Royals shouldn’t be fooled by luck this former All-Star is having in spring training

Any baseball fan should know how fickle spring training statistics are. Kansas City Royals fans should be especially aware of this, given how many spring training darlings over the past decade have fizzled into nothing once Opening Day arrived.

It is the nature of the beast, whether because of the volatile quality of the opponent or just the reality of a small sample size. The good and the bad marks from Arizona are easy to explain away, because they usually revert to some level of normal once the games actually matter.

That is what would likely happen if Kansas City inexplicably rostered right-handed pitcher Aaron Sanchez based solely on his game-level statistics.

Aaron Sanchez does not look like a Royals rotation contender...yet.

For a player trying to return to MLB action for the first time since 2022, Sanchez has not looked half bad in the box score. His 2.57 ERA sits not too far from his 2016 mark, when his 3.00 ERA won him the AL ERA title and his first All-Star selection.

But Sanchez is not that same pitcher, and he last appeared in the majors with the Minnesota Twins four seasons ago. He even took a full year away between pitching in Triple-A and resurfacing in the Dominican Winter League. There, he posted a superb 3.8 strikeout-to-walk ratio for the Toros del Este and won their Cy Young equivalent.

That performance, along with a tryout, put Sanchez back on teams’ radars, and Kansas City added him as a non-roster invitee this offseason. It was very much a prove-it deal, if there ever was one for a minor-league free agent.

MLB Trade Rumors reported that Sanchez would earn $1.5 million if he made the big-league roster, with another $1.35 million available in incentives. The 33-year-old could still have MLB games ahead of him, but his spring has not been enough to say he should break camp with the Royals.

The two runs he has allowed on six hits in 7.0 innings are absolutely palatable, and he has avoided any true blowup outings. But the command profile, limiting free passes while missing bats, just has not materialized in a Royals uniform.

He has walked more batters than he has struck out, and he truly lacks a putaway pitch. More than half of the batted-ball events against him qualify as hard hit. His 52.4% hard-hit rate would have been higher than any qualified MLB pitcher in 2025. Perhaps that number is ballooned by his Feb. 22 outing.

But that is the point. Sanchez does not have a real swing-and-miss weapon right now, leaning mostly on the curveball and a pair of fastballs. With an average fastball velocity sitting below 92 mph, neither fastball has a trait that makes it particularly effective on its own. He has decent command, but he cannot afford to live in the zone very often.

Considering the Royals are building Sanchez up on a starter’s rhythm, that is not a profile that inspires much confidence over multiple innings in a big-league game.

The Royals may still identify some tweak that makes Sanchez’s curveball sharper or get more ride out of his fastball. But for anyone combing through the spring stats and wondering about his chances of making the Opening Day roster, the veteran does not look nearly as strong as his ERA suggests.