That's the dude that totally lost his ability to pitch after messing with his delivery and lost all his velocity...the yips as someone stated here. Sucks cause he was supposed to be good. Only the Royals

Just illustrates how awful Dayton Moore has been at drafting over the last several years.

Nah. Not only the Royals. Lots of teams in baseball have highly drafted players never amount to anything or contribute to a major league roster.

Even the Astros, a team that has universally recognized great front office, have glaring misses - Mark Appel instead of Kris Bryant, for example.


His recent history is not good. They’re going to have to turn that around over the next few years. Macro view, his success rate is not bad... but if you shrink it to 2011-2016, it’s rough.

Some of that is bad luck, too. Starling was a known risk and doesn’t qualify, but Kyle Zimmer... no way to predict that other than the fact he was a pitcher, and pitchers break. A lot.

I’m encouraged by the past few drafts. Guys like Khalil Lee, Michael Gigliotti, Nicky Lopez, Richard Lovelady, Pratto, Melendez, Brewer Hicklen are players with slightly different profiles than they’ve focused on in the past (more advanced bats, but still toolsy guys).

This is a big draft for him. Lot of picks between rounds 1 and 2.

Personally after everything I've seen I'm not sure I would ever use a high pick on a pitcher. Bats seem to be safer unless you go for a risky one like say Starling.

I think my approach would be to stack my system with polished bats that can advance quickly and if it creates a logjam use them to trade for the pitching I need.

The best bets are high school position players and college position players.

They had good success with the former early in Moore’s tenure (Moustakas, Hosmer, Myers) but had moved away from that spot in round 1 other than Starling.

College position players, the only time they went there early, really, was Colon. Who was a bust. (Dozier doesn’t count, really - they did that primarily to get a player who might work but who would sign low enough for them to draft Manaea).

That’s why I like the shift. They’re still drafting guys with tools, but now seem to value approach as well. I’ll take a guy with very good tools and a great approach over a guy with amazing tools and no approach, generally.

Here's some trivia for you.

Four players in ML history have hit 3 home runs on Opening Day. Three of them -- George Bell, Dmitri Young and Matt Davidson -- did it against the Royals. The fourth, Tuffy Rhodes, once played in the Royals organization (88 games in Omaha).

Isn't it about time someone starts the new thread?

You know, the 2019 offseason repository?

Are there any other MLB teams that are as bad at developing starting pitching?

Everyone in Baseball, basically, is “bad” at developing starting pitching. It’s hard to do.

The Rays and Cardinals are probably the two best, and I don’t know what type of success rate you’d see even from those squads on turning picks into major league value.

I don’t think you’d seen even a passing grade average across Baseball in general, if considering 59 percent or below “failing.”

I’d put Billay and Dane in charge of player scouting for the draft.

Their hindsight is 50/50.

Alex started out the game yesterday with a nice double and seemed to be getting decent contact on pitches. Not to mention he made a pretty awesome diving catch (albeit the diving part being a tad unnecessary).

Also, was it ever explained why a solid fielding center fielder swapped positions with arguably the best fielding left fielder of the last decade?

This is exactly why Moore and the entire front office and staff should have been fired after last season to give the team a fresh start and reboot.

Moore's a mess. He says he's going young, cutting payroll, then goes out and signs a bunch of vets. The payroll was supposed to be cut to somewhere around $110 million while they rebuild the Farm, yet it's only $12 million less than last year's payroll. He says he's not interested in Moose, then signs him, only to publicly trash him.

I don't know why anyone in their right mind would think that he can rebuild the Royals into a contender whether he's given 4 years or 10 years.

I hope he proves me wrong but I highly doubt it.

I don't claim to be a baseball scout.

But as a former executive a $5 billion dollar entertainment corporation, I easily recognize mismanagement when I see it.

And the 100 loss season that I predicted in November still stands.

I don't think this organization has done a very good job of developing pitching, but the future outlook of this team is different if Yordano is still alive. Then they have two good pitchers in their 20s locked up at a team-friendly rate for years to come.

Pitching is such a tough thing to develop, you just don't see many teams do what the Mets did... and even then they haven't been able to keep all those young aces healthy and/or pitching efficiently.