How Royals ace built on his breakout season

After losing 106 games in 2023, the Royals responded to the embarrassing result by going on a relative spending spree last winter. Bobby Witt Jr.’s 11-year, $288.78M extension naturally drew most of the attention, but Kansas City spent $110.5M on free-agent contracts, most notably bringing Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha to bolster the pitching staff.  The strategy paid off handsomely as the Royals rebounded for their first winning record and playoff berth since 2015.

Not content to just make the postseason, K.C. defeated the Orioles in the wild-card series before falling to the Yankees in four games in the ALDS. This playoff run provided a bit of a national showcase for Cole Ragans, who had a sterling 0.90 ERA in 10 innings and two postseason starts.

Witt’s MVP-level performance, Salvador Perez’s strong bounce-back year and the immediate impact of Lugo and Wacha rightly drew a lot of credit for the Royals’ success, yet they also somewhat overshadowed Ragans’ continued excellence since coming to the Royals in June 2023. Continuing the “under-the-radar” theme, Ragans’ season would be drawing a lot of Cy Young Award buzz if Tarik Skubal wasn’t such a heavy favorite for the trophy.  In fact, Skubal is the only AL pitcher who had a higher fWAR than Ragans while only Chris Sale and Zack Wheeler topped Ragans among the National League’s arms.

Ragans posted a 3.14 ERA over 186 1/3 innings and his 29.3 percent strikeout rate and 31.8 percent whiff rate both ranked in at least the 88th percentile of all pitchers. Ragans did a good job of limiting hard contact and avoiding home runs, which couldn’t be entirely attributed to pitching at Kauffman Stadium — the left-hander’s road ERA (2.87) was actually better than his home ERA (3.40).  A below-average 8.8 percent walk rate was the only real flaw in Ragans’ arsenal, though he at least improved on his 10.5 percent walk rate from the 2023 season.

The changeup has been Ragans’ most consistently solid pitch over his three MLB seasons and batters only hit .183 against the offspeed offering in 2024.  The big difference in arsenal this season, however, was that Ragans started to more fully capitalize on his 95.4 mph fastball’s elite spin rate. Ragans’ fastball was ranked by Statcast as a below-average pitch in 2022 and 2023, but adding about 1.2 inches of vertical break on the pitch from 2023 to 2024 seemed to unlock something special. His four-seamer was suddenly among the more effective pitches in all of baseball.

This big year only continued the sudden success Ragans enjoyed after he was traded to the Royals (along with outfield prospect Roni Cabrera) from the Rangers for Aroldis Chapman in June 2023.  Selected 30th overall in the 2016 draft, Ragans’ career was put on hold for the entirety of the 2018-20 seasons due to two Tommy John surgeries and then the canceled 2020 minor league season.  He pitched well enough after his return to action to eventually earn his first MLB call-up in 2022, and Ragans had a 4.95 ERA over nine starts and 40 innings for Texas in his rookie season.

Working out of the bullpen in 2023, Ragans had struggled to a 5.92 ERA in 24 1/3 relief innings at the time of the trade, but the Royals immediately gave him another look in the rotation.  As if a switch was flipped, Ragans posted a 2.64 ERA in 12 starts and 71 2/3 innings over the remainder of the 2023 campaign. The Royals suddenly had a rotation building block as a silver lining within their dismal season.

After now a full season of success for Ragans, that Royals-Rangers trade is looking like one of the more impactful win-win deadline deals in recent memory. Calling it a “deadline deal” is perhaps a misnomer since it came a month before the trade deadline as the Royals were already in sell mode and the Rangers were desperate to shore up their badly struggling relief corps. Teams tend to have higher asking prices in trade talks further in advance of the deadline, yet moving Ragans was a price the Rangers were willing to pay in order to achieve bullpen help as quickly as possible.

While Chapman wasn’t exactly airtight during his time in Arlington, he pitched well enough down the stretch and in the playoffs to help Texas secure its first World Series championship. The “flags fly forever” mantra is a pretty good salve for any regrets the Rangers or their fans might have about letting Ragans go for a rental reliever while the K.C. organization is undoubtedly thrilled with everything they’ve seen from their new ace.

Ragans turns 27 in December and still has another full season remaining before reaching salary arbitration. Locking up Ragans to a contract extension would help the Royals get some cost certainty over a pitcher whose ceiling only seems to be rising. Plus, the rotation could use some solidification since Wacha will surely exercise his opt-out clause and test free agency again.  On the flip side, since Ragans is under team control through his age-30 season and already has two Tommy John surgeries on his resume, the Royals might well hold off on any serious extension talks and just go year-by-year with Ragans for now.

Deciding how to best deal with the unexpected windfall of a frontline pitcher is a nice problem for the Royals to have, and in hindsight, the Ragans trade was the first sign that K.C. was going to rebound from its 106-loss disaster. An inability to develop homegrown pitching prospects stalled the Royals’ rebuild for years so there is some irony in the fact that the team’s emergence has now been led in part by another team’s seemingly stalled prospect.