If you look at the Royals' financial commitments past 2017, it's pretty obvious that a lot of guys on the team today won't be around two years from now.

Many of the contracts on the team will expire after 2017, so we tried to assess the situation and think of what the fate of the bigger likely-to-depart names might be.

Joining Mike this week as guest co-host is Ben Nielsen, formerly of the Walkoff Talk podcast and various KC sports blogs. You can follow him on Twitter at @BenThereBro.

Follow the Vault at @KCBaseballVault. Follow host Jeff Herr at @TheJeffReport, co-host Michael Engel at @michaelengel. You can also email feedback to KansasCityBaseballVault@gmail.com.

(Today's short music clip: "Achilles" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

NOTE: Part of the conversation referenced future free agents, comparing current Royals to that crop. Unfortunately, we were going off a list of free agents for the year AFTER this class, which does change the equation a bit, at least so far as comparing potential Royals free agents to other free agents. Cain in particular won't have as star-studded a cast to contend against when he's a free agent, and Moustakas won't have Donaldson or Machado to fend off. To me, the general conclusion is the same - that Moose and Cain are probably most likely to stick and have situations best-suited to find something now if they can - even if the steps to get to that point are slightly different. Thanks to Hunter Samuels for catching our error. The responsible parties have been sacked.