Kansas City Royals: 2018 MLB Draft huge for rebuild process

The Kansas City Royals own four selections in the first 40 picks in this year’s MLB Draft. This is an important draft for the franchise and the Royals have to make sure their selections pan out.

The MLB Draft is a much different story from the NFL Draft. For one, it’s much longer, spanning for 40 rounds compared to the NFL’s seven rounds. The other big difference is that these players range anywhere from right out of high school to college graduates or even older.

With some of the draftees being so young, they’re not usually picked with the expectation of starting right away. Take the Kansas City Royals‘ World Series run several years ago for example. The big names like Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, and Alex Gordon were all drafted in the first round and didn’t come up to the big leagues for two or three years.

Speaking of those guys, the Royals haven’t had as much luck with their early round picks since then. They’re in the midst of a rebuild right now though, so it’s incredibly important that the organization hits on these many selections they have.

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As mentioned above, the Kansas City Royals have four picks within the first 40 selections and they have to make those count. Their first selection will be 18th overall and oddly enough, two analysts have the Royals going in the exact same direction.

Both Mike Axisa of CBS Sports and Jonathan Mayo of MLB.com have the Royals selecting outfielder Jordyn Adams out of Green Hope High School in North Carolina. Adams has the option of playing both football and baseball for North Carolina next season, but if chosen in the first round, it’d be difficult for him to turn down the opportunity to play with a Major League team.

With so many early round picks, the Royals have little excuses not to get productive players. They haven’t done well with their first round selections recently, with Bubba Starling and Kyle Zimmer still not having made their MLB debuts. Hunter Dozier is finally getting a chance to play every day, but it took the organization a long time to give him a shot.

Hopefully the Royals land the right draft picks and handle them the right way. It’s true that baseball prospects don’t always pan out (in fact, it’s common for them not to since there are so many to choose from), but the Royals need these players to come through to speed up their rebuild.