2025 Team Previews - Kansas City Royals
As part of my 2025 team previews series, I go through all fantasy-relevant players on the Kansas City Royals ahead of the 2025 season.
Check out the intro and team links page here.
Intro
With the help of a couple of young studs and a few strong years from veterans, the Royals made the postseason and even won a series. They haven’t done a ton this offseason to push toward the next step, but the roster is fine.
Roster
The weaknesses are at the bottom of the lineup and the bottom of the rotation, but that’s true of most teams! The Royals are a normal baseball team in the middle of the country in these days of the big market coast teams doing unprecedented stuff.
It doesn’t give them much of a chance at winning a World Series, but hey, they’ll have some fun along the way.
Hitters
Bobby Witt Jr.
Age: 24
Pos: SS
All Bobby Witt Jr. has done since coming to the Major Leagues is slash .288/.336/.506 with 82 homers and 110 steals in three seasons. He’s been a first-round fantasy player since getting to the league, and he has a ton of great years ahead of him. We could very well be looking at a Hall of Famer here.
2024 was his best work. He slashed .332/.389/.590 with 32 homers and 31 steals. He improved in everything except steals. He slowed the pace down a bit there, going from a 42% attempt rate to 23%. But we were happy to take that because he lowered his strikeout rate even more and added power.
Witt is a 30-30 guy, and he’s a stud in every category.
The only question is if he’s #1 ahead of Ohtani or #2 behind him. You can’t take anybody besides Ohtani in a league where you can switch him back and forth daily between hitting and pitching, but if we’re just looking at Ohtani as a hitter - I’m taking Witt over him. I think Ohtani will steal way fewer bases next year, and the injury risk of him trying to throw 150 innings along the way comes back.
Witt is at the top of my list.
Rank
Projection
679 PA, 14 R, 35 HR, 100 RBI, 34 SB, .305/.365/.367, $18.55 roto value
Salvador Perez
Age: 34
Pos: C/1B
Perez was a big part of the Royals’ surprising 2024 season. He did his best work at the plate since that 2021 season when he hit 48 homers.
651 PA, .273/.332/.458, 27 HR, 19.8% K%, 6.8% BB%, 0 SB
He hasn’t stolen a base since 2021, so he’s reliant on the homers and the RBI for fantasy value. He did finish about 20 points higher in batting average than his prior two seasons, but that was mostly because he lowered his strikeout rate by almost four points. It was really impressive stuff from Perez; you usually don’t see improvements in your mid-30s, especially from a guy who plays catcher. He caught in just 91 games last year, adding 49 appearances at first base, and he made 23 starts as the DH. That’s good for his long-term health, and we could see that catching number go down even further as we go on.
He still has the raw power. He showed us a 12.2% Brl% and a 106.6 EV90 last year, and the flyball rate stayed high at 34%.
Everything checked out very well. He’s one of the top catchers in the fantasy game.
The aging question is an interesting one. He’s always been a free swinger, and he once again had one of the highest swing rates in the league last year at 58%. That could hurt his counting stats more than a typical person if he starts losing his physical skills because he won’t be taking many walks to get on base while fewer hits are falling in. So far, there have been no signs of his age playing a factor, and in fact, he’s been getting better with age.
I’ll never feel super pumped to draft a 34-year-old catcher, but I’m still going to rank Perez very high up on the catcher list.
Rank
Projection
618 PA, 76 R, 25 HR, 89 RBI, 0 SB, .255/.318/.444, $10.97 roto value
Vinnie Pasquantino
Age: 27
Pos: 1B
Pasquantino is a very impressive real-life hitter. He combines a very low strikeout rate (12.8% K%) with a decent barrel rate (7.1%) and an acceptable mark of 105.4 in the 90th-percentile EV. Not many hitters can make contact at that rate and still hit the ball hard. He put up the second-highest contact rate in the league (85.5%) among hitters who also had at least a 7% barrel rate (Yandy Diaz outdid him slightly).
That aside, he didn’t have a fantastic fantasy season last year:
554 PA, .260/.313/.444, 19 HR, 64 R, 97 RBI, 1 SB
The steals aren’t there; the home runs are a slight negative in standard leagues, so he was pretty much a one-category guy with those 97 runs batted in.
The ballpark doesn’t fit him very well. It’s tough to hit homers in Kauffman, especially as a left-handed hitter. That led to another low HR/Brl of 42% for Vinnie last year.
I really don’t like to draft a hitter that I don’t think can hit 20 homers or steal 20 bases. Vinnie projects for exactly 20 homers and just three steals with a .267 batting average - so there just isn’t that much to get excited about. That said, his playing time is locked in, and he’s not a guy at risk of a single-digit home run season or anything really disastrous like that. So he’s a fine floor option at first base, I just don’t think his playing style fits the roto fantasy game super well.
Rank
Projection
644 PA, 81 R, 20 HR, 87 RBI, 3 SB, .267/.338/.440, $8.10 roto value
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