Baseball America Recognizes Royals Prospects

Stop me if you’ve heard this one – the Royals have a lot of big prospects performing well this year.

If it were any other team, any other group of players, I’d be tired of hearing about it, but since it’s my Royals, I’ll read the same articles over and over like a seventh grade book club reads Twilight.

The newest bit of recognition comes from Baseball America, who have repeatedly pointed out Royals prospects this season for their exceptional performance.  Jim Callis has called Kansas City’s the best minor league system in the game.  Wil Myers and Mike Moustakas have both been featured in their prospect hot sheet, and at the All-Star break, Eric Hosmer was included as a minor league midseason All-Star by BA.

Well the newest level of praise by Baseball America is actually a little bit ridiculous – in a great way.

Earlier today, Baseball America produced an end of year prospect hot sheet, selecting a player at every hitting position and then five pitchers as their Hot Sheet All-Star team.

So keep in mind that there are 30 Major League Baseball teams. Each team has four full season minor league affiliates. Now if all of those have, say, 23 players on average at a given time, that works out to (carrying the one, drop down the six…) 2760 minor league players under consideration.

Baseball American chose fifteen as the best in 2010.

And the Royals had five of them.

Granted, BA isn’t naming their top 15 overall. It’s fairly arbitrary in that they selected a full batting lineup, so in some cases, Mike Stanton and Jesus Montero, considered among the top three to start the year, a prospect was on the honorable mention team. Still, this is elite company. There were theoretically 120 everyday minor league first basemen (assuming every minor league affiliate had one primary first baseman), and Eric Hosmer was chosen as the best of them all.

The honored Royals (all deserving) were:
Catcher: Wil Myers
First base: Eric Hosmer
Third Base: Mike Moustakas
Starting Pitcher: John Lamb
Relief Pitcher: Tim Collins

Even if that’s just a list of five Royals who happen to play five different positions who were selected, that’s still a sizeable distinction. A major league roster consists of 25 players. If you have five that are listed as All-Star anything, you have a chance to win. The Hot Sheet selections omitted Johnny Giavotella, Mike Montgomery, Clint Robinson, Kila Ka’aihue and other Royals minor leaguers who had amazing 2010 seasons (not that I’d have expected them to be selected for this exercise as there are a LOT of talented minor leaguers).

The Royals system is stacked, and to have core players being recognized in this way says a lot about how they rank among their peers. If the development continues or even increases, those five could be the best at their positions once they’ve hit the major leagues for a season or two.

Tell me that’s not exciting…

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