KC Royals: The worst free agent deals in club history

Despite having baseball’s best utility-type player in Whit Merrifield, the KC Royals signed career utility man Chris Owings as a free agent for 2019. He didn’t last the season.

For several seasons, Chris Owings made his name and living as an effective utility player for the Arizona Diamondbacks. He played six positions and hit .250, an average certainly passable for a part-time player with his versatility. He had a bit of pop, hitting 12 homers in 2017 in 97 games.

Owings was valuable to the Diamondbacks, but value has its limits and Owings’ reached his after the 2018 season. Facing arbitration with their jack-of-all-trades and staring a projected $3.6 million salary in the face, the D-backs non-tendered him, making him an immediate free agent.

Kansas City had Whit Merrifield, the best utility-type player in the business, but that didn’t stop the Royals from pursuing Owings. Planning to use him anywhere they might need him, they signed Owings to a $3 million deal, together with performance-based incentives, and put him to work.

Unfortunately, Owings didn’t make it through the first week of June. Although he was still versatile (he played seven positions), his .133 average and .193 OBP were too little for the lineup and too much for the club to tolerate. He appeared in 40 games and was released on June 4.

Negative fan and media reaction to Owings made this deal even less tolerable. His signing triggered criticism and disbelief; his poor play, and the club’s inexplicable determination to play him frequently, merely compounded the problems surrounding the deal. Critics were relentless until the club mercifully released Owings. Although it didn’t last long, the Owings deal was bad.

But it wasn’t among the three worst.

The KC Royals were eager for a return to the postseason after 1989 and signed a star free agent pitcher coming off a stellar two seasons with a division rival. The acquisition didn’t go as planned.

Storm Davis was raised in the Baltimore Orioles’ system, a baseball child of an organization known in the ’70’s and early 80’s for its wonderful homegrown pitchers. Davis learned and plied his craft as a starter from and with the likes of Jim Palmer, Mike Flanagan, Scott McGregor, Dennis Martinez and Mike Boddicker, winning 37 games in one three-year span and 61 in six.

It was Davis’ Baltimore success and two excellent seasons with Oakland that attracted the Royals when he became a free agent after the 1989 campaign. Kansas City had just won 92 games but finished second in the American League West, seven games behind the A’s; Oakland had supplanted the then-fading Yankees as KC’s chief rival and the Royals needed pitching to seriously challenge the A’s.

Oakland not only won the West in 1989, they also won the World Series, and Davis was a key to their success. He went 19-7 to tie Mike Moore for the second-most club regular season wins (Dave Stewart had 21); those 19 wins bettered his 16 of the season before when he helped the A’s claim their first of three consecutive division titles and World Series appearances.

The Royals coveted Davis and signed him to a three-year, $6 million deal to aid their pursuit of his former club, a move that complemented KC’s contemporaneous acquisition of star free agent reliever Mark Davis. (More on that later).

Storm proved to be too calm for the Royals. He went 7-10 with a 4.74 ERA in 1990, then 3-9 with a 4.96 ERA in ’91; his decline contributed to the Royals’ sixth-place finish both years. That Davis pitched for two bad KC teams didn’t help his record. But he didn’t help himself, posting WHIPs of 1.464 in ’90 and 1.627 in ’91, and his RA9 far exceeded his ERA both seasons.

Davis had one year left on his contract, but the KC Royals had seen enough. They traded him to the Orioles for Bob Melvin and he went 7-3 for them in 1992. It was his last decent season.

Expectations were justifiably high when the Royals spent $6 million (a hefty sum in 1989) to secure Davis’ services for a run at the A’s. But Davis never approached those expectations. The deal ranks here as the third worst in club history.

The KC Royals hoped a December 2013 free agent signing ended their long search for a superb second baseman. But by early 2016, they realized they still hadn’t found the solution.

Frank White is in the Royals’ Hall of Fame for a reason. He’s the best second baseman ever to play for the club. The team found the five-time All-Star’s clutch bat and eight Gold Gloves impossible to replace after his final season in 1990. Chris Getz, Mark Grudzielanek and Carlos Febles each played at least three seasons at second, and Johnny Giavotella and Alberto Callaspo (among many others) took their shots at replacing White but fell short.

