The Shifting of a System

The Royals were pitching-rich until they were hitting-rich.

The 2018 draft set the Royals farm system up for the ascent from one of the worst in baseball to one of the best. I remember that draft so well. When the pick got to the Royals at 18, Nolan Gorman was still there. So was Brice Turang. And I think I remember some Nico Hoerner talk as well. But Brady Singer was there too and that’s who the Royals picked. Then, as you know, they took his college teammate Jackson Kowar with the 33rd pick and another college guy, Daniel Lynch, with the 34th. Then it was Kris Bubic at 40 and Jonathan Bowlan at 58. Five college pitchers in five selections. That was the beginning of the turn.

As you know, four of those five have reached the big leagues and three of the four have had success in the big leagues. Bowlan is the only one who hasn’t reached the top level, but he probably would have if not for getting hurt. Of course, getting hurt is part of why you need a (sorry to use a technical term here) crapload of pitchers in your system. They also took and signed Austin Cox, Zach Haake, Tyler Gray, Austin Lambright, Rylan Kaufman, Jon Heasley, Christian Cosby, Kyle Hinton, Noah Bryant, Bryce Hensley, Josh Dye, Derrick Adams and Ted Cillis. All college pitchers. They didn’t take many bats, but in a span of three days, a system that was lacking pitchers was no longer lacking pitchers.

Things don’t progress linearly generally, but so many of these guys just hit the ground running. Singer, Kowar, Lynch, Bubic and Bowlan all had pretty immediate minor league success once they started pitching. Cox, Haake, Lambright, Heasley and Dye have all had their moments. In 2019, they did it again, though not quite as blatantly.

They took Alec Marsh, Grant Gambrell, Dante Biasi, Noah Murdock, Drew Parrish, Justin Hooper, A.J. Franklin, Austin Manning and others. Some have been better than others there, but it was just a continuation of the system becoming pitching-rich, partially with the philosophy of throwing as many as you can out there and hoping to find five to seven who work.

While this was going on, the Royals had guys like Nick Pratto, Seuly Matias, MJ Melendez and some other bats in their system that just weren’t progressing. They took Bobby Witt Jr. with the second overall pick in the 2019 draft. But the bats just flat out stunk. If you’re reading this, you probably know very well how bad their 2019 season was. Witt got a bit of a pass as it was his first exposure to professional baseball, but Pratto, Melendez and Matias basically fell off the prospect map with their seasons.

And so the Royals pivoted. For years, they’d been the butt of jokes about developing hitters, and as frustrating as that was to hear and must have been for the front office, it was deserved. The best hitter this front office had developed was probably either Eric Hosmer, a perfectly fine hitting first baseman, or Salvador Perez, a catcher who had big power but somehow less than zero plate discipline. There were others like Mike Moustakas and Whit Merrifield, but the track record was…rough. And so after the brutal 2019 season, the Royals said enough was enough and went modern.

I can’t do the change justice the way Alec Lewis did in The Athletic back in August, so I’d recommend reading that, but Alec Zumwalt, Drew Saylor, Mike Tosar and Keoni DeRenne took things over. You might have recognized a couple of those names as part of the group who worked with guys like Perez and Jorge Soler before his breakout season. Zumwalt was already in the organization but he spearheaded the change. And then, as I’ve lamented so many times, we didn’t get to see how it worked during the 2020 season because there was no minor league season.

But we did hear about it. We heard how Pratto and Melendez and Witt and so many others were looking great. It’s just so easy to say that as an organization wanting fans to buy in to a new philosophy after the old philosophy proved unsuccessful so many times. I don’t know about you, but I was cautiously optimistic, but not ready to fully believe. Then spring training came around and Witt was the best player on the field. Pratto was showing huge power. Kyle Isbel was making a push to the big league roster. Matias hit a ball that almost knocked a palm tree over. It was spring training, but it was impressive nonetheless.

Then we had to wait some more after that. Isbel made the big league roster and had his struggles (more on that in a bit), but the rest didn’t make the team and the minor league season didn’t start until May. So it was back to reports from the alternate site. When the season started, though, we could see it was for real. It took a couple weeks for some, but by the time the season was rolling, there were so many players doing things we hadn’t seen from anyone but the guys like Hosmer, Moustakas, Gordon and Butler in a long, long time.

When the season was done, the prospect pedigree for Pratto and Melendez had completely done a 180 from where they were in 2019. Vinnie Pasquantino had become a legitimate bat-first prospect. Michael Massey had a year that put him on the map as a second baseman of the future. Nick Loftin had a run that makes his path to the big leagues seem much shorter than it did a year ago. Emmanuel Rivera had such a nice start to his season that he got a big league shot. Maikel Garcia had such a nice year that he got added to the 40-man.

There are more too. Brewer Hicklen had a monster final two months. John Rave, who is a legitimate center fielder, started to tap into his offensive ability. Kale Emshoff and Tucker Bradley showed promise. It was just a lot of players hitting well in a way I don’t think we’ve seen from the Royals system in quite some time.

But maybe the most impressive, to me, was the Isbel turnaround. He struggled in his brief time in the big leagues and then struggled when he started the year in the minors. This group had to make changes on the fly with him and it took a little time. But from June 29 until the day he played his last AAA game of the year, September 11, he hit .300/.380/.507. If you’ve read me for any length of time, you know that I love a good development story, but more than that, I love a good adjustment story. If you can adjust, you can succeed. And Isbel and the offensive development staff showed they can succeed.

I’ve spent an awful lot of time talking about the offensive prospects, but the point of this is that the system has gone from all pitching and thinking that if the Royals were going to win in the future, it’d have to be a bunch of 2-1 or 3-2 games. But now, the system has absolutely shifted. I think you can make an argument that it’s more tilted to the offense with the graduation of so many pitching prospects, but I still think they’re loaded there as well. Not to give too much free publicity to The Athletic, but Alec Lewis wrote a great look at the pitching still in the system. There’s a lot of that too.

And before anyone laments that they need to overhaul the pitching side, they’ve done that too. You can make a strong argument that the Royals inability to develop arms, at least starters, was a bigger issue than their inability to develop bats. Paul Gibson is overseeing a huge change within the organization that is now relying heavily on sports science and technology to guide their decisions. A one-size-fits-all approach that the Royals would likely argue they didn’t take is something they absolutely did take. They don’t do that anymore. Just spend five minutes on the Royals Farm Report Twitter account to see what the young arms are doing. The number of young pitchers hitting upper-90s or higher is pretty astounding.

I don’t know if it’s going to work. Of all the young bats, only Isbel has become a big leaguer and the sample is minuscule. I mentioned the mixed debuts of just about every pitching prospect so far. But I do know that this system has shifted into something much more balanced and, theoretically, more sustainable. It’s not based on having top-five picks who get by on talent without proper development. It’s based on good approaches from both sides of the ball from the development staff, which means that while the system rankings might drop a bit from their mid-season heights because of graduations, there should actually be a pipeline now that we didn’t see before.

The argument of process vs. results is one that kind of drives me crazy. Give me a good process all day and the results will come, but this is one of those situations where I think we have a pretty good idea that the process is there. But until we see the results, we won’t truly know. We’ll get a lot of answers over the next eight to nine months, but I’ve very much enjoyed seeing this system shift into something that feels like it can lead to the solution and get the organization back into prominence.

Photo credit: Minda Haas Kuhlmann