By Paul Thompson

Northeast News

May 9, 2016

In general, I try to withhold all baseball-related hot takes until at least Memorial Day. At that point, teams will be roughly 50 games into the 162-game grind of a season; 30.8% of the way into the long, slow trudge to October.

Ostensibly, now that the Kansas City Royals are among the cream of the crop in Major League Baseball, they have earned this 50-game buffer period to work out any early season glitches. After Memorial Day, as the thinking goes, the sample size is large enough to begin making roster adjustments based on the current season’s performance.

The problem with this measured approach is that it leaves little room to consider the increasingly erratic play of starting pitcher Kris Medlen. The right-hander has now made five starts this season, and he’s been positively lit up in two of them. It’s still only a handful of games, so I’d usually be willing to look past his unseemly 6.85 ERA. However, Medlen’s struggles don’t overtly appear to be a luck-based phenomenon. He’s allowed 24 hits in his 22.1 innings of work, but he’s also walked 17 additional batters. That’s 41 base runners allowed in just over 20 innings; a decidedly unacceptable pace. In fact, by any reasonable metric, Medlen has easily been the worst pitcher on Kansas City’s staff.

If his struggles hadn’t coincided with a grisly 3-9 stretch that began on April 25, they’d be more forgivable. But with the Royals sitting at .500 and six games behind the Chicago White Sox in the AL Central, Medlen is looking like an awfully appealing scapegoat. What’s more, he has already proven to be solid in relief throughout his career, making a temporary transition to the bullpen defensible. Over 147 lifetime MLB innings as a reliever, Medlen has posted a 2.88 ERA while striking out more batters per nine innings than as a starter.

Of course, in order to replace Medlen in the rotation, a worthy replacement must be identified. The best bet I can see for the role is left-hander Danny Duffy, who has posted 19 strikeouts and a 3.38 ERA in 16 innings of MLB relief this season. Duffy probably should have started the season in the rotation anyway; he’s a 27-year-old former top prospect who was recently considered a crucial cog in the team’s success. Remember, this is the same guy who compiled a 2.53 ERA while starting 25 games in 2014; he’s definitely got the ability to hold down a rotation spot.

Another option is former Minnesota Twins lefty Brian Duensing, who was signed to a minor-league deal this past off-season. To be fair, Duensing is far from electric. But he has been steady for Triple-A Omaha, recording a 2.04 ERA over 17.2 innings while working exclusively out of the bullpen. The big issue with Duensing, aside from his general lack of dynamism, is that he hasn’t pitched more than 2.1 innings in any appearance yet this season. Despite his 61 major-league starts and respectable 4.13 lifetime ERA, he seems a better fit for a stint in Kansas City’s bullpen than as a replacement for the enigmatic Medlen.

Brooks Pounders and Jonathan Dziedzic have also emerged as potential dark horse rotation candidates, thanks to strong starts at Triple-A this season. Pounders has struck out 30 batters over 26.1 frames with a solid 2.73 ERA, while Dziedzic leads all Omaha starters with a 2.49 ERA while striking out 26 batters in 25.1 innings pitched. Both are just 25 years old, so there’s still some upside in there, too.

All four of these guys seem like more intriguing options than Kris Medlen right now, and it’s not just because the grass really does look greener on the other side of the fence. The big issue is of Medlen’s own creation: if he hadn’t left the yard looking like a drought-riddled wasteland over the first few weeks of the season, us Royals fans wouldn’t be so envious of a little touch of color.