-
Bradford Doolittle
WHEN A TEAM finds a successful strategy in pro sports, it has long been the expectation that its competition will shift toward that strategy. The typical refrain: “It’s a copycat league.”
If that’s the case in Major League Baseball, shouldn’t the replicating felines be conducting thorough investigations of last season’s Kansas City Royals?
The 2024 Royals were a historically remarkable team. Kansas City won 30 more games than it did in 2023. If you prorate every past team to a 162-game season for comparison, the Royals authored just the 14th year-over-year leap of at least 30 wins since 1901. It was just the fourth such leap in the three decades since the advent of the wild card. Kansas City joined the 1946 Boston Red Sox and the 2008 Tampa Bay Rays as the only teams to improve by at least 30 games, then go on to win more than one game in the playoffs.
How could such a thing possibly happen? It’s not as if the Royals were like the 2022 Baltimore Orioles — another 30-win leaper — who turned the corner after years of topping the prospect rankings. Entering the season, the prospect mavens remained very much down on the Royals’ system. Yet they broke out anyway. Wouldn’t the answer to this particular “how” question have some repercussions on baseball’s hypercompetitive, eager-to-innovate landscape?
The answers have a lot to do with the fading status of the starting pitcher — and how, when it comes to managing a rotation, there’s more than one way worth copying.
THEY TRIED. THAT’S what you heard so often about Kansas City’s success. It’s true. Despite losing 106 games the season before, the Royals went about building the best 26-man roster they could, displaying an aggression during free agency that surprised everyone. They tried, sure, but they also tried in a very specific way.
The sexy part of the Royals’ breakout was the amazing-but-expected rise of star shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. But the Royals scored only 59 more runs in 2024 than the season before. The rocket fuel for the turnaround came on the other side of the ball, where K.C. slashed 215 runs off of its 28th-ranked runs allowed total of 2023.
While the bullpen performed better, the rotation accounted for most of this, cutting its collective ERA from 5.17 to 3.76. The group didn’t have a Paul Skenes ascend to the majors, nor did it have a high-profile international addition. The Royals did introduce two solid veteran free agents to the group in Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha.
“We felt like we had a lot of holes to fill and everything in this game starts and ends with starting pitching,” Royals GM J.J. Picollo told ESPN during the team’s hot start last year. “So that was clearly the No. 1 objective, trying to secure two starting pitchers.”
That’s an old-school statement, the type of thing baseball execs have been saying for eons. Still, while Lugo and Wacha had good enough track records that Kansas City was far from their only option, between them they had accounted for one All-Star appearance (Wacha in 2015) over 19 combined big-league campaigns. It’s not the kind of thing that takes a team from 106 losses to playing the New York Yankees in October.
But it did. The Royals did play into October, and everything did begin with those two signings. Lugo (16-9, 3.00 ERA over 206⅔ innings, second in AL Cy Young balloting) and Wacha (13-8, 3.35 ERA, 166⅔ innings) were outstanding. Just as important, though, were the downhill effects of their dual arrival.
“Wacha and Lugo are great,” said the budding ace the Royals already had in their deck, fireballing lefty Cole Ragans. “They are two great guys who you look up to and try to understand how they go about their game.”
Well, how do they go about their games?
The most important statistic about the Kansas City rotation might simply have been 908 — the number of innings the Royals got from their starting pitchers. That total ranked second in the majors behind Seattle, but 95% of that figure came from K.C.’s five most-used starters, the highest percentage in the majors. Lugo led the way with an AL-leading 836 batters faced.
“Lugo threw 206 innings, I think, last year,” Ragans said, correctly. “That’s where you want to be. The goal is 200 innings. You just watch him, how he goes about his business, how he thinks about pitching. He knows he can get swing-and-miss when he needs it, but he’s trying to get guys off balance and get some weak contact.”
Lugo led the way, but his approach was Kansas City’s approach — even for Ragans, who has elite swing-and-miss ability. These aren’t new ideas, but they felt kind of like it during a season when pitcher injuries — and the widespread focus on max-effort pitching that likely contributes to them — dominated the headlines. The Royals simply did not participate in that narrative.
With five core starters — Lugo, Wacha, Ragans, Brady Singer (now with the Cincinnati Reds) and Alec Marsh — doing most of the work, the Royals’ rotation still managed to work deeper into games than any other team in an era of two-times-through-the-order starters. Some facts:
• Royals starters faced 23.4 batters per outing, most in the majors, making the trip into the third time through the order a standard, not a rarity.
