Royals Free Agent Pitching Targets: Chad Kuhl
To put it bluntly, Chad Kuhl had a terrible season with the Colorado Rockies in 2022 and he wasn't exactly an ace with the Pittsburgh Pirates before that. He also has only one season above 1 WAR, back in 2017 (2.2), so why would the Kansas City Royals give him a shot if he is less than good?
For one, Kuhl pitched at least half of his career in pitcher-unfriendly parks (PNC Park and Coors Field). Coors, specifically, is notorious for making certain pitches worse — ones that rely on horizontal movements like sliders and sinkers. Why might that affect Kuhl, you might ask?
Kuhl throws a sinker and slider combo 78.8% of the time, so that might have led to his Baseball Savant percentiles all being blue aside from one. With that said, while Coors might have affected the movement of Kuhl's pitches, he has always had another issue throughout his career.
Kuhl walks way too many batters while not striking out enough. Kuhl's BB/9 in 2022 was 3.81 while his K/9 was 7.23; both are below average by major league standards. The main issues with this are his overall lack of control and the fact that he doesn't fool anyone with his stuff.
If we look at the Statcast heat maps for where Kuhl throws his pitches, you can see that he throws a lot of pitches in hittable spots or is otherwise erratic. That isn't a good combo but to add to it, his chase% is 25.1% and he generates whiffs 23.6% of the time. Let's return to the Coors Field effect on Kuhl's sinker and slider.
To preface this, Kuhl's sinker was average by horizontal movement throughout his career before his tenure with the Rockies (hovers from 15-17 inches of horizontal movement in his career). In 2022, his sinker's horizontal movement dropped to 14.4 inches. That doesn't sound like much, but that drop in movement makes it a lot easier to hit since it's straighter. In fact, it made it so easy to hit that Kuhl's sinker registered the highest run value in all of baseball on his sinker.
Move over to his slider, and we get a breath of fresh air as it isn't bad by a lot of metrics. Looking at his run value chart for his career, Kuhl's slider has never registered a positive run value and its "worst" total was -5 in the shortened 2020 season. Let's get into the main reason why (in this writer's opinion) Kuhl has struggled.
Outside of giving up a lot of barrels (8.0% career barrel rate) and hard-hit balls (39.5% hard-hit rate), he doesn't get many groundballs. For a pitcher with your standard groundball repertoire, he only gets 42.0% of hit balls to be grounders. Looking at last year's batted ball profile, Kuhl had an abysmal 37.4% groundball rate. His line-drive rate was almost as high as his groundball rate at 29.3%, these are really bad.
With all of these negatives to Kuhl's game, why would the Royals even be tempted to sign him? There are a couple of reasons. First and foremost, whoever signs Kuhl is banking on his slider continuing to be good and his sinker being average at best. Teams are also banking on him continuing to lower his BB/9 (decreased every season since 2020).
The team that signs Kuhl will have to do one thing, and that is try to get him to switch his philosophy. He has the repertoire of a traditional groundball pitcher, yet he doesn't lean into that. If he becomes more of a groundball pitcher, there's a chance that he could become markedly better.
Signing Kuhl is undoubtedly a reclamation project, and the Royals have a noted track record with those. Kuhl's estimated market value is around $9.4 million according to Spotrac, but he will probably sign for less after his 2022 season if the Royals are looking for a potentially cheaper option to round out the rotation.
