The Royals will have a ton of draft capital

The picks. There are so many.

By Patrick Brennan Feb 26, 2018, 9:59am EST

For the casual baseball fan, a rebuild by one’s favorite team can be a very dark, long, and boring time. As the offseason has trenched on, many Royals fans have come to realize that this is likely what they’ll be partaking in over the course of the next few seasons. A dark, long, and boring stretch of seasons, something that they are far too familiar with. This is one of the perks of being a fain of a small-market baseball team, as building consistency in contention with the current state of baseball economics is something that almost never comes.

So yes. Rebuilds can be tough. But with the current state of this Royals organization (lack of talent on the major league team, unlikely contention, and having one of the worst, if not the worst farm system in baseball), there is no question that this is the right direction. You can have your own opinions on whether they should or shouldn’t the talent that is left on the roster (I’m part of the latter), but that’s not what I’m particularly going to focus.

With how the rules of balance and compensation work in baseball, the Royals have positioned themselves fairly well for a nice start to this rebuild. Their position in the 2018 MLB Draft is a terrific one and it was only enhanced with departure of Eric Hosmer. All you have to do is look at some of my tweets that followed the news to get a feel of how excited I am.

The Royals now have four of the top 50 draft picks, five of the top 60, and six of the top 100 in a fairly loaded class compared to recent years. I'm already so ready for the draft.
— Patrick Brennan (@paintingcorner) February 18, 2018

Amount of selections by team in first round of this year's MLB Draft

KCR- 4
CLE- 3
TBR- 2
ARI- 2
SDP-2
PIT- 2

BOS- 1
NYY- 1
BAL- 1
TOR- 1
DET- 1
CWS- 1
MIN- 1
LAA- 1
TEX- 1
HOU- 1
SEA- 1
OAK- 1
LAD- 1
COL- 1
SFG- 1
STL- 1
CHC- 1
MIL- 1
CIN- 1
NYM- 1
MIA- 1
ATL- 1
WAS- 1
PHI- 1
— Patrick Brennan (@paintingcorner) February 18, 2018

So as things stand (and they could change slightly), the Royals currently have picks 18, 31, 33, 39, 58, and 93 in the first 100 draft slots. If Mike Moustakas signs with a team other than the Royals, they will likely find themselves with a seventh pick in the top 100, depending on the figures of the contract.

In my opinion, this makes the draft all the more important for the Royals. This draft presents a great opportunity to get a jump-start to what looks like could be a long rebuild. Getting this draft right could be huge for this organization.

And as it tends to be with me, these things usually strike curiosity in me. Looking at how the Royals amount of draft picks compared to other teams this year, I wanted to see where they stacked up compared to other teams in recent memory with draft supply. The answer is the Royals do have one of the bigger collection of picks in draft history. Since 2000, only eight teams have had four chances to make a pick in the top 40 selections, with the 2018 Royals being the first team since the 2011 Rays, who arbitrarily had six of the top 42 picks. So let’s dive in and take a look at how some of those comparable situations went.