Can you call it “a breakout” if the player in question already finished fourth in the AL Cy Young Award voting just two seasons ago? No, probably not.
Can you call it “a comeback” if every advanced metric said that the same pitcher, last season, was then even better – as dominant on a per-inning basis as the best pitchers in the game, such as Tarik Skubal or Paul Skenes?
Maybe you can – if that pitcher also had a 3-3 W-L, 4.67 ERA baseball card line, and missed most of the summer with a rotator cuff strain, and played for a Kansas City team that finished out of the playoff hunt. That was all true of Royals lefty Cole Ragans.
He wasn’t really gone in 2025. But it does seem like he’s been forgotten.
Maybe we’re talking about an early contender for Comeback Player of the Year, but maybe we’re also just talking about a vitally important player for Kansas City’s 2026 playoff hopes. Ragans, in 2024, was worth 5 WAR based on a run-based version of that metric. Last year, it was just 0.2. (It was different based on other types of WAR.) While it’s oversimplifying just a little, and it doesn’t work exactly like this, it’s not hard to notice that the Royals won exactly four fewer games and finished five games out of a Wild Card spot. The lack of Ragans was pretty close to the difference between playoffs or not.
While the Royals over the last few years have gained a reputation for strong starting pitching, that’s been based more on solid depth than truly high-level dominance. Seth Lugo, Michael Wacha, Noah Cameron and Kris Bubic have all been valuable in their own ways, and you’ll need them all over six months, but none are ideally cast as your Game 1 starter in a postseason series, going against the Skubals and Crochets of the world.
Ragans, however, might be. So: Why wasn’t he last year – at least so far as that inflated 4.67 ERA tells you? And why does it seem like he can be again?
ERA isn't the best way to evaluate pitchers
Compare 2024 to 2025, and tell us which season you think was better.
- K% up from 29% to 38%
- BB% down from 9% to 8%
If striking out 38% of batters sounds good, it’s actually great. Among the nearly 300 pitchers who had 60 or more innings last year, only Mason Miller was better, and he’s a one-inning closer. Among starters over the last five years, again using 60 innings as a minimum, only a handful of peak Jacob deGrom and Shane Bieber seasons were better. No one who pitched 50 innings in each of the last two seasons increased their strikeout rate by as much as Ragans just did – and remember, he was a top-five Cy finisher in 2024.
It goes without saying: 60-ish innings is not enough for a starting pitcher. Arm injuries are bad. You’d surely take the very-good-but-worse production he gave you over 186 1/3 innings in 2024, rather than the 61 2/3 truly outstanding innings he posted in '25. We’re not debating availability or health so much as we are performance, and how that high ERA doesn’t really tell you much.
As you can see: which number is the one that stands out the most from Ragans in 2025?
- ERA: 4.67
- -----------------
- xERA: 2.67
- DRA: 2.83
- SIERA: 2.52
You don’t even need to have a full understanding of the alphabet soup of advanced pitching metrics (xERA is Statcast’s Expected ERA; DRA is Baseball Prospectus’ Deserved Runs Allowed, SIERA is Skill-Interactive ERA) to realize that the outlier here is ERA, which is generally a pretty poor predictor of the upcoming season. That two-run gap between his 4.67 ERA and 2.67 xERA? It was the second-largest of any pitcher who faced at least 200 batters.
You could see the way teams view ERA versus more advanced measurements of pitcher performance in action throughout winter. Look no further than the Blue Jays valuing Dylan Cease as far better than the 4.55 ERA he just offered, or the Mets being clearly willing to see that Devin Williams is not likely to be a 4.79 ERA pitcher again.
For some context on that 2.67 xERA, consider this: Skenes was at 2.65. Skubal was 2.71. Yoshinobu Yamamoto was 2.74. Those studs were certainly more available, durable. It’s not clear they were better. It’s why at least one projection system has him as a possible top-five arm in the American League this year.
Nor do you have to worry about which of these metrics is the most predictive. It's increasingly clear that the simple difference between good old-fashioned strikeout rate and walk rate does the best there, and there’s Ragans, third in baseball, behind only Miller and Aroldis Chapman.
