Free Agent Signings:
Carlos Santana
Mike Minor
Michael Taylor
Ervin Santana
Top 10 Prospects:
1 Bobby Witt Jr., SS
2 Asa Lacy, LHP
3 Daniel Lynch, LHP
4 Jackson Kowar, RHP
5 Erick Pena, OF
6 Nick Loftin, SS
7 Kyle Isbel, OF
8 Khali Lee, OF
9 Jonathan Bowlan, RHP
10 Carlos Hernedez, RHP [Reply]
Daniel Lynch is developing rapidly, so don’t be surprised if he’s promoted as early as June. His fastball velocity is consistently in the 95 to 99 mph range with sink and deception thanks to his lanky all-legs-and-arms delivery. His slider is a true wipeout, nasty, filthy, see-you-later-type pitch. His change-up is above average, and he’s not afraid to throw it in any count. His curveball is serviceable. It’s been difficult for Lynch to command his pitches in the strike zone, but that has more to do with his height and wing span than mechanics. He has ace upside. [Reply]
Asa Lacy, whom the Royals drafted at No. 4 last year, was projected to take one of the quickest paths to the big leagues among the 2020 picks. He gets a unique downward angle on his delivery that adds deception to his mid-90s fastball, which he fills up the strike zone with early in the count. Lacy has two above-average breaking balls: His slider, which comes in at 88 mph with late break and tilt, is probably his best off-speed pitch, but his 12-6 downward curveball is also a lethal weapon. He has an above-average change-up that he can spot on either side of the plate. It’s a four-pitch menu that appears unstoppable. Now, Lacy needs to master his control and command of his repertoire. Once he does, he’ll be in the big leagues for a long time. [Reply]
Originally Posted by TomBarndtsTwin:
It’s the last day of April and I’m waking up to the Kansas City Royals who STILL own the BEST record in Major League Baseball!
Happy Friday! Enjoy the weekend and let’s kick some Twinkie ass!!
Originally Posted by duncan_idaho:
Those scouts are... exciting.
Those are premium, premium arsenals. Lynch probably has the best stuff, and Lacy has a better combination of stuff and polish.
I have a question on that. It was a Bowden article...which always makes me roll my eyes. Is he getting those numbers from other, qualified guys or are they coming from him? [Reply]
Originally Posted by dallaschiefsfan:
I have a question on that. It was a Bowden article...which always makes me roll my eyes. Is he getting those numbers from other, qualified guys or are they coming from him?
It doesn't say....just this:
I ranked the top position-player prospects I’m most eager to scout when the minor-league season begins on Tuesday. Now, it’s time to break down the prime pitching prospects I’m targeting.
One requirement for my list:
A pitcher cannot have made his major-league debut, so top prospects such as Nate Pearson, Sixto Sánchez and Brailyn Márquez were not included. Let’s get right to it.
(Jim Bowden’s tools grades are based on the 20-80 scouting scale, in which 20-30 is well below average, 40 is below average, 50 is average, 60 is above average and 70-80 is well above average.
Joe Posnanski has a Dayton Moore bit today in his column:
Monday, April 26
Dayton
As of this writing, the Kansas City Royals have the best record in all of baseball and, OK, sure, we’re only 21 games into the season and there is absolutely no reason when looking at this team to believe it’s going to last. But I still want to spend a moment talking a bit about the subtle genius of my friend Dayton Moore.
He was a hot commodity when the Royals hired him in 2006 — the guy at the top of most of the “Next-Gen General Managers” lists — but I am not sure that would be true today. He had moved up step by step by step, first as a college coach, then hired by Atlanta as a scout, then moved up to assistant director of scouting, then to assistant director of player development, then to head of international scouting, then to director of player development, then to assistant general manager. He was not an Ivy Leaguer — no offense to the fine institution that is George Mason — and did not claim any particular savvy for the analytics that were sweeping the land post-Moneyball.
He was an unabashed traditionalist who believed then, as he does now, that to build a great baseball team, you have to bet on talent and character, you have to treat people well, you have to excel at every part of the game from groundskeeping to scouting, from the concessions stands to the ticket takers to the bullpen.
And in the early years, none of it seemed to be working. He talked about the Royals’ “process” so often that the very word became a punchline in Kansas City. The Royals finished a 100-loss season in his first year and then lost between 87 and 97 each of the next six years. He took a flier on an intense and similarly minded manager named Trey Hillman, who’d never been in a big-league clubhouse but had won as a skipper in Japan. That didn’t work out. He hired Ned Yost, who had taken Milwaukee to the brink of success before the organization determined in a panic that they had to fire him in order to get that success. That hire looked doomed, too.
But all the while, Moore didn’t waver. He’s this sort of person: After he first took the general manager’s job, he was driving around The Plaza in Kansas City — a lovely outdoor area of shops and restaurants — and thought: “This would be a great place for a World Series parade.”
