Mellinger Minutes: Royals promote Bobby Witt Jr. + Pratto. And it’s Chiefs camp time!
The best and worst part of following a last-place team is the emphasis on prospects.
Best: help is on the way!
Worst: Nobody gave even the tiniest care about the Royals’ farm system in October 2015.
Baseball prospects are not exactly celebrities in the way that some college basketball and football players are, but they are better known than ever. Their signing bonuses are bigger than ever.
I don’t know if it’s fair to say the expectations are bigger than ever, because I remember Brien Taylor and others, but I do think we generally know more about them than ever. If you look at the trade market, teams are valuing young players more than they used to.
This all comes up today because the prospect light is about to start shining a little brighter on Bobby Witt Jr. and Nick Pratto. The Royals on Sunday promoted their top two position-player prospects to Class AAA Omaha, where they’ll play their first game Tuesday.
They will be in Kansas City relatively soon, and they will have gotten there in vastly different ways.
It seems as if Pratto has been around forever, but he’s still just 22. The Royals’ first-round pick in 2017 was written off by some after a miserable 2019 in which he slashed .191/.278/.310.
He is some combination of using the alt-site year productively and the Royals’ revamped approach to organizational hitting, promoted after slashing .273/.405/.573 in 60 games for Class AA Northwest Arkansas. Compared with 124 games in 2019, Pratto has already nearly matched his walk total while lowering his strikeout rate and hitting six more home runs.
The defense has always been there, so if this continues the Royals have a terrific piece that they could not have felt certain about when they signed Carlos Santana to a contract that expires after next season.
You’ve probably heard it said that baseball players do not develop in straight lines, and Pratto is 363 games and 1,513 plate appearances into his professional career. His teammate, Witt Jr., has so far developed in what is essentially a straight line upward — .292/.367/.564 with 16 home runs and 30 total extra-base hits in 60 games at Class AA.
He was the No. 7 prospect in MLB.com’s most recent ranking and left an indelible impression in big-league camp this spring. He has been called baseball’s best shortstop prospect since Alex Rodriguez, and he is the Royals’ best prospect in years — the last one with a higher Baseball America ranking was Wil Meyers in 2013.
The Royals have been hugely disappointing in the big leagues, but they’ve been really impressive in the minor leagues. Their High-A team is in first place, their Double-A team is two games back, and Pratto and Witt Jr. are joining a Triple-A team in first place. These promotions are a reminder of that success.
Two things I’ll watch for. The first is that Witt Jr. struggled his first 20 or so games in Class AA. I’m curious if that happens again with a change in level.
The other thing is that both these hitters have some swing and miss — Pratto had 80 strikeouts in 60 games, while Witt Jr. had 67 in 61.
The minor leagues have been reorganized so heavily that I’m not sure how true this is anymore, but traditionally Class AAA was home to some older and more experienced pitchers who maybe didn’t have the high-end stuff but could work around an opponent’s weakness.
The pitching in Omaha’s league isn’t great, so they’ll probably be fine, but as much as anything I’ll be watching for whether those power and strikeouts numbers change.
The reading recommendation is Zach Baron on Jason Sudeikis, and the eating recommendation is the half chicken and half ribs at Poio.
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This isn’t going to be popular, and some of you might end up mocking me for this, but I actually like the Chargers this year.
I get all the jokes and even think many of them are funny. The Chargers have a well-established pattern: They get some nice pieces, they get some attention, then they get some injuries and some losses.
Rinse.
Repeat.
Over and over again.
They need some health, so if your stance is that you have to — grabs sunglasses — see the Chargers be relatively healthy before you — puts sunglasses on — believe it.
That’s a reasonable stance! Probably the one I should have!
But if — IF — they can be healthy, they have a chance to be pretty good. They’ve got the quarterback, and they’ve surrounded him with enough talent — not just with skill position guys like Keenan Allen and Mike Williams, but defensive studs like Derwin James and Chris Harris and Joey Bosa. They even improved the line, perhaps most notably with rookie left tackle Rashawn Slater.
There’s a new coaching staff, and those things can always go either way, but there’s some profit to be made in the AFC West.
The Broncos are doing some interesting things, but unless they trade for Aaron Rodgers it’s hard to see them jumping too far. The Raiders … not to put too fine a point on it, because they’ve got a nice mix on offense, but it really feels like there’s a 9-8-ish* ceiling on a Gruden-Carr pairing.
