Baseball’s Hot Stove has started, and it seems that the Kansas City Royals are the first to turn it on. As reported by Levi Weaver and Ken Rosenthal, the Royals are aggressively advertising their main trade chips now and declaring themselves open to business. It makes sense that the Royals would be sellers: they are bad and they frankly knew they’d be bad entering into the season, with the only question being “how bad.”
It’s pretty unusual to try and kick off the trade season this early—except Kansas City has a few good reasons for it.