The Kansas City Royals already had Bobby Witt and Salvador Pérez on their roster in 2023, and all it got them was a miserable 106-loss season.
The Royals didn’t start winning—and make a return to the postseason for the first time in eight years—until club ownership began a more-than-minimal effort to sign free agents.
Several other major-league teams who missed the playoffs in 2024 find themselves in a position like K.C. was a year ago, when the Royals committed $109.5 million to free agents like Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha and made a 30-game improvement in the standings to reach the postseason. While the Royals made a significant investment, it bumped them from 23rd in payroll in 2023 to 20th. Even if K.C. had failed to make the playoffs—if the Minnesota Twins had played to expectations, for example—it would have been worth it, and not all that costly, just to try.
The Royals weren’t going to make it with just Witt, a generational talent who was worth 9.4 wins above replacement in 2024. Witt has improved exponentially over the past two seasons after being taken second overall in the 2019 draft, but the Royals haven’t exactly hit on their other draft choices like the Baltimore Orioles, who had just as many 100-loss seasons as K.C. since they started tanking in 2017. And as good as Pérez has been, his World Series MVP season came even longer ago, in 2015. Witt and Pérez needed better teammates more than K.C.’s front office needed more lottery tickets.
The Royals rebound in 2024 was a record improvement, but other teams don’t need something so dramatic to get competitive. An effective offseason, even just an attempt to improve by adding payroll in free agency, could put one of these teams in the postseason tournament. It’s hard to envision how else they’ll get there in 2025.
The Pittsburgh Pirates won 76 games for the second straight season in ’24 and missed the NL Wild Card by 13 games, but they were over .500 in early August, and they have right-hander Paul Skenes, the NL Rookie of the Year, who appears to be a franchise talent like Witt. Outfielders Oneil Cruz and Bryan Reynolds give them a base that’s no less talented than Kansas City’s. Andrew McCutchen even provides a Sal Pérez-type veteran holdover from a decade ago when the Pirates most recently were winners. Imagine what the Bucs could do if ownership spent more than a reported $84 million on payroll, which ranked 29th in 2024.
As the Pirates have shown the past two seasons by nearing .500, they’re beyond the woeful 100-loss zone of 2021-2022. It’s time for owner Bob Nutting to start spending in free agency and to stop pocketing revenue-sharing money. There’s no single path for major league teams to take in order to win, but the Pirates picked closer to the middle of the draft than the top in ’24. It’s time to give Skenes more help he can use now.
The Cincinnati Reds have too many weapons to stay wasting in the middle of the pack. In addition to the talent on the roster, like infielder Ely De La Cruz, left-hander Hunter Greene and catcher Tyler Stephenson, the Reds have added manager Terry Francona to the dugout. The Castellini family would seem poised to move off the $100 million reported payroll in 2024, which ranked 25th as the Reds won 77 games. But it’s hard to ever envision the Reds committing real money to winning. The franchise has made the playoffs just once in the past 11 years, and that came in the expanded postseason of the shortened COVID year in 2020.
If any organization could use a little free-agency success for once, it’s the Tampa Bay Rays. The Rays are known more for ditching their talent before free agency comes up, but when you’re coming off an 80-win season in which you ranked 28th in payroll, it must be clear to the front office that something was left on the table. It’s been a topsy-turvy offseason for Tampa Bay, which lost its stadium in a hurricane but appears to be close to securing a new ballpark that will keep them in the area.
Having to play this season’s home games in a Spring Training ballpark might make it hard to attract the likes of slugger Juan Soto, even if the Rays were willing to meet his price of $600 or $700 million. But ownership has kept enough potential big contracts off the books for long enough to make a splash this offseason.
Tampa Bay has added free agents before, most notably right-hander Charlie Morton for $30 million in 2018. They also extended one of their own players in 2019, giving left-hander Blake Snell $50 million for five years—before trading him before the 2021 season. The Rays always make the most of what they have, but giving manager Kevin Cash a little more to work with in 2025 would make the coming season a little less arduous and a little more optimistic about returning to the postseason.
Teams aren’t going to hit on every free agent. Even the Royals a season ago weren’t 100 percent accurate, also adding outfielder Hunter Renfroe and left-hander Will Smith. They were disappointments, but there was value in the attempt. Signing Smith indicated to Lugo and Wacha that the Royals were open for business and not closed off to spending money to make their team better in the present.