* Yes, I did initially write 9-7. This 17-game thing is going to take some getting used to.
If I’m right about that, then if you’re the second best team in the division and you’re playing a third-place schedule … there’s some wins to be had.
This is not me saying the Chargers will win the division, but I also don’t know of anyone who’s doing that. Maybe I’m missing something, but what I feel is people saying Hey, Justin Herbert is a stud, and the Chargers have some nice talent, so if the new coaching staff works and guys stay healthy this could be a tough out in the playoffs.
Or maybe I feel that because that’s how I see it.
OK, I chose this question to start because I didn’t want to leadoff with the Royals, but we might as well get this over with now.
This is worth keeping mind: a gap exists between what teams say and what’s real.
And, actually, you could substitute “people” for “teams” there.
We all do this, right? We present a certain image, or a thought, and often it’s what we want to be true more than what’s actually true. We see ourselves in a certain way, and projecting that into the world might be a small part of making it a certain way.
I’m not trying to get all meta here. What I’m saying is that the Royals have long had this organizational priority on the messages sent to players. And if the manager is calling it a developmental season, then that means the score doesn’t matter, which means focus drifts and the process slows or dies.
You develop by winning, and you win by developing. The Royals are far from the only team that believes in all this, but it’s worth remembering.
They’re simply not going to call it a rebuilding year, even if the projections had their win total somewhere in the 70s.
You’re asking specifically about Jorge Soler and Hunter Dozier. I’ll answer this a few ways, and you probably won’t like any of them.
Before we get going, it’s probably right to acknowledge that the Royals aren’t hitting Soler and Dozier 5-6 very often anymore — just twice in the last three weeks.
But you might have the same question about why they’re in the lineup at all when they’re struggling this bad, and the first answer that you won’t like is that the Royals don’t have a lot of great options right now.
Here are the OPSes of the three hitters behind Dozier in the Royals’ most recent lineup: .669, .439, .692
The second answer that you might not like is that the Royals and Dozier are married. They’re tied together through at least 2024. They’re going to keep giving him opportunities as long as they believe in his talent and focus. Dozier went 4-for-4 on Sunday, and afterward opened up about why he believes he’s been struggling.
It’s probably true that reporters generally overestimate their ability to know where an athlete is mentally, but in these days of closed clubhouses and limited access you should be particularly skeptical of anyone who goes down that path.
The way I would read this is that actions speak loudly, and the Royals’ philosophy has been to stay with guys through struggles as long as their attitude is in the right place and their teammates aren’t giving up on them.
The most-cited example is probably Mike Moustakas in 2014. He was moved to Omaha once the organization detected a change in attitude. The struggles got to him. He reset in Class AAA, and even as his numbers didn’t improve much — until, of course, the playoffs — he was back having fun.
If the Royals believe Dozier is in the right mental space, they will believe he can get his way out of this. Dozier is among the most respected teammates in the clubhouse. That matters, too.
I haven’t talked to anybody about this, but I believe the plan is different with Jorge Soler. The Royals are not married to him in the same way. He’ll be a free agent after this season, and it’s hard to imagine him coming back.
If we start the clock after the six-game experiment of Soler hitting second, he’s started six of 10 games — once hitting fifth, three times hitting sixth, and twice hitting seventh. He’s hitting worse, not better, with a .509 OPS this month.
Depending on injuries and a few other factors, honestly, I would not be shocked if the Royals released Soler. They’re paying him $8 million, which would sting, but the Royals have done this before, most notably with almost-All-Star Omar Infante*.
* The real ones know.
So, anyway, I don’t know if I’m giving you anything good here. I would just say the Royals know the rest of this season is about development, and seeing who’s on board for 2022 and beyond.
But they have reasons they don’t want to say that out loud. At least not yet.
I’d be all for this. And not just for the reasons you laid out, but because it might help a little with the third-time-through-the-order thing.
If the opener gets out of the first with three or four batters, if the starter’s going well, maybe — maybe — you feel better about him getting through an extra frame if he’s facing the other side’s best hitters for the second time and everyone else three.
The Royals’ problems are bigger than an opener could fix. We agree about that. The guys who are paid to get outs need to get outs.
