<\/p>\n
Veteran outfielder Austin Hays remains unsigned, but it isn’t due to a lack of interest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The celebrity.land<\/em>‘s Jon Heyman<\/a> reported the New York Mets and Kansas City Royals have the 30-year-old on their radar. Heyman<\/a> included the New York Yankees in the group as well and said their pursuit could intensify if they fail to retain Cody Bellinger.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Hays had a solid 2025 season with the Cincinnati Reds. He batted .266 and slugged .453 with 15 home runs and 64 RBI.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n His performance was actually marginally better outside of Great American Ball Park, which has historically favored hitters<\/a>. He had<\/a> a .270\/.306\/.438 slash line at home and a .262\/.323\/.465 mark on the road.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The interest in Hays reflects the fact he has been a pretty consistent producer at the plate and won’t command a big contract. Across eight seasons, the 2023 All-Star has a .748 OPS and a 107 OPS+, while Spotrac<\/a> projects his market value to be $5.1 million.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The fact the Royals are tracking Hays is a little surprising because they already signed<\/a> Lane Thomas to effectively occupy the same role. In the case of the Yankees and Mets, he’d provide some outfield depth at a reasonable cost. The Mets in particular have a void in that area of the diamond after trading<\/a> Jeff McNeil to the Athletics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source bleacherreport.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Veteran outfielder Austin Hays remains unsigned, but it isn’t due to a lack of interest. The celebrity.land‘s Jon Heyman reported the New York Mets and Kansas City Royals have the 30-year-old on their radar. Heyman included the New York Yankees in the group as well and said their pursuit could intensify if they fail to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2211497,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2211496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Updated-MLB-Rumors-on-Yankees-Mets-Royals-Pursuit-of-Reds-scaled.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2211496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2211496"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2211496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2211498,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2211496\/revisions\/2211498"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2211497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2211496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2211496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2211496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}