I find myself feeling more optimistic lately about Jonathan Heasley than about any of the other starters that KC drafted ahead of him. Singer in particular strikes me as being more high-strung and mercurial (and maybe hyper-sensitive?) than the others. To a lesser degree this might also be true of Lynch. Heasley, OTOH, seems much more down-to-earth or level-headed or well-grounded or something along those lines.
I wonder if Singer isn't maybe responding poorly to the (real or perceived) pressure of the expectations from being such a high draft pick. He has 45 career starts under his belt now. That hardly makes him a grizzled veteran but he should be well past the "wide-eyed rookie" stage of his career, and I'm not certain that he really is. 18ER in his last 26IP has done nothing to dispel that doubt.
Soon we'll need to stop calling them our "young starters." Singer, Kowar, Bubic, Heasley and Lynch currently average 25 years and 5 months of age. Singer is just 2 months away from his 26th birthday. They really aren't all that young for MLB players anymore.
Saberhagen was just 21 when he won his World Series MVP. Now THAT is a "young starter." (Reliable workhorse Mark Gubicza was 23 at the time. Equally reliable Danny Jackson was one month younger than Singer is now.)
Referring to those five pitchers from the 2018 draft, Royals Review declared on 7/1/19 that "We've got a Fab Five." They really should have known better. Especially in reference to an organization that has been so inept in developing pitchers for three full decades now. It's easy to think of the three exceptions to that - Greinke, Duffy (sort of) and Ventura - precisely because they've been so rare and unusual around here.
Heasley has been impressive lately, but let's keep in mind that it's a four-start stretch. Outside of Kowar, all of the young starters (and yes, I'll get to that term in a second) have had multiple four-start stretches as good or better. So while I'm happy with what I'm seeing, I'm not ready to say anything about him being at the top of the list.
As for Singer, while I wrote quite a bit about his inability to handle any adversity, I think he's been considerably about that this season. He doesn't seem to get shaken and while he's struggled a bit in his last few starts, in two of those starts, his manager has pulled him to ask a reliever to strand runners. Both times, both runners left on base have scored. Sure, Singer put them on, but you'd expect he'd get some stranded runners sometimes. I'm a lot more happy with Singer over his last few starts than the numbers would suggest. He made mistakes against Houston, but this is a guy who absolutely crumbled at any sign of pressure last year. In San Francisco, he couldn't find the zone for four batters and still only allowed two runs in five innings. Yesterday, he got out of a massive jam in the fifth and I would have let him try to get out of it in the sixth, but Cuas ended up giving up the home run that made Singer's line look worse.
And the "young" terminology, to me at least, is more about the number of innings. It's very easy to forget that Lynch, Kowar, Heasley and many others didn't get to throw a single competitive inning in 2020. As we get farther and farther away from that, it's harder and harder to remember. But Lynch has 127 big league innings. Kris Bubic has 208. Brady Singer has the most with 238.1. Carlos Hernandez has 130. Jonathan Heasley has 51. Jackson Kowar has 33.2. Jonathan Bowlan, who is rehabbing now, has 0. Only two have what you'd consider a bit more than a full big league season and the rest aren't even all that close.
Some of it is the way the game is played today vs. the mid-80s, but some of it is simply they haven't had a lot of time to get their big league reps in and we don't have any idea what kind of an impact having no minor league season had on these guys in 2020. Obviously Singer and Bubic spent the year in the big leagues, but Bubic would have never even been a big leaguer if there was a minor league season to be had. So if you prefer inexperienced, that's fine, but they're still very young by big league standards.
Within limits, IMO, that's a totally legit way to look at it... Innings rather than age determining who is a "young starter." But that begs another question: why did they have to wait until age 25+ to accumulate the small number of IP they have now? (Sabes and Gubicza and Jackson, among many others, clearly didn't have to.) 2020 can explain perhaps one year of that delay, but not all of it.
Poor coaching and development? Or did Dayton simply draft the wrong guys, giving the coaches/developers little to work with?
I understand what both of you are saying. I would put it this way not even based on age. Singer and Bubic are not young anymore. This is the 3rd full season. Better results are to be expected now. Maybe not better, but improvement is expected. They don’t get the young label to me anymore in my eyes. With no 2020…Lynch, Heasley, Hernandez….ok… I’d buy that I guess. Pitching is a little more difficult because some do figure it out later or with a different pitch…etc. But man, I think if they were going to be top of the rotation pieces we’d know by now or at least have a much better feel regardless of what DM says.
I'm not saying I have faith in any of these guys to become aces like we all thought they might be a few years ago, but 2020's impact goes beyond just 2020. There were innings limits last year because of it and, again, you can say this is the third full season for Singer and Bubic only, but also there's not a single person in the game who looks at 2020 as anything remotely normal, even at the big league level and that's not even accounting for the fact that it was barely more than one-third of a full season anyway.
