Sam McDowell: The Royals call up Jac Caglianone. There's one adjustment he might need to make.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A 22-year-old prospect is officially joining the Royals this week, a left-handed free swinger whose arrival in the bigs includes an online greeting from the most famous person in Kansas City.

Jac Caglianone has been all the rage outside an organization that already features one of the five best players in baseball, even if he’s yet to step his mammoth power into a major-league batter’s box.

That will change Tuesday.

The Royals have called up Caglianone from his pit stop in Triple-A Omaha ahead of their series with the Cardinals in St. Louis. ESPN’s Jeff Passan first reported the news Sunday.

The Royals have tried every internal option available to improve the lowest-scoring offense in the American League — which was shut out once more Sunday, ruining another terrific outing from lefty Kris Bubic. They’ve parted ways with veterans (and even eaten the money) and tested minor league bats more seasoned than Caglianone.

But a 22-year-old fast rise through the minors has always come down to one question:

Is he ready?

The answer, as it stands: Probably.

But there are some caveats.

Caglianone has pushed this track faster than the Royals ever envisioned, and even as the non-voting public pressed for his arrival in Kansas City, the organization kept testing him in ways that stretched beyond measuring the distance of his home runs. In an attempt to mirror what he’s likely to see in the Major Leagues, they focused on his hard-hit rate, chase rate, in-zone swing-and-miss and overall swing-and-miss rates.

The batted-ball profile, for starters, is truly insane. In in his first 11 (of 12) games with Triple-A Omaha — a small sample size but our only sample size there — his hard-hit rate was at 60%.

There is only one MLB hitter better than 45.7%, per Fangraphs data, and it’s Shohei Ohtani at 50.3%.

There is all the reason in the world to believe Caglianone will excel in the majors. That’s one of them, and it’s a pretty darn good one. His batting practice alone will be worth the price of admission in St. Louis this week.

A team equipped with one of baseball’s best pitching staffs and in desperate need of an offensive injection prompts a secondary question: Can he excel immediately?

That has a slightly different answer: It depends.

There’s one aspect of Caglianone’s metrics that I’ve long been tracking, because the Royals and every other team follow it closely, and because it was littered throughout Caglianone’s college scouting reports.

Exactly how much of a free swinger is he? And can his current approach at the plate be immediately effective in the majors?

In the short stint with Omaha, Caglianone swung at 55.8% of the pitches he saw, according to data tracked by Statcast. There are only 10 major-league hitters with a higher swing percentage (one of which is Salvy Perez, at 57.9%).

He swings. A lot.

And it influences the production. A lot.

Caglianone swung at 24 pitches out of the zone in Triple-A in his first 11 games. The data for the 12th and now-final game has not yet been included. Nine of those 24 pitches concluded an at-bat (put in play or a strikeout). He had one hit, a single, in those nine at-bats.

On pitches in the zone, by contrast, Caglianone just hammered the ball, to the tune of a .394 average and .970 slugging percentage. That circumstantial slugging percentage — in-zone swings — ranks fourth-best in Triple-A for hitters with at least 30 plate appearances this year.

When it’s there, he rarely misses it.

Caglianone has incredible reach with his long arms, so I’ve heard (and read) conventional wisdom that he can more afford to swing at pitches outside the zone than other hitters.

Maybe.

It didn’t bear out that way over the last two weeks. But it just might’ve reached a point in which Triple-A pitching isn’t good enough to execute the kind of optimal test. It’s a bit more difficult to learn patience against minor-league pitchers more prone to making mistakes, and you don’t exactly want that kind of hitter making a habit of watching mistakes fly past him.

In the majors, you don’t typically get another shot.

At some point, you might just have to live with the imperfection — with this particular imperfection — knowing the remainder of the package is oh-so-enticing.

Because it really is. Even that chase profile doesn’t mean the player is going to fail. There is overwhelming evidence in the remainder of his profile suggesting the opposite.

It simply means that for all of the ways Caglianone looks like a machine, there is at least one aspect in which he looks just as human as everybody else. And it’s important to note it now, because Major League Baseball teams will be noting it now, and major-league pitchers will spend the next four months using it to try to bring out the human side in him.

Caglianone has made hitting a baseball look remarkably easy, whether it be in college, Single-A, Double-A or Triple-A. It’s why a call-up is happening remarkably quickly.

On Sunday, the Royals landed in a place this was always destined to arrive, even if we could’ve debated when it might do so.

It’s been a quick ride.

Now we all get to see if this too can provide a quick adjustment.

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