Milwaukee<\/a>, and Tampa Bay consistently build effective bullpens from inexpensive, internally developed arms, while the Royals keep returning to free agency and the trade market looking for answers? Bullpen performance is notoriously volatile from year to year, and even the best executives have free-agent signings or trade acquisitions that don\u2019t pan out. But what separates the league\u2019s best organizations is their ability to continually replenish their relief corps. When a reliever departs in free agency, gets hurt, or regresses, those clubs seem to have another hard-throwing right-hander or overlooked waiver claim ready to step into a high-leverage role.<\/p>\nAdvertisement<\/p>\n
The Royals have spent considerable resources to patch up the bullpen the last few years, with mixed results at best. Every dollar spent on veteran relievers is a dollar that can\u2019t be spent addressing the lineup or rotation, and every prospect traded for bullpen help is one that can\u2019t be used to acquire talent elsewhere. For a team operating with financial limitations, repeatedly investing significant resources into one of baseball\u2019s most volatile assets is a risky strategy.<\/p>\n
Whether that reflects shortcomings in scouting, player development, pitching infrastructure, or simple misfortune is open to debate. But after four years of cycling through free-agent signings, trade acquisitions, and bullpen overhauls, it is fair to ask whether bullpen construction has become J.J. Picollo\u2019s biggest weakness as a general manager.<\/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 sports.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Monday evening, Royals fans rose to their feet in anticipation of Alex Lange recording the final out to seal a win over the Giants. Instead, Wily Adames deposited a sinker over the right field fence for a two-run home run to tie the game. The Royals rallied to win in the bottom of the inning, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2511200,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[416711,424371,451005,308583,438636,347504,350963,364827,279699,349960,353432,311283,349016,313216,319715,340583,351123,402966,22091,326961,307920,432325],"class_list":["post-2511199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty","tag-alex-lange","tag-angel-zerpa","tag-beck-way","tag-carlos-estevez","tag-chris-stratton","tag-cleveland","tag-daniel-lynch-iv","tag-era","tag-hunter-harvey","tag-john-schreiber","tag-jonathan-bowlan","tag-lucas-erceg","tag-matt-strahm","tag-milwaukee","tag-san-francisco-giants","tag-steven-cruz","tag-the-athletics","tag-the-kansas-city-royals","tag-the-royals","tag-tyler-tolbert","tag-will-smith","tag-willy-adames"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/This-may-be-the-worst-bullpen-in-Royals-history.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511199","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=2511199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2511201,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511199\/revisions\/2511201"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2511200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2511199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2511199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2511199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}