But if this provided some small edge — and I agree with you; Zimmer and Hernandez figure to be the best candidates — then it’s worth a try.
Well, I don’t know that they are subpar at that.
The Royals’ World Series was fueled largely by two trades of high school kids this front office developed. Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Sal Perez, Yordano Ventura and Kelvin Herrera were all signed out of high school or younger.
If we’re talking specifically about starting pitching, I wrote this last week, but using the awesome Baseball Reference we can find 19 high school pitchers taken in the top 10 of 10 drafts between 2007 and 2016.
That’s a little arbitrary, but I thought it could be helpful context on how highly regarded prospects fare with the idea that we need at least five years to begin judging draft classes.
Anyway, Madison Bumgarner is the only one of those 19 to turn into a No. 1 big-league starter. Zack Wheeler has also had a nice career, but of the other 17, none have achieved 10 career WAR and 11 have less than 1 career WAR, including six who have not yet pitched in the big leagues.
This is apples-to-oranges, because neither was a top 10 pick, but Danny Duffy and Jakob Junis were each drafted out of high school. Duffy has 19.9 career WAR, and Junis is a terrific draft-and-develop story.
But I’m probably overthinking your question. We don’t have time here to get into the details — though Alec Lewis’ story here is a good place to start if you want them — but the Royals have changed a lot about how they develop prospects.
Worth noting here that Royals minor-league pitchers increased their strikeout rate by 22.1% so far this season compared to 2019. That’s close to the best jump in baseball, though obviously there are a lot of factors that go into something like that.
I get that it’s easy to criticize everything the Royals do right now, and I think it’s clear that I’ll criticize them when it’s warranted.
But I don’t think this is it. Yes, it’s a different strategy than the one they used in the 2018 draft, but I believe the Royals would have taken high school shortstop Jordan Lawler if he was available and, besides, do you want a team that tries one strategy no matter what?
It will never be lost on me that from about 2007 or so to 2012 it was impossible to criticize the Royals enough and those are the years they were making real progress to 2013 to 2015, a time when it was impossible to praise the Royals enough, and THOSE were the years they were making many of the decisions that have led to the last few years of struggles.
This isn’t going to surprise you, but I’d frame it more as the players are not getting it done. I’m always going to push back against this idea that coaches and managers matter even close to as much as players.
Kansas City should be the easiest place to make this case. Ned Yost was once everybody’s idiot, and then he was the most popular thing in town after Eric Hosmer’s haircut. He was the same guy before and after.
Dayton Moore and Mike Matheny have expressed support for the coaches, meaning they believe the problem is not with those sending the messages but with those receiving the messages.
The players either do it, or they don’t. And based on that the rest of us think the coaches are good, or not. But it’s the players who drive the conversation. There’s no hitting coach making as much as his leadoff hitter, and no pitching coach who needs to pick up the tab with his No. 3 starter.
All that said, I’ll be surprised if the coaching staff is the same next year.
Can we be done with the Royals stuff now?
It’s a good question. I don’t know the answer, but this is one of the things I’m most curious about this preseason.
Andy Reid is about routine. He’ll change things up, and he’s not one who does something this year simply because he did it last year, but after 22 years you develop certain beliefs and comforts.
Well, that’s 22 years with a schedule that no longer exists.
I would tell you that the Chiefs are better positioned for this than most. There’s a lot of continuity here with the coaches and players, and one of the benefits of being a Super Bowl contender is that guys are less focused on themselves and more focused on the collective.
My guess is that the traditional approach to the fourth game will now be done for the third game, which would mean lots of backups and fringe 53 or practice squad guys getting looks.
I can’t speak to how it was around the league, but I thought with the Chiefs the quality of football was fine without preseason games last year. So I could see Reid going super light with his starters, but my expectation would be that the 1s get a possession or two with the first game and something between that and a half of the second game.
There could be some concern that this would mean three weeks between full-speed football for the season opener, but I think the combination of injury risk and what we saw last year will convince Reid he doesn’t need his best guys to play much in the preseason.
Perez is not from Cuba, but there are a few different things going on here.
The first, and maybe this is just a me thing, but you’re asking me the question so I have to say this: I don’t care much about what coaches or athletes have to say on most of this stuff*.
* Though I’m not sure exactly what “social issue questions” you’re referring to.
