Rough spring training debut brings up questions for promising Royals prospect arm

The Kansas City Royals are in a pickle, one that years of poor drafting and development helped create. The organization lacks clear-cut reinforcements at the upper levels of the minors.

Yes, the rotation has depth, but most of that depth arrived from outside the system, with names like Ryan Bergert, Stephen Kolek, and Mitch Spence. There is not a non-roster invitee, or even a non-debuted player, that fans can point to and say, “That guy has to break camp with the team.”

Still, every backfield session and Cactus League game is a chance to change that perception.

If right handed pitcher Ben Kudrna was hoping to nudge his Opening Day odds in the right direction, his first Cactus League outing did not help.

Ben Kudrna needs to move past his Saturday performance fast.

Every fan knows spring wins and losses do not matter, but Kudrna’s line against the San Diego Padres was rough. He took the loss after allowing four earned runs on six hits, with two walks, in 1.2 innings. Pitchers are going to take their lumps in March, and Saturday was one of those lumps for the Blue Valley Southwest product.

Kudrna also started slowly in 2025, with some ugly early outings for Double A Northwest Arkansas. He turned things around later in the summer, though. Over his final six starts at that level, Kudrna posted a 1.71 ERA in 31.2 innings, including an 11-strikeout effort in six innings on July 22. That run earned him Northwest Arkansas Pitcher of the Month honors for July and pushed him to Triple-A Omaha, where the learning curve is steep, and the results reflected it.

In spring, a bad outing can still come with something to hang onto. Maybe the hits were flares. Maybe the walks were part of a plan, working on chase in specific counts. But a quick look at the Baseball Savant data did not offer much comfort.

Kudrna threw 37 pitches and used five pitch types. He leaned mostly on his sinker and slider, which tracks with his recent usage. His four seam fastball touched 94.9 mph and averaged 93.2. The sinker averaged 91.9. His slider sat in a tight band at 83.1 mph.

In other words, this looked like the same Kudrna evaluators saw in 2025, which is why MLB Pipeline has questioned how his arsenal might play in a bullpen role.

The contact quality was the bigger issue. Of 10 batted balls against him, six were hard hit. That is not just one pitch getting ambushed. Padres hitters squared up both fastballs, and even tagged two sliders.

That kind of rate is unsustainable at any level. Kudrna also did not record a strikeout, and the whiff total was minimal, with only one whiff on 15 swings. For this outing, it was hard to point to a true putaway pitch, and that is a non-negotiable trait in most big-league roles.

None of this means Kudrna is cooked. Spring is for adjustments, and it is wasted time if a pitcher is only stretching out to be the same guy he was last season. Grip tweaks, shape changes, sequencing shifts, mechanical cleanup, all of it should be on the table. This is the kind of outing he can learn from quickly, diagnose, and move past.

But for now, his first look against a mostly B-squad Padres lineup was one to flush. And if Kudrna wants to push the Royals’ thin internal depth chart conversation in a different direction, the next appearance needs to look a lot sharper.