As it turns out, the parade was held downtown. That happened in 2015. First came 2014, when the Royals were good enough to sneak into the postseason as a wild card and then went on an epic playoff run that lasted all the way to the ninth inning of Game 7 of the World Series. In 2015, the Royals were simply the best team in the American League from start to finish and they had another extraordinary playoff run, this one ending with that parade.
And the team was pure Dayton Moore. They were certainly not the best hitting team in the league, and they were certainly not the best pitching team in the league. They did not have an MVP on the team, they did not have a Cy Young Award winner on the team. In 2015, nobody on the club hit 23 home runs, nobody won 14 games, nobody stole 30 bases, nobody struck out 160 batters; the team itself led the league in only two statistical categories:
• They were the hardest team to strike out.
• They won the most games.
How did they do it? I can’t help but wonder if it’s the wrong question because, frankly, nobody seemed to care. While everybody was utterly fascinated by how the A’s won, by how the Astros won, by how the Cubs won, by how the Red Sox won, by how the Rays won — all of these inspired big, best-selling books — the success of Moore’s Royals was chalked up to, what, luck? Flukiness? The rest of baseball being temporarily numb?
But, of course, it was more than that. That team perfectly embodied the philosophy of Moore and assistant GM J.J. Picollo and the rest of the Royals front office. They put together a team of players who liked each other, played for each other, fed off each other’s energy. They put together an outfield that had no gaps, literally — you couldn’t hit a ball into the gap against Jarrod Dyson-Lorenzo Cain-Alex Gordon because they covered everything. They put together a bullpen that took relief pitching to a new level with closers for every inning after the fifth. And, yes, they put together a lineup that scraped and clawed and put a lot of balls in play and found ways, somehow, to score more runs than they allowed.
For the next two years, Moore made the fateful decision that the team’s greatest chance of success was to, as best they could, keep the team together and hope they could find the magic one more time. That didn’t work at all, the team hovered around .500, and then they fell apart and lost 100 games each of the next two seasons.
And I kept wondering if Moore might step down, take on another challenge, decide he’d done all that he could do. But then the pandemic hit, and Dayton, in my view, became baseball’s conscience. He and new owner John Sherman again cut hard against the grain last year. They refused to cut salaries and, remarkably for a small-market team, paid their minor leaguers. Why? To explain, he offered my favorite baseball quote of 2020:
“Understand this: The minor-league players, the players you’ll never know about, the players that never get out of rookie ball or High A, those players have as much impact on the growth of our game as 10-year or 15-year veteran players. They have as much opportunity to influence the growth of our game as those individuals who played a long time because those individuals go back into their communities and teach the game, work in academies, are JUCO coaches, college coaches, scouts, coaches in pro baseball.
“They’re growing the game constantly because they’re so passionate about it. So we felt it was really, really important not to release one minor-league player during this time, a time we needed to stand behind them.”
That, my friends, is Dayton Moore.
So, yes, of course I’m thrilled to see the Royals having early season success. I don’t understand how they’re doing it. My baseball mind doesn’t have much confidence that Danny Duffy will maintain his 0.39 ERA or that the touching reunion of the 2015 World Series team — this club has Wade Davis, Greg Holland, Ervin Santana, Dyson and Salvy Pérez — will lead to the movie finish. But who knows, right? [Reply]
Welcome to the first edition of this season’s MLB Playoff Tiers. It’s still early, of course, so we’re looking at the teams most likely to win it all — from the Dodgers to the sleepers to the long shots — and we’re looking at the worst title droughts in baseball. To do the latter, we’ve devised a score — the Drought Index — an unscientific 10.0-point metric that considers history, expectations, the organization’s most recent title(s) and overall franchise success. For example: The Cubs before 2016 would have warranted close to a perfect 10.0; the Yankees after the 2000 season would have been close to a 0.0. Now that that’s explained, let’s get on with it.
Originally Posted by :
This is the monthly column where we rank every team in baseball in a series of tiers, from most likely to win the World Series to most likely to end up in a five-way NL wild-card tie to most likely to draft No. 1 overall next June.
I. Best. Team. Ever?
1. Los Angeles Dodgers
When the season began, it was easy to wonder if this Dodgers club had the goods to reach the magic number of 116, the all-time mark for wins (shared by the 2001 Mariners and 1906 Cubs). The club finished 43-17 in 2020, on pace for — wait for it — 116 victories in a 162-game season. It capped the shortened season with its first title since 1988. The Dodgers have the depth and talent to cruise past 100 victories — but 116? We’ll see. It won’t be easy to accomplish when playing 19 games against the Padres, perhaps the second-most talented team in baseball. It may not matter. For the Dodgers, the only thing missing is this: A championship in a full season — and a real parade and celebration to go with it.
