Estévez was a solid signing.
In the baseball world, there’s a tongue in cheek acronym used by prospect writers: “TINSTAAPP,” or “There Is No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect.” The idea there is that young pitchers are highly volatile, developing in a frustratingly nonlinear fashion and subject to a myriad of devastating arm injuries. Pitchers, they say, will break your hearts.
But that’s not just true about young pitchers—it’s true about pitchers, period. Starting pitchers can go from zero to hero in a blink of an eye, and they can just as easily fall off a cliff for no apparent reason. Relievers are especially unpredictable, with high leverage innings magnifying their success or failures.
You can therefore never have enough bullpen arms, and even Lord Vishnu himself would be on the search for more of them. So the Kansas City Royals’ signing of Carlos Estévez is encouraging that the team is not resting on its laurels there.
The Royals’ strength is undoubtedly its pitching, as there are legitimate reasons to project the lineup to once again be an unreliable source of offensive outside of Bobby Witt Jr. While the second half bullpen was much improved compared to the first half of 2024, there were also enough questions about the ‘pen to wonder if the Royals had enough firepower there.
Last year, Estévez posted career lows in ERA and FIP last year at 2.45 and 3.24, respectively, and a career high K-BB% of 17.9%. He’s a strikeout pitcher who has a career strikeout rate of 24.3%, and he may very well become the closer.
Estévez joins Lucas Erceg and Hunter Harvey as legitimate flamethrowers in the back end of the pen; all three have a career fastball average of at least 97.4 MPH. This marks a rather significant shift from the start of last year, with much less dangerous pitchers like James McArthur, John Schreiber, Angel Zerpa, and Will Smith tasked with holding down the fort when games came down to the wire.
Why does it matter having multiple guys who can pitch in high leverage? The depth is obviously important, and not only does it help cover from injury but it pushes McArthur et al down to lower leverage situations. In the playoffs, it also helps with an emerging trend over the last few years that’s been dubbed the “reliever familiarity effect,” where being able to avoid exposing your best relievers to the same batters too many times within a short series seems to be important.
Of course, teams can’t and shouldn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars on free agent relievers, and even deals for individual relievers can be a problem. The good news is that Estévez is only due $20 million, which is an objectively lot of money but also will represent only eight or so percent of the Royals’ payroll over the next two years. One WAR on the free agent market is expensive, and Estévez is poised to be worth that money.
I’m not totally sold on Harvey, and Estévez and Erceg are both on the wrong side of 30. But take them as a group, and throw in some other decent bullpen arms like Zerpa and Sam Long and Daniel Lynch—well, combine it with a strong starting rotation that won’t overexpose them, and it should be a pretty good group.
You can never have enough bullpen arms, though. Maybe Kansas City should see if Vishnu is interested in playing in the United States.