Let's start with Alex Rios. Rios is going into the 12th year of his major league career that began when he was 23. Since his birthday is in the summer, this means he will turn 34 this year. That is not horribly old for a player who has as much experience as Rios does. Though age does become a problem when you are in your thirties, Rios has not had a noticeable decline in his performance, aside from a down year last year. The two years prior to that he averaged .291/.329/.473, which was good for a .802 OPS and 115 OPS+. These are very good numbers. Only Billy Butler and Alex Gordon had any comparable track record last year. It must be noted, however, that he has been prone to fairly down years in the past. The key appears to be in his batting average. When it is low, he struggles mightily. This could be due to high BABIP in his good years or bad luck in his bad years. I don't have the time or sufficient resources to determine this. Rios also has a fair amount of speed, so stolen bases and relatively good defense should be expected. In a best case scenario, Rios will hit 25 home runs, steal 30 bases and bat around .300 with a .340 OBP. That is not a player that you will be ashamed of, so the one year deal that he signed doesn't scare me. Sure, it is for a high salary, but it is better to get a player you want who won't hold back any prospect development than to just grab from the bargain bin. While I wanted Colby Rasmus to fill this position, there seemed to be little interest in him for one reason or another. I don't know if it was his low batting average numbers or his slightly greater tendency to strike out, but he remains unsigned while Rios has a new home. I think Rasmus has higher overall potential and is more apt to achieve that potential still, given that he is six years younger than Rios. But Rios should be stable force that you will be able to pencil into the lineup somewhere in the middle to give protection to our useful hitters such as Hosmer, Gordon, Perez and Cain. He also provides a much greater power potential than Nori Aoki, who apparently resigned himself to playing slapball at Kauffman after hitting 10 home runs the previous year as a Brewer. I think he is going to have a better year than last year, but probably not as good as he was in 2012. Something along the lines of his stats over his White Sox tenure in 2013 seems about right, which was .277/.328/.421. That puts him at a slightly below his average OPS of .759. In the ever-challenging goal of baseball hitting, that would be very respectable. Something a touch lower may also be possible. Essentially, he should be around Lorenzo Cain's numbers.
Edinson Volquez is a bit more of a mystery to me. I haven't had the opportunity to watch him like I have with Rios. The career numbers for Volquez are very odd. He has some years of very low ERA and some years of just horribly exorbitant numbers. The Royals, I am betting, are counting on him to play like his good numbers indicate. The most interesting thing about Volquez is that his career ERA is higher than his career FIP. This is interesting because FIP is almost always higher than ERA. For the Royals starting five last year, every single one of them had a higher FIP than ERA. This was true for Volquez too, but had not been true in the past. This means that he was either getting unusually unlucky or that he was playing behind a bad defense. In the Royals, he will now pitch for a team with an above average to excellent defense at nearly every position. His FIP should be much higher than his ERA again, though perhaps not as much as it was last year. He seems to have gotten very lucky last year. I do not expect that to happen again. In 2013 he was atrocious, while 2012 was not bad. He can be all over the board, but Eiland has shown himself to be an outstanding pitching coach. I believe that Volquez will regress to somewhere in the 3.5 to 4.2 ERA range, which would be perfectly adequate for a number four or five starter. If this is the worst any of our pitchers do, we are in great shape. Our offense, once again, underperformed stupendously. We have a chance to get much better on offense with very minimal change in every other department. I think the Royals of 2015 could be just as good as those of 2014, though perhaps not as lucky. We shall see.
Now I get to talk about Kris Medlen, and man does that make me excited. This is just an interesting, awesome case. There are few players like Kris Medlen that truly make me excited, but this is exceptional. This is a reliever who was converted to a starter midseason of 2012 and proceeded to take 20th in the MVP vote. His numbers were just silly. He follows that up with his only full season as a starter in 2013 with 197 inning of 3.11 ERA ball. Then he gets Tommy John for the second time and misses all of last year. The Royals signed him to two years and $8.5 million with massive incentives. He could potentially have Cy Young stuff, but he needs to prove that his second Tommy John was completely successful. The success rate on the second surgery is not as good as the first, but if it works out, this could be a huge steal. The guy is a legitimate number one or two starter and when paired with Ventura and Duffy, could be a ridiculous starting rotation that could be made even more impressive if Cueto or one of the young guns (Zimmer, Manaea, Finnegan, Almonte or even Binford), is able to step into the void left by Guthrie's departure next year or an injury to Vargas/Volquez and just dominate. The Royals are set for pitching for the future even if none of those prospects develop, but if one of them does develop into what the Royals think they can be then the team is going to be Braves-esque.
I'm excited about these moves. I think Dayton Moore did a good job of acquiring proven talent at each of the needed positions. There are some buy-lows in the group, such as Medlen, Morales and Rios, but even these guys are not truly over the hill and have legitimate ability to improve, rather than just my idiotic hope that they will. Volquez is somebody you don't want to regress to their averages. I think that all of these players will come back closer to their averages, but I do believe that the Royals coaching staff is at least as good as many others and will be able to get good results out of these players. Maybe this will be the first time in three years that we won't fire our hitting coach halfway through. The season is long and spring training starts in less than two months. I'm ready for some baseball.
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