Lottery tickets are no way to get rich.
As we enter the final stretch before the deadline, the Royals are four games below .500 and five games out of a playoff spot. For weeks, fans and analysts have been banging the table for the Royals to sell. “It’s a seller’s market!” they scream. “There are too many teams between the Royals and the final postseason berth!” they shout. “Even if they made it to the playoffs, they wouldn’t get anywhere!” they holler.
The last two things don’t matter, but the first thing is wrong.
Four years ago, MLB permanently expanded the playoff field to six teams from each league. With that simple change, it became far more likely a mediocre team could squeak into the playoffs. In 2021, the last year before the change, the fewest wins necessary to get to the playoffs was 88 wins from the eventual World Series championship team in Atlanta. The fewest a Wild Card team needed was 90. During the period of time with two wild cards, it took at least 90 wins most years to get to the playoffs. Since the change, we have seen multiple sub-90-win teams make it every season.
The odd thing is that this has caused fans and analysts everywhere to insist that their team should sell because obviously every other team is going to keep fighting for that final playoff spot. But, well, if you don’t think that final playoff spot is worth anything, why do you think anyone else should or would?
And so it has played out that almost every team would rather trade on the margins than deal any high-level prospects to improve their odds of making the postseason. The big trades are primarily perpetrated by the teams that are already in the driver’s seat for the playoffs and want to improve their odds of winning once they get there, such as the Dodgers trading two top prospects for Jack Flaherty last summer. But look at the list of all the other deals done last season. There’s a lot more chaff than wheat in that rundown.
But Seth Lugo!
Ah, yes, Seth Lugo. Perhaps the most coveted starting pitcher on the market this year. 2025’s version of Jack Flaherty. At the time of the trade, Flaherty had a 2.95 ERA, a 2.73 SIERA, and a 27.5% K-BB%. Lugo’s ERA is certainly comparable at 2.63, but his SIERA of 4.08 and K-BB% of only 14.2% tell a story of a far less dominant starter than Flaherty had been.
Also, let’s take a closer look at the Flaherty deal for a moment. The Tigers got back Trey Sweeney and Thayron Liranzo, 45 and 50 Future Value prospects, respectively, per FanGraphs. Using their outcomes calculator, we can see that the Tigers ended up, between the two of them, with a less than two-thirds chance of developing even one future MLB regular. There is about a one-in-four chance that one of them will turn into an above-average major leaguer, and almost no chance either becomes a star.
The Royals, admittedly, have pretty poor odds of making the playoffs given their current record. However, setting aside the fact that the Royals could very well not see a prospect haul on the level of the Flaherty deal, would you really rather trade away a one-in-ten chance of making the playoffs this year for a one-in-four chance you’ll get back a player worth getting excited about in a couple of years?
There are other pros to keeping Lugo around, too. The Tigers traded Flaherty away last season and then signed him again in the offseason, but that’s very much a rarity in these situations. If the Royals want to re-sign Lugo after this season, their best chances probably lie in keeping him here for the remainder of the season. If, for whatever reason, they are unable or unwilling to work out an extension for him, once he opts out of his contract, they could make a qualifying offer and receive an additional first-round draft pick if and when he signs elsewhere.
It would be ridiculously easy to improve the Royals’ playoff odds
The other thing about the Flaherty trade was that the Dodgers wanted a really good pitcher to lean on in the playoffs. Even with an injured starting staff, they had reasonably good pitchers to rely on. To upgrade, they needed to add something big. The Royals, meanwhile, have anchors (the bad kind) in their corner outfield spots and at second base. In those three spots, the Royals have combined for -3.5 fWAR this year. Dan Szymborski at FanGraphs ran the odds, and the Royals would be among the teams most likely to benefit from adding two fWAR relative to the league at the deadline, with a potential increase in playoff odds of 12.4%. While the Dodgers needed to add a player on the level of Jack Flaherty to make a noticeable difference to their team, the Royals only need to add a couple of replacement-level players to make a drastic difference. And we have already seen the cost of replacement-level players on the open market. Like it or not, that’s exactly what the Adam Frazier deal represents.
If the Rays could be convinced to part with Kameron Misner for Jonathan Bowlan, and the Reds could be convinced to send Gavin Lux for Gavin Cross, the Royals could be very much in business. And, by the way, those are both considered moderate overpays from the Royals’ side for those players by Baseball Trade Values. So maybe the Royals could get them for even less! The Royals could suddenly double or even triple their playoff odds while trading away guys no one is likely to ever miss!
Even last year, Royals fans fretted a bit about the trade to acquire Lucas Erceg because they gave up Mason Barnett, Will Klein, and Jared Dickey. Barnett has fallen apart in the Athletics’ farm system, striking out fewer and walking more than ever on his way to a 5.50 ERA. Klein is on his third team since leaving KC with a career MLB ERA of 7.36 and a 7.48 ERA in AAA between the Mariners’ and Dodgers’ organizations this year to match. Jared Dickey is hitting exactly a 100 wRC+ in High-A as a 23-year-old, quite old for that level. Remember, Jac Caglianone is in the big leagues at 23.
The Royals got one of the most valuable relievers available at the deadline last year for, basically, nothing.
Baseball media has long described certain kinds of prospects as lottery tickets. But the reality is that, outside of a couple of guys every year, every prospect is a lottery ticket. Sure, there are the $1 scratchers that almost never win and don’t pay much when they do, but even the $20 versions will give you losses far more often than they’ll ever even allow you to break even.
“Sustainability”
Teams and certain kinds of fans will insist that it only makes sense to sell high on veterans when the team isn’t a World Series contender in the name of building a “sustainable” winner. But the Royals have more World Series wins in the past 15 years than the Guardians, Rays, Mariners, and Twins combined. Even the Astros, perhaps the poster children for tanking to build a sustainable winner, have only won two World Series titles in the same span as the Royals’ one. And they did it by spending big and making huge deadline deals to improve their team every time they could after the period of tanking. When they decided to curtail their spending last year, they got ousted in the Division round.
And if you’re concerned that the Royals can’t get anywhere in the playoffs as a Wild Card contender, know that fully half of the World Series participants since the expanded playoffs were Wild Card entrants. In a short series, as the saying goes, anything can happen. Just ask the Marlins; sure, they just took two of three from the Royals, but they got swept by the Rockies earlier this year.
Sustainability is a sham, outside of developing good players and spending big simultaneously. The Royals have recently gained the ability to develop pitching at an extremely high level. If they want to build something sustainable, the time to start is now, before other teams start poaching their pitching coaches and while Bobby Witt Jr. is still at the beginning of his prime.
So why spend Seth Lugo on a lottery ticket or two when you could throw away a couple of your own scratchers for a ticket to ride on the playoff train? At least with the latter option, even if you lose, you almost certainly had more fun than scraping a quarter across a piece of paper and creating a mess to clean up next year.