2024 Season in Review - Kris Bubic

The left-hander made a terrific comeback from Tommy John Surgery. Is the future brighter still?

It probably says something about Kris Bubic that he missed half the season and then pitched out of the bullpen for the remainder and still had his most valuable season as a professional pitcher by FanGraphs WAR. Of course, what that says can be a bit more confusing.

If you take it entirely out of context, it might seem obvious that Kris Bubic is one of those dozens and dozens of pitchers who can’t hack it as a starter but who can be quite good out of the bullpen. The second half of that statement is verifiably true, he finished the season with a 2.67 ERA, a 2.09 SIERA, a 1.95 FIP, and a 28.1% K-BB%. Those are elite numbers. For comparison’s sake, AL Cy Young finalist Emmanuel Clase finished the season with a 2.64 SIERRA, a 2.42 FIP, and a 20.7% K-BB%. Yes, he had a minuscule 0.61 ERA in twice as many innings, but the fact that Bubic has multiple numbers that are generally considered predictive which are competitive with a reliever who was so good he got significant Cy Young Award support tells you Bubic is very much on the right path.

Honestly. What else is there to say? Bubic was fantastic. The only obvious thing he struggled with was closing out games. He blew two of the three save opportunities he was offered, finally earning his first career save during the final game of the season. It’s a small enough sample size that you honestly can’t take it particularly seriously, anyway.

But let’s put Bubic back into context. That context is that for his first three seasons, he had Cal Eldred as his pitching coach. Nearly every pitcher Eldred coached got worse under his tutelage, and Bubic was no exception after a promising debut in 2020. In 2023, that all changed when the team hired Zach Bove, Brian Sweeney, and others to coach the pitchers. Guys began improving with the Royals instead. And Bubic was no exception. In his first two starts of 2023, he allowed only two runs in eleven innings while striking out thirteen and walking one. He seemed well on his way to a breakout season before getting hurt before he could complete his third start and landing on the injured list until mid-2024.

It might be tempting to leave Bubic in the bullpen, a unit that has been pretty unstable for a while now, instead of trying to reinsert him back into the rotation which (as of now, at least) looks to return all five of the guys who made the vast majority of the starts in a rotation that was top-three in all of MLB. But not giving him one more shot to show his value in a starting role would be incredibly wasteful of the Royals. Even during his days as a not-very-good starter with Cal Eldred, he was always a positive-WAR pitcher. Those can be incredibly difficult to find. If he can’t hack it, for whatever reason, there’s always the bullpen to fall back to.

Kris Bubic still has the chance to be the best of the pitchers drafted by the Royals in a notoriously pitching-heavy 2018 draft class. Give him his A for his tremendous work in 2024 and then ask even more of him for 2025.