What a difference competent leadership makes
Kansas City Royals pitching has gone from an expectation of bottom feeding to the top half of the MLB very quickly.
Fangraphs finished their positional power rankings for 2025 last week and the one thing that really stood out to me was the opinion on the Royals pitching as a whole. Royals pitching has been bad to terrible for a very long time. Even when one unit is good, the other tends to struggle.
In 2008 they managed to have both units ranked in the top half of the league, but it didn’t last. You also had the dominant bullpens from 2012 to 2016, but only the 2014 starting group managed to sneak into the top half of the league during that stretch. Last year, it was the bullpen squeaking in at 15th, though before the last couple months of the season they were near the bottom. Now the two groups are actually projected to be in the upper half of baseball.
In March of 2024, Fangraphs projected the starters to finish 25th in the majors and the bullpen was even worse at 27th. The rotation immediately put those projections behind them as Cole Ragans and Seth Lugo both became Cy Young contenders. Projections would not, should not even, expect that to happen as Ragans had not shown this level for very long before and Lugo had recently converted to becoming a starter in his 30s. Throw in solid efforts from Singer, Wacha, and a step forward from Alec Marsh, what a nice turn of events for a front office trying to push this team's pitching into the modern era.
The bullpen, however, struggled mightily for most of the year. Piccolo and team did not sit back and hope for the best. They traded for Hunter Harvey and Lucas Erceg. They put the rehabbing Bubic into the mix and found a way to get good performance out of Daniel Lynch and Angel Zerpa finally. This bullpen looks very different than last year at this time when James McArthur, Will Smith, and Nick Anderson were some of the better options.
Here we are in 2025, and the positional power rankings have the starters as 13th in baseball. I think they are better than that, but it is still a projection for the top half of the league. The revamped bullpen is also expected in the top half at 14th. This front office has taken a perennially rough pitching staff and turned it into the strength of the team in a shockingly short period of time. When analysts and solid math models are starting to look at the staff as the real deal, it is hard for me to wrap my head around. Kansas City has never had respect in those types of circles. Think of all the positives we have seen in pitching in the last couple of years:
- Picking up Ragans in a trade then almost immediately turning him into an ace
- Targeting Lugo two off-seasons in a row and having that work out
- Changing Bubic up a bit looked like it would pay off quickly, but even after TJ he has come back looking like he will be a very good pitcher when he was not under the old front office
- Alec Marsh taking a step forward last year
- Angel Zerpa and Daniel Lynch starting to produce out of the bullpen
Several minor leaguers showing signs like Noah Cameron and Frank Mozzicato showing upticks in velocity this spring along with steps taken forward last year by Ben Kudrna and Chandler Champlain among others. I just don’t ever remember so many positives being sustained over a two-year period in this organization. The only thing I remember being anything like it was the Best Farm System Ever™, which ended well, but never had a sustained and replicable process behind it to keep producing quality.
This is the time of year for optimism, and I have it, but not just about the 2025 Royals who are finally playing real baseball again. My optimism extends beyond just this season now. The front office really seems to have competence in building pitching depth at both the big leagues and the minors. I still have yet to see this sort of consistent march of developing talent on the position player side, but drafting Jac Caglianone and seeing Blake Mitchell hit in the minors is not nothing. Maybe we could all soon be rooting for something Royals fans have not rooted for since I was a very young child in the ‘80s. Maybe we could end up rooting for a model organization.