Which Royals would you protect from a hypothetical expansion draft?

The season is over, but the off-season transactions haven’t really begun yet, so it is a bit of a dead time here at Royals Review. I did have an interesting email the other day from a baseball fan named H.W. Linwood that got my baseball-nerd senses tingling. What if there was an expansion draft this off-season? Say MLB was expanding to two more franchises this winter (they’re probably overdue for expansion, this is the longest period without teams being added since expansion began, despite a more international talent pool).

He set forth the following guidelines, which mirror the expansion draft protection guidelines from the 1997 expansion draft when the Devil Rays and Diamondbacks were…