The Royals are unique in MLB’s risk-averse culture

If you’ve been paying any attention over the last few years, you’ll have noticed that a smaller and smaller percentage of movies make it to the theaters. These days, many, if not most are being released directly to streaming. This used to be the sort of thing movie production companies only did when they had absolutely no faith that a movie would be well-received. Now it’s the norm.

The thing is, movie companies own the streaming services, much like they used to own the theaters before the US Government forced them to divest in an antitrust case. And the movie companies prefer the steady income of a subscription model to the boom-or-bust of the theater, so they release their movies directly to streaming – much to the frustration of the artists creating the films – because that’s all they really care about. It removes a lot of the risk from the equation for them – as long as they continue to create content and host old content that people still enjoy, they’ll get their $5-$20 bucks a month. A movie might be a critical bomb, but in this setup it can’t really be a commercial bomb – assuming they budget correctly for how many subscribers they have. On the other hand, without that risk, there’s no reward for a movie that does incredibly well, either. K-Pop Demon Hunters was a surprise smash hit for Netflix, but because it’s on their streaming service instead of in movie theaters, it couldn’t add hundreds of thousands in ticket sales; it simply maintained their subscriber numbers or maybe bumped them a little.*

*This has nothing to do with the point I’m trying to make, but spelling things out like this really gives you insight into why Netflix views “content” the way it does. Why would you give the creatives a little more time or money when it won’t benefit you in potential additional profits?

“What does this all have to do with baseball?“ I can hear you shouting, and, well, that’s easy. Baseball, with its focus on being a business, has adopted a very similar low-risk, low-reward plan. With a handful of exceptions.

The big-spending baseball teams buck the trend

People complain about the Dodgers’ and the Mets’ spending. But they don’t complain about the Yankees – except out of remembrance for what they did in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. I haven’t heard anyone complain about the Blue Jays, White Sox, Cubs, or even Red Sox, despite those teams also residing in super-sized markets. Why is that? Well, because the Dodgers and Mets are doing what precious few other teams have been willing to do in recent years. They’re taking “risks.”

The Mets have an owner who has thrown the team’s maximization of profits out the window in an effort to chase wins because he’s a fan of the team first, and a business owner in his other endeavors – as I have often advocated MLB owners should be. The Dodgers are buoyed by not only a TV contract significantly better than most of the rest of the league, but one that they are not responsible for sharing with anyone else due to loopholes added to the team when MLB needed to find a buyer.

But the reasons these two teams are willing to outspend everyone are less important than the reality that they are willing to do it. The Yankees and Blue Jays didn’t get Kyle Tucker because they were simply unwilling to take the risks that the Dodgers were. And this is the thing that sets these two teams apart.

Some teams could have been doing much better

But it’s not just the Yankees who have been playing things safe. This brings us to the Milwaukee Brewers, a team held up as the modern ideal of a middle-market club in MLB. Last week, the Brewers traded away their ace, Freddy Peralta, for prospects – high-level prospects, to be sure, but prospects. They explicitly made their team worse in 2026, a year after reaching the National League Championship Series. Why did they do this? Was it because they couldn’t afford Peralta’s $8M salary? No. It was because they decided that they weren’t going to try to offer him an extension to keep him around for the rest of their young core after this season, and they could improve the franchise’s total talent over the next few years by trading him. They traded known talent now for future potential talent. This is the kind of move that used to be reserved only for teams approaching the trade deadline who realized they had very slim odds of reaching the playoffs, but which are now common among the “smart” mid-to-small market teams such as the Brewers, Guardians, Rays, and even Mariners.

The Brewers, as I said earlie,r are held up as the best franchise going that doesn’t spend a ton of money. Royals owner John Sherman even pointed to them as the franchise he hoped to mold the Royals into. And, on the surface, that sounds like a good thing. They’ve made the playoffs seven of the last eight seasons. They’ve won their division five times in that span, including in each of the last three years. What Royals fan wouldn’t salivate over that kind of success?

But they’ve also only made it to the Championship Series twice, getting swept out of it last season, and they’ve gotten knocked out in the Wild Card round four times in those seven playoff appearances. They haven’t made the World Series even once. And after taking the Dodgers to a CS Game 7 in 2018, they haven’t gotten close.

