The schedule from now until the All-Star break will likely determine if the Royals buy or sell at the trade deadline.
There seem to be a lot of fans frustrated with the 2025 iteration of the Kansas City Royals. I have been one of them at times, though I can usually remind myself of where they were two years ago and feel a bit better about the progress they have made. It would be nice to go to the postseason for a second year in a row, and I think they can if they add another bat at some point. To do that, and have it make sense, they need to be in striking distance at the beginning of July, which looks like it might be tough.
The upcoming schedule for the Royals is not easy. For the rest of this month is going to test this team. June’s remaining series are as follows:
New York Yankees (39-25)
Oakland A’s (26-42)
Texas Rangers (31-35)
San Diego Padres (37-28)
Tampa Bay Rays (36-30)
Los Angeles Dodgers (40-27)
Seattle Mariners (33-32, four-game series, only the first is in June)
So of the 19 remaining games in June and 22 games through that Seattle series, the Royals will be playing mostly teams that are above .500 so far this season. More than that, the Yankees, Padres, and Dodgers are three of the best teams in baseball. That is a tough stretch. It is the second time this season the Royals have faced a difficult schedule, but last time it was not as hard as it looked. That couple of weeks included the Guardians, Brewers, Orioles, Yankees, Twins, and Tigers to open up the season. It turns out that the Orioles were not good, as people were expecting, and Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Minnesota are fine but not scary. The Royals went 9-14 in those 23 games.
I think we may look back on the season and find that the next three weeks will determine a lot for this team. If it is a repeat of the beginning of the season, say 9-13 through the Seattle series, then it might be time to sell. That would only put the team a couple games below even, but in a tough division, I would not want to spend a lot of prospects to maybe sneak into a Wild Card and I do not think this team will get to the finish line without adding a bat along with pitching staying healthy. Pitching health risk is a problem for everyone so that is always looming. It becomes a risk/reward problem at some point, where the playoff odds have to be high enough to justify the cost of giving up a real prospect in a farm system that is not loaded with them.
The current playoff odds are not terrible, a little over a third of the time this season would play out with Kansas City in the dance. I think if they are under .500 in early July with less than half a season left, that probability falls below 20%, which is where I would start being uncomfortable pushing chips in on this season if I were J.J. Picollo. The division race isn’t completely over, but that plays into this as well. Fangraphs has Detroit winning the Central 83.6% of the time already since they have a seven-game lead. How much of the future do you want to invest to push the odds of a wildcard spot from 15% to 35%?
That just doesn’t seem worth it, so that means they need to keep their head above water through this chunk of the season. The second half schedule looks easier, so just survive to mid-July and it will likely make more sense to bolster the lineup through trade and then take advantage of a little softer second half. After the All-Star break there are no Yankees, Dodgers, Mets, Giants, Astros, or Padres, that is six of the top ten teams by record at this point in the season that you don’t have to face at all.
Buckle up, I guess that’s what I’m saying. We are about to go into a very consequential stretch after which we may be talking about getting Cedric Mullins or trading off Seth Lugo depending on what happened.