Cutters like a knife

Junis continues his hot start, the Royals' bats are getting warm and Matheny continues to be a wizard at managing his bullpen.

We sweat over the Opening Day starter in spring training. We project rotations by slotting guys in a particular order, usually the best option to the least appealing. Rank ‘em, one through five. That’s your rotation.

And then the games start and you can throw everything you thought you knew straight out the window.

After two full turns through the starting rotation, we all know how it’s shaken out thus far for the Royals. Their top two starters so far are Danny Duffy, who was slotted in at number four in the rotation to open the year, and Jakob Junis who was penciled in as the fifth starter only after the season started.

Plans have a way of changing. And in the case of both Duffy and now Junis, this ranks as a most pleasant development for a team that had plenty of question marks surrounding the rotation going into the season.

Junis solidified his place in the rotation for the foreseeable future by going five innings, allowing five hits and one walk against six strikeouts. After allowing the first two batters to reach before exiting in the sixth, he was charged with two runs. The first damage against his ERA this season in 12 innings of work.

The Royals have ripped off three wins in a row. After the offense experienced a barren patch that included a void of extra-base hits, the bats have found the gaps, hitting four doubles on Thursday. And their bullpen has offered up five different pitchers to record a save.

Good starting pitching… Timely hits… A lockdown bullpen… Baseball is back, baby. it’s back.

It’s a cutter frenzy

Junis confounded Statcast, which failed to record a slider from the right-hander on the night. We know that’s not correct. And I have a lot of doubts about the accuracy of the cutter classification from Statcast. According to Baseball Savant, the pitch they labeled as a cutter ranged from 80.9 mph to 85.7 mph. A lot of those pitches (all of them?) are really sliders. (The classifications often do change well after the game has been completed. This may be the case if someone digs back through the data. But as of this writing, the “no slider” classification remains on the game feed at Savant.)

The typical slider and cutter we’ve seen from Junis this year have had an average spin rate of around 2,500 rpm. That’s been an increase of around 100 rpm from the average for his career. (Obviously, when we’re discussing career on that, it’s exclusively the slider.) On Thursday, Junis averaged 2,638 rpm on the spin rate on the slider/cutter, another bump of almost 100 rpm. That’s an impressive jump and one that had the hitters off-balance against the pitch all night.

Whether it was bearing down and in to a left-handed batter…

Or low and away to a righty…

Just take a few minutes to get lost in those gifs. I’ll wait…

Junis allowed six “hard hit” balls on the night, but most of those came off the four-seamer. The average exit velocity against his cutter/slider was 87.4 mph. Then again, the Jays only put two of those pitches in play.

The cutters that were in the strike zone were mostly fouled off. There’s just enough movement, just enough of a different look that it confounds opposing hitters. Try as they might, they just can’t barrel the pitch.

A little more about those “hard hit” balls. Those are classified by Savant as having an exit velocity greater than 95 mph. As noted above, Junis surrendered six total on the night. It’s a lot, given he faced only 21 batters on the night and seven of them didn’t put the ball in play. That works out to a 43 percent hard-hit rate. However, those were perfectly scattered through his five-plus innings of work. The only frame where the Jays had more than one “hard hit” ball was in the fifth when Rowdy Tellez laced a single to right and Josh Palacios flew out to left-center. The Tellez single followed a Lourdes Gurriel Jr. single, so the hard-hit balls in that inning were coming with runners on base. It was the moment where it seemed the wheels could fall off.

Yet Junis wasn’t having it.

With runners on the corners and one out, he attacked the ninth-place hitter Danny Jansen, going outside with back-to-back cutters/sliders before firing a 92 mph fastball on the edge. Jansen swung and missed at all three.

Here’s the third strike:

Just a killer sequence with a runner on third and less than two out.

The lineup flipped over for a third time as Marcus Simien stepped in. Junis started him off with a fastball up and on the inner half of the zone for a called strike. He then went outside of the zone for the next two: A four-seamer that was fouled off before finishing him with another cutter/slider for a swing and a miss.

