Kansas City Royals top 10 prospects for 2019

The Kansas City Royals took a turn to their first year of rebuilding in 2018. How did they do in acquiring talent to jumpstart a rebuild?

We are in our third offseason at Call to the Pen of putting together top 10 prospect lists for every organization in baseball. Today’s list is the Kansas City Royals.

The Process

Our team prospect lists are compiled by Benjamin Chase, who has spent time doing plenty of watching via MiLB.tv of every organization in baseball along with talking to a very wide array of scouts who have seen players in person to hone his own opinion on players. That allows for a wide coverage on players from the Dominican Summer League all the way to the major leagues.

These lists are the opinion of Ben, and his process is heavily weighted on his own view, but also on trusted views of others. Typically, each system’s list of 10 is peeled down from a consideration list of 50-75 players. There will be some weight given to a player who is closer to the major leagues, but often these opinions will be different than some of the “major” lists out there. Feel free to comment at the end of the list with any questions you may have!

With that out of the way, let’s dig into today’s list:

Kansas City Royals system review

Royals list for 2017
Royals list for 2018
Royals 2018 minors all-stars

Coming into the 2018 season, the Kansas City Royals were considered one of the worst farm systems in the game. The team had stripped the farm system in efforts to continue competing from 2013-2017. In that 5-year span, the team only averaged 86 wins per season, but they made the playoffs twice, and used both times in the playoffs to make it all the way to the World Series, winning it all in 2015.

As the saying goes, flags fly forever, so the Kansas City Royals are most likely not feeling bad at all about the state of their farm system as they achieved the ultimate goal as a small market team by using their assets wisely. As the young players that the team developed in order to have that 5-year run hit free agency last offseason, the Royals took an intentional turn toward rebuilding.

The 2018 draft went a long way to replenishing the farm system, but investments in scouting and development has allowed for multiple prospects to “pop up” that were lesser-regarded even last offseason and are now viewed as potential big leaguers. While the 2019 draft should be significant as well for the team, they made big strides already in 2018 with a heavy focus on college arms.

Let’s start with the countdown, starting with a player that fell outside of the top 10, but was picked up in 2018 via the draft or international signing and is worthy of extra attention going into 2019…