Kansas City Royals taking different approach for next era of contention

The Kansas City Royals have made it a point to focus on pitching the past few years.

When the Kansas City Royals went on their World Series runs in 2014 and 2015, a lot of the attention was on the homegrown talent the Royals had taken in the mid to late 2000s (Alex Gordon, Mike Moustakas, Eric Hosmer, etc), which happened to be position players.

This time around, however, the Royals are focusing on a different aspect in their next era of contention, which is pitching.

Yes, the bullpen was dominant when the Royals went on those epic runs several years ago, but the starting rotation was more on the mediocre side. The starters had less pressure on them by knowing that they only had to go six innings before being able to hand things off to the H-D-H trio in the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings respectively.

Dayton Moore has made it clear that he’s focused on getting the Royals pitching unit to be one of the best in all of baseball. He’s done that by adding an abundance of arms over the past few years with an emphasis on college pitchers (more on that in a bit).

Obviously the biggest name right now to Royals fans is the newest first round pick, Asa Lacy of Texas A&M, who slipped to number four overall. Moore had to be elated that he was still available because this kid has ace potential for sure. Not only that, but he’s a lefty and it’s hard to find truly dominant lefties to throw into the rotation.

The Royals really fixated on pitching – and college pitchers at that, as they’ve selected 47 college pitchers in the last three drafts per Alec Lewis of The Athletic – in 2018 when they took Brady Singer, Jackson Kowar, Daniel Lynch, Kris Bubic, and Jonathan Bowlan with their first five picks. That was the beginning of this storyline and it’s continued now two years later with the addition of Lacy.

Singer and Kowar pitched together at Florida, Lynch pitched at Virginia, Bubic at Stanford, and Bowlan at Memphis and all five of those guys pitched well in the minor leagues last season. There’s a good chance all five make it to the major leagues and can provide SOMETHING for this team.

While the Royals still need to find more position players for their next run, Bobby Witt Jr. has the potential to be one of the greatest ever for them at shortstop and they found nice players in this draft too who might be able to help.

Those runs in 2014 and 2015 were nice, but the biggest concern on most occasions was how would their starting pitching fare? That will be the furthest thing on Royals fans’ minds if these young flamethrowers all continue to pitch at the level they’re pitching at right now.

As Josh Vernier of 610 Sports mentioned above, they have a nice base to go off of here with the aforementioned names along with Brad Keller. It’ll be a lot of fun these next few years to see how these pitchers develop and if the Kansas City Royals truly will have one of the most shutdown rotations in all of Major League Baseball.

It might be a few years before the Kansas City Royals are truly contenders again, but these pitchers are worth getting excited about.