Turning up the heat

Cole Ragans makes a statement and the offense continues to roll. The Royals have won six in a row.

This was the start. This was the start where everything came together for Cole Ragans. The capital-S-italic-for-emphasis Start.

Yes, Ragans has been very good this season. Entering Wednesday, he had held opponents scoreless in three of his ten starts. He had struck out nine batters on two occasions and eight on two others. He limited offenses to two hits or fewer three times. In six of his 10 starts, Ragans’ Game Score topped 60. Yes, Ragans has been good, as expected, in 2024.

On Wednesday as the Royals looked to finish yet another perfect homestand, Ragans wasn’t just good. He was excellent. Nasty, too.

Ragans put the exclamation point to a six-wins-in-six-games homestand with six nearly flawless innings. He struck out 12 Detroit Tigers, a season-high. He allowed just one hit, coming off the bat of the penultimate batter he faced on the afternoon. And most importantly, he kept the Tigers off the board, crushed their will to hit and showed who has the upper hand in the AL Central.

The Royals finished off yet another perfect homestand. Their second one of 2024. The only other time in franchise history they have had two perfect homestands of six games or more was back in…wait for it…1985. Their record is 32-19.

Where to begin on the afternoon Cole Ragans had? How about the strikeouts? Ragans punched out a season-high 12 batters. Ten of those were on swinging strikes. The four-seamer was responsible for most of those swing and misses, but the slider was it’s usual dirty self. I believe this pitch, delivered to Andy Ibáñez in the third inning is what we would consider as a “wipe-out slider.”

If you were to ever get peak internet and LOL at a GIF, this would be the one. For a baseball nerd.

Ragans threw 53 four-seamers on the afternoon. Detroit batters offered at 21 of those pitches. Ten times they missed. Another eight times they fouled it off. And Ragans also got 12 called strikes on the pitch. He was filling up the zone and the Tigers couldn’t do a damn thing.

That cluster of four-seamers in the upper right of the strike zone was almost exclusively delivered to right-handed batters. Up and away with smoke…good luck. The thing that really stands out to me on the pitch chart above is that in addition to working up in the zone for the most part, Ragans was really finding the edges of the strike zone. Not much in the middle. There were a couple of what Uncle Hud would call “cookies” in the zone, but one of those was on a 3-0 pitch and the others were just so dominant that they were either fouled off or watched for a called strike.

The changeup was delivered exclusively to right-handed hitters. (To be fair the lineup was stacked that way against the southpaw Ragans.) Again, he was able to use the horizontal run of the pitch to get hitters to chase.

He had to really miss with that pitch to not get a swing. And he filled the zone plenty with the change to pick up a number of called strikes on the pitch. With that combo working and then the slider you saw above as a wipeout pitch, there was no hope for the Detroit offense. Thanks for visiting our city. Hope you enjoyed the BBQ.

I know there was much knashing of teeth over Ragans’ velocity in his last start. It was down again—about a tick across the board. I’m not sure that’s something to get worked up about though.

On Friday, when the speed on his four-seamer was down, he finished off his start with his fastest pitch of the evening. Wednesday afternoon, it was his second to last four-seamer that registered as his fastest. Ragans is clearly going out there with an aim of conserving energy to be able to not only pitch deeper into games, but to stay in the rotation for a full compliment of starts.

It’s obviously still a weapon.

What are you supposed to do with that? It’s perfectly located at the ceiling of the strikezone, so you can’t take it or you risk getting rung up with the bat on your shoulder. No hitter wants that. So you’re kind of forced into having to swing. There’s just no way Mark Cahna is going to be able to identify the pitch, make the decision to swing and then…actually make contact on the high heat. He’s toast the minute the ball leaves Ragans’ left hand.

This was the final pitch he threw on the afternoon, a 96 MPH heater that Gio Urshela could not catch up to:

That, dear reader, is an exclamation point on a wonderfully dominant afternoon.

