How Lugo plans to use his fastball to get back on track in '26

KANSAS CITY -- Seth Lugo’s 2025 season was a roller coaster. There were high points, including the month of June, when he posted a 1.26 ERA over five starts. His two-year contract extension that he signed in July, effectively ending any rumors for that upcoming Trade Deadline.

The low points included two separate injured list stints and an August that really didn’t look like what the Royals were used to seeing out of Lugo, who posted a 9.11 ERA that month and then ended up on the IL on Sept. 4 through the end of the season.

In 2026, he’s eyeing the consistency that he pitched with in ’24, when he posted a 3.00 ERA across 206 2/3 innings en route to a runner-up American League Cy Young Award finish.

It’s no secret that for the Royals to get back to the postseason in ’26, they need that version of Lugo, pitching healthily and effectively at the top of the rotation alongside Cole Ragans and Michael Wacha.

“Finished the year not the way I wanted to, but I relate it to a career -- there’s ups and downs, stuff you got to work through,” Lugo said this past weekend at Royals Rally. “At the end of the day, we learn from our mistakes. This offseason, [I’ve] been able to think about some stuff that didn’t go over the way I hoped. Hopefully moving forward, we can correct some of those issues.”

One of those things has been fastball command and using the pitch more after continually increasing his breaking-ball usage in recent years. Lugo spins the ball as well as anyone, and his manipulation of pitches has made him one of the most unique pitchers in the league. But he thinks all those breaking balls have allowed hitters to not worry about his fastball as much. Lugo threw fastballs 49.8 percent of the time in 2025, his lowest fastball usage since 2018 (48.9 percent) when he was mainly a reliever with the Mets.

“I think over the past couple of years, all the breaking balls that I like to throw, it kind of gave me a reality check -- we’ve got to use your fastball,” Lugo said. “We’ve got to command the fastball. Get up when I need to. So that’s been my focus.”

Another factor Lugo and the rest of the Royals’ pitching staff has to deal with this season is the Kauffman Stadium fences being moved in about 10 feet in most places except for center field, as well as the wall height lowering. There’s been so much focus on how this helps the Royals’ offense, but it’s going to affect the pitchers, too.

Lugo joked that when he heard the news his main thought was, “Here we go again,” because of how often teams around the league have changed their ballpark dimensions. Lugo would like to play on the biggest field possible, of course. But he reiterated what the Royals’ research team has said: It might not affect this pitching staff as much as one would expect.

“[General manager J.J. Picollo and I] spoke a little bit about some of my metrics and how much you would think it would affect it from my last two seasons,” Lugo said. “... He gave me some information, some stats, and just from my knowledge, I can think of maybe one hit, a double, that would have been a home run with the fences in. So that’s over 350-some innings. That’s not bad. It’s not something that I have any control over, so like I said, keep the balls out of the gap, keep it to the big part of the field or keep it to the ground. That’s our gameplan, anyway. It shouldn’t make much of a difference for what we’re trying to do anyway.”

Lugo is referencing the RBI double that Giancarlo Stanton hit to the deepest part of Kauffman Stadium in the fourth inning of Game 4 of the AL Division Series in 2024, a 114.1 mph screamer that went 406 feet to left-center field and hit the top of the wall.

Based on Statcast data analysis, Lugo would have seen three balls land for a homer with these new dimensions. All of them came in 2024 -- Gunnar Henderson’s 366-foot double to the right-field wall on April 21, Yainer Diaz’s 369-foot double to the left-field wall on April 10 and Logan O’Hoppe’s 391-foot flyout to left-center field on Aug. 19.

“Gappers, whether they’re going out or fly balls, they’re extra-base hits,” Lugo said. “That’s where they made an adjustment to the fence. It’s already part of my gameplan to not let hitters get the ball to the gap. If I can eliminate that, it shouldn’t be an issue to think about.”

That's a sound strategy. And one that might allow Lugo to flatten all of those ups and downs he encountered in 2025.