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The Royals announced that they have selected right-handers Ben Kudrna<\/a><\/strong> and Steven Zobac<\/a><\/strong> to their 40-man roster. That protects both players from being selected in next month\u2019s Rule 5 draft. Kansas City\u2019s 40-man roster count climbs from 37 to 39.<\/p>\n The 22-year-old Kudrna was a second-rounder back in 2021. He\u2019s long ranked among the top pitchers in what\u2019s now a thin Royals system. Kudrna struggled to a 5.30 ERA in 106 2\/3 innings between Double-A and Triple-A this season, posting an average 22.9% strikeout rate and a worse-than-average 10.8% walk rate. He\u2019s 90-93 with his sinker, generating a slightly above-average ground-ball rate and a better swinging-strike rate (12.3%) than one might expect for a sinker pitcher with pedestrian velocity.<\/p>\n Zobac, 25, was a 2022 fourth-rounder who missed time this season with a knee injury. He logged an ugly 7.25 ERA with a sub-par 21.7% strikeout rate but has drawn average or better grades for his heater, slider and command. Zobac posted a 3.64 ERA in 126 minor league innings during a healthy 2024 season, and the Royals unsurprisingly didn\u2019t want to risk losing someone they\u2019re envisioning as a potential big league starter even on the heels of an injury-marred \u201925 campaign.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.mlbtraderumors.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Royals announced that they have selected right-handers Ben Kudrna and Steven Zobac to their 40-man roster. That protects both players from being selected in next month\u2019s Rule 5 draft. Kansas City\u2019s 40-man roster count climbs from 37 to 39. The 22-year-old Kudrna was a second-rounder back in 2021. He\u2019s long ranked among the top […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2165610,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[348875,415785],"class_list":["post-2165609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty","tag-ben-kudrna","tag-steven-zobac"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Royals-Select-Ben-Kudrna-Steven-Zobac.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2165609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2165609"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2165609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2165611,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2165609\/revisions\/2165611"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2165610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2165609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2165609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2165609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}