That was some pitching right there. As Bill Raftery would say, “Onions!”

The Royals were leading at that point 7-0 and it felt comfortable, but as we saw in the later innings, the Jays are a very capable offensive club. That Junis was able to escape that jam in the fifth was massive. He locked up the win right there.

Double double

After going through a stretch where they couldn’t buy an extra-base hit, the Royals were flush with them on Thursday. They collected five of them—four doubles and a triple—against four singles. The fourth inning in particular was something of a double-palooza with Jorge Soler, Hunter Dozier and Hanser Alberto each grabbing two bases. It could’ve been more as Whit Merrifield laced one down the line at third that Cavan Biggio missed but it was given an error.

This offense will be improved over what we saw in 2020 and certainly in 2021, but it still has that feast or famine tendency. All offenses have that to some degree, but it just kind of feels a little more pronounced with the Royals. They’re sitting on seven wins in 11 games despite the bats going cold for about a week because the few that remained productive (Merrifield, Perez and Taylor) were properly scattered through the lineup.

On Thusday, the bottom of the order was doing the work. Soler picked up two hits. As did Dozier and Alberto. Nicky Lopez contributed with the aforementioned triple and drew a walk while scoring two runs on the day. Flipping over to the top, just how torqued do you think Merrifield was that he reached twice on errors, that to my untrained official scoring eye could’ve been called hits?

More Matheny bullpen magic

Scott Barlow required six pitches to navigate the eighth inning for the Royals in protecting a two-run lead. Under normal baseball bullpen orthodoxy, Barlow would grab some pine, secure in the knowledge that he earned a hold. The game would be turned over to the closer for the final three outs.

Except Mike Matheny doesn’t give a damn for your old-school bullpen orthodoxy.

With the low (and easy) pitch count, Matheny sent Barlow back out for the ninth. It wasn’t exactly smooth sailing as he allowed back-to-back singles with one out. Greg Holland was getting hot in the bullpen. Matheny made a trip out to the mound.

And he left Barlow in.

The right-hander got Bo Bichette to pop out and then had Vlad Guerrero Jr. swinging out of his shoes for the final out of the game.

The hold turned into a save.

For the Royals, it was the 14th time going back to 2010 that a reliever pitched two innings or more to get a save. A few of those were in blowouts where a reliever went three or more innings. A couple more were when a reliever came into a close game and the offense salted it away late. There are very few true two-inning saves on this list.

Matheny has been masterful at pressing those bullpen buttons. It seems he has a group of guys in that pen without ego or the need to have strictly defined roles. They are all on call at all times and as a group, seem to thrive in that situation. Five different Royal relievers have recorded saves in the seven wins.

Miscellany

From the Royals PR department, the seven Royals wins in April matches their win totals from each of the previous three Aprils.

• April 2017 — 7-16

• April 2018 — 7-19

• April 2019 — 7-19

A decent start was essential. We’re in the middle of the month and getting close to the point where this is guaranteed.

Central issues

• Boston 3, Minnesota 4

Twins blow a three-run lead in the eighth but rally to snap their own five-game losing streak and the Red Sox nine-game winning streak with a walkoff. Max Kepler has the honors.

• Cleveland 4, Chicago 2

Lance Lynn cruises through the first five-plus before giving up a two-out, two-run dinger to José Ramírez in the sixth. The Sox and the Clevelanders split a four game series. Oh, and Adam Eaton started a bench-clearing kerfuffle in the first inning.

• Detroit 8, Oakland 4

The Tigers drop the first game of their series in Oakland. Sean Manaea limited Detroit to two runs over six innings and seven different A’s batters drove in a run.

And the Royals keep their hold on first in the division.

Final thoughts

As I close out another week, I wanted to again take a moment to thank you for reading. I’m having a blast writing full-time about the Royals and hope that when you click on this newsletter in your inbox in the morning, you’re enjoying reading it. If you are, will you take a moment to share?

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