Michael Wacha can thank his new approach for early-season Royals surge

The Kansas City Royals over the past two years have had one pitcher break out on a league-wide level, seemingly from nowhere. Seth Lugo's 2024 season earned him a second-place finish in the AL Cy Young race after never sniffing that award earlier in his career. Kris Bubic earned an All-Star selection in 2025, turning the corner from an injury-plagued fringe starter into one of the most watched southpaws in the game.

Now, in 2026, Kansas City is once again leaning on its starters to keep them in games amid an anemic run-scoring effort. This time around, it seems MLB veteran Michael Wacha is taking his turn in the spotlight after being an underrated Royals starter throughout his tenure. Following his third start of the season, Wacha's 0.43 ERA ranks second among MLB starters, while his command-over-stuff approach has him finding success in the simplest of baseball terms: limit free bases, keep the batting average low, and get outs however they may come.

His April 11 start against the Chicago White Sox illustrated that perfectly. He threw eight shutout innings, allowing only four hits and one walk while striking out seven in the process. Wacha needed just 88 pitches to get through those eight frames, an efficiency many baseball purists would admire. The box score is incredible enough on its own, one that is deservedly drawing praise from the broader national media.

But where Royals fans should find the most solace in Wacha's performance is how that final line came to be. His batter-by-batter performance shows how valuable it is when 72% of his pitches go for strikes. A ton of two-, three-, or four-pitch plate appearances from the White Sox had Wacha seemingly cruising for long stretches, such as when he went 12 batters between allowing hits on Saturday.

One of the game's most notable shifts from a starting pitcher workload management perspective, however, has been the third trip through the order. The numbers back it up, with batters' OPS rising from .707 to .727 to .755 after facing a starter the first, second, and third time, respectively. Teams are always trying to find value and win in the margins, and getting an extra three outs from your starter can be the difference between winning and losing on many summer nights.

So how can Wacha do that? His changeup has been his bread and butter for years, and one of the reasons Kansas City acquired him in the first place. An elite pitch is something to build around and something only a few pitchers can boast. But even he can only throw that pitch so many times against hitters before they start teeing off on it. Wacha has good enough command that he can try to dot the corners with his fastballs, but polished MLB hitters know how to get to those pitches and read the spin if the approach becomes too limited.

Still, Wacha has always had a solid pitching arsenal, even before the recent push for pitchers to carry more offerings in their tool belt. It's how the veteran uses those pitches differently the third time through the order that may allow him to go deeper into games than most.

Michael Wacha's latest start demonstrated how he keeps hitters on their toes

Take his four battles against Chicago leadoff man Chase Meidroth on. That was the only batter Wacha faced four times on Saturday, a rare threshold for pitchers to cross in today's game.

Going plate appearance by plate appearance, there is subtle but intentional change in how Wacha attacks Meidroth, rarely giving him the same look or sequence twice. A low-and-away sinker-slider combo used for a groundout to start the game did not show up again, while Wacha followed that with more varied location in the bottom third of the zone for a double-play ball. The third time up, he went more north-south, freezing Meidroth with a cutter away before getting ugly swinging strikes on a curveball well below the zone and then a sinker well above it.

Does the level of competition have something to do with it? Absolutely. But just because the White Sox seemingly made Wacha's job easier does not mean we need to, or should, discount him for not stooping to that level. After all, that was still a club good enough to beat the Royals on Sunday.

But it was not just Meidroth that Wacha was doing this against. He was simply the best example because he saw the most pitches from Wacha among Chicago's batters on Saturday. This was something Wacha was doing to different degrees throughout his start, setting up future pitches not only within the current plate appearance, but in the ones that followed as well. Many pitchers do this to varying degrees, but for Wacha, this is the difference between being solid and being great in 2026.

In a world where calls for throwing your best pitch more and more just because you can, or hammering one location to every single right-handed batter, are treated as fixes, Wacha showed what mound intelligence actually looks like.

I am sure I can find more to appreciate from other Royals starters, but in Saturday's game, that approach, like Wacha himself, stood out from the rest.

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