Message to Kansas City Royals pitchers heading into camp: Don’t expect to be pampered
With the first spring training workout two weeks away, the message sent to Kansas City Royals pitching boils down to this basic pillar: You need to be ready to pitch. Period.
The Royals brain trust, including general manager Dayton Moore, manager Mike Matheny and pitching coach Cal Eldred, seems poised to take an aggressive-yet-careful tact with their pitchers following an unprecedented year, rather than treat them exclusively with kid gloves.
“After talking to Cal, he was just like, ‘Come into the season prepared, ready to go for the whole season,’” Royals starting pitcher Brad Keller said last week. “I feel like across the board that was the message for everybody. Don’t expect to get pampered. Come in ready to work and get innings under our belt, and we’ll go from there.”
Coming off a truncated season in which the typical throwing progressions were interrupted by the spring training shutdown and three-month hiatus, there’s no clearly-defined road map.
The attention paid to pitching workloads — pitch counts, innings pitched, innings increases, high-stress pitches — has expanded exponentially in recent years.
The difference between a 60-game season and a full 162-game slate will be particularly significant for starting pitchers.
“We have an aggressive plan that’s put in place,” Royals manager Mike Matheny said in December. “... There’s going to be a very clear plan, and right now it’s full-steam ahead.”
The message Matheny said he and Eldred wanted to convey was “keep the throttle down” and let the coaching and training staff be the ones to pull back if and when needed.
Keller planned to arrive in Arizona about a week ahead of the first scheduled workout, which is Feb. 17.
Innings needed
Royals starters threw 860 innings in 2019, the last full season. Ten pitchers made starts that season, all of them had started games in the majors previously.
Of the Royals’ projected starters headed into this spring training, only free-agent acquisition Mike Minor has pitched 200 innings in a big-league season. He did so twice, including 208 1/3 innings in 2019.
Danny Duffy’s highest single-season innings total was 179 2/3 innings in 2016. Jakob Junis’ 177 innings in 2018 represents the next highest total. Keller has topped out at 165 1/3 innings.
While Junis could provide a valuable weapon out of the bullpen, the Royals will need innings from their rotation.
Even if Minor gets to 200 innings and Duffy and Keller reach 180 apiece, there would still be a need for roughly 300 innings from the rotation.
Brady Singer, Kris Bubic and Carlos Hernández didn’t throw a pitch above the Double-A level of the minors before last season. Singer logged 64 1/3 innings as a MLB rookie, while Bubic pitched 50 and Hernández 14 2/3 innings. None of them reached 150 innings in a single season in the minors.
While Moore steadfastly says the organization will never put limitations on its players, he also acknowledges that it’s not realistic to “expect” a pitcher who only threw 50-60 innings to jump to 170-180 innings a year later.
“It’s one pitcher at a time,” Moore said. “We will just simply manage it day to day, week to week, month to month. That’s why we have managers, coaches, medical personnel, performance science, expert baseball people and players who are well-educated about their own bodies and understand what they can push through and can’t push through. We will all communicate very well.”
Signing 38-year-old Ervin Santana to a minor-league contract signaled the club’s desire to have in-house innings-eating options as they attempt to integrate other young pitching prospects into the major-league mix.
Moore said a six-man rotation was an idea discussed in the past and will likely warrant discussion going forward.
Former first-round draft pick and left-hander Daniel Lynch ranks among the top pitching prospects in baseball. Lynch and Jackson Kowar, another former first-round pick, were in big-league spring training camp last winter and spent the spring training 2.0 and the season as part of the player pool and training at the alternate site.
Several other talented pitching prospects have put themselves on the radar, and last year’s top draft pick Asa Lacy is very highly-regarded though he had a truncated final college season and hasn’t yet pitched in minors.
“We have a lot of your pitchers on the horizon that we’re going to have to transition into the major leagues at some point,” Moore said. “I’m not sure that opening day or the first month of the season is going to work for a lot of those guys. Therefore, we’re going to have to have some veteran arms that can lead-off if you will.”
This story was originally published February 3, 2021 at 12:16 PM.