None of which matters, we agree, if he’s not available to pitch, and the tale of Ragans’ entire career to this point has been one of injury-fueled starts-and-stops; he’s already had Tommy John surgery twice. Even a best-case 2026 has that “but he missed much of 2025 with a shoulder issue” in the back of your mind, for certain.
That would all be more concerning if not for the following two things, we think.
1) He did come back last season after the shoulder injury, and he looked great.
If we were still waiting on our first regular-season look now, having had his season ended by the shoulder problem, we’d feel a lot differently about this. But Ragans did come back in September to make three starts, and they hardly could have gone better. In 13 innings, Ragans struck out 22 batters (a nearly 46% strikeout rate, top-five that month), walking just four; his fastball velocity was a lot closer to what it had been in April than it was before he got hurt.
2) Spring Training has been full-speed ahead.
If we’re willing to overlook regular-season ERA, imagine how much stock we’re putting into spring ERA. (Among many other things: nine different Royals left camp to go to the World Baseball Classic, including Bobby Witt Jr., Maikel Garcia, and Salvador Perez. Ragans himself was invited but turned down the chance, which tells you something both about his skill level but how much the late-September return inspired confidence.)
We had to go look up that Ragans has an 8.44 ERA, because we did not know or care about that, but it’s also not what’s worth thinking about. There’s really only two things that matter in spring for pitchers; the first is health, obviously, and the second is learning what you can about the way pitches are moving, in terms of velocity, shape and movement, since there is information there in small samples.
That being the case, the only thing more notable in Eno Sarris’ Spring Training Stuff+ leaders (a "stuff model" being a way to evaluate the physical characteristics of a pitch) than little-known Angels prospect Walbert Urena tearing up the Cactus League was Ragans, at No. 2.
Ragans' 2024 was good by any standard, and his 2025 was good by advanced metrics. His spring has looked like that, too, and there’s no indication of any health issues this time. So there should be absolutely nothing standing in the way of Ragans and —
Wait, why was the ERA so high?
… right, OK. We’re talking about what’s going to predict the future, but when the Cardinals tagged him for five runs in three innings last June, you don’t get to hand-wave that away with what might have happened. (Though the Royals did win that game, 7-5.) So what caused Ragans to let those runs in?
As you’d expect: Lots of things. That Cardinals game was his last one before going on the shelf, and his fastball velocity was noticeably down; it’s easy to think he was already diminished at that point. In such a small sample, poor defense could really get you, and indeed it did; in 2024, the Royals defense saved +9 runs with Ragans on the mound, but in 2025, they cost him minus-2. (On a completely related note, Ragans' Batting Average on Balls In Play shot up from .290 to .354, the second-largest change of any pitcher with as many innings.)
Run prevention is rarely only about the pitcher. But he remains a main character. When Ragans did allow contact, he did get hit somewhat harder, seeing his barrel rate fall from the 79th percentile to the 28th percentile, which is what happens when your hard-hit rate goes up and your ground-ball rate drops. As his arm angle dropped, his fastball cut more and his slider slowed and changed shape, becoming, for lack of a better term, droopier.
All of which were known issues for Ragans headed into this season.
“It got super depthy and was almost a baby curveball,” Ragans told MLB.com’s Anne Rogers earlier this spring. “... It was bigger and inconsistent. And just depthy, just straight down. I got some chase with it, some swing-and-miss with it, but it’s more so about putting it in the zone. I could never throw an 0-0 slider last year. In the grand scheme of things, I didn’t do well with that.”
After spending a winter working on the grip, Ragans seems to think the slider is back. The metrics agree it’s closer to what it was before 2025. Again: which is the outlier here?
- 2026, ST: 86.2 MPH, 37.6 inches drop
- 2025, reg: 84.7 MPH, 40.3 inches drop
- 2024, reg: 86.0 MPH, 36.3 inches drop
It’s not even so much about “better,” because an argument could be made for either. It’s about “looking like it did in 2024.”
“I feel as good as I’ve ever felt,” Ragans said at the beginning of spring. “It just felt good to be out there.”
The Royals will need him to be his old self. For all the reasonable talk about what young Royals slugger Jac Caglianone can do in 2026, it’s just as important for Kansas City – moreso, perhaps – what Ragans can do. Having starting pitching depth is fantastic. Having an ace is pretty nice, too.