Royals Pitching 1985 vs. 2025

Entering the 2025 seasons, the Royals have assembled a noteworthy pitching staff filled with experienced starters and quality starting depth along with a strong backend.

Is this the best pitching staff in Royals history? Let’s review, compare and debate.

Several posts in the comments section suggested the 1985 Royals pitching staff was the gold standard in Royals history. Having lived through every Royals’ seasons, I would agree that was an incredible staff that led the team to the World Series.

Below are stats from the 1985 team as well as the main pieces going into the 2025 season (making a few guesses) with their stats from last year (with the exception of using the 2023 season for Hunter Harvey and 2022 season for Kyle Wright.) Thanks to Baseball Reference for the data.

The comparison of pitching staffs will be apples-to-oranges in that forty years separate these two pitching staffs. A lot has changed in baseball over the years.

Pitching eras

• Baltimore’s 1971 rotation feature a four-man rotation in which each won twenty-plus games (Cuellar, Dobson, Palmer, McNally).
• Five man rotations came to dominate with a fireman before closers rose in prominence, many pitching multiple innings for a save.
• Pitchers started to throw harder and injuries began to mount.
• Pitch counts came to be a means to protect pitchers from injuries, resulting in the need for more bullpen arms.
• Times when a team had one hard throwing pitcher are a relic of the past, teams fill the pen with hard throwers now.
• Analytics came along helping to define multiple bullpen roles that pitchers found their place to the point starters are pitching fewer innings than ever.

Starters were once the single most important members of the pitching staff, now they are just an important half of the pitching puzzle, strong bullpens are necessary to finish off wins for the team.

Comparison
The stats clearly show the changes in pitching just in the past forty years.

Note: The average line is technically not strictly statistically valid but is provided as a frame of reference for the collection of pitchers.

The 1985 pitchers were on average two years younger, made their starts (I believe Goobie missed a few starts at some point due to injury), used a multi-inning closer, relied on basically five bullpen arms.

The 2025 pitchers (relatively healthy last year), walk fewer and strike out more batters, WHIP is down, ERA+ is up reflecting a more pitcher friendly game, starters pitch less, and a larger bullpen with multiple closer-class relievers.

Debate
Is it possible to really determine which collection of pitchers is better?

Since we haven’t played the 2025 season, and one can not ‘project’ what players will do, let’s frame the discussion as which staff gave you the best feeling at the start of the season in their era.

This means setting aside the known results of the 1985 team and remembering what you felt before the season started.

Those old enough to remember will recall the buzz was about how young and inexperienced the talented trio was – Saberhagen, Gubicza and Jackson were 21/22/23 going into the season – no real track record to suggest strong performances or how their careers would turn out – just hope and hype.

I personally have a better feeling about the 2025 pitching staff for their era than the 1985 pitching staff for their era. The main reasons are:

• track records of Lugo/Ragans/Wacha
• collectively the staff is older and in prime years
• multiple closer quality pitchers (Erceg, Estevez, Harvey)
• quality of starter depth to mitigate injuries
• potential mid-season upgrade with Wright in rotation and Bubic to pen

In simple terms, the Royals in 1985 benefited from few injuries and unexpected strong performances - they had no apparent depth. The 2025 Royals have been built for quality and depth to handle both injuries and poor performances – so many pieces they can keep shuffling the deck all summer.

I’ll take the 2025 Royals pitching staff over the great 1985 staff for the start of the season when not knowing the outcome.

Once 2025 is over, we can debate which pitching staff was actually better by results.