While the Royals' rotation didn't have a stellar 2026, whether due to underperformance or injuries plaguing them, Michael Wacha showed that he still has plenty left in the tank at 34 years old. For Wacha, 2026 was arguably the best season of his career and his best as a Royal, despite having one fatal flaw holding him back.
Wacha finished the season with a 3.32 ERA, 7.09 K/9, 2.42 BB/9, and a fWAR value of 2.4 (second best on the Royals, more on this later). While in terms of fWAR, it was Wacha's second-best season as a Royal, Wacha put together a career high in innings pitched with 200.2 innings of work while also getting his second-ever All-Star nod. Let's dive into the profile of 2026 Michael Wacha.
If there were any guarantees for the Royals in 2026, it was that Michael Wacha was going to pitch six solid innings of work, and that is what he did most of the time. He had a career-high 21 quality starts in 32 starts, which tied him with Sandy Alcantara for second most in the league behind Christopher Sanchez and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
To show how steady Wacha was in 2026, his monthly splits are the best way to show it. Wacha's worst month of action was in July where he had a month ERA of 4.25. Every other month saw his ERA lie in the 3.10-3.70 range, with August being his best month at 2.51. He also nearly had 30+ innings of work in every month, but he was one out from that total in July. He did all of this with one of the best changeups in baseball with a run value of 11 on that pitch, which tied him for the fourth-best changeup in the league with Michael King.
He also did all of this with a profile that doesn't fit the bill of "ace." Similar to Noah Cameron's profile , Wacha doesn't excel in any statistic, nor is he outright terrible in any stat. He is perfectly in the middle for most stats, with a couple of key standouts. For one of those standouts, he doesn't walk anyone, as he only walked 6.7% of batters. On the other extreme, he did not get out via the groundball because batters only hit grounders 36.4% of the time.
He also teeters on the line of being downright terrible in terms of chase rate, whiff rate, and K-rate, as they all sit at 29.5%, 21.6%, and 19.5%. Then again, in his Royals tenure, he has never had a good season for any of those metrics. The way he has gotten outs is through limiting barrels and hard hits, something that plagued him in 2026. Let's discuss it.
One key stat I left out in the intro was Wacha's 1.35 HR/9, because this section was going to discuss it. The one major change in Wacha's Royals tenure was that in 2026, the hard hits came out in bunches. He had a hard-hit rate of 36.9%, which is solid but quite a few ticks below 2025 and 2024's total, and that saw his average exit velocity spike to 88.3 mph.
The increase in hard hits and the fact that he wasn't getting a ton of grounders led to an obvious conclusion. He had a flyball rate of 44.7% this season, with his HR/FB rate sitting at 11.5%, a high in his Royals tenure. That led to him giving up a career-high 30 home runs in 2026. The best thing about this for Wacha was that a good chunk of these were solo shots, but it also shows why his fWAR tally is lower than Noah Cameron's.
The main issue with fWAR for pitching is that it heavily relies on FIP, and due to an inflated HR/9 and low K/9 and BB/9, Wacha will have a higher FIP since he relies more on his defense. Personally, I don't think fWAR is the right way to paint Wacha's season, as he was the definitive ace of the Royals in 2026. In terms of bWAR he sits at 4.3, which falls more in line with the All-Star season Wacha had.
Wacha has fully etched himself into the discussion of the best Royals free agent with his three seasons of work. While he has been tied to some trade rumors early this offseason, the Royals have a decision to make on whether they maximize his value now or keep him as the number one guy going forward. Either way, Wacha will probably continue to be the ole' reliable in whatever rotation he is in.
This article was originally published on www.si.com/mlb/royals/onsi as Michael Wacha Put Together His Best Season as a Royal despite Having One Major Flaw .
