Doubling up on triples

The triple has become the Royals weapon of choice, Sam Long turned in his best outing of the season and the Royals came away with an important victory.

One night after Bobby Witt Jr’s. triple ignited a five-run rally, the Royals rode the triple wave to two more runs on Thursday.

Back-to-back triples from Kyle Isbel and Maikel Garcia provided just enough juice for the offense. Michael Wacha continued a string of strong starts from the rotation—it was the fourth consecutive game where starters allowed one run or fewer. The bullpen, led by lefty Sam Long, held the Guardians down in the later innings. It was a pressure-packed 2-1 victory to open an important four-game series.

Don’t look now, but the Royals have won three of four.

Kyle Isbel led off the sixth and laced a drive to right-center. The Guardians right fielder, Daniel Schneemann, got a bit turned around and could only touch the ball as it bounced off the wall. Isbel motored around second and slid safely into third. A leadoff triple. Down one run and the Royals were in business.

There’s another cliché that baseball is a game of inches. In Isbel’s case, this was doubly accurate.

If Scheemann gets a good break on the ball and doesn’t momentarily stumble, he’s probably going to make the catch. Instead, the baseball just barely glances off the top of his webbing. He recovered in time to make a good throw to the cutoff man, Andrés Giménez. Giménez then uncorked an absolute seed to José Ramírez at third. In fact, the throw beat Isbel. By quite a significant margin.

From this still it looks like Isbel is going to slide directly into an out. The first out. Oh my god.

Except the ball had kicked on a short-hop and Ramírez’s glove had a bit of recoil action as he caught it. The glove elevated and Isbel slid under the tag. Whew.

Witt’s triple on Wednesday was with two outs. You might recall in yesterday’s newsletter I wrote about how a runner absolutely cannot make the first or the third out of an inning at third base. This was one of those moments where you had a feeling things might just turn out ok. Get not one, but two, breaks and avoid what would’ve been a disastrous mistake by running into an out at third…that’s living right.

Isbel ripped an inside fastball for his triple. Maikel Garcia took an inside-out swing on an elevated four-seamer for his three-bagger.

Since the Royals began that brutal stretch of their June schedule with the home series against Seattle, Garcia has hit .111/.190/.175 with one extra base hit. He’s been dropped to the lower third of the order. He’s shifted his defensive position from third to second. Not much has gone right for Garcia this month. Yet there he is with a massive piece of hitting. Dunno…that looks like the swing of a hitter who is kind of locked in at the plate. To be able to pull his hands in and elevate the bat path to make that kind of contact is impressive. I’m wondering if he doesn’t start to pull himself out of his offensive doldrums.

Garcia was at the bag with a little more room to spare than Isbel and the Royals were in business. They had tied the game and the go-ahead run was a mere 90 feet away.

You’ll recall that on Thursday, I wrote about the top run producers for the Royals.

On the 2024 Royals, if you need a run brought home (and Bobby Witt Jr. isn’t an option because he’s on base) the guy you want at the plate is Vinnie Pasquantino. Pasquantino has brought home 21.1 percent of all runners on base when he’s hitting. That’s second only the team among regulars to only Witt who has scored 21.7 percent of all runners. (For perspective, the league average is 14.4 percent so both Witt and Pasquantino are well above average at cashing in baserunners.)

(I don’t think I’ve ever block-quoted myself before. Feeling pretty good over here!)

The one thing I considered mentioning, but ultimately didn’t because Thursday’s hit parade came with two outs, is how Pasquantino is a monster at bringing home runners from third base with fewer than two outs. Entering play on Thursday, Pasquantino had come to the plate 30 times with a runner on third and fewer than two outs. That was tied for most in the majors with Cleveland’s Josh Naylor. Pasquantino has brought 16 of those runners home. Again, tied for the most in the majors with Naylor. Among hitters with 25 or more opportunities to score a runner from third with fewer than two outs, only the Guardians Andrés Giménez has a higher success rate. He’s at 60 percent on the season while Pasquantino (and Naylor) are at 53 percent.

So after Bobby Witt Jr. was a tad overanxious and swung under a sweeper to hit a foul pop for the first out, the pressure was on Vinnie to cash in that go-ahead run. As you would expect from my previous paragraph, he came through.

A sacrifice fly to center easily pushed Garcia the 90 feet he needed to travel to score and the Royals took a 2-1 lead. It was Pasquantino’s ninth sac fly of the year, just four short of tying the franchise record. It was also his 18th go-ahead RBI this year, second most in the majors behind only Aaron Judge at 20. His offensive numbers aren’t where we thought they’d be, but the dude has been incredible at producing runs for this team.

