Rich Hill Starts Yet Another Climb, This Time With the Royals

Rich Hill has a chance. On Tuesday, the Royals announced they had agreed to a minor league deal with the 45-year-old left-handed starter. He began his professional career in 2002 with the Boise Hawks, who are no longer part of affiliated baseball. Hill’s journey from the majors to independent ball, then back to a career renaissance in his late 30s is one of the game’s true feel-good stories, and it’s not over yet. If he makes it to Kansas City, he’ll tie Edwin Jackson as the most useful player on Immaculate Grid, with appearances for 14 different major league teams. However, that’s by no means a sure thing.

Hill started the 2015 season – yes, this historical overview section is skipping over the first 13 years of Hill’s professional career – with the Long Island Ducks of the Atlantic League. The Red Sox signed him that August, and from 2015 to 2020, he went 43-22 with a 2.92 ERA and 3.48 FIP. Over that stretch, relying (sometimes exclusively) on a four-seamer that averaged under 90 mph and a loopy curveball, Hill put up 10.7 WAR, struck out nearly 29% of the batters he faced, and pitched in two World Series to a 1.80 ERA.

The 2021 season, when Hill was 41, marks a dividing line. Over the past four seasons, he owns a 4.51 ERA with a 4.42 FIP and a 4.52 xFIP. His strikeout rate has fallen to 21.1%. In 2023, Hill posted a 4.76 ERA with the Pirates, then imploded after being traded to the Padres at the deadline, running an 8.23 ERA and 6.77 FIP over 10 appearances. He sat out the beginning of the 2024 season to spend time with his family, then joined the Red Sox in August, putting up a 4.91 ERA with ugly peripherals over four appearances and 3 2/3 innings. For the first time, his fastball didn’t reach 90 mph even once. The team released him in early September.

Hill pitched for Team USA in the WBSC Premier12 tournament in November, allowing no earned runs and striking out 14 batters over 10 1/3 innings. During the tournament, MLB Network’s Jon Morosi reported that Hill wanted to return to pitch again this season. He didn’t intend to sit out the beginning of the season as he did in 2024, but no deal materialized. Last week, Hill appeared on the “Baseball Isn’t Boring” podcast and discussed his desire and readiness to return to the majors. He revealed that he’s been throwing regular bullpens and feeling 100%, and that he’s been sending Trackman data to teams that might be interested in signing him. He hoped to sign a deal earlier in order to give himself a chance for a deadline trade in case things didn’t work out.

Step one is complete. Hill will report to the Royals’ spring training home in Surprise, Arizona, before joining the Triple-A Omaha Storm Chasers. However, step two might be tricky. Royals assistant GM Scott Sharp told reporters, “He had been throwing, said he felt good. We had contacted him actually last year. He wanted a little bit more of a clearer path to the Major Leagues, so we reached out to him this year and said, ‘Hey, look, we have an opportunity to start in Triple-A. We don’t know if there’s a path to the Major Leagues at all.’ But he wants to continue to pitch, so we felt like it was a good spot.”

The reason the path isn’t clear is pretty simple. Any way you slice it, the Royals have a top-10 rotation. Their starters rank first in innings pitched, second in WAR and ERA, fifth in FIP, eighth in xFIP, and ninth by DRA-. Cole Ragans, Seth Lugo, Kris Bubic, Michael Wacha, and Michael Lorenzen have combined to make 44 of the team’s 45 starts this season. Noah Cameron, who made his major league debut on April 30 with 6 1/3 scoreless innings before being optioned back to Omaha, made the 45th. Here’s how the rotation has fared so far:

Several pitchers are outperforming their peripherals, so regression is likely, though the staff ace’s numbers are probably due to shift in the other direction. Ragans, who has been one of the best pitchers in the league since arriving from Texas in the 2023 Aroldis Chapman trade, has struggled to a 4.20 ERA despite excellent peripherals. Among pitchers who have thrown at least 40 innings, he has the 10th-highest WAR, fifth-highest BABIP, and 16th-lowest strand rate.

Still, the rotation is bound to need reinforcements at some point, and depth is a real issue. Alec Marsh and Kyle Wright have both been out all season with shoulder issues. Wright made two rehab starts earlier this month, but shoulder fatigue has reared its head again, and he’s backing off. Nine pitchers have started a game for Omaha this season, and Cameron is one of just two with an ERA below 5.40. If Hill can pitch even decently in Omaha, he could have a real chance to start for the Royals, even if he’s behind Cameron on the depth chart.

The Kansas City bullpen is also pitching well, though it’s not dominating like the rotation. It also could use left-handed reinforcements, and the sooner the better. If you look just at the performance by left-handed relievers, the Royals have a 4.95 ERA, which ranks 24th in baseball. Royals lefty relievers also rank 27th in FIP and 20th by xFIP. Daniel Lynch IV has been lights out (and the beneficiary of some batted ball luck), but Sam Long and Angel Zerpa have been dreadful thus far. Evan Sisk has been excellent in Omaha and in a brief stint with the big club, but most of the Storm Chasers’ top-performing relievers are right-handed. Once again, Hill has the chance to vault himself into a high position on a relatively short depth chart just by putting up a decent performance.

Whether that’s possible remains to be seen. Hill’s success in November is encouraging, and the Royals wouldn’t have signed him if they hadn’t seen something in his Trackman data. But the last time Hill put up an xFIP below 4.00 or a DRA- below 100 was 2019 (except for his brief 2024 campaign, when Hill had a 92 DRA- over his 3 2/3 innings). After hovering around 88 mph for years, his fastball averaged closer to 86 last season. Although it was an extremely small sample, Hill was a different pitcher for the Red Sox, throwing his curveball just 11% of the time and relying on a sweeper that the stuff models loved. It will be interesting to see whether these changes were flukes. Will he stick with the sweeper going forward? Will his four-seamer remain below the all-important DeLorean time travel threshold?

Most of us will be hoping that Hill makes it simply because he’s fun to watch. He uses every trick in the Crafty Lefty handbook, screwing with his timing, altering his release point, changing speeds, and varying the tightness of his breaking ball. And he does it all with intensity, grunting as he releases each pitch and swearing loudly when it doesn’t do as he commands. Here’s the final fastball he threw above 90 mph in the majors.

Hill is also one of the most fun players to root for, not to mention a participant in one of its most morbid competitions. There will be no shortage of baseball fans willing him to make it to Kansas City. If he can manage that, the real sickos will be hoping for a deadline deal that takes him to his 15th big league team and a brand new record.