Kansas City Royals could grab a top talent with No. 7 pick in the MLB Draft on Sunday
The Kansas City Royals will pick seventh in the first round of this year’s MLB Draft, but that will still likely put them in position to grab a player from the top tier of this year’s class.
By virtue of Major League Baseball having shifted the draft to coincide with the All-Star Game and festivities, the latest Royals selection will be made in the hours after recent first-round picks and top prospects Bobby Witt Jr. and Nick Pratto appear on the national stage in the SiriusXM All-Star Futures Game.
This year’s MLB Draft will begin on Sunday at 6 p.m. Central time with the 20 rounds spread over three days. Rounds 2-10 will be on Monday beginning at noon and rounds 11-20 on Tuesday starting at 11 a.m.
“You can make an argument that whoever is going to get picked second in this draft, the Royals are going to get a very similarly-talented player at seven,” said MLB Network analyst and former Colorado Rockies general manager Dan O’Dowd.
O’Dowd, a 30-year MLB front office executive, spoke to The Star in a phone interview on Thursday.
He’ll feature prominently in MLB Network’s Draft coverage beginning on Sunday. He oversaw the Rockies for a 15-year period that included the drafting of multi-time All-Stars Troy Tulowitzki, Nolan Arenado, Trevor Story and Charlie Blackmon.
Coming off of an abnormal year for amateur baseball because of the coronavirus pandemic, O’Dowd anticipates an increased level of debate and uncertainty in draft rooms this year.
“You take all these small snapshots of a player in the evaluation of that individual’s career,” O’Dowd said. “If it’s a college player, it starts in high school and goes on to their freshman, sophomore and then their junior year. All these little pictures then make a big picture.
“Losing your opportunity to scout them, not just during the season but during the summer season on top of that, creates a huge incomplete picture.”
The seventh overall pick carries a slot value of $5,432,400, while the Royals will have the eighth-highest bonus pool of any club with $10,917,700. Their selections in the first 10 rounds are Nos. 7, 43, 66, 78, 108, 139, 169, 199, 229, 259 and 289 overall.
O’Dowd believes that Royals general manager Dayton Moore and assistant general manager/amateur scouting Lonnie Goldberg will have freedom to go in multiple directions with the seventh pick.
“They’re far enough along and they’ve accumulated such a great level of talent in their system that they’re going to take the best player anyway,” O’Dowd said. “They really don’t have a specific need. … If you look at every position on the field from a depth standpoint, they’re in wonderful shape. So it’s just a matter, then, of taking the best player available.
“The key to drafting year in and year out, you’ve just got to be consistently good. You can’t have a year where you do really well and the next year you do really poorly in the draft. You need to nail your top picks in the draft. That doesn’t mean they all have to turn out to be impact players, but they all have to be solid contributors. Then you layer those on year after year after year, and then you end up with a World Series team like they did in Kansas City [in 2015]. There’s no magic to it. It’s just hard to do.”
Kumar Rocker to KC?
ESPN draft and prospect guru Kiley McDaniel, a former scout and front office official for four MLB clubs, sees a group of six to eight players at the top of the draft who all appear to be of similar caliber and attractiveness to teams.
McDaniel will be a central figure in ESPN’s draft coverage beginning on Sunday.
The group at the top of the draft class includes four high school shortstops McDaniel views as a virtual guarantee to be selected within the top eight picks: Marcelo Mayer from California, Brady House from Georgia, Jordan Lawlar from Texas and Kahlil Watson of North Carolina.
Vanderbilt right-handed pitchers Jack Leiter and Kumar Rocker, Louisville catcher Henry Davis and right-handed high school pitcher Jackson Jobe from Oklahoma round out the group, though McDaniel noted the four shortstops, Leiter and Davis are six all the evaluators seemingly agree are in the top group with Rocker and Jobe sometimes on the outside.
“They are most often tied to Kumar Rocker, who I don’t think goes in the top five, maybe even the top six,” McDaniel said of the Royals. “I’m inclined to say if Rocker is on the board at seven, it’s like a higher than 75 percent chance they would take him if he’s there. That’s one of the picks I feel most good about.”
McDaniel ranked House as the next player most often linked to the Royals, and cited Witt Jr. as the best recent comparable for House. House is not considered as far along defensively, and he has some swing mechanic questions.
The 6-foot-5, 245-pound son of a former NFL defensive lineman and the current Philadelphia Eagles defensive line coach, Rocker tied with Leiter for the NCAA Division I strikeout lead and earned unanimous All-American honors.
Rocker burst into the national spotlight as a freshman in 2019, when he helped lead Vanderbilt to the national championship.
That season, he won the College World Series Most Outstanding Player award, multiple national Freshman of the Year awards.
In the past two seasons, Rocker’s draft stock has slipped somewhat from its height following the national championship.
“He went from a mid-first rounder out of high school to a very likely one-one candidate as a freshman to not continuing to improve and all of the guys around him continuing to improve for somewhat predictable reasons,” McDaniel said. “Also because there’s been some limitations to the swing and miss on the fastball, and you’ve had Jack Leiter right next to him in all the same situations and it’s easy to see he has that swing and miss on the fastball.”
McDaniel attributed some of Rocker’s slide to peaking physically earlier than some other prospects and the fact he’s been watched for so long that people have had a lot of time to poke holes in him compared to some others.
“I think Kumar is now seen as a very good shot to be a second or third starter,” McDaniel said.
This story was originally published July 9, 2021 at 10:56 AM with the headline "Kansas City Royals could grab a top talent with No. 7 pick in the MLB Draft on Sunday."
