How I voted for the Royals award winners

With the Royals announcing their organizational awards earlier this week, it’s time for my annual post on my vote for said awards, as chosen by the Kansas City chapter of the BBWAA. Honestly, since Bobby Witt Jr. arrived on the scene, the whole discussion is kind of rote, at least when it comes to the Royals Player of the Year. Honestly, is there ever any other choice? And if, at any time in the near future, Witt doesn’t win the award, we can surmise that either something catastrophic happened, or the Royals won 120 games.

Yes, I voted for Witt. Yes, he won for the fourth consecutive year.

The Royals Pitcher of the Year category always gets the most attention from me because it’s never as cut and dried as Witt for Player of the Year award. The winner for the Royals this year was rookie Noah Cameron. He had a fine season once he found his spot in the rotation when Cole Ragans landed on the IL in mid-May. Over 24 starts covering 138 innings, Cameron pitched to a 2.99 ERA with a 20.5 percent strikeout rate and 7.7 percent walk rate. He limited opposing hitters to a .214 batting average and a .279 OBP. It was a very solid rookie campaign from the kid from St. Joseph.

Yet, when it came time to cast my vote, I opted for Kris Bubic. Yes, I realize he didn’t pitch in August or September, but he threw only 22 innings fewer than Cameron. And when Bubic was healthy, I felt he was much more dominant than Cameron, routinely pitching deeper into games and with a 2.55 ERA and a 24.4 percent strikeout rate to go along with an 8.2 percent walk rate. Bubic’s average Game Score was 58 compared to Cameron’s 56 average Game Score.

I’ve written before that when it comes to Pitcher of the Year type awards, innings matter. We seldom see a starter throw 200-plus innings in a season and most pitchers miss, at a minimum, a turn or several in the rotation over the course of the season. In the matchup between Cameron and Bubic, for me the discrepancy in innings pitched wasn’t so great that it would prevent Bubic from getting my vote because he was generally statistically dominant in a head-to-head comparison.

Other metrics likewise point to Bubic’s superiority. Below are the Statcast profiles for both pitchers. Bubic is on the left. Cameron is on the right.

Finally, here are the final fWAR numbers for the top five pitchers on the Royals staff this year:

Michael Wacha - 3.6
Kris Bubic - 3.3
Cole Ragans - 2.1
Noah Cameron - 1.8
Michael Lorenzen - 1.2

I’m always surprised when I look at the full season leaderboard at FanGraphs and see Wacha atop the fWAR list, but he had a very good season and was the most durable of all Royals starters. Ragans at third is likewise a bit of a surprise, given he threw the fewest innings of all regular starters in the rotation, but he struck out a whopping 38 percent of batters he faced. Then there is Seth Lugo, notable by his absence.

For me, after looking at all the numbers and rates, the vote for Bubic was the right call.

The Special Achievement Award is always a little nebulous to me. It’s basically an acknowledgment of a guy who had a good season but not a Player or Pitcher of the Year type of season. Maikel Garcia won and he got my vote.

It was a breakout season for Garcia who won a Gold Glove and set career highs across the board while cutting down on his strikeouts and walking a bit more than ever before. He also earned some down-ballot MVP consideration in the AL.

Like I did above with pitchers, here are the top five Royals hitters, ranked by fWAR:

Bobby Witt Jr. - 8.0
Maikel Garcia - 5.6
Vinnie Pasquantino - 1.5
Mike Yastrezmski - 1.3
Kyle Isbel - 1.1

Carter Jensen was sixth with 0.7 fWAR in 69 plate appearances. What a strange year for the entire offense outside of the top three. And the gap from first to second and second to third…You’d kind of like to get a little more balance there.

Anyway, Garcia was the easy choice for the Special Achievement Award.

To follow up on yesterday’s Rule 5 summary, Baseball America notes that the Royals weren’t the only team that failed on first round draft picks by leaving them unprotected. According to BA, just 17 of 27 first-time-eligible first-rounders were added to 40-man rosters at Tuesday’s deadline.

