Sunday survival on the South Side
Royals grab a win in extras and stay above .500.
Sometimes, it feels like you can get a read on how the ballgame is going to turn in the early innings. It’s a vibe really, picked off the day’s starting pitcher; maybe how he’s painting the edges of the zone. Or perhaps it’s off the hitters; how they collectively can seem locked in on every delivery.
On Sunday my first impressions were that the day was headed toward a repeat of the series opener on Friday. It was certainly not favorable.
First impressions can be incredibly wrong.
Watching Mike Minor work for four innings was a chore. After requiring just nine pitches to navigate through four batters in the first, Minor threw 34 alone in the second. He didn’t help his cause by committing a throwing error on a comebacker that extended the inning. But still…ugh. He rallied a bit in the third (15 pitches) and the dam finally broke in the fourth as the Sox strung together a single, a walk and a run-scoring double, all with two outs.
With the Royals themselves mustering a baserunner in each of the first four innings but squandering them with double plays, strikeouts and base running blunders, it had the makings of a long, familiar afternoon that wasn’t going to turn out well.
This is why you watch the entire game.
Extra inning shenanigans
I don’t like the fact that a pitcher doesn’t have to throw a baseball when issuing an intentional walk. You can imagine what I think about baseball’s extra-inning rule.
It’s a gimmick that’s wholly unnecessary. Two teams play for nine innings and suddenly, the rules change? I get the desire to move games along, but extra innings are when the tension is the highest. Adding a ghost runner or whatever on second is just adding artificial sweetener to a situation that doesn’t require any more seasoning.
Fine. It’s here and like many other of the changes we’ve seen in Covid-ball, it’s probably going to stay. One can only yell at clouds for so long before it starts to rain.
So if you’re the Royals, you couldn’t ask for a better situation than the one they found themselves in when the 10th frame started. Michael A. Taylor, the final out of the ninth, was on second. Nicky Lopez was up to bat. You knew exactly what was going to happen. And it did. Flawlessly.
Truly. Bunting is awful in most (98 percent?) situations, but if MLB is going to gift you a runner on second base to open an inning late in a game, you’re damn sure the right call is to bunt him over when the top of the order is lurking around the corner. It was a beautiful bunt from Lopez on a really difficult pitch to execute on.
After the Merrifield intentional walk (two dumb rules in the same inning? Aaaarrrrrrghhhhh!!!) to set up a double play, I also really liked the safety squeeze with Andrew Benintendi. Except his bunt was the exact opposite of the Lopez sacrifice, right back to the pitcher and with force. Fortunately for the Royals, reliever Garrett Crochet threw the ball about 45 feet, bouncing it to the plate and turning an easy out into a difficult one.
With runners on first and second and the heart of the order coming up, the Royals were threatening to break the game open. It didn’t happen, but that one run manufactured by bunts, an intentional walk and Major League Baseball was enough to stand.
Perhaps the Royals stole a victory. Honestly, it doesn’t matter how it happens. The season is a long one and wins like that will pop up from time to time. So will some losses. That’s just baseball.
Self-inflicted wounds
When a team is having difficulty mustering baserunners, losing said baserunners to outs, either self-inflicted or imagined thanks to the lords of replay, is going to leave some kind of mark. For the Royals, who lost three of their first 10 baserunners on the basepaths on Sunday, they got lucky.
The nightmare start to Hunter Dozier’s 2021 continued. He did draw a walk but was hitless in his other two plate appearances. That wasn’t the worst of his afternoon. At a time when it was clear the Royals needed every baserunner the lineup could muster, he inexplicably wandered off second base following a 3-1 pitch to Michael A. Taylor that was called a strike. Perhaps he thought it was the third strike and the inning was over? He didn’t have long to figure it out as he was thrown out by an alert White Sox backstop.
That was followed an inning later by Whit Merrifield’s oven mitt losing contact with second base a fraction before his knee connected with the bag. Replay in almost all sports is a dumpster fire. To me, it looked like it was possible—nay probable—that Merrifield lost contact with the bag. But I didn’t see it in the video. And after an interminable delay, the call on the field was overruled and Merrifield was out.
In the eighth Andrew Benintendi completed the team hattrick when was thrown out at second as the final out of double play when Salvador Perez struck out swinging.
Lopez successfully commits larceny
One of the more bizarre stats from the 2020 Royals was the fact that Lopez was 0-5 on stolen base attempts. Lump that performance together with his 1-2 success rate in his rookie campaign of 2019 and somehow Lopez, with a sprint speed that’s averaged in the top quarter of the league, had just a single career steal entering this season.
That changed when he swiped second as Merrifield went down on strikes in the top of the 8th. Obviously, it was a massive base to advance as he came around to score on Benintendi’s single to give the Royals a brief, late lead.
In the seven games he’s played this season, Lopez is hitting .333/.400/.333 with four runs scored. More importantly, he’s drawn three walks while striking out three times. In his brief major league career entering 2021, Lopez whiffed around 2.5 times for each walk drawn, which was completely opposite from his minor league track record where he took a walk less than he struck out—a K:BB ratio of 0.8. It looks like he may be finally channeling the approach that made him successful in the minors.
