Kansas City Royals: 71.5 wins
- Baseball Prospectus: 65 wins
- FanGraphs: 71 wins
The Royals are starting a new era without Eric Hosmer and Lorenzo Cain, and their potential replacements are still at least two years away from reaching the big leagues. Kansas City’s two best prospects, Khalil Lee and Nick Pratto are both 19. The Royals do not have a single top-100 prospect in their system, and the next great core players may not have even been drafted yet.
Keeping Mike Moustakas should help keep the Royals respectable in 2018, but he won’t have much help in the lineup. Whether or not Kansas City can tread water while they wait for more prospects to arrive will depend on Jorge Soler and Raul Mondesi Jr. finding a way to live up to their tremendous potential. Both have struggled to establish themselves at the MLB level.
While the Royals were winning, their flaws could easily be overlooked. As the key cogs in the World Series machine are stripped away, it becomes that much more obvious how incredible it was that a team without power or dominant starting pitching could win a title.
Conclusion: The Royals need to rebuild, but do not have many pieces to trade away. It will be difficult for them to lose 91 games and fall under the line set by Vegas — if only because the teams below them in the division are even worse. Seventy-five wins seems fair for the Royals, and that’s the over.