• Kansas City tied for third in quality starts (76), which of course entails going at least six innings in an outing.
• The Royals’ starters threw just 16.2 pitches per frame, ranking 23rd in the majors.
• The Royals ranked 21st in total payroll, but 14th in payroll allotted for starting pitchers. Their core five starters accounted for 30.7% of the outpay, the second-largest percentage allocated for that group in the majors, behind Toronto (34.4%).
• Of the Royals’ 86 wins, 58 resulted in winning decisions for a core-five starter, the highest total in the majors.
• The core five started 151 of the Royals’ 162 games, another big-league-leading total.
Obviously, a lot has to go your way for this to happen. It’s not as if the Royals have figured out how to sidestep pitching injuries. But this was all very much by design, not just in roster construction, but in terms of game-by-game, inning-by-inning, pitch-by-pitch approach.
Call it a season approach, rather than a game approach. To achieve maximum results over 162 games, don’t leave it all out there in any one situation with a barrage of 100 mph fastballs and a focus on the strikeout column. Much of it has to do with managing effort, not the easiest skill to learn in the era of Statcast and Rapsodo, but it’s one even the game’s best strikeout pitchers can hone over time.
“It’s trying to rein in when somebody steps in there,” said the Texas Rangers‘ Jacob deGrom, a two-time Cy Young winner with a career strikeout rate of 11 whiffs per nine innings. Yet, after a string of injury-plagued seasons, deGrom is focused on easing up on the throttle. “When somebody steps in, it’s go time. But you have to trust that your stuff plays at maybe not 100% effort. There’s a lot of times you’ll actually locate the ball better. So it can be a plus in both ways, health wise, and maybe some location stuff.”
These are lessons taken to heart by the newest member of the Royals’ rotation, lefty Kris Bubic, who is transitioning back to starting pitching after Kansas City traded Singer over the winter.
“I don’t want to say pitching to contact,” Bubic said. “But we’re not relying on velocity. We’re relying on change of speeds, throwing a lot of strikes.”
This sentiment is borne out in the data. The Royals’ starters ranked in the middle of the pack in terms of average velocity, with Ragans’ ability to crack 100 with his four-seamer leading the way, so it’s not like they were a bunch of Jamie Moyers. But the Royals’ reliance on softer stuff resulted in the second-highest aggregate spin rate among rotations.
Forget the radar. Get in, get out.
“There’s always a philosophy of ‘an out in three pitches,'” Bubic said, repeating it like a mantra. “You want a guy out on three pitches. You want a guy out on three pitches. You just continue that attacking mindset.”
THIS WINTER’S TOP free agent starting pitchers had plenty of suitors. Based on data from Roster Resources at FanGraphs, we can estimate that about $1.38 billion in committed salary went to free agent starters — highlighted by nine-figure commitments for Max Fried, Corbin Burnes and Blake Snell.
After the Royals’ success in 2024, you might have expected a bit more activity from baseball’s also-rans and low-revenue teams, which saw how the right couple of rotation additions can not just infuse the win column but can paper over an organization’s lack of depth.
Yet it was mostly the usual suspects doing all of that spending. Teams that finished .500 or better last year accounted for 78% of the collective rotation investment. If you look at it from a revenue standpoint, the 12 highest-grossing teams (or 40% of the league) accounted for 58% of the spending on starters.
There were exceptions in the Athletics and Los Angeles Angels. The low-ish revenue Arizona Diamondbacks doled out $210 million for Burnes. Still, by and large, there wasn’t a deluge of teams following in the Royals’ path. Ranking eighth in spending on starters were the Royals themselves, who committed $58 million to bring back Wacha and Michael Lorenzen.
If you love the traditional models of starting pitching, this might be disappointing. As we’ve alluded to, while the Royals didn’t reinvent the rotation wheel, they did at least show us that some of the old ways can still work. But so, too, do the new ways.
Case in point: If the Royals took a season approach to running their rotation, other teams won with a game-based approach — and none more so than the Milwaukee Brewers.
“We don’t have the firepower to give up one game, you know?” said Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy, the reigning National League Manager of the Year. “I mean, we just don’t. We’re not built that way.”
