The Royals Add an Arm — A Big, Muscular One

Just two weeks after Jac Caglianone fell to them in the draft, the Kansas City Royals have acquired another beefy two-way college player: Michael Lorenzen. After spending the first seven seasons of his major league career with the Cincinnati Reds, the former Cal State Fullerton star is now on his fifth team in the past 24 months. And for the second time in as many seasons, he’s parlayed a strong first half into a midseason trade to a contender. In return, the Rangers receive Walter Pennington, a 26-year-old lefty reliever who made his MLB debut earlier this month.

The Rangers signed Lorenzen at the very end of spring training to a one-year, $4.5 million contract, intending to use him to plug one of the various holes in the rotation left by injuries to Tyler Mahle, Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, and I’m sure I’m forgetting someone, but you get the idea. Lorenzen wanted to start, and the defending World Series champions had a need.

And for a while, it looked like the steal of the offseason. In contrast to other late signees like Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery, Lorenzen didn’t seem adversely affected by his short ramp-up. He debuted on April 15 and threw 79 pitches over five scoreless innings. Lorenzen followed that up by finishing six innings over his next eight starts, all while holding opponents to a .204/.296/.343 batting line. At the end of that run, Lorenzen’s season ERA was below 3.00.

Though if you want a microcosm for how the Rangers’ season has gone, Texas rewarded Lorenzen’s outstanding first two months with insultingly meager run support: enough to go just 3-6 in those nine starts.

Which is how we got to a point where the Rangers are selling to Kansas City. It’s pretty common historically for these two teams to exchange players; in fact, it was just a year ago tomorrow that Texas acquired Aroldis Chapman from the Royals for a package including pitching prospect Cole Ragans. It worked out for both sides: The Rangers won a championship, and Kansas City was able to magically turn Ragans into a no. 1 starter overnight.

It’s less common for Texas to be in a position to sell to Kansas City. The Royals are currently in possession of the last AL Wild Card spot, and according to our Playoff Odds, they’re a little less than even money to hang onto it. The Rangers, at 51-55, aren’t out of hope yet, but they’re taking on water. Well, they’ve already taken on water and the ship could capsize any day now. The Royals haven’t been good while the Rangers were bad since 2014, which was a one-off anomaly in a highly competitive decade for Texas. Before that, you have to go back to the 1980s.

With all that said, why are the Rangers trading off one of their early-season successes for a 26-year-old rookie who was undrafted out of (checks notes) the Colorado School of Mines?

Well, as good as the first two months of the season were to Lorenzen, the last two months were less so. Since June 7, his ERA is 4.79 and his FIP is 6.19, and he’s allowed 10 home runs in just 47 innings. Over the past 30 days, his ERA is 6.20. His past two appearances were the apotheosis of a pitcher on his way out: On Saturday, Lorenzen threw 40 pitches and allowed four runs but failed to get out of the first inning. A day later, the Rangers brought him back for a four-inning relief appearance totaling 55 more pitches.

Some regression was always going to happen. Lorenzen has never been a big strikeout guy, and this season he’s increased his walk rate by more than half. Out of 80 pitchers with at least 100 innings this season, Lorenzen is dead last in K-BB%. All of this while allowing a higher-than-average HR/9 rate.

Some internet weirdos think that the metrics we put out here at FanGraphs have their own thoughts and emotions, so as to be vindictive against certain players or teams. Of course that’s not the case — something like WAR or FIP is just an equation. It does not love or hate. But if FIP did have a mind of its own, self-awareness, or even a soul, it would look at Lorenzen’s numbers from this season, hold its nose and go, “Oooooh, stinky!”

So the other shoe — in Lorenzen’s case, that shoe is an extremely cool custom Vans cleat — was always going to drop. And it’s happening just as the Rangers’ need for Lorenzen is disappearing. Scherzer is back already, and deGrom, Mahle, and Cody Bradford are close behind. Lorenzen was going to be out of the rotation pretty soon no matter what, so now he has a chance to make another team’s rotation.

Lorenzen’s contract calls for $2.5 million in workload bonuses, and I was curious how many of those markers he’s hit. He gets $200,000 reaching 60 innings pitched, and another $200,000 for every 10 innings from 60 to 100. Throwing 40-plus pitches on consecutive days might be the kind of thing you’d expect from, well, Cal State Fullerton a generation ago, but that last outing also got Lorenzen over 100 innings before the trade. So that’s $1 million in the bag so far, with the following bonuses still on the board: $300,000 for 120 innings, $350,000 for 140 innings, $400,000 for 160 innings, and $450,000 for 180 innings.

Unless Lorenzen gets hurt, 120 innings feels like a lock. But there are only 10 or 11 trips through the rotation left in the regular season; unless Lorenzen does a 2008 CC Sabathia impression, 180 innings isn’t going to happen, and even 160 innings feels unlikely.

For the second time in as many years, the team Lorenzen is joining at the deadline counts its rotation as its greatest strength, and there’s not an obvious place for the 32-year-old to slot in. Ragans and Seth Lugo are All-Stars, Brady Singer and Michael Wacha have been excellent so far this year, and even no. 5 starter Alec Marsh has had better results and peripherals than Lorenzen.

I would imagine that Lorenzen is going to serve as a middle reliever and swingman. The Royals not only need to make the playoffs, they need to make sure not to wear out their rotation along the way. This is not a rotation that’s used to making 30 starts in the regular season, then five more in October.

Wacha and Lugo have both pitched in the postseason, but collectively, this rotation’s last MLB playoff start came in 2015, when Wacha was 23 years old and two seasons removed from winning NLCS MVP. Lugo is going to pass his major league career high in innings the next time he takes the mound. Ragans has already thrown more innings this year than he has in any professional season. It doesn’t sound like the worst idea in the world to toss in a guy who can piggyback or serve as a no. 6 starter.

So what of Pennington? The other half of this trade has two-thirds of an inning of career big league experience and a sinker that sits in the low 90s — for a reliever, even a lefty, that’s fringy. But Pennington also has above-average feel for a breaking ball, which has allowed him to put up eye-popping numbers in the high minors: a 32.9% strikeout rate with a .179 opponent batting average and a 2.26 ERA in 59 2/3 Triple-A appearances.

A finesse-and-soft-stuff lefty is obviously going to fare well against Triple-A opposition and have questions over whether he can sneak that breaker past big leaguers with any consistency. For that reason, he came in at no. 36 on Travis Ice’s Royals prospect list a few weeks ago. It’s a token return for a pitcher who was as hot as Lorenzen was two months ago, but a non-trivial return for someone who was trending toward getting DFA’d. Even if the Rangers right the ship and make a surprising run for the playoffs, I’d argue that a dedicated lefty reliever, even a low-leverage one, is more valuable to the Rangers right now than Lorenzen. Particularly as any such run would require Mahle and deGrom returning to the rotation and pitching well.

I usually don’t care even a little about team control for relief pitchers in a trade — especially if that reliever isn’t, like, Devin Williams or Mason Miller. But it’s also worth mentioning that Kirby Yates and José Leclerc are going to be free agents next year, and David Robertson could join them on the open market if his $7 million mutual option doesn’t get exercised. (Mutual options tend to have a narrow window for both sides to agree.) Also, next year Yates is going to be 38 and Robertson will be 40. So if nothing else, Pennington gives the Rangers useful depth.

The Rangers get a prospect, the Royals get some depth, and Lorenzen improves his chance of playing into October. It might not be the blockbuster everyone was waiting for, but trades like this keep the wheels moving.