Postseason appearances since 2000: 12
Last championship: 2020
Drought Index: 1.1
3. Chicago White Sox
The White Sox have a championship in the not-so-distant past and a truly promising present (and future), which obscures how difficult the last 15 seasons have been on the South Side (just one AL Central championship and a quick postseason exit in 2008). If not another championship — those can be elusive — White Sox fans seem to deserve a sustained run of success in the early 2020s.
Postseason appearances since 2000: 4
Last championship: 2005
Drought Index: 5.5
6. New York Yankees
It’s hard to imagine Yankees fans as ever truly suffering. In addition to the 27 championships and 17 playoff appearances since 2000, the most under-appreciated statistic in baseball might be this: The Yankees have hadn’t a losing season since 1992. Still, the 11-year drought with a championship represents the longest since the years between 1978 and 1996, and after four straight postseason disappointments and a sluggish start, fans in the Bronx are starting to fear that the club is squandering a window to win another title.
Postseason appearances since 2000: 17
Last championship: 2009
Drought Index: 6.5
11. Kansas City Royals
The Royals are tied for last in baseball (with the Marlins and Mariners) with just two playoff appearances since 2000. But how different must Royals fans and Mariners fans feel in this moment? If you’re only going to reach the playoffs twice in two decades, it’s best to maximize those runs, and the Royals did just that, reaching Game 7 of the World Series in 2014 and winning it the following year. The championship afterglow is just about over in Kansas City, but an entertaining team in the present and an intriguing crop of pitching prospects offers a bridge to the next era.
Postseason appearances since 2000: 2
Last championship: 2015
Drought Index: 3.3
12. Minnesota Twins
It’s now been 30 years since the Twins’ last championship, and the organization has lost 18 postseason games in a row, the longest playoff losing streak in North American sports history. It’s a unique type of sports heartache. There is the pain of losing seasons, and the sting of never being in the hunt. There’s the pain of a close call in October. Twins fans have experienced the rare pain of getting there quite a bit — and then getting crushed.
Postseason appearances since 2000: 9
Last championship: 1991
Drought Index: 7.4
14. St. Louis Cardinals
The Cardinals trail only the Yankees in postseason appearances since 2000. Two of those came in the last two seasons after a three-year drought. This year marks a decade since the organization’s last World Series parade, and if there’s any organization that feels as entitled to championships as the Yankees, it’s the Cardinals. Still, there should be some leftover goodwill after 2006 and 2011.
Postseason appearances since 2000: 14
Last championship: 2011
Drought Index: 4.8
19. Cleveland Indians
The Indians’ championship drought reached 72 years in 2020, but they have lost four World Series in that time. It’s hard enough to reach the World Series, let alone win it, and the Indians may have missed their best shots in 2016 and ’17. To add to it, they traded Francisco Lindor to the Mets this past offseason, and the competition in the AL Central is even more intense. The only thing lessening the sting is a front office with a track record of sustained success, a pitching development machine, and a rotation currently fronted by Shane Bieber.
Postseason appearances since 2000: 7
Last championship: 1948
Drought Index: 9.6
30. Detroit Tigers
From 2006 to 2014, the Tigers went to the World Series twice, appeared in the playoffs five times, and at one point won the AL Central four times in a row. They could never push over the top, though, even with Justin Verlander and Miguel Cabrera and Max Scherzer (and more), and now that success is long in the past and the rebuild continues, with sluggish returns so far in 2021, and it’s been nearly 37 years since the last championship.
Postseason appearances since 2000: 5
Last championship: 1984
Drought Index: 8.1
Originally Posted by KChiefs1:
Joe Posnanski has a Dayton Moore bit today in his column:
Monday, April 26
Dayton
As of this writing, the Kansas City Royals have the best record in all of baseball and, OK, sure, we’re only 21 games into the season and there is absolutely no reason when looking at this team to believe it’s going to last. But I still want to spend a moment talking a bit about the subtle genius of my friend Dayton Moore.
He was a hot commodity when the Royals hired him in 2006 — the guy at the top of most of the “Next-Gen General Managers” lists — but I am not sure that would be true today. He had moved up step by step by step, first as a college coach, then hired by Atlanta as a scout, then moved up to assistant director of scouting, then to assistant director of player development, then to head of international scouting, then to director of player development, then to assistant general manager. He was not an Ivy Leaguer — no offense to the fine institution that is George Mason — and did not claim any particular savvy for the analytics that were sweeping the land post-Moneyball.
He was an unabashed traditionalist who believed then, as he does now, that to build a great baseball team, you have to bet on talent and character, you have to treat people well, you have to excel at every part of the game from groundskeeping to scouting, from the concessions stands to the ticket takers to the bullpen.
