All-Star lefty Bubic (rotator cuff strain) to miss rest of season
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KANSAS CITY -- As the Royals celebrated the stability that extending Seth Lugo brings to their rotation now and in the future, they were also balancing the news that they’ll be without another starter for the rest of 2025.
Kris Bubic will miss the remainder of the season as he recovers from a left rotator cuff strain, the Royals announced on Monday. Bubic was placed on the 15-day injured list on Sunday following his 2 2/3-inning start against the Guardians on Saturday night, an outing in which he walked four consecutive batters to start the game and said afterward that “physically, something’s not right.”
The Royals do not believe Bubic’s injury will require surgery, but he does need extended rest. He’ll be shut down until at least October, but that timeline does give him a healthy offseason if everything stays on track and the further evaluation Bubic will receive in the coming days matches what he’s learned in the past 24 hours.
“It sucks,” Bubic said. “I mean, especially coming off a fairly recent rehab experience not too long ago. So it is what it is. I mean, sometimes your body just says, ‘No.’ But kind of looking back, it’s still fairly fresh, but I can’t be mad about how the season went from an overall standpoint.”
Bubic, a first-time All-Star this year, ends his season with a 2.55 ERA across 20 starts and 116 1/3 innings. In his first full season back from Tommy John surgery, the lefty blossomed into one of the Royals’ best starters. He earned American League Pitcher of the Month honors in May with a 0.56 ERA and was sticking around in the AL Cy Young conversation, with his season ERA ranking fifth among AL starters at the time of his injury.
“It’s no fun to hear [about the injury] for us or for him,” manager Matt Quatraro said. “... I feel badly for Kris. This is two out of three years that he’s had an injury that ends his season. But he’s a competitor. He’s a guy that’s already going to start to think about how he can get back and be better.”
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Bubic said after his start on Saturday that he had been managing some shoulder pain for a “good portion of the season.” But it took a turn for the worse during his five scoreless innings in Miami on July 20. He attributed the velocity drop to being sick earlier that weekend coming off the All-Star break.
Then on Saturday, he couldn’t command the ball and barely reached 90 mph with his fastball.
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Regarding whether Bubic should have taken further precautions in the earlier part of the season, he said he “doesn’t regret anything of how I handled it earlier in the year.”
“I was bouncing back fine,” Bubic said. “Velo, command, all that stuff was stable and the results were good and the process was good. There were really no red flags in my mind. There were no red flags from anybody coming to me about anything. Not until essentially this last week, between Miami and the other day. That was when, ‘OK, you see the velo drop, you see the command all over the place.’ Those are some pretty obvious red flags.
“… We’re competitive athletes. We want to pitch. We want to be out there if we feel like we can pitch. Like I said, given the way most of the season had went, it’s hard to pull the plug on it. As long as it stayed manageable, which it was for a very long time, that was fine with me.”
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Bubic knows how to attack a long rehab, and this figures to be much shorter than the grueling year-plus he spent recovering from elbow surgery. Still, it’s a devastating blow to the Royals’ rotation that already has two other starters from their Opening Day rotation on the IL in Cole Ragans (left rotator cuff strain) and Michael Lorenzen (left oblique strain).
Both are expected to pitch again this season, Lorenzen closer than Ragans, whose rotator cuff strain is in a “different spot,” than Bubic’s and therefore not as severe. Ragans has been playing catch and is a week or two away from his first bullpen, so he still has a bit to go before he gets back into games.
The Royals will need a starter as early as Wednesday, and all options are on the table -- including targeting pitching depth in the next few days ahead of Thursday’s Trade Deadline.
The 27-year-old Bubic is arbitration-eligible for a third time this offseason and will be a free agent after the 2026 season, so he figures into the Royals’ rotation plans next year.