Young Pitching is On the Clock
It's been five years since the Royals sold out for college pitchers. The time to produce is now.
We all know what the 2018 draft brought for the Kansas City Royals. In order, Brady Singer, Jackson Kowar, Daniel Lynch, Kris Bubic and Jonathan Bowlan were selected on the first day. They also selected and signed, in order, Austin Cox, Zach Haake, Tyler Gray, Austin Lambright, Rylan Kaufman, Jonathan Heasley, Christian Cosby, Kyle Hinton, Noah Bryant, Bryce Hensley, Josh Dye, Derrick Adams, Andres Nunez and Ted Cillis. That is 19 college pitchers out of the 33 players signed from that draft. Of those 19, five have appeared in the big leagues, one has an ERA better than league average.
It’s been bad. We know it, they know it, people who barely even follow baseball know it. And it goes beyond those 19. There wasn’t as much fanfare in 2019, but they selected (and signed) Alec Marsh, Grant Gambrell, Dante Biasi, Noah Murdock, Drew Parrish, Anthony Veneziano, Adam Lukas, Justin Hooper, AJ Franklin, Austin Manning, Cody Davenport, Matt Stil, Elliott Anderson, Alex Smith, Josh Broughton, Zack Phillips, Patrick Smith, Jonah Dipoto and Augie Sylk. That’s 19 more. Of course, so many of the lower-round pitchers aren’t going to make it and that’s fine, but over two years, they did select 15 pitchers in the top 10 rounds and only four of those have gotten to the big leagues.
I’m rehashing history. Again, we all know that. And yet I can’t stop thinking about that article in The Athletic that was written by three previous Royals beat writers, Rustin Dodd, Andy McCullough and Alec Lewis. It was scathing. Maybe it led to Dayton Moore’s firing (or maybe Moore’s comments after did) and maybe it didn’t, but it was just a few days after that article dropped that the Royals started their major changes with the dismissal of Moore. As we get closer to the 2023 season beginning and many more changes having come since that day in September, I’ve been thinking a lot about that pitching staff. I think about this paragraph almost daily:
“If these stud pitchers — Kowar, Lynch, Singer, all these guys — had they been Dodgers or Rays or Guardians, they would be very, very good,” said one rival pro scout, referencing three clubs seen as at the forefront of pitching development. “But unfortunately … they haven’t been taught how to move well. They haven’t been introduced to the metrics that gives them an idea of how they can pitch most effectively.”
It haunts me. No joke, I think about it regularly and it upsets me. The Royals spent draft capital and draft dollars on pitchers who they thought could turn the organization around and ultimately put them in the hands of Cal Eldred. That’s malpractice. And I’m not going to relitigate all of that because the organization has made the correct decision since, so good on them even if it was years too late. But that move is something that I find so interesting. “…had they been Dodgers or Rays or Guardians, they would be very, very good.” The Royals hired the “guru” from the Guardians.
Maybe they’re now in an other organization. I’ve heard multiple people who are way smarter than me talk about how a guy like Lynch might explode in another organization. I had a scout with another organization tell me that Kowar is like three tweaks away from finding it again. A different scout asked me in August what I thought it would take to pry Bubic away and when I asked why, he said because he knew that there was a number three starter in there who could pitch a LDS clincher. I’ve heard from others about others, but those three stand out with the quote from The Athletic above.
Basically what they’re all saying is that the Royals have a pitching staff full of pitchers who, with a change of scenery, could become what the Royals thought they would be when they drafted them. Well, the location is the same, but the voices are almost exclusively different now. It’s no longer Eldred and Larry Carter. No, instead it’s Brian Sweeney and Mitch Stetter. They also added Zach Bove, who is extremely well-regarded. The one name of the three who you might scoff at is Stetter because he’s been with the organization, and I’ll get to that in a bit, but the point here is that the voices these young pitchers will be hearing are different. Different isn’t always better and I think there’s at least a reason to be cautious with the optimism, but it also can’t get a whole lot worse. Sorry, Buddy Bell, but I said it.
The Royals mlb.com beat writer, Anne Rogers, put out a great newsletter yesterday about the young pitching, which was just perfect for me since I started writing this over the weekend. She didn’t get too in depth about the work that they’ve done, but you can tell just in a quote from Lynch how different things are going to be.
“I’ve talked to Sweeney and Bove about different things, different subjects,” Lynch said. “It’s cool to have two resources like that. Just sort of recognize that you have three guys now with all different strengths. … We’ve talked about pitch design and shaping. I came to them with an idea of what I wanted to do, because I really wanted to be on the same page.”
Look, maybe I’m being unfair, but can you imagine reading that with Eldred in charge? I know I can’t. I feel bad giving away more of the newsletter here instead of you just subscribing to the work, but I just think it’s so important for this particular subject.
Sweeney earns praise from pitchers he’s worked with in the past for balancing each player’s needs well. He wants them to tell him how they want to develop, then he guides them along the way. The dialogue about analytics and data is different than what some pitchers have heard or thought about in the past.
That change is welcomed by players, who are always looking for ways to improve -- especially with how the past two seasons have gone.
