Cole Ragans is your Opening Day starter

Ragans gets a well-deserved honor. Plus, MJ Melendez is looking good, Jake Brentz is hurt, a Royals prospect is touching triple-digits on the radar gun and the Royals Hall of Fame gets it right.

We’re in the home stretch of the Cactus League as the Royals have just six more games remaining. After Sunday, they’ll break camp and head for Northwest Arkansas for one more exhibition game before they get to Kansas City.

Opening Day is just a little over a week away. Baseball is coming.

Let’s take a quick trip around camp as spring training is mercifully winding down.

Cole Ragans is named Opening Day starter

Less than a year after arriving in Kansas City via trade and coming off just 12 major league starts where he posted a 2.64 ERA and 2.49 FIP to go along with a 31 percent strikeout rate, Cole Ragans will get the nod when the Royals open their 2024 campaign against the Minnesota Twins next week.

I like what this says about the Royals’ methodology of building a roster. Ragans has a total of 136 major league innings under his belt, including just 21 starts. He’s thrown about twice as many innings in the minor leagues. While he’s entering his age 26 season and has dealt with some serious injury issues, Ragans has low mileage on his arm. It’s difficult to shake the feeling that the Royals of years past would’ve rolled with some trope about how Ragans needs more seasoning to be prepared for the pressure that comes with being the so-called staff ace and the Opening Day starter. The additions of a Seth Lugo or Michael Wacha, free agent signing that brings the coveted veteran presence to the rotation would’ve provided cover for Matt Quatraro and JJ Picollo to steer clear of Ragans.

The fact is that Ragans is the most deserving starter in this rotation. Experience be damned. The Royals recognize that. The best pitcher in this rotation will front said rotation.

Hell, he’s pretty much been the guy in Surprise as well. I’ve thought a lot about what kind of stats I like to see out of spring training. Hey, it’s March and these games don’t count. I have to do something with my mind. For pitchers, I would lean heavily on strikeouts and walks. Here, Ragans checks the boxes. He’s whiffed 16 batters in 13.1 innings of work while walking just three. With many parks in the Cactus League lacking Statcast technology, it’s difficult to parse how the particular pitches are playing, but striking out over a batter per inning while keeping the walks in check bodes well for getting the season started.

Obligatory Jake Brentz update

Every time I’ve posted this spring, I’ve written about Jake Brentz. (That may not be true, but I’m not fact-checking myself.) In his last outing on Sunday, he exited after throwing five pitches with what appears to be a hamstring injury. He was due to go for further testing on Monday.

It’s another rough turn for the lefty who is attempting to come back from Tommy John surgery. He’s made seven appearances now in the Cactus League, throwing 4.1 innings and walking 11 and with his final pitch on Sunday, he hit his first batter of the spring. Brentz had his rehab from Tommy John cut short at the end of last season with a lat strain.

Melendez is playing like it’s September

If I’m looking for strikeouts and walks from pitchers in spring training, I’ll also look for the same from hitters. Through 13 games, Bobby Witt Jr. is a man whose singular mission seems to be putting the ball in play. He’s walked just once in 42 plate appearances which obviously is not what you want. Especially from a guy who drew a free pass just under six percent of the time last year. Yet on the flip side, he’s whiffed just twice. Salvador Perez hasn’t walked yet in Arizona. (Come on…he’s not going to Spring Training to watch pitches. The man is there to swing the bat.) Like Witt, he’s making plenty of contact as he’s whiffed just four times.

MJ Melendez has a perfect SO:BB ratio as he’s walked five times in 37 spring plate appearances to go along with five strikeouts. It would appear he’s continuing an approach he flashed last September as he walked 18 times while striking out on 19 occasions in 88 plate appearances. He finished up the season hitting .261/.409/.493 which translated to a 145 wRC+ (meaning he was 45 percent better than the league average hitter in September).

Melendez was a much better hitter over the final two months of the season last year. If the approach he flashed as the year wound down is sticky, he could be primed for a breakout year. Returns from Surprise have me feeling a little more optimistic than I thought I would be.

Blake Wolters is bringing the smoke

From Baseball America:

Wolters has…taken another couple of steps forward. The fastball that was sitting in the high 80s as a high school junior now sits in the high 90s. He’s already touched 100+ mph on the Royals’ backfields this spring. A fastball that was projectable but below-average on a major league scale less than two years ago is now flirting with plus-plus grades.

