The Summer of Seth Rolls On

A big first inning and eight more innings from Seth Lugo fueled the Royals fourth straight win.

On December 14, 2023, the Royals signed their third big league free agent of the winter and first big splash. When the contract for Seth Lugo was announced at three years and $45 million with the third year a player option, I liked it enough, but didn’t love it. He was a 34-year-old coming off his first season as a full-time starting pitcher. It was a big expenditure for someone who was no sure thing. A little more than four months and 23 starts into the deal, it’s become one of the biggest bargains in baseball. And Lugo did it again last night.

How good must things be when a pitcher gives eight innings with one run allowed and it just feels like it was sort of a pedestrian outing? Maybe it was the lack of strikeouts or that he went to three balls on 21.4 percent of hitters last night when he’d only gone there to 17.8 percent of hitters previously. Or maybe it was that he fell behind nearly half the hitters he faced. Maybe it’s because his velocity was down across the board. I’ve said a lot of negative things in this paragraph and, in the end, here was his line: