{"id":670670,"date":"2026-04-08T17:53:25","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T17:53:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/670670\/"},"modified":"2026-04-08T17:53:25","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T17:53:25","slug":"what-happened-to-cole-ragans-royals-ace-pitcher-injury-leads-to-delayed-exit-vs-guardians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/670670\/","title":{"rendered":"What happened to Cole Ragans? Royals&#8217; ace pitcher injury leads to delayed exit vs. Guardians"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Cole Ragans is pivotal to what the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sportingnews.com\/us\/mlb\/kansas-city-royals\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Kansas City Royals<\/a> hope to accomplish this season.<\/p>\n<p>On Wednesday in Cleveland, though, the news wasn&#8217;t good, as Ragans lasted just five hitters before an injury ended his game.<\/p>\n<p>The injury didn&#8217;t occur on his last pitch, though. Ragans tried to power through.<\/p>\n<p>In the end, though, Luinder Avila was coming out of the bullpen, and Ragans&#8217; day was done early.<\/p>\n<p>MORE:\u00a0<a target=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sportingnews.com\/us\/mlb\/new-york-yankees\/news\/yankees-outfielder-battled-ostrich-11-plate-spaghetti-eating-contest\/db7ab397cfd963fbafd93a72\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Yankees outfielder once battled ostrich in 11-plate spaghetti-eating contest<\/a><\/p>\n<p>What happened to Cole Ragans?<\/p>\n<p>Ragans was injured on a line drive right back at him.<\/p>\n<p>With two outs in the bottom of the first (both strikeouts), Jose Ramirez roped a ball directly at Ragans. It hit Ragans on his left thumb, on his throwing hand.<\/p>\n<p>Ramirez beat it out off the deflection, and the trainer came to check on Ragans. He threw a few practice pitches and stayed in the game.<\/p>\n<p>But his next four pitches were out of the strike zone to walk David Fry.<\/p>\n<p>After one more ball, Ragans allowed a two-run double to Chase DeLauter.<\/p>\n<p>At that point, the Royals pulled Ragans. His fastball velocity was down, and his location was all out of whack.<\/p>\n<p>He ended up being charged with the DeLauter run, too, as Rhys Hoskins doubled as the first batter Avila faced.<\/p>\n<p>The Royals will hope for the best, but on Wednesday, things certainly got a lot more difficult.<\/p>\n<p>More MLB news:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cole Ragans is pivotal to what the Kansas City Royals hope to accomplish this season. On Wednesday in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":670671,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2387],"tags":[5,936,2123,55,2596,2595,4,252],"class_list":{"0":"post-670670","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-kansascity","13":"tag-kansascityroyals","14":"tag-mlb","15":"tag-royals"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116370368457406199","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670670","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=670670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/670671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=670670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=670670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=670670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}