There isn't a future to mortgage.
Going into the trade deadline next week there's been a lot of discussion as to how the Royals should handle things. The debate between buying and selling was seemingly put to rest with some public comments by owner John Sherman expressing support for going for it as well as the acquisition of Hunter Harvey.
With the direction of the franchise seemingly settled, thoughts have turned to the degree rather than the bearing. One of the more popular sentiments that's been brought up ad nauseum has been a desire to not see the Royals sell off the future in an attempt to win now. After all, winning for a couple of years is nice, but building an organization that can sustain success over decades is the gold standard for a small market team. It's not hard to look at what teams like the Cardinals, Rays or Guardians have done and hope that the Royals can become perennially interesting as well.
I have some bad news for advocates of that thought, however. There is no future to mortgage right now. The farm system is as bereft of talent as it has ever been. You don't need to take my word for it, a quick glance at the media surrounding baseball is enough to tell the tale.
MLB itself ranks the Royals system as 28th. Bleacher report has them 28th. USAToday ranks them 28th. Fangraphs ranks them 29th. Worse is how they've gotten there. The system utterly lacks top end talent, Fangraphs (who have one of the few free comprehensive prospect rankings) list Blake Mitchell as the team's lone player with a rating higher than a 45, and he manages just a 45+. That means prior to the draft the Royals had just one player in the top 150 and he was close to the bottom of that range.
The team does have...well depth might not be the right word...breadth perhaps, with 15 40+ players. However given a single 50 player is expected to provide the same value as fourteen 40+ players, it would seem to be only false promise. A shotgun approach to hoping one or two prospects pan out into becoming just major league average players.
What does this give us? Well the bad news is that the system might actually be overrated. You see the one team consistently under the Royals is the Angels...and they have far fewer "ranked' prospects. While this certainly means the Royals have more "longshots" that still have a chance...it also means that the average value of their chances is far lower than any other team. In fact, the average value of a Royals prospect is $2.2 million. The Angels have an average value of $2.6million! No one else has a value under $3 million! The average Royal prospect simply is far less valuable than the average prospect in every other system.
It's apparent that the system is still suffering the effects of a decade+ of terrible drafting and development under Dayton Moore coupled with "losing" the lottery over the last two season and taking a more unconventional approach to acquiring talent in the draft during that time. With luck, the changes to the front office will eventually pay dividends, but in the short term there's little for anyone associated with the team to hang their hat on.
Right now, the farm system might have 3-4 future major leaguers in it. Even if the team were to trade all of them away for assets over the next two year, it wouldn't meaningfully impact the team's ability to compete in the future. Whether we like it or not, it's going to take 3-4 great drafts to restock the farm system with the talent needed to build a home-grown contender.
And as we've seen, even with good picks in the draft, getting a good farm system and creating a winning team from that isn't a sure thing. If the team has the opportunity to turn some of their league bottom assets into actual useful major league talent...well then, they should. Because right now those assets aren't nearly enough to accomplish the long-term goals of the organization.