The future is now: Early success of Royals pitching prospects – Farm to Fountains

Last season was a revelation for those following the Kansas City Royals minor league system. The organization had built a reputation of poor pitching development, headlined most heavily by their recent crop of 2018 draftees who had struggled throughout their major league careers. In 2023, that reputation started to improve. The Royals had a handful of standout pitching prospects, including Chandler Champlain, David Sandlin, Steven Zobac, Tyson Guerrero, and Mason Barnett. The Royals brought in Justin Friedman as Assistant Director of Pitching Performance. Under Paul Gibson, the pitching started to take steps forward and improvements happened. Anne Rogers of MLB.com outlined the improvements last July.

“The turnaround started with Gibson and a 25-year-old former-pitcher-turned-coach, who helped spearhead highly specific plans for each individual pitcher, built around personalized pitch selection, grips, delivery and location. The Royals paired that with workout regimens and warmup routines designed to bring those skills onto the mound.”

Many of the minor league arms I’ve talked with this season and over the offseason have highlighted those pitching plans as key reasons behind their success. LHP Walter Pennigton was the latest to talk with me and the guys as Chase to the Pennant about how that pitching plan has helped him on the mound in 2024. “We’re starting to get more analytically driven like everyone else in baseball,” Pennington said. “In years past, the transparency was maybe too much where there was all this information being thrown at us that we previously did not have. We didn’t know what to do with it.”

That’s been different of late. “Now they have — all the coaches and staff — are there to translate that for us. So what’s really been nice is they’ll take all this information and they’ll simplify it and then give it back to us,” Pennington continued. The result becomes those highly specific plans that Rogers alluded to last year.

Those plans and improvements have continued all offseason, including the use of NewtForce mounds to help prospects such as Frank Mozzicato. Not only have they continued — they’ve done even better. The Royals’ pitching development improved vastly last season, but when the starting point is so low, how high did they truly reach? If the Royals’ pitching development as a whole improved to the middle of the pack last season, it’s only gotten better in 2024. It’s still early, but the signs are there: the Royals are good at developing starting pitchers. The process is working.

It’s still early, but the results this season from Kansas City’s organizational pitching staff have been staggering. Here are the organizational ranks by level for runs allowed this season:

• MLB: 134 (2nd)
• AAA: 157 (2nd)
• AA: 129 (16th)
• A+: 99 (1st)
• A: 123 (6th)

The Royals are finding success throughout the organization. That’s especially true where it matters most. In Kansas City, the Royals have seen great seasons so far from Alec Marsh, Brady Singer, and Cole Ragans. That’s alongside the veterans they’ve brought in to anchor the rotation, Michael Wacha and Seth Lugo. In the minor leagues, the Royals currently have 13 qualified pitchers throughout the system. Seven of them have an ERA under 3.00. In 2023, that number was zero.

If you expand that search criteria to arms with at least 10 IP, 24 of the Royals’ 48 pitchers have an ERA under 3.00. Young arms such as Felix Arronde, Hunter Patteson, Ben Kudrna, and Noah Cameron all look to have taken serious steps forward in the small sample we have this season. How are they doing it? So far, the answer has been more strikeouts.

The pitchers in the system aren’t just preventing runs. They’re striking out more hitters in the process. Among 29 notable pitching prospects in the system, 18 of them have improved their strikeout rate from a year ago. Some of the largest gains include Mauricio Veliz (+21.35%), Brandon Johnson (+16.51%), Jacob Wallace (+16.85%), Chandler Champlain (+10.03%), and Walter Pennington (+9.79%). There are some standouts on the other side of the spectrum as well, namely John McMillon and Daniel Lynch IV.

McMillon has been slow returning from injury and has struggled to regain velocity this season. Daniel Lynch was demoted to Triple-A following an up-and-down spring and has yet to show many signs of improvement.

The command of the strikezone has led the way to improvement in the ERA and FIP departments. The Royals have nine qualified minor leaguers with a FIP under 4.00 this season. Last year that mark was 2. That improvement has been led by many of the pitching prospects that headline the farm system.

• Hunter Patteson – 2.34 FIP
• Mason Barnett – 2.52 FIP
• Ben Kudrna – 3.25 FIP
• Ethan Bosacker – 3.44 FIP
• Hunter Owen – 3.55 FIP
• Jonathan Bowlan – 3.56 FIP
• Chandler Champlain – 3.61 FIP
• Emmanuel Reyes – 3.64 FIP
• Eric Cerantola – 3.82 FIP

Talk of the Royals’ need for better pitching development has persisted for years. Maybe even decades. We saw the start of that last season when the Royals saw some serious improvements throughout the farm system. It improved to the point last season that the Royals’ organizational pitching development was finally closer to the top 20 than the bottom five. The development wasn’t among the best quite yet — it was simply closer to average than we’d seen in quite some time. This season, that isn’t the story. So far, the organization looks to have some of the very best pitching top to bottom in the entire minor leagues.

If the Royals finally clawed their way closer to average last season, they’ve followed that up with signs that they’re finally joining some of the best big league organizations with successful pitching development. It’s still a process and a month doesn’t make a season, but imagining these sorts of results in 2021 would’ve seemed laughable to most. Hats off to Paul Gibson and the rest of the Kansas City pitching development team. The talk of improving pitching development in the future has transitioned to results on the field now.