(610 Sports) – During the 2018 Major League Baseball First-Year Player Draft, the Royals made the surprising decision to spend their first five draft picks on college pitchers, in an effort to build a dominant MLB rotation. Of those five pitchers taken in 2018, four of them have pitched in the major leagues.
Brady Singer and Kris Bubic were the first two pitchers from that 2018 draft to pitch in the big leagues, both making their debuts for the Royals in the 2020 truncated MLB season and both have pitched well enough to stick around this season, as well. For Daniel Lynch and Jackson Kowar, their first taste of the big leagues has been a little different, as both have struggled mightily against major league hitters, despite their dominance at the AAA level.
Joining Fescoe in the Morning, Royals manager Mike Matheny discussed Lynch and Kowar's struggles, and what has gone into the decisions to send Lynch back to Omaha and to keep Kowar in Kansas City.
"With Kowar and Lynch, why not keep them up here at this level, to let them kind of work through their things, as opposed to sending them back down to AAA," asked show host Bob Fescoe? "Because in my opinion, the way I look at it, I'm like hey, these guys are gonna need to get big leaguers out next year, if this team is making a World Series push. Why not let them figure it out up here this year, instead of doing that at the minor league level?"
"Part of the equation is, what is it that needs to be worked on," said Matheny. "Is there something that's glaringly obvious, like we felt with Daniel Lynch, that needs to be addresses, and it's a much easier place to work on those things (in AAA), than it is here."
"If it's a matter of repetitions, which I believe is what Jackson needs right now, that's continue to get him on the mound because he has major league dominant stuff, in my mind," Matheny continued. "From what I've seen, it's just getting over that hurdle. It's just that balance, about as much as anything, of how we can help them progress but not put them into a spot where they're not set up for failure."
"You try to read the player, individually. How's this guy wired? How's he made up? What's our team look like right now and can we afford to let a guy go in there without taxing the rest of the team," Matheny explains.
While the results have been mixed to this point, each of these guys have dominated at some point in the minor league careers and it's a matter of continuing to work on the things that Matheny and his staff identify and get the reps in. When these guys arrive, Kansas City could end up with one of the top rotations in all of major league baseball.
Hear the rest of Mike Matheny's interview with Fescoe in the Morning below:
