The best win of the season
Yeah, I'm going there.
This was it. I mean, this was it. This was the game of the year for the Royals. A quality opponent. A comeback. And a walkoff throw. This game brought it.
You thought Tuesday’s win was outstanding? Well, Wednesday’s topped it. The Royals did just enough to pull off the victory. By inches. Wait, that’s probably not accurate. By millimeters. The Royals edged the Houston Astros by a 3-2 count and have now won the first three games of this four-game set.
After further review, this may be the most exciting play in baseball
It’s become kind of a cliché to proclaim the triple as the most exciting play in baseball. After all, what’s more fun than watching a hard-hit ball fly down the right field line or into the gap and watching a speedster turn on the afterburners to get around the bases? It’s an event that rarely happens and requires a perfect confluence of events.
I think we may have found the newest, most exciting play in baseball.
Royals’ left fielder Andrew Benintendi has a fine arm. It’s not great. It works for the position he plays. So it not only took every ounce of power he could summon from his left arm in firing to the plate, he needed to get it there on target. According to data from Statcast, the throw was uncorked at 91.6 mph. Again, nothing particularly notable there (Michael A. Taylor’s throw for his home plate assist on Tuesday was clocked at 96 mph.), but it was perfect.
Plays at the plate are always exciting. And they’re always important. But to have one that close in a one-run contest that ends the game? Mercy. Walkoffs are a blast, but I don’t know how you can have a better close to a victory.
Hunter D💣zier
I’m stealing this from the Royals’ social media account.
It’s been a rough season for Hunter Dozier. I know that. You know that. It’s been chronicled in this space since almost the first pitch of 2021. He’s improved the slash line over the season’s second half, hitting .289/.372/.412 since the All-Star break, but that included a home run drought that stretched exactly 100 plate appearances before he snapped it on Monday night. On Wednesday, with the Royals trailing 2-1, he did this:
The ball traveled 425 feet and almost knocked out a window on on the Hall of Fame building. Those damn kids playing baseball near the shrine.
Rex Hudler called it a “cookie” on the broadcast, as he is prone to do on any ball that is launched into the stratosphere, but I’m not so sure this qualifies. It was an 81 mph looping slider that was way down and in from the left-handed reliever Blake Taylor. Look at the dot from the broadcast on where the pitch was located when Dozier made contact.
That’s also exactly where catcher Martín Maldonado set his target.
Let’s get extremely granular. Dozier has seen 12 sliders in that exact location this year. He’s swung at nine of them. That’s the first one he hasn’t missed or fouled off.
That pitch, on a 1-1 count to Dozier, was designed to get a foul, a whiff or a called strike. It was a set-up pitch meant to move the count to 1-2. Taylor was thinking strikeout to keep the leadoff runner—Benintendi doubled to start the inning—rooted to second base.
It didn’t work.
The start we’ve been waiting for
Brady Singer is the most frustrating starter in the Royals’ rotation. It’s not even close.
His struggles in 2021 have only been amplified when the other young starters such as Carlos Hernández and Daniel Lynch and ocassionally Kris Bubic have found some success of late.
This wasn’t Singer’s best start of 2021—he had a pair of strong back to back starts in mid to late April—but it was his best start in a long, long time. The sinker was working from the jump.
Like Hernández on Monday, Singer didn’t pick up a lot of whiffs on either the sinker or the slider. But he was absolutely peppering the zone on the sinker, getting 19 called strikes on the pitch.
The Astros put just four balls in play off Singer’s sinker, all went for singles. Only one was hit with an exit velocity greater than 95 mph.
But the changeups! Oh, the changeups!
Singer delivered just four on the night according to Baseball Savant. They were extremely well located.
The above statement may seem strange, given there’s a pitch sitting almost pure in the middle of the dish. But that was a first-pitch change to Yordan Alvarez in the first inning. He went back to the middle for the second pitch, a 95 mph sinker. Ahead 0-2, Singer finished off Alvarez with a nasty slider.
Three pitches to one batter in the first and Singer was able to show to himself why it’s so important to have—and use—those three pitches in his arsenal.
Three Takes: Taylor proves his worth, Santana’s BABIP and making Astros hitters look foolish
With all the power of a Hunter Dozier homer and the accuracy of a game-ending peg at the plate by Andrew Benintendi, we’re back for Thursday’s and The Takes That Were Promised.
Take One: Michael A. Taylor has broken me
I swore I wouldn’t believe in Michael A. Taylor, Everyday Centerfielder. That held up until they started playing the games.
I wasn’t gonna get roped in. Save the 2017 season, there was nothing in Taylor’s career that ever led me to believe he’d amount to anything except, “fourth outfielder/bench bat/late inning defensive replacement.” He couldn’t hit enough to justify his above-average defense in the outfield and the Royals would trade him at the deadline if he played well enough to find a sucker.
Then the first couple of weeks of the season happened and I nearly broke an ankle jumping on the, “Actually, between his dirt-cheap contract and production at the bottom of the order, Michael A. Taylor is a steal!” bandwagon. I could hear Washington fans snickering, or I could have if they existed. Those hypothetical people knew.
Now it’s August. Michael A. Taylor has been exactly who we thought he was at the plate—the living embodiment of 1-for-4 with a strikeout, with a hole in his swing you could hide a refrigerator in and two walks per lunar cycle. If there are two strikes on him, he’s finished (.179 average). I’d take a blind guess that if he doesn’t lead the league in third outs recorded it’s only for a lack of opportunities and not a lack of trying.
