The present and future of Bobby Witt Jr.
The present and future of Bobby Witt Jr.
Don't worry...It won't be long before he arrives in Kansas City.
I’ve invited my old running mate from BP-Kansas City, Colby Wilson, to contribute occasionally to the newsletter. He’ll chime in from time to time with his observations on the Royals and baseball. Today, he focuses on the name we’ve been discussing all spring. Enjoy. -CB
Despite what anyone involved with the sport would have you believe, there’s really not a hard-and-fast rule about what to do with a top baseball prospect. You scout him, you observe his development, you project him through all possible metrics and vet him with regard to how well he might do at the various levels, but from every jump—from short-season all the way to the pull of the trigger, be it from Double-A or Triple-A to the bigs—the best a franchise can do is observe all the data, use it to plot a course of action, do the best they can… and hope it works out. I don’t say this to denigrate anyone involved with the analytics community or the purveyors of the numbers, because they do a job that makes the game both easier to understand and way more enjoyable to a certain kind of fan that baseball cultivates, needs and could not advance without. It’s just sort of true.
Many, many people devote a lot of time and money to the idea of jail-breaking the game, that with a few tweaks and twerks, baseball is not only solvable from an on-field standpoint but from a team-building one as well; perhaps you can (and even should) argue they’ve been successful. Whether that success is good for the game is not the sort of argument I’m interested in having. You could (conceivably) argue that more people write about football in a fashion lighter on analytics and longer on what occurs in front of your eyes because football is more visceral and considerably more focused on the here-and-now, and that the future can sort itself out after the dust starts collecting on the Lombardi Trophies; I’m not really here to have that argument either, but before you devote a few more minutes mentally imploring me to get to the numbers part of this, it feels only fair to warn you upfront that’s not what this one is about.
This is about Bobby Witt Jr., his present, his future and why both have always been closer than we might otherwise anticipate.
A David Clyde-John Olerud situation in 2021 is not the kind of situation baseball has ingrained in you to believe is possible, as a fan—when Brandon Finnegan was an important bullpen arm in 2014 and Adalberto (then doing business as Raul Jr.) Mondesi made his professional debut during the World Series a year later, anyone able to understand context knew that the duo may have been able to participate in a highly specific situation and excel, but consistent time with the big club was unlikely in the near future. This worked for Mondesi, who returned to the bigs for good in 2018, and less so for Finnegan, who debuted in Kansas City months after he was drafted out of TCU, hasn’t thrown a pitch in the majors since 2018 and is currently fighting for a job with the Reds. Did the Royals rush him in their zeal to compete for a pennant for the first time in almost 30 years and essentially break him? Not for me to say. Sometimes baseball decides to punish neither sin nor sinner but innocent bystander.
Either way the premature promotion of a gifted prospect, except in very rare and very specific circumstances, is quite simply not how we do things anymore. If anyone tried a ham-handed Clyde-esque play to put butts in the seats with a clearly not-ready high schooler in the year of our Lord 2021, the good folks at Baseball America would storm the facility in righteous indignation. And there is (for good and bad) no Veeckian figure in 2021 baseball that worries more about fun and headlines than profit—starting a prospect’s service clock before the absolute last conceivable moment might cause them to get paid what they’re worth before a team is willing to not pay it in the name of financial flexibility, and profit trumps titles for [quick back-of-the-napkin math] at least 20 franchises, including a few who could jump quickly to contender status with a little innovative try-hard from the front office. But that would cost money, and what billion-dollar entity can afford that in this economy?
Enough preamble. This is about Witt. Is he ready? I have no idea. Anybody who wants to offer a definitive conclusion on a 20-year old with less than 200 professional at-bats is filled with more crap than a Port-O-Potty at Bonnaroo back when that was something we could go to. It’s patently absurd to consider him ready just based on his lack of seasoning and also that the Royals are… not expected to be contenders in 2021, to put it mildly.
But Dayton Moore has never been afraid of bringing up the guy who is ready, service time be damned, and Bobby Witt Jr. is closer than I think anyone expected given the dearth of pro at-bats he’s enjoyed. Overmatched guys aren’t grinding out 10-12 pitch at-bats in spring training or earning the orgasmic praise of veteran teammates or doing this just absolute gorgeous nonsense:
Soon—how soon is to be determined by when the minor league season begins, potential injuries to the big club, the relative success or lack thereof by the Royals, the perceived buttness of the other four American League Central teams and that Witt continues making opposing pitchers weep when entering the ballpark—he’s coming to Kansas City. All those benchmarks and considerations I outlined in the opening paragraph will be taken into account by the people who matter in the front office. For many franchises, the considerations in the second paragraph—money, controllable years, timeline, window of contention—would take precedent. Modern baseball means Witt can be both ready for promotion and not eligible for reasons that have nothing to do with Baseball, the Game and everything to do with Baseball, the Business.
The Royals aren’t most franchises. They have a tendency to do right by people. They have exhibited a penchant for doing a good mitzvah now to receive a good mitzvah later. Sooner or later, the pros of bringing Bobby Witt Jr. to Kansas City are going to outweigh the cons; whether that’s because of baseball or business is to be seen.