Kansas City Royals should retire at least one number for Bret Saberhagen

The amount of players in MLB history that have had a very long (10+ years) and a good career is very rare. Even rarer is that a player, while with the same team, changes their uniform number and has success with both of them. Coincidentally, there are a few of those players that played on the Kansas City Royals but one of them is Bret Saberhagen.

Bret Saberhagen saw great success with the Kansas City Royals wearing two uniform numbers: 31 and 18.

Bret Saberhagen broke onto the baseball scene at the tender age of 19 as he made his MLB debut one week before his 20th birthday, despite being drafted in the 18th round of the draft just a year and a half prior.

By the time he turned 22 in April 1986, Saberhagen already had won the 1985 AL Cy Young Award and won the World Series with the Royals.

But after the 1986 season, Bret Saberhagen changed his number from 31 to 18. Why? In 1986, Saberhagen (and the Royals both) had a bad year. Saberhagen wore 18 when he was in high school and hadn’t worn it since then but he wanted a change.

In 1987, he was an All-Star (for the first time) and, by rWAR, had a better season than he did when he won the Cy Young Award in 1985. He had a down year again in 1988 but in 1989, he won a Gold Glove, came in 8th in AL MVP voting, and won the Cy Young Award again. That made him a two-time Cy Young Award winner before he turned 26.

He was an All-Star with the Royals one more time in 1990 before he was traded to the Mets after the 1991 season. By the time his career ended with the Royals, Saberhagen started to struggle with some injuries and those continued when he joined the Mets, the Rockies, and, finally, the Red Sox. He retired after the 2001 season. He last saw major success in 1994 with the Mets, when he came in third in NL Cy Young award voting.

While with the Royals, Saberhagen pitched in eight seasons with a 110-78 record, a 3.21 ERA, and a 128 ERA+. He also had two of his three All-Star selections while with KC, both his Cy Young Award wins, and was in the top 10 in MVP voting twice.

Despite the injuries, he had a borderline Hall of Fame career as he had 58.9 rWAR in his career. In fact, Hall of Famer Whitey Ford played in as many seasons as Saberhagen (16) and had nearly an identical WAR (57.0). Among starters in all-time rWAR, Saberhagen is 73rd but between 58 and 88 (15 on each side of Saberhagen), 11 of them are Hall of Famers, including four below Saberhagen. There are even more, like Jim Kaat and Sandy Koufax, that are further below him.

But the Royals don’t have either one of his numbers retired.

Currently, the Royals have issued both 31 and 18 out to personnel as pitcher Domingo Tapia wears 31 and coach Rusty Kuntz wears 18.

However, Saberhagen is, arguably, the best pitcher in Kansas City Royals history. It’s about time that the Royals recognize him as such by retiring one of the numbers and having him join (along with Jackie Robinson‘s #42) his former teammate George Brett and his late manager Dick Howser among the numbers retired by the Royals.