The bullpen was pressed into action in the top of the sixth with the Royals trailing 1-0. Wacha was chased after Giménez doubled and Gabriel Arias followed with a single to put runners on the corners with one out. If there was ever a chance for the game to go completely off the rails, this was the moment. Even after the Royals came through in the eighth inning the previous evening, their offense had once again shown so little up to that point, that it just felt a bit precarious to have to lean on the bullpen to navigate the final three-plus innings in order to keep the game close enough for the offense to find some runs. I am consistently shocked at how stressful June baseball is with this team.

With a runner on the corners and fewer than two out, the Royals really needed a strikeout. A double-play ground ball would work as well, but this was really a situation where you want to keep the ball out of play. Miss a bat. Get an out. Then attack the next hitter.

Lefty Sam Long was the first out of the bullpen for the Royals. He was met by left-handed hitting Bo Naylor. It’s a promising match-up as against lefties, Naylor is helpless against the slider. He’s seen 30 of them from southpaws this year. He’s whiffed on 58 percent of his swings on the pitch and only put one of them in play. Long threw him five pitches total. Four of them were sliders away. Naylor offered at all four. The last one was a beauty.

Ideally, you’d want Long to really attack Tyler Freeman, the Guardians number nine hitter and the next man up. The last thing you want to do is flip the lineup and allow Steven Kwan to come to the plate with a chance to break the game open. Alas. Long couldn’t command his fastball, missing inside to the right-handed hitting Freeman. He walked on five pitches, loading the bases and bringing up the uber-dangerous Kwan.

Steven Kwan simply doesn’t swing and miss. Like hardly ever. The one weak spot is a pitch down below the strike zone. Even then, it’s far from certain he’ll go fishing.

I want to point out that the above chart isn’t granular enough for my liking. The bottom zones are too large. This is where Gameday logged the location of the pitch Long punched out Kwan on:

Fortunately, Baseball Savant lets you parse the data a little deeper. Given the location of the pitch charted on Gameday, before Thursday Kwan had seen 14 pitches total in that location. Here’s the outcome of all 14 of those pitches:

Nary a strike in the batch. In other words, if you want to get Kwan to offer at a pitch below the zone, it can’t be that far below the zone. It has to be somewhere between the plate and the bottom of the strike zone box on the chart above. Yet somehow, Long got him to offer. And miss.

Look! A baseball unicorn!

The fun thing was the Royals kept Long in the game for another inning, after the Royals grabbed the lead. He carved up Jhonkensy Noel on three pitches. Long then fell behind the ever-dangerous Ramírez 3-0 before battling back and getting him to foul tip a slider off the plate. He finished his night getting Josh Naylor to weakly tap back to the mound. What a night.

Given the opponent, the current state of the offense, the fact the Royals were playing at home and then who Long was facing, I don’t think it’s overstating the case that this was the most important relief appearance of the season to this point.

John Schreiber and James McArthur finished off the eighth and ninth respectively. Overall, the three relievers retired 10 in a row to close out the victory. About as perfect a night you can have from your bullpen.

A bit of controversy—what’s the deal with these umpires this season?—when Nick Loftin was called out for going out of the baseline going from second to third in the bottom of the fifth. It was on a ground ball to Ramírez at third, who set up in the baseline to field the play. Manager Matt Quatraro came out to discuss and was ultimately ejected.

As I wrote earlier this month when Quatraro was run against the Yankees, his timing on these types of things is really impeccable. Plus, he’s not going all Earl Weaver out there. He’s getting hot, yeah, but he’s backing his guys. I’ve heard the complaints that Quatraro lacks fire, but that’s just not true. He possesses a mild temperament for sure, but he’s smart enough to know there are times he has to get out there and protect the team. With runs still a scarce commodity and with every baserunner a precious asset, Quatraro did the right thing on Thursday. The team recognizes this. It’s important.

He missed a helluva finish.

Central Issues

Twins 13, Diamondbacks 6

David Festa made his major league debut as the Twins starter and allowed five runs in five innings. Didn’t matter much because his teammates backed him with a baker’s dozen of runs. Hell, they scored all 13 while Festa was in the game. Byron Buxton went 3-4 with a three-run home run.

Atlanta 0, White Sox 1

Really? Now I have to question everything. Chad Kuhl started and went three before turning it over to the Sox bullpen. Ultimately, five Chicago pitchers outdueled Chris Sale. Luis Robert Jr’s. first inning home run was all the scoring. This was a makeup game from an April rainout.

Tigers 0, Angels 5

Trade candidate Jack Flaherty went 5.2 innings, allowing five runs on seven hits—three of which departed the premises. Miguel Sanó and Willie Calhoun both clubbed solo shots and Luis Rengifo hit a two-run blast. Davis Daniel, who posted 5.33 ERA over 14 Triple-A starts this year, cruised through eight frames in his 2024 major league debut. He allowed just four hits and didn’t walk a batter while striking out eight.