Royals Lose Bergert and Kudrna to Elbow Surgeries, Thinning an Already Shallow Rotation

Per the team's announcement, Kansas City is without two rotation depth pieces for the foreseeable future — and almost certainly for the remainder of the season. Right-hander Ryan Bergert underwent UCL reconstruction, the procedure that typically carries an 12-to-18-month recovery timeline. Prospect Ben Kudrna had surgery to repair an olecranon stress fracture in his elbow, a less catastrophic procedure but one that still ends his year before it started. Neither will factor into the 2025 Royals in any meaningful way.

Bergert, 25, came to Kansas City through the Padres organization — a system that has churned out intriguing arm depth for years — and represented the kind of back-end innings-eater every contending-adjacent club needs to survive a long season. Kudrna, still just 22, was one of the organization's higher-upside pitching prospects, a power arm whose development timeline now has a hard reset built into it. Losing both simultaneously isn't a headline-level catastrophe, but it compounds the Royals' depth problem in a way that matters across a 162-game season.

Kansas City's rotation was already operating with thin margins behind Cole Ragans and Seth Lugo. With Bergert and Kudrna gone, the club will be leaning harder on internal options who were never meant to be frontline contributors — names like Alec Marsh, Michael Lorenzen (if healthy), and whatever the farm system can accelerate. More spot starts, more bullpen games, more situations where a starter gets pulled after four innings because the organization simply doesn't have a better answer behind him.

That pitching-by-committee reality is where the betting angle sharpens. Bullpen-heavy teams consistently suppress strikeout totals for individual starters — managers pull arms earlier when depth is thin and relievers are managing cumulative workload. Ragans and Lugo are legitimate strikeout arms, but watch their K prop lines closely as the season stretches into June and July; if the rotation behind them keeps fraying, their per-start pitch counts could get managed down rather than up. More directly, Royals team totals against quality offenses deserve a harder look on days when the lineup card shows an emergency starter making his third or fourth career appearance. Kansas City's run prevention has a ceiling problem now, and books haven't fully priced in the depth erosion at the back of this staff.