The Kansas City Royals may have had one of the best drafts in recent memory as we look back at their 2018 haul. Now, the club was set up well for success when it had four picks in the first 40 selections of the draft thanks to the compensation picks for losing Eric Hosmer, Lorenzo Cain, and Mike Moustakas, but that doesn’t always guarantee success. We’ve seen a lot of teams in recent years whiff with multiple early picks when overthinking things and perhaps not having a great plan mapped out ahead of time.
The Royals were not one of those clubs. The organization had a very clear strategy entering the draft: They were going all-in on college pitching in an effort to rebuild a farm system that had struggled to draft and develop pitching for years – mostly through the high school ranks.
The list of failures is extremely long and features the likes of Foster Griffin, Scott Blewett, Ashe Russell, Nolan Watson, and Garrett Davila when counting only the 2014 and 2015 drafts. Those five prep arms cost the organization more than $10.5 million in signing bonuses. Those five pitchers have also accounted for zero MLB innings to date and two of them (Russell and Davila) are out of baseball. Watson is still in A-ball (and hurt). Griffin and Blewett are pitching in Triple-A but their ERAs are 5.58 and 7.23, respectively.
Fast-forward to the 2018 draft where the Royals waded waist-deep into the college pitching market and came away with 11 college pitchers (and one junior college pitcher) with their first 17 selections spanning the initial 14 rounds of the draft. And eight or nine of their 2018 picks could end up with fantasy baseball value.
FANTASY VALUE: Brady Singer, RHP, 18th overall: At one point, Singer was in the discussion to go No. 1 overall in the 2018 draft so for him to slip down to 18 was a huge win for the Royals. After not pitching any pro innings after signing, he was assigned to High-A ball to begin 2019 and posted a 1.87 ERA in 10 games. Promoted to Double-A at the beginning of June, he’s had a couple of rough games and has a 6.35 ERA in five starts. The balls have been jumping out of the yard more for Singer, who allowed just one homer in 57.1 A-ball innings but has now given up four in 22.2 Double-A innings. Even so, he’s still inducing ground balls at a very high rate and doing a solid job of throwing strikes. His strikeouts are down in Double-A after averaging almost one per inning at the lower level but he’s shown the ability to make adjustments. There is mid-rotation potential here with a chance at being a top-of-rotation guy if he can keep missing bats and inducing ground-balls at an elite rate.
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