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Excuse us while we adjust our Top 50 Free Agents list. Coming off their first postseason appearance since 2015, the Royals have decided to keep the band together. On Sunday, the team announced that Michael Wacha has signed a three-year contract with a club option for a fourth year. Royals starters ran a 3.55 ERA in 2024, second only to the Mariners. Their 16.7 WAR trailed only the Braves. Now that Wacha is locked up long-term, Kansas City is set to return eight of the nine pitchers who started a game for the team during the 2024 season, led by ace Cole Ragans, Seth Lugo, and Wacha. The only exception is midseason acquisition Michael Lorenzen, who has entered free agency.
Wacha joined the Royals as a free agent before the 2024 season, inking a two-year, $32-million deal with a player opt-out. After running a 3.35 ERA and putting up a career-high 3.3 WAR, he was all but certain to exercise that opt-out. Instead, the 33-year-old is set to stay in Kansas City through at least 2027, his age-35 season. He’s also guaranteed to roughly double his career earnings to this point. The deal guarantees Wacha a minimum of $51 million and could be worth as much as $72 million. According to Mark Feinsand, Wacha will earn $18 million in the first two years. In 2027, he’ll have a base salary of $14 million, with performance bonuses that could push it to $18 million. If the Royals exercise their 2028 option, Wacha’s salary will feature the same 14/18 structure. If they decline the option, they’ll pay him a $1 million buyout. As Anne Rogers reported, five of the 10 largest contracts in franchise history now belong to players on the current roster. Wacha joins Lugo, Bobby Witt Jr., and Salvador Perez, who appears on the list twice thanks to two separate extensions, in that club.
The 2025 season will be the first since 2019 in which Wacha doesn’t pitch for a new team. He came up in 2013 and pitched for the Cardinals until 2019, then signed a succession of one-year deals with the Mets, Rays, and Red Sox. In 2023, Wacha signed with San Diego on a convoluted one-year deal that featured a club option for two more years (which the Padres declined), and player options for three more years (which Wacha declined).
Wacha offered the Royals a couple of important things in 2024. By all accounts, he fit in well. Kansas City’s rotation was particularly close-knit, huddling together in the dugout to conduct a postmortem as soon as the starter came out of the game. The 12-year veteran worked to add a slider at the request of the team. “Ton of credit to him for being open and willing to try and experiment,” said assistant pitching coach Zach Bove. “It’s been cool to see his progression on that pitch.” The slider didn’t perform particularly well, but it might have provided some harm reduction, as stuff models hated it less than they hated his sinker and cutter.
The other thing Wacha offered? A lot of solid innings. Despite missing three weeks due to a fractured foot, Wacha pitched 166 2/3 innings, surpassing 135 for the first time since 2017. He doesn’t get many strikeouts, but he avoids walks and has evolved into a contact manager over the past three seasons:
Wacha ran a 3.35 ERA and a 3.65 FIP in 2024. The expected stats liked him less. Even though his 32.5% hard-hit rate ranked in the 92nd percentile, he ran a 4.05 xERA and a 4.14 xFIP. Part of the reason he was able to outperform those numbers is because Kauffman Stadium, with its spacious outfield, is a nice place to be a fly ball pitcher. If, like Wacha, you throw a sinker that rises as much as most pitchers’ four-seamers, you appreciate it all the more. Wacha was also able to leverage his all-rise arsenal into a 15% infield fly ball rate, the highest of his career and the second-highest among qualified starters.
After running a combined 5.11 ERA from 2019 to 2021, Wacha has put up the best three-year stretch of his career. Since 2022, he has a 3.30 ERA and a 3.87 FIP to go with 7.5 WAR. His success has come on the back of his changeup. According to Baseball Savant, the pitch was worth 17 runs in 2024, which made it the 17th-most valuable pitch in baseball (among changeups it trailed on only Cristopher Sánchez’s).
Keeping Wacha around until his mid-30s leaves a couple questions for the Royals. The immediate one is how much more money they’ll spend to improve the team for 2025. Retaining Wacha and the entire starting pitching corps must be reassuring, but Kansas City’s offense ranked 20th in wRC+ in 2024. Even Bobby Witt Jr. can only do so much by himself. The team had five different players with a wRC+ below 93 take at least 350 plate appearances. Just 38% of the Royals’ plate appearances were taken by above-average hitters. For reference, we talked all season about how top-heavy the Yankees offense was, but they were way above the Royals at 51%. On that front, the Wacha deal definitely seems reasonable. He’s returning for less than the price of the qualifying offer and just $2 million more than he made in 2024 ($1 million more in terms of average annual value). If J.J. Picollo and company went into the offseason intending to add, this move shouldn’t stop them, and it could give them the freedom to trade one of their younger back-end starters.
The second question is how much Wacha will be able to contribute over the next three (or four seasons). It’s reassuring that his fastball velocity ticked up 1.5 mph from 2023 to 2024, but it’s still below average. One fully healthy season doesn’t set aside the durability concerns. He missed time with shoulder inflammation in 2020, 2022, and 2023, and shoulders generally don’t start getting healthier in your fourth decade. Wacha made 29 starts in 2024, a mark he had reached just twice before, and neither of the previous seasons came in this decade. Even if he does remain relatively healthy as he enters his mid-30s, it would be unreasonable to expect a repeat performance of arguably the best season of his career. Beating your FIP as a fly-ball pitcher is a dangerous game. It’s one of those things that works until it doesn’t, and the Royals have signed on to find out how long Wacha can make it last. Wacha has parlayed a couple of excellent seasons into some long-term security with a club that finally seems focused on winning. But if the Royals are intent on making it back to the postseason, they’ve still got work ahead of them.
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