KC Royals' Cole Ragans must take next step in 2025 after MLB experts' assessment

The Kansas City Royals are going into the 2025 season with one of the best starting rotations in MLB, and left-hander Cole Ragans is set to lead the team as their ace. On March 16, Royals manager Matt Quatraro confirmed Ragans would get the ball on Opening Day for the second consecutive season, and considering the 27-year-old earned a fourth-place finish in AL Cy Young voting last year, that's certainly no surprise.

Still, 20 experts surveyed by The Athletic aren't convinced that Ragans has achieved "ace" status in MLB — at least, not yet.

KC Royals ace classified as "doorstep knocker" by MLB experts

In an attempt to identify true ace pitchers across MLB, The Athletic have surveyed baseball experts before each of the last six seasons, asking them to fill out a survey and provide scouting grades for top hurlers. The experts give each player a grade from No. 1 to No. 5, and then points are assigned based on each grade — a No. 1 grade is worth five points, a No. 2 grade is worth four, a No. 3 is worth three, a No. 4 is worth two, and a No. 5 is worth one point.

On March 19, the Athletic released their results from this season's survey, which featured 20 experts grading 80 top pitchers. The maximum number of points a player could receive was 100 (20 grades of No. 1), which would put the pitcher in "Tier 1 (100) — The Inner Circle: The unanimous No. 1s." Underneath those select few, players who received a total score of 90-99.5 points fell into Tier 2, which The Athletic defined as "Aces: The pitchers you can trust all regular season and again in October."

In tied-seventh place with 86 points, Ragans was ranked in "Tier 3 (89.5 to 80) — The Doorstep Knockers: The pitchers who might one day call themselves aces."

"The Texas Rangers... should harbor little regret about their handling of Ragans, who they drafted in the first round in 2016," The Athletic wrote. "He missed multiple seasons as he underwent two separate Tommy John procedures... With the Royals, though, Ragans has blossomed into a budding ace. His 12-start performance in 2023 set the stage for a breakout last year. He ranked fourth among all pitchers in FanGraphs’ version of WAR. He overpowered hitters with his 95 mph fastball and befuddled them with his changeup. One executive paid him a high compliment, describing Ragans as a 'workhorse, with upside for more.'"

While the blurb accompanying Ragans' score acknowledged his strong numbers since joining Kansas City, the score itself seems to diminish those same stats. Ragans went 11-9 last year, posting a 3.14 ERA, 1.14 WHIP, and 223 strikeouts, becoming just the fifth pitcher in Royals history to strike out 200 batters in a single season. In addition to finishing fourth in AL Cy Young voting, he was selected to his first All-Star Game, and was nominated for a Gold Glove Award.

In fact, Ragans' 2024 campaign was so game-changing for the Royals that they rewarded him with a three-year, $13.25 million contract extension this winter, buying out his final pre-arbitration season (2025) and first two years of arbitration eligibility (2026-27). With that in mind, ranking Ragans as a player who "might one day" become an ace feels like a major underestimation of the young starter — but it also challenges him to step up his game even more than he already has.

Going into 2025, Ragans leads a fierce rotation of Seth Lugo, Michael Wacha, Michael Lorenzen, and Kris Bubic, and as the Royals look to back up their 2024 return to the playoffs with an even deeper postseason run this year, the left-hander couldn't be in a better position to steal the spotlight.

So, could this be the year that Ragans wins his first AL Cy Young Award, forcing his way up The Athletic's ace rankings before next Opening Day? Only time will tell, but if he "might one day" call himself an ace, there's no better time than now for that day to come.