And according to Baseball Reference, he’s been worth 2.7 WAR. Fangraphs, 1.2, which doesn’t sound like much until you look a little further into it and realize he’s got the lowest Offensive Runs Above Average (negative-7.8) of any league regular this side of Garrett Hampson.
His defense has been spectacular—entering Wednesday, he was leading all outfielders and second among all players, period, in Defensive Runs Saved and, as has become custom, chased down a ball it seems like only a handful of guys would have gotten to behind Brady Singer that night. That his defense has been so good that it’s outweighed his absolutely atrocious offense has been one of the season’s highlights. They still should have traded him in July; since he’s the sort of guy a contender loves to have in the postseason, only no team can give him the 400 at-bats necessary to make sure he’s ready for a postseason role without also taking a pretty large gamble that their own October calendar won’t suddenly be free, they could do the, “Sign him cheap, play him a ton, trade him for a lottery ticket,” routine for a couple of more seasons, until perhaps he was part of a playoff team in Kansas City. The Michael A. Taylor Experience has something for everyone, and I can’t decide if I want another year of it or if I’d rather scoop my own eyes out of my head with a rusty melonballer.
Take Two: The Royals starters have broken the Astros
Every week, I spend way too many words on the first Take, so I try to condense where I can in the second take to really give myself ample room for No. 3. And now you’ve learned how the magic happens.
Anyway, in the name of space, let’s watch some GIFs of Royals starters making Astros hitters look incompetent.
Carlos Hernandez did it.
Oh, not at the table, Carlos.
Daniel Lynch super-did it, to the point where if you told me his evil twin brother Donald impersonated him for his first three starts, I’d believe it.
Seriously, this is gross. There might be children around, Daniel.
Below we have Michael Brantley, only the leading hitter in the game, flailing like an overmatched child.
Last night, Brady Singer shoved as hard as we’ve ever seen him.
Take Three: The BABIPing of Carlos Santana is hard to fathom
Yeah, yeah. Batting Average on Balls In Play is the poseur stat, the Bud Lite Lime of analytics—you don’t really want to be caught with it in public, and if you are you’ll claim you’re just holding it for your wife/girlfriend/buddy. It’s not just luck, or it’s more than just luck, or it’s not indicative of anything other than the Baseball Gods deciding for or against you for a stretch of time.
Still though. For his career, Santana has a .263 BABIP, which is about 40 points below league average, which he eclipsed once, at a .301 clip in 2013 while his Cleveland career was still in its infancy. This isn’t new ground, but it’s wild that even with an uptick of Barrel percentage (7.2 percent), average exit velocity (89.8 mph) and hard-hit balls (42.8 percent, above his career number since the advent of StatCast) that his performance remains mired in mediocrity. He still walks. He doesn’t strike out. He doesn’t really chase, according to the numbers. The pop remains in the bat. He’s perfectly productive, if ill-suited for a spot in the upper reaches of the lineup any longer. In hard-hit ball rate, Baseball Savant has him in the 61st percentile; meanwhile, among hitters with 250 at-bats this season, his BABIP is the 12th-worst.
This caught my eye, because when I went through the rest of the top-11, three stood out the same way Santana does—good hard-hit numbers, lousy BABIP. Jason Heyward is legitimately getting BABIP’d to death this year—career .295, this season he’s at .235. It happens. It’s the other two that are such diametrically opposed hitters that I wanted to find a correlation—Max Kepler, he of the decent walk rate, low strikeout rate and above-average base running runs, and free-swinging, power-or-bust three-true-outcomes king Mike Zunino. Save for one outlier for Zunino, they’ve performed at roughly the same rate as Santana on BABIP through the years.
I found no correlation, aside from a lower rate of first-pitch strikes than the baseball average, for what these three have to do with one another. They get on different ways—Santana walks a ton, Kepler is a little speedier than the other two, Zunino hits massive dingers—and are all three still productive big-leaguers. They just have about a 15 percent worse chance of the ball landing when they put it in play, and the explanation of, “Well, that’s baseball,” just doesn’t do it for me here. No one has rotten luck, year over year, despite solid peripherals when it comes to putting the ball in play. That simply doesn’t happen.
Or does it?
—Colby Wilson
Central issues
Angels 3, Tigers 1
Shohei Ohtani hit a dinger.
Shohei Ohtani pitched eight innings of one-run ball.
Cleveland 7, Twins 8
Cleveland tallied single runs in innings one through five and the Twins hung a five-spot on the board in their half of the fifth to take the lead. After Minnesota closer Alex Colomé walked in the tying run with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, that set up the walkoff celebration via a Jorge Polanco bases loaded single.
A’s 2, White Sox 3
Lance Lynn got ejected for throwing his belt from the dugout in a bizarre attempt to comply with MLB’s required substance check. The 2021 season is weird.
Up next
The Royals close out their 10-game homestand this afternoon with the final game of this four-game series against the Astros. Win and the Royals hit the road with a 5-5 mark. Not too shabby given how the Yankees and Cardinals worked them over for the first six games.
Luis Garcia squares off against Mike Minor. First pitch is scheduled for 1:10 CDT. Just three homestands remain after today.