Kris Bubic's Wild Ride

He was league average for his first two seasons and then hit a bump in the road in 2022. Can he recover?

It’s easy to forget right now, but Kris Bubic came into the 2022 season with a lower career ERA than Brady Singer. The underlying metrics were way better for Singer, but Bubic had prevented actual runs from scoring better than Singer had. So when Bubic was named the third starter out of spring training and Singer was put in the bullpen, it kind of made sense to me. I also have a bit of a soft spot for Bubic when I learned how analytical he is as a pitcher. Guys like that, I feel, have a better shot to succeed because they understand what they need to do as a pitcher when adjustments are necessary.

But we know how things went for Bubic. He couldn’t get out of the first in his first start or his fifth start. He walked a ton of batters. Ultimately, he finished five innings just once and that was in a start when he’d allowed three runs before he’d recorded a second out. I think there’s always been an uneasiness with Bubic because of those underlying numbers I mentioned. He doesn’t throw that hard. He walks too many batters. And he doesn’t strike out enough. That’s a pretty bad trio of facts for a starting pitcher. Personally, I still think there’s something Bubic can show to become a consistent big league starter, but that will remain to be seen.

I think what makes Bubic unique is that everything plays off his changeup, even though he throws his four-seam fastball a lot more. And it’s a really good changeup…when it’s good. We saw the downside of that changeup in 2021 when he gave up a ridiculous 14 home runs on it. But the fact is that his fastball only works if he’s locating it well and hitters have to think about preparing for the changeup. So because of that, the changeup is his most important pitch. My personal opinion is that he gets too much of the zone with it. When he locates it well, he should be nipping the corner and getting hitters to swing over the top of it. But this is the heat map of where he threw the pitch in 2022:

Just for reference, here’s 2021:

So you can see it was maybe a little bit more widely distributed in 2022, but I still just think it catches too much of the zone. But where he differed on that changeup in 2022 was he added a little more than an inch and a half of horizontal movement. While there was less drop, the pitch moved more side-to-side, which I think disrupted timing a little bit. You can see some of that horizontal movement in an increased spin rate on the pitch, jumping from 1604 rpm to 1690 rpm.

Let’s take a look at a movement comparison.

For those who don’t know, active spin is the amount of the spin rate that contributes to the movement of the pitch. You can see that the changeup moved vertically very similar to 2022 in 2020 and the spin rate in 2022 was a lot closer to 2020 along with the active spin. So it could very well be that 2021 was just a blip on the radar for the changeup, which was considered to be Bubic’s best pitch in the minors.

Maybe this is a good time to talk about the minors. Prior to getting sent down in May, Bubic had pitched 38 innings in rookie ball in 2018 after he was drafted followed by 149.1 innings between low-A and high-A in 2019. And that was it for his minor league work. The 2020 season was one where he likely would have started at AA, theoretically worked his way to AAA and maybe knocked on the door for a big league debut. But instead, he started the Royals eighth big league game of the year in 2020 and stayed in the rotation through the entire season. I don’t think that’s an excuse for why he’s still struggling to throw strikes in 2022, but he did strike out 32.2 percent of hitters in the minors in 2019 and walked just 7.3 percent of them.

The minors aren’t the majors, but that shows me he can throw strikes. Yes, he got a lot more chases, likely on a changeup out of the strike zone, than he will in the big leagues, but someone who can do that is someone, to me, who deserves another shot to figure some things out, especially with a much more competent coaching staff. And for my money, while his changeup is what sets up everything, his fastball is the pitch that could potentially become his money pitch. We all know the numbers differ by location, but did you realize by how much?

Fastballs up - .225 average, .324 SLG

Fastballs down - .445 average, .809 SLG

Those numbers fit with his career numbers as well. He’s given up a .212 average and .294 slugging percentage on fastballs up and a .355 average and .633 SLG on fastballs down. It’s a very easy look at where he needs to be pitching to use that fastball. Okay, so that’s an easy look at what makes him successful. But, what if I told you that his velocity might matter even more than that?

Here’s a look at the numbers for fastballs 93+ and fastballs slower than 93:

That’s…jarring. And also totally independent of where the pitch is thrown. I’m not going to dig into the numbers of 94+, 95+, etc. because it just continues to get better but with a smaller sample, but you get the idea. For a pitcher who has struggled with command, it seems like there are two options here for his fastball to be effective. He can either figure out how to consistently throw it harder and not have to worry so much about where it is or he can figure out how to throw it more accurately. I honestly don’t know what’s easier for a guy, but I feel like there’s something that can be done mechanically to help give him more consistent oomph on that fastball.

The fact that he threw just 263 of his 1163 fastballs at 93 MPH or harder makes me wonder if he really has the juice to be able to throw it that hard consistently ever. But it’s also not like he’s slight. He’s 6’3” and 225 lbs. listed. That’s not to say that bigger players inherently can throw harder. You’ve got some guys like Sonny Gray at 5’10” and 195 lbs. throwing 93-95 earlier in his career and others like 6’10” Chris Young living in the 80s. But still, you’d think the fact that Bubic can dial it up would indicate that he might be able to figure out how to maintain that.

