Competitive, but not where they want to be

The Royals drop two of three to the Orioles over the weekend but continue to make an early season statement.

It’s a new feeling to be let down by the Royals starting pitching. The last few seasons you’d go in with low expectations for the starters and, more often than not, they’d deliver. This year, though? This year has been different. The rotation has been nails through the first three-plus weeks of the season. So when the starters fail to deliver now…it feels disappointing.

The headline today comes from Vinnie Pasquantino in Anne Rogers’ post-game wrap from Sunday. He described the series against the Orioles thusly:

“I would evaluate it as competitive but not where we want to be,” first baseman Vinnie Pasquantino, who extended his hitting streak to 10 games, said. “These are the series you really want. It’s tough to do that. … It sucks losing this series. We’re not happy with it at all. We’re happy with how we played, but we’re not happy with the results.”

Vinnie is a quote machine. And he’s not wrong. These Royals have been in almost every game they’ve played this season. But if this matchup against Baltimore was a measuring stick, the Royals fell short. The outcome may have been disappointing, but the process is still looking good.

Saturday’s game against the Orioles was a surprising outcome for Cole Ragans. After 16 mostly great starts for the team since joining the Royals, maybe he was due for a clunker. It’s been almost 48 hours and I’m still trying to wrap my head around what we saw.

After striking out three of four batters he faced in the first inning, the wheels flew off in the second.

This is the pitch chart for the pitches the Orioles put in play for hits.

The changeups and sliders were all hit when Ragans had the advantage in the count. Most of them came with two strikes. The Orioles defensive approach at the plate was reflected in the exit velocities.

Revisit the pitch chart above and note the location of the cutters that were put in play. Those were 3-2 pitches against Adley Rutschman and Jordan Westburg. It’s not surprising that those pitches were laid in the zone at that point. Everything about that inning was an absolute grind. Ragans would get ahead in the count and get dinked by an 80 MPH exit velocity that was perfectly placed. Work behind in the count and then lay a meatball in the center of the zone.

The xBAs are high because baseballs put in play with a positive launch angle with a soft exit velocity usually reflects those flares that find the grass. Look at the difference between the first two batters who put the ball in play in the second. Both Jordan Westburg and Austin Hays had a launch angle of 24 degrees (incidentally the highest launch angle of the inning against Ragans). The difference in xBA is nearly 400 points because Westburg hit his with 9 MPH less in exit velocity. Physics, man.

So while the exit velocity was generally soft (at least in the early part of the inning), the results based on where the bat met the baseball means the outcome wasn’t all that surprising. What was surprising I think was that the Orioles were able to make contact at all. Most of those changeups and sliders weren’t poorly located. They were meant to get a swing and miss. On Saturday, contact was the result. It happens. Even to an ace like Ragans.

What was more disturbing that Ragans getting touched up for seven runs and not getting out of the second inning was the fact that manager Matt Quatraro let Ragans throw 49 pitches before mercifully going to his bullpen. That is a ton of pitches to throw in an inning. A ton.

Given that Ragans’ elbow has undergone the knife not once but twice and that he missed over three years to injury (and COVID shutdowns), I just don’t think it’s wise to let him throw that many pitches in an inning. It’s understandable how innings can kind of get away. Ragans got two outs after giving up just two runs. He was this close to getting out of it.

After getting that second out, Gunnar Henderson looped a first pitch slider for a single. (It’s the slider that’s outside the zone in the pitch chart above.) Then Rutschman worked him for a nine-pitch at bat before hitting a single. Ryan Mountcastle followed with a six-pitch at bat and also singled. In my mind, those were both a couple of extremely high-stress confrontations. That was when Quatraro should’ve hooked Ragans. Instead, he was left in to throw nine more pitches to two more batters.

I’m no sports scientist. In the discourse from earlier this month about the rash of elbow injuries among pitchers and talk about the impact of the pitch clock on those injuries, I found it interesting that there was discussion about load on the arms. In the pitch clock argument, it went that pitchers had less time to “reset” after delivery and their arms weren’t used to such stress in the shorter period of time. I’m dubious on that count, but I do think there’s something about load when it comes to the number of pitches delivered in an inning. In this case, it’s a prolonged period of exertion. Consider that the average inning lasts around 15 pitches. After an inning, a pitcher returns to the dugout and does whatever he needs to do while his team is hitting to prepare for his next inning.

On Saturday, Ragans tripled that number.

I’m very curious to see how this impacts him going forward. I certainly hope there isn’t a hangover. I fear there will be one.

Watching this team this season, I should’ve have been surprised that, after falling behind by seven runs, they mounted a comeback that was serious enough the Orioles had to sweat. This will likely be the hallmark of the ‘24 Royals, meaning this team will continue to entertain.

Salvador Perez—who else?—started the comeback when he launched a three-run home run in the sixth inning that knocked Orioles starter Corbin Burnes from the game. In the seventh, things got serious.

It’s not often a team plates four runs in an inning and all one can think about is missed opportunities, but that’s how it felt after the seventh inning on Saturday night.

