Haha, the Royals could never trade for Mike Trout. Or...could they?

What if?

The Kansas City Royals need a leadoff hitter. What if that hitter was Mike Trout?

On its face, that is a pretty wild sentence. And, to be fair, it’s a farfetched scenario to be sure. But friend of Royals Review, Alex Duvall, wondered on Twitter what Trout’s value is, and that got me to thinking: what would it take for the Royals to acquire him? To do so, we’ve got to talk about why the Angels would want to trade him, why the Royals would want to acquire a player like him, and discuss the ins and outs of trades and bartering.

So, like, why would the Angels want to trade Trout, and why would he want to leave Anaheim? Unfortunately for Trout, Los Angels Angels are cooked. They lost 99 games last year and have one of the worst farm systems in baseball. Trout’s superstar teammate, Shohei Ohtani, took the 5 over to Dodger Stadium rather than re-upping with the Angels, leaving Trout’s team bereft of any significant co-stars.

And unfortunately for the Angels, while Trout may not yet be cooked himself, he’s at least at the prep station. Trout played 29 games in 2024, and he hasn’t played more than 119 games in a season since 2019. He hasn’t played more than 140 games in a season since 2016. While he’s still a great hitter, his overall volume of production is not enough to carry a team.

This creates the scenario where the Angels would want to move on from Trout, and why Trout would want to move on from the Angels. On the Royals’ end: why would they want Trout at all, or a player like Trout?

There are two parts to this. First is that, as JJ Picollo said in the Royals’ first offseason press conference, the Royals desperately need a leadoff hitter. Trout has spent the majority of his career batting second or third, but he has started 168 games as a leadoff hitter, where he has an OBP of .395. Over the last four seasons, Trout ranks ninth overall in OBP among all hitters with 1000 or more plate appearances.

The second part is that the Royals’ realistic position player options in free agency are slim pickings. ZiPS predicts only three free agents to produce 3 or more Wins Above Replacement in 2025. The top options—Juan Soto, Alex Bregman, and Willy Adames—are likely to get more than $150 million, which is out of Kansas City’s price range. And when there aren’t many top options, I fear that the more realistic options—like Ha-Seong Kim and Gleyber Torres, for instance—would be pushed out of Kansas City’s comfortable price range.

So, why would Trout be a possibility for anyone? Isn’t he so good? Well, the fact of the matter is that his contract is way out of line with what he is owed. MLB Trade Values, which has an excellent trade simulator, puts Trout’s future on-field value at $56.1 million in monetary terms. That’s excellent, and it would be the third-highest future value figure on the Royals behind Bobby Witt Jr. and Cole Ragans.

But on-field value is only part of the equation. The other part is salary, and Trout is deeply in the negative after factoring that in. Trout is simply not worth the $37.1 million a year he is owed over each of the next six seasons. This puts his overall surplus at -$156.8 million.

In other words, for the Angels to expect to get any value out of trading Trout, they’d have to kick in a ton of money. Maybe not the $156.8 million MLB Trade Values calculates—these types of cases tend to break simple trade calculators—but the Angels are just not going to get to trade Trout for a lot of value without literally paying for it.

Let’s say that the Angels would be willing to offload half of Trout’s salary, and they wouldn’t get much in return—a few fringe prospects with minimal projection—and would kick in half of Trout’s salary. If you’re the Royals, would you pull the trigger on acquiring an aging, albeit still productive when on the field, superstar and future Hall of Famer for $19 million a year over six years? Or would you rather spend the $114 million on a top-tier free agent?

Look: this isn’t gonna happen. But it’s fun to think about. And besides, the real thing to take away here is that this would be a very creative way to acquire a player that would help the team make the most of peak Witt years. The Royals should seriously consider taking on salary like this scenario to acquire a player they might not otherwise have gotten—probably someone more accessible.

Can you picture it, though? Trout in Royal blue, scoring the winning run in a World Series game on a Witt double? We can all dream.