The Royals have designated right-hander Matt Sauer for assignment and selected the contract of left-handed reliever Sam Long from Triple-A Omaha, per a team announcement. Sauer was selected out of the Yankees organization in December’s Rule 5 Draft. The Royals will have a week to trade him or place him on waivers, and if he goes unclaimed he must be offered back to the Yankees for $50K. If he lands with a new team, his Rule 5 restrictions will roll over to that new club.
A second-round pick by the Yankees back in 2017, the now-25-year-old Sauer made his big league debut when he first took the mound for Kansas City this season. He held opponents to just two runs through his first 9 1/3 MLB innings but did so with an ugly ratio of just four strikeouts to eight walks. The lack of command and a put-away pitch proved problematic in the weeks since. Dating back to April 29, Sauer has been torched for a dozen runs in seven innings.
Overall, Sauer pitched 16 1/3 innings for the Royals and yielded a 7.71 ERA. He fanned only 10.7% of his opponents against an ugly 13.1% walk rate in that time. Were the Royals at or near the bottom of the division, perhaps they’d have been more patient, but at 29-19 on the year and standing in second place, Kansas City clearly felt that they couldn’t continue the experiment if it meant getting such minimal production out of a bullpen spot.
Long, 28, has spent the past three seasons in the majors with the Giants (2021-22) and A’s (2023). He’ s pitched 128 innings for the two Bay Area clubs, logging a 4.92 ERA with an 18.5% strikeout rate, 9% walk rate and 40.5% grounder rate. The southpaw averages 93.8 mph on his heater and couples that four-seamer with a curveball as his primary breaking pitch. Long used a changeup quite a bit during his Giants days but swapped that out for a slider with Oakland last season.
Though he doesn’t have a great track record in the majors, Long has been nails with the Royals’ Omaha affiliate this season. In 20 2/3 innings, he’s pitched to a tiny 1.31 ERA with an impressive 27.4% strikeout rate against a 6% walk rate. He hasn’t given up run since April 25, rattling off 8 1/3 shutout innings with nine punchouts and just one walk during that hot streak.
Long opened the season on a similarly impressive run of nine straight scoreless frames with a 12-to-3 K/BB ratio. Add in 8 2/3 innings of one-run ball with a 48.4% strikeout rate and 3.2% walk rate in spring training (15-to-1 K/BB), and it’s become increasingly difficult for the Royals to overlook his contributions to date.
The Royals have Sauered on Matt already.
Why are you doggin’ on the Royals’ hot start?
The boys are playing ball
Three straight transactions involving players whose last names have three straight vowels.
This is the kind of comment I’m here for
loser
Steve
Thumbs down to you
That’s only happened twice before in the stat-cast era.
Three straight vowels? Wait, how do you know the vowels’ orientation?
I think i and o go both ways.
Haha!
I’d rather Will Klein be the guy who got the call, but whatever. Sauer was not good.
Pirates should place Bednar on the DL and claim Sauer to replace him. Same type of pitcher this year, only Sauer cost less.
Half the teams in the league would trade an unranked prospect for Bednar in the hope that a change of scenery would resuscitate him. Some would probably even trade a team top 10-20 prospect. A few months ago the Pirates could have had a much larger haul.
Sounds good.
He’d improve the Angels BP numbers.
Fans thinking Royals can’t win that weak division are funny.
I don’t know about that those Guards are playing ball but WC team at the very least.
Dude if they get in anything can happen. They remind me a little of last years Dbacks
dougdeb. Funny ha ha or just funny? Royals have won a world series more recently than most teams. So sit back and watch because they are for real.
You must be a Yankees fan. Ugghh
Most Yankee top prospects are all hype
WHEN was Matt Sauer a top prospect????
Sauer WAS a “steal” at 56 overall as many teams passed on him because he was coming out of high school and had committed to the University of Arizona to play college baseball (the same way they successfully got Anthony Volpe in the draft at 30th overall who had committed to Vanderbilt University and signed him and the same way they unsuccessfully took Gerrit Cole 28th overall in the draft in 2008 but he chose to play college baseball at UCLA instead).
The Yankees gave Sauer the $2,497,500 million dollar signing bonus (which was more than the suggested $1.2 million slot value) so he WOULD sign instead of going to college – using the money they saved by gambling Clarke Schmidt who had just had Tommy John Surgery in the first round and only giving him a $2,184,300 signing bonus.
EVERY team worth their salt hypes their own prospects (or at least should be doing so) to get fans excited to buy tickets when they come up OR just to inflate their trade value.
But, Sauer was NEVER a “top” prospect – the highest ranking he ever got was 17th on the Yankees top 30 by MLB.com (which is only around the 510th best prospect). Then he was another “victim” to missing a year of development when the 2020 minor league season was cancelled due to covid and fell all the way down to 26th on the Yankees top 30 in 2021. the highest he got after covid was 22nd on the Yankees top 30 in 2023 and 22nd on the Royals top 30 on MLB.com (which is only about the 630th overall prospect) and 23rd-best prospect in the Royals system, according to Baseball America. He’s never thrown an inning in AAA in the minors and had a 4.45 ERA in AA.
Nice to see Sam Long promoted. I hope Klein and Pennington follow soon.
I wouldn’t doubt this team. The whole Central is probably playing above their stations right now.
The Royals soured on Sauer.
I can see Cashman bringing him back. He can’t be any worse than Tonkin.
How many players drafted in the second round of the 2017 draft are ML regulars, would you guess?