The Cleveland Guardians have made the playoffs in seven of the last ten seasons. They have made it to the Championship Series twice, the World Series once – in 2016. They haven’t won it all. The Rays have made the postseason five of the last seven seasons, but neither of the last two. They’ve made the Championship Series and World Series once each, in the same season. The Mariners have won more games than they’ve lost in each of the last five seasons, but made the playoffs only twice and the Championship Series in 2025 was the limit of their reach. It was also notably, the first time in years that they approached the deadline by adding some of the best available talent in Josh Naylor and Eugenio Suárez at the deadline instead of trading away some of their players for more prospects.

How different might things be if these teams took a few more risks? Sure, there’s a chance they’d make a dud move like signing Albert Pujols, Anthony Rendon, or Jason Heyward. But if one of these teams had been the ones to add a Teoscar Hernández or Brandon Nimmo or Cody Bellinger, how much more success might they have had? But risk-aversion means they play it safe, consistently win games, but never end up having a real shot at glory. They do just enough to keep their fans invested, but never enough to get over that hump because they’re more terrified that they’ll miss than motivated to try to win.

The Royals are different – but only a little

The Royals have set themselves apart from these other small-market clubs with their willingness to spend in recent years. Two offseasons ago, they went out and gave real dollars – though not a ton of them – to pitchers Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha to stabilize their rotation. Then, over the past two seasons, they’ve given those guys extensions to keep them around while their farm system catches up. At the trade deadlines, while other teams with similar record,s like the Guardians and Diamondbacks were selling, the Royals were buying. This off-season, it’s easy to be frustrated with how little the Royals have done, but look around the league at what other teams are doing.

The Guardians have added no one, though at least they’ve also not lost anyone of note. The Rays have traded away Kam Misner, Shane Baz, Brandone Lowe, Jake Mangum, and Josh Lowe. They refused to tender Pete Fairbanks despite him being one of the better relievers in baseball last season. They’ve added only Gavin Lux, Cedric Mullins, and Steven Matz – once-good players nearing the ends of their respective careers. The Mariners kept Josh Naylor and added Rob Refsnyder, but let Jorge Polanco and Eugenio Suárez go.

The Brewers, the so-called model franchise, let Rhys Hoskins go before dealing away Nick Mears, Isaac Collins, Tobias Myers, and Freddy Peralta. They’ve added no one projected to be worth even a single fWAR to their major league team.

This isn’t a defense of the Royals. They’d be easy favorites for the division if they’d been willing to take the risk of signing Cody Bellinger or Bo Bichette. But they’re still trying harder than their peers, and that means something. At least for now. As I said earlier, John Sherman wants to ultimately become a Brewers clone. If he ever gets there, we might be in for the same frustration that I am sure Brewers fans feel right now of watching their team sit right on the edge of greatness but unwilling to ever take a step forward toward the ultimate prize for fear of tripping over their own feet.

Jonathan India is the prime example of the Royals sitting in the middle-ground

If Jonathan India hadn’t played for the Royals last year, and KC had given him the deal they did, many Royals fans would be celebrating the choice to bring a bounce-back candidate in to give Michael Massey some competition for his roster spot. Especially because at one year and $8 million, it’s an extremely reasonable contract to give a guy who is still only entering his age-29 season, who still showed elite chase rates in 2025, and was a productive major leaguer for the previous four seasons. It would be a risk, sure, but a reasonably smart one.

Instead, because he did play for the Royals last year it reads as an extremely safe play, a choice to preserve the floor he represents to the team rather than go out and take a real risk by signing someone like Jorge Polanco or Bo Bichette. And that, I think, is the lens through which to view their move in keeping India.

The problem with keeping India isn’t that his contract is a little risky, it’s that the upside of such a risk is so low as to feel pointless. Let’s be clear, the Royals could have cut him and “played it safer”; certainly other teams made those choices such as when the Rays moved on from Christopher Morel or the Brewers dealt Isaac Collins. But it’s one of the “safest” risks the Royals could have made. And that’s why it disappoints so many of us. Go big or go home, as the saying goes.

The Royals are trying to straddle a line that pretty much no other team is even willing to approach. We’ll have to see both if it pays off in 2026 and if they’re willing to continue being even this aggressive into the future.

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