Signed, sealed, delivered ... But what’s next for the Kansas City Royals’ newcomers?
Thirteen players joined the Kansas City Royals organization as either recent draft picks or undrafted free agents this week. Their professional careers start during a time of great uncertainty in baseball, particularly with the minor-league season in doubt.
When asked about the next steps for these newcomers during a conference call this week, Royals assistant GM/amateur scouting Lonnie Goldberg said they’d be turned over to the club’s player development staff under the guidance of assistant GM/player performance J.J. Picollo.
That handoff hardly strays from the baseball norm. But the on-boarding process of young baseball players into the Royals’ organization has been and will continue to be significantly different than previous years due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Even if we were able to start up tomorrow, a lot of these players are going to need to get built up for a month before they could ever go into competition,” Picollo said. “They’ve stayed in shape. They’re just not in game-shape. It’s not too much different than what our big-league guys are doing.”
Usually, newly signed first-year pros would go to the Royals’ facility in Arizona. Pitchers might dive into a throwing program and start pitching out there within 10 days of the draft.
This year, if the minor leagues had been in progress, short-season Rookie-level affiliate Idaho Falls would’ve already been several days into its season by the time the signings were made official this week.
This year’s group of six draft selections, led by first-day picks Asa Lacy out of Texas A&M and Nick Loftin from Baylor University, and seven undrafted free agents, highlighted by Arkansas-Little Rock catcher Kale Emshoff, got into town last Saturday for several days of physicals, meetings, an introduction to Kansas City and Kauffman Stadium and a visit to the Urban Youth Academy and the C-You in the Major Leagues youth clinic.
They were slated to leave town Thursday.
First up: Assessment
This year, those incoming players go into a holding pattern instead of a minor-league clubhouse.
“They’re going to finish up here — they’ve just signed — then they’re going to go back home, and then they’re going to have to wait to find out when they can report anywhere,” Picollo said. “That part of it feels very different.”
The key difference between recently acquired players and those currently in the minor-league system is that the Royals already know in detail what their minor-league players’ workloads look like and have been tracking all their activities for the past three months.
A portion of this week’s time in Kansas City for each of the newly signed players included a chance for the team’s player development staff to sit down with them and get an idea of what their workout and training schedules have been like during this period without organized baseball.
How many side sessions have the pitchers thrown? Have they thrown to a catcher or a net? Have they faced live batters? Have the batters seen live pitching? What has their weightlifting routine been like? Have they had coaches throwing batting practice, or pitching machines?
While most have been spread out across the country, with varying levels of access to training methods and facilities, the Royals have separated their players into three groups.
One has stayed right on track throughout this period of isolation and there’s no hesitation about gearing them up for games fairly quickly.
The next group lags slightly behind and isn’t quite on track to jump into game-type settings right away, but they’re close.
The third and smallest group consists of guys who’ve struggled to keep up with their training due to lack of access to resources, equipment or facilities.
The Royals used this week to assess where their newcomers fit among those categories.
“We don’t have that background, so we’ll probably be a little more cautious with what we assign to them,” Picollo said. “Not long after they leave, we’ll give (pitchers) an idea, based on their throwing program, what we think they should be doing.”
What hitters have available to them as far as cages, pitching machines and live pitching will dictate how they proceed.
What comes next
If there is no minor-league season this year, Picollo said the team would want to bring the players into their training facility and have their staff and coaches start working with them.
“Absolutely,” Picollo said. “We have a lot of different ideas of how we could do it. We’ve broken them up into different-size groups. You look at a facility like we have in Arizona — obviously, it’s closed right now — but we anticipate it’s going to be open again at some time.
“If you have a morning group, a mid-afternoon group, a late-afternoon group, a night group ... whatever we have to do to service players and to get them on a field.”
With the details of the major-league season now taking shape, the hope is that the industry’s collective attention can turn to player development for the hundreds of minor-leaguers in each club’s system.
One idea that’s been discussed is an expanded fall league.
Typically, the Arizona Fall League’s regular-season lasts 29 games. Five MLB clubs contribute a group of players to each one of the AFL teams. This year, it’s possible that MLB clubs might see fit to field teams entirely composed of their own minor-leaguers.
“A year of being idle without game competition of any sort, that’s tough,” Picollo said. “That’s going to be tough in 2021 because you’re going to have to play 140 games ... In particular, the pitchers haven’t logged innings. Now, you’re going to log innings on an arm that has been stagnant for a year.”
Not all of the pitchers will fall into the same category, either.
Some will have nowhere near the number of innings under their belt that they would’ve had if they’d pitched on a regular basis throughout a full minor-league season.
Others who are knocking on the door to the majors will be in the process of making the leap from a full minor-league season to an even longer major-league season.
“The tougher group is the one that we’re counting on to be in the major leagues in the next year or year and a half,” Picollo said. “That group, they get to the major leagues and they’ve got a six-month season instead of a five-month season. How do we get them to an innings total that will safely allow them to move to the proper number of innings the following year?”
For the Royals, that’s a group that includes top pitching prospects such as Brady Singer, Jackson Kowar, Daniel Lynch and Kris Bubic. All were in big-league camp in February and March.
Picollo said the club hadn’t gotten into specifics as of mid-week, and general manager Dayton Moore alluded to possibly including top prospects in the Royals’ major-league taxi squad. Moore also mentioned not wanting to compromise their ability to play in an extended player-development camp-type setting.
If those pitchers don’t pitch this year and the Royals still anticipate them being part of their plans for the majors in 2021, it will likely affect how they’re used in April of next year.
“If they’re a guy we anticipate being up in September, it’s going to be a gradual progression so they have innings left when they get to September and hopefully October,” Picollo said. “We’re doing this to get into the playoffs. So you really could be looking at two more months, maybe, coming off a year where they didn’t play at all.
“And that’s why I think it’s so important that the industry looks at every avenue we can to get some sort of development in this year.”
This story was originally published June 26, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Signed, sealed, delivered ... But what’s next for the Kansas City Royals’ newcomers?."
