The Rockies have reached the point every bad pitching staff dreads: the roster churn starts, and the arm that just got shown the door is one the Royals already knew well.
On Monday, Colorado designated Michael Lorenzen for assignment after a brutal first season in Denver. The move came with the Rockies recalling right-hander TJ Shook from Triple-A Albuquerque, and the club noted it had 37 players on the 40-man roster.
Lorenzen’s numbers in Colorado tell the whole story. In 115.2 innings over 26 outings, he posted a 7.08 ERA, a 1.88 WHIP and a .331 BAA. Among pitchers with at least 100 innings, he sat at the bottom in all three categories by a wide margin.
That’s a hard fall, but Kansas City had already seen a version of this act. Lorenzen spent 2025 with the Royals after arriving at the trade deadline the year before, and while he was serviceable, he never became more than that. In 27 outings for Kansas City last season, the veteran right-hander finished with a 4.64 ERA, 1.33 WHIP and .266 BAA.
The home run issue has followed him for a while, and it only got louder. Since he moved back into a starting role in 2022 with the Angels, Lorenzen has allowed more than one homer per nine innings every season.
This year his HR/9 sat at 1.48, which placed him in the bottom 15 among starters with at least 100 innings. Last season with the Royals, that figure was even worse at 1.59.
For Colorado, that’s especially painful. A pitcher in that organization can’t afford to be giving up long balls, and Lorenzen did exactly that.
There were also the same warning signs in the underlying numbers. Last season with Kansas City, Lorenzen was below average in barrel rate at the 43rd percentile, and this year that slipped to the 20th percentile.
His bat-missing ability was already shaky in 2025, when he logged a 37th percentile K-rate, 33rd percentile whiff rate and 48th percentile chase rate. In Colorado, those marks cratered, with strikeout, whiff and chase rates all landing below the fifth percentile.
The expected stats painted an ugly picture too. Lorenzen’s 2025 line included a 21st percentile xERA and 19th percentile xBA. This season, those numbers dropped all the way to the second and first percentile.
The Royals have had their own pitching problems, but theirs have been driven more by injuries than by a steady stream of underperformance. Even so, it’s hard to imagine Kansas City looking at Lorenzen’s collapse and thinking it let the wrong guy go.
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