How this ‘rock bottom’ moment turned Kris Bubic into another Royals pitching ace
Kris Bubic trotted down the dugout steps, before traveling a tall staircase to the Royals clubhouse.
This was 2022, Kansas City off to a pleasant 2-0 start, but that would soon change.
Five runs had crossed the plate before the Royals defense escaped the top of the first inning. The starting pitcher? Bubic, the guy headed for the clubhouse as the inning mercilessly carried on.
Back then, the Royals had a strict rule prohibiting phones in the clubhouse during a game. So when he arrived at his locker, Bubic initially stood up and paced the room, hoping to avoid watching the bullpen try to record the next 25 outs.
But the overhead speakers bellowed the broadcast, and a half-dozen screens showed the pictures.
He was stuck.
“You’re sitting there staring at nothing,” he said. “Pre-pitch clock, too.”
Once.
And then twice.
Four starts later, the Cardinals came to Kauffman Stadium and chased Bubic after he had recorded only one out. He figured it better to hide in the dugout for a few innings this time, as though it might somehow alter its reality.
“That,” he said, “is rock bottom.”
Well, it was.
It is now the foundation of a man leading American League pitchers in WAR this year, the story arc of a player who looks more a budding ace than bust, the shining example of a rising draft class rather than the face of its failure.
That foundation started here, in an empty clubhouse and then a crowded but just as lonesome dugout, left with nothing but his thoughts.
“What next? Where do I go from here?”
The Bubic start ... or starts
Bubic got on the phone with his family back in California recently. He wanted to share the most consequential inning of his promising season.
He has a 1.47 earned run average this year, fourth best in baseball, in his first full year after 2023 Tommy John surgery.
The comeback from an elbow injury is not unique, even increasingly expected.
His comeback is of a different variety, his disappointment predating the injury.
A first inning last month in New York provided that reminder. The Yankees loaded the bases in that opening inning, with just one out. Bubic, on the mound in front of a crowd of 43,000 at Yankee Stadium, felt, well, nothing. He got the next two hitters out and escaped the inning unscathed.
The anecdote reveals a contrast between past and present.
The numbers are right there, too. Bubic is yet to allow a first-inning run this year. He’s yet to allow a second-inning run either, for that matter.
Coming into the year, in 60 career starts, his first-inning ERA stood at 6.10, his worst in any frame.
But it’s not really about the results. It’s the process.
Three years, back in those rock-bottom days, Bubic put everything he had into the first inning. The scouting reports were intricate, and Bubic felt it necessary to follow them with precision.
To best ensure that, he developed a warmup procedure that encompassed dozens of tosses in the outfield grass before moving to the bullpen and throwing 35 or 40 pitches to a squatted catcher. It was time-consuming, but more apparent in retrospect, it consumed all his thoughts.
“I was trying to throw a no-hitter in the bullpen,” he said.
An extravagant routine was built on the notion that he better have everything working from the jump. Some of that stemmed from a narrow repertoire, which, to be clear, is certainly part of his revitalization. The arsenal is wider. In fact, part of Brian Sweeney’s interview for the pitching coach job ahead of the 2023 season included a question about how he’d “fix” Bubic, so to speak.
“Why isn’t this guy throwing a slider?” he asked.
When he asked Bubic the same question a few weeks later over dinner, Bubic felt relieved. He throws five pitches now — two forms of fastballs, two sliders and a prominent change. Hitters are having a far more difficult time recognizing the movement on his pitches than they once did.
But there’s more to it than a repertoire change.
It’s his concentration on it.
“I’d say it’s 80% pitching to your strengths and 20% on the opposing hitter,” Sweeney said. “You do something well for a reason. That’s why you’re here. Use that.”
That freed up a clogged mind that once felt psyched out before the first pitch.
Bubic is using a style dictated by his strengths, by his terms and absent a need for perfection.
It’s produced the recent results, but it’s not a recent a change.
That dates back to 2022.
Before any of us even caught it.
The Kris Bubic breakthrough
The turnaround we see today — among the best baseball has to offer this year — actually pivoted on Oct. 1, 2022, five games left in a 97-loss season that would get a World Series-winning general manager fired.
On the mound, the Royals placed a pitcher sporting a 5.81 earned run average, season and confidence both long gone.
“I just decided going into the game that I’m not going to try to be perfect,” he said. “It’s my last start of the year. It’s been a terrible year. What do I have to lose?”
He turned in five shutout innings. Struck out eight and walked one.
Maybe, he thought, there could be something to this. Less is more, that kind of thing.
The idea didn’t come from nowhere. It arrived from desperation.
And that’s where his story returns to the rock bottom.
After failing to complete even a full inning for the second time, that start against the Cardinals, Bubic was demoted to the bullpen. A week passed before the Royals put him in a game in that role, and Bubic, candidly, spent most of that time wondering when — not if — the team would return him to the minor leagues.
They did, but a day before, they offered him a ninth-inning appearance in a 8-1 game, the most low leverage of appearances.
Bubic got the first out. Then stepped in Corey Seager, an all-star shortstop.
Bubic tried a 94 mph fastball. Seager hit it 420 feet to straightaway center.
Gone.
“The next two hitters, I’ll never forget it, because I was just so pissed off,” Bubic said. “I told myself I’m just going throw it as hard as I can and see what happens.”
Bubic has thrown 1,899 fastballs in the major leagues over the past six years.
After the Seager home run, the next four that left his hand were among the nine hardest he’s thrown.
Ever.
His 97.0 mph four-seamer to strike out Adolis Garcia remains the hardest fastball he’s thrown in six years.
He knew he couldn’t replicate that with any regularity, at least not with expectations of throwing deep into a game. But that final 2022 start in Cleveland, it dawned on him, almost like an epiphany.
It wasn’t about letting loose with a four-seam fastball.
He had finally let loose with his mind.
‘Keep it simple’
The Royals pitching coaches turned over at a preferable time.
Sweeney considers it a goal to help his pitchers perform with freedom. Throw strikes. Trust your stuff. Don’t overthink it.
It’s an about-face to the way Bubic had approached a major-league outing the preceding three years.
The game had become so all-consuming that he spent every day between starts tinkering with anything and everything. Mechanics, pitch releases, grips, you name it.
“I was mentally exhausted,” he said.
He was in a better place at the onset of 2023, equipped with a new slider and secondary fastball, but most importantly a liberation to rely on his stuff.
Then came the elbow injury. It was devastating.
You’d think.
“I think having the injury when it happened was probably a good thing,” he said. “It allowed me to reset, reevaluate, step away for a second and come back with a clear mind.”
It cut out the noise.
For good.
It’s funny the way Bubic describes being sidelined for more than a year. Uninterrupted time, he calls it, ignoring that the injury itself is, well, an interruption.
But it didn’t rob him of a year. It gifted him time to perfect the process, even if it would be a year before he could assess the results.
His pre-start bullpen routine has now been trimmed in half — Sweeney says Bubic could be ready with only 13 pitches. He’s unbothered by one of them not feeling absolutely perfect before he takes the mound. There are other options.
”Kris keeps it simple — he pays attention to the game plan but knows who he is as a pitcher and how valuable that can be,” Sweeney said.
Bubic is barreling toward the best first half of any left-handed starting pitcher in team history.
The ERA this month is 0.36, lowest in the majors.
Earlier this week, he flirted with a no-hitter in San Francisco. He returned to the dugout six times that night, and his teammates, following a baseball custom, left him all by his lonesome.
A different type of isolation.
This story was originally published May 23, 2025 at 6:30 AM with the headline "How this ‘rock bottom’ moment turned Kris Bubic into another Royals pitching ace."