Remembering The Royals Recent Top Picks

To get our Draft Day appetites whetted, here are the recent first and second players taken by the Royals:

Of course, this is a terribly misleading way to note past drafts. The first few selections take a firmer hold in our memories, but they really only tell a small part of the story.

The list above is fairly interesting. The Royals, for all their problems, did produce a homegrown ace starting pitcher (Greinke) along with a good young 1B/DH (Butler). Luke Hochevar hasn't exactly electrified just yet, but he's established himself as a Major League pitcher of some value. Alex Gordon is well... who knows anymore. Finally, we have, at the big league level, a useful spare part in MITCH. And of course, a number of these high picks are still in the Royal system, and all of the more recent ones, save Runion and Taylor, have major champions amongst the commentariat and fans.

Interestingly, Billy Butler was taken at 14th overall, the latest the Royals have drafted in the 1st round since 1995.

You can almost certainly find worse stretches. In the last three years or so, there's been much attention paid to the team's past draft failures, especially those near the top of the board. However, perhaps the larger problem was the team's inability to get much of anything out of the middle and later rounds.