Royals trade return from Yankees in Andrew Benintendi deal appears dead in the water

Is it wild to think there is a large group of Kansas City Royals fans who never really experienced the Dayton Moore era? He ran baseball operations for nearly two decades, with two World Series appearances to show for it.

The highs were unforgettable. The lows, though, piled up late, including a 65-97 faceplant in 2022 that felt like the organization running in place.

That summer, Kansas City did what bad teams do. They sold at the deadline. The headliner was their lone All-Star, outfielder Andrew Benintendi, a Gold Glove winner who was legitimately one of the hotter rentals on the market.

Can the Royals get anything out of this 2022 trade with the Yankees?

The deal looked fine on paper at the time.

All three arms landed on MLB Pipeline Top 30 lists for the Yankees at some point. That is not nothing. But the more time passes, the more this trade looks like another swing and a miss that helped define the back half of Moore’s tenure.

Sikkema never got off the runway in Kansas City. The Royals lost him in the minor-league phase of the 2023 Rule 5 Draft to the Cincinnati Reds, and he is still there on a minor-league deal.

He is now 27, and his track record is what it is: a career 4.57 ERA across 311.0 innings, with most of that work coming in Double-A. At this point, the Royals are not even waiting on him anymore. They already turned the page.

Champlain at least offered a path that resembled “starter depth” for a while. The right-hander has been durable and has made 25 or more starts in each of the last three seasons. Durability matters.

The problem is everything else. Heading into his age-26 season, Champlain owns a 6.80 ERA and 1.672 WHIP in 223.3 Triple-A innings. He has tried to get by with a deep mix, but he does not have a true out pitch or anything that plays as a consistent plus. You can squint at a bullpen conversion, sure, but even then the jump from Triple-A innings eater to major-league contributor is steep.

Which brings us to Beck Way, the name that brought this trade back into focus after he appeared in the Cactus League opener against the Texas Rangers. It was a scoreless inning, but it came with a walk and a hit, the kind of spring line that can mean everything and nothing at the same time.

His sinker still flashes as a legitimate plus pitch, and that is the hook. The issue is that his first extended look at Triple-A was ugly: a 6.87 ERA and 1.789 WHIP in 38.0 relief innings. He is also entering his age-26 season, and the starter path is long gone.

Right now, Way’s most realistic outcome looks like an Andrew Hoffman-type arc, eventually debuting as bullpen depth if the command cooperates.

And that is where the Royals are stuck with this trade. They have not gotten any big-league impact from it. Not a useful reliever. Not a spot starter. Not even a fringe contributor who can soak up innings when things get messy. Meanwhile, the Yankees did not exactly strike gold either. Benintendi broke his hamate and only played 33 games in pinstripes. It was a rental that ended with a whimper.

But New York still got something. Kansas City has gotten nothing.

So what would “success” even look like now? It is not the original ceiling, not the one fans talked themselves into in 2022. At this point, it is simpler. It is Way turning into a usable middle reliever, or Champlain carving out a niche as organizational depth who can survive a big-league cameo without lighting the game on fire. That is a far cry from what you hope to land when you trade your lone All-Star.

But in this case, something really would be better than nothing.