Giving one away

The Royals were one out away from taking the series from the Brewers. And then it all unravelled.

There are, in baseball, myriad ways to lose a ballgame. If you’ve been watching the Royals for any amount of time over the previous six seasons you understand this. There’s your garden-variety loss when the starting pitcher just doesn’t have it or the bats are collectively cold or the team just isn’t very good. There’s your nail-biter where a team may fall behind early and then start chipping away before ultimately draining their allotment of outs.

Then there’s the gut punch. It looks something like this.

There have been some rough losses for the Royals already in this young season. Tuesday night’s 6-5 defeat to the Milwaukee Brewers was the worst of the bunch.

Closer James McArthur had the Brewers on the ropes. He retired the first two batters he faced. You can see the moment on the graph above. It’s that instant in the top of the ninth where the Royals held a Win Probability of 99 percent. Normally, you like those kinds of odds. On Tuesday, it didn’t matter.

McArthur gave up a double to William Conteras, walked Gary Sánchez (who I thought he didn’t want to give anything to hit, more on that in a moment) and then Willy Adames came up to the plate with a dagger and shoved it right in the chest of Royals Nation.

That’s going to leave a mark.

Thinking about this some more, I just don’t understand the strategy that went into working around Sánchez.

The fourth pitch, the sinker up, was one of those automatic 3-0 strikes. McArthur was working away, away, away, looking to get Sánchez to fish for something, but ultimately they were going to be ok putting him on first with the base open. Still, just needing one out and with Sánchez the tying run, why not pitch to him? He’s a guy with a career .309 OBP and is sporting a .281 mark on the season so far. Yes, he’s hit four home runs in 52 at bats, but still…I really would’ve liked McArthur’s chances against him in that situation. Now you have the lead run at the plate, plus Adames is a much better hitter.

It didn’t make sense at that moment. It made less sense once Adames deposited the baseball over the fence.

It makes even less sense (if that’s possible) after learning that Adames basically called his shot. What???

All game, a group of fans on the other side of the netting had been all over Adames whenever he came within earshot. It was all good fun, Adames said, the sort of Midwest nice players don’t always get when they stand in on-deck circles around the Major Leagues.

“They were like, ‘We want Willy! We want Willy!’” Adames said. “I went close to them and said, ‘Are you sure you want me?’”

They told Adames they wanted to see him hit a three-run homer.

Adames smiled and said, “All right, bet.”

…

Adames glided around the bases, and instead of going to the dugout to be mobbed by teammates, he went straight toward those fans, yelling, “Oh my God, that was the coolest thing I’ve ever done!”

Fun baseball moment, I guess. Unless you’re among my subscribers. In that case it’s just another unwelcome punch to the solar plexus.

I’m thinking about bad losses, and as noted, there have been a few for this team in the first month-plus of the season. There were the walkoffs in Baltimore. Giving up five runs in the seventh inning in a game in Detroit. Sunday’s matinee where the Rangers scored once in the eighth, ninth and tenth innings to flip a 2-0 deficit to a 3-2 victory.

These are all bad and Tuesday’s is unquestionably the worst of the bunch. If it feels like it hurts more than usual, that’s because it does. That’s what happens when you have a good team take a bad loss. It stings just a little more. The thought of not just a game, but an opportunity lost. Imagine where the Royals would be if they could’ve closed out those five bad losses described above. That’s a five-game swing for a team currently five games over .500. That’s huge.

Every team has a handful of games that slip away, despite being safely tucked away in the win column. Or I should say supposedly tucked away in the win column. I’ve seen enough of how the 2024 Royals play to comprehend that these types of losses truly hurt because they are in the hunt. We have no idea how the season is going to play out, but I fully expect them to be lurking for most of the year. So there will be a few more of bad losses in the months ahead and there will be some wins they literally steal from time to time. The really good teams close out more often than they don’t. I’m not sure these Royals are there quite yet. But they are getting close.

A bad loss can carry over, but if there’s one thing we’ve seen from this team it’s that they’re not phased by something like what transpired on Tuesday. Wash it off, as Vinnie would say. Turn the page. Tomorrow is a new day. Sure, it’s like Nuke LaLoosh practicing his clichés with Crash Davis but in baseball, it’s true. There’s no guarantee in Wednesday’s outcome (just like there was no guarantee in Tuesday’s) but even if the Royals drop another one, they just don’t seem like the kind of team that would fold up and take a beating after beating. They’re too talented and have too many solid leaders in that clubhouse to surrender after a couple of tough games. It’s a workman-like team. I expect them to dust themselves off and get back to business soon enough.

