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]
Originally Posted by duncan_idaho:
Agreed. Unfortunately.
100 percent agree. Being "awesome" doesn't gain you much beyond being "competant." But being bad can hurt you a lot.
No doubt he isn't losing on his own. My argument would be that he and his below-average staff are making things worse than they can be. A good manager might help you pull an extra win or two. A bad manager who makes his team play tight, doesn't organize appropriately, and burns his bullpen (it sure looks like Matheny still doesn't pay attention to whether he's warming guys up too much in the pen) can certainly hurt you.
I fully understand the sensitivity around Moore. He’s obv a Royals HOF and a good case could be made MLB HOF for pulling off what he did. That said, even HOFers reach inglorious ends (look at Pujols last few years).
I don’t think we can attribute the last 10 years of shitty drafting and development to “bad luck”. It’s bad management. We are currently #28 fWar position players and #27 pitching. That’s not bad luck. [Reply]
Originally Posted by cosmo20002:
What about pitching coaches:-)
It certainly seems so, Cosmo! Every reply of yours about this will be met with another article, just an FYI! Please feel free to call it Fake News it you want to model someone you clearly would never try to emulate. :-)
Originally Posted by :
Longtime Cardinal pitching coach Dave Duncan loves the sinker. The Braves’ Leo Mazzone was all about establishing the pitch low and away. Rick Peterson may hate the cutter.
The Mets’ Dan Warthen may not have the name value of legendary pitching coaches that have come before him, but he does have his own pitch. If you want to see what it looks like, you just have to notice how the Mets, as a team, are outliers when it comes to slider velocity and movement.
[...]
The Mets are throwing a different kind of slider.
Pointing out what this Mets slider is all about could be as easy as linking to this leaderboard, which shows that the Mets have the hardest sliders in baseball. Or even this leaderboard, which shows that Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, and Jeurys Familia are in the top 15 when it comes to slider velocity.
[...]
Back in 2012, David Laurila spoke to Matt Harvey as an “emerging ace,” and Harvey heaped praise on his pitching coach for one pitch in particular. “Dan Warthen helped me out with the grip during Spring Training,” said Harvey. “I threw it last year, but I didn’t really know how to throw a slider.”
[...]
Both Syndergaard and newcoming lefty Steven Matz — who isn’t learning the slider because the team wanted him to “focus on developing the curveball” — are interested in learning the pitch, and that’s no great surprise.
Maybe that’s because they can see what a success story deGrom has been. When I talked to deGrom last, he was in the midst of making his slider harder — “It’s been quite a bit harder than it has been” — but it was 87-88 then. It’s now 89 mph and the eighth-hardest slider in the bigs.
[...]
Ask Warthen if he’s in his dream job, and he doesn’t equivocate. “Absolutely. All of these guys are good guys, too, and they want to learn. Syndergaard and Matz and Harvey — they’re just sponges, and they want to learn.” That’s no surprise. You’d hope most pitchers would want to learn the low-spin, high-velocity, all-in-the-fingers slider that helped make Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom, Jeurys Familia and Jenrry Mejia who they are today.
That’s a pitch good enough to get its own name: The Dan Warthen Slider.
Originally Posted by Fansy the Famous Bard:
The Royals developmental system is terrible, it has been for a long time. The guys having constructed this is at fault. Draft all you want at the top of the draft, it doesn't matter because we can't do anything with that talent (for the most part). The very few guys that DO develop are doing so in spite of the organization, or were acquired later in their development (Cain)
That's... an extreme take. An overreaction, IMO.
They won a world series, went to another, and had the best 5-year stretch in 25 years based on the back of amateur talent acquisition and development.
They did a bad job adjusting to the talent acquisition angle after the draft slot system change, and didn't really find a new angle that worked until 2017/2018 (dumping the "always draft HS arms high" approach).
Wave 1/approach 1 was a huge success. Wave 2 (with same approach) was a huge failure. Wave 3 is TBD (with a new approach to both the acquisition side and drastically different approaches to developing hitters and pitchers).
Are they the best? Absolutely not. Are they the Pittsburgh Pirates? Also no. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Prison Bitch:
I fully understand the sensitivity around Moore. He’s obv a Royals HOF and a good case could be made MLB HOF for pulling off what he did. That said, even HOFers reach inglorious ends (look at Pujols last few years).
I don’t think we can attribute the last 10 years of shitty drafting and development to “bad luck”. It’s bad management. We are currently #28 fWar position players and #27 pitching. That’s not bad luck.
I've said consistently and repeatedly that they didn't do a good enough job adjusting to the hard draft slots once they happened.
Between that and cashing in a few successes (Manaea, really) and a few bad luck cases, you've got a 2021 roster that doesn't have enough home grown talent.
Yet.
I think the org shifted gears drastically following the disaster in 2015. They stopped trying to hammer all SP into the same mold, started drafting college arms instead of projectable HS arms, and have changed the way they train hitters following the 2019 disaster for all the guys at A+. This includes completely changing High A affiliates.
There are enough good trends for me to be OK with an infusion of new blood rather than a wholesale house cleaning, assuming appropriate staff changes are made at the MLB level.
But if they try to hold the course entirely? Yeah, that's a final straw. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Prison Bitch:
I fully understand the sensitivity around Moore. He’s obv a Royals HOF and a good case could be made MLB HOF for pulling off what he did. That said, even HOFers reach inglorious ends (look at Pujols last few years).
I don’t think we can attribute the last 10 years of shitty drafting and development to “bad luck”. It’s bad management. We are currently #28 fWar position players and #27 pitching. That’s not bad luck.
3 winning seasons out of 15 will get him in the Royals HOF woof [Reply]