That works out to a 63 percent protection rate, which is the worst of the past decade. The previous worst was a 73 percent rate back in 2018.

Yet we can’t give the Royals a free pass on this topic just because there were a lot of poor first round picks recently. BA notes:

The Royals left a pair of top 10 picks, LHP Frank Mozzicato and OF Gavin Cross, unprotected this year, marking the first time a team has done that in the past decade. Kansas City is also the only team with three unprotected top 10 picks over the past decade. Lefthander Asa Lacy, the No. 3 pick in the 2020 draft, was also unprotected in his first year of Rule 5 eligibility.

When they write “top 10 picks” that’s overall in the draft. Lacy was the fourth overall pick in 2020 (not the third as BA wrote). Mozzicato was the seventh overall selection in 2021. And Gavin Cross was the ninth overall pick in 2022.

There’s failure, there’s epic failure and there’s Royals drafting in the first round from 2020 to 2022.

The shifting landscape of broadcast rights for Major League Baseball seemed to settle on Wednesday as the league announced they had reached a deal to stick with ESPN while coming to terms with new partners, NBCUniversal and Netflix.

What does it all mean? Will it be easy to watch baseball in 2026?

I don’t think anyone knows at this point.

The Sunday Night Baseball property and first round of the playoffs will shift from ESPN to NBCU, mostly landing on the Peacock streaming service. I don’t think I can agree more with Joe Sheehan:

Because I’m a Premier League goofball, I already subscribe to Peacock, so this is added value for me. Until they raise the price to cover what they’re paying MLB for the rights. Such is life as a consumer of televised sports in the 21st century.

The big story here is that ESPN is acquiring MLB.tv as part of their rights deal. From Sports Business Journal:

ESPN has carved out an entirely new package that includes exclusive rights to the MLB.tv digital out-of-market package — which will include access to MLB Network within the ESPN app — plus in-market streaming rights to six clubs whose rights are currently managed by MLB (the Mariners, Twins, Guardians, Padres, Diamondbacks and Rockies) and a package of exclusive weeknight games that includes Memorial Day and a standalone game on the first night after the All-Star break.

…

Both MLB.tv and the local in-market productions will remain “available on MLB platforms” for this coming season. It would be fair to assume that starting with the 2027 season, those properties will become exclusive to the ESPN app, but that was not said in any of the announcements Wednesday.

It’s difficult to keep up with the business of streaming and broadcasting, but I don’t see how this isn’t anything but a massive loss for Rob Manfred and Major League Baseball. This all started back in February when ESPN and MLB agreed to mutually terminate their agreement that saw ESPN pay the league $550 million annually for broadcast rights. Then Manfred called ESPN “a shrinking platform” that was “not the best platform for our content.” Manfred then promised a speedy resolution to the broadcast rights saga.

That “speedy resolution” saw things drag out for almost a year and now MLB is back with ESPN. Except to guarantee the same $550 million per year deal, MLB now has to surrender its flagship MLB.tv, along with streaming rights that the league has long coveted to control, to ESPN. MLB.tv has been the standard-bearer of how a league can deliver its product to the fans. Yes, there are blackouts and other issues that crop up and last season the league seemed intent on enshittifying its product, but among the American sports leagues, MLB.tv was the first and usually the best at getting baseball to the masses.

And now it’s another ESPN property.

Nobody knows what ESPN is going to do with it, other than presumably make it exclusive to their app starting in 2027. But given that it’s ESPN, I would assume further enshittification is on the horizon.

Way to go, Rob. Bang up negotiating on your part!

Friday is the deadline for teams to tender contracts to their players on the 40-man roster currently not under contract. Should a player not be offered a deal, they will be non-tendered and then will officially add their names to the free agent markets.

The Royals have a lot of decisions to make. I’ll have a post up tomorrow predicting what I think they will do. Stand by to refresh your inbox!