Longtime readers know that I’m a fan of Game Score when it comes to measuring a starting pitcher’s performance for a particular start. It’s not really scientific, but it puts starts into perspective. Developed by Bill James, you start with 50 points and add points for outs, innings completed past the fourth and strikeouts. You subtract points for walks, hits and runs. You can find the full details here.

Ragans’ start on Wednesday finished with a Game Score of 79, which is quite impressive. Even more impressive perhaps when you learn he’s thrown three starts with a Game Score of 75 or higher. With the story of the season thus far being the efficiency and excellence of the starting rotation, here is a look at the games where Royals starters posted a Game Score of 60 or higher:

I like Game Score better than Quality Starts as a statistic. There’s a bit more that goes into Game Score. This is a well-balanced rotation. Plenty of Ragans and Seth Lugo as you would expect, but then Brady Singer is on there four times which is impressive. I love that Daniel Lynch IV makes an appearance here in his spot start for when Alec Marsh was on the IL. That gives the Royals four starts on this list from their de facto number five starter. Amazing.

A factoid that I very much enjoy is that the Royals never trailed at any point during this six-game homestand. They led for 49 innings of action and were tied for 5 innings. That’s taking care of business. Yeah, half of those innings came against the Oakland A’s who were reeling when they arrived in Kansas City after a decent start to the season, but that doesn’t mean you hang some kind of asterisk on this note. The Royals are playing the schedule. They have to kick teams when they’re down. Playing the bully in sports is how you win championships.

On the other hand, the Tigers have disappointed up to this point. They seem to lack an identity. They had lost four of their last five series before getting swept this week at The K. It’s extra sweet when you get over on one of the teams in your own division. All wins are important, but those carry a little extra weight.

Maikel Garcia and Bobby Witt Jr. continued their assault from the top of the lineup, collecting four hits between them and scoring three times. Witt drove in two on a double in the seventh that was all about hustle. Another liner to the right of the center fielder and Witt never broke stride. With his Sprint Speed, which is almost off the charts, any baseball hit to the side of an outfielder is an opportunity to take the extra base.

Who’s the fastest man in baseball? I think you know the answer to that.

Related, the Royals have had at least one extra-base hit in each of their first 51 games this season. That’s matching the club record to begin a season set by the 1978 Royals. And it wasn’t like they pushed this record to the edge, waiting until Witt came up in the seventh to double. Freddy Fermin and Garrett Hampson each hit run-scoring two-baggers in the bottom of the second to put the Royals on the board. Nelson Velázquez added a prodigious solo blast in the fourth.

The Royals currently own an 8.2 percent extra-base hit rate. That’s the sixth-highest rate in the majors.

Central Issues

Mets 3, Guardians 6

While the Royals were dusting off the Detroit Tigers, the Guardians were doing the same to the Mets. Ugh. New York pushed out to a 3-0 lead off the backs of three solo home runs. Cleveland tied it up in the sixth on an Andrés Giménez three-run bomb and then pushed ahead an inning later on a Jonathan Rodriguez single, the first hit of his major league career. He also saved a baby bird that was struggling in the outfield in the first inning. Karma for the win.

Twins 3, Nationals 2

Max Kepler and Carlos Correa homered and Simeon Woods Richardson pitched 4.2 innings of scoreless baseball. The Twins went to the bullpen early because Rocco Baldelli wanted to get his relievers some action, which even in 2024 seems weird to me. But they have an off day tomorrow so I guess some guys needed some work. Jhoan Duran gave up a leadoff home run in the ninth to make it a little less comfortable but secured his fourth save of the year.

White Sox 2, Blue Jays 9

Toronto unloaded a season’s worth of frustration in the second inning, scoring seven runs, all with two outs, against Chicago starter Nick Nastrini. In just his third start of the season, Nastrini allowed seven hits, walked six and was charged with nine runs allowed, eight of them earned.

Wild that the Royals went 6-0 on their homestand and didn’t make up a lick of ground against Cleveland. They have improved their playoff odds, though!

The Royals are off Thursday, resuming play in Tampa Friday evening under the dome. It’s the start of another important stretch of the schedule that includes seven road games against Central Division rivals and culminates with seven in a row against the Yankees and Dodgers.