2026 Royals Draft Review
The Royals went a different direction at the top, but overall had a nice draft.
The baseball draft is a funny thing. The player who ends up the best often doesn’t go first overall. Sometimes players you would never have expected in the later rounds emerge. Sometimes, early picks flop. It’s easy to see a difference between baseball and the other sports. In baseball, you don’t draft a player with the expectation that he’ll help your team right away, as you see in other sports. There is a lot of development that goes into just getting to the top level. It often raises the question of whether drafting or development is more important. I actually kind of think development is more vital here, which is why evaluating a draft within days is a fool’s errand. But I’m going to take that errand on.
First, I want to dig in a little as to why I think development is more important. The gap is probably closing as fewer high school options become available. In this year’s draft, just 60 of the first 313 picks were taken out of high school. Go back to 2010, a random year I selected before the slotting system, and there were 119 high schoolers drafted in the first 10 rounds. Some will argue that NIL has been the catalyst for fewer high schoolers getting drafted, but it’s clear that the slotting system has left high schoolers more enticed to go to school. In 2019, it was nearly the same number of high school selections, and that was before NIL was a thing. Anyway, I digress. The fact that you have such raw players coming into the system requires more development than anything else.
I think a team can marry the two by understanding where the development system succeeds and drafting toward that. The two should work together, not separately. That’s an area where I think the Royals struggled for quite some time, but have improved under Brian Bridges. Though, to be fair, the Royals have also had more draft success than people give them credit for. Bobby Witt Jr. is obviously the star of the last decade, but they also drafted Michael Massey and Vinnie Pasquantino in that draft. The real issues came in the next couple of years. The 2020 draft was a tough one for a million reasons, but for the Royals, it’s that they picked the right player, and he just couldn’t stay on the field. In 2021, they got cute with the seventh overall pick, but that effort did give them the slot money to draft Carter Jensen in the third round. They also picked Noah Cameron in that draft.
That brings us nicely to the 2026 draft, where they selected Zion Rose with their first pick. At six overall, I didn’t have Rose on my radar. He was on my radar as a potential pick at 30, but I didn’t see this one coming. Let’s just get to it.
I’m going to hit on the first few picks in detail, then pick a couple from later rounds.
First Round - Zion Rose (6)
The Royals comped Rose to Ron Gant, which I love because I don’t think there are enough players comped to Ron Gant. I just loved watching Gant on TBS back in the day. I hadn’t thought of him with Rose until the Royals mentioned it, but yeah, it kind of makes sense. Before breaking his leg in a motorbike accident, he had an impressive combination of power and speed. That’s what Rose potentially brings to the table. He stole 55 bases in his last two years at Louisville and was caught just six times. He showed off more raw power than game power, but had plenty of game power as well. He did have an ankle injury that cost him the first third of the season or so, which means all the numbers he put up were against conference opponents rather than non-conference games that could have allowed him to boost them earlier.
Now, let’s talk about where he was drafted. I have said, and will stick by, that I think it’s silly to play games with the sixth overall pick. Just take the best player, sign him, and move on to the next one. For that reason, I don’t like the rationale of the pick. I do think there is a world where the Royals had a very similar grade on Rose to the one they had on Drew Burress, Eric Booth Jr., and maybe someone else, and decided to take the player who gave them the most draft-pool flexibility. If that’s the case, okay, but they better be right. And let me be clear that I love that they added Rose to the organization. I just think the value at this pick wasn’t right, but I’m hoping to be proven wrong.