As the Royals kicked their rally into another gear, the Orioles brought Yohan Ramírez into the game with one out and a runner on first. Ramírez…uh…did not have it. “It” being location. His first three pitches hit the dirt, the first of which hit pinch-hitter Adam Frazier on the rebound. The next two resulted in runners moving up 90 feet both times. This is a situation where I enjoy the three-batter-per-reliever rule. There’s just a little extra danger in going to the bullpen, especially for a reliever like Ramírez who generally has an uncomfortable relationship with the strike zone.

Yet the biggest moment of the inning was a real TOOTBLAN moment from Kyle Isbel. Isbel was the recipient of that four-pitch walk from Ramírez. With Frazier all the way around at third due to the wild pitches, Isbel had designs on second. He took off for the base but Garcia fouled it off. Ramírez then threw over his allotted two times, the first of which almost caught Isbel. A bit too close for comfort. When Garcia turned on an elevated fastball and lined it into left, Isbel decided to kick on the afterburners.

He was out trying to advance to third. A true TOOTBLAN for a couple of reasons. One, he has to be aware of the situation. The Royals at that point were down three runs and had eight outs left in their account. You absolutely cannot be thrown out on the bases (like a nincompoop) in this situation. Two, he had the entire play in front of him. The ball was hit to left field. I’m not sure he could even make an aggressive turn in that situation as shortstop Gunnar Henderson was out to cut the ball off and could’ve made a snap throw behind Isbel at second. Just dumb baserunning all around.

The next missed opportunity came with the bases loaded and two outs. The Royals had batted around and Nelson Velázquez, who opened the frame with a walk, was back up with an opportunity this time to put his club ahead. After taking the first offering for a ball, the next two pitches he saw were fastballs down in the zone that he watched go by. These are pitches he’s done damage on in the past. Last year, he hit .429 on fastballs in the lower-middle area of the zone.

This season, Velázquez has seen 10 fastballs in that location. He’s swung and missed at two, put two in play (for ground ball outs) and watched six go by for called strikes. While the power hasn’t really manifested for Velázquez yet this season, he’s still doing some damage at the plate. One these low fastballs though, he’s a different hitter.

After falling behind in the count 1-2, Velázquez watched a curve drop out of the zone before he swung and missed at a 2-2 sinker that had some nasty movement.

There was a lot of talk about the home plate umpiring on Saturday, starting with a clip that made the rounds on social media of the first pitch of the game that sure looked like a strike that was called a ball, prompting Ryan LeFebvre to remark: “Fastball right down the middle for ball one.”

I’m not going to get into all that because honestly, this kind of discourse bores me, but I will drop home plate umpire Ryan Blakney’s Ump Scorecard here because I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that’s in the shape of a mitten.

Blakney needs a stepladder or something. He wasn’t even the worst ump on Saturday!

I was impressed by the fight shown on Saturday. There are a handful of games each season where a win just isn’t going to happen. I imagine it would be easy to switch off. Especially when you’re down seven to a team like the Orioles and a pitcher like Burnes.

That’s not these Royals. The win probability never tilted in their favor, but they sure made it interesting.

Not a moral victory or anything like that. Just a team that doesn’t quit until the 27th out has been recorded. We haven’t seen that in these parts for the last six or seven years. Nice that it’s back.

Oh, the announced attendance for Saturday was 23,118, which is a good crowd for a team coming off a 100-loss season on a chilly April evening. Credit to those fans because they were into it. The vibe was postseason-esque. Fun.

The Royals couldn’t get to Orioles starter Cole Irvin on Sunday, despite touching him for four runs over five innings the last time the two met. Irvin hasn’t been especially good this year, but was able to keep the Royals off-balance with a curveball/sinker combo that didn’t generate a single swing and miss all afternoon. Instead it was a lot of moderate contact and balls hit at defenders. The offense, as we’ve seen, runs a bit hot and cold. All or nothing. Yet it was the first time they’ve been shutout this year.

Colton Cowser and Jordan Westburg went yard in back-to-back at bats leading off the third against Seth Lugo. Both were on pitches that caught too much of the zone and both were obliterated. Cowser and Westburg are Baltimore’s seventh and eighth place hitters. Lugo narrowly escaped allowing a third when Gunnar Henderson’s blast hit off the wall and he settled for a double. That team is good.

These were the first bombs surrendered by Lugo since joining the Royals and snapped a career-best 41.1 inning homeless streak dating back to last year when he was with the Padres. Lugo was charged with two more runs in the sixth. The extra runs didn’t really matter as the offense could never find their groove.

Overall, the Royals went 2-4 against the Orioles this season, but damn if it didn’t feel like the Royals were in most of these games. Better relief pitching in the first week of the season and that record could’ve been flipped. There’s no glory in what-could’ve-beens, and it’s possible I’m stating this far too much, but the way the Royals played one of the best teams in the league shows that they’re making their own strides. They may not be there yet, but you can see they’re building toward something.

It could be a fun summer in Kansas City.