This might be something he’s already working on. From August 1 on, 32.6 percent of his fastballs have been 93 MPH+ and from September 1 on, that’s jumped to 37.8 percent. The number was just 16.3 percent before August 1. That’s a big, big jump. One change he made is moving exclusively to the stretch. There has been some talk that there is just too much movement in his delivery. It looks like that change was made in late August against the Padres, so maybe there’s a little something to the increased velocity, though it did increase before then, so hard to say for sure. Still, one thing I noticed is that the stretch allows him to economize his delivery a good amount.

While his fastball is important and he needs to figure out how to get something out of it, the Royals correctly recognized he had to utilize a breaking ball more. And they wanted him to emphasize his curve more in 2021. I remember so well seeing him start throwing it more when he came out of the bullpen in Yankee Stadium in a game in June 2021. I think his first pitch was a curve and he got Giancarlo Stanton to bounce out to third with it. The problem with the curve is it just isn’t that good. It’s a pitch that he used to show hitters something a little different, and while it has a pretty high spin rate (29th out of 121 lefty curves), it just hangs too much.

It’s not that it can’t be a good pitch. It can be successful when he locates it well, but the problem with any curve is that it’s much more destroyable when it’s hung. And, well, here’s the heat map for Bubic’s curve in 2022:

That’s…not great! Now, it didn’t get hit as hard as I would have guessed in looking at the numbers. He allowed a .294 average and .353 SLG on it, so maybe it’s still a usable pitch and I’m being unfair. He didn’t get a ton of swings and misses on it, but it wasn’t hit that hard either and he actually didn’t allow a single home run on the pitch. So maybe I’m being unfair and should spend more time bashing his fastball. But if you want a culprit to Bubic’s high pitch counts, the curve is part of that problem. Of the 491 curves he threw, 89 were put in play. That leaves 402 curves. Of those, 199 were called balls and 64 were fouled off. Not all balls are wastes of a pitch and not all foul balls are either, but that’s a lot of extra pitches.

What I want to know with Bubic is what happened to his slider from spring training that got so much attention. I wrote about it nearly eight months ago because it was the talk of the spring for him.

Bubic's Slider Could Be the Difference

And he pitched well in spring training too! I wrote at the time that a slider would be a perfect pitch for him because it would change the hitter’s eye level. Maybe some of the additional horizontal movement on the changeup that he picked up this year changes that a little bit or maybe he picked it up from working on that slider, but I’d like to see him revisit that pitch. At the very least, it’s a pitch that can work in a different quadrant than most of his pitches do work. And while he has been more successful against righties, as an additional weapon to lefties that could get them leaning over the plate, it might work to keep them off pitches on the inner-third that they’ve been able to gear up for to this point.

While it’s interesting to see how his pitches look and what they do, I still believe command matters more than anything for Bubic. And his command is just not good enough, which brings up the question of whether or not that’s something that can be taught. In 2022, he threw 28.2 percent of his pitches right in the heart of the plate. We’ve talked about the heart before. It’s a strike but eliminates the edges. The league threw 26 percent of pitches in the heart of the plate. It may seem like a small number, but 2.2 percent is fairly significant here. He actually was right around league average in living in the shadow zone (the edges, both in and out of the zone), so he did a nice job there, but he spent way too much time in the middle of the plate to even allow himself a chance to have success.

It’s funny because I came into this thinking I’d look at the fastball and think it was hopeless and look at the curve and think he should completely put it on the shelf. I don’t think that’s accurate. He needs to utilize his fastball better, but as I wrote, there’s a good pitch in there. It remains to be seen if it can be consistent enough to matter, but we see the upside of that pitch. The curve, if it’s his fourth pitch and not his third, can be a quality one for him. The numbers didn’t back up what I expected to see on that. But ultimately, it’s about location and his location generally stinks. Can that be taught? I guess we’ll find out.

It’s easy to say that it’s time to move on from Bubic. I get it. And I’m honestly not even opposed to it necessarily. I think my first choice would be to see how a truly cerebral pitcher who I think has more in the tank can do with a new pitching coach, but if they went out and got enough pitching that he was superfluous, I’d also be fine with that. Still, this is a pitcher who was roughly a league average starter in 2020 and 2021 without any experience above A-ball. His command was the biggest issue for him in 2022, which led to him getting hit more than ever before, but I still believe there’s something more there.

Is he an ace? No, I guess never say never, especially with lefties, but no. He’s not even a two or three starter, but look at some of the contracts being given out to guys who sit at the back of a rotation. There will be bargains as the offseason goes on, but let’s go back to the start of 2020 because that’s when Bubic started in the big leagues. We’ve seen five pitchers without a spotless recent history - Zach Eflin, Andrew Heaney, Sean Manaea, Jose Quintana and Ross Stripling - get at least $12.5 million per year for at least two years.

They’re all better than Bubic and have been for the last three years, but all but Eflin have been somewhere between below average and bad within the last three seasons. The Royals themselves gave Jordan Lyles $17 million over two years. I don’t know. I think I’d take my shot on a guy who you control for four years and has shown an ability to find success and hope the new coaching staff provides him with the support he needs to succeed. If it doesn’t work, so be it, but I’m curious to see what he looks like in 2023 with a staff that can actually help him.