Royals have polar opposite duo worthy of being team’s next Luke Maile in 2026

If there is one thing Kansas City Royals fans can agree on, it is that the team has a pretty favorable situation at catcher heading into the 2026 season.

Team captain Salvador Perez is coming off a 30-home run, 100-RBI season and a World Baseball Classic win with Team Venezuela. Carter Jensen, the Royals’ current top prospect, had a red-hot run in September and is already a favorite in the AL Rookie of the Year race ahead of Opening Day.

Those two form one of the strongest catching duos in the league on paper. The narrative writes itself, too, with Perez as the final remaining player from the 2015 World Series team possibly passing the role of primary backstop to the green Kansas City metro native in Jensen.

The situation behind them is not exactly scary, either. The Royals have long had a trio of catching prospects in the pipeline, now led by 2023 first-rounder Blake Mitchell. While he and Ramon Ramirez are years away from a big-league call, there are at least bridge options between Jensen and them if the need arises.

While fans may have thought that bridge player would be the returning Luke Maile, it is not just one but two other catchers who have shown out this spring in his place.

It is a race between the newcomer veteran in Elias Díaz and the long-tenured prospect in the Royals organization in Luca Tresh. Luckily for Kansas City, judging off spring training numbers alone, there is no wrong answer for a favorite to be the third catcher.

The Royals have a great catching problem, thanks to Luca Tresh and Elias Diaz.

Tresh and Díaz are doing damage at the plate this spring in very different ways. Tresh is following up a strong 2025 season in Triple-A Omaha with another solid spring in his fourth consecutive major-league camp.

Meanwhile, 11-year veteran Elias Díaz was a late addition to camp and has done nothing but hit for average since joining the team, something he struggled to do last year with the San Diego Padres. Both players have filled up the stat sheet in Surprise, just in very different fashions.

Tresh was Rule 5 eligible this past winter, and the often-forgotten catcher had some strong underlying numbers that made him at least an intriguing draft candidate.

But Tresh stayed in the Royals organization, and the 26-year-old could just help shore up Kansas City’s catching situation even further. His five home runs in 16 games led all Royals hitters this spring, and most of that damage came against the same general level of competition Kansas City’s Opening Day starters were seeing.

Now, it is easy to understand that baseballs in the hot Arizona air have physics on their side, and some of these balls would likely die on the warning track in the denser air of early spring Kansas City. But Tresh is still posting excellent batted-ball numbers, including a max exit velocity of 108.3 mph and 12 batted balls hit harder than 100 mph.

Tresh is doing most of his damage with an all-or-nothing approach, while Díaz is more or less dinking and dunking his way through the spring. The former All-Star has never had prodigious power and owns a career .683 OPS.

Díaz keeps finding work because he remains above average at throwing out would-be base stealers and still has an elite pop time. On top of that, he has improved his framing skills, according to Baseball Savant, which remains a valuable trait even in the age of ABS challenges.

Díaz has produced plenty of hard-hit balls of his own, including a 114.5 mph single in early March. His hard-hit rate surpasses Tresh’s by a wide margin, and both hitters are deploying a pull-heavy approach to get the most out of their swings.

Díaz has been a contact-first catcher for most of his career, and he has made plenty of quality contact down in Surprise. This is one of those pairings where I wish the Royals had more broadcasted games so fans could see how well Diaz and Tresh looked, because that eye test may not be the truth, but it is still valuable. The stat sheet tells one story, but seeing how a catcher receives or how those batted balls came to land for hits or not does matter.

Now, is this to say either has a real chance at the Opening Day roster? Not unless there is an injury to Jensen or Perez that fans do not know about.

The race for Kansas City’s bench spots is tight, and considering the Royals already have two catchers cemented on the roster, Díaz and Tresh are hardly betting favorites.

Still, the Royals kept plenty of catching depth ready to go in Omaha last year, with Maile being a prime example. Díaz or Tresh could absolutely become part of that organizational depth picture, and if the need arises, all it takes is one open 40-man spot for the path to the Royals dugout to become a lot clearer than a Kauffman Stadium sky.