The Kansas City Royals have a secret up their sleeve that should be anything but. Outfielder Tyler Gentry isn’t a top-100 prospect. He’s the organization’s number eight prospect, according to MLB Pipeline, and he may not earn a spot in the lineup on Opening Day. The team signed Hunter Renfroe this winter and seemingly put the kibosh on that possibility. All of those things have come together to create a weird narrative around Gentry that is difficult to understand. That narrative came to a head on Wednesday when another unnamed publication released their latest Royals top prospect list. On it, they named Gentry a player with “potential to make the majors; possible sleeper candidates for sustained MLB success.” He’s tiered with other Royals prospects including Austin Charles, Carson Roccaforte, and Jared Dickey (among others). That’s a sound list of prospects.

My gripe isn’t so much the prospects he’s paired with. Although it’s clear to me that Gentry is far ahead of them (more on that soon), I think it’s a fairly sound group of prospects. No, instead I take offense to the notion that Gentry simply has “potential” to make the Major Leagues. Gentry is closer to a Top-100 prospect right now than he is to a fringe big leaguer, and it isn’t remotely close. I got so annoyed that I decided to just put this together and hopefully open more eyes to just what Gentry has done in his minor-league career thus far. He isn’t flashy. Gentry isn’t going to belt 35 home runs, steal 30 bags, or win an MVP someday (probably). Despite the lack of ceiling in any one aspect of his game, Gentry is the most well-rounded bat in the entire farm system and one of the most underrated players in the entire minor leagues today.

A look at Gentry’s résumé of work and the narrative around it

Without question, the 2023 season started slowly for Gentry. He started the year in Omaha, making his first stab at the minor league’s highest level. It was the first true slump of Gentry’s entire professional career and lasted until the mid-season mark. The slump saw Gentry slash .227/.334/.378 over 354 plate appearances. It was enough to create some questions about his prospects, I’ll admit that. Entering last season I saw Gentry as a potential late-season callup. Instead, by the All-Star Break it was worth wondering what went wrong. He wasn’t quite the same as we’d seen before.

After the All-Star Break, the outfielder all but silenced those questions. The rest of the season from July 15 on, he slashed a resounding .295/.427/.494. In that span, he walked 17.8% of the time and struck out 20.2%. He was one of the hottest hitters in all of Triple-A to end the year and the coverage around him was essentially zero. He didn’t explode in the home run department but there was plenty of loud contact and something certainly clicked. My gripes — if we can revisit those — aren’t even based on this sample of around 50 games. Although it’s a sizeable piece of the season, 50 games in the grand scheme isn’t all that large of a sample.

Small samples, followed by larger samples, followed by the largest sample

Instead, it’s worth looking at the résumé of work encompassing the rest of Gentry’s professional career to this point. Gentry didn’t debut until 2021 after being selected in the third round of the 2020 draft. The 2020 minor league season was, of course, canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Once he did arrive in 2021, Gentry posted a respectable .844 OPS for High-A Quad Cities. Then in 2022, he exploded. Gentry was the Royals’ 2022 George Brett Hitter of the Year Award winner. The award is given the the organization’s best minor league hitter each season. He more than deserved it, after slashing .326/.422/.542 over 108 games between High-A and Double-A.

Gentry had 44 extra-base hits that season with 60 walks. It was a fantastic showing that put Gentry firmly on the map — or so we thought. Then the foretold slump happened to start last season and we’re back to square one debating if Gentry is even a true major-league prospect. What does his entire minor league career look like with that slump removed? If you remove last season’s early season slump (which matters, don’t get me wrong), the results are fantastic.

Without the first half of 2023, Gentry has compiled 887 plate appearances. Gentry slashed .305/.418/.512 over that span. The walk rate over that workload is a healthy 14.4% and he’s limited the strikeouts to an average mark of 23.0%. Some home run power showed up, anchored most by his mark of 22 in 2022. In all, he has 35 over the span mentioned above. Those results are fantastic. If you plug the above slash line and walk rate into a data filter of all minor leaguers since 2006, just two hitters have performed that well over their MiLB career (min. 800 plate appearances): Brandon Belt and Alex Gordon. Gordon, of course, was the best prospect in baseball at third base before moving to left field. Over his minor league career, the results were extremely close to what we’ve seen from Tyler Gentry.

Let’s get one thing clear: I’m not calling Tyler Gentry the best prospect in baseball. He isn’t even my top Royals prospect (although those rankings are tied a lot more to the ceiling than what a player is right now). He isn’t going to be the next Alex Gordon, he’s going to be the first Tyler Gentry. With all that clarified, the point at hand should be exceedingly clear. Gentry is nowhere close to a fringe major leaguer. He’s a true prospect that deserves much more respect than he’s been given. Don’t discount him forcing the issue in Spring Training and don’t be surprised if he’s the Royals regular left fielder by the end of 2024. He’s a bonafide top prospect and it’s time to make the narrative reflect that.