KANSAS CITY, MO (February 9, 2019) - The Kansas City Royals announced today that the club has signed right-handed pitcher Homer Bailey to a minor league deal with an invitation to Spring Training.
Bailey, 32, has pitched exclusively for the Cincinnati Reds during his 12-year Major League career, after being selected seventh overall in the 2004 First-Year Player Draft out of La Grange High School in La Grange, Texas. He's made 212 career regular season appearances since his Major League debut in 2007, all of which have been starts.
In December, Bailey was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers in a seven-player deal, but was released and became a free agent. The move from Cincinnati ended the third-longest tenure of any Major League pitcher with his current team (debuted in June 2007), trailing only Seattle's Félix Hernández (August 2005) and St. Louis' Adam Wainwright (September 2005).
Bailey was on the Reds' Opening Day roster in 2018 for the first time since 2014, and made the first Opening Day start of his career, taking a 2-0 loss vs. Washington's Max Scherzer despite allowing just one run over 6.0 innings. Bailey won just one of his 20 starts last season, thanks in part to a 2.54 run support average that was the lowest in the Majors (min. 100 IP). He did, however, record the only complete game by a Reds' starter in 2018, 8.0 innings of two-run ball in a 2-1 loss at Detroit on July 31.
Bailey started the season on the disabled list each year from 2015-17, a stretch in which he recorded just 125.1 innings at the Major League level.
In 2012, Bailey threw the 15th no-hitter in franchise history, a 1-0 win at Pittsburgh on Sept. 28. Less than a year later, on July 2, 2013 vs. San Francisco, he recorded his second career no-hitter, becoming the first to be responsible for the Majors' two most recent no-hitters since Nolan Ryan (1974-75). Bailey is one of four active pitchers with multiple no-hitters, joining Jake Arrieta, Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander.
Kansas City now has 62 players on its Spring Training roster, including 21 non-roster invitees.