Why the Royals’ trade (Singer for India) is actually about another player altogether

The best season in Royals franchise history, if you will tag along the wins above replacement (WAR) metric with me, came from a 24-year-old.

This year.

Shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. posted a 10.4 fWAR, which bested a 1980 George Brett season in which the Hall of Famer flirted with .400, won the American League batting crown, topped everyone in baseball in slugging percentage and won what remains the only AL MVP award in team history.

Witt beat that. There is a lot that went into the 10.4 — hitting, fielding and baserunning — but the easiest way to sum it up is that Witt is only the second major-leaguer ever to capture a batting crown while producing a 30-30 season. Oh, and he was also the Gold Glove winner. So maybe there’s not an easy way to sum it up.

Witt was historically good.

But he was historically underutilized.

He stepped to the plate more than 700 times in 2024, and in 433 of those instances, he entered the box with no one other than himself to drive in. There’s not a non-leadoff hitter in baseball who batted with the bases empty more than he did this season.

Or hardly a season before that.

The Fangraphs data for that specific split statistic dates back to 2002. Witt’s 433 plate appearances with the bases empty ranks as the most for any player in any single season in 22 years. At least, remember.

Witt led the league in a lot of categories. That’s one you’d rather leave to someone else.

Which brings us to the present.

The Royals traded homegrown starting pitcher Brady Singer for second baseman Jonathan India, the team announced Friday evening.

Off the top, there’s one thing you should know about India, and if you could read this to the backdrop of a particular movie scene, even better:

He gets on base.

The defensive position is interesting and will require further examination, considering second baseman Michael Massey was one of the Royals’ better hitters in 2024. So you, like me originally, might ask a pertinent question:

Where will he play?

The Royals, though, were driven by a far more pertinent question:

Where will he hit?

India has a career on-base percentage of .352 and posted a .357 OBP last summer, better than any Royals player besides Witt, and 87 points better than Kansas City received from the top spot in the order a year ago.

That’s not a misprint. The Royals’ leadoff men reached base in just 27% of their plate appearances, dead last in all of baseball by a mile. The Cardinals, second worst, were at 29.2%.

India reached base safely 227 times, including via 80 walks (tied for fifth in MLB) and 15 hit-by-pitches (tied for eighth).

Do we care how he gets on?

Because this is what waits behind him: Witt hit 23 solo home runs in 2024, fifth most in baseball. His 23 doubles with nobody on ranked fourth. The six triples, second. The 122 hits, first.

For the record, I remain curious about what the Royals do defensively, and they’ve talked with Massey about left field. They’re also now back in the market for starting pitching. This offseason just turned up a notch.

Those items matter, but they can’t match the consequence of giving, say, 10% of Witt’s plate appearances a little more juice.

Look at the Yankees this season. They led the American League in runs. Aaron Judge, crowned MVP this week with Witt finishing second, is a major reason for that. But the Yankees also maximized Judge’s talent.

In half of his at-bats — OK, 49.9% of them — the Yankees had someone occupying a base. Juan Soto is the solution to a lot of things, but giving Judge someone to drive in is a pretty big thing.

Stick with this point for a moment. Judge led the league with 392 total bases and 144 RBIs. Here’s the math on that: For every 2.72 bases, he was driving in a run. Witt had 374 total bases and 109 RBI; thus, he needed to total 3.43 bases for every run he drove in.

The Royals have their superstar.

This is part of the equation to maximizing his impact.

It is the most pressing part of the equation, in fact, and that they parted with Singer, who finished 17th in the AL in earned-run average (3.71) in 2024, demonstrates their urgency to address it. Singer is one of their own — drafted and developed, with plenty of ups and downs in between — and those players can be particularly difficult to deal.

“It’s the hard part about this — you have to take the emotion out,” Royals general manager J.J. Picollo said, later adding, “As hard as it is to trade a guy like Brady, who is homegrown and has done really good things for us, if we’re going to be a model of consistency and we’re going to compete at a high level, we’re going to have to face some decisions like this.”

It often takes talent to acquire talent, in other words.

The Reds are content with their half of this trade, of course. Both players are under team control for two more seasons. India will almost certainly make a bit less than Singer, who is arbitration eligible once more.

The Royals deserve credit for not simply prioritizing the talent with which they were more familiar. They instead prioritized a solution for the unfamiliar.