The Royals should seriously pursue Jurickson Profar this offseason

Profar’s 2024 season was not a fluke, and the Royals need someone like him in the outfield.

I wanted to look at the best fit for the Royals in free agency, but this article is running on a few assumptions. The first assumption is that the Royals will not be playing in the deepest end of the free agency pool. I would love to see Juan Soto, Alex Bregman, or Teoscar Hernandez in a Royals uniform next season, but I just do not see them opening up the pocketbook to that extent. Teoscar was someone I thought might be possible not long ago, but his season and postseason were so good that I think the price tag is going to be quite a lot higher than I would pay in dollars and years now. Ben Clemens at Fangraphs has him getting three years and $72 million, but I think I think that article has a lot of players underpriced personally. There is no way Bregman only gets $28 million per on a five-year deal. If that were true, the Royals should go get Bregman right now.

After picking through all the options after my favorite top-end talents, the guy I landed on was Jurickson Profar. He has had an odd career, and I think valuing him right now is not easy. In the Fangraphs article linked above, he is projected to get around three years and $45 million, which if that’s what he costs, I am 100% in. Again, I would tend to think that is less than he will actually get for several reasons, but let’s go through his history a bit and talk about why he looks riskier than he is, in my opinion, and $45 million would be a steal.

Profar was the #1 prospect in baseball back in 2012 and 2013 as a shortstop for the Texas Rangers. He made it to low-A ball as a 17-year-old, and skipped AAA a few years later to debut at 19 toward the end of 2012. It looked like he was a five-tool phenom - I mean how many guys hit 14 homers at age 18 in AA while posting a .390 OBP? He was a “can’t miss” prospect who then promptly missed.

After struggling in Texas four seasons, he ended up in Oakland for a year. He only posted a wRC+ above 100 once, in 2018 and his defense was fine but unspectacular. 2018 was around a 2 WAR season, so he was around an everyday-level player for the first time. He wouldn’t do that again over a full season until 2023, though he did well in the shortened 2020 campaign.

Then this year he exploded.

This season saw a massive jump in production for Profar, who is now a left fielder. He is not a good fielder, but his .280/.380/.459 slash line means no one cares. That’s a 139 wRC+, and for someone as inconsistent as he has been, my first inclination was to assume he just had a lucky BABIP season. That is not the case. His BABIP was .302, so very normal. I also went and checked out his expected slash lines, and again his 2024 production does not look like luck as his xBA is .283 and xSLUG is .448, which is right in line with his actual production. His xWOBA is .364 versus the .365 actual. Everything looks real.

What happened? How did an inconsistent player start looking like one of the top 20 hitters in baseball? The answer is, he is now hitting the ball HARD. Look at his career Baseball Savant hitting stats:

His average exit velocity was above 90 mph for the first time, and more than 3 mph above any of his other seasons. He had a record year for Barrels, Barrel Rate, and Hard Hit%. And he did it against all pitch types. In 2023 his fastball wOBA was .351 and in 2024 it was only slightly higher at .361.

It is on breaking and offspeed stuff that he made the jump against. Again, in 2023 his breaking pitch wOBA was a paltry .258 and it was an ugly .219 for offspeed. Those jumped to .363 and .383 respectively in 2024! Along with that, his K% was the lowest it has been in a full season since 2019 and his walk rate was the highest it has ever been over a reasonable sample size. I assume he is just taking a better approach and swinging at the right pitches. His swing rates are not all that different than they have been, but something has definitely improved.

For a guy with a lot of experience, thes trends make me think he will continue to be a good major-league hitter. Will he be 2024 good? Maybe not quite that good, but likely above-average. It is unusual for a player to bounce around this long and then suddenly turn into a consistently great hitter, but the Jose Bautistas of the world do exist.

Profar’s pedigree also says this talent was always there too. I just think that he is likely to be a good everyday player for the next several years, which means he is likely to be worth a three- or four-year contract worth $20 million per year or more. He is probably not going to cost that because of his up-and-down history - think of him as a poor man’s Cody Bellinger, and Bellinger struggled to find someone willing to bet on him repeating his 2023 season as a free agent last season. I just don’t think Profar looks the same as Bellinger because he has not fallen off multiple times in the same way. Cody’s 2023 did look somewhat fluky and the fall back to the level he found this season makes a lot of sense.

The Royals need a left fielder they can count on. A talented 31 year-old who can lead off fits right into that slot, and 4 WAR upside at $15-20 million per year is nice too. I would love to get him on a three-year deal, maybe with a team option for a fourth. If you guarantee him $50 million with some incentives for more, I think he signs, and now you have a guy who can get on base in front of Bobby. Could he turn back into a pumpkin? Sure, it could happen, but at least he isn’t another Hunter Renfroe who was already a pumpkin the day they signed him.