Small sample caveats and all that, but this is one of the more pleasant developments of the 2021 season for the Royals. And completely unexpected given how he played himself out of a starting job in spring training.
Bullpen rethink coming?
After getting another short outing from his starting pitcher on Sunday, Mike Matheny pushed all the right buttons while managing his bullpen…almost. Scott Barlow, Wade Davis and Josh Staumont fired three innings of scoreless ball with two walks from Barlow the only baserunners allowed from the trio.
Jesse Hahn did not fare as well when his turn came in the eighth.
Charged with holding a one-run lead, the right-hander promptly walked Yermín Mercedes on five pitches. I wasn’t listening to the radio, but can only imagine the disdain Denny Mathews had for that moment. Denny has seen a lot of Royals’ baseball. He abhors late-inning leadoff walks about as much as rain delays, Tim McClelland or a pitcher who takes 30 seconds between deliveries. Mathews probably knew something bad was brewing.
The bad came in the form of an Adam Eaton pinch-hit, go-ahead home run.
It wasn’t a poorly executed pitch. It had some nice movement. It was on target with where Perez set his glove. The issue is, that location is the spot where Eaton is best primed to do some damage.
The above chart is pulled from the 2019 season, the most recent year with a decent sample size. Last year’s chart looks colder in that zone, but with damage done on the inner third. I’m comfortable calling Eaton a low-ball hitter. And that was a slider with not enough bite to drop too low for Eaton to drive.
Hahn followed up the go-ahead home run from Eaton with a walk to Zack Collins before he was pulled from the game. Hahn’s pitch chart from Sunday is ugly. Four pitches in the zone, 10 of the 12 others nowhere close.
Hahn has experienced a rocky start to his 2021 season, allowing four walks and giving up runs in three of his five outings. He’s now blown saves in back-to-back games after surrendering a dinger to José Ramírez last Wednesday in Cleveland.
Matheny is fortunate enough to have options in his bullpen, along with a knack of generally pressing the right buttons. While it’s far too early to draw any kind of conclusions about how 2021 is going to turn out for Hahn, it would probably behoove the manager to move him out of some of the higher leverage situations the Royals may encounter. Give him a chance to get right. Hahn is still an important contributor to a bullpen that should absolutely be a strength for this team. Right now, Hahn is leading the Royals’ bullpen in average Leverage Index, the measurement of pressure in an appearance. Of course, some of that is his own doing. But part of that measurement is the time he’s being brought into the game.
Were you nervous that Greg Holland returned to throw a second inning in the ninth? Wouldn’t blame you if you were. It seemed risky, but the veteran got out of it with a well-timed double play. Such are the perils of trying to predict reliever performance.
Zimmer Saves
We’ve seen a lot of cool things the first ten days of this 2021 season. Frankly, the baseball has been incredibly compelling. I can’t decide if it’s just my personal craving for normalcy that having some fans back at the game provides or just having what should be a full slate of the 162 games is coloring my view, but the game just seems…different. Baseball feels much more alive. And I feel like my appreciation for the game is as high as it’s ever been.
So let’s discuss Kyle Zimmer for a moment. The guy has endured a ton to get to the major leagues. He was completely washed by injuries. It wasn’t going to happen. Yet the guy battled, rehabbed, battled some more and now he’s a bullpen mainstay for the Royals.
On Sunday in Chicago, he entered the game in the tenth inning (with the automatic runner on second), tasked to secure the victory. He went 3-2 with Eaton and froze him on a curve for the third strike. He went 3-2 with Collins and got him to chase a high slider. And he got Nick Madrigal to ground out to end the game. Three up, three down. Ballgame.
It was the first save of his major league career.
(Don’t forget, when Minor was scuffling round in the second, Zimmer was the guy summoned to get hot just in case the day went entirely off the rails. For him to come in and throw darts after warming up two to three hours earlier was something else.)
In postgame coverage, Joel Goldberg asked Zimmer about that moment and what it meant. The pause where Zimmer had to collect his thoughts really said it all. Just a fantastic moment in a season that’s already provided us so much.
Central Issues
Detroit 2, Cleveland 5
Cleveland’s bullpen locks up the Tigers and earns them a three-game sweep.
Seattle 8, Minnesota 6
Kyle Seager’s second home run of the day—a three-run ninth-inning blast—sinks the Twins.
Up next
The Royals return home for a 10-game homestand. The Angels are first up.
The probables for the first three games:
Monday — Alex Cobb vs Brady Singer
Tuesday — Dylan Bundy vs Danny Duffy
Wednesday — Griffin Canning vs Brad Keller
This is a different set of starters for the Angels after they were rained out on Sunday in Florida playing the Blue Jays (Covid-ball remains weird). It sounds definite that there will be no Shohei Ohtani as Fabian Ardaya of The Athletic reports he needs to throw a bullpen before his next start, which means he wouldn’t be ready for a start before Friday at the earliest.