I just wish the Royals didn’t spend high picks on high school pitching

Where are the results?

The 2024 Major League Baseball draft is over. Led by a new scouting director, Brian Bridges, the Kansas City Royals navigated the 20-round draft with a collection of young, hopeful talent.

As always, the top picks in a draft are the most likely to reach the big leagues and contribute, and Kansas City had three top-100 picks after trading a fourth away to the Washington Nationals days previously. At sixth overall, the Royals drafted first baseman and pitcher Jac Caglianone from the University of Florida. At 41st overall, the Royals picked pitcher David Shields—no relation to James—out of Mt. Lebanon High School in Pennsylvania. And with the 76th pick, Kansas City got pitcher Drew Beam out of the University of Tennessee.

Overall, the trio of top picks fit well with the industry’s pre-draft rankings, and the Royals didn’t really do anything too crazy here. If anything, the question will be if Kansas City should have picked JJ Wetherholt—who Fangraphs and Baseball America had as a better overall prospect—but the Caglianone pick was entirely defensible.

If you recall, last year I was less than pleased with the Royals’ picks. I said that the Royals bombed their first real test of the JJ Picollo era; many folks, especially those over at the Kansas City Royals subreddit, thought I was stupid for making that claim days after the draft. But I was deeply concerned with process, which you can judge immediately. I noted that drafting Blake Mitchell and a pair of high school starting pitchers was risky and that the smartest organizations in baseball don’t do that:

Could Blakes Mitchell and Wolters, as well as Wyatt, become stars? Sure. In fact, I hope so. Nothing could possibly please me more than seeing Mitchell and Wolters become legendary battery mates who become All-Stars together while Wyatt turns into a great closer. I will root for them, and Royals fans will root for them, and I hope they get all the success in the world. But this isn’t about them. It’s about the Royals scouting department, and it’s about making the right gambles. Because, look, the draft is just one big gamble. There are things you can do to maximize your return based on the data known to you, and by their actions, the Royals think they are smarter than that.

Other organizations know better. Neither the Tampa Bay Rays, the Los Angeles Dogers, nor the Houston Astros—three of the smartest organizations in baseball—have selected a high school catcher with a top-50 overall pick in any of the last decade’s worth of drafts. Meanwhile, the only big league pitcher who was a top-50 overall pick with one of those clubs and was drafted out of high school is Matthew Liberatore. He has a career 6.35 ERA in 66 innings.

While Blake Mitchell is doing well in A ball, other potential picks are carving up Double-A and putting themselves in the position to contribute at the big league level early next season. And as for Blake Wolters and Hiro Wyatt, they’ve been so-so, which leads me to my point: I just wish the Royals would spend less capital on high school pitching. They’re not good at developing them and they’re too volatile to spend on high draft picks. And at this point, I’m not mad. I’m just tired.

From 2000 to 2019, 376 high school pitchers were selected (and signed) in the first 100 picks of the draft, and 205 of them—or 54.5%—reached the big leagues in some capacity. That’s not great, and it’s less than the percentage of college pitchers who pitch in the big leagues (62.3%). High school pitchers do potentially provide more upside, but when you compare the number of high school pitchers with 10 or more WAR from that group (38, or 10.1%) to the number of college pitchers with 10 or more WAR from that group (51, or 9.8%) the comparison is a little more dodgy.

It just takes so long for high school pitchers to reach the big leagues. And with the top college programs matching or exceeding the statistical know-how of some big league pitching development, it just makes sense to let one of those colleges suffer some of the attrition for you.

Additionally, man, the Royals have just been bad at developing high school starters. Since 2015, the Royals have drafted nine high school pitchers in the top 108 picks of a round (expanded for Shane Panzini, who just missed the cut). The next pitcher who makes it to the big leagues will be the first. Heck, the next pitcher to make it to Omaha will be the first to do so, and only one of these players has even pitched in Double-A Northwest Arkansas so far. Now, I obviously don’t expect players drafted in the last year to be in the upper minors, but they’re so incredibly far away and, importantly, none of these guys are on top 100 prospect lists, either.

I hope that these players succeed. I really do. I just wish that the Royals would spend their valuable top-100 picks on players that they have shown they can develop recently: college pitchers, college bats, and high school hitters. It’s not the players that I’m weary of—it’s the Royals player development. If they can pull it off, I’ll happily eat some crow. And you know what? I’m rooting for that, too.