Former Royals first-rounder has revitalized his career in return to MLB with Nationals

On July 11, 2022, the Kansas City Royals designated a former 10 prospect of theirs in Foster Griffin for assignment and traded him to Toronto four days later for a player named Jonatan Bernal. Griffin hadn’t come close to living up to the hype, having pitched six total innings in a Royals uniform across parts of two seasons. He allowed six earned runs. He had Tommy John surgery in between. Kansas City received nothing essentially in return, which was roughly what they expected from him at that point.

Fast forward to 2026. On Friday night in Miami, Griffin struck out nine Marlins batters, allowed one earned run on 103 pitches, and moved to 4-1 on the season with a 2.12 ERA for the Washington Nationals. He is, by any reasonable measure, the best story in the Nationals organization through the first five weeks of the season. The Royals could not have seen it coming. Neither, frankly, could anyone else.

Griffin was the 28th overall pick in the 2014 draft out of high school in Orlando, Florida, a left-hander the Royals believed in enough to pay first-round money. What followed was eight seasons in the minor leagues, a 49-50 record, and a 4.54 ERA. He made his MLB debut on July 27, 2020, his 25th birthday, a detail that would have felt more poetic if he hadn’t immediately strained his left forearm and been shut down for the season. Tommy John surgery came two weeks later. By November, he was designated for assignment.

He came back in 2022, made five appearances for Kansas City, was DFA’d again, surfaced briefly with Toronto, and was released. The American baseball pipeline had run out of patience. So Griffin crossed the Pacific.

Royals drafted Foster Griffin, but he found better development in Japan

Three years with the Yomiuri Giants did something to Griffin that eight years in the Royals system never quite managed. They made him a different pitcher. When he left for Japan, he threw four pitches: a four-seamer, a cutter, a curveball, and a changeup. He returned with seven, having added a sweeper, a sinker, and a splitter. The cutter had always been his best pitch; now it had six companions, each with a specific role, and Griffin had developed the feel to deploy them in sequences that left hitters genuinely uncertain about what was coming next.

Washington manager Blake Butera calls him a tactician. It is an accurate description. Against the Atlanta Braves earlier this season, Griffin recognized mid-game that Atlanta hitters were sitting on his cutter inside. He could tell because they were making hard contact even on cutters off the plate. He redistributed his entire approach in real time, throwing six different pitches at least 10% of the time in the same outing.

He told reporters afterward that a particular hitter’s success against him had given him the information he needed to adjust. That is not a power pitcher’s instinct. That is something acquired over seasons of professional development in a league that required him to think because he could not simply overpower anyone.

The pitch that makes it all work is the cutter, which it has always been. He uses it 31% of the time, twice as often as any other offering, and the average exit velocity against it is just 85.5 mph, meaning hitters who do make contact are making soft contact. He throws all seven pitches to both left-handed and right-handed hitters, with the exception of the changeup. That bidirectional threat is what makes the deception durable. Hitters cannot narrow their search.

His 2025 NPB season set the table for what 2026 has become. He went 6-1 with a 1.52 ERA across 17 starts for Yomiuri, posted a 0.61 ERA over a nine-start stretch from May through July, and was named to the Central League All-Star team. When he announced his intention to return to Major League Baseball, the Nationals signed him for $5.5 million on a one-year deal, a modest bet that has already returned far more than its cost.

That is perhaps the strangest part of this story. Griffin is 30 years old, in the prime of his athletic life, and pitching in his first sustained run as a major league starter. The Royals drafted him to fill that role twelve years ago and never got to see it. The Nationals, who signed him for the price of a middle reliever, are watching it happen every five days.

The Royals should not be kicking themselves too hard over what might have been. Griffin showed little promise during his time in the organization, and it took a complete shock to the system for him to develop into a viable MLB starter. But the arc of his career does reflect how far the Royals’ development processes have come since the earlier part of this decade.