The long winter has finally ended. Baseball is back. And while we got to laugh at the misfortunes of nearly half the teams in the league yesterday – seriously, Oneil Cruz seems very badly miscast as a centerfielder – it\u2019s finally our turn to fret about our own team\u2019s foibles. Let\u2019s play ball!<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s starter for Kansas City is Cole Ragans, getting his third straight Opening Day start. He\u2019ll be looking for his first win in such games, though. He took the loss against Minnesota in 2024 and could only watch from the bench as Sam Long got rocked for three runs in the tenth inning against the Guardians last year. Even after a ninth-inning rally forced the extra frame to begin with.<\/p>\n
We all know that Ragans was hurt and had a much worse ERA last year. But pretty much every backing stat we have says he actually pitched significantly better than fourth-in-Cy-Young-voting campaign in 2024 – at least, when he was able to be on the mound. Keen-eyed Royals fans should watch not just to hope he stays healthy, but to see if he can pitch similarly to how he did last season while he\u2019s at it. If he pitches a full season the way he did last year, he could end up the runaway favorite for the 2026 Cy Young Award.<\/p>\n
Ragans has never faced Atlanta as a member of the Royals; he pitched three innings of relief against them in 2023 as a member of the Rangers and gave up four runs. But that was a long time ago and a very different Ragans. Atlanta\u2019s offense somewhat resembles the 2025 Royals in that it has some absolute studs – Ronald Acu\u00f1a Jr, Drake Baldwin, Matt Olson, and Austin Riley – and then a bunch of guys you mostly would rather weren\u2019t in your lineup. Former Royals Mike Yastrzemski either isn\u2019t in the lineup or shouldn\u2019t be thanks to his splits.<\/p>\n
The Royals, as an organization, are very familiar with Atlanta\u2019s starter, Chris Sale, as he pitched for the White Sox for so many years. But they haven\u2019t actually faced him since 2023, when he was still with the Red Sox. He\u2019s a very different pitcher now than he was then, back to being absolutely elite when he\u2019s on the mound, and the Royals are going to have their hands full.<\/p>\n
The Royals\u2019 opening day lineup includes four players who weren\u2019t on the team at this time last year. Maikel Garcia also returns to his old home at the top of the lineup after a monster 2025 and an even better WBC performance, after being left out of the Opening Day lineup last year.<\/p>\n
The Royals are really leaning into their platoons, at least to start the year, with Starling Marte and Lane Thomas getting starts over Kyle Isbel and Jac Caglianone, who each figure to get the majority of the playing time at their positions over the course of the season. However, you can understand letting them sit against one of the very toughest lefties in the game. They could both enter as pinch hitters later in the contest.<\/p>\n
I think it probably says something less than kind that the Royals\u2019 plan for leadoff last year now bats seventh, and their \u201cbig\u201d offseason acquisition is batting eighth. But Lane Thomas is having a lot of faith put in him to bat third today. Still, it may be Opening Day, but it\u2019s also only one game out of 162. So let\u2019s try not to panic too much about what this lineup construction means or how lineups will work for the rest of the year. Looking purely at the positive, it\u2019s nice to see Manager Matt Quatraro leaning into the platoon matchups the front office built for him. We\u2019ll just have to see whether they and he did well enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The long winter has finally ended. Baseball is back. And while we got to laugh at the misfortunes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":647435,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2387],"tags":[5,936,2123,55,77903,2596,2595,4,252],"class_list":{"0":"post-647434","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-kansas-city-royals","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-kansas","10":"tag-kansas-city","11":"tag-kansas-city-royals","12":"tag-kansas-city-royals-game-information","13":"tag-kansascity","14":"tag-kansascityroyals","15":"tag-mlb","16":"tag-royals"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116303439138490707","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=647434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647434\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/647435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}