Royals Add More Pitching with Seth Lugo and Chris Stratton

The Royals added to the bullpen again and made their biggest splash yet too.

The Royals started the offseason with the stated goal of bringing in bullpen help and at least two starting pitchers. After today, they’re up to three relievers brought in and have signed their first starting pitcher who can help the 2024 team. The biggest move was the deal to sign Seth Lugo, but they also followed that up with a deal for Chris Stratton to help fortify the bullpen. Both of these pitchers are improvements over what the team had in 2023, so that’s a plus. Neither is a long-term answer, but that’s okay at this point. They need to get better.

Let’s start with the bigger deal and the bigger signing.

Seth Lugo for 3 years and $45 million (sort of)

Lugo started a lot early in his career with the Mets, making eight starts in 2016 and then 18 in 2017 before becoming an occasional starter over the next five seasons but mostly a reliever. And in those five seasons, he was generally very good outside of a rough 2020. He signed with the Padres ahead of the 2023 season with the chance to move back into the rotation. I was a bit skeptical about that, as I’m sure others were as well, but the transition went well for him. In all, he made 26 starts, averaged about 17 outs per start and put up a 3.57 ERA, 3.83 FIP, but a 4.42 xERA if you’re into that sort of thing.

It’s kind of unfair to look at what he did prior to 2023 as meaningful at all because of his role. Going from coming out of the bullpen as a short reliever to being expected to face a lineup two or three times every fifth day is very different. On the plus side, while his strikeouts dipped, he still struck out 23.2 percent of hitters. League average for starters was 22.1 percent. He also walked just 6.0 percent of hitters. League average was 7.9 percent. Both of those are good.

Lugo comes at you with a four-seam fastball, a curve and a sinker mostly. But he also adds a slider, an occasional changeup and he did feature a sweeper 91 times in 2023. The fastball and curve are the one and two for him with both coming about 30 percent of the time. In 2023, he averaged 93.4 MPH on the fastball with decent spin, a decent whiff rate and decent results, allowing a .247 average and .466 SLG. The curve had been his swing and miss pitch, but that dropped a bit as a starter, which I’ll get into shortly. He gave up some hits on that but not much in the way of damage. His sinker was actually pretty effective, so I wonder if maybe that’s something he throws a bit more in 2024, but then the rest of his pitches were kind of window dressing.

The thing about Lugo is that he’s going to fill up the zone.

Normally I’d give you each pitch individually, but if you look at the three he throws the most, the heat map is very much in the center of the plate. I mentioned that his fastball doesn’t jump off the page, but there are times that it can make a hitter look a little silly. Take this 92 MPH heater to Michael A. Taylor in a happy zone. Maybe I’m seeing what I want to see, but the swing looks like it’s 95 or 96. Maybe he’s sitting on something else, but that fastball has some life to it.

That’s not to say he can’t run it up a bit too. This one to Matt McLain looks very good at 95.

And that’s also not to say that he can’t get hit with his fastball.

So it’s not a perfect pitch. That was 94.8 in a zone that a hitter can crush it and it was absolutely crushed by Jeimer Candelario. That’s going to happen. His fastball did have more vertical movement than average, so that helps it play up even when the velocity isn’t where you see elite starters.

On the plus side overall, he picked a good ballpark for his skillset. He’s going to give up some fly balls and Kauffman Stadium is very kind for home runs when it comes to pitchers (though don’t tell Jordan Lyles). He also gets a fair amount of grounders with a 44.4 percent career rate and 45.2 percent in 2023. So he’ll be helped by his park and his defense for sure.

Where I find myself concerned is in the dropoff in the effectiveness of his curve. It was an absolute hammer in relief. He had a 30.8 percent whiff rate, .159 average allowed and .261 SLG in 2022 compared with a 26.4 percent whiff rate, .280 average and .375 SLG allowed in 2023. What changed? It’s still an absurdly high spin rate, but it just didn’t work as well. Maybe it’s that opponents saw it way more often. That would check out and would be a good reason to use his slider more. He also didn’t throw it in the same spot in 2022. It was used much more on the edges.

Some of that is simply the difference between being a starter and a reliever. You can nibble more when you’ve got an inning. If you’re needing to get through five or six innings, early count outs can be your best friend. I’m fine with that if that’s the case, but I worry a bit that his whiff rate with two strikes on that curve was just 24 percent. I was hopeful I’d see a bunch of called third strikes with it, but there were only four all year. What was once his out pitch turned into something that I’m not sure he can rely on the way I think he’d like to. I just wonder where he turns.

This particular Royals regime has done a really nice job of taking pitchers with good curves and helping them to develop their slider. He gets good spin already on the pitch and you’ll often see pitchers able to master that because they’re able to manipulate a curve as is, so there’s some hope there. Among pitchers to throw at least 200 sliders in 2023, Lugo’s spin rate is 45th out of 222. That’s a good start for sure. Hopefully there’s something left to unlock here.

