King of the eight-pitch club: Royals' Seth Lugo rides vast arsenal to All-Star success (2024)

One day earlier this season, Kansas City Royals starter Seth Lugo listened as a reporter went through his arsenal of pitches, ticking off the assets in one of baseball’s deepest portfolios.

There was, of course, the curveball, the pitch he once mastered by clutching a single tennis ball can in his right hand and spinning it end over end. He had learned the drill when he was a boy in Louisiana. A college coach had showed it to Lugo’s father, who then taught it to him. Lugo’s curveball is one of the best in the world, spinning more than any other, at more than 3,300 revolutions per minute. Among starters, only the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Tyler Glasnow has one that grades out better by advanced metrics.

So, yes, the curveball. That was one.

There was also a sinker — which the New York Mets told him not to throw — a cutter he added this year, and (deep breath) a four-seam fastball, a slider, a sweeper, a changeup, and a slurve. According to Baseball Savant, Lugo throws eight different pitch types, which would tie him with Chris Bassitt and Yu Darvish for the most in baseball. Yet as Lugo listened to the list, he stopped to correct the record.

“Well, I think it’s a few more,” he said, standing in a clubhouse. “But they kind of blur them (together) a little bit.”

In baseball’s era of pitch design, Lugo, 34, has become the sport’s answer to Back to the Future’s Doc Brown, a mad scientist forever in search of the perfect pitch shape, a cerebral inventor underappreciated — until recently — in his own time. An All-Star for the first time, Lugo entered the week leading major league starters in ERA (2.21), quality starts (15), innings pitched (122), and, unofficially, in quantity of pitches.

“It’s actually 10 different pitch types,” Royals pitching coach Brian Sweeney said.

Bassitt, a former teammate in New York, calls Lugo a “tinkerer,” while Mets pitching coach Jeremy Hefner said the right-hander was “one of the most creative thinkers that I’ve been around.”

His superlative performance in 2024 has kept the upstart Royals in the playoff hunt and, in a league of aging and injured aces, has made him a strong candidate to be the American League starter in Tuesday’s All-Star Game in Texas. His breakthrough has also revealed the cruel irony of his career: The pitcher with more pitches than anyone, who spent all those hours poring over scouting reports and studying swings, was for years confined to the Mets bullpen, where he was both a good major league reliever and incapable of using the full breadth of his arsenal.

“His journey, to me, is fascinating,” Sweeney said. “When his name came up in the offseason for us, I was like: I love that journey. Because it’s not typical. He had to earn the right to do a lot of different things.”

Once a longshot to even make the majors, Lugo debuted with the Mets when he was 26 and spent most of seven seasons as a mainstay in the bullpen. It wasn’t until last season, when he signed with San Diego, that he could prove himself in a rotation. Yet in all his years as a reliever, he never wavered from his belief that he could start. He told pitching coaches that he still viewed himself as a starter. He prepared that way, too. He wanted to be a pitcher in full, to embrace the cat-and-mouse games, to adjust to an umpire’s zone, to pitch deep into games and live the roller coaster of managerial moves.

As he waited for his chance, he came to understand: If he ever gave up on the dream of starting, it would be as if he gave up on the entire sport.

Back in February, when the Royals gathered for spring training, the club’s pitching coaches searched for a method to liven up the tedious days of pitching fielding practice. They settled on a contest to power rank the best athletes on the team’s pitching staff.

The name at the top seemed to be an upset: Seth Lugo?

“It pissed everybody off so much,” Sweeney said.

The argument was simple: When Lugo was in high school in Bossier City, La., he had lettered in the rare combination of baseball, football and soccer. How many pitchers could kick a soccer ball, punt a football, spin a breaking ball, showcase a sterling short game on the golf course, and then take money from their friends in a game of pool?

“He’s a great pool player,” said Mike Diaz, one of Lugo’s former coaches at Centenary University. “He’s got all the shots.”

Since childhood, Lugo was the preternaturally coordinated kid with a rare assortment of athletic skills. What he did not seem to be was a future major leaguer. When he finished high school, his best college baseball options were a junior college or Centenary, a nearby school in Shreveport. When he didn’t perform well as a freshman, he was nearly cut from the team.