I just don’t. I’m interested if things outside sports affect the dynamics of a locker room or organization, and when certain issues become A Thing then of course the local sports columnist is going to write about it.
But, generally, I do not care which political candidate Andy Reid supports.
If a coach or athlete feels strongly enough about something to speak publicly on it, then I’ll listen and decide how much to think on it*, but generally I don’t feel the need to be in the business of asking humans who are paid to perform at a sport what they think about a news event.
* Patrick Mahomes, Tyrann Mathieu and others were very effective in pushing the NFL on racial equality, which became part of a bigger moment across the country.
That said, Salvador Perez has been asked about issues in Venezuela, and my guess is that with normal access to players someone would have asked Jorge Soler about the protests in Cuba by now.
As for the other thing you ask about, I’m not sure what the media “allows.”
If someone gives an answer we don’t like, should we electroshock them? Boo them? Throw a tomato?
I’ve always approached it this way: I can’t tell them what to say, and they can’t tell me what to write.
I’m not trying to talk around the question, but I’m not sure either can happen without the other.
What I mean is they’re not building a good culture without consistency, and they’re not going to have consistency without a good culture.
Lance Leipold is a better coach than Kansas football has a right to expect. He has relevant experience building a winner, and is presumably here as sort of his last (and only) big shot — he’s 57 years old and he’ll be into his 60s before we have much of an idea whether it’s working.
He could have stayed at Buffalo and been a legend there. He could have waited another year or so for a more stable program to call, but at that age how long would you wait?
The timing worked perfectly for Kansas, in other words, and if they get impatient and fire Leipold after three years they’ll deserve whatever imitation of Charlie Weis or David Beaty that they get.
The top three assistants listed on KU’s website came with Leipold from Buffalo. The offensive and defensive coordinators have been with Leipold dating back to Wisconsin-Whitewater.
There is some Peter Principle danger here, but you can say that with most hires. The point I’m making here is that for years Kansas football has not had a chance because it was a bad program trying to navigate a sport that rewards continuity with no pretense of continuity.
Here, largely through luck and timing, they are set up to have years of continuity.
They’ll need to build the culture and recruit talent, but the program at least has a chance.
I’m actually not sure about the answer to your first question. Maybe?
We were going down that road, if I’m remembering correctly, but let’s just say I was less than 100% convinced that a newspaper would spend many thousands of dollars to send me to Japan to write about athletes who with a few exceptions have no connection to Kansas City.
I’ve only covered one Olympics, in London in 2012. Before that I was on baseball, and in 2016 Vahe big-leagued me*.
* I’m kidding! I don’t remember the specifics of how we decided between Vahe and I, but if I had to guess I’d say it was a three-week conversation where we were both like, “Hey man, you should really be the one to do it.”
The Olympics are similar to nothing else I’ve ever done in this job. The scale is beyond comprehension. Every hour of every day there’s an event that you absolutely feel like you need to be at, because of some unfathomably great story. It’s two weeks of drinking incredible storylines from a firehose.
You basically go on three hours of sleep and spend the rest of the time tracking shuttles and transportation and worrying that you’ll miss the event and then waiting for the event to start and then worrying that you’re not doing the story justice and finally just doing the best you can and going to the next Once In A Lifetime Story to tell.
One thing I don’t love about me is that I really do need sleep. I don’t need a ton, but I’ve sort of discovered that at this point in my life I need something close to seven hours to be my best and six to function like an adult. It’s the craziest thing, but the Olympics are like this 16-day adrenaline rush, where it was a Guinness when I got back to the room at 2 a.m., then coffee when I woke up at 6, and somehow it was all fine. Probably helped that London is awesome, but still.
Anyway, that’s the difference. It’s the scale.
It’s like a bunch of Super Bowls, but at the pace of the first weekend of March Madness.
My favorite Olympic event, by far, is basketball. Soccer can be like this too, which is a lot of the World Cup appeal for me, but basketball is a very expressive sport — you can see people’s personalities in the way they play.
When the teams are divided by nationality, that means you can sometimes see a country’s culture in their offensive sets — Spain is free-flowing, Germany is super organized, America is fast and strong and brash, on and on you can go.
It’s also a more compelling event as the rest of the world continues to close the gap in international basketball.
But, really, there is nothing like watching Usain Bolt run in person. My goodness, what a rush.
