A lost opening weekend

The Royals stumble out of the blocks, dropping all three to Minnesota.

It’s not how you want to start the season.

The Royals have played three. They have lost three. For the seventh time in franchise history, and the first time since 2017, the Royals were swept in their season-opening series.

The silver lining—if you are inclined to search for one—is that they actually scored on Sunday. That they actually touched home plate still can’t erase the stench surrounding the offense. They finished the series 1-20 with runners in scoring position and stranded 19 baserunners. When you only muster 12 hits over those three games…That’s simply not good enough.

In game three, the Royals scored four runs. That output would’ve been enough to win on Thursday and Saturday. It wasn’t enough on Sunday. That’s because they couldn’t navigate the bottom third of the Minnesota order. Namely, Joey Gallo and Ryan Jeffers. The two-man wrecking crew combined to drive in six in extremely different ways. Gallo was responsible for four of those runs, crushing a pair of home runs. Jeffers brought home two, going with pitches and doing just enough to flick his hits into the outfield.

I remain confident the Royals will win at some point in 2023. (I mean, there are 159 games remaining.) It was not their opening series.

Manager Matt Quatraro accomplished his goal of getting everyone into a game in the opening series. I think that was smart managing to keep everyone fresh. And that’s something we’re going to see a lot in 2023.

Matt Duffy, one of the last position players to see the field had a productive day, making a couple of nice defensive plays at third and picking up a pair of hits, including a blast that landed in the fountains in left. Edward Oliveras was the other hitter of note. He, too, homered and had another hit in the losing effort. The each drove in two, accounting for all four of the Royals’ runs.

The only Royal batter who has done anything since the start of the season is the captain, Salvador Perez. He has four hits (one double) in his first 12 plate appearances. As a team, the Royals are hitting .133/.250/.244.

The top three hitters in Sunday’s lineup (MJ Melendez, Bobby Witt Jr. and Vinnie Pasquantino) are a combined 1-20. They have drawn seven walks. They’ve also struck out 10 times.

Far be it from me to tell anyone how to fan, but if you’re looking for someone to start banging the panic button, you’re not going to find it here.

Yes, it was a rough weekend. Nobody wants to lose their first three games of the season. Especially to another team in the same division. Especially to the Twins. However it is early days and, no matter how many wins you thought this team would find in 2023, there’s still plenty of opportunity to get there. (Unless you predicted they would win 160 or more games.)

Besides, Quatraro isn’t here to panic. That was the last manager. Q is going to run this operation with a steady hand. It’s been just a few months and a handful of games and it’s already obvious the dude keeps the heartrate low at all times. I was struck by how he handled his bullpen in all three games, bringing in a left-handed reliever to initially face Nick Gordon, knowing that his counterpart across the diamond would opt to play his platoon advantage and go with the right-handed hitting Kyle Farmer.

It didn’t work on Opening Day as Amir Garrett walked Farmer and then gave up a single to another pinch-hitter for the Twins’ second run. It should’ve worked on Saturday as Ryan Yarbrough coaxed a shallow fly to center from Farmer, but Buxton, on a heads-up play, made the dash for home.

And in perhaps the gutsiest move of the series, Q brought Garrett in to once against force Farmer to the plate as a pinch-hitter on Sunday, this time with the bases loaded. Garrett isn’t exactly the guy you would want to get you out of a bases loaded jam. He’s more of a guy to put you in said jam. Yet this time, it worked as Farmer flew out to right.

There’s some data and some feel at play in Quatraro’s decision making process. It’s a mix and it’s one he believes in. Just because it didn’t work on Thursday, doesn’t mean it can’t work on Sunday. What Q is going to do is put his players in the best position to succeed. It’s up to them to get the results.

Garrett isn’t always going to get to face a left-handed batter. Gordon is a much better hitter against right-handed pitching. It’s a pick your poison kind of decision. We now know where Quatraro falls in his process.

There was some promise in Brad Keller’s first start of 2023. Let’s start with his pitch mix.

Throughout his Royals career, Keller has primarily been a three-pitch pitcher. He’s a slider and four-seam kind of guy, with a two-seamer his third most used pitch. He does have a fourth pitch in a change that he’s used about five percent of the time through the years.

From Baseball Savant, here’s his pitch breakdown in his first start since adding a curve and modifying his slider at times to throw a sweeper.

Is it possible? Keller adds a curveball and it immediately becomes his pitch of choice? It makes sense as the curve has already turned into a very good offering for Keller.

Of the 22 curves that Keller threw, the Twins swung at 12 of them. They missed on six swings.

Three were put in play. One, a Joey Gallo groundout, was classified as hard-hit at around 96 MPH off the bat.

With the sweeper, Keller filled the zone. He was able to get a ton of called strikes on the pitch.

To get an idea of how Keller used the sweeper, the called strikes were mostly on the first pitch of a PA or when Keller was behind in the count. In other words, Keller is comfortable enough with the pitch that he has confidence he can spin it into the zone.

The last three batters meant that in the overall assessment of Keller’s performance I would say it was good, but far from great. Had he gotten the third out of the fifth, there was every reason to think he would start back out there for the sixth. And depending on the circumstances, he might have stayed in to face Gordon to get through six. The walks were a killer.

Keller finished with 4.2 innings, five hits and four walks to go along with six strikeouts. He posted a Game Score of 48. As I said, good but far from great.

About those walks…When we say a pitcher has run out of gas, that’s usually when they lose a little oomph off their fastball. In Keller’s case, I was struck by how he lost velocity off his secondary pitches. Mainly his curve and slider. Note the decline from pitch 14 on both offerings.

The velocity declines on both pitches correspond with the start of the fifth inning.

I have no data to back up this assumption, but it feels like more batters are putting the first pitch in play so far. That, combined with the pitch clock and the new, breakneck pace these games are being played, means that when a pitcher hits the wall, it’s coming in fast.

In the fifth inning for Keller, he battled Max Kepler in a seven-pitch at bat. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary here, Keller barely missed on a curve and later got Kepler to foul one off down and out of the zone on a 3-2 pitch. Kepler popped out on a well-placed curve. The next batter, Carlos Correa, offered at the first pitch and grounded out.

After that, Keller couldn’t find the zone.

The pitching matchups are set as the Toronto Blue Jays come to town for a four-game set:

4/3 - José Berríos vs. Brady Singer @ 6:40 PM
4/4 - Yusei Kikuchi vs. Kris Bubic @ 6:40 PM
4/5 - Alek Manoah (0-0, 13.50) vs. Zack Greinke (0-1, 3.38) @ 6:40 PM
4/6 - Kevin Gausman (0-1, 0.00) vs. Jordan Lyles (0-1, 1.69) @ 1:10 PM