KC Royals Trades: 3 mistakes the club must not make

The KC Royals shouldn't be too reluctant to trade pitcher Brady Singer

First-round draft picks typically aren't mentioned in trade talk before their last season of team control nears. But that may not be the case with Kansas City starter Brady Singer.

Singer is becoming an enigma, a pitcher who dominates one game and gets battered the next. His dumbfounding pattern of inconsistency is preventing him from achieving the elite status the Royals foresaw when they picked him with the 18th overall selection of the 2018 draft.

He's 4-5 with an unsightly 6.58 ERA after Baltimore drilled him for four runs in 4.1 innings Saturday, just six days after his 5.2 scoreless innings propelled the Royals to a 2-0 victory over Colorado, the fourth time he's held an opponent to a run or less while pitching at least five innings. But the fourth-year major leaguer has also surrendered five or more runs six times.

Many blame Singer's sparing use of his changeup for his off-again, on-again struggles. His obvious reluctance to regularly use the pitch, despite the success he began to find with it last season when he went 10-5, reduces his pitch "arsenal" to a sinker and slider and spells trouble if one or the other doesn't work on a given night.

Avoiding the changeup is a choice Singer seems to make too often and one the Royals can't like. The club is the employer, Singer the employee. If the Royals can't convince him that throwing the changeup more often is best, they should find another club for Singer.

And even if the changeup, or lack thereof, isn't the problem, he hasn't, at 23-25 since his 2020 big league debut, proven himself untradeable.