Spring Training Mailbag

Answers to your burning questions

Spring Training continues to drag on and rather than do another roster preview (that will come next week) it seemed like now would be a good time to answer your questions. I put out the call on social media, and some of you graciously asked for the knowledge I can provide. However, there were fewer questions than anticipated, so I am able to offer this opportunity to those of you reading now: if you have a question that wasn’t asked by someone else, drop it in the comments to this post and I will do my best to bring you an answer.

With that said, to the questions!

This is a fascinating question to me because the phrasing lends one to assume Maikel Garcia has had a large impact on the team. However, while he was worth a credible 1.9 fWAR last year, he only slashed .272/.323/.358/.681 which amounts to a well-below-average 84 wRC+. I have high hopes for him to break out this season, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Still, I think no matter how you look at this question, my answer remains the same. Tyler Gentry is your man. Gentry had a bit of a down year in his AAA debut last season, but if you look at the second half he seems to have improved quite a bit. From July 1 he slashed .284/.420/.488/.908, good for a 133 wRC+ in Omaha. The Royals have already demoted him to minor league camp so, barring injury, he won’t start the year with the big league team, but we should see him relatively quickly.

ZiPS projects him to slash .246/.334/.381/.715 which would only be good enough for a 96 wRC+ but there’s a 50% chance he performs better than that, and even at those stats he’d be projected to be worth a respectable 1.5 fWAR.

If you know him on Twitter, you know that Scott is quite a bit more pessimistic about the Royals chances this year than your average fan. I will point out in regards to injury risk, Ragans has already had two elbow surgeries, so he obviously hasn’t avoided that bug, but you also have to wonder if he perhaps is through the worst of it now and has come out stronger on the other side.

Whether the Royals should consider trading Ragans at the end of this year has less to do with how well he pitched and much more to do with how well the team does this season. Basically, the only scenario in which it makes sense to trade him is if the team does extremely poorly but all of their free agent acquisitions pan out and therefore opt out. At that point, you’d be left with a roster full of guys who failed to perform for two straight years and not a lot of help coming from the minors any time soon in the form of elite talent. At that point, it might make sense to trade Ragans to add some of that high-end talent, but in almost every other scenario, it probably makes more sense to keep him and try to build around him.

This is a statement more than a question but I’ll answer it as if it were a question. Not a chance. Listen, I love Velázquez as much as any Royals fan, but let’s not get crazy here. You’d have to assume that it would take 50+ home runs to lead the league and it seems foolish to assume anyone would reach that mark. It’s also not as if there aren’t flaws in Velázquez’s game.

He still struck out quite a bit last season and doesn’t counter it with an elite walk rate. Also, his .352 ISO would have put him in the company of only Shohei Ohtani if it were over a full season. Do we really think Velázquez is as talented a hitter as Ohtani? I don’t. And even if he was, Ohtani managed “only” 44 home runs last year. Only one other player - Matt Olson - had an ISO over .300 over the full season. ZiPS thinks Velázquez would hit 20 home runs if he played the whole year and I think that might be a bit conservative, but I wouldn’t think he would hit many more than 30 even in the best-case scenario. Nowhere near enough to lead the league even if it was quite valuable.

In one sense, the answer to this question is yes, because teams almost never have exclusive DHs anymore, so there will almost certainly be some kind of platoon that will see the entire everyday lineup rotate through the spot at various points throughout the season. Especially Salvador Perez who is getting older and needs fewer games behind the plate if he’s going to stay fresh while Freddy Fermin has seemed more than competent at filling in for him.

In another sense, no, because I don’t think it will be a true platoon. I imagine one player will spend most of his time there and play in the field or take days off when other guys need in. I especially don’t see it as likely that they’ll platoon Nelly and Pratto there because whichever of them isn’t starting should probably be getting everyday at-bats in Omaha instead of riding the pine.

A month ago, I think we all assumed it was Velázquez’s job to lose, but he’s had a poor spring while Pratto has been incredibly hot. I’m not sure if it’s enough to overcome the difference in how they both ended last season, but it certainly makes things interesting. Still, I expect the loser of the contest to start the year in Omaha, not as part of a platoon.

Also of concern would be the fact that neither of them are particularly diverse in their defensive skill-sets. You only get four bench players in the modern game and while Garrett Hampson can play just about every position, they’ve locked in Adam Frazier as a bench piece and he can basically only play second and the corner outfield spots. Further limiting the bench by trying to carry both Pratto and Velázquez could make it more difficult to pinch run or pinch hit for fear you wouldn’t have enough gloves to credibly cover all the positions.

I wish I knew. This was a signing that baffled me from the start as he seemed an older worse version of players that were already on the roster. That said, the best guess I’ve heard is that the Royals wanted Massey to have to “earn” his spot on the roster. He’s mostly done that, so far, which makes Frazier kind of useless as a left-handed backup second bagger to a left-handed starter. As I mentioned earlier, he can also play the corner outfield spots but they already have three guys fighting for the two spots all of whom offer more upside than Frazier. If I had my way, the team would probably cut him to make room for someone with more flexibility and/or upside, but as it is he’ll probably be on the bench and we’ll just have to hope he doesn’t get too many at-bats we wish had gone to other players.

From your fingers to the baseball gods’ eyes, I hope. I’ve not been shy about predicting a breakout season from the young infielder. The All-Star Game might be a bit of a stretch even for my hopes, but I surely wouldn’t complain if it were to come about. Bonus: If he plays well enough to even be an All-Star reserve I expect this team to be greatly exceeding expectations.

I know this will shock and disappoint many of you, but despite my love for both video games and Japanese media I’ve never been much of a Pokémon person. The series just doesn’t do it for me. However, if you’re looking for a really good game to play, Marvel’s Midnight Suns is available for free to PlayStation Plus members this month and is relatively cheap at this point on all other platforms. It’s an underrated gem that more people should play, so go check it out!