Now you want to know what I think of the move. I like Lugo for 2024. I’m generally fine with him probably for 2025, but this move is not without risk. He is a 34-year old pitcher with one year of making more than 20 starts to his name. To pay $15 million for that per year is no sure thing. There is definite bullpen upside, but that’s a lot of money for guy who isn’t elite out of the bullpen. But he’s solid and I think should continue to be that for at least another year or two. Where I have real concern is that the third year is a player option for $15 million. There’s only downside for the Royals.

Maybe they don’t care, and if that’s the case, great! But if $15 million for a non-contributing Lugo stops them from adding in a season where you’d assume they’re competing, that’s a problem. It’s not my money, but that has to be considered in an honest evaluation. Overall, this move is perfectly fine. If Lugo is the biggest move to improve the rotation, I fall a little bit more on the meh side. But if he’s your second move, I’m totally in on this.

Chris Stratton for two years and $8 million (sort of)

The second deal that came right after the first was the signing of Stratton to help settle down the middle relief for a bad Royals bullpen from 2023. Stratton has been around for awhile. He came up with the Giants in 2016 and actually started in 2017 and 2018 before moving to the bullpen starting in 2019 where he’s pitched for the Angels (briefly), Pirates, Cardinals and Rangers. He’s generally limited home runs throughout his career and struck out enough to be semi-dangerous but never enough to be more than a middle reliever.

And that’s okay.

He lives and dies with his four-seam fastball, which ranked as one of the best four-seam fastballs in baseball by run value. Among pitchers with at least 100 plate appearances ending on that fastball, he was right in the range of pitchers like Luis Castillo, George Kirby, Zack Wheeler and Jesus Luzardo in RV/100. The whiff rate was in the top-third of baseball among those pitchers. The strikeout percentage was even better than that. He gets it done with that fastball.

He also has a slider that has some elite spin, but didn’t get the whiffs it did in 2022, a curve with a crazy spin rate as well (huh, shocker) that also didn’t get the spin rates it did in 2022 and the occasional changeup that was actually way better in 2023. I wonder a little if he can recapture some of the 2022 magic with his breaking balls and keep his fastball highly effective because it was pretty whatever in 2022 as well.

Regardless, since the start of the 2019 season, Stratton has been perfectly average with a 4.29 ERA and 3.84 FIP to go along with a strikeout per inning. He worked largely as a starter for the Angels to start that season, so if you take out the 29.1 innings he pitched with them, he’s pitched to a 3.31 ERA with a 24.4 percent strikeout rate and 7.5 percent walk rate since moving to the bullpen full time. No, he is not a closer and probably isn’t even a setup man, but he’s a competent arm to put in the middle innings of a game to help protect leads when the Royals actually get them.

When you add him to Nick Anderson, James McArthur and Will Smith along with potential arms like Jake Brentz, Taylor Clarke, Steven Cruz, Carlos Hernandez, Will Klein, Matt Sauer and Josh Taylor along with any of the guys who don’t make the rotation, suddenly you start to see an actually competent bullpen coming together. The same things I wrote about Smith pushing guys down in the pecking order is true here. This Royals bullpen is considerably better today than it was a week ago today. And that’s a good thing.

It sounds like it’s another player option for that second year, but so be it, especially for that amount and the consistency Stratton has had with the end results in his career. I like this move quite a bit and honestly hope there’s still one more in the hopper to help out the bullpen.

If you’re curious about the payroll, it’s starting to creep up. With the addition of Lugo and Stratton, they have 10 players (including Hunter Dozier) making $66.4 million and then six more arbitration-eligible players projected for $13.6 million. If you’re bad at math, that’s exactly $80 million for those 15 players (remember, Dozier isn’t on the team anymore). So if you figure $750k as a round number for the other 11 on the roster, that puts the 26-man total at a little more than $88 million. The 40-man number is right around $99 million. I’m pretty convinced they can go higher.

I think when they talk about payroll, they talk about the 26-man number, so that leaves $12 million to get to $100 million, but I keep coming back to that $115 million number I heard a couple of years ago and assume they could go even beyond that. I would not be surprised if there’s another somewhat large money deal left to give for this team, whether that’s Lucas Giolito, Marcus Stroman or another pitcher or it goes to a bat like Lourdes Gurriel Jr. I would argue they have $20-$30 million more they can spend before they hit their budgeted number and there’s a lot that can be done with that.

The floor of the Royals is significantly higher than it was a month ago, and that’s a good thing. Their rotation depth is now pitchers who have big league experience. The best relievers don’t have to be one guy with one good month and another guy with four big league innings. They haven’t added a star, and I don’t think they’re going to, but they have added competence to the roster, and that’s a heck of a start.