“(It’s taken) two grades forward in a lot of cases. But beyond the stuff, it’s the emotional maturity of accepting and understanding instruction that has blown us away,” Royals senior director of pitching performance Paul Gibson said. 

Wolters was the Royals’ second-round selection in last year’s draft out of Mahomet-Seymore High School in Illinois. He was throwing in the low 90s as a junior but got that to jump to the 93-95 MPH range his senior season. That bump in velocity saw BA grade his fastball as a 60 and caused him to move up draft boards. At the time, evaluators felt that as Wolters learned to harness the strength of his lower body, he could add even more velocity. Looks like he’s figured out how to get those legs working.

More BA:

“He came in this spring and he’s just blown us away,” Gibson said “The delivery is pristine. We’re not doing anything with it.”

Wolters’ increased velocity helps everything else play up as well. He’s showing some feel for developing his changeup.

To bring us full circle from the the opening note on Ragans, this comment from Gibson shows how the Royals have advanced as an organization. Why mess with something that is so clean and effective? If the delivery works, it works. Five or ten years ago, the Royals would’ve felt the need to put their fingerprints on the kid and would’ve altered something. And that probably would have brought less than optimal results.

Wolters didn’t pitch much after he was drafted last year. The Royals will probably keep him in extended spring training before sending him to Low-A Columbia to start his pro career in earnest.

I am officially intrigued.

The Royals Hall of Fame officially rights a couple of wrongs

The latest Royals Hall of Fame class was announced last week and brought what I think is good news to the institution. First up: Bo Jackson.

Jackson doesn’t have an extended tenure with the Royals. Nor does he have any kind of numbers that make you sit back and consider his baseball greatness. He also never played for a postseason team while in Kansas City. In fact, he remains one of the greatest “what ifs” in franchise history.

But in the late 1980s, Bo Jackson was an event unto himself. It’s kind of difficult to describe the vibe he brought to Kansas City at a time where the Royals were going through a period of transition after their championship in 1985. The closest parallel I can think of is Shohei Ohtani. Yes, Jackson was that big of a deal.

A team hall of fame can represent many things. Personally, if you just focus on the stats, I think you miss the larger story of a team that needs to be told. For five years, from 1986 to 1990, Jackson was the guy who kept Kansas City baseball relevant. His exploits were national news. And he was getting better as he spent more time on the diamond.

His time in Kansas City was brief, but he remains an important part in the lore of the franchise. As such, he deserves celebration in the Royals Hall of Fame.

The team also announced that a veterans committee (I don’t think I knew the Royals Hall of Fame has a veterans committee) elected General Manager Cedric Tallis. The fact that Tallis wasn’t in the Royals Hall of Fame was a total and complete travesty. He was the architect of those early Royals teams that dominated the AL West.

Tallis traded for stalwarts Amos Otis from the Mets, Cookie Rojas from the Cardinals, Freddie Patek from the Pirates, John Mayberry from the Astros and Hal McRae from the Reds. While he was working the phones, fleecing his fellow GMs, he was overseeing drafts that brought George Brett, Willie Wilson, Dennis Leonard, Steve Busby and Paul Splittorff to Kansas City. During Tallis’ time, he also brought in Frank White from the Royals Baseball Academy.

Go back and look at the other teams in the expansion class of 1969 and how they did up until 1993, the last year before the Wild Card. You have the Seattle Pilots/Milwaukee Brewers. They won one division title, played in the postseason twice and appeared in one World Series. There’s the San Diego Padres. They won one division title and played in one World Series. And finally, the Montreal Expos. They appeared in one postseason series in the split season of 1981.

Meanwhile, the Royals won six division titles, appeared in the playoffs also in 1981 and captured two AL pennants with their World Championship in 1985. Sure, Tallis didn’t have much to do with that 1985 championship team as most of the players he acquired had moved on at that point, but the moves he made a decade earlier certainly paved the way. The Royals wouldn’t have been the Royals without Tallis’ contributions.

Congrats to Jackson, the Tallis family and the third inductee, John Schuerholz for their election into the Royals Hall of Fame.