Over the weekend, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Kansas City Royals. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Kansas City’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Royals system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.
Below are the top-five prospects in the Kansas City system by projected WAR. To assemble this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.
Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.
5. Brian Flynn, LHP (Profile)
| IP |
K/9 |
BB/9 |
HR/9 |
FIP |
WAR |
| 50 |
7.4 |
2.6 |
0.9 |
3.74 |
0.2 |
At points during the 2013 season, the left-handed Flynn appeared to be developing into a legitimate candidate for a major-league starting role. He produced strikeout and walk rates of 28.7% and 3.5%, respectively, over his first four starts at Double-A before earning a promotion to Triple-A, where he proceeded more or less in the same fashion, if with some of the decline in his rates that one might expect from facing more difficult competition. He hasn’t exhibited that same sort of ability in the majors yet, however. Traded to Kansas City this offseason in exchange for Aaron Crow, he has the potential to become one of the Royals’ large collection of former starters who’ve found considerable success in the bullpen.
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