KC Royals draft check-in: 2015 edition

Any time a professional sports organization has a draft that went as poorly as 2015 did for the KC Royals it is incumbent upon the leadership to look at their own decision-making process and where it all went wrong.

2015 was a rough draft. Either we made bad decisions, or we failed to develop the talent we drafted. Either way, this begins to explain how a team loses more than a hundred games in back to back seasons and is still set to do it again. High school pitchers are a high risk/ high reward proposition. If you are going to use three of your first four picks on them, one of them needs to pan out.

Staumont, Cancel, Dini, Rivera, and Kalish are all respectable picks. Even if some of them never become more than AAA filler. They have all justified their draft position. They are the kind of late-round picks that would have made 2015 a reasonable draft if even one of our early rounds starting pitcher selections had worked out. But they did not.

And that failure is on the KC Royals as an organization. It can only be corrected by admitting what went wrong and correcting that for future drafts. It also usually requires making smart trades to fill in the holes you have created through these bad decisions. When your first-round pick is a starting pitcher who quits the sport before he is legally allowed to drink there is no other way to look at that other than as a failure of management. Luckily for many of us that lived through the 2015 draft, we are legally allowed to drink.