLB.com ranks the top deadline deals. None of the Royals deals made the top 20.
Will Leitch wrote their “6 winners of the trade deadline” story. The Royals didn’t make the list.
At ESPN, David Schoenfield lists his trade deadline winners and losers. The Royals make neither list.
Schoenfield and Bradford Doolittle grade every deal. …except only one of the Royals trades made the cut. The Royals get a B+ for the Fermin trade and the Padres get a B.
At CBS Sports, Mike Axisa names trade deadline winners and losers. Once again, the Royals make neither list. I’m sensing a theme here.
Axisa is joined by Matt Snyder and Dayn Perry. They grade every team at the deadline. Finally, the Royals have to make the list!
Kansas City Royals: C+
They are only three games out of a playoff spot, so kudos to the Royals for trying to win instead of giving up and trying to sell like so many out there wanted them to. They added needed outfield and pitching depth in the process. The moves were unfortunately just of the hole-filling variety.
That’s like not making the list. Oh well.
Last chance. How about The Athletic ($)? Stephen J. Nesbitt (along with Grant Brisbee and old friend Andy McCullough):
Winner: Kansas City Royals
The Royals’ most impactful move was extending starter Seth Lugo rather than dangling him at the trade deadline. They also did well with their smaller moves. They got a lefty-mashing outfielder, Randal Grichuk; a righty-mashing outfielder, Mike Yastrzemski (OK, mashing might be overstating); a reunion with utility infielder Adam Frazier; and three major league arms — Stephen Kolek, Ryan Bergert and Bailey Falter — for catcher Freddy Fermin and two minor leaguers. That’s tidy trade-deadline work for an organization that’s still on the periphery of the playoff race. They got a bit better, and they’ll now have Kolek, Bergert, Falter and Lugo for 2026 and beyond. — SN
I’m pretty sure this has happened before but I can’t remember exact examples. However, yesterday, Jose Caballero started in the Rays dugout and, after a rain delay, went across to the Yankees dugout after being traded.
Minor personal note. I was raised a 4th generation Cubs fan and, growing up, Ryne Sandberg was my favorite player. It’s an odd feeling to lose a childhood icon like this. Earlier in the week, Matt Snyder penned a nice memorial about him. On Saturday, all players on the Cubs will be wearing blue #23 jerseys against the Orioles.
Lastly, not many games yesterday, but the Braves-Reds tilt had quite the box score. 3-3 until the Braves scored 8 in the top of the 8th. But then the Reds matched it with 8 in the bottom of the 8th! Man, it must have been amazing to be watching that one live.
Starting off the blog section with some site news. Sadly, Royals Farm Report is no more. It had been inactive for a while and now their domain has expired. Pouring one out for that site 🙁
We get a double dose of Craig Brown. Both he and David Lesky ($) wrote about Wednesday’s extra inning series clincher against the Braves. Kevin O’Brien had also had a fun breakdown of every pitcher in that game, too.
But then Craig made a second post after the trade deadline:
I mostly like these bits of business for the Royals. They acquired three arms that will immediately help patch together a rotation that has been decimated by injury. In the deal with the Padres, there’s some upside on both, especially Bergert. These days, any time the Royals scouting department identifies pitchers from other teams and gets them in to work with the team’s pitching gurus, how can you not be intrigued?
Blog roundup:
- Darin Watson at U.L.’s Toothpick: This Date In Royals History—1985 Edition: July 31 – Steve Balboni hits a three-run homer in the ninth to give the Royals a win in Detroit (The Royals, after winning 12 of their last 15 games, stood at 54-45 on the season. They were in second place in the AL West, 2.5 games behind California.)
- Patrick Glancy at Powder Blue Nostalgia – Emotional Equivalency V. 4: Death & Baseball – Death stirs up an entire cocktail of disorienting emotions
- Jacob Milham at KOK: Royals pitching duo must step up amid injury nightmare, even after busy deadline
- Jacob Milham at KOK: Royals trade fan favorite Freddy Fermin to land two much needed arms from Padres
- Caleb Moody at KOK: Royals’ starting pitching pursuit continues after latest trade with Pirates
- Caleb Moody at KOK: Royals tackle crucial outfield need with last-second trade for crafty Giants veteran
Yeah, I wrote these a couple of weeks ago, just after getting back from vacation. But I’m assuming everything today will be trade deadline talk. So we get a nice, easy set of movie reviews..
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The first three movies have many similarities. They are animated science fiction films made within a couple of years of each other. Their Wikipedia pages all have lines about mixed critical reviews, box office failure, and subsequent cult followings. At this point, if you bring up one of them online, someone else will bring up the other two. They all tell big stories with name Hollywood stars and mix gorgeous traditional animation with CGI, which was still in its infancy. But they all feel like very different movies.
