The Lexington Legends are arguably the most exciting club among all affiliates of Kansas City Royals baseball. Lexington isn't rich with Royals baseball history, but it may be the current home of the new wave of talent that will make KC competitive again. Nick Pratto, MJ Melendez, Seuly Matias and others represent a significant portion of the next core of highly-touted prospects, but today we're focusing on somebody who avoided most fans' radar entirely.
Largely unheralded 7th-round draft pick Brewer Hicklen leads the Legends in OPS with an impressive .304/.366/.537 slash line through 72 games at this level. That translates into a .903 OPS this season, and Hicklen's doing this in a league that's notoriously tough on hitters. 14 dingers and a 0.71 ground-out to fly-out ratio indicates that this 6'2" left fielder gets plenty of lift on the ball. His strikeout and walk percentages could use some work, but the same could be said for every important batter on the Legends roster (more on that later this week.) When I looked through the stats for previous Lexington rosters, this number really stood out.
Nobody has ever maintained an OPS that high through as many games as a member of the Royals-affiliated Lexington Legends. The Legends were actually affiliated with the Houston Astros prior to 2013, so the last Legend to have a better year with the bat was actually an Astro in-the-making. The guy I'm talking about posted an obscene 1.03 OPS in 2010, then went on to garner MVP votes and All Star accolades throughout a still-impressive MLB career. The last guy to be better at the Single-A level than our guy Brewer Hicklen is currently anchoring the best lineup in the big leagues with his league-leading .655 slugging percentage and the big league's third-best OPS of 1.057. Yeah, we're talking about J.D Martinez.
The devil's advocate in me needs to point out Hicklen's struggles this year before I get all giddy thinking about the future. When he was promoted to the Advanced-A Wilmington Blue Rocks, Hicklen posted a .573 OPS while striking out in more than 36% of his 71 at-bats. There's a reason he spent so much of his year in Lexington, but some of his peripheral stats are encouraging, and he was only drafted last season. There's plenty of improvement that needs to happen before we can call Brewer the next Frank Schwindel (just kidding, maybe), but that's what cheering for prospects is all about.
Let's keep an eye on Nicky Pratto and M.J, of course, and let's hope Seuly gets healthy and gets back to crushing the ball next year. But, let's also keep this Hicklen guy on our radar; he's about to conclude the kind of season that's only typical for a future MLB star.
Doug LaCerte plugs his sports blog articles and gives his opinions on Kanye albums on Twitter @DLaC67. He also still has a Facebook page, I guess.
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