What to expect from Daniel Lynch

The Royals have been aggressive with sending their top prospects to the Majors in recent years. Last season alone saw the club give 2018 first-rounder Brady Singer the start in just its second game of the campaign. It also promoted 2019 Minor League strikeout leader Kris Bubic ahead of schedule, considering he had not previously pitched above Class A Advanced. Even outfielder and Royals No. 5 prospect Kyle Isbel cracked the Opening Day roster last month, despite lacking any upper-level Minor League experience.

Now, it seems Kansas City is right back with that same level of aggression with its pitching prospects.

The Royals have promoted No. 24 overall prospect Daniel Lynch to the Majors for the first time, before he even gets in a Minor League game this summer. The 24-year-old left-hander will make his debut Monday against Cleveland at Kauffman Stadium.

Lynch will take Jakob Junis’ spot in the Kansas City rotation. Junis had shown promising results as a starter through the first month of the season, posting a 3.47 ERA with 27 strikeouts in 23 1/3 innings, but the Royals are hopeful he can be of even more service in the bullpen, where the organization needs the most help. Entering Monday, the Royals sat atop the AL Central with a 16-10 record, 1 1/2 games ahead of the White Sox, but that comes with a relief corps that ranks 23rd in the Majors with a collective 0.0 fWAR.

This shakeup of the pitching depth chart has as much to do with Lynch’s potential as anything else, however.

Lynch will typically sit in the mid-90s with his fastball but can touch up to 99 on the radar gun, as he did at last year’s alternate training site. His plus slider is his best secondary option, coming in with plenty of depth and bite, so Royals fans should expect to see plenty of that in his debut Monday. The curveball can give a different breaking look, though that is typically more of an average offering. Lynch has perhaps made the most progress on his changeup, as assistant general manager J.J. Picollo noted to MLB Pipeline last month.

"He's commanding all of his pitches better, but he has so much more confidence in his changeup now," Picollo said. "It's a devastating pitch for him. He'll throw it 3-0, 3-1, 0-2. He can go to that pitch whenever he wants to, and it's either a swing and miss or weak contact. Rarely does he elevate it. If I had to pick one thing, that would be the pitch that he really improved on, and it can be a difference-maker for him."

The Royals grabbed the University of Virginia southpaw with the 34th overall pick in 2018, the selection awarded to them after Eric Hosmer turned down the qualifying offer and signed with the Padres the previous offseason. Lynch was one of five college pitchers selected by Kansas City within the top 50 overall picks that year, joining a list with Singer, Bubic, Jackson Kowar and Jonathan Bowlan.

Lynch was an immediate standout in 2018, posting a 1.58 ERA with 61 strikeouts in 51 1/3 innings between Rookie-level Burlington and Class A Lexington. He was on track to do something similar in his first full season of 2019 before an arm issue held him back that summer. Instead, he pitched to a 3.10 ERA and 77 K’s in 78 1/3 innings at Class A Advanced Wilmington and made up for the lost time in the Arizona Fall League, where he made four starts and fanned 19 batters in 14 frames.

Like so many of their top prospects, the Royals sent Lynch to their alternate training site in 2020, thus giving him looks against much more advanced bats than he had seen at previous stops. It’s possible he could have debuted in 2020 instead, if the season hadn’t been shortened to 60 games due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Now that Lynch is up, it’s safe to say that he should stick with the Major League club for the long haul. His stuff is good enough to become a mid-rotation starter immediately at the top level, and that would give the Royals a big boost behind early standouts Singer and Danny Duffy. Adding Lynch could be a leg up in Kansas City’s attempts to beat out preseason division favorites Chicago and Cleveland in the AL Central. At the very least, the left-hander’s ascension is another piece of the organizational puzzle the Royals are building in hopes of returning to the homegrown glory of the mid-2010s.