Daniel Lynch IV’s second run as a starter has looked like exactly the kind of move the Royals should have expected to blow up in their faces.
Baseball loves to surprise people, but this one never really had that energy. Kansas City put Lynch back in the rotation in early August when the club was out of the playoff race and short on healthy starting pitching, and on paper it made some sense.
He had started before. The Royals needed innings.
Why not give it a shot?
Because the answer was sitting right there in the numbers from his first turn as a starter. From 2021 through 2023, Lynch made 51 starts and put up a 5.18 ERA with a 4.79 FIP.
The bigger issue was who was hitting him. Right-handed batters carved him up to the tune of a .283/.348/.465 line and a .350 wOBA.
That’s a rough way to live as a starter, especially when opponents can simply load up on righties and force the issue.
Friday was a clean illustration of the problem. Lynch kept leaving hittable changeups and other mistakes to right-handed hitters Vladimir Guerrero, Alejandro Kirk, Kazuma Okamoto, and Ernie Clement, and they made him pay. The game got away from Kansas City before the Royals even came to the plate.
The second inning told the story. Myles Straw, hitting right-handed, singled on a middle-middle sinker.
Then Guerrero launched a hanging curveball that Bobby Witt Jr. barely managed to snag with a dive that saved a run. Kirk followed with a double, and that run came home anyway.
By then, five runs had scored in two innings, and every bit of the damage came from right-handed bats.
That wasn’t a one-inning fluke, either. Over five innings, Lynch didn’t strike out a single Blue Jays hitter and generated only two swings and misses, with just one coming against a righty.
And that’s the part that makes this feel less like an unlucky outing and more like the continuation of a bad idea. In 20.2 innings as a starter this year, Lynch has a 6.97 ERA and a 5.4% K-BB rate. He’s allowed at least two runs in five of his six starts, and Friday was the first time he even got through five innings.
The irony is that Kansas City already has a place where Lynch works. Over the past three seasons, he’s been an effective reliever, posting a 2.47 ERA and a .278 wOBA against.
This year he’s been even sharper out of the bullpen, with a 1.96 ERA and a .241 wOBA against. The formula there is simple: less fastball, more sinker and slider.
That matters because the Royals’ bullpen has been a mess, and Lynch has still been their best reliever. Even with the platoon issues that come with him in relief, he’s been too valuable there to spend time forcing him into something he clearly doesn’t do as well.
There’s also the future to think about, because this move doesn’t just affect 2026. It muddies the waters for next year too.
Starting pitchers get paid more, and Lynch and the Royals both know that. That helps explain why he was willing to try again.
But there’s a real cost here, including the possibility of injury while stretching him back out.
Still, none of that changes the basic point. This was a predictable experiment, and it has played out like one.
Sometimes baseball throws you a curve. Sometimes it just hands you the obvious answer and dares you to ignore it.
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For a club trying to keep its roster moving through the grind of the season, those are the kinds of updates that matter even before anyone returns. Each of the three has been working back from injuries that cut into his time this year, and the next step now is simple enough on paper: get into games, handle the workload, and show the Royals they are nearing a place where reinforcements can actually be considered. [Read more 🡒]