Here’s why Royals pitching prospects won’t be ‘handcuffed’ by innings limits in 2021
Every Major League Baseball organization desires young, talented, homegrown pitching. The Kansas City Royals are hardly an exception.
The Royals have largely focused their rebuilding efforts around acquiring and building pitching depth in their farm system.
“Without question it’s the deepest we’ve ever been, when you combined some of the international pitchers with a deep and talented draft class from 2018, who have gone out and achieved and done everything we’ve asked them to do,” Royals assistant general manager/player performance J.J. Picollo said.
“I think our depth is as great as it has ever been, especially when you talk about starting pitchers. It’s a credit to what Lonnie (Goldberg) and his scouting staff have done on the amateur side. … It gives us a lot of optimism and belief that we are deep and we are prepared to put a good homegrown starting rotation together for years to come.”
Rookie right-hander Brady Singer and rookie left-hander Kris Bubic debuted in the majors this season, and a bevy of prospects appear poised to follow in their footsteps.
But how much will they be able to throw in 2021 following a pandemic-shortened major-league season and the absence of a minor-league season?
Baseball organizations have put the utmost importance on keeping their young pitchers healthy, tracking the workloads, limiting wear and tear and also making sure the year-to-year progression in innings increases proportionally and within limits.
Pitchers have regularly been shut down for the year at both the major- and minor-league levels prior to the end of their season because of innings counts. The Royals shut down two young big-league workhorses, right-hander Brad Keller and right-hander Jakob Junis, late in 2019.
The Royals, however, think they created the right system this year so that their young stable of pitchers can make it to the finish line in 2021 without leaving a trail of injured arms or having to artificially curtail their workloads either in spring training or at the end of the season.
“We are very confident,” Picollo said. “We tried to just measure the intensity of what they were doing, the level of hitters they might have been facing, how many ups and downs (innings) they had. Every guy was a little bit different. Everybody’s conditions were a little different. Some guys had really good situations where they were facing advanced hitters.
“Then we turned it over to our performance science department and said we want to come up with a sort of a model that gives us an idea of what the equivalency would have been.”
The plan, which included members of the strength and conditioning and performance science departments, started with a throwing progression designed to get pitchers prepared to start throwing competitive innings in live situations.
Then the player development staff encouraged pitchers to find a place to create game-like scenarios complete with breaks in their outings or “ups and downs” to simulate innings.
The organization tracked and logged everything for each pitcher with help of the players, videos and weekly conversations with minor-league coaches and coordinators. Each pitching coach in the organization had at least 10 pitchers they were responsible for keeping tabs on.
“We started to think as a group between our strength and conditioning and our sports science departments, trainers, doctors, pitching department, almost immediately after we got shut down,” Royals minor-league director of pitching performance Paul Gibson said. “Now, when we got shut down we thought it would be a month. We thought it might be weeks or a month. Very quickly after that, we realized we were in for something.”
While innings thrown into a net, alone in an empty lot, against high school hitters in a makeshift field, or at some indoor facility aren’t an apples-to-apples comparison to what a pitcher might see against Double-A competition, the Royals factored in things such as weather, mound conditions, field conditions, and whether they were indoors or outdoors.
For the high-level pitching prospects who spent time in the spring training 2.0 or “summer camp” in Kansas City as well as the alternate training site this summer and the Royals fall camp for minor league players, the innings were more easily translatable.
For example, highly touted left-handed prospect Daniel Lynch — ranked the 36th-best prospect by Baseball America — got to approximately 130 innings this year in the Royals formula. Most of the top pitching prospects projected as starters who spent time in Kansas City this summer were in the 90- to 100-inning range.
“The doctors and the people who we were conferring with along the way were all saying if you get to 90 to 100, you’re going to break a barrier that’s important for 2021,” Gibson said. “I feel like these coaches that were on the call with these players ... doing all these things from June all the way through September, I can’t even tell you what an undertaking it was and how productive it was because when they showed up in Arizona, they were all ready to pitch.”
The Royals contend that pitchers who were on their own up until the fall camps in Kansas City or Arizona also showed signs of having benefited from the detailed approach.
A strong indicator of how much faith the Royals put into their calculations is that they didn’t feel the need to send rising prospects such as Jonathan Bowlan and Jon Heasley to Arizona after the fall camp at Kauffman Stadium to further bulk up their yearly workloads.
Even with all the calculations, Picollo stressed that the player development staff will use a combination of intuition, observation and data to make decisions in 2021, and each pitcher’s situation remains individualized and “fluid.”
The overall feeling heading into the winter remains optimistic that the Royals won’t have to, in Picollo’s words, “put the handcuffs on them right from day one going into next season.”
