The Kansas City Royals have been battling issues with their pitching depth all season thanks to injury and underperformance. And on Tuesday that pitching depth endured yet another test after it was announced that Aaron Sanchez had been released from his minor league contract.
As much as this news affects their quantity of their starting pitching depth, the quality is affected far less. In fact, with all his struggles this season, the writing was on the wall in terms of Sanchez’s release. Through 42 innings of work across 13 outings in Triple-A Omaha this season, he was throwing to a 9.43 ERA, 7.20 FIP, 1.98 WHIP and .320 BAA.
Now, the Royals may not have been expecting him to return to the peak form from his early days with the Blue Jays, such as his All-Star 2016 season where he threw to a 3.00 ERA season and finished Top 10 in AL Cy Young voting. However, a near-10.00 ERA in the minors was far from the Dominican Winter League Pitcher of the Year they signed this offseason.
And after surrendering 15 earned runs in just 2.2 innings of work across his last two outings, it may’ve been the nail in the coffin on his time within the Royals organization.
Despite his struggles, Royals now have bigger conundrum after Aaron Sanchez’s release
Again, Sanchez wasn’t offering the Royals much and if he looked overmatched in the International League, even if it’s a hitter-friendly league, there was no reason to believe he could help Kansas City in either a starting or relief capacity. It would be frightening to think how his 27th percentile K-rate and 45th percentile hard-hit rate would translate to the majors.
That being said, the Storm Chasers weren’t exaclty spolied for choice when it came to starting pitching. The next primary options behind Sanchez were Mitch Spence, who’d been beat up in his only two big league outings this year, Ryan Ramsey and his 5.01 ERA and Ben Sears with a 4.46 ERA this season overall, which has been his first professional season with starting experience.
With Stephen Kolek and Luinder Avila already called upon to fill the voids of Cole Ragans and Kris Bubic in the major league rotation and Ryan Bergert and Ben Kudrna out for the year, the Royals have seemingly run through all their viable pitching options and now even the unviable ones are being given their walking papers.
The Royals certainly won’t wrong for cutting Sanchez loose as a major league return seemed all but a pipe dream. However, depth is depth and there’s something to be said for having experienced warm bodies in the Triple-A ranks to be “break glass in case of emergency” options.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source kingsofkauffman.com ’
