Lesky’s Notes: The Royals are passing every test so far
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Tim Fuller-USA TODAY Sports
I was skeptical of the Royals being contenders this season before things got started and even during spring training when they were playing so well. I thought they’d be competitive. I thought they’d at least not be completely out of it by the start of May, which would be a nice change after the last couple full seasons. And I thought they had a chance to outlast some teams because of their upper level pitching depth. But what I didn’t see coming was starting 15-8 and basically doing everything they needed to do along the way. The formula for a team like the Royals to stay in contention is to handle your business against the bad teams and hold your own against the good. We talked about that last week. After going 5-1 against the Tigers and Pirates to start this road trip, they’re now 7-2 against the bad (Rangers, Pirates and Tigers) and remain 8-6 against the good. That’
April 9, 2021
Join me and Kevin Goldstein this afternoon at 1:00 PM PT/4:00 PM ET for another
Prospect Film Session live on the FanGraphs homepage, or our Twitch channel. We’ll be discussing my looks at the unique co-op scrimmages going on in Arizona and the prospects therein, including Jarred Kelenic, Erick Pena, Davis Wendzel, Nick Loftin, the prospects I wrote about here, and more.
Players who participated in spring training but didn’t make the big league team and weren’t placed on the alternate site roster need a place to continue to play in advance of minor league spring training, so a handful of Arizona-based teams are participating in a week of co-op play during which they combine prospects from a couple of different organizations to make one roster. These rosters are heavy on prospects, so I’m targeting these games as I lay a foundation of fresh notes for some of the upcoming prospects lists, in this case Seattle, Texas, Kansas City, and San Diego.
Under-the-radar Royals prospects
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Anderson Paulino
MLB Pipeline recently released their Top 30 prospect rankings, and this week, they placed the Royals tenth among major league teams, the highest organizational ranking of the known prospect sites. You can read about those prospects at MLB Pipeline, and I’ll release a list here as well, but I thought I’d drop a few names that aren’t on the Pipeline that are intriguing if not as highly ranked yet.
The minor league season will be different with the late start, longer series, and no playoffs but the Royals are flush with talent at each level.
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It’s common for our readers to want to know which of the players who aren’t on this year’s Top 100 might grace next year’s. Who has a chance to really break out? This is the piece for those readers, our “Picks to Click,” the gut-feel guys we think can be on the 2022 Top 100.
This is the fourth year we’ve conducted this exercise at FanGraphs, and there are some rules. First, none of the players you see below will have ever been a 50 FV or better in any of our write-ups or rankings. Second, we can’t pick players who we’ve picked in prior years. The two of us have decided to make this somewhat competitive to see which of us will end up being right about the most players. Here’s a brief rundown of how the site’s writers have done since this piece became a part of Prospects Week. You can click the year to go to that year’s list.