​KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI – JULY 21: Matt Strahm #25 of the Kansas City Royals reacts after the final out of the seventh inning against the San Francisco Giants at Kauffman Stadium on July 21, 2026 in Kansas City, Missouri. (Photo by Jay Biggerstaff/Getty Images) | Getty Images The 2026 Kansas City Royals are bad at a lot of things, which is why they are a squad flirting with a 100-loss pace. But though things like the offense remain an issue, we knew that would be the case. Rather, the biggest reason why this year’s Royals are so awful is the bullpen, which has been seventeen levels of atrocious thus far.Looking at the bullpen’s league rank in regards to some key statistics is enough to make you queasy. They rank dead last—that’s 30th out of 30 teams—in Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP), Wins Above Replacement (WAR, per Fangraphs), and strikeout rate minus walk rate (K-BB%). They rank 29th in ERA, batting average against, and average fastball velocity. It has been bad.How bad? How do they compare against other awful Royals bullpens? And is this the worst Royals bullpen of all time? There are a few measuring sticks we can use to try and get to the bottom of this. Here’s what I’m going to consider, ranking bullpen futility by the average ranking of these five stats amongst the 32 Royals bullpens since 1995:ERA-: Raw ERA doesn’t account for the run scoring environment. ERA- does, though. An ERA- of 100 means a team’s ERA is league average. Each point below 100 means one percentage point better than league average. Each point above 100 means one percentage point worse than league average. FIP-: Just like ERA-, FIP- uses the same scale. Including FIP allows us to ignore defense, because let’s be honest, there have been a lot of very bad Royals defenses impacting how pitchers have done.BB%: Strikeout rates have gone up a lot over the years, but walk rates haven’t quite as much, so it’s a better comparison tool across the decades. How often to relievers give batters free passes in close games?WAR/500 IP: I’m using Fangraphs’ version of WAR for this, which is tied to FIP but also takes into account replacement level production for each year as well as innings pitched. We’re normalizing this to 500 innings pitched. WPA per inning: WPA stands for Win Probability Added, and it’s a metric that looks at a team’s chance of winning from one event to the next. You can add up all the events that a bullpen contributes to and see how impactful those events are. I’m including innings pitched, too, so we can easily see how much negative impact these bullpens have in win probability for each inning they pitch. A qualification, also: I’m only looking at bullpens since 1995, the first full year after the strike. Why? Go much further back and the game is just too different. In 1993, for instance, 55 starting pitchers threw three or more complete games. Last year, zero starters did. The 1980s have an even wider gulf between total numbe