Titan A.E. (2000) – We’ve sung the praises of Don Bluth before. While the DVD boldly proclaims “This is the movie ‘Star Wars’ fans have been waiting for”, it’s the roughest of the three. It has the most epic scope: Earth is destroyed in the first few minutes and rest of the movie deals with avoiding extinction. It’s slow, but the script doesn’t use the time wisely. It could have been a time capsule, ponderously dragging us through late 90s, pre-9/11 existential angst. Instead, we get human soap opera and lengthy battles with the film’s bargain-basement-Protoss antagonists, the Drej. It’s not without its charms, but it’s most notable for being Don Bluth’s last feature-length film (to date) and Fox Animation Studios closing 10 days after the movie opened.
Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) – Disney also put some of their biggest names on the next two films, with this one directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise (Beauty and the Beast, The Hunchback of Notre Dame). Generally, the movie moves briskly – a reminder that hand-drawn animation is expensive – but the scenes don’t look as pretty as Titan A.E. Michael J. Fox plays Milo, an animated version of Daniel Jackson, an idealistic but disgraced academic, following in his grandfather’s footsteps. An eccentric benefactor tabs him to join an expedition and the rag-tag team finds the lost city. The movie feels mostly clean and the first act exposition is enjoyable. There are many well-executed stock science fiction and adventure plot beats, though it’s a little conflicted. Part of the movie aims to be a Jules Verne-esque adventure, while other scenes are strictly science fiction. As the movie goes along, the human drama gets predictable and feels at odds with the high science fiction climax. Still, it’s a polished Disney outing and didn’t deserve its fate.
Treasure Planet (2002) – These movies are all high concept and ambitious in different ways. Our last movie takes the classic novel Treasure Island and adapts it to space. It is directed by John Musker and Ron Clements (Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules, The Princess and the Frog, Moana, et al) and is still the most expensive traditionally animated film to date ($140M). It’s been a while since I’ve read the book so I don’t remember how far this deviates from it, but, comparing Wikipedia plot entries, I think it tries to remain true while updating it to feel fresh. Some parts are excellent – like Silver as Jim’s surrogate father – while others aren’t quite as good – Martin Short’s B.E.N. is grating. Oh, and if you need a reminder of when this movie is from, there’s a montage featuring the unmistakable crooning of Goo Goo Dolls’s lead singer John Rzeznik. It’s the most consistent of the three but also the smallest in scope. My wife and I disagreed which of Atlantis and Treasure Plant was the best and I think it had more to do with how you grade ambition versus execution.
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I’m going to just sneak this one in here since I don’t have anywhere else to put it.
Piece by Piece (2024) – Yes, it’s a bit egotistical. Yes, it has the same literary notes as any Behind the Music episode. And, yes, it loses its thread towards the end – there are good messages but, most of the time, they don’t tightly tie back to anything. But it’s an amazingly creative way to do a documentary and it kept my attention the whole time. The Legos were a great way to visualize the musical creative process like Pharell Williams and Chad Hugo creating beats. They were also used to good comedic effect and, unlike most movies in an odd medium, nothing that goes on is too out there for the storytelling. I wish I could order a complete soundtrack for the movie. Yes, there’s an official soundtrack, but it only had 21 tracks – less than half the music actually in the movie. It’s a testament to their influence on modern music and is well worth a watch.
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The other two movies are both (very) loose adaptations of Isaac Asimov’s work. Aside: I’m going to try something new next week, tangentially related to this.
Bicentennial Man (1999) – I like Chris Columbus and everyone likes Robin Williams, but this movie doesn’t quite click in the same way that Spielberg’s A.I. (2001) didn’t*. Both movies want to tell a science fiction version of Pinocchio, but the scripts can’t figure out how to show us humanity. Robin Williams and Sam Neill try their damndest to make this work and the visuals are interesting, but so much of the middle of the movie is painfully dull. There was nothing grossly wrong with the movie, but it’s not very good. It felt more like an 80s movie than something released two weeks before the new millennium: meh pacing with not enough depth, a movie that tries to gloss over a weak plot with sentimentality.
*though I love a lot of things in A.I. and should rewatch it; Osment is brilliant and the cinematography is amazing
I, Robot (2004) – This is the only movie of these that wasn’t a box office flop. Unfortunately, those things that made it money got in the way of it being a better movie. At one point Will Smith’s character calls Bridget Moynahan’s character the “dumbest, smart person in the world” and I feel that way about this movie, though I say that lovingly (mostly). When I say “loose adaptation”, I mean /really/ loose”. Rather than the book’s parable about computers doing what humans told them to do and the inadvertent side effects, we get a lot of Fresh Prince meets Terminator. There’s a little too much Will Smith, but I’m not sure who else can pull off the charm that makes his character endearing and street smart instead of just a cliche, cranky, hardboiled cop. There’s also too much dumb action breaking up the smart science fiction, but that keeps it flowing. A lot of good visual language in the movie is borrowed from The Matrix and Blade Runner – but if you’re going to steal, steal from the best. The near futurism holds up better than most of its peers – I don’t think we’re quite going to be there in 2035, but I don’t think it’s that far-fetched. For a movie I haven’t seen in more than a decade, I liked it more than I thought I would and it holds up better than expected.
This clip gives you a flavor Piece by Piece. It’s kindof the climactic scene, set to “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk (featuring Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers):