Royals Shore up Bullpen With Carlos Estévez

It’s been a quiet winter in the AL Central. After Michael Wacha signed an extension at the beginning of the offseason, the division’s five teams combined to add only one deal worth more than $20 million in guaranteed money; that was Shane Bieber’s surgery-affected pillow contract with the Guardians. Now, finally, we can add another to the ledger, courtesy of the Royals. On Wednesday, they signed Carlos Estévez to a two-year, $22.2 million deal with a club option tacked on the end, as ESPN’s Jeff Passan first reported.

The Royals came into the winter looking for relief help. It’s not the only place their roster needed a glow-up – even after trading for Jonathan India, they could still use another bat or two, especially in the corner outfield – but the bullpen was also a particular area of need. Last year’s Royals made the playoffs on the back of pitching, but their starters were the ones doing the heavy lifting, not their relievers. Deadline acquisition Lucas Erceg was the best of the group by a large margin, and John Schreiber was the only other reliever with impressive full-season numbers.

It’s not so much that a team can’t make the playoffs with such a thin bullpen – obviously, the Royals did. But they did it by the skin of their teeth at 86-76, and that despite spectacular seasons from Cole Ragans, Seth Lugo, and Wacha. Counting on those three to combine for 94 starts, 12.9 WAR, and ERAs in the low 3.00s across the board again would be wishful thinking. Additionally, they no longer have last year’s fourth starter Brady Singer, who was Cincinnati’s return in the India trade.

The 2024 bullpen finished last in baseball in shutdowns – appearances that increased win probability by six percentage points or more – and fifth worst in win probability added. Those are outcome statistics, not process ones, but the process statistics weren’t exactly pretty either. Kansas City was middle of the pack in WAR (3.6), 20th in ERA (4.13), 26th in K-BB% (12.0%). It’s not just that this team didn’t have a “true closer” – its bullpen was light on contributors from top to bottom.

Enter Estévez, who is coming off two straight years of solid closer work. He celebrated leaving Coors Field by taking the late-inning job for the Angels in 2023, and his first year was just good enough to get a crack at a second – too many walks, for sure, but enough strikeouts to make up for them. Then, in 2024, he found the zone, cutting his walk rate by more than 50% while missing bats just as frequently. He went from second-division closer to the top job on the Phillies, one of the best relief units in the majors.

He’s not your traditional fire-breathing closer, at least not after adjusting for current velocity trends. Sure, he sits 96-98 and throws a fastball more than half the time, but that’s table stakes these days. That pitch doesn’t miss bats like you’d expect for a closer; his four-seamer’s swinging strike rate was average for a reliever, and he didn’t induce many chases above the zone either. The big change in 2024 was that he started spotting the pitch well when behind in the count. His walk rate after falling behind 1-0 dropped from 20.4% in 2023 to 10.1% last year.

While the fastball helped to limit walks, Estévez’s slider did the dirty work. It’s a beautiful pitch, in that unclassifiable gap between gyro and sweeper. Hitters can’t quite time it up, because it doesn’t look like a lot of other big league offerings. Two pitchers in all of baseball matched Estévez’s combination of velocity and horizontal movement: Joe Kelly and Emmanuel Clase. And before you start to worry, this is a good Joe Kelly comparison: His slider annually grades out as one of the nastiest in baseball.

A well-located fastball and a funky slider are enough to be a pretty good closer – well, they are if you can keep the ball in the ballpark. That and command issues had always been the knocks on Estévez. He’s an extreme fly ball pitcher, and he had the ugly home run totals to prove it during his time with Colorado. Over the last two years, though, he’s steadily improved on that front – the question heading into his free agency was whether that improvement was here to stay.

The case against Estévez: He still gives up loud contact. Out of 366 pitchers who surrendered enough batted balls to qualify for the leaderboard, Estévez finished 335th in barrels per plate appearance, and 325th in barrels per ball in play. He was 350th in sweet spot rate per batted ball – hitters put the ball in play at dangerous launch angles frequently. His stuff might be deceptive, but opponents were able to handle that deception, largely by waiting for a fastball.

In 2024, none of that seemed to matter. Sure, batters hit a ton of screamers off of Estévez, but they also did a lot of frustrated screaming. Despite all that loud contact, Estévez allowed a minuscule .229 BABIP. He set a career low in home runs allowed per nine innings despite a career-high fly ball rate (a 6.8% HR/FB helps). There was a jarring disconnect between the raw metrics of the contact he allowed and the results.

That screams regression, and it’s why Estévez was 40th on my Top 50 Free Agents list. Steamer projects him for a 4.00 ERA in 2025; ZiPS is comparatively optimistic at 3.75. Those are solid but unspectacular numbers, the kind that might make you a third option in a good bullpen or the second option in a bad one. But I think there’s more than meets the eye here, particularly for the Royals.

There’s one obvious synergy: Estévez was made to pitch at Kauffman Stadium. Kansas City’s home park is one of the toughest places to hit a home run in the majors, with only Oracle Park in San Francisco and PNC Park in Pittsburgh suppressing dingers to a greater extent. That suits him well, particularly now that he isn’t walking as many batters. Estévez can get away with giving up doubles because he limits walks and gets cheap outs on lazy fly balls; the big risk in his profile was that he’d start to give up too many homers, and that feels less likely with a cavernous home stadium.

Even beyond that, I think that Estévez is a savvy signing for the Royals. As I mentioned earlier, they need bullpen depth for 2025. Thanks to roster construction, though, they need reliable depth. They won’t be able to play the bullpen shuttle as often as your average big league club this year. Erceg, Schreiber, and Angel Zerpa are the only relievers with options, and that overstates things: Neither Erceg nor Schreiber are likely to be sent down. Kansas City will have to make some tough decisions on roster management before long, and the only easy move I can see is DFA’ing Chris Stratton. Bullpen flexibility is particularly important for teams that aren’t blessed with a huge variety of top relief options, and the Royals happen to be short on it.

The Royals might have been able to approximate Estévez’s total contributions by signing two cheaper pitchers and letting the season play out to see which of the two is better. But they don’t have the time or roster space to make that choice. By signing Estévez instead of a sampler platter of low-budget options, they’ve concentrated their bullpen improvement in a single roster spot.

Between that and the club option – $11 million after accounting for the buyout – the Royals are getting a lot of flexibility out of this deal. In a vacuum, I wouldn’t love guaranteeing a two-year deal to a 32-year-old reliever coming off of his best season. But between the park synergy, the roster synergy, and the fact that the Royals are right on the cusp of the playoffs and every win counts, he fits their needs like a glove. Take note, Pirates: The Royals are a great example of how small-market teams can supplement a homegrown superstar through their judicious use of free agency.

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