<\/figure>\nThe only Royals AFL representative that didn\u2019t make his pro debut this year, Owen spent the entire 2025 season in Double-A. He had a 4.27 ERA with middling peripherals through 13 starts before missing a month with an injury. He returned in late July and was much sharper down the stretch, posting a 3.03 ERA with improved strikeout and walk rates. He departed his second Fall League appearance with an injury and did not pitch again for the remainder of the circuit. I haven\u2019t seen any news about what happened, so hopefully it was nothing serious. Let\u2019s see what we can glean from the 92 pitches he threw.<\/p>\n
The first thing that stands out is that Owen gave up loads of contact, and hard contact at that. His overall whiff rate was just 22.2%, and 55.0% of batted balls were hard hit. Combine those with a 35.0% line drive rat,e and it\u2019s no surprise that he surrendered 11 hits and six runs in 4.1 innings. Strike-throwing wasn\u2019t a particular issue for Owen, but living in the zone did him no favors as batters had little trouble squaring up his stuff. His 32.6% chase rate was just about the only positive data point here.<\/p>\n
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Owen\u2019s primary pitch is a four-seamer that he threw about 40% of the time in AFL play. He pounded the zone with it, but it\u2019s not a particularly explosive pitch at 91-94. He also throws a changeup at 82-86, a curveball at 74-78, and a slider at 86-89. He\u2019ll throw the curveball to batters of either handedness, while using the changeup and slider as his weapons against right-handed and left-handed batters, respectively. The changeup was his best pitch on balance, racking up a 40% whiff rate, but the slider has real potential with its gyro action.<\/p>\n
I was quite high on Owen coming out of Vanderbilt and have been rather disappointed with his trajectory to this point. He didn\u2019t have a plus pitch at the time, and that remains the case as his stuff hasn\u2019t meaningfully improved after two years in the system. He\u2019s maxed out physically, so it\u2019s hard to see a path to that at this point. That said, he has real pitchability and enough arsenal depth to start. I would be surprised if he doesn\u2019t start a big league game at some point, but the ceiling feels low.<\/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 sports.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Welcome back reader! If you are reading this, you\u2019ve probably already read the earlier\u00a0entry breaking down Royals hitter performances\u00a0in the Arizona Fall League. If you haven\u2019t, go back and read it! We\u2019re back today to do the same for pitchers. Five pitchers from the Royals organization (as of the beginning of AFL play) took the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2204484,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[403481,425516,380521,425517,22091],"class_list":["post-2204483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty","tag-arizona-fall-league","tag-dennis-colleran","tag-hunter-owen","tag-surprise-saguaros","tag-the-royals"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/How-did-Royals-pitchers-fare-in-the-Arizona-Fall-League.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2204483","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=2204483"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2204483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2204485,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2204483\/revisions\/2204485"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2204484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2204483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2204483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2204483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}