{"id":2293394,"date":"2026-02-22T03:14:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-22T03:14:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2293394"},"modified":"2026-02-22T03:14:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-22T03:14:10","slug":"who-was-your-favorite-royals-spring-training-mvp-of-all-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/who-was-your-favorite-royals-spring-training-mvp-of-all-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Who was your favorite Royals spring training MVP of all time?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Hope springs eternal this time of year, particularly if you\u2019re a hitter in the hot, dry air of Arizona. The Royals typically perform pretty well in the Cactus League, which means absolutely nothing since the games don\u2019t count. But you can be excused for getting a teensy bit excited about a player who seemed to figure things out in spring training. Hope is a good thing, after all!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I am usually quite dismissive of guys launching bombs in Arizona. But I couldn\u2019t help but get a bit excited about Peter O\u2019Brien in 2017. I had liked O\u2019Brien as a college player at Miami, and when the Royals picked him up, I thought there was a chance he could help the team. Then he got to Surprise and started launching bombs. He smacked seven home runs – the only players in all of baseball who hit more that spring training were Greg Bird and Bryce Harper. Could O\u2019Brien be our Bryce Harper? No. O\u2019Brien was sent to the minors and hit .162 with three home runs in 27 games before being released.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The next year, it was Frank \u201cThe Tank\u201d Schwindel. He tied for the most spring training home runs in baseball with seven (Salvador Perez and Jorge Soler each hit six, giving Royals fans visions of a Murderer\u2019s Row). His line of .366\/.381\/.976 wasn\u2019t enough to make the team, so he hit 24 home runs for Omaha. He made the Opening Day roster the next year, but lasted just six games before it was back to the minors. He would find some limited success in 2021, hitting 14 home runs with the Cubs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Hunter Dozier had a terrific 2019 season, and although his pandemic-shortened 2020 season had mixed results, he was rewarded with a four-year, $25 million deal<\/a> in February of 2021. That seemed to be a potential steal when he destroyed Cactus League pitching that year, smashing five home runs with a line of .289\/.373\/.733. But it proved to be fool\u2019s gold as he posted a career-worst OPS+ of 76 that year, part of a rapid decline that turned that contract into a dud.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ruben Gotay, Mike Jacobs, and Kila Kaaihue are some other Cactus League MVPs. Who was your favorite performer in Royals spring training?<\/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 www.royalsreview.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hope springs eternal this time of year, particularly if you\u2019re a hitter in the hot, dry air of Arizona. The Royals typically perform pretty well in the Cactus League, which means absolutely nothing since the games don\u2019t count. But you can be excused for getting a teensy bit excited about a player who seemed to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2293395,"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":[439384],"class_list":["post-2293394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty","tag-royals-review-question-of-the-day"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Who-was-your-favorite-Royals-spring-training-MVP-of-all.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2293394","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=2293394"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2293394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2293396,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2293394\/revisions\/2293396"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2293395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2293394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2293394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2293394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}