Vahe Gregorian: Jac Caglianone call-up is exhilarating, but there's a reason Royals wanted to wait

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — As we spoke in front of his locker in Surprise, Ariz., I asked Jac Caglianone what the greatest challenge of his first major-league spring training had been.

In his entirely earnest way, he paused a few seconds to consider the question and smiled.

“Hasn’t really been one,” he said that day in March.

Not with arrogance but innocence, he added, “The biggest thing has been just to not get too ahead of myself. Don’t go out there and try to do too much (or) force stuff to happen.

“Let the game come to me, and everything will work out the way it’s supposed to.”

In a sense, that’s proven exactly true:

Through a mesmerizing spring training and enticing jaunt through Double-A Northwest Arkansas and a fleeting-but-irresistible rampage through Triple-A Omaha, the game so came to the 6-foot-5, 250-pound Caglianone that the Royals felt compelled to call up the Bunyanesque 22-year-old.

(The Star has confirmed ESPN’s Jeff Passan’s initial report on the story Sunday night).

Caglianone achieved what might be considered critical mass with 15 home runs and 56 RBIs in 49 minor-league games (including six HRs in his 11 games in Omaha).

In another sense, though, this is not at all the way it’s supposed to be.

Because no matter how much Caglianone’s berserk power numbers forced the hand of the parent club with the fewest home runs in baseball (34 in 60 games) and that is ahead of only the 9-50 Colorado Rockies in runs scored this season, this is actually exactly what the Royals were trying to avoid.

Exhilarating as it was to see him in a Royals uniform starting Tuesday in St. Louis, the preferred path was to give him far more seasoning — including by facing pitchers more than a time or two to learn to deal with their adjustments to him and to get far more outfield experience than he’s been gradually accumulating.

And the ideal definitely wasn’t to have him come up in the role of would-be savior for a lagging lineup.

Much as they need a jolt ...

“That’s the worst time to bring a guy up … especially one that’s a high-profile player,” general manager J.J. Picollo told me in an April interview.

The optimal hope would have been to mix him into the lineup as a complementary component when the team is producing.

Instead, what figures to be Caglianone’s greatest challenge will be compounded by not just scrutiny of his own progress but also whether he can resuscitate the anemic offense that’s in danger of squandering the fourth-best pitching in MLB (3.13 ERA).

While he certainly seems to have demonstrated that he’s beyond Triple-A, that’s not the same as being ready for this.

No matter how hard the Royals will try to cushion and support him, he’ll surely be the story for weeks to come among fans and media. And while the clubhouse no doubt will be receptive to him, that also will be a room he has to win over as The Great Hope.

The reassuring news in all this is that Caglianone is remarkably grounded and winsome. He oozes sincerity and respect for the game, thrives on challenges and is driven to improve.

During a spring training orientation for first-year Royals players, Picollo was struck by the mindfulness of Caglianone, who was the sixth selection in the 2024 MLB draft.

“If his head wasn’t down taking notes, he was the one asking questions,” Picollo recalled in March. “That’s a little different, because he knows he’s the best guy in the room.”

In fact, Caglianone kept filling up notebooks of wisdom and tips during the spring from conversations he’d have with the likes of Alex Gordon and Bobby Witt Jr..

And he was still doing that when I visited him in Northwest Arkansas in April.

(In fact, as we got talking, he said he was going to add a saying I like to one of his notebooks: “It will all be OK in the end; if it is not OK, it is not the end.” Yes, he may have just been being polite).

Typically, he’ll simmer down advice to one key point and go back over it as needed.

“Especially,” he had said in Arizona, “if I feel like I go through one day where I feel like I wasn’t where I wanted to be.”

Chances are that Caglianone will have a few of those days ahead.

He’s still learning about pitch selection, to be sure, and there’s a lot to ponder in the deeper analytics of his hitting.

And while he played outfield in high school and has been getting a lot of work with Royals roving outfield guru Rusty Kuntz (since the very day I went to see him in Northwest Arkansas), he’s got much to learn about the corner-outfield positions where the Royals could use him most.

So yes, there’s a lot to be excited about when it comes to Caglianone, who is most comfortable at first base. Especially in the long run for a guy with jaw-dropping power that you can’t unsee ... or unhear.

I mentioned this when I wrote about him in spring training, but it bears repeating.

To hear the sonic-boom from certain cracks of his bat is to be reminded of Buck O’Neil’s observation upon watching Bo Jackson hit on the 1986 day he signed with the Royals.

The man who’d heard the thunder of Babe Ruth and Josh Gibson at the plate thought, “Here is that sound again!”

The anticipation of anything resembling that is thrilling in itself.

Just because the Royals couldn’t stay as perfectly patient with him as they’d intended, though, doesn’t mean we can’t.

While there’s no reason not to hope for the immediate best, it’s far more likely he’s finally going to face some severe challenges on the way to everything working out the way it’s supposed to in the end.

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