The Brewers have been one of baseball’s great innovators for years now, but much of their recent run of success has been due to a foundation of starting pitching, led by Burnes, Brandon Woodruff and Freddy Peralta. But Burnes was traded before last season and Woodruff was recovering from a shoulder injury.
Still, the revamped Brewers won 93 games and the NL Central title, and they did it by winning one game at a time in about the most anti-Royals way possible.
Only three teams used fewer starters than the Royals’ nine, but only two clubs used more than the Brewers’ 17. Only three teams got fewer rotation innings than Milwaukee, and only six teams saw their starters throw more pitches per inning.
Instead of riding a group of old-school starters and preserving them as much as possible for the long haul, the Brewers improvised their way along, day after day. And it worked.
“Of course, we want the length,” said Milwaukee pitching coach Chris Hook. “But that’s not necessarily how you put 27 outs together.”
In terms of managing effort, this approach focuses a starting pitcher in that he doesn’t have to worry about the later innings, as starters once did. Still, the notion of managing effort at all might be an individual pitcher thing, as opposed to an explicit message from an organization. Brewers starter Aaron Civale has spent his career taking a tour of some of baseball’s most cutting-edge pitching programs, moving from Cleveland to Tampa Bay to Milwaukee.
“I’ve never been instructed to not have the foot on the gas,” Civale said. “I’ve also never been instructed to have my foot on the gas. I think that if you’re a competitor and you’re at this level, you’re going pitch to pitch, and you’re trying to win that moment versus the hitter. And the hitter is doing the same thing.”
In a sense, the Brewers maintained that kind of postseason mindset from the first pitch on Opening Day. Worry about getting the win today. Then worry about tomorrow.
“It’d be great to have five dudes,” Hook said, “but I don’t think that’s the norm. Throughout the league, it’s not the norm. For us even more so, because we do things a little different in how we construct a roster.”
That roster construction works because of Milwaukee’s ability to consistently build deep, dominant bullpens, often with the considerable help of pitchers who have struggled in other organizations. It also involves finding what former manager Craig Counsell always called “out getters” — pitchers who fill a variety of roles from short, high-leverage spots to multi-inning stints in the middle of winnable games.
“It’s about winning the F’ing game tonight,” Hook said. “That’s basically Murph’s mantra, and I think that’s how we play the system.”
EVERYTHING WENT RIGHT for the Royals’ rotation in 2024, just as pretty much everything went right for the Brewers’ bullpen, at least once closer Devin Williams returned from injury. The teams went about it very differently but ultimately both approaches paid off in postseason appearances.
Now they are running it back, trying to repeat dynamics that are so hard to pin down. Can the Royals get 151 starts from five starting pitchers? Can the Brewers continue to spin almost every bullpen arm they acquire into high-leverage gold, especially after trading Williams to the Yankees in December?
Both teams pursued a bit more rotation/bullpen balance. The Royals made the bold move of moving Singer in his prime in order to acquire a much-needed leadoff hitter in Jonathan India. They also bolstered a bullpen that was spotty for much of 2024, having added high-leverage fireballers Lucas Erceg, Hunter Harvey and Carlos Estevez since the middle of last season.
Still, the investment to bring back Wacha and Lorenzen, and the decision to move Bubic to the rotation after a highly successful campaign as a reliever, shows that starting pitching very much remains the focus in Kansas City.
“You want to take that baton,” said Bubic, who added a second slider in order to diversify his arsenal in a way that will allow him to navigate opposing lineups as many times as possible. “They pass that baton to you and you want to fulfill those same expectations: Make a quality start, pitching deep into games.”
The Brewers, meanwhile, committed just $5.25 million in new salary to its rotation, the bulk of that coming late in the spring when veteran Jose Quintana signed after strangely lingering on the free agent market all winter. They also acquired starter Nestor Cortes in the Williams deal. But Milwaukee will remain unlikely to climb high on the leaderboard for rotation innings.
Maybe the Royals’ turnaround didn’t spur a neoclassic movement in starting pitching, but at least they showed that a season approach can still work. Insomuch as that’s the case, some of the old ways live on. But every new season is a blank slate.
“The starters carrying those innings, going deep into those games, was immensely important last year,” Royals manager Matt Quatraro said. “I don’t know how to predict it going forward.”
This post was originally published on this site