And then came December 2013 and Omar Infante. The Royals were just coming off their first winning season in years and believed the playoffs were once again within reach; Infante was an established second-sacker with offensive and defensive credibility. A steady hitter, he was also coming off a good 2013, when he’d slashed .318/.345/.450 with 10 homers in 118 games for Detroit.

To be sure, Infante wasn’t Frank White, but he wasn’t Chris Getz, either. The Royals saw in Infante the solution to their second base puzzle and signed him to a four-year, $30 million contract shortly before Christmas.

Unfortunately, Infante wasn’t the answer. Although the Royals made it to the World Series in 2014, Infante was below league average defensively and his batting average and OBP dropped 66 points and 50 points, respectively. Although he hit .318 in the World Series with three doubles, a homer and five RBI’s, his regular season was not what the club expected, wanted or needed.

Infante was worse in 2015. His average dropped another 32 points and his OBP plummeted 61. Things improved only marginally in 2016 and, with Whit Merrifield knocking loudly on the door at second, the club released Infante on June 21, eating approximately $14 million of their remaining obligation to him.

The Royals firmly believed Infante was the long-sought answer at second base. He wasn’t and the club is fortunate Merrifield came into his own as Infante faded. The Infante deal, an unanticipated failure, ranks here as the team’s second worst free agent signing.

To improve their chances of overtaking their chief divisional rival in 1990, the KC Royals signed pitcher Storm Davis to a lucrative free agent contract. Then, they signed a second Davis to an even bigger deal. The results were eerily similar.

For the Kansas City Royals, the signing of Storm Davis in December 1989, a move designed to bolster the club’s pursuit of AL West Division rival and World Series champion Oakland, wasn’t enough. Davis was a starter and the club desperately wanted a veteran lock-down closer to fill the shoes of Dan Quisenberry, who so mysteriously lost his touch after the team’s World Series victory in 1985. Jeff Montgomery had assumed the role in ’89, but the KC Royals wanted more.

So it was that they went after another Davis — Mark, late of the San Diego Padres and considered by many the top closer in the game. Davis had saved 72 games, including a National League high 44 in 1989, since becoming the Padres’ main closer in 1988. He made the All-Star team both seasons and in ’89 won the National League Cy Young Award, the rarest of prizes for relief pitchers. He struck out 8.9 batters per nine innings that year and had a 9.3 SO9 the season before.

That Kansas City signed Davis was as surprising as the money they signed him for, hotly pursued by several richer teams, the Royals landed him for four years at $13 million. The deal’s average yearly salary of $3.25 million was the largest annual salary in the game’s history.

It turned out to be money horribly spent.

Davis immediately supplanted future Royals’ Hall of Famer Montgomery as the club’s closer, but saved only six games in 1990. Although he still struck out hitters with impressive frequency (9.6 SO9), he struggled with control, walked too many batters (6.8 BB9), and gave up too many runs (5.11 ERA, 5.64 RA9). Before July was over, Montgomery had reclaimed the closer’s job.

Trying to salvage something of Davis, the Royals tinkered with him as a starter in 1991 and ’92, but he remained primarily a reliever. He went a cumulative 7-6 with one save in 42 games before the club traded him to the Braves in July of ’92 for Juan Berenguer, who went 1-4 with a 5.64 ERA the rest of the season and never pitched in the majors again. It seemed a fitting end to the Royals’ failed association with Davis.

From the moment Davis gave up 12 runs in 13 innings and blew three consecutive save opportunities in May of his first Royals season, until he threw his last pitch for Milwaukee in 1997, he was never the same pitcher who saved 44 games and won a Cy Young in 1989. His decline with the Royals was shocking; the depth of disappointment surpassed that of Storm Davis’ KC deal and figured significantly in the club’s failure to catch Oakland. His signing ranks here as the worst free agent deal in Royals’ history.

The KC Royals typically don’t spend much on free agents. Perhaps their unfortunate experiences with Storm Davis, Omar Infante, and Mark Davis have something to do with that approach.