What Are Royals Getting With Signing of Matt Beaty?
The Kansas City Royals' 2022-23 offseason has featured more under-the-radar moves than anything else, and Tuesday morning's news continued that trend. Per Mark Feinsand of MLB.com, the club signed first baseman/outfielder Matt Beaty to a minor-league deal with an invite to 2023 spring training with the big-league club.
Beaty, who was originally drafted by the Royals back in 2011 and then again by the Los Angeles Dodgers four years later, made his major league debut in 2019 and spent parts of three seasons in Los Angeles. He played 99 games as a rookie, slashing .265/.317/.458 with a 101 wRC+. After an abbreviated stint in 2020, he returned the following year to play a career-high 120 games and hit .270 with seven home runs and 40 RBIs. Beaty walked at an 8.5% clip and struck out 18.8% of the time en route to a 114 wRC+ and was worth 0.5 fWAR on the year.
In March of 2022, Beaty was traded from the Dodgers to the San Diego Padres in exchange for infielder/pitcher River Ryan. He went on to play in just 20 games for San Diego over the course of the season, however, posting a measly .093 batting average with a single RBI across 47 plate appearances. He was outrighted and subsequently elected free agency in late September, remaining on the market until Tuesday.
At the plate, Beaty doesn't do a ton particularly well and boasts a mixed profile. He doesn't walk much but also doesn't strike out a ton, and his power has been a relative non-factor at the plate since his rookie season. With that said, he has a respectable contact-oriented approach and owns a career .736 OPS against right-handed pitchers. That makes him a potentially valuable lefty bench bat.
Defensively, Beaty brings some positional versatility to the table. He has over 400 MLB innings under his belt at first base and left field, as well as 153.2 frames in right field. The Dodgers experimented with him at third base in 2019 and 2021, although it didn't go as planned. Beaty's profile may say that he's an all-corners defender, but he's a true first baseman and outfielder at his core. Even then, he's graded out as a negative or neutral contributor throughout his career.
With all of this in mind, what exactly are the Royals getting here? While Beaty does have somewhat of a track record of success at the plate and he can play a few different positions in the field, that doesn't guarantee him anything in 2023. He'll turn 30 in April and is likely more of a proverbial "Quadruple-A" type of player than a stopgap option.
With the likes of Vinnie Pasquantino and Nick Pratto at first base and multiple players battling for corner outfield reps, it's hard to envision a world in which Beaty picks back up where he left off in 2019 or 2021. That said, this is a low-risk investment by Kansas City with a small chance of seeing some level of reward over the course of the year. Even if the move doesn't end up helping, it surely won't hurt unless Beaty encroaches on the playing time of younger players in a significant way.
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Jordan Foote is the editor-in-chief of Inside the Royals, as well as the deputy editor of Arrowhead Report and a producer for Kansas City Sports Network. Jordan is a Baker University alumnus, earning his degree in Mass Media with a minor in Sports Administration. Follow him on Twitter @footenoted.