2026 looms as make-or-break season for this Royals top prospect

The Kansas City Royals have found an affinity in recent years for taking prep players at the top of the draft. Doubling up on high schoolers Sean Gamble and Josh Hammond in 2025 only cemented that approach, and the outcomes have been all over the map.

Frank Mozzicato still feels far from the show. Bobby Witt Jr. turned out just fine. If you want one prospect who can swing the conversation about Kansas City’s process, it is 2023 first-round catcher Blake Mitchell.

Mitchell heads into a pivotal 2026 season with his stock drifting slightly south. He is still a Top 100 prospect in MLB Pipeline’s eyes, but it is hard to build momentum off what 2025 looked like on paper.

A broken hamate in February put him behind the curve right away, and that is the kind of injury that can hang around a hitter’s bat long after he returns. Power is usually the last thing to fully come back, which is why the 2026 lens matters more than the 2025 line.

Royals' Blake Mitchell is still a top prospect, but one problem needs some solutions

The encouraging part is that the power is not the central question. Mitchell hit some of the hardest balls in the Arizona Fall League, with a max exit velocity that sat in the 99th percentile. The raw thump is real. The concern is everything that has to happen before the power shows up in games. The swing decisions. The bat-to-ball. The hit tool. That is where the microscope belongs.

Mitchell walked 20.8 percent of the time last season, mostly at High-A Quad Cities, but he also ran another strikeout rate north of 30 percent. The walk rate is excellent, and in a vacuum, the ratio can work.

The problem is the contact quality underneath it. A career-low 66.7 percent contact rate on his swings is the wrong trend, and it shows up when you look at how his profile shifted level to level. He looked comfortable in Low-A Columbia, and part of that came from getting the barrel out front and pulling the ball with intent. That same pull-heavy damage did not show up as consistently at Quad Cities, even before you get into the broader batted-ball distribution concerns.

Baseball America still tags Mitchell as having the best strike-zone discipline among Royals prospects, and I understand why evaluators like the foundation. But it has to show up in outcomes that matter. Royals fans have heard versions of this story before, including the high praise that followed Nick Pratto through the minors. Pratto’s 2019 High-A season had some similar shape to Mitchell’s 2025 in terms of patience, strikeouts, and the hope that the next adjustment would unlock everything. Royals fans also know how that one ended.

That is what makes 2026 such a defining year. The ball is in Mitchell’s court. There is no hesitation on the defensive side. He is athletic for the position, and among the notable catching prospects in this system, he is the best defender. The power is there, even if 2025 was a season-long recovery process. But power only matters if you can put the barrel on the baseball often enough to access it.

If Mitchell wants to quiet the doubt, it is simple, even if the work is not. He has to turn those walks into damage by tightening the miss rate, cleaning up the swing decisions that lead to empty swings, and proving he can consistently get to his impact contact against better pitching.

A strong spring in big-league camp would not solve everything, but it could be the first step toward putting him in front of the right coaches, the right tech, and the right feedback loop to address what is holding the bat back. These are all competitors in camp, and competing is all about fighting back.

Let's see if Mitchell can fight back against his issues this season.