{"id":44522,"date":"2025-07-29T07:11:12","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T07:11:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/44522\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T07:11:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T07:11:12","slug":"kris-bubic-to-miss-remainder-of-2025-season-with-rotator-cuff-strain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/44522\/","title":{"rendered":"Kris Bubic To Miss Remainder Of 2025 Season With Rotator Cuff Strain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Royals left-hander Kris Bubic<\/a> will be out for the remainder of the 2025 season after suffering a rotator cuff strain in his most recent outing, reports Anne Rogers of MLB.com<\/a>. The 27-year-old exited his start on Saturday in the third inning, later telling Rogers<\/a> that \u201csomething\u2019s not right.\u201d He noted that he had been pitching through a stiff shoulder for \u201ca good portion of the season,\u201d but what he felt on Saturday was worse than stiffness. The team placed him on the 15-day IL on Sunday<\/a>, and further testing evidently found the injury to be quite serious. Thankfully for the young hurler, he is not expected to need surgery (per Sam McDowell of The Kansas City Star<\/a>) and hopes to have a normal offseason.\u00a0The Royals have not yet transferred Bubic to the 60-day IL, but they will presumably do so as soon as they need to open up a spot on their 40-man roster.<\/p>\n

Most evaluators saw Bubic as a back-end starter in his prospect days, and that\u2019s pretty much who he was over his first three seasons, pitching to a 4.89 ERA in 67 games (57 starts) from 2020-22. He then missed most of 2023 and a good part of \u201924 after undergoing Tommy John surgery. When he returned in the latter half of 2024, he looked like a brand-new pitcher. Working out of the bullpen, he produced a 2.67 ERA in 27 games, striking out 32.2% of the batters he faced while walking only 4.1%. His four-seam fastball and changeup, always the bread and butter of his arsenal, looked better than ever, while he turned his slider into a sweeper and enjoyed tremendous success with the new breaking pitch.<\/p>\n

The Royals moved Bubic back into the rotation in 2025, and he didn\u2019t miss a beat. While he wasn\u2019t as overpowering as he had been out of the bullpen, he was every bit as successful. Through 20 starts, Bubic pitched to a 2.55 ERA in 116 1\/3 innings of work. He was named to the AL All-Star team earlier this summer. While his underlying metrics (3.06 xERA, 3.74 SIERA) suggested he wasn\u2019t likely to maintain a sub-3.00 ERA all season, there was no denying that Bubic was a breakout star. With Bubic, Seth Lugo<\/a>, Michael Wacha<\/a>, and Noah Cameron<\/a> atop their rotation, the Royals looked like dark horse postseason contenders, even with Cole Ragans<\/a> on the IL and arguably the least productive offense in the American League.<\/p>\n

By trading for Adam Frazier<\/a> and Randal Grichuk<\/a> earlier<\/a> this month<\/a>, and by extending<\/a> a potential trade chip in Lugo, the Royals signalled that they would be buying rather than selling ahead of this Thursday\u2019s trade deadline. However, their chances of leapfrogging the four teams ahead of them for a Wild Card berth are significantly lower without Bubic. Kansas City is down to four healthy starting pitchers now, and one of them is 45-year-old Rich Hill<\/a>. In addition to Ragans and Bubic, Michael Lorenzen<\/a> and Alec Marsh<\/a> are also on the IL. The Royals have averaged fewer runs per game than any other team in the AL, and it\u2019s starting to look like they just won\u2019t have enough healthy pitching to compensate for their pitiful offense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Royals left-hander Kris Bubic will be out for the remainder of the 2025 season after suffering a rotator…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44523,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[13670,99],"class_list":["post-44522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-kris-bubic","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44522\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}