Derailed in the dome

Singer gets roughed up, the bats remain largely silent and the Royals stumble to another blowout loss.

Do you know the baseball adage about the schedule? In a given year, you’re almost guaranteed to win 60 and lose 60…the fate of your season lies in what you do the other 42 games. It feels like that needs to break down a little further. You’ll win 60 and lose 60…and of those losses, about 20 will be of the blowout variety.

Honestly, I don’t know how many blowout losses a team should have. Specifically, how many a good team should have. What I do know if you chose to define “blowout” as a game where the final difference is five runs or more (which is how Baseball-Reference defines a blowout), the Royals own a 3-8 record thus far in 2021.

On Thursday the Royals almost avoided a blowout after Mike Matheny pulled his starters and started to empty his bench, courtesy of a Hanser Alberto bloop and a Ryan O’Hearn blast. With a 7-2 final score under the dome in St. Petersburg, once the teams rolled through three innings, the result was never really in doubt.

Grading Singer

How would you assess Brady Singer’s 2021 season thus far? It’s a difficult question. He’s had some good starts (his back-to-back appearances against Toronto and Detroit in mid-April were outstanding) and he’s also thrown a handful of clunkers. There’s no question which pile Thursday’s outing belongs.

The overall line now for 2021 is unimpressive, especially when compared to what we saw in his rookie campaign last year.

Diving a little deeper, the numbers tell us that batters are doing better against Singer’s slider this year. In 2020 he limited opponents to a .212 batting average against the pitch. This year, that’s jumped to .247. That would be a tidy explanation, but the slugging percentage on the pitch has dropped. It’s currently at .416 compared to last year’s .424.

Still, he’s getting hurt on the slider. All four of the home runs he’s allowed in 2021 have come off the pitch. Including yesterday’s two-run shot from Austin Meadows.

A 0-1 slider that sat right in the middle of the plate. You can tell from Singer taking a knee immediately after launch, he knew that ball wasn’t coming back.

Meadows faced Singer only twice on Thursday. In his first plate appearance, he laced a 0-1 sinker into the right-center gap for a two-run triple. On the day Meadows saw four pitches from Singer—three sliders and a sinker. Both times Singer was down the pipe on an 0-1 pitch. Both times Meadows made him pay.

Singer, as you know, features two pitches almost exclusively. The sinker and the slider. He’ll occasionally show a change-up, but it’s not often enough that hitters even have to be aware. He’s throwing it 4.5 percent of the time this year after offering it 4.7 percent of all pitches in 2020. This means we have a small sample of results. Last year, 12 plate appearances were ended on his change with just two hits and two strikeouts. He had a Whiff% of 16.7. This year, just seven plate appearances have ended on the change with four hits, no strikeouts and he has yet to miss a bat with the pitch.

I’m not saying the Singer change is a bad pitch. Nor is it a good one. We simply haven’t seen it enough to render a judgment either way. But what I do know is that if he doesn’t trust a pitch, he’s not going to throw it. If he’s not going to throw it, he’s essentially a two-pitch pitcher.

And if he’s going to throw both those pitches down the heart of the plate to a cleanup hitter, his afternoons on the bump are going to be short.

Presented without commentary because it’s just too depressing

Fine. I can’t resist. This is a chart of every pitch Jorge Soler saw on Thursday afternoon. Two strikeouts and two ground outs with an exit velocity that barely registered.

You would think those strikeouts came on the swings out of the zone. You would think wrong. Both were caught looking.

Soler is just all kinds of messed up at the plate. If the Royals are serious about putting their best hitters in the lineup on a nightly basis, they have to be questioning penciling Soler in there in any position at this point.

He’s now hitting .171/.253/.311 with a wRC+ of 57. Among hitters with at least 150 PA, that’s the seventh-worst wRC+ in the majors.

Like I said…depressing.

Saturday starter mystery

The intrigue is swirling as Danny Duffy’s spot in the rotation is coming around on Saturday. It intensified when Singer could only go 2.2 innings and Mike Matheny used both Jakob Junis (46 pitches in 2.1 innings) and Ervin Santana (18 pitches in 1 inning) in mop-up relief duty. If the Royals were planning on throwing some sort of bullpen game with Junis and/or Santana that may not be in the cards now. Although it is possible they could flip workloads. Santana had a relatively easy time in his inning of work and has generally been efficient all year. He could open the game and go three or four innings. Junis could perhaps add another inning or two and then they could throw it open to the rest of the pen to finish it out.

Or they could look to the minors. Jackson Kowar has dominated in four starts in Triple-A. He owns a 1.25 ERA with 32 strikeouts in 21.2 innings. As of this writing, he’s scheduled to throw on Saturday in Omaha. But if the Royals were to bring him up for a start in the majors, they would have to make a roster move to get him on the 40-man which raises a whole other set of questions.

The one thing we know for certain is that the Royals prefer to hold their cards extremely close. They probably know exactly what they’re going to do and it’s entirely possible they won’t reveal until after the game Friday. Let the guessing begin.

Central issues

• Cleveland 5, Tigers 2

There goes Colby’s phone again, buzzing with another no-hitter alert. This time it was Shane Bieber who threw six hitless innings, broken up by a Jonathan Schoop home run to open the seventh. Bieber went seven, striking out 12 with the home run the lone blemish on his day.

• Orioles 1, White Sox 5

Dylan Cease came out firing against the O’s, going six innings while striking out 10. Eight of the nine hitters in the Sox lineup collected at least one hit. Yermín Mercedes had a pair, including a solo laser shot in the seventh, and collected three RBI.

Up next

The Royals head to Minneapolis to take on the suddenly resurgent Twins. Kris Bubic gets the start in the opener against Randy Dobnak. First pitch is set for 7:10 CDT.

Thanks for reading and have a great holiday weekend.