“The actual conversations are different, talking more like pitches and pitch shape, a lot more analytically-driven versus conversations I’ve had in the past,” Keller said. “I haven’t thought this way before in the past, and it’s really cool to see this view. I really like the change of scenery in a way.”
Players are always going to praise the guys they’re with now and sometimes that ends up throwing the previous regime under the bus, but even if you just look at what that Brad Keller quote is saying, it’s very clear that they were well aware where the issues existed before. Even the oldest of old school baseball fans should agree that if you’re not utilizing all the tools at your disposal, you’re not doing enough. And I don’t believe the Royals were doing enough.
I had a chance to talk with someone who has worked with Sweeney before and he echoed what was in the newsletter. He said that he doesn’t see any two pitchers as being alike and isn’t afraid of anything like analytics. He is said to be a great communicator, which is something we’ve heard so much this offseason regarding the new hires (maybe saying something about the past hires…) and is “nearly impossible to dislike.” You obviously don’t need to like who you’re working with, but it certainly helps.
On the subject of Bove, people within the game who I have talked to can’t stop raving about how fast his mind works. He’s able to get the data, process the data and explain it in ways that this Royals pitching staff may not be familiar with. And that’s a good thing. Bove is also said to do wonders with grips and pitch design that can help to get the most out of certain pitches that maybe seem like they should be better than they are.
A few that stand out to me are Bubic’s fastball, Lynch’s slider, Kowar’s fastball and Keller’s sinker. On the pitch arsenal stats on Baseball Savant, they are four of the seven worst pitches thrown by a member of the 2022 staff, but you sort of feel like all should be better. The combination of Sweeney and Bove, I believe, have a chance to make an instant change that could help all four of those pitchers tap into something to make big improvements in 2023.
By run value, Bubic’s fastball was the sixth-worst pitch in baseball. Lynch’s slider was tied for 17th-worst. Kowar’s fastball was tied for 59th-worst (and would have been way worse if he had more time) and Keller’s sinker was tied for 111th-worst out of 3,191 pitches. So improvement is a low bar, but even if they can be merely bad pitches instead of world-class bad, that’s a big jump and could make a big difference.
And as for Stetter, I completely understand the trepidation of promoting the minor league manager of pitching performance and thinking that it’s a good thing. A big part of his role has been to be a liaison between the minor leaguers and the research and development team. He’s worked with almost all of these pitchers throughout their minor league team and while the results have been less than stellar, I get the impression that the minor league development team was both hampered by a lack of a cohesive organizational message and not as bad as it maybe seemed.
Stetter is known to be honed in on analytics and is extremely innovative. On one hand, it’s not entirely fair to judge one person from the development team for organizational failures. I think it’s interesting that since certain people have been removed the organization, things seem to have changed.
That’s one player’s viewpoint from a couple of months ago. I’d recommend giving this podcast a listen on either Spotify or Apple. Time will tell as the season goes on, but it does appear that things are going to be different from top to bottom even without sweeping changes in the development staff. I know there’s been a lot made of JJ Picollo’s comments that the issue was at the big league level and the transition. I continue to disagree with that comment as a whole, but I also don’t think it’s that far off.
They certainly had their hiccups through the minors, but Lynch was excellent up through high-A and leading into the lost season. Bubic posted a nearly four-to-one strikeout-to-walk ratio. Kowar was dominant in AAA before his 2021 callup. Heasley showed an ability to get strikeouts and limit walks in the minors. What changed in the big leagues? For one, it’s harder. But for another, it really does sound like there just wasn’t a plan. I’ve always said that development, especially for pitchers, doesn’t stop when they get called up. Nobody comes to the big leagues fully formed. The best organizations see their pitching get better as they gain big league time, not worse.
The Royals have generally seen regression at the big league level. That’s bad for any organization, but especially for one that has invested so much in this group. But what both the actions and the words have shown this winter is that they believe they pinpointed the problem and they took actions to fix it. Is it too little, too late? We don’t know the answer to that and won’t for a bit, but the message sent is that what happened before wasn’t on the individuals. What happens next will be, whether that’s fair or not.
The Royals have a small army of young (though getting less young) pitching that needs to show they can be part of a winning big league club. This is a massive season for them. It’s a lot to ask over the course of just one season, but they’re banking on the new coaching staff having an immediate impact and that leaves these young pitchers with a lot to prove in 2023. And if they don’t, well, their time might be nearly up when the season ends.
lurking for way too long, and really enjoying your knowledgable insight for a while, but had to subscribe after this article - well done!
I am a new royals fan, but longtime baseball fan. Happy to get on now before the bandwagon leaves. I think they could be a real "team" - which is rare these days. If Singer and greinke stay on track, and just one SP steps up? And the "kids" keep swinging and tcob?... I think the royals will be in contention sooner than later. Baseball is fun!
Very nice piece, David. Some really eye-opening info in here that a lot of us wondered about, but to hear these things from insiders...
As a glass half-full guy, it gives me optimism that the stuff is there, and with the right people now in place we can start to see what we've suspected all along from these guys. Anyone who has watched the young Royals pitchers the last couple of years has seen the flashes that have tantalized us. All of them have had moments, without the consistency. Hopefully the potential has just been delayed...