Speaking of the Olympics …
My man, I have no idea.
Well, that’s not true. I know exactly why. And you do, too:
There’s been somewhere north of $15 billion spent on this already, and NBC paid $7.75 billion for broadcasting rights that go through 2032.
When there’s that much money involved, it’s going to take a lot more than a global pandemic to stop.
I’ve found myself wondering if this is the year the Olympics really start to fade in profile.
They’ve already been delayed a year, and fewer of what makes them compelling television I wonder if that means more space for the realization of how outdated and out of touch everything other than the competition has become.
I mentioned basketball earlier. But how much can it be if guys are in Covid protocols, and there’s no atmosphere at the games?
I mentioned watching Bolt, but most of that excitement came from the crowd. It was like the anticipation of a championship boxing match, but now would it just look like some guys running fast in an empty stadium?
We’ve seen our favorite leagues play in empty stadiums, and we know it made for a much less compelling watch, and we know that leagues and teams are still working to get back to pre-COVID levels of attendance and interest.
The Olympics will presumably have the same challenges, but without the safety net of people having invested in specific teams.
I don’t know. I’m just wondering if we’ll ever see the Olympics mean as much as they once did.
A list!
In reverse order, the home games I’d be most interested in:
9. Steelers, Dec. 26. There’s just nothing here. I’m not expecting the Steelers to be good, and the day after Christmas?
8. Broncos, Dec. 5. I’m thinking a lot about the calendar here, and this is very much in the part where you might be miserably cold.
7. Raiders, Dec. 12. Same thing.
BIG GAP
6. Giants, Nov. 1. Maybe it’s just me, but I think the Giants could be pretty good. This is the day after Halloween, but it’s also a Monday night game. I guess that could be a plus or minus, depending on your job.
5. Cowboys, Nov. 21. This is probably higher than a lot of people would have it, but if the Cowboys can be healthy they’ll be really good, and that’s a big enough fan base that the stadium will be lit.
4. Chargers, Sept. 26. Maybe the Chargers will still be healthy in week 3? Either way, it should be a glorious day, plus this is the weekend of the Plaza Art Fair. Get some culture.
3. Bills, Oct. 10. There’s an argument for the AFC Championship Game rematch as the most anticipated of the season. But I’m putting it here because Sunday night games can be rough for going in person, and it’s not the season opener.
2. Packers, Nov. 7. Obviously I’m doing this with the idea that Aaron Rodgers is still there, but for me the late afternoon kickoffs are also the best. You don’t have to rush out of the house at 7 a.m. to tailgate, and you don’t get home after midnight on a Sunday (unless you want to do that which, god bless).
1. Browns, Sept. 12. There’s just nothing like the season opener, especially when it’s against a good team.
With some exceptions, the struggling teams are harder, and 2012 is a great example of the exceptions because the 2012 Chiefs existed largely as a thunderstorm of topics for a sports columnist and the 2012 Royals were booed 16 minutes into their home opener and did not win a home game until May in an Our Time season in which they hosted the All-Star Game and were expected to contend.
But those are the exceptions.
Bad teams need some inherent and compelling drama to make for good columns: someone getting fired, a leader with a sort of charismatic unlikeability, arrogance, something.
Those teams exist, but more often you get a locker room full of guys who don’t want to talk, and when they do it’s bad quotes. Bad teams can be sort of fun in retrospect, like the time Romeo Crennel replaced the ELIMINATE BAD FOOTBALL sign with one that said PLAY GOOD FOOTBALL, but in real time those aren’t particularly interesting for fans who sometimes feel like you’re piling on*.
* And, let’s just be real here, sometimes the local sports columnist IS piling on.
I got this weird job in 2010. Here are the five best teams to cover in that time:
The 2014 Royals, the 2015 Royals, the 2018 Chiefs, the 2019 Chiefs, and the 2012 Chiefs, and it’s probably in that order.
Though maybe Kansas City’s history makes it different. That was the Royals’ first postseason in 29 years, and the Chiefs’ first AFC Championship Game in the history of Arrowhead Stadium, which still seems impossible. If I did this job in New York, maybe it’d be more fun to go after the losers.
This week, I’m particularly grateful for this summer. I joke a lot about the heat, and for good reason, but I can’t even pretend this year. I’ll take this, you guys. No hate from me.