UPDATED MLB TRADE INFORMATION ON ESPN THIS MORNING: After inking a $193.6 million, six-year contract with the Atlanta Braves the talented left-hander for the Kansas City Royals has formally confirmed his departure. Still,…

Quantifying the effect of the Royals’ improved starting pitching

Last season, I wrote an article titled “Avoiding the Disaster Start.” The Royals were 45 games into the season, floundering with a 14-31 record, and had recently gone through a stretch where the starting pitcher had failed to complete five innings and had given up more runs than innings pitched seven times out of nine starts. These starts we can call “disaster starts.” The article also defined other types of starts:

Disaster start (DS): fewer than 5 innings, more runs than innings (or at least eight runs allowed)

Weak start (WS): a start that doesn’t qualify as disaster, strong, or outstanding

Strong start (SS): Innings exceed runs by at least three but less than five

Outstanding start (OS): At least five more innings than runs allowed

These categories are meant to update the “quality start” metric to reflect a contemporary strategy for how deep starters go into games, as well as give more degrees of “quality.”

One hundred games into the 2024 season, the results could not be more different from last season. Last season through 100 games, Royals starters had 14 disaster starts, 40 weak starts, 30 strong starts, and just 16 outstanding starts (and an overall team record of 28-72).

This year, the Royals are obviously much better in the standings, sitting 27 games ahead of last year’s 100-game record at 55-45. How much of that can be pinned to starting pitching alone? We’re going to attempt an answer here.

First, a breakdown of the Royals’ starts this year (when there is an opener, I use the combined efforts of the first two pitchers):

Outstanding: 38
Strong: 31
Weak: 22
Disaster: 9

Here’s the breakdown by pitcher (GS, OS-SS-WS-DS):

Seth Lugo: 21, 11-7-3-0
Cole Ragans: 20, 10-5-3-2
Brady Singer: 20, 7-8-4-1
Michael Wacha: 17, 5-6-5-1
Alec Marsh: 17, 4-5-6-2
Others: 5, 1-0-1-3

So after 100 games, the most common type of start the Royals have had is an outstanding start! Both Lugo and Ragans have turned in an outstanding start in half or more of their starts. The starters have provided a strong or outstanding start 69 times out of 100, with only 9 disasters (only six of which were by the regular starting five). Each of the regular starting five are above 50% in achieving a strong start or better, and only Marsh is below 65%. This is incredible consistency.

Denny Medley-USA TODAY Sports

Source of improvement

Last year, the Royals only had two pitchers with at least nine starts who had strong starts or better in at least half of their starts (Ragans 75% in 12 GS and Daniel Lynch IV at 56% in 9 GS). They only had 30 outstanding starts all season. This year, the Royals already have 38.

Better starting pitching, unsurprisingly, leads to better game outcomes. Here are the winning percentages by type of start:

2024:
Outstanding: .816 (31-7)
Strong: .516 (16-15)
Weak: .318 (7-15)
Disaster: .111 (1-8)

2023:
Outstanding (30 GS): .667 (20-10)
Strong (41 GS): .390 (16-25)
Weak (71 GS): .282 (20-51)
Disaster (20 GS): .000 (0-20)

2023 (through 100 G):
Outstanding: .563 (9-7)
Strong: .367 (11-19)
Weak: .200 (8-32)
Disaster: .000 (0-14)

As you can see, the winning percentages are higher across the board. Last year’s team was a disaster in just about every way, and the 2024 Royals have improved in ways beyond just starting pitching. If you apply last year’s winning percentages by start through 100 games to this year’s numbers, you get this:

2024 starts w/2023 100-game win %:
Outstanding: 21-17
Strong: 11-20
Weak: 4-18
Disaster: 0-9
Total record: 36-64

This is still a pretty dismal record, a 58-104 pace, but after 100 games last year, the team was on pace for a 45-117 record, so it’s still a pretty big improvement. If we use the winning percentages for the team over the whole 2023 season, it looks like this:

2024 starts w/2023 win %:
Outstanding: 25-13
Strong: 12-19
Weak: 6-16
Disaster: 0-9
Total record: 43-57

This record over 100 games projects to about 70 wins. The Royals this year through 100 games are on an 89-win pace. So you might say that out of the Royals’ projected 33-win improvement this year, 14 wins can be attributed to starting pitching alone. The rest goes to improvements in the lineup and bullpen.

It’s interesting to me that the winning percentages at weak and disaster starts are not much different from 2023. These Royals aren’t able to overcome a bad start much better than last year’s team. But the starting pitching allows the shaky bullpen to be less exposed and more rested, indirectly leading to better bullpen outcomes, and the lineup produces runs more consistently to take advantage of when the starting pitching is good.

To finish up, let’s compare this rotation to the World Series championship team of 2015. This is how starts broke down in 2015:

2015:
Outstanding (46 GS): .913 (42-4)
Strong (45 GS): .644 (29-16)
Weak (54 GS): .444 (24-30)
Disaster (17 GS): .059 (1-16)

The championship Royals were excellent at turning good starts into wins, and they had almost a coin flip’s chance even if the start was weak but avoided disaster. If you combine these outcomes with this year’s starting pitching, you get a 65-35 record (a 105-win pace).

Going forward

When looking at the prospects of the Royals competing this year, the two best sources of hope were that Bobby Witt, Jr. would blossom into a superstar (check) and that the Royals would have one of the best rotations in baseball, which has also been true this year for the first time in at least 30 years. The key going forward is health. The Royals top four of Ragans, Lugo, Wacha, and Singer only combined for 91 starts last season, and they are already at 78 this year. With health and continued consistency, the Royals should stay in the hunt all season long.