Sure, IDK if its right or wrong either. But for how young the front office always says….Singer and Bubic have 23,24, and 25 left is all before a free agent. Now, three years is a long time but from an age and rookie contract timeframe they aren’t exactly young anymore. It ultimately doesn’t really matter because life happens but I just get tired of DM talking is all. Lol
I’ve been pretty anti Singer to be honest. Not anti Singer, but pro bullpen Singer. He’s shown more this of that potential this year than almost anyone else. But his refusal to still adapt as a pitcher infuriates me. :)
I believe both Bubic and Singer spent enough time in the minors that they pushed their free agency back a year anyway, so they do still have four seasons left before they reach free agency. I agree DM needs to stop talking, but my point is and always will be that there is enough they do wrong to talk about for days so we don't need to create things that they didn't actually do wrong.
They were drafted in June of 2018. The Royals are slower with their prospects than some teams, but I don't know if that's right or wrong. So that brings us to 2020, where there was literally no minor league season. But even for a guy like Singer who pitched the whole year in the big leagues, it was just 64ish innings because the season was 60 games. So then after either not throwing a single competitive pitch in 2020 or throwing way fewer than a full season, they were careful with workload in 2021. I don't defend the Royals often, but their lack of innings has very little to do with anything but circumstance.
I can't stop watching the O'Hearn pinch-hit double GIF. He got 84 mph middle-middle, and hit a chopping grounder that fortunately got over the 1st-base bag. Kind of sums up the year on offense.
When I was watching the game, I thought it must have been like outer third and down. So I rewound. And nope, he just couldn't do actual damage on a 2-0 middle-middle pitch. It ended up working, but yikes.
Dayton Moore with a very troubling admission today. But first let's review just a bit of history.... Luke Hochevar was a 1-1 draft pick who gave the team two very good years out of the bullpen and nothing else. Kyle Zimmer was a top-5 pick who gave them a couple of decent months out of the bullpen and nothing else.
And today DM admitted that top-5 pick Asa Lacy might end up being "a power lefty out of the bullpen."
Pitchers taken in the top five need to be long-term top-of-the-rotation starters, not bullpen pieces that last a couple of months or a couple of years. And you definitely CANNOT blow three such draft choices in a row. (I could have made it sound even worse by adding Mike Montgomery to the list, but as a #12 pick that error was perhaps not quite as egregious. Perhaps.)
Now the next question is: will Frank Mozzicato ever solve the mystery of the strike zone? Or is this history of failed top-5 picks among pitchers going to grow even longer?
I find myself feeling more optimistic lately about Jonathan Heasley than about any of the other starters that KC drafted ahead of him. Singer in particular strikes me as being more high-strung and mercurial (and maybe hyper-sensitive?) than the others. To a lesser degree this might also be true of Lynch. Heasley, OTOH, seems much more down-to-earth or level-headed or well-grounded or something along those lines.
I wonder if Singer isn't maybe responding poorly to the (real or perceived) pressure of the expectations from being such a high draft pick. He has 45 career starts under his belt now. That hardly makes him a grizzled veteran but he should be well past the "wide-eyed rookie" stage of his career, and I'm not certain that he really is. 18ER in his last 26IP has done nothing to dispel that doubt.
Soon we'll need to stop calling them our "young starters." Singer, Kowar, Bubic, Heasley and Lynch currently average 25 years and 5 months of age. Singer is just 2 months away from his 26th birthday. They really aren't all that young for MLB players anymore.
Saberhagen was just 21 when he won his World Series MVP. Now THAT is a "young starter." (Reliable workhorse Mark Gubicza was 23 at the time. Equally reliable Danny Jackson was one month younger than Singer is now.)
Referring to those five pitchers from the 2018 draft, Royals Review declared on 7/1/19 that "We've got a Fab Five." They really should have known better. Especially in reference to an organization that has been so inept in developing pitchers for three full decades now. It's easy to think of the three exceptions to that - Greinke, Duffy (sort of) and Ventura - precisely because they've been so rare and unusual around here.
Heasley has been impressive lately, but let's keep in mind that it's a four-start stretch. Outside of Kowar, all of the young starters (and yes, I'll get to that term in a second) have had multiple four-start stretches as good or better. So while I'm happy with what I'm seeing, I'm not ready to say anything about him being at the top of the list.
As for Singer, while I wrote quite a bit about his inability to handle any adversity, I think he's been considerably about that this season. He doesn't seem to get shaken and while he's struggled a bit in his last few starts, in two of those starts, his manager has pulled him to ask a reliever to strand runners. Both times, both runners left on base have scored. Sure, Singer put them on, but you'd expect he'd get some stranded runners sometimes. I'm a lot more happy with Singer over his last few starts than the numbers would suggest. He made mistakes against Houston, but this is a guy who absolutely crumbled at any sign of pressure last year. In San Francisco, he couldn't find the zone for four batters and still only allowed two runs in five innings. Yesterday, he got out of a massive jam in the fifth and I would have let him try to get out of it in the sixth, but Cuas ended up giving up the home run that made Singer's line look worse.
And the "young" terminology, to me at least, is more about the number of innings. It's very easy to forget that Lynch, Kowar, Heasley and many others didn't get to throw a single competitive inning in 2020. As we get farther and farther away from that, it's harder and harder to remember. But Lynch has 127 big league innings. Kris Bubic has 208. Brady Singer has the most with 238.1. Carlos Hernandez has 130. Jonathan Heasley has 51. Jackson Kowar has 33.2. Jonathan Bowlan, who is rehabbing now, has 0. Only two have what you'd consider a bit more than a full big league season and the rest aren't even all that close.
Some of it is the way the game is played today vs. the mid-80s, but some of it is simply they haven't had a lot of time to get their big league reps in and we don't have any idea what kind of an impact having no minor league season had on these guys in 2020. Obviously Singer and Bubic spent the year in the big leagues, but Bubic would have never even been a big leaguer if there was a minor league season to be had. So if you prefer inexperienced, that's fine, but they're still very young by big league standards.
Within limits, IMO, that's a totally legit way to look at it... Innings rather than age determining who is a "young starter." But that begs another question: why did they have to wait until age 25+ to accumulate the small number of IP they have now? (Sabes and Gubicza and Jackson, among many others, clearly didn't have to.) 2020 can explain perhaps one year of that delay, but not all of it.
Poor coaching and development? Or did Dayton simply draft the wrong guys, giving the coaches/developers little to work with?
I understand what both of you are saying. I would put it this way not even based on age. Singer and Bubic are not young anymore. This is the 3rd full season. Better results are to be expected now. Maybe not better, but improvement is expected. They don’t get the young label to me anymore in my eyes. With no 2020…Lynch, Heasley, Hernandez….ok… I’d buy that I guess. Pitching is a little more difficult because some do figure it out later or with a different pitch…etc. But man, I think if they were going to be top of the rotation pieces we’d know by now or at least have a much better feel regardless of what DM says.
I'm not saying I have faith in any of these guys to become aces like we all thought they might be a few years ago, but 2020's impact goes beyond just 2020. There were innings limits last year because of it and, again, you can say this is the third full season for Singer and Bubic only, but also there's not a single person in the game who looks at 2020 as anything remotely normal, even at the big league level and that's not even accounting for the fact that it was barely more than one-third of a full season anyway.
Sure, IDK if its right or wrong either. But for how young the front office always says….Singer and Bubic have 23,24, and 25 left is all before a free agent. Now, three years is a long time but from an age and rookie contract timeframe they aren’t exactly young anymore. It ultimately doesn’t really matter because life happens but I just get tired of DM talking is all. Lol
I’ve been pretty anti Singer to be honest. Not anti Singer, but pro bullpen Singer. He’s shown more this of that potential this year than almost anyone else. But his refusal to still adapt as a pitcher infuriates me. :)
I believe both Bubic and Singer spent enough time in the minors that they pushed their free agency back a year anyway, so they do still have four seasons left before they reach free agency. I agree DM needs to stop talking, but my point is and always will be that there is enough they do wrong to talk about for days so we don't need to create things that they didn't actually do wrong.
They were drafted in June of 2018. The Royals are slower with their prospects than some teams, but I don't know if that's right or wrong. So that brings us to 2020, where there was literally no minor league season. But even for a guy like Singer who pitched the whole year in the big leagues, it was just 64ish innings because the season was 60 games. So then after either not throwing a single competitive pitch in 2020 or throwing way fewer than a full season, they were careful with workload in 2021. I don't defend the Royals often, but their lack of innings has very little to do with anything but circumstance.
I can't stop watching the O'Hearn pinch-hit double GIF. He got 84 mph middle-middle, and hit a chopping grounder that fortunately got over the 1st-base bag. Kind of sums up the year on offense.
When I was watching the game, I thought it must have been like outer third and down. So I rewound. And nope, he just couldn't do actual damage on a 2-0 middle-middle pitch. It ended up working, but yikes.
But...wait....Hud said he "was up there HACKIN'!!!!" That's the universal solution to all problems, right?
Dayton Moore with a very troubling admission today. But first let's review just a bit of history.... Luke Hochevar was a 1-1 draft pick who gave the team two very good years out of the bullpen and nothing else. Kyle Zimmer was a top-5 pick who gave them a couple of decent months out of the bullpen and nothing else.
And today DM admitted that top-5 pick Asa Lacy might end up being "a power lefty out of the bullpen."
Pitchers taken in the top five need to be long-term top-of-the-rotation starters, not bullpen pieces that last a couple of months or a couple of years. And you definitely CANNOT blow three such draft choices in a row. (I could have made it sound even worse by adding Mike Montgomery to the list, but as a #12 pick that error was perhaps not quite as egregious. Perhaps.)
Now the next question is: will Frank Mozzicato ever solve the mystery of the strike zone? Or is this history of failed top-5 picks among pitchers going to grow even longer?