Let’s focus on some of the good that came from the game on Tuesday. Before the whole two-outs-in-the-ninth-inning thing happened. It was a very similar game to what we saw from these two teams in the series opener. The Royals fell behind early, looked like they would never get the bats going and then, boom. Just like that, grabbed the lead they would hold up until almost the very end.

I can’t get over this offense. The opposing pitcher may think he’s safe. He’s cruising after all, shutting down the Royals on a couple of hits and a walk or two scattered through the first handful of innings. He may get somewhat comfortable. That would be a mistake. You see, the Royals offense is never dormant. It’s circling. It’s hovering. It waits for that moment…the instant there’s a single drop of blood in the water, the attack is on. And then as quickly as it begins, it’s over. The pitcher is back in the dugout (or more likely, the clubhouse) wondering how it could’ve all gone so wrong, so quickly. The Royals’ offense, man…It’s like a shark attack.

The attack started when MJ Melendez opened things up in the fifth with a leadoff triple. Damn, did he need some kind of good fortune. It helped that Sal Frelick misplayed the ball and had it sail over his head. You know what, though? Sometimes you have to make your own luck. Melendez was busting it out of the box on a ball that really should’ve been an out and because of that, ended up at third.

Nelson Velázquez hit a sharp grounder to third and Melendez, again making the right decision on the bases, broke for home but then scampered back to the bag. No contact play there with nobody out, but Velázquez continues to scuffle.

Could Kyle Isbel pick up his teammate? With Isbel it’s far from a sure thing, but in this instance, he guided an 0-2 fastball on the outer half into left field. A fantastic piece of hitting given the situation goes for a line drive for the first run of the game for the good guys.

When Maikel Garcia grounded out to third, the opportunity to tack on another looked dim, even with Isbel advancing and Bobby Witt Jr. at the plate. That’s not a knock on Witt (seriously, why on earth would I say anything remotely negative about Bobby Witt Jr.?), that’s just baseball math. Although if there’s a guy you want up at the plate in that situation, it would be Number Seven. (See?) He hit a sharp grounder to third and third baseman Joey Ortiz made a helluva play…one, snaring it on the backhand, and two, getting to his feet and firing a throw across the diamond. Watching the play in real-time, I didn’t think there was any way they would get Witt at first. Credit to Ortiz for making it close. Impressive play, even if it didn’t count for an out.

With runners now at the corners, blood was most definitely in the water. It was time to strike. Vinnie Pasquantino was first pitch swinging.

A double to the right-center gap was good for two runs and the lead. The feeding frenzy was on. Salvador Perez got into the action with a double of his own down the left field line to bring home Pasquantino. And then it was over as quickly as it had begun. By the time the waters calmed, the Royals had staked themselves to a two-run lead.

The Royals offense isn’t what I would call threatening. Yeah, they’ve put up plenty of crooked numbers this season, but looking at their order one through nine, there’s quite a falloff from Perez or Michael Massey to the bottom half of the lineup. You don’t fill out a scorecard with this crew and think that you’re going to drop a lot of lead in those columns. And then they strike. No, they’re not threatening, but I imagine they make opposing pitchers feel extremely uncomfortable. It’s incredibly fun to watch.

Central Issues

Tigers 11, Guardians 7

For the second game in a row, the Tigers opened their game against the Guardians with a home run. Andy Ibáñez didn’t do it on the first pitch like Riley Greene did last night, he waited until the third. But he did add another dinger just one inning later. The Tigers needed it as starter Kenta Maeda was far from sharp, coughing up seven runs in two innings of work. The Detroit bullpen held strong and the bats, trailing 7-5 after two innings, chipped away in the middle innings.

White Sox 1, Rays 5

Mike Soroka gave up four runs in five innings and Brad Keller chucked three innings of one-run ball. With the Chicago offense last in the league in almost every single category (seriously, name it…they’re last), five runs is an insurmountable deficit. Their lone tally was courtesy of a Paul DeJong home run.

Mariners 10, Twins 6

Cal Raleigh hit a titanic grand slam in the seventh to push the Mariners in front. The Twins rallied for runs in their half of the seventh and then in the eighth to tie the game going into the ninth. That’s when Seattle kicked on the afterburners. Jorge Alcala, working in his second inning, couldn’t shut them down as the Mariners went triple, walk, single, single and with one out, a sacrifice fly to push the score to 8-6. They tacked on a couple of insurance runs via a wild pitch and another single. The Royals weren’t the only team to lose in dispiriting fashion on Tuesday.