It wasn’t that long ago that Kyle Zimmer, Major League Pitcher was a pipe dream. Similarly, it wasn’t that long ago that Kyle Zimmer, Functioning Pitcher At All was a pipe dream.
Zimmer is an exercise in “what if” if there ever was one. The fifth overall pick in the 2012 draft, Zimmer was considered, along with Mark Appel and Kevin Gausman, to be one of the top college arms in the draft. Had Zimmer succeeded like the Royals were counting on him to, a cascade of events could have happened—maybe we’d have seen Zimmer’s debut out of the pen in the 2014 playoffs, and maybe the Royals wouldn’t have spent north of $70 million to acquire Ian Kennedy, thereby allowing them the money to sign Lorenzo Cain, Mike Moustakas, or Eric Hosmer after they hit free agency.