The Brian Bridges hire might look good on paper, but...

Can the accountability-allergic Royals FO get out of its own way?

Photo by Cesar Cid on Unsplash

News broke on Wednesday that the Royals had hired Brian Bridges to be their Director of Amateur Scouting. The story was accompanied by baseball people who know more and are more plugged in than me lauding Bridges as a real get for the Royals. Given his role as Director of Amateur Scouting in the Braves organization from 2014 to 2019—a period in which the Braves drafted Austin Riley, Kyle Wright, Mike Soroka, AJ Minter, Kolby Allard, Evan Phillips, Ian Anderson, Kyle Muller, Bryse Wilson, Joey Wentz, and Drew Waters—and his subsequent experience as national cross checker in San Francisco for the past five years, he’s at least coming over from organizations with much more recent success to point to than the organization he’s joining.

The Royals brought Bridges into the fold in the wake of the departure of Gene Watson, who had been serving as the Royals’ Assistant General Manager and VP of Major League Scouting. A front office reshuffle followed with Danny Ontiveros, who’d served as Director of Amateur Scouting for the past two seasons, ascending to the position of VP of Scouting.

For all the talk of Bridges being a real talent in terms of scouting, it seems like there is not enough concern being voiced about the fact that the three men who have overseen the Royals’ string of almost entirely disastrous drafts since they fired Deric Ladnier are all still in the front office and are titular superiors to the new Director of Amateur Scouting.

Ladnier—a holdover from the Allard Baird front office who wasn’t fired until the end of the 2008 season when Dayton Moore was confident he could give his good buddy, J.J. Picollo, Ladnier’s job—drafted the assets which either facilitated the acquisition of or were the backbone of the Royals 2014-2015 squads. The Royals’ success in the draft dating all the way back to 2009 is BAD. The Royals’ draft track record dating back to 2012—when a draft cap was instituted and the Royals couldn’t outspend everybody, essentially loading up on multiple first-, second-, and third-round talents in later rounds while other teams were being stingy on spending on the amateur front—is even worse.

While it’s difficult to separate amateur talent acquisition from their systemically broken player development, proof of their amateur talent acquisition being broken is self-evident. They haven't had a winning season since 2015. They are in Year Six of a rebuild with the first wave of talent having reached the majors at this point, and yet they’re hurtling towards what will likely go down as the worst season in the franchise’s history, an ignominious history pocked with SEVEN 100-loss seasons since 2002, three of which have come in the past six seasons.

While seriously threatening to eclipse the previous franchise nadir of 106 losses (the Royals have 102 losses with nine games to play), the Royals farm system consistently ranks near the league’s worst per most prospect evaluators. FanGraphs currently ranks the Royals 28th out of 30 teams, and they don’t have a single prospect who would rank amongst FanGraphs’ top 114 prospects.

To be this bad at the major-league level and have a farm system this bereft of impact talent should be damning enough to fire everyone.

But the Kansas City Royals are not a franchise in which the decision-makers are held to even a modicum of accountability. Picollo, Lonnie Goldberg, and Danny Ontiveros have turned in draft after draft of results which even in good years can best be qualified as middling.

There is an oft-made joke amongst Royals fans on Twitter that any jamoke off the street with a Baseball America draft preview issue could outperform the Royals’ draft performance by just selecting the best player available when each pick was on the board, but the joke sadly is rooted very much in truth.

The Royals go off script routinely, reaching way down the consensus draft boards to grab a guy who they’ve fallen in love with but could conceivably have still been available with their next pick and certainly shouldn’t have been taken for another 15-20 picks. This has meant taking the likes of prep arm Frank Mozzicato with the 7th overall pick—AT LEAST 20 picks earlier than anyone else would have been considering him—ahead of a slew of current major leaguers (Sal Frelick and Matt McLain) and top 100 prospects (Harry Ford, Andrew Painter, Jordan Wicks, Colson Montgomery, Gavin Williams, Jackson Merrill, and Carson Williams).

The general thinking here is that going under slot with a guy like Mozzicato allows them to spread that money to over-slot picks later.

They used much of the under-slot money in 2021 to sign another prep arm—the most volatile player group in the draft—Ben Kudrna. Still on the board? Prospects who’ve enjoyed much more success thus far, including second rounders Edwin Arroyo, Andrew Abbott (in the bigs), James Triantos, Zack Gelof (also in the bigs), James Wood (consensus top 10 prospect), and Kyle Manzardo.

Mozzicato, by the way, does not know where the ball is going when it leaves his hand, as evidenced by his 8.10 BB/9 in high-A this season. Two years later, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a worse first-round draft pick from the 2021 draft than Mozzicato.

Using the 2021 draft as an exemplar is obviously anecdotal, but pick almost any draft since Deric Ladnier was fired, and you’ll get similarly dismal results. Last year, Gavin Cross—universally viewed as a reach and not appearing to garner much, if any, consideration for top 100 lists for next year—was taken ninth. Over the next eight picks, Kevin Parada, Jace Jung, Zach Neto, Jett Williams, Dylan Lesko, and Justin Crawford came off the board, all of whom would appear to be much better prospects at this point in time than Gavin Cross.

Virtually every draft class is littered with examples of this, and while the MLB draft is far from an exact science, these were drafts that at the time were met with derision by those who were plugged into scouting the prep and college ranks.

Rather than serve anything resembling accountability for their poor performance in the MLB draft, Picollo, Goldberg, and Ontiveros have failed up into higher roles in the front office.

So while the hiring of Brian Bridges might seem good on paper, it is fair to wonder how much autonomy this outside voice will have when the last three people to run the draft (poorly) for the Royals dating all the way back to 2009 are not only in the room, they’re his superiors.

Picollo said the right things in the presser announcing Bridges hire yesterday, as Anne Rogers notes:

“The people we have are great,” Picollo said. “Their reputation speaks for themselves. But sometimes you get a little too close. You need people to challenge you. You need people to open your eyes to things. This is a long-term vision. People who have different backgrounds, different experiences, will help us understand how we can achieve that.”

Unfortunately, saying the right things and knowing how to actually do them are two different things, as I opined last year reacting to Picollo bafflingly succeeding Dayton Moore. Since the early going of the Picollo regime where he at least said some of the right things emboldened the more optimistic Royals fans with hope, he’s had plenty of chances to show his reign would be different than Moore’s, but the front office is still seeing failure be met with promotions.

The one shred of hope might be that Bridges’s mentor Roy Clark, serves as an advisor in the front office, but there should be significant concern that Bridges will have the control over the draft that he should have given his title, when three of his superiors have been promoted from his position and will likely have sway in the draft war room. Bridges may have a better nose for sniffing out amateur talent than his predecessors, but will he be able to make his selections uninhibited by his bosses?

We needn’t worry about his job security—failure will be met by promotion—but will he be set up to actually succeed?