Lugo possessed a big frame, a strong arm and a curveball with a healthy measure of bite. But he didn’t throw many strikes, and his ERA often hovered above 5.00. It wasn’t until a matchup against future big leaguer Blake Treinen, then a pitcher at South Dakota State, that big league scouts started to take notice. The Mets took a flyer on Lugo in the 34th round in 2011 — he was the 1,032nd overall pick. But a year later, he was nowhere close to the big leagues. He underwent a spinal fusion surgery in 2012 to address a back condition called spondylolisthesis. The recovery kept him confined to a bed or couch for months. He passed the time by streaming television shows and plucking at a guitar. Yet when Lugo visited with Diaz later that year, his former coach was amazed by one thing: Lugo was still convinced he would pitch for the Mets.

“I didn’t think he ever thought he wasn’t going to,” Diaz said.

Lugo proved himself right in 2016, when he debuted for a Mets team coming off a World Series appearance the previous October. He made eight starts as a fill-in in 2016 and another 18 in 2017, returning from a partially torn ulnar collateral ligament to post a 4.71 ERA. But by 2018, the Mets had a rotation with Cy Young Award winner Jacob deGrom, Zack Wheeler, Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz and Jason Vargas. They also had a significant issue in the bullpen.

“We had a desperate need in the bullpen for someone like him,” said Dave Eiland, who began a two-year stint as the Mets pitching coach that season. “The bullpen was just in shambles when I got there. And really, they did nothing to address it while I was there.”

Lugo grew into one of the Mets’ most consistent relievers. He also kept reminding Eiland that he wanted to start. The questions and conversations about getting an opportunity continued when Hefner replaced Eiland in 2020.

“If not monthly, weekly,” Hefner said.

There would be more opportunity as Wheeler departed for Philadelphia and Syndergaard began to decline. But as the years passed, Lugo became more entrenched in the bullpen, the front office experienced constant waves of turnover, and once owner Steve Cohen took control, the Mets kept acquiring free-agent starters. The Mets, as Hefner puts it, followed the evidence in front of them, which was that Lugo was a valuable reliever. In some ways, his success made it easier to follow the path of least resistance.

“I don’t know if regret is the right word,” Hefner said. “But obviously looking back now, it’s easy to say we should have given him some runway in spring training to build up as a starter.”

It wasn’t just that the Mets were risk-averse. Lugo also offered an unusual profile. He is at once a throwback — utilizing what Hefner calls the “kitchen sink approach” — and a pitcher whose gift of spin is now more easily measured in the era of pitch tracking.

Most starters cannot handle utilizing 10 different pitches. But Lugo possesses an imagination rare even among intelligent pitchers. The Mets, for instance, tried to de-emphasize his sinker usage based on metrics and industry trends. But Lugo believed in its utility against specific hitters.

“Having all those different mixes and just going pitch to pitch and swing to swing, another team could say I’m wrong, but I feel like I’m not predictable,” he said. “You can’t say ‘It’s a percentage count, here’s what he’s throwing.’ Because every hitter is different.”

Lugo is among a growing subset of pitchers who are throwing three different fastballs — a four-seam, a sinker, and a cutter, which he picked up from Padres pitching coach Ruben Niebla. The cutter provides another weapon to keep hitters from guessing, and it has seemed to lessen the penalty as Lugo navigates a lineup for the third time, helping him pitch deeper into games.

“Everyone knows he can spin a baseball,” Sweeney said, “but which one is it going to be? Is it gonna be the vert sweeper, the regular sweeper, the curveball, the hard slider?”

The main beneficiary of Lugo’s sudden dominance has been the Royals, who signed him to a three-year, $45 million contract last winter. (Lugo has an opt-out after 2025.) The club’s front office believed Lugo could help stabilize their rotation after he posted a 3.57 ERA in 26 starts last season. But they didn’t forecast how his cerebral nature would rub off on the rest of the rotation, nor did they realize how hot his competitive fire burns beneath a placid exterior.

“He has something to prove,” Sweeney said. “And when Seth has something to prove, usually he’s gonna prove that he’s right.”

Lugo remains a searcher at heart, and one day this season, he found personal validation in an unusual place: He stumbled upon a statistic that position players who had been called upon to pitch in mop-up outings had thrown 16 straight scoreless innings. To Lugo, it made sense. If a batter sees 100 mph all game, they will be able to time it up. But if a pitcher keeps the hitter guessing — if you show them something different, such as 10 different pitches across six innings — it can sow the seeds of doubt. Then, you win.

“It’s all relative,” he said. “It’s all timing. As soon as you’re thinking about something, the brain’s going to slow down.”

(Top photo of Lugo: Eakin Howard / Getty Images)