What a difference a year can make
Outstanding minor league season puts North Vancouver pitcher on Royals’ radar in a big way
Brandon Marklund swears his first summer in the Kansas City Royals organization was an indication rather than an aberration.
The 24-year-old right-hander from North Vancouver was one of the pleasant surprises in all of the minor leagues, dominating out of the bullpen with the Single-A Lexington Legends team after signing on with Kansas City as an undrafted free agent out of the Australian Baseball League in January, 2019.
Marklund felt that he still had pro ball potential in him after being passed over in the big-league draft following four years at Bryan College, a small school in Dayton, Tenn., and that led to him joining the Auckland Tuatara of the ABL two winters ago.
He was seeing mop-up innings early on with Lexington but he eventually worked his way into the closer role with the Kentucky-based South Atlantic League team.
He finished the regular season with an 0.46 earned run average and six saves in 24 appearances, giving up 23 hits in 39 and one-third innings while striking out 44 and walking 19.
In the playoffs, he had saves in his first three appearances and then tossed one-hit ball over four shutout innings in a 3-1 13-inning win over the Hickory Crawdads that clinched the Legends the South Atlantic title.
His success in Lexington led to him making Team Canada for the Premier 12 Tournament in Tokyo in November, where he got to play alongside former majorleaguers like Mike Saunders and Scott Mathieson. Marklund took the loss in a 3-1 setback to Australia, giving up two earned over an inning and two thirds.
It’s easy to wonder where Marklund might be pitching this summer if not for the novel coronavirus shutting down the minor leagues. He was the Royals’ No. 27 prospect on mlb.com heading into this season. More impressively, his scouting report on the Web site stated the “Royals think they stumbled upon a future big leaguer,” and suggested that he “could start to move quickly,” through the Royals system after what he showed in Lexington.
“This extended time off is definitely a little challenging,” admitted Marklund, who is waiting out the pandemic with family friends from university at a place in Jacksboro, Tenn. “But I know I can prove that the one year wasn’t a one-off. I have this time where I can work on my development.
“You can frame it like that, or you can feel sorry for yourself about what’s happening and you can lose this development time.”
Bryan College is an NAIA school. Marklund was a politics and government major. He admits that he “got a lot of funny looks,” when he started to tell people that he was going to try pro ball in Australia, that it was a lot of “go live your pipe dream.”
“My family was supportive. They knew what I could do,” he said of dad Joe, mom Cathy and 20-year-old sister Brooke.
Marklund is 6-foot-2 and 205 pounds and has a fastball that sits in the 93-97 mile per hour range. He complements it was slider that has twoplane action — “It has more depth than your traditional slider,” he says — and a change-up.
He pitched in the B.C. Premier League with the North Shore Twins, where he was coached by Brooks McNiven, the former UBC Thunderbirds ace from Vernon who took the mound for seven seasons in the San Francisco Giants’ system.
McNiven, 39, a righthander who relied heavily on his slider back in the day, also pitched for Team Canada, including at the Beijing 2008 Summer OIympics.
“He was the epitome of everything that I wanted to be — national team, drafted, pro ball,” explained Marklund. “I knew I had to pay close attention to what he was telling me. I knew I had to pick his brain.”
Marklund was a reliever his first two years at Bryan and shifted to starting as junior. He went back to the bullpen as a senior and he says he feels like he stopped overthinking pitching then, that it became about “going as hard as I can as long as I can,” and that seemed to work for him.
He says he’s put on 10 pounds of muscle this off-season, and is pleased with how he’s been throwing. He’s hoping that there’s some sort of fall league for prospects.
“Yesterday my championship ring came in the mail,” Marklund said. “I was checking it out and I was thinking that last year was a really good year. This year won’t be, but there’s still the chance that next year could be a really good year.”