The Royals have a lot of pieces worth building around, but the bullpen is not one of them.
Kansas City’s 2026 roster has real bright spots. Bobby Witt Jr. is great.
Carter Jensen and Jac Caglianone are two of the most exciting young talents in the league. Only injuries could dim Maikel Garcia’s budding stardom.
Noah Cameron has been the best Royals starting pitcher the team has developed in a decade and a half. Michael Massey and Nick Loftin have both taken meaningful steps forward.
Even with that core, though, the Royals are headed toward a season with at least 90 losses because the rest of the roster is too thin to support it. That creates some uncomfortable questions, including whether Salvador Perez is better left out of the lineup and whether Vinnie Pasquantino still belongs in the core. But the clearest problem is the one that keeps blowing games open: the bullpen needs a complete reset.
And not just a tweak. Kansas City needs a total overhaul, the kind that makes an offseason feel like a wholesale run.
The recent slide has made the issue impossible to ignore. The Royals have lost 14 of their last 19 games, and while the bullpen hasn’t been solely responsible, it has taken most of the heat. The list of late-game breakdowns keeps growing.
On one night, Nate Pearson gave up a single on a four-seam fastball up in the zone and missed with a slider low enough to get punished for a two-run homer. On Saturday, Steven Cruz threw a middle-middle cutter to a hitter with a career .233 isolated slugging percentage. On Friday, Pearson again left a four-seam fastball up after already putting two other runners on and allowing a previous run in the inning.
The pattern has been just as ugly in the earlier examples. The previous Sunday, Craig Kimbrel walked two batters before Connor Thomas failed to get a sweeper down enough in the seventh inning against the Boston Red Sox. One day earlier, Anthony Gose served up a middle-middle fastball to a hitter with a career .206 ISO.
Then came the sequence on Tuesday, September 8. Thomas allowed consecutive singles to open the eighth and then gave up a sacrifice fly on a mediocre cutter. Cruz then left a cutter up to give the Diamondbacks the lead in the 10th, and Gose followed by leaving a slider up that let Arizona take the lead again in the 11th.
Over the last two weeks alone, the Royals bullpen has surrendered a go-ahead run or runs eight times in the sixth inning or later. Kansas City lost all six of those games.
And in every one of those instances, the bullpen was not cleaning up a mess created by the starters. It was the bullpen itself creating the damage.
That kind of relief work spills over onto the rest of the roster. It has to.
The pressure on Royals hitters and starting pitchers has to be relentless when late leads keep evaporating. Jac Caglianone said punching something in the dugout and cutting his hand came from frustration with his own performance, and that may be true.
Still, it’s hard not to wonder how much calmer the lineup would feel if it didn’t have to try to be perfect every night. Since August 29, Kansas City has won only one game in which it scored fewer than five runs.
The biggest headache is that this isn’t a one-man problem. Five different pitchers - Pearson, Cruz, Kimbrel, Thomas and Gose - showed up in the examples above.
In total, 23 different pitchers have thrown at least five innings for the bullpen this year. Fourteen of them have taken at least one loss, 10 have an ERA of 5.00 or worse, nine have blown at least one save, and only one has struck out at least a quarter of the batters he’s faced.
That leaves the Royals with a brutal offseason assignment. This isn’t a case of needing one or two upgrades. Kansas City probably has to go find 10-15 new bullpen arms if it wants to uncover a few it can trust.
And when you look at the current options, the list of dependable pieces gets very short very fast. Alex Lange comes with a sky-high career walk rate.
Lucas Erceg is 32 and posted a K-BB% of 1.4%. Mason Black has a career 5.53 ERA.
Connor Seaboldt has a career 7.36 ERA. Craig Kimbrel is 39.
There are really only two relievers who can be penciled in as likely candidates to give the Royals semi-competent innings next season. Daniel Lynch IV is one, and he’s been one of the few truly good bullpen arms on the roster. Steven Cruz is the other, though not in a closer role.
Beyond that, the outlook gets bleak in a hurry. There is no convincing case that any of the other 21 bullpen arms would be a net positive for Kansas City if they were back on the mound in 2027.
So yes, the Royals need help. A lot of it.
If Costco is selling arms in bulk, Kansas City ought to be first in line.
In Other News...
Royals Fans Finally Get To Celebrate The Voice Of The Franchise
For more than half a century, Denny Matthews has been the soundtrack for Royals baseball, and Friday night will add another line to a run that began when the franchise did. The longtime radio broadcaster is set to call his 8,000th game, a milestone the team verified by going through the scorecards Matthews has saved dating back to 1969.
The Royals are planning a full-night salute, with fireworks, appearances by top minor-league players, a Salvador Perez bobblehead giveaway and an in-game presentation for the man so many fans have come to think of as the voice of the franchise. It is the kind of recognition that fits a broadcaster who has been there from the start, and one more reminder that some parts of the Royals experience have lasted far longer than any one season. [Read more 🡒]
Royals Fans Finally Get A Chance To Honor Denny Matthews
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What has stood out inside the organization is not just the arm, but the way Chourio carries himself on the mound. Royals officials have pointed to his maturity, discipline and pitching intelligence, along with his fastball command and durability despite his age and size, as reasons for optimism. The next step is shaping the rest of his arsenal, with the curveball and changeup still in development and the possibility of a fourth pitch eventually entering the mix. [Read more 🡒]