And in the early years, none of it seemed to be working. He talked about the Royals’ “process” so often that the very word became a punchline in Kansas City. The Royals finished a 100-loss season in his first year and then lost between 87 and 97 each of the next six years. He took a flier on an intense and similarly minded manager named Trey Hillman, who’d never been in a big-league clubhouse but had won as a skipper in Japan. That didn’t work out. He hired Ned Yost, who had taken Milwaukee to the brink of success before the organization determined in a panic that they had to fire him in order to get that success. That hire looked doomed, too.
But all the while, Moore didn’t waver. He’s this sort of person: After he first took the general manager’s job, he was driving around The Plaza in Kansas City — a lovely outdoor area of shops and restaurants — and thought: “This would be a great place for a World Series parade.”
As it turns out, the parade was held downtown. That happened in 2015. First came 2014, when the Royals were good enough to sneak into the postseason as a wild card and then went on an epic playoff run that lasted all the way to the ninth inning of Game 7 of the World Series. In 2015, the Royals were simply the best team in the American League from start to finish and they had another extraordinary playoff run, this one ending with that parade.
And the team was pure Dayton Moore. They were certainly not the best hitting team in the league, and they were certainly not the best pitching team in the league. They did not have an MVP on the team, they did not have a Cy Young Award winner on the team. In 2015, nobody on the club hit 23 home runs, nobody won 14 games, nobody stole 30 bases, nobody struck out 160 batters; the team itself led the league in only two statistical categories:
• They were the hardest team to strike out.
• They won the most games.
How did they do it? I can’t help but wonder if it’s the wrong question because, frankly, nobody seemed to care. While everybody was utterly fascinated by how the A’s won, by how the Astros won, by how the Cubs won, by how the Red Sox won, by how the Rays won — all of these inspired big, best-selling books — the success of Moore’s Royals was chalked up to, what, luck? Flukiness? The rest of baseball being temporarily numb?
But, of course, it was more than that. That team perfectly embodied the philosophy of Moore and assistant GM J.J. Picollo and the rest of the Royals front office. They put together a team of players who liked each other, played for each other, fed off each other’s energy. They put together an outfield that had no gaps, literally — you couldn’t hit a ball into the gap against Jarrod Dyson-Lorenzo Cain-Alex Gordon because they covered everything. They put together a bullpen that took relief pitching to a new level with closers for every inning after the fifth. And, yes, they put together a lineup that scraped and clawed and put a lot of balls in play and found ways, somehow, to score more runs than they allowed.
For the next two years, Moore made the fateful decision that the team’s greatest chance of success was to, as best they could, keep the team together and hope they could find the magic one more time. That didn’t work at all, the team hovered around .500, and then they fell apart and lost 100 games each of the next two seasons.
And I kept wondering if Moore might step down, take on another challenge, decide he’d done all that he could do. But then the pandemic hit, and Dayton, in my view, became baseball’s conscience. He and new owner John Sherman again cut hard against the grain last year. They refused to cut salaries and, remarkably for a small-market team, paid their minor leaguers. Why? To explain, he offered my favorite baseball quote of 2020:
“Understand this: The minor-league players, the players you’ll never know about, the players that never get out of rookie ball or High A, those players have as much impact on the growth of our game as 10-year or 15-year veteran players. They have as much opportunity to influence the growth of our game as those individuals who played a long time because those individuals go back into their communities and teach the game, work in academies, are JUCO coaches, college coaches, scouts, coaches in pro baseball.
“They’re growing the game constantly because they’re so passionate about it. So we felt it was really, really important not to release one minor-league player during this time, a time we needed to stand behind them.”
That, my friends, is Dayton Moore.
So, yes, of course I’m thrilled to see the Royals having early season success. I don’t understand how they’re doing it. My baseball mind doesn’t have much confidence that Danny Duffy will maintain his 0.39 ERA or that the touching reunion of the 2015 World Series team — this club has Wade Davis, Greg Holland, Ervin Santana, Dyson and Salvy Pérez — will lead to the movie finish. But who knows, right?
Good read from JoePo. We were lucky when him and Whitlock were in town. [Reply]
Originally Posted by :
So, yes, of course I’m thrilled to see the Royals having early season success. I don’t understand how they’re doing it. My baseball mind doesn’t have much confidence that Danny Duffy will maintain his 0.39 ERA or that the touching reunion of the 2015 World Series team — this club has Wade Davis, Greg Holland, Ervin Santana, Dyson and Salvy Pérez — will lead to the movie finish. But who knows, right?
I know this is Joe Posnanski and not you, but Santana was with the Twins in 2015. Ervin Santana was with KC in 2013.
Still a good story and it's nice to have the media recognizing the Royals. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Discuss Thrower:
Good article but JoPo went full Birdbox on Paterno & Sandusky
JoPo was ascending to the national scene at that time and immediately tanked his credibility. I've seen him come up on a few reddit/non KC fan sites and usually one of the first replies ties him to Sandusky. [Reply]
